Kate's recovery had been slow, ridiculously slow. That was partly the severity of her injuries, but it was more down to Sawyer than anything else. He wouldn't let her attempt to sit up for two days after she had first woken, so scared that she might burst her wound again. Once she'd convinced him to let her try she thought he might back of slightly, see that she was actually capable of doing things. But the effort of forcing her body to hold her weight when it was still healing took a lot of her strength, leaving her exhausted and irritable and what she classed as a failure.
At first she'd felt safe with him, but her mind was so eroded by fear and pain that anything she could grab hold of became her haven. With Sawyer pampering her, offering food and water and anything else she might want every five minutes, she began to feel caged and confined, trapped by his need to help her. She wasn't used to people helping her, wasn't used to kindness, and she saw all sorts of conflicting motivations for his actions, becoming more suspicious and paranoid every time he did something for her. It had come to the point where she would grind her teeth to keep from spitting accusations at him, his irritatingly cheerful demeanour rubbing her completely the wrong way.
For his part, Sawyer could see that something was wrong with her, and knew that it was something more than pain. She was perfectly able to deal with pain, ignore it, move past it, and use it as a way of manipulating everyone else. He knew it because he did it, played it was for all it was worth, but was bothered very little by it. He had learnt when he was young that physical pain was vastly surmounted by emotional pain, and he'd learnt how to close his mind off to it. He'd seen the haunted look in her eyes when she thought no one was looking, seen the way her fingers went automatically to the toy plane in her pocket whenever anything got to her, and he knew that she had the same defences he did. She had to have them to have survived this long.
His assumption was that it was the helplessness getting to her, eroding her confidence in her body and her ability to survive. He tried to fill in for that, getting her everything that she needed so that there was no reason for her to doubt her abilities. Cheerfulness and happiness was not something that his character generally expressed to any extent at all, and it wasn't something he managed to bring across easily. He found himself biting back quips and falling back onto his smile to get through awkward silences. It worked too, for a little while. But now she just sat there, seething, not meeting his eyes, and he could feel her bristling anger with every breath she took. When he tried to calm her, when he let her exert herself beyond what she was obviously incapable of achieving, it only made things worse. She fell back into exhaustion and became even more irritable, and the words, "I told you so," had to be bitten back more than once.
Unable to fathom that it might be his very presence that was driving her mad, he had spent most of the day glaring silently at the sand, unable to look at her pale, gaunt figure, swathed in the shadow of his tent as the blistering glow of the sun illuminated everything apart from her. He was quite shocked when her voice broke into his carefully created illusion of harmony. Each word was carefully spoken, the pain that they elicited well hidden.
"We need more water." The statement was simple, but it took a lot of effort. She refused to meet his eyes, unable to bear the compassion there. Flirting she could take, she was used to men undressing her with their eyes, but kindness was not something she could take, not from him. He was like her. He was supposed to hurt her. It was what she deserved.
There was an awkward silence born of vast chasm separating them. Sawyer could reach out his fingers and they'd be lost within the soft depths of her hair, but he wouldn't really be touching her. She was too far away. So he grunted a sound that could be taken as an agreement and turned away from her, feeling the aching shadow of betrayal haunting him. He knew that he wasn't what kept her alive, but he couldn't shake the memory of her body lost in the darkness but for his eyes holding her there.
He wasn't even that surprised when he came back to find his tent empty, her footsteps quickly fading from the beach and into the jungle. He didn't know where the strength for that had come from, but it didn't surprise him. Running was what she was good at. He didn't swear, kick or throw things. He just sat down where she had been laid, dropping the water bottles on the floor. The cynical part of his mind was glad to get his tent back, and he took comfort in that, even though the rest of his mind was picturing Kate's motionless body lost in the jungle. He didn't make a move to follow her, it was her choice.