The finale was amazing, especially the Jate scenes, but Jack's death left me so heartbroken that I haven't even been able to work on my old fics. Even though this is only short, it was the hardest thing I've ever written because every time I tried to imagine how Kate must have felt I ended up in tears again. I think her line in the flashsideways about missing him says it all: he was the love of her life and she never got over him. I've heard a lot of people compare her to Rose in Titanic.
I started planning a flashsideways fic about Jack, Kate and David but now that that world has dissolved I'm not sure. If anyone has any ideas about the kind of post finale fics they'd like to see PM me or put them in your review and I'll do my best. ;)
PARTING GIFT
On the day they reach home, once she's taken Claire to the motel where her mother is still waiting with Aaron, she allows herself to be admitted to his hospital.
As the doctor removes the stitches he made just two days before, she feels as though he's unravelling his existence, the last tangible proof that he was ever here, and she wonders if he knew him, if they worked together, if he feels the hole that he left the way that she does.
She wishes he was there to talk her through it, to tell her that it's okay like always, but it isn't, because he's gone and she will never hear his voice again or see his face or know if he was scared when he died. If he thought of her. If he wished he'd chosen her the way she chose him. If they would have been happy this time.
When the wound is clean and covered with bandages, they draw blood.
Staring at the vial, all she can think about is watching his seep through his fingers as he sank to the ground. She saved him from Locke, but by then it was too late. He knew he was dying.
Still, it doesn't stop her from wondering. If she had arrived a few seconds earlier, if she had killed Locke the first time she tried, if his death had been the end of it, would that have changed things? Would he have come with her?
They tell her that they want to run some tests to make sure that she isn't septic, but instead of an infection, they find something else.
"Congratulations, Kate. You're pregnant," the doctor announces with a smile as if this is great news. As if this isn't the single most wonderful and devastating moment of her life. "Based on these results, my guess is about…" She doesn't hear the rest. She doesn't need to. She knows when it happened. She just wishes he was there to remind her.
When she's alone, she tries to imagine his reaction.
He would be wary at first, afraid that it would prevent her from getting the treatment she needed, that their child would be affected somehow, that maybe it just wasn't meant to be, but slowly his fear would morph into the kind of joy that she hadn't witnessed in him since before they broke up. He would be so proud as he watched her belly grow along with the life inside; in her mind's eye she can see his smile as she places his hand against it so that he can feel it kick too, and she wants to cry again at the realisation that none of this will ever happen, but the constant stream of tears she's been shedding since she watched him walk away has left her tear ducts dry.
She tries to remember the look on his face the night he proposed, when she told him that she believed in him. He had wanted so badly to be a good father. More than anything she wishes he could have had the chance.
Nine months after the last time she saw him she gives birth at the same hospital.
Claire is there holding her hand through the delivery but it's too small, too soft. She's not the right Shephard, and she can tell by the way she looks at her that she knows it, but she and Aaron are the closest she will ever get to him again, or so she believes until the moment she finally lays eyes on their child.
She doesn't know whether to laugh or burst into tears when the nurse wraps the tiny boy in a blanket and places him in her arms, so she does both. She's never been a believer in miracles, but looking at him now, she knows that that's exactly what he is.
"Do you have a name for him yet?" the nurse asks her and she smiles.
"Jack," she whispers, and as she draws him closer to her chest, pressing her lips to his dark hair, she feels as if a piece of him has come back to her at last.
It makes her heart ache to think that he will never know his son, that he won't cradle him in his strong arms - the same arms that held her on their last night together - when he cries, or take him to watch the Red Sox win the World Series for a third time, or see the man that he grows into.
One day she'll tell him.