EIGHT DAYS

Somehow eight days turns into a lifetime. Kate doesn't think she'll ever stop missing him.

SERIES FINALE SPOILERS

It's exactly 8 years ago today I published my first piece of fanfiction. This is my 100th fic. I thought it would be all kinds of fitting if I wrote my 100th fic for my first fandom. So I dipped back into LOST. It was Jate that got me into both reading and writing fanfiction.

It's short, and it's pretty sad. Apologies.

Jate. With the slightest hint of a nod towards Suliet, if you squint.

EDIT: This turned into more of a character study of a future Kate, I think.

I thought we would grow old

It's been eight days, but it feels like a lifetime. There have been plenty of times in your life you haven't wanted yours to be a long one, but never to this degree. It's been eight days. Eight days 'after Jack', and there's no way you can wrap your head around even one year, let alone the decades that there will probably be. Even through everything that's happened, you've always had this image in your mind, so tiny it almost isn't there at all – you thought you'd grow old together. If you'd been able to see anything, in 30 or 40 or 50 years from now, it'd been Jack-and-Kate. You don't know how to recreate that image without him in it.

After Tom, you'd promised yourself you weren't going to feel that way again – it wasn't worth it. But he'd snuck up on you, and sooner rather than later you'd started to feel the warmth spreading when he smiled, at the sound of his laugh, your ease in his company.

You'd tried to convince yourself you felt something more for Sawyer, in an attempt to mask what you knew was dangerous. Everything with Sawyer suited you far better; it was passionate, you weren't denying that, but it was a lot simpler. It was like neither of you were under any illusions that this was about anything more than sex, and desire, and good company.

You hadn't thought you were the kind of girl for relationships that meant anything. Not anymore. You hadn't thought Sawyer was, either, you'd seen him as some sort of twisted kindred spirit, someone with whom a relationship was never going to be anything other than safe. You realised, and you had realised some time ago, that you were wrong in both respects. It seems that both you and Sawyer were able to have a relationship that meant everything, a whole lot more than nothing, with the right person. You'd have figured that out just talking to him about Juliet after her death, let alone seeing them together.

He's struggling too, you suppose, with something of the same loss, and he's survived. A whole lot longer than you feel like you're going to last at the moment. You suppose that's something to consider.

You roll onto your other side, glancing quickly the LED display of your alarm clock. It's 3.47am. Another night where you're not going to sleep. All the memories are somewhat to blame.

I lie awake

You left me here to choke

It's been eight months, and it feels like eighty years in many respects.

Claire and Aaron are sliding back to some sort of normal, slowly. And you think Sawyer's doing alright, but you don't see much of him. You suppose the way he'd prefer to put everything that's happened behind him is to pretend it didn't happen, and he can't do that over coffee with you. You don't mind, not really. You wish you could pretend none of it happened, even for a second.

You find it the most confusing for a matter of seconds every time you wake up (because you are sleeping now, however fitfully). You've been so many places, you've been Kate at so many different stages that for barely a moment, when you wake, you're somewhere else. You're on the beach, you're Aaron's makeshift mother, and the worst mornings, for a split second, you think you can feel the turbulence again. The handcuffs around your wrists, the oxygen mask hanging, useless, in front of you, your desperate, futile reaching.

You always come back to reality before you turn to the Marshall to get the keys to free yourself. It's only a fraction of a second, but for a fraction of a second the fear coursing through you is second to nothing else you have ever or will ever experience in your life.

Some days, you hate yourself. You built yourself into so much more of a person in those years, you're more than the plane crash. You shouldn't let it define you. Other days, you hate the moment you come crashing back to reality, and it's just a bad memory. Because it lead to so many memories, and not just bad memories.

It took you to feeling a way for someone you didn't know it was possible to feel.

The fallen hero haunts my thoughts

The last words that you said

It's about eight years after everything happened that you meet Adam. You're not looking, you're still not even considering the possibility that you might ever feel anything for anyone in quite the same way again, but he's got a wide smile and an infectious laugh when you meet him in a seemingly never-ending queue in a Wal-Mart, and you weren't expecting to ever see him again after you slightly coldly decline 'going out for a glass of wine'. He doesn't take your refusal, though, and you find him in the Wal-Mart at the same time on a weekly basis, asking you again, for the next seven weeks.

And it's probably a sign that you're ready for someone making your heart flutter slightly again when you don't change the time you turn up. Eight weeks after meeting him, and you agree to go out for a cup of coffee.

You considered the possibility that maybe he recognises you as one of the 'Oceanic Six', maybe he wants to sell your story and make a few bucks, but when you find he'd hardly heard anything, he was on a two year stint teaching in Ethiopia, you find yourself smiling. Someone who only has to know the new Kate, someone who doesn't even have to think about all the people you once were, and you're not anymore.

He's kind, and he makes you laugh, and he even makes you feel wanted again, beautiful in both your long navy blue dress for his school's Christmas Ball, and your pyjamas, curled up with the flu. You hadn't been expecting to feel anything, but all of a sudden you find he means something to you.

You've been doing nothing more than going out casually for drinks and dinner for three months when he kisses you on your front doorstep, and on the next date you find him in your bed, his arms around you, and it doesn't feel as wrong as you think maybe it should.

You tell him all about Jack after your first night together, and you honestly wouldn't have blamed him if he had run for the hills, never looking back. He returns the story it's still painful to tell with one of his own high school sweetheart-come-fiancée dying of cancer, and you mutually agree that you both have histories and both feel unable maybe to ever feel quite as much again.

He tells you he loves you between your sheets a few weeks later, and you choke on your reply. You had hoped Jack would be the last man you ever said that to.

But you do tell him, in the end, and to your surprise, as you say it, you realise it's true.

He proposes the following summer.

Can't get those words out of my head

Mirrors in the smoke

You don't know how long it's been, anymore. You don't know a lot, these days. An old man comes to visit you every now and again, sometimes alone, and sometimes with either one or two young women with long legs and dark curly hair. Every now and again there are a combination of children with them, ranging in ages from about four or five to a sultry looking teenage girl with bleached blonde hair. On good days, you smile, and let everything happen around you, contented. You have something of an understanding that these people are right, being here. On bad days, there's only one face you want to see, and though you know you'll never see it – you know that much, still, despite not knowing a lot about what's going on around you – you keep asking the old man with the kindly face if he knows where Jack is. He always smiles sadly at you, and once or twice one of the young women has told you calmly and gently that you've been married to the old man for 48 years. Of course, that's ridiculous, because you just said goodbye to Jack on the rocks, and you won't be 31 until next May.

The two young women have shown you all sorts of wedding photos, trying to convince you otherwise. And the woman in the ivory dress next to the tall, fair haired man who looks maybe like he was the old man who keeps visiting you in another life – she sure as hell looks like you. That confuses you, so you don't like to think on it.

You've heard the dark-haired women (and they did tell you their names, but you can't remember) talking, when they thought you weren't listening. One of them saying something about 'Dad' (they must be the old man's daughters – that makes some sense) being nearly 90, 'not as well as he used to be', and 'maybe this is too much for him', and the other one, the one that you suspect has slightly more of a fiery temper, retorts almost instantly with, 'he wouldn't listen if you told him not to.'

You're just really tired, most of the time. The old man and his daughters talk to you about anything and everything, and listen to you telling a select few stories about your time on the island, and with those people you won't ever forget, despite everything.

You miss him, more than ever, now. He's closer, strangely, than he's been in a long time. You feel like he's almost within your grasp.

And that's what you're most tired of, really. Missing Jack.

I want to see your face

I've got some things to say

You're living something of another life, now, where 815 didn't crash, and you stole his pen on the plane. And all of a sudden you're delivering a baby at a concert, and more memories are flooding back than you even had in your last years on earth. Because, really, you've not quite been living your own life for years. You've been halfway to somewhere else long before you actually went somewhere else.

You watch Claire and Charlie in each other's arms, Aaron between them, and you know who you have to find. And it doesn't escape your notice that Jack was the person you'd been asking for when you couldn't even remember your own husband's existence, let alone his name.

You sigh, slightly, because you had a good life with Adam, and with Cassie and Juliet, and all four of those bonny little grandchildren, whom you had stopped knowing before they even really got old enough to know you. It's like you can see your last years through something of rose tinted glasses, now, though, because you can see what you never really saw when you were back there… they were all growing up so beautifully.

When you first see him, he doesn't know he's in this other life, he doesn't know how much he meant to you. But he will, soon.

You take his face in your hands, and say possibly the truest thing you've ever said to him.

I missed you so much.

FIN

That's a wrap! Hope you enjoyed, apology for all the angst, and hope I've still got something of an ability to write sort-of-Jate – it's been a very long time! Would love to hear what you think, criticism welcome (preferably constructive).