On Board the Searcher

Desmond was half asleep as he dropped his phone on the nightstand. His conversation with Kate about the Looking Glass blended with a dream about The Searcher at sea on the waves. Except, he really had just been talking to Kate and the ship was actually moving. His eyes opened again. He was alone.

He sat up, sighed, rummaged around on the bed, the floor for his shorts and a tee shirt. He ducked his head into Charlie's half a bedroom and saw him sleeping deeply with one arm across his chest. Desmond watched him for a minute, went upstairs.

Penny was sitting back in a deck chair with both feet on the floor and her arms crossed lightly, gazing up at the almost full moon. He felt most of the fear and resulting frustration in him melt away as if the moonlight had burned it off.

"Penny, we're at sea?" He sat in the chair next to her, took her hand. "What the hell?"

"It's my fault," she said, "If anything happens it's on me."

"Child services might have an issue with that," he said, but with a trace of a sardonic smile. She shot him a look. "Did you ask the crew, the docs? Are they in?"

She nodded and he sat back too.

"When we win," Desmond finally said, "we should stay on the island. Let someone else run The Searcher. We've earned a few years' peace."

The pause was so long he wondered if she was annoyed with his demand.

"I'd like to start a school for the kids," she said. "There will only be more of them and they're going to need a school."

"Headmistress Penny," Desmond smiled as The Searcher sailed into the great unknown of what would actually happen next.

The Island
6:30am

Kate felt like it'd be a waste of their time to ask Richard or Walt to go to the Weather Vane with her just for the company or the comfort of it. They had a lot to do, too.

She set out just after dawn, putting the pack with its three air tanks and masks on her back. They were heavy but manageable and it was only a fifteen-minute trip over flat ground. She grabbed a 9mm and tucked it into her belt.

The walk there was peaceful with only the sound of her own feet in the grass and the occasional bird singing. It was early but it was also humid and she could practically smell the dew on the trees and plants: Her favorite kind of morning. She took her time, feeling rested and hopeful.

When she made it to the other side, she found she was still on her own: No Jack, no anyone. The lights in this Weather Vane were still on and it felt like it'd been visited in the month and a half since she'd left - yesterday. She dropped the pack, walked to the bank of computers. One was at the DOS prompt with request after request keyed in. She realized she should have told Sayid the only things this hatch could do were forecast the weather and connect places. It would have saved him some time. At the end of the console there was a piece of notebook paper with Jack's handwriting all over one side - a long list of questions, ones she expected were for her.

When half an hour went by and she was still alone, she set out for the beach camp.

It was nightfall on this side and she wished she'd brought a torch. She'd walked ten minutes, watching the dusk fall, was just getting ready to give up and turn back when she saw a glowing dot. She waited, watched the dot resolve into a torch in Jack's hand and felt a flood of relief.

"I know, sorry, I'm late. I couldn't leave 'til the meds brought his fever down."

He saw her look of confusion and frowned a little regretfully at what he had to say next. "Sayid. He's got a couple of pretty bad infections from stab wounds. He was on the mend for nearly a week, but then two nights ago he got worse. He went into septic shock."

"Danielle?" She asked, "I thought it'd go better for them, not worse."

"I know," Jack said. He put a hand on her shoulder, turned her around and started walking slowly back toward the hatch with her. "He's been improving all afternoon. He'll make it, I know he will."

He was staring straight down and she noticed he'd barely looked her in the eyes since they'd first met up. A thought crept into her mind.

"What else?" Kate asked sharply. Jack kept walking. "What else has happened?"

"Don't freak out," he said it fast, shook his head, eyes still down.

"This is not helping," she almost yelled it, "Breaking it gently, it's not helping."

"Boone's dead,"

He looked up and she saw both his misery at the loss and pain at what was on her face. He was watching her hope for them all fall away.

"Course correction," she said softly, her eyes widening.

"What?"

"The universe," Kate said, her mind clearly elsewhere, "has a way of course correcting," she looked angry, partly at fate but also with herself. "I can't help you. You can only help us. It's not fair. That's not fair."

She bolted, ran for the Weather Vane and Jack swore under his breath and ran after her. She was fueled by adrenaline and he was carrying a torch, trying not to start a fire in the jungle: It took him all the way back to catch her. He threw the torch to the dirt just steps from the door, got a hold of her shoulder and pulled her to him hoping to put out her urge to run.

The sun had set and it was getting dark now.

"If you leave, I don't know how we're getting out of here," he said it half under his breath. "But if you stay…. It hasn't all been a disaster. We found the people from the tail section. Boone talked with them from the radio in the plane we pushed off that cliff."

"How did he die?" she asked, her voice still shaky.

"They were headed our way and thought they were still a full day out from our camp. They heard someone moving through the brush. She shot him. Ana Lucia. It wasn't her fault."

"Shannon," Kate blurted her name out, practically shouted it, and it was his turn to look confused.

"What about Shannon? She's fine, she's watching over Sayid until I get back."

Kate's forehead dropped onto his chest and Jack realized she was laughing: Certainly not happily, even a touch hysterically- but it was better than tears and running for cover.

"Maybe I can help you," she said. "Some of you. Maybe there's hope."

She looked up and saw a small smile on his face.

"Claire had her baby," he said.

"Who delivered him?"

"I did," Jack said, sounding surprised she would ask.

"Glad to hear that," she said. "I think I should have let you know what was coming so you could be your own variables. That's what Eloise told me last night. Seems she was right as usual. "

"And who's Eloise?" Jack asked.

"Someone I hope you'll never meet. Are you ready to hear all this? You were pretty freaked out the last time just hearing the island has a leader, and believe me that's so far from all of it. You aren't even going to believe…"

"I'm ready," he interrupted her, but it felt like he was trying to be polite, to spare her some embarrassment. That's when she realized he'd been scanning her face the last minute or so, looking at her eyes, absorbed more in the way she was talking to him than with what she was saying. It was also when she noticed she hadn't stepped away from him at all. She still had one hip and the palms of her hands against him, and was holding his shirt lightly, toying with it with her fingertips as if this were L.A. and they were standing in the kitchen after he got home from work on a Friday night.

She turned abruptly, hoped he hadn't caught her expression as it dawned on her.

"C'mon," he said, reached back and offered a hand as he started down the steps of the hatch. "We have a lot to talk about."

On Board The Valenzetti

"Are you out of your mind?" Sawyer hissed as Annie came up the stairs from the lower deck to the middle-deck. He had the computer bag over his shoulder, a laptop full of dummy data Evan had set up for him to feed to the D.I. leaders bit by bit.

Annie had started her solo tour of the cargo ship the moment she'd tossed her bags into her clean but unbelievably tiny room. She'd found an engine room, several supply rooms, some with bunks, some full of food - and a huge set of doors that were triple padlocked. She smelled something familiar, pressed her face against the seam where they met: Benzene, ketones – a lab, she thought. They've got a laboratory on board. For what?

"Why shouldn't we check it out?" Annie said, "They told us to meet them upstairs in half an hour. They didn't say 'don't go to the lower deck, don't look around.'" We're supposed to be getting as much information for Hurley and Ben as we can. Right?"

She looked straight up at him as she asked the question, watched his face go smooth and blank. Nice poker face she thought. What else had she expected?

"What would you have said if they caught you snooping around?" Sawyer asked, not angry now, more like 'listen and learn.' "You have to have a plan. Tell 'em you went to school with someone whose dad built ships. Ask if this was built in Auckland or Nigeria? Point out that it used to be a dry goods vessel but someone obviously retrofitted it for general storage…"

"How did you know all that?"

"Because," he said, turned and started walking up the stairs to the main deck, "I do my homework. We had two days to read up on this ship and I did. You might want to not push it right away, Annie," he stopped, looked back at her. "If you haven't noticed, these guys aren't the peace, love, and flowers types. They're not messing around."

"I've noticed," she said, but didn't apologize and he turned and kept going.

Dori Goodspeed was waiting for them on deck, led them up a short set of steps to the control room at the very top. There were several people there already, some on computers and some patrolling the room with one hand on the guns in their belts. All together she'd noticed four D.I. leaders, ten support crew and six people armed with everything from high-powered rifles to handguns.

"Best get started," Dori said, sat at a table against one of the windows that made up most of the control room. He and Sawyer each logged on to their computers. Annie sat a few yards away.

At first she didn't notice it, her attention divided between them and the view of the open sea. Then it hit her: There was nothing tentative about the information exchange going on at the table. Sawyer wasn't giving them iffy coordinates and a general idea of where to head – he was helping Dori transfer programs, set up applications, sending him passwords.

He hadn't only been doing his research these last few days; he'd been stealing from Evan's laptop. In a matter of minutes they'd have everything they'd need to find The Searcher and maybe even a way into the Lamp Post's live data. And there was nothing she could do about it.

Annie stared daggers at Sawyer, mentally willing him to look up at her. She wanted to run over and shake him, ask him how the hell he could do this, put their friends' fate so completely in these peoples' hands?

Suddenly Sawyer turned his head ever so slightly away from her, his hair falling over his eyes. He'd caught her expression. He knew that she knew, she thought, and he knew there was still nothing she could do about it.

The only thing keeping her from a panic was the memory of Ben's voice on the phone the night before, saying, "He needs you a hell of a lot more than you need him."

Island Iteration 4 of 5
The Weather Vane

"That's it," Kate said, "You're the only person on the island who knows how it ends."

They were sitting in two of the swiveling office chairs that lined the wall of computers, Jack leaning forward in his contemplating what she'd said, Kate kicked back with one foot against the counter in front of the monitors.

"Or how it would have ended," he said.

They'd started out talking in the breakfast nook, but it took hours for her to tell the story and it was a lot to process. It felt to her that he was far away from her now even though their chairs were a couple of feet apart.

"Once you're out of here," she got up to break the moment and hopefully the mood, went to the sink for another glass of water, "Don't come back. Get everyone you can away and none of you comes back, please, ever."

He didn't acknowledge what she'd said but she knew he'd heard.

"I think some people will stay," he said. "Locke for sure. From what you've told me, though, no ending he'll face here would be more awful than what he had ahead of him."

Jack turned his chair around. Kate was still at the sink.

"You're not coming back, are you?" he asked.

"No," she said. "I can't. If you all don't make it I don't want to know. And if you do… I just have to go home and hope it was enough. And there's our own war going on. Hurley's going to need me."

"How bad is it there?" he asked, "What are you all up against?"

She tried to shrug it off.

"Do you really want to know when you can't do anything about it? Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I believe we'll be okay. Only... some disappointing things are happening along the way."

The conversation wasn't going anywhere less stressful, but how could it she thought? They both still had a lot of question marks ahead of them. He looked further away than anytime since she'd gotten there today.

"Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," he said, "I wasn't sure if I should tell you this but I won't see her again once we're out of here."

"Really?"

Kate walked to the bunks, sat on the bottom one finishing her water with an indignant expression on her face on behalf of her counterpart. He turned, caught it, laughed dryly and shrugged.

"I don't know if the fact of you changed how we interacted with each other," he said, getting up and walking over, sitting next to her. "But that's just the way it's turned out. She'll probably head east with Sawyer."

"Why do you think that?"

"She moved in with him," Jack said. "They built a tent condo on the dunes west of the camp. You should see it, it's huge. You could throw a dinner party in that thing. They seem happy."

"Huh," she set her empty glass on the floor just under the bunk, stared out at the room. "I did not see that coming."

"And there's one more thing I need to say."

"What's that?"

"Stop me," Jack said and she looked up at him.

"Stop you?"

"If you've had second thoughts about this since last time you were here," he said, "stop me."

Before she could ask him what the hell he was talking about he reached around her with one arm and pulled her to him. His other hand was in her hair, tipping her face up and then his mouth was on hers and he kissed her so hard and so hungrily that for a few seconds she had no sense of which way was up and which was left.

Then he stopped just as quickly and Kate dropped back onto the bunk looking up at him.

"How am I supposed to stop you," she reached up with both hands, pulled him toward her with one, ran the fingers of her other along his jaw, touched his lips with her thumb, "If I can't even see straight."

"Sorry," he said, "I've had a month and a half to think about this" and then he reached down and kissed her once more, but this time so softly he barely grazed her mouth. She knew he'd thought about that too.

"I'm not seeing you stop me," he said, hovering over her and she grinned, her eyes narrowing as she reached between them. He felt her sliding his belt open and then shimmying out of her own jeans.

"I'd like to point out," he said, pulling back a little, taking her in with his eyes, running a hand over her hips, the back of her leg. "That's the exact opposite of stopping me. And that you were going commando."

"Jack," she said, "shut up," and she set to work on the buttons of his shirt.

"Okay," he said, but his hand was in her hair again, pulling her eyes up to his, "But only if you're sure."

"Yes," she said, and kept unbuttoning. "Let me show you how sure I am."

When she woke up he was asleep. She leaned up to look at his watch and saw she only had a few minutes left. She slid back into her clothes, trying not to wake him, thinking it'd be better if he didn't until she was gone. He did, though, and reached for her.

"No," she pushed him away, curled up between him and the wall. He looked more concerned than anything.

"I'm going soon," she said. "In a minute. I don't want feel you there and then not."

He nodded, lay on his side watching her. She felt the queasiness start, knew the room would go all swimmy next.

"Does your Lamp Post station connect to ours?" he asked, "Can you use it to get to my L.A.?"

It sounded like he'd been thinking about the question while she was sleeping.

"I don't know. I think so. There's a lot I still don't know about how this works."

"Find out," he said, pushed himself down the bunk a bit so that they were exactly face to face.

"What if I go there and…" she stopped, looked away and then back at his eyes, didn't say 'what if you're not there'.

The room went thin, stretchy, and now she could barely see him or feel the bed under her. Her brain yelled for her to reach out, but she willed her hands to stay put.

"Have some faith," she heard his voice fading away. "We'll make it. Come find me."