Author's note: Again, thank you so much for all of the feedback! It's a great inspiration and incentive to write. I would absolutely love to hear from you after this one.

Oh, and Freckles-101 – Are you psychic, or am I obvious? Cyber props to you! You're on the right track.

As always, these characters are not mine…

Test Subject

Chapter Five

For the first time since he and Kate had started working with Desmond's drugs, Jack had no idea what was going on.

And it scared him.

Just a few minutes ago he had injected Kate with a liquid drug labeled with only a number.

It looked a lot like the others that they had been working with, but those had been easily recognizable once they'd started to take effect. Sedatives and anesthetics and mild painkillers… they were all familiar to him.

This was foreign.

He'd done his usual little examination, and it had given him no reason to worry.

But sitting cross-legged on the bed in front of him, Kate looked… drugged.

"Everything okay, Kate?" he asked her, trying to sound casual, and trying to get her to meet his eyes.

"I'm not sure," she answered immediately, and then they were both silent for a moment, as he sat watching her.

"Do you feel… strange?"

"Yeah. And tired. Did you give me another sedative, Jack?"

She looked curious and confused, and he shook his head.

"I don't think so," he answered quietly, hoping she couldn't hear the worry in his tone.

"Jack?" Sayid called from somewhere behind them, and Jack turned to face him and found him closely examining the bottle containing the drug.

"You see something in there that I don't?" Jack asked, rather hopefully, and Sayid looked up and met his eyes.

"Maybe."

Sayid said nothing more, instead just giving Jack a meaningful look.

Jack glanced at Kate again and decided there was no reason that he and Sayid couldn't step out into the hallway for just a moment.

Outside the room, Sayid held up the bottle and nodded his head in Kate's general direction.

"This is all looking eerily familiar to me," Sayid told him, his tone low and secretive.

"Well that makes one of us," Jack replied, rubbing his forehead with his hand in an anxious gesture. "What are you thinking?"

Sayid waited a beat, as though considering.

"At times, when I was working as a communications officer, we tried innovative methods to get the enemy to communicate. One of those methods was Sodium Pentothal."

Jack raised his eyebrows in surprise, recognizing the name.

"So-called 'truth serum'?" Jack questioned.

"Yes."

"You think… Kate…" Jack looked distinctly uncomfortable with the idea. "Are you sure?"

"No," Sayid told him. "But I suspect. She has the look, and… have you ever known Kate to answer a question so quickly and directly?"

"I haven't asked her much," Jack pointed out, and Sayid nodded.

"That is true. I would suggest you ask her something else, then. Something that she might be less likely to answer so freely. I'll be in the computer room."

"Sayid!" Jack called as he began to walk away, and he turned back. "I need to know everything you know about the drug."

Nodding as though he should have realized that, Sayid returned to Jack's side.

"It interferes particularly with judgment, higher cognitive function. Clearly, it makes a person very communicative. You should also consider that usually it is followed by a… a kind of recovery period. The after effects… can be… discomforting."

"Which means what?"

"I've seen disorientation, exhaustion… sometimes lack of balance, even intense nausea."

Jack took that in and nodded, not happy to hear it, but accepting it as a potential inevitability.

"I'll be with her," Jack said, clearly confident that that was all that mattered. "Anything else?"

"Medically, no," Sayid answered.

"Otherwise?"

A tiny, slightly amused smile played with the corners of Sayid's mouth.

"Well, if I'm right about this, she's uninhibited and extremely open to suggestion." He left a beat. "I would suggest not leaving her alone with Sawyer."

Apparently pleased by his own little joke (a joke lost on Jack at the moment), Sayid turned to leave again, and offered one final parting remark.

"If only we'd found this before we captured the man who claimed to be Henry Gale."

With that, Sayid left, and Jack went back in to Kate.

She hadn't moved. Nothing seemed to have changed.

Jack knew exactly what he wanted to ask her, to test Sayid's theory.

It would be so easy.

Just a little phrase or two.

Tell me about the man you loved. Tell me about the man you killed.

He'd always wanted to know; always hoped it might somehow be less cold-blooded than it had sounded when she'd said it all those days ago; always wished, however privately, that some day, somehow, wanting her - wanting everything with her - would be simple again.

But he heard her earlier words ringing in his head.

"I didn't say anything, did I?"

"Never really liked to feel out of control."

"If we come across those painkillers, shoot me."

Kate would probably prefer poison to truth serum.

She would hate this, if she was more aware.

And yet… he had to ask her something significant.

Even if only to find out if Sayid was right.

He sat down next to her bed again, leaned forward, watched her intently.

He settled on a question, something that he had been wondering, something that he knew she normally took care to hide.

Almost as if it could make up for what he was about to do, he reached out and took her hand.

"Kate," he began, his serious tone sounding intense in the otherwise silent room, "When you were sixteen… how did you break your arm?"

Her already confused expression darkened immediately, her eyes clouding over with remembered pain.

"He hit me."

Jack all but gaped at her, startled by the abrupt admission.

"He hit me, and I fell down the stairs," she continued, her far away gaze looking distinctly anxious and troubled now.

It was far more than she would have told him if she'd had the choice.

And he knew it.

He knew he should stop now.

But he needed to ask… needed to know… if for no other reason than so that he didn't have to lie in bed wondering at night…

"Who hit you, Kate?"

"Wayne."

Her expression told him the very name sickened her, and it filled him with a brewing dread.

"Wayne?"

"My step dad," she nearly whispered.

He didn't have the words to respond to that.

He somehow both craved and feared knowing more.

Unable to help himself now, he leaned further forward almost imperceptibly, almost involuntarily, and opened his mouth to ask another question.

"Why did Wayne hit you, Kate?"

"Mom ducked."

Mom.

Ducked..

It rang in his ears.

And the haunted look in her eyes twisted something deep inside of him.

That was the kind of home she had lived in, wasn't it?

"Kate…" Jack started softly, with no idea how to follow it up.

"Are you mad at me, Jack? For lying before?" she asked worriedly, absurdly.

She looked and sounded so vulnerable, so unlike herself that it was unnerving.

"No, Kate, I'm not mad." He paused, again at a loss for words. He felt like a fish out of water, seeing her like this. "I just… hope that someone took good care of you." he finally finished, telling her what came easily, because anything else was too much to process right now.

Feeling almost as disoriented as Kate looked, Jack was about to end the discussion, and suggest that she just lie down and try to rest.

But then suddenly she volunteered information of her own free will, staring right through him, almost as if she was talking to herself.

"Tom was there."

Something about the way she said it made Jack wonder if this 'Tom' was the one.

There was something wistful and careful about the way she said his name.

And Jack had to fight with himself, because he had no right… she would hate him for this… she would be right to hate him for this… and part of him never wanted to know…

But…

"Was it Tom's plane, Kate?"

"Yeah." She spoke quietly. "We… we buried it… in a time capsule…" She smiled softly at the memory. "We were supposed to dig it up later, we were supposed to be married and have nine kids…"

She looked like she might cry at that, and he unconsciously moved closer to her.

"Kate -"

"We almost did."

Jack froze, shook his head slightly in a way that conveyed confusion.

"Almost did what?"

"Not nine, but… we almost had a baby."

Her eyes filled with tears, and he stared at her, his own eyes stunned and sorry and uncertain.

"Almost?" he prompted, though he knew what was coming.

"I lost it," she admitted, and turned her head away from him briefly, looking guilt-ridden, as if it was somehow her own fault, as if it was just another item on the list of things that kept her constantly longing for a redemption she didn't really believe she would ever deserve. "Mom said it was for the best…" She confided, and a lone tear made it's way down her cheek. "She said that, Jack," she told him brokenly, her voice catching. "She said we were too young, and that it was for the best, and Wayne said I'd just screw it up anyway…"

She looked positively devastated by the memory of it.

And while he sat there with her, part of him trying to figure out how to offer comfort while another part tried to put all the pieces together, something occurred to him.

"I only ever got dizzy or faint when I was sick, hurt… whatever."

That was what she'd said.

And he understood now.

'Pregnant' was the 'whatever' she had carefully kept hidden in that sentence.

"I'm sorry, Kate," he told her quietly, genuinely, and in a sense he meant it more literally than it sounded.

He couldn't look at her when he asked his next question.

"What happened to Tom?"

That broke her, so suddenly that it startled him.

The tears came fast and hard, and she dropped her face into her hands.

And he felt guilty as sin.

"It should have been me… It should have been me, Jack, it should have been me…"

She was sobbing now, and Jack moved onto the edge of the bed and awkwardly reached out his hands, barely touching her arms, looking into her face, almost afraid to touch her.

"Okay, Kate, it's okay… let's not… don't think about this right now. You hear me? We don't need to talk about this right now."

"I should have made him get out of the car…"

"You…" Jack was puzzled, not sure what exactly she meant. "I'm sure you tried," he insisted to her, wondering if she felt she'd killed him because she'd been driving and they'd crashed.

"I should have made him get out of the car, Jack… I knew he could get hurt, and I just drove off…"

"Kate…" Jack started, sitting directly across from her now on the bed, trying to get her watery eyes to meet his. "I'm sure you didn't mean for him to get hurt."

And he was sure now.

That much was clear to him.

"But I didn't stop it," she insisted, looking up at him. "And I started it all… I started it all the night I killed Wayne… if I hadn't done that…"

Her eyes begged him to disagree with her, but Jack just stared at her again, thrown.

The night I killed Wayne.

How easily the words slipped out of her mouth chilled him.

But that was the big answer, wasn't it?

That was what she'd tried to tell him that early day on the beach.

That was what she'd done.

He must have looked appalled despite his mixed and chaotic feelings, because when she took in the expression on his face, she started clumsily pleading her case.

"You don't understand, Jack, it's not like you think, it's not like they said… I just wanted him to stop… I did hate him, but I also needed him to stop… just to stop, 'cause the police wouldn't help, 'cause Mom wouldn't admit anything… Mom lied, she just kept lying for him…" She spat the word 'lying' as if it was a dirty word, which would have been ironic on any other night, coming from her. But tonight, now, in this, it pulled at his heart. "The police wouldn't help, and I had to stop him, Jack… I had to stop him… He broke her wrist… and you don't know, you don't know what it's like, when he looks at me like that… you don't know what it's like…"

"It's okay…" Jack told her soothingly, and yet almost pleadingly, needing to somehow end this, wanting to right the wrongs that had her so broken, troubled by the fact that she'd slipped into the present tense without even realizing it. "It's okay, Kate, it's okay, because he's gone, and I understand… I understand, okay?"

Emotion threatened to steal his voice, his eyes locked on her face, and he gently took her by the shoulders, and then took her face in his hands, cupping her chin, forcing her to look him in the eye.

"I understand," he said slowly and clearly; promising her quietly but forcefully.

He nodded encouragingly, over and over again, until, finally, she nodded back.

And then he wasn't sure if he reached out for her or if she reached out for him, but suddenly she was in his arms.

And she clung to him.

Because this was new for her.

Because no one had ever understood.

He knew that in the light of day this would all be different.

Tomorrow he would have to figure out what this changed for him.

Tomorrow she might hate him for knowing her secrets.

Tomorrow they'd have to face reality.

The exposed truths would complicate things for her.

And simplify things for him.

But at least they were moving forward.

And there was still tonight.

He slowly adjusted them both until they were lying next to each other rather than sitting there together holding on tight, and then he just watched her.

Her eyes were so damn haunted, but there was something grateful there now too, and though he'd left a respectable distance between them (as much as the small bed would allow) he reached into the space between them now and tangled his fingers with hers, reassuring her with just a touch.

He remembered walking away from her that day by the caves, remembered leaving her sobbing over the man she'd loved and killed.

He remembered that he hadn't even given her a chance.

And if he was honest with himself – truly honest – he remembered all the subtle, silent punishments he'd heaped on her since then.

Punishments for falling off the impossibly high pedestal he'd had her on.

He'd been wrong.

And he was sorry.

But he knew it all now.

And he wasn't going anywhere this time.

…