Let Fate Decide
It was raining. And she knew that she needed to get out of it soon, before he got sick. He had already been sick once, right after they had landed in the real world again. Not being vaccinated against smallpox, measles, etc., in the world they had returned to, and surviving more than two weeks was impossible, and she had already risked everything in order to get him those vaccinations. And now, with a sleeping, healthy baby boy in her arms, Kate Austen was standing on the street that Jack's passport had informed her was his. Where he lived.
It was a wealthy neighborhood, there was no denying that. Most of the people who lived in these three and four story houses were doctors, lawyers, politicians, and professional sports players. All of the driveways contained BMW's, Mercedes, or both. To an outsider looking in, Kate must've seemed like some sort of stalker. There was just no way a person like her could possibly live in a house like these.
Nonetheless, Kate continued forward, examining all the houses she passed as she did so. His, she had come to learn, was number 347. Her feet splashed in the two inch deep puddles of water that covered the street and the sidewalk. Her black printed t-shirt was already soaked, and now so were the bottoms of her jeans. Her black leather jacket was being used as a poncho of sorts to Aaron, who slept in her arms, completely oblivious to any other world but his own.
Waverly Street was practically a ghost town. In the fifteen minutes she had spent on it, no car had passed by, nobody else passed her on the street, and no one came out of their houses. It was like they knew she was there, watching them, waiting for them. Well, not them. Him.
The lone resident of 347 Waverly Street. Jack Shepard, spinal surgeon, leader of the Oceanic 6. Hero. Every woman wanted him, and every man wanted to be him. More respected than the president himself. At least that was the world's impression of him, anyway.
And all of that made him the favorite of the paparazzi. Even more so than all the A list celebrities and big shot football players. Which meant that Kate would have to use the back door. Which meant breaking in. Which meant taking him by surprise. Which meant pissing him off. And Kate definitely did not want to piss him off, but she supposed that just showing up at his house would piss him off. After all this time.
Kate ran through everything she would say to him; every answer to the questions she knew he would ask her. It was all well rehearsed, ready to be spoken aloud. She looked down at Aaron one more time, making sure that he was still asleep. He was, and for that Kate was grateful. She tucked the jacket tighter around him, making sure that he was as concealed from sight as possible. The last thing she needed was for the paparazzi to see him and know who they were.
As the second to the last house on the left came closer and closer, Kate's heart started to pound harder and harder. The rain was coming down heavier now, as a foreshadow of events to come. Kate was never a believer in signs, and karma, and fate, but if fate was ever to give her a sign of things to come, the rain was as obvious as they came. It wasn't too late to turn back. There was plenty of time to run in the opposite direction, check into a hotel and be off to the bus depot first thing in the morning. Jack would never have to know that she had been this close to coming back into his life.
But deep down, she knew that it was too late. She had made it this far, had sacrificed so much to be here. It was getting late, and Aaron needed to be put down for the night soon. His house was only twenty yards away. It was now or never.
Kate scanned the area around number 347, searching every space that could be used for hiding and sure enough she spotted three men dressed all in black, cameras in hand, ready for some sort of activity. The front door was definitely not an option. She hurried to house beside Jack's. To the fence leading to their backyard. Kate pushed on the front of fence, which the residents had luckily left unlocked. She hurried inside and shut the gate back before anyone could notice it had been opened.
Getting to the other side wouldn't be as easy. She walked to the other side, past the swing set and the slide and the trampoline to the fence that stood between her and Jack. With Aaron still in one arm, she felt around for a loose board, and found one near the center. Probably one of the kids who lived here had knocked on it one too many times. She loosened it just enough where she could get the two of them through it and once they were through, she walked as steadily as she could muster to the back porch and the sliding door. It was locked, but she had prepared for that. Shifting Aaron to the other arm, she took out a lock pick from her jacket pocket and worked haphazardly on the door, slowly but surely working the lock open.
A minute later the lock gave way, and the door slid open with no more resistance. The back door led to the kitchen. That room alone could probably fit her entire childhood home and then some. And from what Kate could see of it, it was spotless. Hard to tell that anyone lived in it. No dishes piling up in the sink, no coffee mugs lining the counters, not even a scrap of trash on the floor. The clock on the refrigerator was informing whoever was looking that it was 11:42.
Aaron was starting to stir. He was going to be hungry as soon as he woke up. She knew based on the absence of cars in the driveway that Jack wasn't home yet from the hospital. Probably couldn't tear himself apart from the current patient that needed his attention. Kate smiled, despite herself. She knew him too well. Knew that he couldn't resist.
Well, since he was gone, Kate decided to get a bottle ready for Aaron when he woke up. She took out the clear bottle with a blue rim and birds lining the plastic from her messenger bag and took out Jack's half full container of milk and poured some of it into the bottle and heated it up in the microwave. By now Aaron was awake, and was looking up at Kate expectantly.
"Almost," Kate cooed, rocking him back and forth gently. He calmed down a little after, but he still knew that something was different.
The bottle finished up in the microwave, and Kate took it out and started to feed the baby boy.
Aaron took it and started sipping hungrily. For the millionth time Kate couldn't help but be won over by him. He was so cute and so precious. He didn't deserve the life Kate was giving him, running around everywhere, never in one place long enough to get used to it. It was another thing to add to the list of screw-ups she had committed over the years.
Kate wandered into the next room, which was the dining room. It was interesting, at least to her, to find that there was a dining table designed to seat up to twenty people. Who did he ever invite over? She knew he lived alone. Was it his fellow doctors and nurses? Random people he met on the street? Or did he have so much money that buying the most expensive items he could find was the only logical thing to him? Because the Jack that she had met on the island wouldn't have anything unless he had some use for it.
Perhaps she was just reading too much into it. It wasn't like something as simple as a dining table really affected her in any way. And it wouldn't matter at all in a few hours when Jack discovered that she was here, and would most likely tell her to leave. That he couldn't afford to have her here and jeopardize his career or his reputation.
That was just some of the things she imagined him saying. Over and over until she had convinced herself that there was no possible way he couldn't say any of those things.
The room after that was the study. A large mahogany desk sat in the far right corner with piles upon piles of papers filling nearly every inch of it. There was a massive brown desk resting beside the desk, and every available space of it was occupied by books. Hundreds of thousands of them. Kate didn't go over there to inspect the types of books he had, but she figured they had to be informative and significant to his life somehow.
She didn't get very far after that, because the beep of a car locking filled the room. Then the turn of a door and Jack's all too familiar breathing and striding down the hallway followed before Kate even had a chance to prepare herself. There was nowhere in the study to hide, for that was the first instinct to do in a foreign house.
Almost as if he knew that she would be in the study, the door to the room flung open, and a genuinely startled Jack filled the doorframe, staring at Kate almost as if she were a ghost.
Kate couldn't think of anything to say. All she could do was stare back at Jack. Jack came to it first, and his expression changed from shock to anger.
"Kate. Wh-what are you doing here?"
Kate looked down to the floor, not exactly sure how to answer. "I-I don't...I didn't mean..."
"Yeah, I've heard that one before. 'You didn't mean to.' Well, when I find you breaking into my home in the middle of the night, looking through my stuff, I kind of have a hard time believing that you didn't mean to, Kate! I mean, it's been almost six months! Six months since we were rescued, and I haven't seen you since! You just took Aaron the minute your feet hit the concrete, and you were off before any of us realized you were gone!"
It was obvious that Jack had kept his rage bottled up inside of him all this time. But Kate couldn't deny it. Couldn't deny any of it. And not even any of her well rehearsed answers could fully explain to Jack the reasoning behind her running away. She couldn't justify what she did.
"Why'd you come back now? After all this time, why did you come back now? And don't you dare lie to me," Jack continued nastily, inching closer and closer to Kate until soon they were just inches apart. "You run out of money and thought that you could come crawling back and I would just give you some so that you could be on your merry way again? Is that it?"
Kate shook her head. "No. It isn't like that..."
"Then what is it? Because I'm starting to think that maybe..."
"Because I love you! I came back because I love you, Jack!"