It's long overdue, but hopefully this clears up some questions...

Chapter Twenty One:

Jack shook his head from side to side, unable to process what was happening before him. "No..." he whispered. "No, this can't be possible."

Two blonde women were stood before them, one of whom he recognised all too vividly.

"Sarah?"

"Hello, Jack," she said with a sad smile.

"What?" he asked incredulously. "...how?"

"It's a long story," she shrugged.

"Katie..." the woman beside her, Beth, murmered. Kate turned away from her, not bothering to hide the tears that spilled down her cheeks. "Katie, I never meant-"

"Look, perhaps we'd better start at the beginning," Sarah suggested.

"Sarah, what do you have to do with any of this?" Jack asked her. "These people...are you one of them?"

She wilted under his confused gaze for a moment. "Jack, this is a complicated issue we're dealing with here," she explained. "If you really want to understand how this has unfolded into you two ending up here together, I'd suggest you listen to to what Beth and I have to say first."

"Then you'd better explain quickly because I've got a whole bunch of questions," he told her.

Sarah cast a sideways glance at Beth, who couldn't take her eyes off of Kate, and started. "We got involved with Ben when we were in our teens," she started.

"Wait, who's Ben?" Jack asked.

"I believe you've been calling him Henry Gale this whole time," she told him.

"Ben..." he repeated slowly. "Right."

"I was in college when he contacted me, or rather, my mother," she explained. "He knew my father from somewhere, and I later found out that my father was one of the original members of the Dharma Initiative to come to this island."

"You told me your father died when you were six," he remembered.

"No, my father came to this island when I was six," she corrected. "You see, Jack, once you come to this island, you cannot leave it until your purpose is fulfulled, and my father was caught by the security system that lurks in the jungles before his purpose was fulfilled. Either way, by the time you came into my life he was dead."

"Then what was your purpose here?" he asked.

"Ben contacted me, and recruited me and Tom at the same," she remembered. "I didn't know either of them before then, and I didn't even understand their proposal at the time--"

"So why did you do it?" he asked, before he realised what 'it' was.

"I was in college and my mother worked in a diner," she cast a look to Jack's side. "I think Katherine understands how hard it is to even consider college when you're in that sort of financial situation." Kate glared at her through teary eyes. "I needed the money, and they offered to pay my entire tuition plus living expenses. Actually, the sort of money they offered I wouldn't have needed anything more than that for my entire life. It was just what I had to do for the money that was complicated and immoral."

"Then why did you do it?" he asked her again.

"Do you remember my sister, Rachel?" she asked.

"Yes, she came to the wedding with her baby."

"Rachel isn't my only sister," she explained. "My younger sister, yes, but I have an older sister, too. Her name is Juliet. She was one of the primary carers, along with Alex, to be involved with raising the twins. Juliet disappeared shortly after Rachel's cancer went into remission, and Rachel got pregnant thanks to Juliet's treatment and research. The last we heard of her, she went to Portland for a job. She was hired by some fancy company who admired her work and she said she'd be back in six months, in time for Rachel's due date...but six months came and went and she never came back. It turns out she was here the whole time."

"And what does she have to do with this?" Jack asked.

"Juliet's research was based around artificially created life," she told him. "Insemination, basically. Her experiments were praised as a gift...she could create life where life shouldn't be able to thrive. Her first breakthrough was getting a male fieldmouse pregnant through insemination."

"A male fieldmouse?" Jack repeated incredulously.

"Yes, quite remarkable," she nodded. "Anyway, they brought her here to solve the problem of the pregnant women dying."

"They were dying?" he asked.

"Yeah, and horrible deaths too," she grimaced. "If a woman fell pregnan, she'd be dead before the end of her second trimestar, if she even made it that far. There was no logical explanation of it either, which is why they brought her out here. The women didn't stop dying at first, if anything it got worse, but then Juliet and Bea came up with a solution."

"Involving us?" he realised.

"A woman gave birth here and survived, as did her child. The conception happened before they came to the island. In theory, we just needed to have all the children conceived before the couples were recruited to Dharma Initiative, but because of the turnover of new recruits it was never a certainty, and none were enthusiastic about the possibility of it ending badly."

"I wonder why," he said, in a sarcastic drawl that would have made Sawyer proud.

"In the end, the answer was simple. We needed to get the sperm and the eggs back from the mainland and bring them to the island frozen so that we could experiment in the best conditions. Luckily, Juliet was trained in this so we didn't have any doubts. We just needed to find donors."

"And that's how you found me and Kate," he finished for her.

She shrugged. "In a nutshell, yes."

Jack turned his attention to Beth. "What about you?" he asked. "How did they get you into this?"

Beth looked nervous, unable to look away from Kate, who would still not look at her. "My husband...he forced me."

"He forced you?"

"You have to understand," she pleaded. "Katie and I had been best friends since we were four years old...best friends. Me, her and Tommy Brannon..."

Kate looked up at Beth now, despise written all over her face. "Yeah, Tom's dead now, did you know that?" she spat at her.

Sheepishly, Beth looked down at her shoes. "Yeah, I knew," she admitted. "I had to bring the tape you recorded together out here withme, and they asked me to retrieve it from his personal effects in the morgue..."

"You gave them the tape?" Kate cried.

"I had no other choice, Katie, you have to understand-"

"How long were you working for them?" she asked.

"Katie-"

"How long were you lying to us?" she asked, raising her voice dangerously.

"Since I married Jason," she replied calmly, with an ironic smile. "It's almost funny, really...you always did tell me he was crazy."

"No, Beth, it's not funny!" Kate yelled.

"I'm sorry, Katie," she pleaded. "My parents were in the Dharma Initiative for years. I never got involved and then when Jason came along...he said his parents were involved in the same thing and he promised me that I'd never have to be a part of it and I foolishly believed him...then I married him and realised how deep I was in it already."

She shook her head. "Why did you do this to us?" she asked in a quiet voice.

"I had no other choice, you have to believe me," she repeated. "It was either this or you and Tom died-"

"Oh, so it's better that one is dead and the other's life has been ruined by it, rather than both of us being dead?" Kate asked. Beth couldn't answer that one. Kate shook her head. "When I remember what happened to Tom, it makes me feel worse than dead."

"I'm sorry," Beth murmered again.

"So, the whole children act was bullshit?" Beth looked down again. "I knew it. I knew something wasn't right."

"What are you talking about?" Jack asked.

"Jason was known for his violence," she explained. "Katie had already experienced violence from Wayne, so she kept encouraging me to leave Jason. We had this whole dream about running away together, two girls on their own...when it came down to it, it was just unthinkable. Jason and Ben assigned me the mission the same time they did Sarah."

"What mission?"

"Recruit the donors they'd chosen," she said. "You and Katie."

"We were set up?" Kate asked.

"Sarah and I had nothing to do with the recruitment, we had no say in the matter," she said.

"Why us?" Kate asked.

"We honestly don't know."

"But the accident..." Jack remembered. "Sarah, you were paralysed...."

"The accident was real," she admited. "They had to get me into the hospital and under your long term care somehow. What better than a severe spinal injury?"

His eyes narrowed. "How dedicated of you."

"You have to understand that we had no choice in this matter."

"How did you do it?" Kate asked. "How did you manage to trick us into this?"

"I was your wife, Jack," Sarah reminded him. "For however short a time. It wasn't hard to get what they needed from you."

"How did you fool Kate?" he asked.

"It was much harded than getting what we needed from you, for sure," Beth told him. "I had to fake infertility, and carry on telling Katie how desperate Jason and I were for a child. Eventually, it worked, and shaved, offering to donate some of her eggs so that we could proceed with insemination. Katie and I went to the clinic together."

"Only you didn't get pregnant," Kate remembered.

"The first time we passed it off as a missed opportunity," she explained. "It happens like that sometimes. But we realised that I couldn't keep the excuses up forever, so we did the only thing possible."

"You had to die," Jack realised.

"Yeah, but I had to be alive as well. We staged the car crash, and they used a fake body."

"Did you know I'd be the one who had to identify that body?" Kate asked her.

Beth looked away again. "No, I didn;t."

Kate laughed hollowly. "I bet you don't even care...you don't care how hard it was to identify my best friend's body...how horrible it was to wake up in the middle of the night and remember all the blood..."

"Katie, I'm sorry-"

Kate's laugh stopped, and she cut Beth off with a horrifying shout. "I don't care if you're sorry!"

"Katie-"

"No one would do that to their best friend. No one."

"Katherine-" Sarah stepped in.

"No, she's right," Jack defended her. "How can you live with yourself for this?"

"Jack, working for these poeple has nothing to do with morals-"

"You're damn right it doesn't," he agreed. "I don't know what's worse; knowing what you did and how you did it, or knowing that our children have been forcably seperated from us for the first years of their lives!"

"The plan all along was to reunite you..." she started to defend, but Jack cut them off.

"How did you manage to get us on the same plane?"

"It was simple really," she told him. "Dharma knew where Katherine was the whole time she was on the run. They monitored her and sent in the cop when she'd have to get on the plane. And Jack, your father was part of Dharma," she said.

He rolled his eyes at that part. "Don't tell me he faked a death as well."

"He was supposed so, but things went wrong," she told him.

"Good," he nodded. "Because I think I'd have to kill himf or this if he walked through that door."

"Where are the kids now?" Kate asked.

"They're safe," Sarah told her.

"That's not what she asked you," Jack pointed out.

"Surely all that matters is that they're safe," Sarah told them.

"No, I want to know EXACTLY where they are!" Kate shouted again.

"Just tell her, Sarah," Beth said tiredly.

"They're with Alex," Sarah said. "She's preparing them."

"Preparing them for what?" Jack asked.

"Leaving."

Kate frowned. "Where are you taking them?"

"As long as everything is kept under control for the next forty-eight hours, the'll be heading back to your beach camp with the two of you."

They stopped, looking up at their captors. "Just like that?" Jack asked.

"Just like that," Beth nodded.

"Why?" Kate asked suspiciously.

"Because we started out by doing the wrong thing, and now we're doing the right thing to make up for it," Sarah explained.

Jack shook his head. "This doesn't make up for it. This doesn't even start to make up for it."

"Which is why you're providing passage home for you and your friends," Sarah replied.

"Rescue," Kate mumbled.

"In seven days time an empty cargo plane will pass over the island on it's way back to Figi. It will be enough to take your entire camp back along with it."

"We're going home?" Jack asked.

"There are conditions," Beth explained quickly.

"What conditions?" Kate asked.

"Silence," Sarah said simply. "You can't tell anyone about the Dharma Initiative or this island."

Jack laughed emptily. "I hate to compromise your apparently perfect plan, but I think my mother's going to wonder where her two grandchildren randomly appeared from," he reminded them.

"Then you come up with a cover story," Sarah instructed. "Anything to prevent them finding out. No one can know what happened to you on this island."

"Or what?" he challenged.

"Or everyone you love will be killed."