Chapter 3. Come What May

By the time they reached their camp at the beach, Jack had managed to find and remove both bullets. The good news was that the wound in Kate's side was more superficial than he'd thought, the bullet lodging itself barely an inch from her side.

The bad news was that the wound in her stomach wasn't. If anything, it was worse than he'd hoped.

Cleaning both wounds, he had repaired the damage as best he as could, stitching her up with the thread Desmond had found him. It was standard black, he noticed, the irony not lost on him. How he longed to go back to that day, the day of the crash, before The Others, before Juliet, before any of this. If he could have his time again, would have waited their captivity out, instead of trying to save Kate, only to face losing her again, right when it seemed that she might return his feelings.

The hatch was gone, to his dismay, so they set up a second infirmary at the caves, where he could keep the wounds sterile much better than he could at the beach. More than a week after Jack had won them fairly in a poker game, Sawyer finally returned his stolen medical supplies, and for once, Jack was glad that the southerner was such a bad sport. Until then, all he'd had to work with was the first aid kit on Desmond's boat, and he'd basically gutted that, using most of the bandages before they'd even reached land.

She had regained consciousness for a few moments on the boat, long enough to look into his eyes with her hazy jade green ones and whisper, "You never give up, do you?" before she drifted off again. That was the last time he heard her voice for three days.

Jack had used most of the painkillers on Sawyer and Boone before Libby had even been brought to him, so he gave Kate some of the heroin instead. It took him a while to figure out the right dosage; he only wanted to lessen her pain, not give her a taste for it, like Charlie, but eventually he was satisfied that it wouldn't do her any further harm.

He sat by her bedside for most of those three days, aware that if it were someone else, he would have sent them away like he had Kate, back when Sawyer had been shot. Sun tried to send him off to sleep a few times, only for him to return less than an hour later with some forgotten instruction she insisted was common sense. By the third day she had given up.

Sawyer hovered beside him for the first day or so, but after a while, the lack of change in her condition started to get to him, and he left, coming by three or four times a day for updates. There was never much to tell, but he kept appearing anyway, staring at Jack with his mouth open as if he wanted to say something before rushing off back to the beach. Jack wasn't sure he wanted to hear whatever it was Sawyer was trying to tell him, not if it somehow related to Kate. He was still trying to erase the grainy image of them wrapped around each other from his memory, though he was beginning to doubt he ever would.

Claire, Charlie, Hurley, and even Locke came by once in a while, but he sent them away, citing sterility and silence as the reasons for their banishment, though he knew neither of those things were likely to make much of a difference this late in the game.

Only Sayid seemed to understand his desperate wish to be alone, keeping his distance once he knew there was nothing he, or any of the others, could do. It was all on Jack now, and Kate's will to survive, and no amount of protest from Sun could make that any less true.

So that left him and Kate. Alone, like lone survivors on a desert island. Somehow it felt right. He knew she'd be angry if she could see him like this, like she was after Boone's funeral when he wouldn't sleep, and when Claire and Charlie disappeared, but he couldn't will himself to leave her. He needed to be there, come what may, even if it was only to close her eyes in death, or to carry her to the beach to join the other casualties. He needed to be there at the end, whatever that was. His father was right, he wasn't good at letting go.

Jack managed to keep the wounds from getting infected, and by the third day, more than thirty-six heart-wrenching hours after she was shot, she was able to find the strength to turn her head, reaching out to touch his shoulder as he drifted into a troubled sleep beside her. He woke with a start, his face cracking into a grin when he saw her watching him. "Hey," he said, unable to keep the emotion from his voice.

"Hey," she replied, her voice shaky from lack of use, but strong, much stronger than he'd had reason to imagine it would be. He'd almost given up hope of ever hearing it again.

"You scared us," he said, only realising this was another denial once the words were out of his mouth. Who was he kidding? "You scared me."

"Sorry," she said sheepishly, melting his heart with another watery grin. What she said next almost stopped it completely.

"About Sawyer, Jack," she began, her voice growing in confidence as she pressed on. "That was a mistake. I was scared and lonely, and I thought he was going to die. Maybe I did love him a little. He's right, we'll always have a connection. But not like you and I do. I'm not in love with him, Jack, I'm in love with you. I never meant to hurt you." Tears glistened in her eyes now, and she turned away again, but he reached over and cupped her chin gently, bringing her back to him. He wasn't going to let her run from this. Not again.

"I'm in love with you too, Kate. I think I have been for a long time," he said, surprising himself with the simplicity of his words, the directness. He'd spent the last three days trying to figure out what he'd say to her when she woke up, and in his more morose moments, what he'd say at her funeral, but somehow this simple phrase had escaped him until now. "I'm sorry it took something like this for me to see it."

And with that, he leant over and kissed her lips lightly, sweeping a sweat-dampened curl out of her eyes. She smiled at him, and he smiled back, musing at how things worked out sometimes. Three days ago he thought he'd lost her, never realising that she'd been his all along. All he'd had to do was find the courage to ask her to stay.