Chapter 7

The second reaction that James had when he read Kate's text message to him was even simpler. "Of course."

Of course it made sense that Kate was here. It was what she did, after all. She always ran away, and she always came back. Granted, there had been a much longer gap between when he had last heard from her and now, but when there was trouble that was what she did.

James knew she hadn't come back to see him or to see Jack, for that matter. She had come to see Claire. They had always been pretty close on the island - hell, Kate had been Aaron's midwife - and having heard on the damn news that her mother was in the hospital, she had come back to support her friend. Never mind that all of those cameras were going to be turned on her the minute she stepped foot in this hospital.

No, she hadn't come to see him. So why had that simple text message caused his heart to skip?

'Sawyer: I need to get in. Please help me.' K

No one called him Sawyer any more. He had managed to get rid of that name once for all when he left that island. Even Hurley had managed to stop calling him that after the last few weeks. Kate had never gotten the memo.

He tried to shake it off. He was with Juliet now. Christ, how the hell was he going to tell her that Kate was here? For that matter, it wasn't like he was going to be able to keep this secret from everybody else. God help them when Hurley found out.

And how could he get her into this hospital? It wasn't like he'd been a bank robber when he'd broken the law. Sure, he knew how to shed a tail, but that was getting out of places, not getting into them. And he didn't know much about how a hospital worked to begin with...

Oh, hell.

No, he didn't know how a hospital worked. But Juliet did. This just kept getting better and better.

Jack was clearly upset about something. He'd never been that good at hiding his pain before he'd come to the island, and it was even more obvious now. Juliet had always been good at reading him - she'd almost been in love with him for that reason - and he was looking at the operating table with an intensity that did not at all fit the way one looked at a relative stranger.

Not that what was happening wasn't distracting enough. There was a fairly extensive team of surgeons in the middle of a big procedure. They been effectively running ice through the veins of Carole Littleton to reduce her body core temperature. According to Jack, doing this was the only way to make the aneurysm visible enough for him to clip. Of course, doing so was going to basically stop the patients heart, and render her clinically dead. It would only be for about ten minutes, according to the literature, but that was more than long enough to cause brain damage - assuming they would be able to start her heart again after the surgery. They'd made improvements in this kind of procedure over the past ten years - but dead was still dead.

Not for the first time, Juliet was beginning to wonder if Jack was thinking about the island. She had never taken much stock in the gospel according to Ben - especially considering how many patients she'd lost in the three years that she'd been there - but apparently it had the ability to heal all ills. But then again, considering that Jack had to remove a cancerous tumor from Ben, he probably wouldn't have believed it either.

"How long is this going to take?" Juliet asked Jack, more for the purposes of distraction than because she was really curious.

Jack didn't answer for a moment. "Probably twenty, thirty minutes. As surgeries go, it's not that extensive. Recovery's going to be a bigger problem. But they're going to have to do this step by step."

"Jack, are you okay? You seem a little out of it yourself."

Jack looked at her again. This time he took an even longer pause. "When you got those files on us, how extensive were they?"

Of all the questions he could've asked her, that one had to be at the bottom of the list, right below: "What's Sawyer like in bed?" It took her several seconds to wonder how to answer it before she could even formulate a response.

"There was a station on the island. It was responsible for communications with the outside world. Mikhail - the Other who killed Charlie - was responsible for it. He gathered all the data that he could assemble on every survivor of that flight."

Were there reporters in this room? Were the other doctors aware of the fact that they were getting the story of a lifetime? Juliet didn't know and wasn't sure she cared.

"You knew who Sarah was. You knew who she was sleeping with. That's not exactly the kind of information you get off MySpace." Jack asked.

"I don't know where he got the information from," Juliet admitted. "Frankly, I didn't really care that much. Ben was very particular about what he told us. Jack, what is this about?"

Once again, Jack was revealing how bad he really was at hiding his emotions. He was swallowing repeatedly, and he seemed on the verge of tears. But even that was less startling than the question he asked next. "Did you have any files on Claire?"

Perhaps she shouldn't have been that surprised the question had been about her. In truth, despite the fact that Ethan's abduction of Claire had been one of their priorities, Ben had cared less about trying to find any information about her than how to make sure that they had been able to take possession of her unborn child. Even after she had escaped and given birth, Ben had never seemed interested in reclaiming her or Aaron, or even trying to bring about retribution to whoever had allowed her to escape in the first place. But then again, Ben had more pressing matters on his mind - or rather his spine.

She gave Jack the abbreviated version of this story, but he still seemed unable to tell her what exactly was troubling him. Before she could press him still more, her cell phone started buzzing. When she had shut it off, Jack just said. "You should get back to everybody else."

"Jack, are you sure you're okay?"

At that moment, the door to the observation room opened. Dr. Lexie Grey emerged with Claire right behind her. "I know you've gotten permission to be here, but are you certain about this, Miss Littleton?" Grey was saying.

What the hell was going on? Juliet wasn't a surgeon, but she knew for damn sure that patient's family weren't allowed in this room. Why on earth would Jack allow this?

She turned back to Jack who, in the space of a few seconds, had managed to turn his professional face back on. "It's okay, Juliet. Everybody else will be worried."

Like you're not? But there was no point in her lecturing Jack on whatever secret he was holding on to. He'd tell it when he was good and ready, and this was literally the last possible time for her to talk about it.

Looking over at Claire, who seemed to be having a hard time herself (but given what was going on, that was understandable) she very slowly walked out of the room.

And ran right into James. "How the hell did you get up here?" she said almost without thinking.

"How's the surgery going?" James asked instead. It was a perfectly valid question, but Juliet could tell it was one of the last things on her boyfriend's mind.

"As well as can be expected. From what Dr. Weber is telling me, the harder part is just ahead." Juliet fixed James with the same one she'd given to him on far more vital situations. "Now why are you really up here?"

She expected some kind of stall - Jack had done the same thing rather than tell her what was really bothering him - but as he always proved, James wasn't Jack. "I just got a text message from Kate."

Now it felt like her heart had stopped beating for a moment. Ever since Kate had disappeared nearly a year earlier, she had always wondered whether she would ever come back to break her heart. She had been with James for more than eight months - twice as long as Kate could ever have been with him - but she had known that the convict had always had a place in his heart that she just couldn't reach. Even as she and James had gotten into a fairly deep relationship, she wondered if Sawyer had ever stopped waiting for her to come back.

"What does she want?" she seemed to hear herself asking.

James showed her the text. "My guess is she's here to see Claire. Only reason she'd have popped up from Bumfuck, Alaska or wherever the hell she's been hiding the last year."

Of course. This had been all over the news. And Kate, being Kate, was preparing to walk into the lion's den to try and offer help to a friend. Never mind the fact that the last thing Claire - or any of them - needed was to have a wanted fugitive wander into a hospital where it seemed the entire media was huddled up waiting for something to happen. "Have you told anyone else?" she asked.

James had the good grace to look embarrassed. "Really didn't know who else to talk to. If I told Hugo, ball games over right then. Sun and Jin probably couldn't help much. Thought about asking Sayid, hell, maybe I will anyway. But this kind of mission doesn't call for anyone getting hurt." He looked at Juliet. "You're the only one here who knows how a hospital works."

"You could've asked Jack," she pointed out.

"Last thing Doc needs is to know the woman who broke his heart is in the building with him."

"He's not going to be much happier if he finds out about it on CNN," Juliet argued.

"Shit! Didn't think about that."

Of course not. You were dwelling on the fact that the woman who ripped your heart out of your chest was in the building. That was cruel, and a little unfair. The old James would've just tried to get Kate into the building himself, and then only told her about it when they got caught. She decided to try and offer a certain amount of compassion.

"Right now, Claire is in there watching them cut into her mother's head." James seemed kind of appalled at that, so she moved on. "You have any idea where Kate is?"

"All I did was tell her to hold on. " Her exasperation must have shown, because he told her: "Shit, you got a better idea, I'm open to suggestions."

The thing was, Juliet wasn't sure she had one. Then, suddenly, something did. It wasn't a great idea, but it was an idea, and as much as she really disliked Kate, she figured that there might be a way after all. "Is Desmond still down there?"

George had done enough research on this particularly kind of surgery to know that while it was definitely high risk, the actual operation wasn't going to take that long. The real problem would come not only resuscitating Carole Littleton, but in waiting for her to regain consciousness.

The fact that he expected Meredith and the other Dr. Shepherd to be moving to recovery within the hour didn't do much to relieve the stress for the survivors of Oceanic 815. It had been clear that pressure had been getting to them. James Ford had left a few minutes earlier to go up and get an update himself, and had yet to return. The Kwons were apparently a bit concerned as well, and had asked him if he would mind getting them some information. George had agreed to head upstairs, and had been surprised not only to see that there was no sign of Ford, but also no sign of Juliet Burke, the fertility specialist that Jack had given permission to ask the surrogate between the OR and the other survivors.

Lexie wasn't much help, though she did tell him that Derek had managed to clip the aneurysm. Normally, that would've been sufficient good news for him to head back downstairs or at least wait back in the OR until Miss Littleton had been revived. But Lexie had been more than a little surprised that Juliet had left the observation room, and hadn't come back. She was equally curious to find out why the hell the Chief had decided to let the patient's daughter to watch the procedure. "This is the kind of thing that they created the medical code of ethics for," she had reminded George. "The last thing I would've wanted to see was to watch my mother die on the operating table. You know that as well as I do."

Had Alex or Cristina or even Meredith asked him this, he probably would've stonewalled them. But because he had been through the exact same thing not that much longer ago that Lexie had, and because they were still interning together, he felt more inclined to share. "You can't tell anyone else about this yet, but I'm pretty sure that Claire Littleton is Jack's sister."

Lexie considered this for a couple of moments, then really said the only thing that could be considered appropriate. "What the fuck? Did he tell you this?"

"I think he just found out before her mother went under the knife." George was even more stunned now that he said this out loud. He was now realizing, of course, that Claire and Jack had apparently been on Oceanic 815, been on an island in the Pacific for 100 days, gotten back to civilization, and had only found out about this now. "Holy crap," he muttered to himself.

Lexie seemed on the verge of asking another question that he was pretty sure that he wouldn't be able to answer, when she looked over his shoulder, and spotted Juliet and James, looking around talking to another person who he couldn't put a name to. "Who the hell is that?" George asked.

"His name is Desmond Hume." Lexie said quietly. " Jack said that he knew him from back in LA. Said they were old friends."

"How does he know those two?" George asked.

"I'm not sure," Lexie admitted. "There's certainly no reason that they would be conspiring like thieves. Come to think of it, I'm not entirely sure how Dr. Burke would know him, either."

This was just getting weirder, but really this was not something that was any of their business. George had been about the only one of original interns who was taking seriously Jack's idea that they had no business getting involved in what patients were going through, let alone what visitors were up to. Then again, considering what he had just learned about the other Dr. Shephard...

"Check in on the operation. I'll see what's going on here."

Lexie nodded.

"Are you sure this is the best idea, brutha?" Hume was asking.

"No, I'm pretty sure it's a shitty one. But right now, it's the best one we have." Ford had a bizarre look that George couldn't quite place on his face.

"More importantly, are you sure you want to do this Desmond?" Juliet asked him. "This happens, there's a pretty good chance that you end up going public. That happens, your father-in-law is going to know where you are."

Three people talking in vague terms about something he didn't understand. Was that what all the patient's thought when they heard the residents talking about their sex lives? George was beginning to see Jack's point.

"I'm not afraid of him pushing me around anymore," Hume said boldly. "But let's not worry about that right now. Do you know how to get in touch with her?"

"She's been waiting on my response for half an hour," Ford told him "We'll be lucky if she hasn't decided to try and break in on her own."

A very vague picture was beginning to form in George's head. About half of the Oceanic survivors had come to Seattle Grace. But there had been some kind of memo going around that there was at least one person who everybody was supposed to keep an eye out for. Unfortunately, most of that had been passed on to the residents and the attendings. The interns, the actual people on the floor, who probably had more contact with the patients than anybody else, had been left out of the loop.

But George hadn't gotten this far without being able to hang onto some details. He might not know what she looked like, but he remembered Katherine Austen's name. By pure coincidence, it was the same name as one of the pioneer cardiac surgeons in the country. And now it seemed that some of her old friends were going to try and sneak this fugitive into the hospital. He wasn't sure of Austen's guilt or innocence, but he knew enough to know that her showing up in the hospital would turn what had been a media event into a full-blown circus.

He knew that he should tell somebody, if not Weber or an attending, at least Cristina or Alex. They would at least know who to look for, and could help him figure out what to do next. But the sad truth was, with the exception of Izzie (and it had been really hard talking to her ever since he had separated from Callie) none of them seemed to regard him with the same respect any more. It was as if, just because he had been a repeater, he now mattered less to them than the doctors they were studying with, or the surgeries that they were trying to scrub in on.. There was a residual bitterness in him that he had managed to stow away most of the time, but that nevertheless felt like a kick in the groin. And the worst part was, they didn't even seem to notice that they were doing it. It was as if the year they had spent together was meaningless.

George tried to shake off the feeling of self-pity that had just overcome him. This was literally the last thing that he needed to be thinking about right now. But it did point out that his options were limited. He now knew that Ford, Hume and Juliet (he refused to think of the blonde as Dr. Burke) were somehow going to try and get Kate Austen into the hospital. That would be a neat trick, considering the circumstance.

Then Lexie reentered. "They're reviving her," she told him. "You figure up what they're up to?"

What the hell. He had to trust somebody, and Lexie and he had been becoming good friends. And considering what she had told him one night at the bar, she might be the best equipped to help. "When they showed you the file of the attendees, was Kate Austen's photo in it?"

Lexie frowned. "Yeah, but I'm not sure why. She's been a fugitive for the last year."

"Would you recognize her if you saw her?" Lexie nodded. "Okay, this next bit is going to be tricky. I need you to go to the ground floor. Check on Mr. Lawrence." Lawrence was one of the coma patients in the ICU His condition had been unchanged for more than two months. He was so close to permanent vegetative state that interns were tasked with checking up on him daily.

This was odd and Lexie picked up on it. "This seems like a really odd time for-"

"I'm not finished. When you're there, I need you to call a code. When they ask you about it, I want you delay them as long as you can."

This was getting really weird. "George, what are you going to be doing while this is going on?"

"I need to talk with security. We may be able to do something to catch a wanted fugitive."

The pieces were starting to come together - Lexie was not a fool. "We could get in a lot of trouble for this," she reminded him.

George actually managed to laugh a little at this. "What's the worst that can happen to us? We're already at the bottom of the totem pole."

He didn't know - no one on the staff would've known - that he was about to do something that would scotch his relationship with the attending he was almost friends with.

The surgery had been successful, and Carole Littleton was headed towards recovery. Jack knew that he should be more cheerful about this considering the level of risk associated with the procedure, and the fact that he had promised Claire that Derek could 'fix' her.

But the sad truth of the matter was that he had never been less focused on a medical procedure in his life. Admittedly, he hadn't been in the OR, which given his state of mind was probably a good thing. But now that it was over, he had to go through the process of dealing with what Claire's mother had told him. He knew that she had only told him because a part of her had been sure that she might be about to die. But she hadn't - though admittedly, they still weren't clear if she'd recover. And it was time to admit that he hadn't been particularly clear-headed about what had happened. Letting Claire watch them operate - that was the kind of thing that could get him in a world of trouble even though the procedure had been a success. There was still a pretty good chance that he could end up being severely disciplined, though considering some of the things the interns had been able to get away with -

Just then, Meredith walked up to him. "How long will it be before we know?" he asked her, almost as a reflex.

"We'll check in on her in a couple of hours. See what kind of progress she's made. But the operation was textbook."

Jack gave a grim smile. "We all know how often routine procedures can go ballsup."

"I know you have reason to be invested in this one, but you've got to have confidence in the science." Meredith looked like she was about to walk away, but then Jack hesitated.

"When did you find out that you had another family?" he asked.

Meredith clearly was caught flatfooted by the question. "Last year, when my father came to the hospital to watch his daughter give birth."

Jack knew Meredith well enough to know that the only person she really considered 'family' was her late mother. She had been working in the same hospital with Lexie for nearly six months, and Jack had barely heard the two of them have more than a handful of conversations, even when he asked Lexie to be one of his interns for the media event. He'd considering her behavior cold, and had had problems talking with her about it. Now, however, considering they were in the same boat, he felt like he had to try and find out what you did when you had family you didn't know existed.

"Why do you have so many problems getting along with your sister?" God, had that come out wrong. "I'm sorry. It's just, you never seem to even make eye contact, and you're family

Meredith didn't answer for several seconds. For a moment, Jack thought that he had truly offended her, and that she would walk away without saying another word to him. "My mother never talked about my father," she finally said. "There was no reason that she should have. She made it clear very early on that he didn't fight for her. Of course, it wasn't until much later that I found out that she had other reasons for not caring about him."

Jack had heard gossip to that effect - something to do with Dr. Weber and Ellis Grey - but since it was twenty years ago, and Meredith's mother was dead, he really didn't care that much before this had come up. "He was your father. And he lives around here. You're telling me you hate him that much?"

"I don't hate him. And it's not like I hate Lexie either. It's just..." Meredith trailed off. "What does this matter to you? Frankly, this is none of your business."

"You're right, it isn't. And up until a few hours ago, I wouldn't have cared beyond a professional level, if that. But..." Now he trailed off. Jack realized he shouldn't have blamed Meredith for not wearing her heart on her sleeve. He sure as hell didn't. That had been his problem.

"You're not the only surgeon at this hospital whose parents kept secrets from them for decades." Jack took a deep breath. "I haven't told anyone else that yet, and I'm a lot closer to the people on Oceanic than I am to you. But I don't know anyone else who gets these kinds of bombs dropped on them on a regular basis."

It was a testament to how badly staggered he was that Jack was thinking of confiding in Meredith Grey, of all people. The moment he told her, it would be a matter of time before she went to Cristina Yang. Then she would go to her other intern friends, who would spread to the attendings, and within twelve hours at the most, the whole hospital would know. That would be bad enough, but there was a fair chance that a reporter would be eavesdropping, and very likely, his mother would find out that her husband had been unfaithful to her on TMZ. He'd be better off telling Hurley. At least, he would've known better than to tell strangers.

"Jack, I realize that this surgery was very difficult to go through. Maybe you should think about telling your friends that the operation was successful."

Of course. He knew that he should be grateful that Meredith was taking the decision out of his hands. She didn't want to deal with his shit. Why should he be that surprised? She had nearly as much excess baggage as he did, and he'd just spent the last few minutes reminding her of it. Yes, he'd been incredibly selfish, but just for a moment he wished that she could be a little less so. Anyway, there were people downstairs who would be sure to demonstrate far more compassion.

He'd been about to say something to Meredith - some kind of apology, though what would be particularly fitting, he had no idea - when suddenly, his pager started blaring. Jack had no idea why. Weber had given strict instructions that absolutely no one was to be on his service today, and if any of his friends had wanted to get in touch with him, they would've used their cells.

He saw Derek appear. Jack took this as a good sign; if something were wrong with Miss Littleton, he would've been in the thick of it. "Everything all right?" the neurosurgeon asked.

"No fucking clue," Jack mumbled. "I better find out what the hell's going on. Get back to me as soon as you know anything."

He ran down two floors, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Whatever patient it was, they were in long-term care, in which case they would need Derek's help, not his. He was beginning to think this was just the mistake of one of the newer interns, who had forgotten how to spell his name. But what the hell. Given what he was dealing with right now, the opportunity to yell at a subordinate - something he tended to avoid doing - seemed to be a welcome distraction.

It was only when he got down to the coma ward that he began to get even more confused. Bailey and Yang were present, and so was Lexie Grey. There was a certain logic to this, Yang had been in charge of Lexie before Jack had shown up at Seattle, and Miranda was chief resident, so clearly they were piling on her for some reason, and they wanted him to join the parade.

"You had no business doing this," Miranda was saying. "Do you realize how much of a panic you could've caused?"

"Dr. Bailey-"

"There are patients who actually need surgeons. What are you going to tell their families if something went wrong?"

By now, he was nearly on top of the three of them, and it was clear that there was something going on far beyond the scope of the usual intern screw-up. Miranda looked genuinely furious, as opposed to the front she always put up, and Lexie looked like she was on the verge of tears. Jack had gotten to know Lexie very well, and knew that despite her greater humanity, at heart she was nearly as stoic as her half-sister was.

"I hope you didn't call me down just so I could see the three of you fight." Jack told them. "As you can see, I don't have time for this."

"She's your intern, which makes her your responsibility, " Cristina alone seemed calm as ever, but Jack thought that a bomb could go off in front of her, and she'd still seem bored. "And she said, she'd only explain to you why she turned off the machine, basically signaling a code to everybody on this floor."

If Cristina thought that this would explain things to him, Jack was even more baffled then before. "Lexie, I told you to handle my friends. I realize that's not the most thrilling task, but damn it, it was important to me."

"That's what I was trying to do." Lexie swallowed, and managed to regain her composure. "Handle your friends."

This just kept getting more and more unfathomable. "Dr. Grey, if you don't start explaining things to me, I can't help you."

"One of the doctors saw somebody on the floor," Lexie sounded even more uncertain than he'd ever heard her. "She was trying to sneak in to see Miss Littleton, and I read the report from the Marshal's service that they sent out."

Jack had only thought he had gone through the most potent of shocks today. This made what Claire's mother had said to be a walk in the park. "You're telling me that Kate is here?"

"I know she was your friend, Dr. Shephard," Lexie told her "but I didn't have a choice."

And suddenly, the old self-righteous Jack, the one that he had hoped that he'd left on the island was back. "Who told you about her?"

There was something in his tone that clearly was dangerous; even Cristina seemed a little concerned. "There are certain rules that have to be followed?

"Who told you?!'

Now Lexie looked like she was on the verge of tears. "George."

There were a hundred reasons why this wasn't O'Malley's fault, not the least of which was he hadn't bothered to keep anyone in Seattle Grace involved with who Kate had meant to him. But Jack was beyond thinking clearly right now. So when he saw George walking up to him looking like he was scared shitless, he did something that was almost certainly the kind of thing that should've got him fired.

He walked right up to his intern and punched him in the face.

In front of two attendings.

Then, without looking around to see the looks of sheer horror that had appeared on everyone else, he ran off the floor.

Cristina recovered first, as was her fashion, and ran over to George to see if Jack had done any real damage - George had been hit before, but never with this degree of menace behind it.

Bailey recovered next. "Well, all three of you are now in a shitload of trouble, so maybe you can explain to me what the hell that was all about?"

"All I know for sure was gossip." Lexie told her.

"This hospital runs on gossip; I think we could use it as a renewable energy source. What did Dr. Shephard get so mad about?"

"The rumor was, before she became a fugitive, Kate Austen and Jack were having an affair." Lexie looked at George. "I'm guessing it was true."

"I'm sorry, Dr. Bailey," George looked around hesitantly. "Some of Austen's friends were going to try and aid and abet a fugitive. I wanted to have this happen with the least number of people getting hurt. Dr. Shephard's already had to deal with a lot today; I didn't think he needed to have any more of his friends possibly headed to prison."

"You still told Dr. Grey here to cause a code -"

"I made sure there were no emergent cases before she did it," George said patiently. "And Lawrence has been stable for the past two weeks. He was in no real danger. All Lexie did was make some noise. No one got hurt." He touched his eye where there was already some visible swelling. "Except me."

Bailey and Cristina considered this for a couple of moments. Everything George said was correct, and in truth, Jack had just violated more protocols than he had. There was going to have to be some disciplinary action handed down, but considering all the shit that had been falling the past few months, it was hard to figure out just how much blame they were going to have to land on the two of them.

Miranda was torn. As chief resident, it was her job to mete out an appropriate report before this went to Weber. On the other hand, she had a soft spot in her heart for both attending and intern, and she wasn't a hundred percent sure that, in this case, she could be impartial.

"Dr. Grey, Dr. O'Malley, for the moment the two of your are off the floor. Yang, check with the other Dr. Grey and the other Dr. Shepherd. Find out how long it'll be before Miss Littleton comes out of recovery."

"Since when did this become my problem?' That was Cristina. If she wasn't in an OR, she could give a damn about human fallout.

"We need somebody to handle this. This is what residents deal with. Handle it." Miranda left the floor.

"Where are you going?" Yang demanded.

"Someone has to tell Shephard's friends what happened. And I can't count on you to be a human being."