I know that the ending of the last chapter wasn't exactly fun, and the beginning of this isn't either. So now you get to find out what Kate's dad did.
It had been exactly as Jack had feared - Kate had been abused by her father. She had said all that she wanted to say, and then simply stopped talking. Jack had taken her back to the cave to fall asleep, and although she quickly fell back into her slumber, he stayed upright all night, leaning against the cave wall, watching along with a few select others for any sign of Danielle or Ethan. One of these others was Sawyer, who came over to Jack and sat opposite him, leaning against the other side of the cave wall.
Sawyer looked at Kate, who slept laying across Jack's lap. She seemed oblivious to what had just happened, but it was contrasted strongly in Jack. "She Ok?" Sawyer asked after a long silence.
"I think so." Jack murmered back.
There was another silence. "I overheard what Kate said about her Dad." Sawyer admitted, and Jack looked away from the looming trees to look questionably at Sawyer. "He sounds like a right dick if you ask me."
"For once, I'm gonna have to agree with you." Jack said. Sawyer raised his eyebrows, and Jack doubled back. "But just this once." He assured him. Sawyer grinned stupidly.
"Listen, Jack." He began awkwardly. "Earlier on...I...uhh...well, I'd never do anything to put Freckles in danger." He said. Jack went to speak, but Sawyer shook his head. "I care about her too, we all know that, but I wouldn't do anything to get her hurt. Including handing her over to those freaks in the trees." He jabbed his thumb towards the jungle.
Jack nodded. "I know." He said, making sure that he kept his voice low as not to wake Kate.
"You think she's gonna remember all this?" Sawyer asked him.
Jack shrugged. "I've got no idea." He admitted. "She might, she might not. It might just be a dream to her, who knows?"
"Well, hopefully she does, 'cause otherwise you've got some explaining to do." Sawyer said, standing up, and going to where he sat before, leaving Jack alone with his thoughts, and the sound of Kate's gentle breathing and occassional sighs as she slept.
The next morning, while Jack fixed a wound on Hurley's hand, Kate sat with Shannon, Claire and Aaron while they ate their breakfast. If Jack was seen as Kate's temporary father, Shannon was most definately motherly. As much as she insisted that she'd be a terrible mother, she definately knew how to take care of kids. Jack finished with Hurley, and then went over to where she was eating. Subconsciously, he put a hand on her head and smoothed her hair before sitting down beside her. Claire and Shannon looked at each other and smiled when Jack wasn't looking at the gesture.
"You Ok?" He asked her.
Kate nodded, not stopping to answer him. She finished eating, and then waited for Aaron to finish his food before crawling over to him, and sitting beside last nights burnt out fire and playing with him and a new fresh batch of bugs.
"She's going to eat one again isn't she?" Jack asked with a grimace.
"At least the other one didn't resurface." Claire pointed out.
"Obviously she's built up an immunity to them." He continued, not changing the grossed out expression on his face. Even if he was absolutley starving he doubted he would eat a bug that he didn't know the species of. What if they were poisonous? They knew from the amount of times that Aaron had swallowed virturally every bug on the island that none of them so far were poisonous, but then again, Kate didn't exactly like to stick to tradition did she?
As if on cue, Kate picked up a bug, and raised it to her mouth. This time, Jack was quicker, and took it from her hand. "Oh no you don't." He said as he released it back on the ground, so that it could scuttle away in the opposite direction to the four-year-old Kate. "Surely you're not still hungry?" He asked her.
"I'm always hungry." She said, shrugging her shoulders as if it were normal.
"Maybe she's got worms." Shannon laughed.
"Thats what my Mommy says." Kate said, shrugging again and turning back to Aaron, babbling again.
"How do they understand each other?" Shannon asked.
Claire shrugged. "I don't know, but Kate's the only one who can understand him when he does that it seems. Hopefully she'll remember it when she changes back, then I'll finally know what he's talking about when he does that." Aaron could speak perfectly well for his age, but until Kate had changed, he had lacked infant company.
"Oh, we're low on food." Shannon said, turning to Jack.
"Already?" He exclaimed. "We got some just the other day!"
"I know, but like Kate said, she's always hungry. She eats more than twice as much as she used to." Shannon pointed out.
"Ok, I'll go." Jack said.
Kate heard this, and whipped her head around. "Can I come?" She asked excitedly.
There she went with that selective hearing again. Jack was trying to understand how she could hear something like that, or how she could hear him mention her name when she was the other side of the camp, but not hear him tell her not to eat a bug when she was less than a metre away from him. "Only if you promise to stick close." He made her swear.
"I will!" She said, nodding her head.
"Now, you said that last time, and you ran off into the bushes." Jack reminded her.
"I came back!" She pointed out.
"After you nearly gave me a heart attack." He muttered under his breath. She climbed to her feet, and went over to Jack, and put her arms around his neck, standing beside him and looking at him with her deep eyes.
"Please, Jack-Jack?" She asked in her sweetest, innocent voice. "I promise I'll be good. I won't run away ever." She said, and to top it off - she fluttered her eyelashes.
Jack's eyes immediately went over her shoulder to look at Shannon accusingly, who avoided his gaze deliberately. Fantastic, as if Kate wasn't persuasive enough, she now knew how to flutter her eyelashes at him to get her own way again. She was gradually becoming more and more like her former self. He worried about taking Kate into the jungle again, even though it was daylight. He didn't want a repeat of last night, especially when both Danielle and Ethan were lurking somewhere. The idea of the two nuttiest, craziest, mental, insane lunatics on the island working together was definately not a comforting thought. He sighed.
"If you run off once, just once, then we're coming back, Ok?" He said sternly. He needed her to understand how important it was to her safety that she didn't put herself at any risk. "You stay right beside me unless I say otherwise."
She nodded strongly. Jack just hoped that this was a good idea.
