Thanks for the reviews. I'm glad people are still so enthusiastic about this fic because I have some exciting stuff planned for the next few chapters, starting with this one. ;)
Chapter 4.
Tunisia
Later that night when his patients were asleep he decided to use the dial up connection on the hospital's one and only computer to do some digging in the hopes that it might spark a memory.
On entering the name from the TV into the search engine, he discovered that it brought back two kinds of hits: those relating to two plane crashes that he'd reportedly been involved in and a few that listed him as part of the St Sebastian Neurosurgery Group at St Sebastian's hospital in LA.
So he was right. He was a doctor. Not just a doctor, but a neurosurgeon. That explained how he'd known what to do with the drill.
The images that accompanied the articles were enough to convince him that he must really be the Jack Shephard from the news. The resemblance was uncanny. He just wished that he still felt like that person; that he could remember pulling off any of the amazing feats that he was credited with, like delivering the final member of the Oceanic six on an island somewhere in the South Pacific or helping a woman with a crushed spinal column walk again.
He'd obviously maintained close relationships with his fellow survivors, he realised as he scrolled over paparazzi-style pictures of himself leaving Sayid Jarrah's wedding, and two years later, Kate Austen's trial. Close enough for him to take another trip with three of them. He should be sad that most of them were dead now, but they didn't feel like his friends. They felt like strangers. It was as if it had all happened to somebody else and he was just reading about it.
No one knew that he'd survived. It would be easy to disappear, to start over again in a place like this where who he was didn't matter, just what he could do. But after watching the news footage of them disembarking the plane in Honolulu and seeing the woman who came out of the crowd to embrace him, he knew that that wouldn't be fair. Somewhere out there was at least one person who missed him.
He opened a new search window and typed in three words: 'American Embassy, Tunisia'.
Los Angeles, California
"Thank you for inviting me today."
It was the day of Aaron's fourth birthday and Kate was sitting out on her back porch with Margo, drinking fruit punch while a dozen children tore the inside of her house apart.
"It's Claire you should be thanking, not me," Kate told her. She had helped out by giving her the phone numbers of some of the mothers from the park and driving her and Aaron to the store, but other than that, she'd left the planning up to her. The party had been her idea, after all.
"Claire?"
Kate couldn't blame her for being sceptical. She was just as surprised when Claire suggested it. She wasn't even sure that she would come until she showed up on her doorstep with another gift for the pile. "You were married to her father for almost forty years. I think she's hoping she can get to know him through you," she explained. Now that her brother was gone, there was no one else left to tell her about him.
"I wish she could have known him the way I did. Despite what Jack may have told you, he really was a wonderful father. He loved that boy more than life itself. He would have been devastated if he'd lived long enough to see what happened to him."
Kate knew from experience that there was nothing she or anyone else could say that would lessen her pain so she just sat with her in silence until Margo's cell began to ring. "Would you excuse me for a moment?" she said, digging around for it in her purse and Kate nodded. "Yes, this is she," she heard her say as she moved to the other end of the porch to answer it, her voice fading until Kate couldn't make out her part of the conversation anymore.
Whatever it was, it looked like good news, Kate thought as she watched Margo's tired expression change to one of disbelief, her hand shaking as it came up to cover her mouth.
It was at that moment that the back door opened and Claire's head appeared, scanning the garden for her. "Kate!" she called when she spotted her sitting by herself. "Are you coming back in? Aaron wants to open his presents now."
Kate knew better than to keep a four-year-old waiting. She got up slowly and went back into the living room to rejoin the party just as Aaron yanked the paper from a toy fire engine while Claire cheered him on from behind her camera. She looked so happy that for a moment, Kate could almost believe that it had all been worth it, until she was struck by the memory of his last birthday, when she and Jack had unveiled the shiny new tricycle that they'd bought for him here in this very room.
"Who was that?" she asked Margo when she finally came in, eager for something to distract her. She looked as though she'd been crying.
"Just the lawyer calling to tie up a few loose ends," she assured her, folding her arms as they watched Claire help Aaron free a Spiderman action figure from its box.
She didn't seem to want to elaborate so Kate decided that it was best to let it go. "That reminds me," she told her, changing the subject. "My OB is going on vacation on Friday so they rescheduled my appointment for tomorrow." Now that she was in her twelfth week, she was both looking forward to and dreading it since the doctor was going to try again to listen for a heartbeat. Just this morning she'd woken up crying from a nightmare that she wasn't able to find one. She couldn't wait until her baby was big enough for her to feel it moving so she would know that it was alive. "That's not going to be a problem for you, is it?"
Margo gestured for Kate to step into the kitchen with her. "That's what I wanted to talk to you about. I have to go out of town for a couple of days so I won't be able to make it. But if you ask Claire, I'm sure she'll be happy to go with you instead."
Not for the first time, Kate had the sense that there was something that she wasn't telling her. It wasn't like her to give up the opportunity to bond with her future grandchild. "Is everything okay?"
"Why don't you let me worry about that?" she told her, the fact that she hadn't answered her question not lost on Kate. "You just take care of yourself and that baby of yours. Then when I get back I'm going to insist that you let me take you shopping."
"It's a little early to start buying things for the baby," Kate insisted. "We don't even know what it is." So far she hadn't even been able to bring herself to start clearing out the room she'd set aside for the nursery. It was the kind of thing she'd always imagined doing with Jack. She wasn't ready to start making decisions about themes and paint colours without him, but all around her, life was going on without him. Their baby was proof of that. As hard as she tried, she couldn't stop herself from leaving him behind.
"I'm not talking about the baby. How much longer do you think you can get away with pinning your jeans like that?" Margo teased her.
Kate glanced down to see that the bottom of her tank top had ridden up, revealing the safety pin she was using to hold the zip closed beneath her belly. "Oh," she whispered, tugging it back down over it with a self-conscious smile. She hoped no one else had noticed.
Margo cast an appraising eye over her. "You're fortunate that you haven't put on much weight anywhere else. When I was pregnant with Jack, I went from a size six to a size nine. My breasts were huge," she told her with a wry smile and Kate burst into stunned laughter.
"I just wanted to make sure everything was on track before I went out and spent a fortune on replacing my wardrobe," she explained. She'd never considered herself superstitious before, but since discovering that she was pregnant, she was terrified of doing something to jinx it.
"Well you're in your second trimester now," Margo reminded her gently, "so there's no excuse for you not to invest in some proper maternity clothes."
Tunisia
Two days after he got the address from the embassy's website, Jack managed to hitch a ride into the capital with a courier who had come out to the hospital to deliver medical supplies.
He hadn't considered how far-fetched his story would sound until he caught the dubious looks the clerks exchanged on hearing him try to explain why he couldn't provide them with basic information like his own middle name or date of birth, neither of which had appeared in any of the articles, though according to the media, at the time of his recent "death" he was approximately forty-one years of age.
In order to prove his claim, he agreed to let the doctor they appointed run the gamut of tests, from blood tests to cranial CT scans and MRIs to a mini-mental status examination designed to measure both long term and short term memory; he went over the results himself afterwards but he couldn't find any evidence of a brain injury sustained in the crash or of neurological disease.
He couldn't leave the country without a passport, and they couldn't issue him with one until they verified his identity, so once the doctor convinced them that he was telling the truth, he was granted a small cash loan to pay for his food and accommodation while he waited for them to cut through the red tape.
At the end of his first week in Tunis someone called his hotel to inform him that they'd located an identifying witness, who was flying in from Los Angeles with his birth certificate and photocopies of his passport later that afternoon. After spending days in limbo, he was relieved that something was finally happening, but at the same time he was nervous at the thought of meeting someone from his past, who would no doubt be disappointed that he didn't remember the same things that they did.
When he arrived at the embassy for his appointment, he was met by the Consulate-General himself, who ushered him down a long hallway to a conference room where a dark-haired woman Jack guessed to be in her fifties or sixties was waiting alone.
"Mrs Shephard?"
She turned at the sound of her name, her eyes filling with tears at the sight of him emerging from behind the official and he recognised her as the woman from the video. "Jack!" Before he knew what was happening, her arms were around him and she was holding onto him so tightly that it made his ribs ache. "Don't you ever scare me like that again, you hear me? I don't think my heart can take it a third time."
It wasn't hard to see that she loved him. He wished that he were as overjoyed by the reunion as she was. "I'm sorry, who are you?" he asked her when she released him.
A flicker of hurt passed over her features as she searched his expression for a sign that he was just kidding.
"We had our doctors examine him and it appears that Dr. Shephard is suffering from retrograde amnesia," the Consulate-General explained. "He has no memory of his life before eight weeks ago. That's why it took us so long to contact you."
The woman nodded, composing herself before she turned back to Jack. "I'm your mother. I'm here to take you home."
Next chapter: Kate gets the shock of her life. ;)