Five Crimes Kate Austen Never Committed
Disclaimer: Lost isn't mine.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Kate has never begged and Kate has never stole. Kate is never late and Kate has never deceived. Best of all, Kate has never lied and Kate is anything but lost.
Author's Note: This is pretty much a collection of five drabbles, or five vignettes, or whatever you wish to call them, all tied together in a neat little package with an overriding theme for a bow. This goes in a somewhat chronological order, starting with the very start of Season Two and ending somewhere generically towards the ends of the same season. So, please, do read, reveiw, and enjoy.
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Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.
- Desmosthenes
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Tomb of Lazarus
She doesn't beg people to stay.
Kate just doesn't beg.
Beggars are sad people. They are sad and lonely, fearful people with nothing in this world and just pleading for money, for safety, for love. Kate's not sad and she's not lonely. Yes, she is alone, and yes, that's the way it has to be. But that doesn't make her lonely. No. That doesn't make her lonely.
Kate doesn't beg because Kate doesn't need people. And she'll tell you the feeling is mutual and it goes hand-in-hand and if she doesn't need you then you more likely than not don't need her either.
(The waves beat a rhythm and it all sounds the same. Sawyer. Sawyer. Sawyer.)
The plane crash was a funny thing, a little wrench in the long walk to the gallows she was preparing for. She didn't ask for an escape. She didn't need one. It just kind of appeared. Fell from the sky in that ultimate ironic twist. She didn't ask for this. She did not ask for this.
(Hands clasped in metal and maybe in prayer and the remaining juice in the bottom of her cup is spreading its way towards her and he's bleeding and they're screaming and she can't reach and she remembers scant seconds before she was thinking of jail and of judges and juries.)
Kate doesn't need other people. She never asked for connections and interactions and she never had any real desire to make friends or find friends and deal with the inevitable pain and grief of losing them.
They blew the hatch open. That doesn't really matter.
(She wanted him to walk away. She wanted him to climb aboard that raft and set sail, get lost in the waves, drown at sea. She wanted him out of her life and far and away and she didn't want to feel him, taste that omnipresent scent always hanging on the air in his lazy wake: all sweat and smoke and something scared. She didn't want him to stay. She didn't want him to stay. He wasn't supposed to stay.)
Kate doesn't beg people to stay. Because when it comes down to it, life is just better this way.
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The Artful Dodger
Kate has never taken anything without asking first.
They teach you early on to keep your wallet in your front pocket and avoid certain neighborhoods at certain hours. Petty thieves and bellicose muggers: Sneaking things from people – their wallets, their watches, their souls. She would never pull a stunt like this, like that. But if she did, she imagines that she would never really mean to do it; it would just kind of happen. These people, they stand there, alone on a fucking subway, arms wide open, gold Rolex hanging from lax fingers, saying, come, take it. It's yours.
She's not supposed to be the one in control, she's not supposed to be the one slipping her fingers along your arm and five minutes later walking away with your fortune and your heart you foolishly adorned on your exposed sleeve.
(Jack is a doctor, which means his wallet should be overflowing.)
Kate didn't kiss Jack. No. He kissed her, he kissed her, and if it ever comes down to the blame game, it shouldn't fall on her.
(Jack doesn't look at her like she's the cat and he the canary. He doesn't look at her like he's at her mercy. He looks like love. Yes. And that sounds pretty.)
They don't talk much. And if silence is anger, then he's near overflowing with the sentiment. She doesn't really care. She doesn't care at all.
(She doesn't wish that he would understand.)
She would never take anything of his without asking: least of all his love.
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The Spanish Prisoner
She is no more a con artist than she is a thief or a murderer. The three combined form a triple threat, the ultimate criminal trifecta.
(If this was the Wild Wild West Sawyer's mug would grace the posters hanging in the local post office. Never hers. Never next to him.)
She isn't angry. And if she is it is only at herself. Because she saw this coming. She knew this would happen. Yes. She knew. She knew what Sawyer was all about, that he's really no better than this. Wool over the eyes or whatever the expression is. He never had her fooled. He never had her fooled and now he's got the guns.
(Sawyer probably only owns two nice suits. But it doesn't matter. You only ever con a person once. They're supposed to know better after that.)
She went to a bank out in the West. She went to a bank and she wasn't trying to cheat and she wasn't really stooping to all levels to get what she wanted. She didn't stay up the entire night before, worry tangling her stomach because she was going to have to kill again. No. She didn't plan on shooting anyone (no) and she didn't plan on causing terror and chaos at some small-town bank (Never.) She just did what she had to do and sometimes people get hurt in the process.
(She's not hurt and doesn't really mind.)
He's the kind of guy that's nothing more than this. A conman, a grifter, a useless sack of shit. A fuck up. She doesn't care because it doesn't matter.
And there really was never anything there between them in the first place.
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The Madonna and the Whore
Kate drives like a matronly bus driver with a family of four waiting for her fat ass to get home and feed them a greasy dinner. Slow and almost patient, abiding by the traffic laws and everything taught in those dreary hours of driver's ed, beneath the shadows drifting through the classroom shades and bouncing with the gory filmstrips. She drives like she can see her family in the rearview mirror and that makes her ease up on the gas.
(She really doesn't have eight speeding tickets to her name. And she swears she finally paid that last one.)
She is always on time, always ready and she is never, ever running late, running out of time, running somewhere, here, there, anywhere. One day in June she didn't find herself a different kind of late, the kind that no amount of lead foot speed-racing or ignoring stop signs could ever get her there on time. No. That didn't happen.
(Two pink lines never appeared. No. No. That would never happen to a girl like her. There were no pink lines and in the end there were no congratulations and smoked cigars and diaper bags because in the end there was no baby and there never were two pink lines. She never had to hide the evidence.)
On the island there is no sense of time.
And when Sun asks her if she ever took one of these, one of these pregnancy tests gripped tightly in her hand, she finds herself choking out the truth and somehow that one little word feels a little bit like an indictment: the slamming of the door and the tossing of the key.
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The Wooden Marionette
Australia seemed like the kind of place meant for disappearing.
She called herself Annie. Little Orphan Annie, just missing the red curls and the Daddy Warbucks willing to take her in and love her and be the father she never had.
(She'd say her name is Pinocchio, but it's too obvious, suspect. She's not the theatrical spawn of a German toy maker and when she tells a lie you'll never know the difference.)
The farmer, yes, he turned out to be a good man. He turned out to be a good man with the promise of $23,000 and the burden of a heavy mortgage burning a hole in their friendship and the tenuous bond of trust.
Kate is real. Not fake.
Kate is not a killer. Kate is not a sinner, not a criminal. Kate is fine and good and she has no father and she has no mother. Kate is not alone; she isn't one of them.
(Kate is not lost.)
Kate is not a liar, and Kate Austen has never whispered a lie in the middle of the night, told herself that it's okay and she's okay and everything is going to be alright.
She'll stamp her foot and tell you that she's real, not fake. She'll swear that she's the truth and would never try to trick herself into an easier version of reality. And Jiminy Cricket will shake his head because this, fooling herself into fiction, might just be the biggest crime of all.
(Kate's not lost at all.)
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fin.
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