I was really inspired by The Candidate, but all of the Jate moments were so perfect that I wasn't sure I would be able to do them justice! I wanted to write something fluffy to celebrate their comeback, but it didn't fit in with the mood of the show, so instead here is my take on what might happen in the next episode. On a side note, was anyone else shocked by the similarities to Brother's Keeper in the flashsideways? ;)
HURT
By the time he and Sawyer made it back to the shore, it was too dark to do much about Kate's shoulder, so once he was sure that the bleeding had stopped, Jack spent the night keeping vigil, watching her for signs of shock after she drifted into a troubled sleep at his side.
Debris from the sub had washed up on the beach in the wake of the explosion; while trying to catch a fish the next morning, Hurley found the green and white box containing the first aid kit floating in the water not far from where they where they'd been camped.
As soon as they finished breakfast, Jack turned his attention to treating Kate's wound. He tried to pull her t-shirt aside so that he could examine it, but the crew neck made it difficult for him to see anything except shadows. "I'm not gonna be able to get to it like this," he told her apologetically. If they were at the hospital, he wouldn't hesitate to cut her out of it, but he couldn't destroy the only clothing that she had with her. "We're gonna have to take it off."
She wrapped her good arm around his waist and helped her walk to a dip in the treeline, away from the others, where they would at least have some semblance of privacy. "If I lift it up, do you think you can slide your arm out?" he asked, kneeling with his legs on either side of hers and she nodded, bracing herself.
Together they managed to free her good arm, then he eased the bloody fabric over her head, taking hold of her hand to guide it through the hole. "It's okay," he murmured when the strain on her shoulder caused her to gasp and screw her face up in pain. "Breathe."
She kept her eyes closed while she took a couple of deep breaths. "It's a little weird, being your patient," she confessed when it subsided, settling back against the tree behind her, watching him fold the shirt and drape it over one of the roots. "I mean the last time you…" She trailed off with a self-conscious smile, and glancing back up at her, he felt his own face grow warm as he allowed himself to consider the last time she'd been this naked in front of him. It seemed like an eternity ago now, though in reality he knew it couldn't have been more than two weeks.
"I was starting to think you'd forgotten about that," he said, keeping his voice carefully neutral. He forced himself to shut out everything but her injury as he shifted her bra strap out of the way and set to work wiping the mess of blood and sand from her pale skin so that he could see what he was dealing with. He was so used to having blood on his hands that he barely registered it anymore; for the first time in a long time he felt sick to his stomach as he uncovered the dime-sized hole the bullet had ripped through the body of the woman he loved more than anything and it hit him that a few inches to the left and they wouldn't be sitting here.
"Oh Jack…" she whispered. "How could I?"
He didn't dare meet her eyes, coaxing her shoulder forward instead so that he could inspect the exit wound. It was smaller than he'd feared and surprisingly neat, which meant that as long as he could keep it from getting infected, it should heal up okay, without any loss of function to her arm. "You're lucky the bullet went straight through," he told her, riffling through the first aid kit until he found a small bottle of antiseptic spray. It wasn't ideal, but it would do until he could get her some antibiotics. "This is gonna sting."
Tears poured from her eyes and she let out a strangled cry, her back arching in protest as he squirted a generous amount into the wound, and for a moment, he was afraid that she was going to black out. "You still with me?"
"Yeah," she agreed in a breathy voice. She flashed him a wry smile to show that she hadn't lost her sense of humour. "That'll wake you up in the morning."
And despite the gravity of the situation, he found himself smiling for the first time since their ordeal on the sub.
"It's just that you never seem to wanna talk about what happened," he explained as he located a needle and thread. "I tried to bring it up the next morning but you couldn't get out of my apartment fast enough and then when we were on the plane, you said we weren't 'together'. How else did you expect me to interpret that?" He'd given her space, believing that she would come around, but in the end, she'd left him with no choice but to assume that as far as she was concerned, that night had been a mistake.
She winced when he threaded needle through her shoulder, her fingers digging into his bicep of the arm he was using to keep her still. She was going to have a nasty scar, but there wasn't much he could do about that.
"You hurt me, Jack," she told him, the betrayal underlying each word making it clear that she wasn't talking about his sutures. "I wasn't gonna let you do it again. But when the sub blew up and I couldn't find you and I thought…" Her voice broke and she took a deep, shuddering breath. "That was when I realised that nothing you could do to me could ever compare to the way I felt when I thought I was never gonna see you again. I was so scared."
When he looked up at her, she was crying. "Hey," he murmured, at a loss for how to reassure her. While it touched him to know that some part of her still loved him, he hated seeing her so broken. "It's gonna be all right." He tied off the thread, pulling her into a careful one-armed hug. "You're safe now."
"That's what you said before and Sun and Jin and Sayid… They all died!" she reminded him, refusing to be comforted. "What if we're next? What if he comes after us again?"
He wasn't sure how to respond when logically, he knew that she was right. The monster wearing Locke's face had already wiped out half of the remaining candidates. There was no getting around the fact that he wasn't going to stop until every single one of them was dead and he was free.
"There," he announced, sticking a dressing down over the top. "All done." He could have done a better job of patching her up if they were in his hospital, but at least she wouldn't be walking around with an open wound.
He reached for her shirt, helping her back into it to bide himself some more time before answering. "I'm not gonna let anyone else hurt you, Kate," he told her once he'd begun to formulate a new plan. He'd already learnt the hard way that he couldn't change the past, but he could keep anything from happening to her in future by ensuring that she was as far away from Locke and Widmore and whatever they were doing as possible. "We still have the plane – as soon as we find Claire, I'm gonna make sure both of you get on it, and then you can take her to Aaron, just like you always planned." If nothing else, losing Sun and Jin should have taught him not to make idle promises, but she needed more medical assistance than he was able to give her, and he was determined to get her off this island for good if it was the last thing he did.
"What about you?" she pressed when she realised that he hadn't included himself. "Please, Jack. You have to come with us." A note of hysteria crept into her tone as she added, "If you stay here, he'll kill you!"
He could handle Locke; what he couldn't handle was him using her against him. "Not if I kill him first," he insisted. He'd tried giving him the benefit of the doubt, waiting for his motives to become clear, but now that he'd launched an open attack that had left three of their closest friends dead, he was done playing nice.
I'm considering turning this into another mini fic or writing a follow up of some kind, in which case there are three ways I can go:
a. Kate leaves the island with Claire and the others and Jack stays behind to deal with Flocke
b. Kate decides to stay on the island with Jack
c. Kate begins to show signs of infection so Jack goes with them in order to keep treating her