Author note: I've never done this before (literally, this is my first fic), so any feedback is appreciated, especially constructive criticism! :)
In Transit
It's nights like this that Kate is aware of every inch of her body, as though she's alive with an anticipation that she can't quite define. It's partly left over from her days as a fugitive, she thinks – the knowledge that she'll be leaving the following morning taps into some sort of dormant reflex, a heightened awareness that comes of years when she was always on the move, making her own luck and relying on little more than her intuition to keep her free. It's more than that, though. Against all odds, Kate actually looks forward to flying. There's something about being up in the air that makes it seem as if she's everywhere and nowhere all at once, and it's the only time that she feels like anything is possible. It's a feeling she looks forward to, though she usually forgets about it until she's actually up in the air.
She has a long flight ahead of her this time, from London to LA. She'd stopped in London to visit Desmond and Penny on her way back from a month in Rwanda, where she'd been doing research for a story about the state of the country 25 years after the genocide. It was nice to see them again; they'd fallen out of touch, after the island, but she'd always liked them. She's glad her visit was only for a few days, though. She isn't sure how much longer she would have been able to fend off the questioning from their kids, who were understandably fascinated by a woman connected to the past that their parents refused to talk about. Lying in bed now, Kate thinks that it's hardly fair to keep that part of Desmond's life a secret from them. Everyone deserves to know the truth about where they came from, she thinks, and Charlie and Jacqueline – the significance of those names is hardly lost on her – are forever tied to the island even though they'll never see it for themselves. At 14 and 8, they might not be old enough to know everything (okay, she admits, they probably aren't old enough to know MOST of what happened – after all she still wakes up crying some nights, and she was an adult when everything happened), but they should get answers to some of their questions, at least. If knowledge of the island dies with the original survivors, with Kate and her friends, did it mean anything in the end? She can't help but wonder. Maybe this is what keeps me up nights, she thinks.
Despite her misgivings, she honors Desmond and Penny's wishes, revealing nothing about the island to Charlie and Jacqueline, skillfully dodging the questions about how exactly she knows their parents. Instead, she answers the questions from Desmond and Penny, who are eager to know about what she's been doing in the last 10 years or so. She tells them the bare details of her life: getting back to LA after that last time on the island; the way that her gamble, using a false name on the Ajira flight, must have paid off since not even her probation officer seemed to have noticed that Katherine Austen had been missing from the state of California for months (leaving out her secret, embarrassing wish that maybe that was a sign that somewhere, someone was looking out for her and wanted her to be okay); how she'd started taking classes at UCLA to fill the time and ended up settling on journalism as her field of interest; and that brought her right up to now, traveling around like she's been ever since her probation time was up, working as a freelance journalist and covering stories about human rights. When they ask her the questions that everyone does – why journalism, especially an area that can be so upsetting, one that makes her travel so much, too – she tries the same tactic that satisfies most people: cracking a smile, saying You know me, always on the run, I never really wanted to settle down anyways and tossing a laugh towards them, but she can tell that it doesn't convince them, Penny especially. So she grows somber, and looks her square in the face, saying I want it to mean something. I want it to matter. I want to, I don't know, make people see things. It's not something she says out loud very often; in fact she's only said it one other time, on a night not unlike this one – she couldn't refuse him after all, not that night, not after everything he'd given up and lost, everything he'd done for her, not when he turned over and looked at her with concern showing in the creases near his eyes.
She falls asleep with memories of that night drifting through her mind. It's the first time in a while that she dreams, but she's sure it won't be the last. She wakes up shaken (he always does that to her, even in her dreams), but she can't let herself dwell on it. She's sure her shrink would have a lot to say about all of this – if she could open up enough to get herself a shrink, anyways – but today is not the day for introspection. Today, she has a plane to catch.
Kate still thinks Heathrow is overwhelming, and she realizes that at this point she probably always will, but she finds her terminal easily enough. The only hitch in the morning comes at security, when she sets off the metal sensor and gets frisked. The security guard recognizes her, which has happened occasionally in recent years, though Kate is never sure whether it's from one of her headshots next to an article, or if she's still recognized as one of the Oceanic 6, defined as part of a group that doesn't really exist anymore except in the public's mind. Regardless of how she knows her, the guard smiles apologetically while she says Would you mind stepping over to the side here for a minute, Ms Austen? It's only afterwards, after the cause of the beeping has been found to be the engagement ring that hangs on a chain around her neck, after she's cracked a light-hearted joke about how she should really know better since she flies so much these days, that Kate thinks the guard must have known her from something more recent than the old plane crash stories; it's something about the way that she eyes the ring, half curious and half excited, as though she'd discovered a new and interesting tidbit about Kate Austen, the acclaimed and notoriously private journalist. Kate shrugs it off, thankful that the guard is apparently too shy to actually ask the question that she's clearly dying to know the answer to, though she hopes that she won't be fielding any calls about her "happy news" from the media once she's back home.
On the plane, Kate settles in for the flight, calm replacing the excitement she felt just hours before. She watches the in-flight movie, a mindless but entertaining romantic comedy starring a still boyishly good-looking George Clooney (the man just doesn't age, she thinks to herself, then smiles as she remembers Richard. He had bought a house in Spain, last she heard, and was aging gracefully). When the movie ends, she leafs through the book she brought with her, a ripped-from-the-headlines bestseller she grabbed last-minute at the airport. It looked interesting at the time but can't hold her attention any more, not now, not when she's in the air and she's reached that in-between place where she can't help but think that anything is possible and nothing is irreversible, and the part of her that still believes in something is telling her that headlines are meaningless in the end. She pulls out her laptop, thinking that maybe she'll get a start on that story about Rwanda since it's due a week after she comes home, but discards that idea too. She's got most of the story planned out in her head by now – she's been mentally working it out since the moment she arrived in Africa, practically – and she always writes better at home surrounded by familiar things and faces, anyways.
Three hours in, she gives up on finding anything to keep her busy on the airplane. It always comes to this, anyways, so she's never sure why she bothers trying to do anything else. She closes her eyes, picturing the scene awaiting her at the arrivals gate at LAX. She'll come out of customs, squinting as the sun beams through the windows, looking for the two dark heads that she knows will be craning their necks for a glimpse of her, too. Finally, she'll spot them: Jack is in jeans and one of his old t-shirts that she loves, so old and worn and soft that she can't wait to bury her face in it – he's probably taken the afternoon, if not the entire day, off from work to clean up the house that he's surely let fall into disorder in the month that she's been gone, which explains why he's not in a suit. He's holding Violet up, she'll be insisting that she wants to help look, too, without all those tall people in the way; Kate catches her breath when she sees her, sure she's grown another two inches and yet she's still the same, still hers, dark curls tumbling down her back, brown eyes scanning the crowd in a face with Kate's freckles sprinkled across a nose that's a replica in miniature of Jack's. Then, suddenly, Violet sees her and she's scrambling down, running, catching hold of Kate's knees with such force that she's almost knocked over, and then she's holding her daughter. Tiny arms are slung around her neck and there's a whispered voice in her ear: I looked for you for a zillion years, Mommy. And now Jack is there, smiling, having caught up to them, and there's so much she wants to say to him but Violet is asking her question after question – something about elephants, maybe? – and so there's not much that Kate can do but spare a second to take his face in her hands and say something mundane, something he already knows, something like I've missed you so much, Jack. But that's all right – there will be time for her to say everything else, because she's decided that this is her last long trip overseas. (It's a decision she's made a thousand times before, but she thinks that maybe, just maybe, she means it this time. She wants to mean it, anyways.) Jack grabs her suitcase, and Violet takes hold of her hand, and then they're walking out the door, going home…
Kate opens her eyes just as the plane touches down and the pilot welcomes her to Los Angeles. Shaking the sleep from her mind, she collects her things, eager to get through the routine of arriving and go home. She's surprised to find no one waiting for her when she finishes with customs, but she doesn't let it concern her. Her flight landed early, after all, and school pickup often takes so much longer than it should. Still, she pulls out her cell phone, thinking it couldn't hurt to check her messages and make sure nothing is wrong. She's surprised to find that she has three, since most people knew that she was flying today. The first is from her editor, welcoming her back to the states and reminding her that copy for her Rwanda story is due a week from today. The second is a number that she doesn't recognize, but she smiles when she hears the familiar Southern drawl: Hey there Freckles, a little blonde bird told me you'd be back in the US of A today. Just so happens I'm in the area. Why don't you give me a call? She hasn't heard from Sawyer since that night a year ago, when he asked her why she had to keep leaving and she told him that everything needed to matter. It was the closest they'd both come to admitting that they were each using the other to fill a void, and while she wasn't surprised when his calls stopped coming, she realizes now that she's glad to hear his voice again. The last message is the one she sort of expected from the start. It's from Claire – she's so sorry, but Aaron's soccer team unexpectedly made the playoffs in a huge upset, and the game is this afternoon. Would Kate mind taking a taxi home? She and Aaron will swing by later with pizza to make up for it. They can't wait to see her again and hear all about her travels!
As Kate hangs up the phone, she can't help but laugh at herself. Even now that Claire's voice has firmly reminded her who was actually supposed to pick her up, she has to stop herself from scanning the crowd for them. Life with Jack is a story that Kate has told herself so many times that it's easy to slip into it whenever she wants. At first, when she'd just gotten back from the island that last time, she pictured so many different futures for them, all of them as happy and satisfying as the others. As the weeks turned into months, she settled on the one that had been her favorite from the start, where she and Jack lived a normal, domestic life with the little girl they named Violet. It's the only one that she returns to now that the months have turned into years and she's come to understand that Jack won't be coming back, and it's always the same. She tried to give her fictional daughter a little brother a few times, but she could never imagine a boy whose face is a blend of hers and Jack's. Any son she pictures for herself only looks like Aaron, and that won't do, not in Kate's picture-perfect life, so it's always just the three of them: Kate and Jack and Violet, and she's okay with that. Life was good for her, when it was just her and Sam and her mother, and since imaginary-Jack will certainly never up and leave, she figures that Violet's life will be a happy one.
A security announcement blares, and suddenly Kate can't believe she's still sitting there as all around her other passengers head home. I've given too much thought to this old daydream already, she thinks, clearing the image of Jack's smiling face from her mind as she shakes the sound of her daughter's laugh from her ears. Grabbing hold of her suitcase, she tells herself that she has too much to do to dwell on her imagined life. First of all, she has to hail a cab and get home through LA's traffic. She'll need to unpack, and then if there's any time she should really start that Rwanda story. Claire and Aaron will come over in a few hours, and she'll listen to Aaron recount a play-by-play of his soccer game (hopefully his team wins, she thinks, or he'll be in a bad mood all evening) and regale her guests with stories about Africa. She should give Sawyer a call once Claire drags Aaron home to finish his homework. He'll probably spend the night. Maybe they'll drift back into their state of sort-of-togetherness, or maybe they won't. They'll figure it out; they always do, after all. Regardless, Kate's life is full, and busy, and she doesn't have time to think any more right now. She's back on the ground, and it's time to move on.