AN: So I've never written a Lost fanfic, but this is a little oneshot about Kate's relationship with planes and Tom. I hope you enjoy. :) (Also, apparently, I am the artist of subtlety. Pay close attention. :D)
Disclaimer: Lost, as well as Evangeline Lilly, (unfortunately) do not belong to me.
Ironic, really, everything that planes were to Kate. It was a plane that took Major Sam Austen away from the states, away from Diane and Wayne and the new baby Katherine. And it was a plane that brought him back in time to pick up his role as a father.
Everything about Katie's childhood revolved about the plane's distance away that her father had been when she'd been conceived.She had a constant, desperate need to get away, to run away and never look back and only have that boy and his plane with her forever.
And Kate could never forget that day, flying back home, the day before Tom had died before her eyes and her mother had died inside her heart. She'd known it had been a mistake from the beginning. But Kate couldn't leave her mother to die alone, having committed her to the fate. Wayne should have been there for her. Kate's father should have been there for her. Kate had to go, to beg forgiveness for what she'd had to do.
"Peanuts?" the flight attendant had asked. Kate turned her head to the woman and saw her mother. "Coffee, dears?" Kate shook her head.
Flying was hell for Katie. Stripped to the barest of defense, slipping through the tangle of guards looking for her, but looking for nothing like her. Forcing Kate to sit still on a plane for hours at a stretch was like handing a little kid a box of markers and telling him not to draw on the walls. She fidgeted and pushed her face into a flight brochure and pretended to be interested in the clouds outside the window.
Seeing Tom again had been the worst. She'd wanted to talk to him again like nothing had changed, like they'd still be the little girl with the far-away dreams and the little boy that put his sights anywhere the girl went. Kate wanted to fall into his arms and let him tell her again that Wayne wasn't her fault, that pain wasn't her fault.
And she had an even stronger urge to flee. She'd never forgotten the plane Tom had stashed away in the capsule. "It's so we'll never forget our dreams," he'd whispered, tucking it between the baseball cards and the tape of their voices, the children locked away behind sixteen years of sins and fears and loss.
"I can't believe I let you talk me into putting that in here," Tom had said, pulling the tiny thing from the tin box. Kate wasn't sure she believed him. He said he'd done it so she would never be able to forget the promise that she'd made. She could never have let Tom be with her, not when she'd had Wayne, not when she'd had the constant urge to flee and get away from everything that was her life in that town. She had promised that she'd come back. "You always wanna run away, Katie."
"And you know why," she said, and the tape ended, like it was waiting for them to fill it in. "Why, Katie, why, why, why?" she asked herself, eyes glazed over as she stared at the top of that little tin box. Why had she run away from the only thing she'd really had left?
And the day Tom died, she got away the same way she'd come. She took a plane.
And at night when she woke up, sobbing, or she couldn't sleep at all, Kate decided it was time to take one last flight. It was time to go and get Tom's plane, and get her promise at last. And she'd had it. She spied and tricked and stole, but she got the plane, that last bit of herself that was still left. And then she'd bought a ticket.
How she hated, once she got there, how hard it was to do what she told herself she'd do. "We'll run away forever, the two of us," Kate said. "Where?" Tom had wanted to know. "Anywhere, Tom, I don't care. Australia. We'll never leave."
And, oh, how she'd never planned to leave. And then there was US Marshal Edward Mars, always intent on pulling her away from the one thing she needed, her one last release, and he put her on another plane and took away the one thing that mattered.
"Can I just ask one favor?" Kate turned her face from the handcuffs that bound her to her chair, bound her to the air in a way that was nothing like flying, nothing like she'd ever dreamt that flying would be.
"Oh, this oughta be rich." The Marshal turned to her, and she bit her tongue, bit back the helplessness that was there. And then Oceanic Flight 815 had gone down, and Kate really believed that perhaps the flight had worked out the right way, after all.