Four days in and they've already settled into some sort of sick routine.
It's a careful rigid maneuvering dance around Dharma and each other, no choreography for them to rely on, all improvisation, and the four of them are so uniquely and individually afraid of screwing up that the politeness, the careful distances, aren't forced at all.
No one wants to be the first to fall.
How are we gonna do this? He didn't get a chance to answer her but she can't help but wonder what he would've said.
They get up each morning and slip into the starched and labeled jumpsuits like they're their second skins. They go to work, eight hours a day but without the minimum wage, Kate with Juliet (motor pool isn't so bad because when your head's stuck under a car there's no need to make eye contact), James and Jack separately, on opposite ends of the food chain, rarely, if ever, crossing paths (Kate's not sure but she thinks they must've fought on that first night, which shouldn't surprise her but it somehow does).
The benignant Dharma powers-that-be have designated a large room to be used for recreation in their afternoon allocated free time (it's like summer camp, Kate would say, if she'd ever been). There's a pool table that she remembers from an age yet to come and faraway in her memory (it looks like goodbye and feels like a jinx), and it's a good thing that she never learned to pay because she's superstitious and there's no way she's going to touch it, even with a ten foot pole. Hurley and Jack play interminable rounds of chess, which she watches when she's not too tired, and she can tell by the way Jack's gaze strays to her face between moves, and lingers there, quietly trying to read her mind, that he's letting his opponent win on purpose, and he sure as hell isn't doing it for Hurley.
On days when this subconscious between-the-plays action is too much for her to take, she heads home early, pleading a headache. That, at least, isn't a lie.
She pretends not to feel his eyes on her back as she leaves, and the burning in the pit of her stomach, she can almost imagine it isn't guilt.
The route back home (she calls it home, but it's really just a tidy little house she shares with the other new female recruits) takes her by Sawyer's (sometimes she still calls him that in her head, but she can never bring herself to actually say it), his and Juliet's, and he's always there on the front stoop, sometimes nursing a beer, sometimes a book, more often both. When she passes he looks up, not because she's said anything but because she hasn't, and his jokes aren't half as funny as they used to be.
The curtain in their window is ever-so-slightly pulled back at the corner, as if someone's standing there, watching, and Kate makes her excuses before her muted chuckles decide to turn into tears.
One night Juliet invites them over for dinner.
The sentence is absurdly innocuous, and Juliet really did invite all of them, Hurley and Miles and Jin too, but Jin's obsessed with finding the one he loves (Kate can understand that, they all can), and Hurley bails out at the last minute for a ping-pong tourney in the rec room, and Miles is just anti-social, as James puts it in an obvious attempt to score a laugh.
So it's just them, Kate and Jack and Juliet and James (she feels like a fourth wheel and not because her name begins with a different initial), and situations like this are funny in sitcoms but not so much when the canned laughter is missing.
Juliet makes hamburgers, no ketchup, and Kate sees Jack, amused, open his mouth to say something, but then he catches Kate's eye, sees her watching him instead of the other way around for the first time in a long time, and the joke shrivels behind his lips. His eyes question hers for a moment and then his fingers fold carefully around hers under the table.
She doesn't pull away.
The smell of meat snarls unpleasantly in her abdomen and her throat (which is ironic when you consider that oil, gas, monkey grease, all the stuff she works in, none of it bothers her in the slightest, but here she is grossed out by some innocent home cooking), and she's no shrink, but she thinks that this probably has less to do with vegetarianism and more with the dull empty space in her chest that throbs, a constant reminder of the days when her happy family made this look like the cheap imitation it is, whenever someone else's arm accidentally, unintentionally, of course, brushes up against hers.
James, interestingly enough, doesn't venture a word unless spoken to, sprawled back in his chair, removed, eyes fixed intently on the bouquet of yellow flowers in the middle of the table, and Jack and Juliet carry most of what's left of the conversation, Jack's right hand curling absently around the base of his full wine glass, barely managing not to twitch, Juliet smiling fragilely as she passes around seconds that everyone takes but that no one wants to eat.
When the sharp insistent rat-tat-tat, 14-J issue down at the Flame, LaFleur come quickly!, sounds at the door, no one pretends it isn't a relief.
James is up and out in an instant, Harry Potter-esque glasses pulled from his pocket and rammed down on his nose, demanding details and more awake than he's been all evening, and Juliet follows him because screw protocol, there's no way she's going to let this be their last meal together.
Which leaves Jack and Kate to do the dishes.
It's been five hours and they haven't heard anything yet, and it feels so wrong that they can't get in on the action, can't lead the charge as usual, but they're unimportant in the scheme of things this time around and they can only wait to be told what to do.
When Kate shows up on Jack's doorstep at midnight she clings wordlessly to his neck, and he slips his arms around her, hands clasping her close, and their bodies press tight together, and she listens carefully to the space between them but she can only hear one heartbeat.