This one-shot was inspired by a dyojs that I wrote over at lost forum, and it thought I'd post it up here as a fic!
Angel
xxx

September 22nd 2007 marked the two year anniversary of the crash of Oceanic 815. In these two years, a lot has happened, but most importantly of all, relationships have been formed. Charlie and Claire are romantically involved, with Charlie becoming Aaron's father. Imagine his surprise when the youngster's first words were "da-da". After Shannon's death, Sayid never found another lover on the island, although recently he has become closer to a British woman named Chloe. Sun and Jin welcomed their daughter, Maria, a year ago, with the young girl already growing up to be just as beautiful as her father.

Now, thought, two years on, there were three children on the island. Aaron was two years old, Maria was a year old, and the most recent addition to the island nursery, who still remained unnamed, was the four-day-old daughter belonging to Jack and Kate.

Kate sat on a dune of sand, holding her new child in her arms. The waves were crashing in the distance, crystal blue against the sandy shore. Usually, this scene before the horizon is what captivated her, and she would spend hours watching the rolling waves grow closer and closer to her until the tides changed and they seeped away again.

Today, however, her eyes were drawn to another sight: the baby. The tiny girl was only four-days-old, and Kate had never felt as at a loss with herself as she did now. She found it strange to think that this was the child she had carried for eight and a half months, the child that was currently laying in her arms. She hadn't named the baby yet. She couldn't think of a name.

Most of the time, the baby looked stared back at the entranced woman who just couldn't take her eyes off of her. Occassionally, small hands, curious like her mothers, reached up and grasped a strand of the long, curly hair that hung close to her, but Kate didn't mind. It wasn't like the tiny hands were trying to remove that hair from her skull, it was more of an observation of it, curling it around her newborn fingers.

Kate stared at the baby still, her head and her mind in two seperate places, yet they were still focused on the baby. She was so lost in thought that she didn't hear the approaching footsteps in the sand, which were drowned out by the workings of her mind and by the crashing of the waves. Every now and again, a particularly loud wave would hit the shore, alerting the baby's attention as she craned her neck to see what the loud sound was.

"Hey."

Kate looked up at the voice, her eyes leaving the face of her child for the first time in two hours, and sees Jack heading towards her. She gave him a small smile as he continued to head towards her. She was glad that she had him. Parenting would have over-consumed her to the point of helplessness four days ago had it not been for him. After all, Jack was the reason that both her and her child were safe. Without him, there was a high chance that one or both of them would have died in childbirth.

"Hey." She replied quietly.

"How are my girls?" He asked brightly.

"Confused." Kate said simply, as she turned her attention back to the baby.

Jack sat down beside her, their shoulders tight against each other, and he reached out to stroke his daughter's head. The baby looked at him, and he smiled as her attention was drawn back to the crashing waves and Kate's hair.

"Why are we confused?" He asked with a gentle frown of concern.

Kate kept her eyes on the baby as before, not meeting his worry-filled eyes. "Because Baby keeps looking around to see what's causing all the noise. It's the waves...but they're keeping her calm, so I guess I shouldn't argue." She realised.

"And why is Mommy confused?" Jack asked her.

"Mommy's confused because she doesn't know what to do." She revealed. Mother was still a new term to her, and one that she was having trouble adapting to.

"What do you mean?" He asked, still the ever-worried Jack that wanted to take away all her cares so that she could enjoy life again. Because of him, she could do that.

She bit her lip, trying not to cry as she admitted what she was most ashamed of. "I don't know how to be a Mom, Jack." She muttered.

He gave her a reassuring smile. "Sure you do, Claire and Sun have been helping." He reminded her.

"Yeah, they've shown me how to change nappes and how to hold her properly, but..." She sighed heavily, tracing the side of the baby's face softly. "I don't know what else to do. Claire's got that bond with Aaron, and Sun's got it with Maria...I haven't."

"Of course you have." Jack disagreed.

She shook her head, the tears still sitting tight in her eyes, waiting for the perfect opportunity to slip down her cheeks. "Don't say that, Jack, 'cause I haven't." She said to him.

"Kate-" He started, but she cut him off.

"I look at her, and I see a baby." She said sadly.

"She is a baby, Kate." He said gently, stroking her hair and looking at her adoringly. "Our baby."

"I know." She nodded. "But I want to look at her like you do. I want to look at her and see my daughter."

With this, Jack realised what she was talking about. She was worried about not being a good mother. "Kate, sweetheart, these bonds, sometimes they take time." Kate bit her lip again. "Sun got hers straight away, I know, but Claire didn't...a lot of mothers don't." He didn't want Kate to feel that she was never going to bond with her baby.

"Claire found her bond when Danielle took Aaron." She looked at Jack, and he saw those unshed tears in her eyes. "Jack, I don't want something like that to happen to make me realise that I love my baby."

"Hey, come here." Jack said, and wrapped his arm around her shoulder before she could start crying. She leaned against him, his shoulder providing a resting place for her head, and the baby in her arms was now balanced between the two of them, looking up at her parents with deep interest, almos like she knew that they were talking about her.

"What do I do, Jack?" Kate asked helplessly. "I want to feel like a Mom."

Jack nodded, placing a kiss on her forehead. "You can try what I did to feel like a Dad." He suggested.

She nodded as well. "I'll try anything. I just want to feel like I should do. I want to feel happy, not confused."

"Is that why you can't decide on a name?" He asked her.

After a few seconds of consideration, she nodded again. "Kinda. I knew that the name would come to me as soon as I looked at her, and I saw it. It's strange, but I haven't seen it yet." She explained to him.

"That's okay." He assured her. "At least we won't be one of those couples who wait until their kid is twelve until they're named." He joked.

Not being able to resist it, she laughed softly. "No." She agreed. "Definately not."

He saw her smile fade after a few seconds, and he looked down at the beautiful child they had created, before joining her gaze at the waves. "Kate, I want you to look at her." Kate looked down, and on cue, the baby looked at her as well, their eyes locking. "I want you to remember everything you can about the nine months you were carring her; how scared you were, how much you wanted to be rescued in case something went wrong, how excited you were..."

She spoke to him, not taking her eyes off of the baby. "You helped me, though." She reminded him. "I would have panicked so much without you there."

"That doesn't mean that I'm going to dissappear now." He reassued her. "I'm not going anywhere." He kissed the side of her head again. "Right, now do you remember the birth?"

She nodded. "Yeah. It hurt." She remembered.

"I know it did, and it hurt for a long time, didn't it?" She nodded with a sigh. She had been in labour for almost twelve hours, and had never felt a pain like it before in her life. "After all of that pain, when she came out, and you heard her crying for the first time, what did you do?" He asked her, even though he knew.

"I cried." She said softly.

"Why?"

"I don't know."

He nodded at her. "Yes, you do."

She looked at him for a moment, and the back at the baby. That was his way of helping her. He was making her realise what went through her head so that she would stop doubting herself. In all honesty, she could barely remember why she cried, because it was such a swell of emotion that she couldn't do anything except let it out.

"I guess...I was...happy." She realised quietly. "I was glad that she was okay, and that she wasn't hurt, and that nothing had gone wrong."

Jack smiled. "And then, when you held her in your arms for the first time, how did it feel?"

"It was really nice." She said, smiling softly down at the baby. "'Cause I'd wanted to hold her properly for a long time, but I couldn't."

Jack nodded. "For the past four days, the only time she hasn't been in your arms is when she's in my arms, and most of that time your asleep." He pointed out.

She shrugged. "I just don't want to let her out of my sight." She admitted. "I don't want anything to happen to her."

"Why not?"

"Because she's my little girl and I love her."

Kate realised what she had just said, and smiled deeply. No wonder this had worked for Jack. When she started to imagine something horrible happening to their daughter, she couldn't help but panic so much that she thought she might die if something ever harmed her. Now, she could look at the litle girl and see her as a daughter, and no just a baby.

She turned to Jack and smiled at him, her first genuine smile in days. "Thank you, Jack."

They kissed briefly, and then he looked her in the eye. "The first time that you held her, right after she was born, I made a promise." He told her. "I saw how happy you were, and I promised that nothing would ever take that away from us, and that nothing would come between us and our little girl."

She smiled, and kissed him again. "I love you."

"I love you, too." He smiled back.

Kate returned her gaze to the baby again, and leaned down to place a kiss on her forehead. Pulling back after placing her lips against her daughters head, she looked at Jack with a grin. "I know her name." She said excitedly.

"Okay, the moment of truth, what is it?" Jack asked brightly, having waited for his daughter to have a name for days, yet every time that he suggested one to Kate, she had insisted that she hadn't seen it yet.

"Sophie." She said with a satisfied smile. "Her name is Sophie."

Jack smiled. "I love it." He told her, and looked down at the baby. "What do you think of your new name, Sophie?" He said in that cute tone he reserved only for babies."

Sophie, happy to have the attention from her father, opened her mouth wide and then gave a gentle smile.

Kate gasped. "She smiled!" She cried happily. "Jack! She's smiling!"

Jack laughed, not knowing that babies this young could smile, and rubbed his hand up the top of Kate's arm. "Now do you feel like a Mom?" He asked her.

She nodded firmly. "The best Mom in the world."