A/N: Thank you, Evermore, my first reviewer! Just wanted to warn my readership, this chapter's kind of...dark, at the end. Please read and review!

"Sawyer. Sawyer!" Boone yelled from beyond an outcropping of rocks into the ocean. He would be calling for Jack, but he was all the way at the caves, and Sawyer's camp was closest to him. Hearing no response, he sprinted around the rocks to where Sawyer lay napping. "Get up, man!" Boone cried, frantically shaking him awake.

"Why the hell you not lettin' the sleeping dogs lie, boy?" Sawyer growled, but Boone was already dragging him back to where he had found her, unconscious.

"It's Kate."

Sawyer paced impatiently at the mouth of the cave where Jack was examining Kate.

"Could you stop that for five minutes?" Jack snapped. "You're making me dizzy, and you're blocking my light."

"All you had to do was ask, Doc." The cold man was not used to…caring this much. About someone else. He strode to the side of the makeshift examination table and took in the sight of Kate. Pale, disheveled, with dark circles around her eyes and swollen cheeks, she was almost unrecognizable.

"She's been vomiting. And she hasn't slept or eaten in a long time."

"So can you fix her, Doctor Jackass?" Sawyer snarled.

"Severe dehydration. Getting her on some fluids will help." Jack was unfazed by the man's outburst. He was almost oblivious to anyone and everything that was not Kate.

"Shouldn't she be awake by now?" Boone asked, walking in. He had been sent as a delegate for the relative crowd waiting anxiously outside.

"I'm a little worried about that. She…" Jack trailed off as he turned back to Kate on the table. Sawyer had found her hand and was gently stroking her wrist with his thumb. As he clasped it, a flutter of eyelids brought Jack back to full attention. Grabbing a bottle of water, he focused his intent gaze on her face.

"Hey," she rasped, and immediately broke into fits of coughing.

"Easy, easy. Here, take some of this." Boone propped her up and Jack handed her a cup of cool water. "Better?" he asked, when she had had about half the bottle.

Nodding, she stared up at…Sawyer? What was he doing here? Afraid to speak, her eyes asked the question of him, then slowly creased closed as she passed out of consciousness again.

Sawyer dropped her hand and slunk out of the infirmary without another scathing word.

Nightmares chased her. Claire was blaming her baby's death on her. Sawyer condemned her with his stare. Every time, she woke to the sight of Jack and assorted other visitors, gasping for air and water and redemption.

Sawyer never came again. Jack never left. She couldn't keep down anything outside of water, but he made sure she got plenty of that. Within two days she was sitting up and walking out on her own. She couldn't return to the beach, though, for a full week after that. The last thing she needed, said Jack, was a draining environment like the hot, dry beach. She was almost positive that the last thing she really needed, he thought, was the chance to see Sawyer.

She was eating now, though little, and had moved back to the beach. Nightmares continued, and even in the daytime she saw the murderer of Claire's child through the mask of trees. Hallucination? She wasn't sure.

The image of the gruesome death was painted on the insides of her eyelids, making her yearn for daylight to finally come every time night fell.

She couldn't talk to anyone. The questions were endless and were really, very good questions. But she couldn't answer them. They knew she had seen something terrible out there.

Thank God Claire had baby amnesia. It was painful to watch her in her confusion, but much better, Kate reasoned, than the knowledge of having lost a child.

One night, when Kate was trying to flee sleep, she heard the swish of sand beneath footsteps behind her. She didn't turn as he plopped down in the sand beside her.

"Sawyer." It was the first word she'd said in days.

"Sweetness."

Silence.

"God, Sweetness, what have you seen?"

Silence.

He pulled himself wearily up and ambled back to his tent.

After he was gone, she looked to the sheath hooked around the belt loop of her jeans. She hadn't done it in years. However, the more she thought about it the more she wanted it. Running an absentminded finger across the scars from her self-destructive past days, she unbuckled the sheath. With one icy stroke she could wash away her pain, let it leak out of her.

She hiked up her tee shirt on one side, the side opposite the place of the old scars.

In a few moments—oh, the sweet release felt so good—she was done and she walked down to the ocean to clean the wound.

His eyes watched her in solemn silence.