Chapter 11 - Raincloud
17/11/5

"A faded vision frozen in my mind
Of melting memories and tears in her eyes

But she's a raincloud and she's washing over me
Makes it hard to see the light
She's a raincloud, it can't be good for me,
So why does she make me come alive?"

There was nothing, then. Nothing but silence, and three minds racing with the fear this was all nothing but a dream. Jack, scared this wasn't really Kate. Kate, scared Jack was nothing but her dilapidated mind tricking her. And Faith… Faith finding a dream coming true and then with each glance at this man she had been watching for weeks, finding that dream fall from her grasp; the flashes of light it caught on the descent that would never end. Eyes meeting, mere glimmers, pupils shrinking against the sheer white light of Jack's torch… and Kate's laboured breathing, the air that wouldn't quite come, her mind screaming at muscles and vocal cords to do something, anything, and them point blank refusing. No need to be strong anymore, they told her. Jack's here now. But she wanted to show him… show him she was still Kate, still capable, still fine on her own. But for once, and for the first time in as long as she could remember, she needed someone. She needed him. And she wanted to.

"Jack…" Her voice was barely a whisper. She was reaching for him with arms that failed her. She was reaching for him, holding out fingers and hands and arms for him to carry her home; but it was all only in her mind, like a falling dream, and each time she realised her arms were in truth still at her side, Kate grew more and more frustrated. At herself, at the muscles that had carried her so far on the run for so long that now failed to manage the smallest of gestures.

Jack opened her mouth to reassure her, trying to rapidly assess the situation at the same time… the path of his gun still firmly trained on the stranger who stood over Kate. This woman who he had assumed would be a man, this broken corpse of a human who he had built up to be someone so huge, so powerful and cruel and unfeeling; her eyes that hadn't left him since he barrelled into the cave, eyes like a rabbit caught in the headlights. Eyes that twitched in shock. Someone long ago shattered, long ago lost… someone so fragile. But someone who had a gun, mere millimetres from Kate's head, a finger that trembled hesitantly on a trigger. And all the sympathy Jack had; all the sympathy and empathy he as a doctor was immediately filled with; deserted him, for Kate, his Katie, was perhaps seconds from death… and certainly battered and bruised, black and blue where tanned healthy skin once lay. A shadow of the power of strength and determination he knew.

The stranger spoke. Screamed. "That's not JACK! That's AIDAN!" Her voice echoed in the cave, shot up to the ceiling and bellowed down again like smoke. The two names mixed and collided until the individual words were indistinguishable, and that gun, that gun Jack wanted to rip from her hands, flailed wildly in unsteady hands. Kate flinched, but not the immediate and conscious reaction she should have had. "Aidan…" The voice was calmer now, almost too calm. Jack's mind raced with trying to figure out what was going on. "… You came back to me, I knew you would, I told her but she wouldn't believe me…"

The words came out too fast, too loud. This wasn't how she wanted it to be. She wanted their reunion to be perfect, on a warm day on the beach, eyes squinting in the sun, a hand up to shield irises so she could see him clearly. He'd walk slowly towards her, footprints just in the waterline, each drinking in the long lost sight of the other. Not this. Not this face she wasn't sure she recognised, and her mind that tried to convince itself, and he looking confused, and that gun. That gun that stayed trained on her, when it was that bitch he should be angry and threatening at.

"Aidan?" Faith asked in a small voice. She wanted him to break into a grin. She wanted him to drop his gun, pick her up, whirl her around like just after he proposed. Fish and chips on Manly beach, and a diamond ring and the sunset. And her face that had said it all.

"Who's Aidan?" Jack replied calmly.

Those words, the exact ones Faith's mother had used the first time she mentioned this wonderful man… Aidan, who had done nothing but help her carry grocery bags up to her third floor apartment upon running into her in front of the broken elevator. Who had done nothing more than smile before Faith knew she was going to fall in love with him. But to hear the words spoken again, and it be this man before her who spoke them, this man she knew was her husband; a chill ran down Faith's spine, radiating through her nerves, speeding up her heart until it thudded into her chest wall and filled her ears with a dull, knowing throb.

Jack saw her eyes widen, the step she took back in a physical motion against the shock permeating through her. A smile seemed to play across her lips for a second, and his mind rattled with bewilderment and a total lack of understanding. Aidan? There was no-one on the island by that name, or as far as Jack knew. Vague bells rang in his head, had there been an Aidan on the flight manifest? He didn't know, and was rapidly caring less. He wanted to run back to normality. He wanted to pick Kate up, and rewind time until she had just kissed him, and tell her not to go for a walk. He wanted to understand the world again.

The smile on Faith's lips spread, until she was laughing out loud, a cackle that bounced off the cave walls. "Oh my god!" She cried. "She's Smurfing brainwashed you as well? She's got you forgetting your own name?" She stepped forward again, pressed the gun into Kate's temple. Kate groaned, barely conscious. "What the flying Smurf have you done to my husband, huh?" The butt of the gun dug into a wound that still blazed with blood, and Faith's frightened, crazed voice came out as a growl. "What the Smurf have you done?"

Jack reacted automatically. It was as if his brain bypassed conscious thought and just immediately directed nerves to move muscles that would achieve something, anything to get this woman away from Kate, a rag doll who lay scattered on the floor, merely whimpering. His booted foot came up to her knee cap, smashing into the clothed bone and knocking Faith off balance. Her tight grip on the gun remained as she reeled backwards; Jack brought his foot up again, landing squarely in the soft flesh of her stomach. Her body lost balance, and limbs and trunk crashed simultaneously into the opposite wall of the cave. To Faith, time seemed to slow and stand still; the look on Aidan's face as the rubber sole of his boot locked with her abdomen, the fierce burning from his eyes at the thought of Kate being put in danger. The shock of his impact against her, how the pain never seemed to start; how there was already too much pain flooding her with the mere idea that he would choose Kate over his wife, brainwashed oe There was no time for Jack to count to five. There was no time to panic, or cry, or run kicking and screaming to the corner of the cave and rip the life from this person who fifteen minutes ago he hadn't known existed, and could now so easily be the person who took Kate's life. There was no time to do anything but rush to her side.

"Katie." He said firmly. He tried to break through the haze that surrounded her. Her hands were resting on the wound. Jack covered them with his own, and pressed firmly. "I need you to press, Kate. I need you to press as hard as you can." Jack ripped an emergency bandage from his pocket, struggling with the cellophane wrapping as his hands shook uncontrollably. Kate's eyes were glazed and lost, staring at him with something like disbelief.

"Jack." She croaked. "Jack…"

"Sssh, ssh, I'm here…" He quickly made a thick pad from the bandage and placed the material under Kate's hands, and pressed them down again. Already the ivory of the dressing was becoming saturated with thick, viscous crimson. Jack swallowed.

"Jack… I've been waiting for you to come, so I can tell you." Kate coughed, dissolving into a fit of jerky splutters and breath that caught.

"Yeah?" Jack was removing his shirt, ripping down the buttons. He tried desperately to keep her talking.

"I needed to tell you. About how I'm not…" The splutters came again, more severe this time. "…How I thought I wasn't good enough for you, and how I'm probably still not, but you make me believe I might be one day, Jack." She paused, mesmerised momentarily by his calmness. Jack tore a long thick strip from his shirt, and another, and another. Her words, her quiet accepting of events, the blood that flooded from her leg… they broke his heart. "I didn't kill Tom. But he was in the car because of me, and they shot him because he was with me… and Tom's baby, Jack, he had a baby…"

"Ssshh." He tried to calm her rising voice, absorbing the information she was imparting to him but needing to concentrate on stopping the flow on blood. Jack grabbed two of the strips of fabric, lined them up together; as gently as possible, unbuttoned Kate's jeans and slipped them over her hips, exposing the skin underneath. Skin that should have been delicate white, but instead was slick with the fluid that should never have seen the outside; fluid Jack desperately wanted to gather in his hands, push back into the artery, sew her up again.

"Jack." Kate whimpered, a moment of clarity seeping into her as she gazed at her damaged leg. "Jack… I'm scared…"

"Katie…" He gathered up the shards of his shirt, lifted her fragile leg and slipped them underneath. As quickly and tenderly as possibly, Jack tied the tourniquet above the point of entry, where the blood oozed from; pulled as tight as possible and double knotted the fabric. He knew the bullet was still within the flesh; there was no exit wound at the back of Kate's thigh. And then Jack stopped moving, and moved his bloodied hands to the sides of Kate's face.

"Listen to me." He murmured. He locked his eyes on hers, both relaying each other's racing fears. "I'm going to take you back to camp. Back home. And I'm going to fix you. You're going to be fine, Kate." A tear trickled from her eye, and Jack leaned in to kiss the droplet as it meandered down her cheek. The touch of his lips… that gentle brush, it was all Kate needed to make the tears come fuller, thicker and faster and no longer anything to do with the bullet in her leg; just seeing him, just having him there when it was all she had wanted and needed for seemingly endless amounts of time. Ever since she had first woken in this lost, foreign place.

"Thank you." It came out as a sob, solid and happy and terrified all at once. There was so much more she wanted to say, so much she needed to tell him. She stared into his eyes, for long moments, trying desperately to let him know all her weak, shattered body had no energy to say.

"I know." He whispered, pressing a kiss to her forehead.

There was a groan from the corner. Jack grabbed the torch and his gun. She was a heap in the corner, a skinny mass of bones and heaving breaths.

"I'm so sorry…" Faith barely recognised her own voice, so full of sorrow and dreams that could no longer ever come true now she knew Aidan was gone. They would never buy their first house together, or sit and wait for pink lines to appear on a pregnancy test, or hold hands and listen proudly to a parent's evening report for maths or English. There was only this island, and never being able to properly say goodbye, and waiting to return to a life she wouldn't recognise. "I thought… I thought you were Aidan, I didn't mean to shoot, I would never have shot…"

"Who's Aidan?" Jack repeated.

"Aidan is…" Faith stopped herself. "Was… my husband. You… you just look exactly like him, I didn't know, I couldn't believe he was dead…" She was no longer speaking to Jack. She was staring into the blackness and at Kate's shuddering form. "I'm sorry…"

She reached up, handed Jack the small worn envelope that sat along with her other things. "Here." And then she was silent, her knuckles white with grip on the clump of metal in her hand. There were no more words, only memories that played in loop in her head. And Aidan, smiling down at her, and Faith knew what she needed to do.

Jack pocketed the scrap of paper without question. He turned from the corner, from this woman he could never forgive; back to his Kate, pale and gently moaning, and knew she needed to be at the caves. Now. And he needed to stop his hands from shaking, for he would allow himself no rest until not only was her life saved, but every tiny bruise and cut and scrape had been seen to. He gathered her up in his arms, softly supporting that leg which still leaked what looked like so much blood, so much that Jack's vest immediately felt wet and warm with foreign fluid.

He walked quickly from the caves, and never looked back; those two specks that now moved as one, his heart that had found her still pounding in his chest. He didn't want to think about how it was at least an hour back to camp, and for every second of that she was in such danger. He remembered all those figures in his medical school text books, of how thirty percent of total blood volume can be lost before transfusion is essential, how blood loss always looks more than it actually is, about how he could do the very best job he was able to as an experienced surgeon, and some patients still won't make it. And Jack thought about first meeting Kate, the courage she had shown in stitching him up, the devastation in her eyes when she admitted she had killed someone, the look of fledgling trust as she kissed him those few long days ago. About how she made him come alive in a way no-one else ever had.

How there was no way he was letting her go yet. Or ever.

Her head lolled from side to side as Jack exited the caves, lifting Kate up and over the lip first and then climbing out himself. Her knelt down to pick her up again.

"Jack…" Her voice was nothing, and at first he thought he was imagining it. Her skin was so, so pale in the moonlight. Jack prayed with everything he had that the torch held out until they reached camp.

"Katie?" He whispered.

"Jack… I don't think I can hold on…." Her eyes were closed.

"Ssshh, of course you can, you hold on for me, okay? Kate?" His heart was thundering. Don't leave me, he wanted to cry.

"Okay. Jack… I need you to know, I lo-"

"Don't say it." He interrupted her quickly, aching at having her back, and not daring to expect those words, and dying inside. "Don't say that, not now. Tell me once you're better. You're going to get better, so you can tell me then."

"Okay." Kate whispered, her mind hazing over again. And she let herself be bundled up again, let his strong arms carry where he could no longer run to herself. She sunk into him, and trusted him beyond anyone else she had ever allowed into her life. She knew; he would save her. Because neither were ready to let the other go.

"A faded vision frozen in my mind
Of melting memories and tears in her eyes

But she's a raincloud and she's washing over me
Makes it hard to see the light
She's a raincloud, it can't be good for me,
So why does she make me come alive?"

Only Jack heard it. That noise he knew was coming.

The gunshot sounded from the caves, the bullet that would have ripped up through her head, her hands that would have been shaking as she took her own life. And, he hoped, found her husband waiting for her on the other side.