Lost and its characters belong to JJ Abrams and crew. I'm just borrowing for fun. Written in response to the Fanfic100 prompts – Purple.

Lost – The Long Road: Letters and Consequences

By Mystic

Oct/Nov

May 2012

Jack came to hate the color purple. It wasn't something that happened overnight, but something that took months, years even. He stood just outside of his apartment with his mail in his hands and it floored him the way it did every time. He stared at the envelope with no return address, thick with pictures and paper. Purple. It was the color of the pen she used to write him her letters. She had sloppy handwriting, neater than his own, but not something anyone would associate with a girl's writing. It wasn't loopy or curvy, but harsh and scratched.

Kate wrote in tall thin letters and she wrote quickly. He knew because she told him she did. She didn't have much time to write, but she made damned sure she did. Always once a month, always to Jack, always in purple letters. And every letter he received took his breath away for just a moment. It meant she was alive. She was safe and still on the run. It meant that there was that small chance she'd come back.

Jack didn't dwell on that small chance though. Instead, Jack ran his thumb along the front, where her letters pressed softly onto the envelope's surface. He touched the small fingerprints that smudged the lower right corner and he lifted it to his nose, smelling the faintest traces of strawberry jelly and sweat. They were familiar to him even though he'd never met the hands who made them.

His apartment was cold. He kept it that way because heat made him nervous. It made him remember the island. It made him remember her. It brought back memories of kissing her, holding her – even just talking to her – that made his heart squeeze painfully in his chest. He dropped his keys and his pocket change into a glass dish on a cherry wood table in the hallway, glancing at himself in the mirror above it for only a fraction of a second. Jack didn't like to look at himself, see the clean shaven face that stared back, the graying hair that grew too fast, the eyes that looked sunken, the body that refused to put on weight.

It just reminded him of who he had become. He worked all day, ate a quick dinner on the way home and then slept all night. In the morning he started the routine over. Jack didn't give himself time to enjoy himself. He felt guilty doing so. He made his way past the entrance to his bedroom and the kitchen and stepped into the living room. His feet clicked with each step, echoing through the house. It kept him calm, knowing the only sound he heard were the sounds of his own footsteps. Secretly, he came home each night hoping to hear hers.

His bag fell with a smack onto the tile floor and he let himself slump into the black leather couch that sat in the center of a bare living room. Jack's life was about the necessities now. There was no indulgence. Jack knew he could, that she didn't really have any power over him. He could buy a fancy rug, get a flat screen television with a digital surround sound system and he could play loud music and get drunk and have parties and fuck girls.

Jack could do anything he wanted to because Kate wasn't there. Kate would never be there. Not really. He tried to tell himself that every night, but it never worked. Somewhere inside, he still had hope. She'd be captured, or she'd turn herself in, or she'd just show up at his doorstep with a shrug and a smile. By the time he thought he could push her out of his mind, her letter arrived with those purple letters scratched onto the surface.

He stared at the letter in his hands, the one that made his stomach turn and his heart pound. The contents of that envelope were all he cared about. The words and the images that the envelope held kept him moving from day to day and he didn't want anything else to take the place of that. Others tried to get him to ignore her. His mother had introduced him to more women than he knew were in her social circle. Sawyer had dropped by unannounced with pairs of them every so often.

Sawyer told him to forget her. Jack would show him her letters. Remind him that there was more to the game than just himself and Kate and Sawyer would understand. For a week. Maybe two. But the other man knew perfectly well, it wasn't easy to forget what didn't go away. Jack slid his finger between the glue and the paper and listened to it tear open carefully. The open flap revealed the white paper folded around a small stack of photos inside. Jack touched it gently, pressing the paper against the photos, seeing the purple writing and grimacing.

It was the color of the words that burned him in the best and worst ways once a month.

"Jack, you won't believe where we've been. Florida. Since we were in Louisiana, and there were signs with Mickey Mouse everywhere – advertising hotels and cheap tickets and rides – Sam wanted to go. He wanted to meet this giant mouse. I don't think he understood he would be so big though. And he was cranky when we finally got through the line. So, of course, he kicked him. I got the picture. The only reason they didn't throw us out of the park is that Sam's barely five and they've had similar reactions. Kids freaking out seeing Mickey up close for the first time."

He smiled, staring up at the ceiling a moment before looking down at the images in his left hand. On top was a picture of Kate with Mickey Mouse. She was grinning, her eyes wide, surprised, and her hair pulled up in a bun on the top of her head, that one stubborn stray strand of hair running down the side of her face. Her cheeks were red and in her arms she held the five year old boy who had his leg swung out, heading in the general area of Mickey's crotch.

It made Jack laugh. The youngster with her dimples and his sloppy dark brown hair had his tongue pressed tight between his lips as he tried to reach the character at his side. He could see Kate straining her muscles to keep him in place. Behind it was a similar photo, except Sam was standing alone next to Mickey. Jack could tell the grin on his face was fake and chuckled as he saw the boy's eyes were trained on the giant mouse. He imagined Kate telling him to behave.

Sam would know he had to. They might cause suspicion otherwise.

"I've never been to Disneyworld. I didn't know it was that big. Sam was too short for a lot of the rides though and we don't have a real use for souvenirs. I did get him a shirt. That's useful at least. We got to see characters mostly, which he ran away from. Were you ever afraid of the characters in suits, Jack? I don't think I would have been. I once went to a water park with the school and there was a guy in a whale costume. I didn't find it too impressive."

He put down the letter and concentrated on the pictures. The little boy standing in front of a bush carved into the likeness of Dumbo. Sam waving in front the castle. Then a dark image of his profile as he stared at the giant boat from Pirates of the Caribbean. He could see, in the corner of the image, Sam's small hand within Kate's. He wondered if his boy was scared. Jack flipped and saw Sam in flip flops and light blue swim trunks and he picked up the letter again.

"Afterwards we just kept driving south. I've never been to Key West. There's a military base down there. I think my dad passed through there once on his way somewhere else. We went to the southernmost tip of the US and we swam in the ocean. There was a guy down there selling shirts with Manatees on them. Sam said they looked like monsters. He wanted to know if monsters were real. I didn't know what to tell him. I knew you'd tell him they weren't real. Monsters were figments of our imagination. Our psyche's attempt to give shape to the things we're afraid of that don't have shape. I told him monsters were real, but they lived on an island far far away."

Jack saw the picture of Kate and Sam at the giant marker at that southernmost tip of the states. Sam was pointing, Kate was watching him. She was making sure he didn't fall off the platform. There were lots of pictures like that, Jack knew. There were also lots of pictures of Sam showing off cuts and scrapes. He smiled at an image of the two of them in a tree. Kate was hanging upside down and Sam was underneath her, playing with her hair, which hung loose. The boy gripped it, pulling it to the sides of his head, so it almost looked like he had on a wig.

He was taken aback by how much Sam actually looked like her. Jack had always looked at the images of his boy and seen himself. The straight dark hair Kate kept cut in a floppy bowl, the thin lips and wide sad eyes. He touched the glossy paper, leaving a fingerprint on Sam's small chest.

Flipping to the next image, of Kate sitting on a fence, Jack straightened on the couch. The image was slightly crooked and she was staring off into the ocean. It was something he'd gotten so used to seeing on the island. Jack didn't think he'd ever see it again. He stared at her image, seeing the wrinkles that had crept into the corners of her eyes and the grey that peeked out here and there in her hair. Jack touched the curve of hips and smiled.

"I don't know where we're heading from here, Jack. I tried to head back to California, but they've got my picture posted everywhere. He knows all about you, Jack. He asks about you all the time. I tell him about the island, about the fun stuff that happened there. I'm scared to tell him about the rest. He has nightmares sometimes, about things I never told him about. I have nightmares now too. That they'll take him away from me."

He stopped, dropping the letter into his lap. It always ended the same. Jack knew she couldn't have changed the circumstances. They rescued them, she was heading for jail. Kate asked him to help her. She begged him for a distraction, something. Jack tackled a security guard, played like he tripped, and she escaped.

She didn't know she was pregnant. Jack told himself that every day – that she didn't know, she couldn't have known. He folded the papers and pushed them back into the envelope, standing with the stack of pictures in his left hand.

The photo album was blue and thick and had Sam Shephard imprinted on the side. Jack had it made after the third set of pictures came, when he had a chance to fully digest what Kate was showing him. Her first letters were short, they were to make sure he knew she was ok and still out there. Then she sent him a letter that was completely incoherent and Jack could see she'd cried all over it. He spent weeks trying to track down the source of the letter. He took it straight to the FBI who deemed her to be in a dangerous state of mind. Manically depressed? Jack couldn't remember what the exact term was.

Then he got the first pack of pictures.

She sat in front of a large sign for the Grand Canyon. Kate riding a mule. Her mocking her own wanted image, which was starting to vary from her actual appearance. Jack noticed she'd gained a bit of weight. He noticed her features rounded and her clothes were baggy and he wondered why. It didn't occur to him until the next set, when her stomach protruded. He stared at the image of her with her hands tucked underneath the bulge at her waistline, standing in front of a mountain somewhere in Washington. She sent him a sonogram that he stared at for an entire night.

He flipped the book open, thumbing through the pages, seeing Sam grow up in a flash of pages and he began sliding the new photos in. Turning each over slowly and reading the purple writing that gave him the date, the place and a little sentence or two on what was going on. Kate had an amazing memory for the details, he learned.

"He liked the train the best. Thunder Mountain. Was too short for Space Mountain, even on tip-toe. Chickened out of Splash Mountain, but I don't blame him."

"Charmed his first free soda from this lady. I made him think it was free anyways. Paid behind his back."

"Sam wanted to feed seagulls, wasn't too thrilled when they bit his finger. He told me daddy would make it better."

"I'm missing you here. Sam took the picture."

Jack slid the crooked image of Kate in beside one of her holding Sam tight to her chest as they sat on a bench near a large old tree. The little boy giggled, his eyes squinted in the way his own would when he laughed. He touched the image, feeling his chest burn as he closed the book on his son and slid it back onto the shelf beside other photo albums and medical books. Jack took the letter and went into his bedroom, sat on his bed and took a deep breath. He reached under the bed and pulled out a shoe box.

Pressing the letter into the box, his fingers slid across his own name printed in her sloppy handwriting on the front. Always purple letters, the same as the ones that ended each letter with the words "I love you, Jack. Sam loves you too." The color that made him clench his jaw and turn away when he saw it on the street held his full attention now as he inhaled the smell of her from faded letters. Jack listened to the knocking on his front door as he pushed the lid down on the box, sliding it back underneath his bed and he went into the living room dragging his feet.

The knocking came now with an urgency that made his heart pound and his head start to feel cold. Someone was in trouble. Her face flashed into his mind just before he whipped open the door and saw her standing there. Kate's mouth dropped open and she adjusted the boy sleeping in her arms.

"Hey, Jack."

End Chapter 1