Chapter 8
Ostensibly, Jack knew that what had happened to Kate was not his fault. The feeding frenzy over the Oceanics had been going on for months. If Kate had wanted to see him, he was a lot easier to find than some of the others. And he knew that, given her survival skills before she had gotten on the plane, that if she'd wanted to get in touch with him, she would've found a way. So the fact that she had chosen to come on what was probably the worst possible time for her to reach him was not his fault. Hell, seeing him was probably the last thing on her mind.
But old habits died hard. And now, on a day that had already had enough stressors to make dealing with John Locke and Ben Linus seem like a walk in the park, he was again reminded of their entire relationship on the island. On how many times he'd gone on long treks, instructing Kate not to come with him, only to have her end up following him anyway. Had it been some kind of self-righteous grudge against the fact that Kate had come to the island in handcuffs, and he was forever holding it against her? Some stupid kind of jealousy about the way she had bounced between him and Sawyer all the time they were on the island? Whatever it was, the fact was he'd been an asshole to her far more often then he'd be nice. Maybe that had been one of the reasons Kate had never reached out to him.
And now, she had stuck her head out in order to come here. And one of the interns he'd been the closest with had cut it off, almost certainly without knowing what he'd done. That didn't make Jack any less hostile towards him. Which meant he wasn't in a great mood when he saw James and Juliet hanging around the marshal's station.
"Christ, Doc, this is the last place you should be," James said the moment that he saw him.
"Did you know she was here?" Jack demanded.
James knew better than to dick him around. "She sent me a couple of text messages a couple hours ago. Said that she wanted to get into the hospital to see how Claire was holding up."
That's why she had come. To see the one member of the Oceanics she couldn't have visited unless she wanted to get on another plane. To see the child that she'd help deliver into the world. This stung a little, yet Jack knew that it was one of the more unselfish things she'd ever done. Still, once again, she'd chosen Sawyer over him. And it hurt.
"Kate's been in hiding for more than a year. You'd think she'd have been a little more sensible than this," Jack said slowly.
"She wanted to see Claire. This was her best chance," Juliet said.
"She couldn't have waited until the surgery was over?" Jack pointed out. "By tonight, everyone would've been back at their hotels. The media circus would've died down a little by then." He looked at them. "This didn't occur to either of you?"
The sheepish look on both James and Juliet's faces showed that, in fact, both had been so stunned by Kate's reappearance, that they had completely let logic go out the window. He didn't know who he was more disappointed by; James, who after all was something of a criminal himself, or Juliet, who had demonstrated time and again, that she was the more logical one of the group. Or maybe he was just upset by the plain truth that, if he'd known that Kate was in the hospital, he would probably have done the same thing they had.
"She came back, Doc. Hell, you know the kinda gal she is," James said slowly. "When she wants to help somebody, she runs right into the hornet's nest, and fuck the consequences."
There was little point in arguing it. That had been what she'd done on the island, and she'd done the same thing here. "Ate you guys going to be in trouble?" Jack asked.
"Depends how vindictive the marshal's plan to be," Juliet admitted. "We were trying to get a wanted fugitive into a hospital, after all. Kate is more than willing to fall on her sword, and say that she was responsible for everything. "
'She does that. A lot." Jack reminded them.
"My guess is, the cops got who they came for; they're not going to try to make this uglier than it has to be." James said, somewhat uncertainly. "They wanted Freckles, they got her. No need to turn this damn hospital into a holding cell."
Jack couldn't help but notice the brief look of pain that had crossed Juliet's face when James had used her old nickname. Even with his old love probably on her way to jail... well, she was human after all. "How'd the surgery go?" she asked.
"Miss Littleton's in recovery." Jack looked at his watch. Could it really have been less than an hour since they'd wheeled Claire's mother out of cryosurgery? The media was going to be descending even more vociferously than they had before this day had started, and he was willing to bet that none of their questions would be about medicine. "You two should probably get up to recovery. Make sure that Claire is doing okay."
Both of them looked at Jack. "Sure you want to talk with her, Doc?" James asked. "She's already done a much better job hurting herself than you could."
An unfair but admittedly pertinent comment. "I haven't seen her in a year," he reminded them. "God knows the next time I'll get a chance to see her again. I need to talk to her. "
"Why?"
"To find out why she didn't stay and fight. Why she did what she always does. Run away."
Sun knew that something was wrong. Claire was still in recovery, waiting for her mother to regain consciousness. But Jack hadn't come down to tell them if there had been any other develops since then. Instead, they had been visiting by one of the surgeons, Meredith Grey, who had given them details in the least personal way possible.
For the next thirty minutes, there had been no sign of Jack, but there had been a lot of other activity, usually such detailed English that Jin had needed to ask for translation on several occasion. There were a lot of other doctors around, but none of them were the same ones that had been dealing with them over the past several hours. Hurley seemed to take it as a sign that something had gone wrong with the surgery, and they weren't telling them. Sayid had told them not to worry, but then he had noticed that for various times, Juliet, Sawyer, and Desmond had all disappeared.
"I thought we had stopped the whole keeping things from each other when we left the freighter," Hurley finally said, after nearly forty minutes had gone by without anybody talking to them at all.
"I'm afraid it's a bit more complicated than that, brutha," Desmond finally reappeared, looking truly disheartened.
"Perhaps if you'd just tell us we'd be able to figure it out for ourselves," Sun finally said, a little exasperated herself.
"That's why I'm back, and I'm guessing Jack is going to be more than a little distracted for... quite some time." Desmond took a deep breath. "Kate's back."
Everyone's reaction was pretty much the same - Jin returned to his native Korean to deliver an obscenity that only Sun understood. (She would've been amused to know that Hurley had said the same word in Spanish). Then everybody began talking at once, until Desmond held up a hand.
"I realize everybody's concerned about her, but come on, don't tell me you're all shocked to know that Kate would do something like this."
"She's been on the run for nearly a year," Sayid told them. "The Kate I know would've shown a lot more sense than to do something this carelessly."
"She wasn't exactly careless." Desmond said slowly.
"Dude, where are Sawyer and Juliet?" Hurley asked. The light bulb then went on over all of their heads.
"Why didn't she come to any of us?" Sun asked slowly. "James could end up back in prison just for trying something like this."
Hurley, who'd been a little slow on the pickup before, answered this question before Desmond could. "Because Jack was too busy."
"And you?" Jin was following this conversation a lot better than he would've been in the past.
"They asked me how I got into the hospital without security noticing." Desmond told them, looking more than a little shamefaced. "I told them upfront it was a bad idea, and we went through with it anyway. I take no pleasure in being proved right."
Everybody considered the general awfulness of the situation that lay before them. Then once more, Hurley got right to the guts of their problem. "Someone has to tell Claire."
"I'm not sure that's the best idea," Sayid said.
"Dude, Kate came to see her. Probably Aaron too."
"Which is exactly the reason that we shouldn't tell her yet." Sayid reminded him. "Considering everything that Claire's been through in the last few days, do you really think she needs to know what happened to one of her closest friends?"
Hurley considered this for a few moments. "If it were me, I'd want to know" he finally said. "Besides, if we don't do anything, you know Jack's going to tell her, and he's got enough on his mind."
They all considered the utter ugliness of this situation, somehow not surprised that their friend had managed to make a mess of what was already an ugly situation. Everyone figured that Hurley, who had always been something of an ambassador, on and off the island, was going to be the one to volunteer. Besides, he'd been close to Claire ever since Charlie had died. Which is why all of them were more than a little stunned to see Sun rising to her feet.
Only one seemed a little less surprised - her husband. "You sure this is the right thing to do?" he asked.
"Claire trusted me with Aaron every time she went somewhere," she reminded them all. "If she's going to hear some bad news, I think she'd rather hear it from me."
The rest of the group seemed a little surprised at this, but they knew very well that Sun was a lot stronger than she appeared to be. "When you see here, remind her that we're all here for her." Hurley said.
Sun actually managed to smile at this. "She knows that already."
Even though Jack had known, practically from the first time that he had met her, about Kate's fugitive status, it was something of a shock to see her in handcuffs.
What was even more shocking - and he wouldn't realize it until after the mess was over - was something that wasn't as obvious. As long as he had known her, Kate had always had a lot of fight in her expression. This was a woman who wouldn't take shit from anyone. He knew this because in their time on the island, he had given her a lot of it. But no matter what she had to deal with, whether it had been some monster destroying the island, or the Others telling her to stay still, Kate had always had a look of defiance in her eyes.
Until now. The Kate Austen that he saw before him looked beaten, and even later, he couldn't figure out why. She'd been dealing with far more messy circumstances long before she had come to the island. So the question was: why had being taken prisoner now defeated her?
Jack wouldn't be able to figure that part out for awhile. He had enough on his plate dealing with the groundswell of emotions he'd always dealt with when he saw Kate, and he hadn't seen her for nearly a year. He was a mess of anger, grief, and joy at seeing the woman who had stolen his heart quite some time ago. There were so many feelings that he had, in his typical fashion, managed to suppress over the past year, and now he had to deal with them all at once.
He looked at the two marshal's positioned on either side of her. "Could the two of you give us a moment?" he asked, hating the quiver that had entered his voice.
The marshals looked as rigid and unyielding as Edward Mars had. "Sir, this woman has been listed as one of the most wanted fugitives in the Bureau."
"I'm well aware of the crimes she's committed." No point telling them that he'd only learned the full extent of them after they had been rescued. "She practically walked into your arms today just to see us. Even if she could escape, she has no intention of trying until she finished doing what she came here to do."
"Are you trying to convince us to stay here?" Neither marshal's mouth had moved much. Jack was tempted to think of them as Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
"I have no intention of helping her escape." He said it so sincerely that he almost believed it himself. "But she came a long way to get captured, and I think it would only be fair before you haul her off to Guantanamo that we get to have a single, private conversation."
Another long pause. Jack was beginning to wonder if these two policemen were actually human being or rather androids that had to be programmed how to respond. "Your friends already tried to break the law to get her inside."
"That was a mistake. Besides, I'm not them." Another big risk. These guys, if they had read Kate's file had to know what Jack meant to her. In fact, the last thing any of them wanted was the cops digging very closely into their recent past.
The two marshals conferred for more than a few moments. Jack couldn't quite tell what they were saying to each other, but he could bet it was nothing good. Finally, they turned back to him. "We'll be right outside the door." Tweedledee said
"And get that tape recorder out of here," Kate finally spoke for the first time.
"Miss Austen-"
"You know damn well this isn't my first rodeo," she said, with a trace of the old fire in her voice. "I have nothing to say to you without an attorney present, and probably not much then. Let me talk with my friend."
There was a long enough pause for Jack to think that maybe they were going to ignore her after all. Then, reluctantly, Tweedledee turned around and said: "Ten minutes. That's all you get."
There was a long pause and then the two of them finally walked out of the room. The moment they did, Kate slumped back into her chair, as if the act of merely being snippy to the marshals had drained her.
Jack considering remaining quiet, and letting Kate make the first move. Then he realized they didn't have enough time for lovers games. "I gotta know why, Kate. You're smarter than this."
"That's it? You're not even going to pretend you're glad to see me?"
That hurt. A lot. "I spent months getting over you. I moved to a different city, a different job to get over the pain. I had just gotten used to the idea that I would probably never see you again." Jack looked deep into her eyes. "And as much as it hurts, it would've been worth it, knowing that at least you were free."
Kate seemed a little better to hear this. Not much, but a little. "Until I texted Sawyer two hours ago, that was the first contact I've had with any of you for more than a year," she told him. "It wasn't just you I cut myself off from. All of them. All of my friends, I had to throw away to keep you safe."
Despite the utter and complete direness of this situation, an involuntary spasm that might have been mistaken for a laugh passed Jack's lips. "You finally got it." Kate looked utterly incredulous. "Why do you think I kept telling you over and over on the island that I didn't want you to come after me? I needed to keep you safe."
Kate actually managed a smile at this. "We really should've talked to each other more."
"Maybe that was part of the magic of the island. Kept us from talking about the important parts of our lives." Jack smiled a little. "I've actually gotten a lot better at that now."
"Sorry I missed that," she told him.
"So how about we start now," he told her. "I know what you did. Shit, the entire world now knows about the collective crimes of Katherine Anne Austen. But honestly, I'd rather have heard about them from you than John Walsh."
"You were the one who told me that I had a blank slate the third day on the island," she reminded him.
"And you know goddamn well that I never treated you like you actually had one," he countered. "That was unfair of me, and I realize that now. We could spend what time we have left on recriminations, but I don't think we should. So just answer my question. Why didn't you stand and fight?"
Kate considered this carefully. "My father was a monster. He beat my mother, he beat me, and he was a lousy drunk. When I killed him, I was trying to spare my mother years of pain with him. And the first thing she did when she learned about this was call the cops. The only excuse that she ever gave me the last time I spoke with her was that he was the man she loved, and I made her life worse. She was the one who pressed charges. She didn't even come to see me when we got rescued. I didn't stand and fight, Jack, because my mother wouldn't dare stand and fight for me."
Jack considered this carefully. "As you'll recall, from some of those long conversations we had on the way home, most of the people on our plane had shitty parents. I just recently learned that my father, who I would never have considered a saint before he died, had an affair. For years." He held up a hand. "Granted, your parents were probably shittier than all of ours put together, but still it's not like we couldn't relate. And we would've stood and fought for you. Hell, Sawyer and Juliet just proved that, if nothing else."
Kate actually straightened up a bit at this. "I'm not a good person."
"Yes, you are. You've just done some bad things. News flash, all of us have." Jack looked at her. "I'm not proud of everything I've done, but I'm not ashamed of it either. You just have to find a way to let go."
Kate fell back. "I'm on my way to prison, Jack. Probably for the rest of my life."
"Unless they've radically changed the way the justice system works since we were stranded, you have to go to trial first." Jack reminded her. "I realize you've been dodging the system for so long that you may have forgotten that, but if what I heard is true, you will be allowed to defend yourself."
Kate considered this. "What kind of defense could I possibly put up?"
"There's a roomful of millionaires down the hall who'd be more than willing to put up your bail, and get you the best legal team possible." Jack didn't bother to say that he would've been one of them, partly because he figured that Kate had to have realized that by now.
"I've escaped custody more times than I can count," she argued, a little less forcefully this time. "That has to count against me."
Jack actually managed to laugh at this. "You're a celebrity, Kate. Famous people get acquitted all the time of far more serious offenses."
Kate actually seemed to be listening to him. "They could drag this out forever."
"What are you really afraid of?" Jack demanded. "Are you so afraid of having to stay in one place that you always have to keep running? Have you been on the run for so long that you actually like it?"
Kate looked a little appalled at the very suggestion. Then she seemed to actually be considering it for awhile. Jack didn't know that Sawyer, of all people, had raised the same idea just a week before they had finally been rescued.
All her time on the island she had spent doing her damnedest to make sure they got rescued. Never mind that the first thing that would happen when the rescue boats arrived would be to put her back in handcuffs; Kate had been the first one to volunteer every time they had to go on a mission. And when that had looked like that was going to happen when the law was preparing to do it, rather than stand with her friends, she had bolted. Only this time, it had been a hundred times more difficult and a thousand times more painful. Sun and Jin had their baby, and she'd never even seen her. Sayid and Desmond had been reunited with their long lost loves, and, given how closely Sawyer seemed to have been with Juliet when he'd seen her, he'd moved past her. She'd been running all this time, and her life had been standing still.
Jack was right. It was time to face everything.
"Will you stand by me?" Kate asked. "I know all of this will just throw another massive monkey wrench into your life again -"
Now Jack managed another, more genuine laugh at this. "You really think after everything we've been through that I wouldn't stay with you?" For the first time, he looked at her without judgment. "I love you, Kate. And as much as I may have tried to bury it, I never stopped loving you."
And then, for the first time since he'd come into the room, he reached out and touched her. "We will get through this. All of us. Whatever it takes. We didn't go through everything we did on the island just to be stopped by something this.. this" He struggled for words. "simple."
"You call this 'simple'?"
"Well, compared to being chased through the jungle by a smoke monster, anything else would seem lightweight."
Now Kate was the one who managed the tearful laugh.
Their timing was impeccable; at that moment, Tweedledee and Tweedledum reentered the room. "All right, time to go, Miss Austen." Tweedledum told them
Jack got up and faced them. "Where are you going to be holding her?"
"That's not up to us." Tweedledee this time.
"Are you going to be charging Juliet and James?" Kate asked.
"That's not up to us, either."
"You know, considering all the time you've been chasing her, you don't seem to know an awful lot." Jack argued.
"Dr. Shephard, we allowed you time with Miss Austen as a courtesy. Frankly, we're still considering pressing charges against your friends." Tweedledee definitely appeared to be the more aggressive of the two of them.
"And you'd have a huge amount of trouble getting any of it to stand up in court." Jack argued. "I assume that after finding the woman that you've spent all this time chasing, you read Kate her rights. If you were going to do the same to my other friends..."
For the first time, both marshals looked a little concerned. The idea that there had been sloppiness of procedure on both sides clearly had never occurred to them. "We're taking our prisoner into custody . Once we're certain she isn't going to run away again, we'll allow her to contact you. Beyond that, she's not getting any more preferential treatment."
They lifted Kate to her feet. For the first time, Jack noticed that they had put her in leg irons as well. They really didn't want her to make a break for it again.
Jack looked at her. "Don't worry. I will always be with you."
He followed her out the door and kept his eyes on her until they led her out of sight. Under other circumstances, he would've stayed with her until he could no longer follow her. But right now, he had other concerns on his mind.
Two of them walked right up to him. "How she's doing, Doc?" James asked.
"A lot better than you'd think," he told the man who had been his rival for Kate's affections for three months.
"She's not going to do anything reckless, is she?" When the others looked at her, Juliet shook her head. "Any other reckless thing?"
"You know how hard it is to talk Kate into doing anything," Jack pointed out. "But I think we'd better make sure of it. We're going to need to talk to Hurley in a little while. "
"Shouldn't we tell everybody?"
"Oh, we're going to tell everyone. But Hugo's most likely going to be the one who knows the best possible attorney." Jack said.
James looked a little nervous at this, but Juliet seemed a little more secure. "You're going to make sure that she gets out?"
"She's not going to have to run anymore."
It said something about the roller-coaster the last several hours that Claire's day had been that the news of Kate's reappearance and subsequent apprehension wasn't anywhere near the most shocking thing that had happened.
Oh, she was worried about Kate, make no mistake - with the exception of Charlie and Hurley, Kate had been the person on the island that Claire had been the closest to. And to learn that she had most likely been caught because she had come to see her was more guilt that she really wanted to deal with today. But right now, she was more concerned about when her mother was going to come out of the anesthesia than anything else. (She refused to believe that Mum wasn't going to wake up after everything that they had been through over the years. Medical prognosis from one of the best neurosurgeons in the world be damned.)
Sun wasn't sure whether or not to be relieved that Claire was taking this so well or concerned that her friend wasn't going to erupt into tears the second she left. Either way, given the intensity of everything that had happened here, she was not going to leave her friend until somebody in authority got back.
"Did anyone tell you how long it would be until your mother woke up?" she asked.
"Dr. Grey told me that, even in the best case, she'll be out for another nine to ten hours." Claire told her. "Comes with being under the anesthesia." She looked around. "I really hate hospitals."
"I'd think having to give birth on a tropical island had given you a certain appreciation of them."
This actually managed to get a faint smile out of Claire - it had been one of the first jokes they had shared as soon as they had been rescued. The smile faded. "I'm sorry I lied to you when you asked about my parents," she told her.
"We lied about a lot of things when we were on the island," Sun admitted.
Claire blushed a little at this - Sun had told some real whoppers, and had lived through a lot more. "That's not what I meant to bring up." There was no real easy way to say this. "Apparently, telling giant lies is something that runs in my family, and I didn't even know about the biggest one until a few hours ago."
Sun had expected something like this had happened. Jack had been distracted after Claire's mother had gone into surgery, and considering that he had a lot of trouble holding information in, she had a feeling that it was something very personal, and possibly very terrible. It couldn't be much worse than some of the secrets that she'd kept or Sawyer or Kate had, but they had learned enough about each other to know that it might be something pretty awful.
"You're dealing with a lot of stress right now," she told her friend. "Now really isn't the time for you to be dealing with bigger problems."
"She's right." Both of them looked up at Jack, who had somehow managed to enter the room without either of them noticing. He looked a bit better than before the operation, which was odd, considering that he'd just been briefly reunited with Kate.
"How is she?" Claire asked. Even though her mother was in a hospital bed, there was no question what she was being talked about.
"Considering she just got taken back into police custody, I think she's doing a lot better than we'd think." Jack told them. "We're going to need to get her the best legal team possible."
"What about Sawyer and Juliet?" Sun asked "Are they going to get into any trouble?"
"Considering that one of my interns managed to run a fair amount of interference, they'll probably get by with slaps on the wrist." Jack looked troubled for the first time. "Which is far less punishment than I gave him." He shook his head, and turned to Sun. "Even given the amount of pull I have here, they're not going to let more than one or two of you up at a time, at least not until Miss Littleton wakes up. You might want to go back to everybody, and tell them they should probably come in shifts for the next few hours."
Sun considered this for a couple of more moments, then told Jack and Claire that she'd be back in a couple of minutes. "Is there anything I should tell them about her condition?"
"Not right now." Jack hesitated. "However, you can tell them one more thing. No matter what the outcome of this surgery, Claire's family will be a bit bigger regardless."
Sun wasn't entirely sure what that meant, but judging from the grin that had crossed Claire's face, for once Jack had completely said the right thing.
George had come to respect Jack Shephard a great deal over the past several months, more than almost any of the other doctors who was going to practice at the hospital. He realized that what he had done could be seen as much as a betrayal than trying to help him. Did it justify getting assaulted by him? Probably not. Then again, considering what Jack had gone through over the last several hours, he had been under a huge amount of stress. For that matter, what he had done was a lot more likely to be viewed poorly than anything Jack had done.
So, when Jack Shephard approached him a few hours later, he wasn't entirely sure whether it was for an apology or because he wanted to slug him again. So, he decided to be proactive. "Dr. Shephard, I realize what I did was over the line."
"People in this hospital are a lot of things, I didn't expect them to be this forgiving." Jack was actually smiling a little, which considering everything that had happened was remarkable.
"I thought I was sparing you a fair amount of pain." George told him. "Considering how nice you'd been to me, I figured I should return the favor. I didn't know about your history with Miss Austen."
"How could you?" Jack asked. "It's not like I went out of my way to be open to anybody about what happened on the island. Here's something no one else as this hospital knows."
"I already know a lot about you, sir," George pointed out.
"Even when I was on the island I didn't tell a lot about my past," Jack told him. "Truth of the matter is, I've been more honest about everything that happened in my life to the people at Seattle Grace in the past year then I was to anybody on the island the three months we were stranded."
There was a story there. Hell, there were probably years worth of stories there. George decided to focus on the one that was the most pertinent. "Lexie told me that you were in a relationship with Miss Austen."
"She's on her way back to prison because of you; I think that you can call her Kate." His wince must have been visible. "That came out wrong. Truth is, regardless of what you did, there's a good chance she'd be on her way back to jail anyway. Kate is many things, but she's never been subtle."
George was a little surprised. "You're not pissed at me, Dr. Shephard?"
"How I could be angry at you? You did the best thing that you possibly could with the information you had." Jack told him. "The information that could've helped you wasn't in that file, and I was in no condition to tell you about it. The only reason I hit you was because it's really hard to punch yourself in the face."
"You should work the ER more. You'd be surprised at what you end up seeing." They exactly exchanged grins this time. "How upset is the Chief going to be?"
"I'll explain it to him first. I imagine considering the extenuating circumstances, he'll understand."
"Maybe." George said. "Though he will be angry at the thought that one of his best surgeons could've wrecked his hands in a fit of irrational anger/"
"Not that that same surgeon was in trouble based on who he slept with." Jack held up his hand. "Right, I forgot what hospital I was working at."
This time, they both managed to laugh. "Actually, there's one more thing I want to show you." Jack told George.
They walked down the hall until they were outside Carole Littleton's room. Suddenly, George thought he could see why Dr. Shephard was in such a good mood.
Several of the passengers from Oceanic were in the room. And in the hospital bed, Miss Littleton was sitting up. "She regained consciousness ten minutes ago," Jack told them. "Thought you might want to share in the good news."
George looked a little strange. "But I didn't even scrub in on the surgery."
"Believe me, Dr. O'Malley, this wouldn't be possible without you."