Thanks for the reviews. Finally, you all say! I meant to have this out last week but I'm been really busy and for some reason I really struggled with this chapter. I'm also sorry to say that I'm leaving to go overseas in a couple of days (Comic Con) so I won't be able to update again until at least the second week of August. But I have a 13 hour plane ride ahead of me, so who knows, maybe I'll be inspired. Oh and I put a new poll on my profile, so don't forget to check it out. ;)
Chapter 7.
"He's a great kid," Jack said, watching Aaron clamber back up to the top of the slide for the tenth time in as many minutes. They'd been at the park for over an hour and he wasn't showing any signs of wearing himself out yet; Jack, on the other hand, was still recovering from the time he'd spent pushing him on the swings, dropping onto the bench beside Claire as soon as a group of children lured him off to play on the fort.
"He is," she agreed, "but I can't take the credit for that."
"Why not?" Jack asked her, more lost than ever. Somehow he knew that the answer had to do with Kate. It seemed that ever since the crash, her life had been interwoven with those of his family in a way that he didn't fully understand, and it all started with Aaron.
"When Aaron was about three months old, I… got sick," Claire explained, picking apart a leaf that had fallen onto the seat. "I couldn't look after him anymore, so Kate took him in. He's been with her ever since." She threw the pieces away and started on the next, her movements becoming increasingly agitated as she spoke. "She's the one who fed him and clothed him and taught him how to walk and talk and write his own name. He is who he is because of her, not me."
"But you were the one who gave birth to him?" he pressed. He wondered if she was talking about PND or some other psychological disorder. She didn't have the sallow, gaunt look of someone who was recovering from a long illness.
Her voice was wistful as she agreed.
That confirmed his suspicions about why he looked so much like her and not Kate. She was his mother after all. At least biologically. "So why does the whole world think that Kate did?"
She finally turned to face him. "Because that's what you told them."
"Me?" Why would he lie to the media about Aaron being his nephew? And why hadn't he pursued custody of him himself? It couldn't have been about money when, as a neurosurgeon, he had to be earning close to half a million dollars a year. Maybe he just hadn't wanted him, hadn't wanted to take on the responsibility of becoming a father, although now that he'd met him, he couldn't imagine that ever being the case.
"You, Kate, Sayid, Sun, Hurley… The Oceanic Six."
"Where were you?" he asked when he noticed that she hadn't included herself in this list.
She shivered inside her coat, despite the mildness of the day. "Somewhere else."
Wherever she'd been for those three years, it didn't sound like a place that she wanted to revisit any time soon.
"But you're home now," he reminded her with what he hoped was a comforting smile.
"We both are," she agreed, smiling back.
He decided that he liked her then. She was sweet and honest and easy to be talk to. She didn't seem to expect anything of him, not like his mother or Kate, who he still couldn't figure out. Of all the people that he'd met from his old life, she was the hardest to read: one minute he thought he'd succeeded in breaking down the barriers between them, the next she'd closed herself off to him and he was forced to start all over again. He wondered if he would ever truly understand her.
"You know, I had amnesia once," Claire piped up, shaking him out of his thoughts.
This revelation took him by surprise. It wasn't like it was a common condition. "Really?"
"Uh huh," she agreed. "Right before Aaron was born. I still remember what it was like – everyone talking about you instead of to you. I want you to know that you can ask me anything. I promise I won't lie to you."
She was offering him a free pass back into his life. "Okay," he agreed, relieved that she at least had no intention of withholding information from him. If he was going to try to fill the same role that he had before he boarded that plane, then he needed to know everything, not just the good parts.
"So, if you're living with Kate, you must have met her fiancé?" He wasn't sure why that particular question came to mind when what he could have asked anything about himself, her, their father…
"Her fiancé?" Claire repeated, narrowing her eyes in confusion. "What makes you think she's engaged?"
It's complicated, Kate had said when he'd acknowledged her ring. "Ex-fiance?" he amended, in case they'd split up and she just hadn't gotten around to taking it off. "The baby's father." When this only seemed to bewilder her further, he added, "You do know that she's pregnant, right?" If she considered Claire to be like a sister, then surely she was one of the first people she told?
The look Claire was giving him was one of sympathy mingled with pity. "She didn't tell you?"
"Tell me what?" he insisted, but he could see that she was determined not to say anymore. "Tell me what, Claire? You just promised you wouldn't lie to me." He knew that he was obsessing again, but if there was one thing he couldn't stand, it was being kept in the dark.
"She's my best friend, Jack. I don't wanna get involved."
She already had by implying that she knew something that he didn't: something that she wasn't prepared to divulge. "Claire," he repeated, trying to keep the exasperation from his tone. "What aren't you telling me?"
Her eyes darted back to the playground, to Aaron, as she tried to come up with a way to escape the conversation. "What happened between you and Kate is none of my business."
This wasn't the response that he was expecting. Something had happened between him and Kate? He wasn't sure whether to be relieved that there seemed to be explanation for why she kept drifting into his thoughts, or concerned that whatever had happened between them was so unpleasant that no one – not even Claire – was prepared to let him what in on what it was.
"I know how hard it is to be the only one out of the loop," she told him, her voice growing softer but no less firm, "but if you wanna hear the whole story, you need to ask her."
Kate felt herself begin to deflate as soon as the door slammed behind them. Then she did something that she hadn't allowed herself to do in weeks: she locked herself in the downstairs bathroom and cried without bothering to muffle the sound now that she was alone in the house.
It seemed like every time she felt like she might be able to live with her grief, life threw her another curve ball. It had happened when she found out that she was carrying Jack's child, just two weeks after she'd said goodbye to him, and now here it was happening again, taking away any chance that she'd had of ever getting over him. When Margo first dropped the bombshell that he had no memory, she hadn't realised just how hard it would be to see him every day and know that she couldn't be with him, that while she was thinking about how badly she needed him to touch her, he would be wondering why his sister's roommate was always around.
She froze when she heard the doorbell echo through the front hall. The only frequent visitor to the house was Margo, and she would have come in with Jack if she planned on having coffee with her today. Claire must have left her keys, she decided. She was always doing things like that: forgetting to take her keys or her wallet or the cell Kate had bought for her with her when she went out. You could take the girl out of the jungle, but you couldn't take the jungle out of the girl.
She had been sitting on the toilet lid but she forced herself to get up, splashing cold water from the faucet onto her face and drying it off with a paper towel to hide what she'd been doing before she went to let them in.
But when she opened the door, it wasn't Claire standing out on the front walk, it was... "Sawyer?" She hadn't seen him in months, not since he hopped on a plane to Florida with Miles to go pay his respects to Juliet's family. In truth, she hadn't thought much about him since. Her own pain had been too all-consuming to leave room for her to worry about his. "What're you doing here? I thought you were in Miami?"
"I heard the doc was back. Thought I'd come see for myself," he explained, doing his best to sound nonchalant, as though he was just in the neighbourhood.
On a normal day, she would have been touched by this display of affection for Jack, but nothing about the last few days had been normal. "He's not here," she announced. "He went to the park with Claire and Aaron." If he wanted to know how he was doing, he could catch up with him there; she moved to close the door but his boot shot out to stop her. "So why ain't you with them?"
She couldn't blame him for being surprised. After the emotional scene he'd witnessed between them on the cliff, before Jack went off to face his death, it would be natural for him to assume that he would find them together, trying to get on with their lives. "Because he didn't invite me," she told him in the same clipped tone. She didn't want to be having this conversation with him. She wanted to go back to wallowing in peace.
When he wouldn't remove his foot, she turned and walked away, back into the house, hoping that he would get the message and go.
"Everythin' okay?" he asked, trailing into the living room after her, reluctant to leave her alone until he was sure that she was all right.
"No, it's not 'okay'," she retorted, sinking heavily onto the couch cushions. "Nothing is 'okay'." She lifted a hand to cover her face, but he pulled it away, urging her back to her feet.
"C'm'ere." He drew her against his chest and she stopped trying to fight him, suddenly grateful that he and Jack had never been close. Until now, she hadn't realised how much she needed to be with someone who wasn't struggling to make sense of his death and subsequent reappearance, since it meant that for once, she didn't have to be strong.
"I don't understand," she whispered into his shirt. "I did the right thing – I gave Aaron back. Why am I still being punished?"
She could hear the shock in his voice as he asked, "Who's punishin' you? Jack?"
She shook his arms off, stepping back out of his embrace once she'd had time to compose herself. "God… the universe… fate…" she told him, before he could come to the conclusion that Jack had knowingly hurt her, scrubbing at her eyes with her fingertips. She didn't want him to know that she'd been crying when he came back. She wasn't sure which would be worse: him feeling awful about it or him not even realising that her tears were connected to him. "He doesn't remember me. He doesn't remember anything."
She watched his eyes grow wide with disbelief. "You're sayin' he has amnesia?" When her only response was a miserable nod, he added, "You are sure it's him?" He was obviously worried about the same thing that she had been, only there was no need for that.
She found herself smiling for the first time since he arrived. "It's him," she assured him. He didn't ask her how she knew and she didn't tell him. It was too hard to explain that it was more the feeling she got from him than anything he said or did. He still felt the same. It was everything else that had changed.
"Had to make sure," he insisted, flashing his dimples at her.
As they lapsed into silence, she watched him size her up with one of his penetrating stares, trying to figure out if she was okay other than that. "I know it's good to be back, but you might wanna lay off o' the Big Macs there, Freckles," he teased her, nodding at her belly when he noticed how round it had become. "You're startin' to look a little tubby." It was the same game that they'd always played: he would ask without really asking and then she would be forced to admit whatever it was.
She couldn't stop the grin from breaking over her face as her hand drifted over it, caressing the small bump that housed her unborn child through the thin fabric of her shirt. Despite the fact that it had complicated her life in ways that she hadn't even allowed herself to consider yet, this – becoming a mother for real – was still the most welcome thing that had ever happened to her. "I'm not getting fat, James," she laughed. "I'm pregnant. Just a little over three months."
She could see him doing the math in his head, counting back the days since Jack 'died'. She knew when he finally reached the end because he glanced back up at her in alarm. "Is it…?"
"Yeah," she agreed softly. "It is."
He drew in a sharp breath. "Well what'd he say when you told him?"
"He only knows that I'm pregnant," she confessed. "He doesn't know how it happened." Even if she wasn't afraid of what the knowledge that he was about to become a father would do to him, she didn't know if she could withstand seeing the blank look on his face as she described the memory that had come to mean so much to her.
He arched a dubious eyebrow at her. "You didn't think he might be interested in that part?"
"When he looks at me…" She squeezed her eyes shut, willing herself not to cry again. "It's like he's not even seeing me. For three years, no matter what happened, I could always count on the fact that there was at least a part of him that still loved me, but now it's just… gone. He doesn't even know that he's supposed to love me."
"So you're just gonna let him go? After all that?" He knew better than anyone what a struggle it had been for both of them to admit their feelings. "What about the kid? Don't you think it deserves to know who its daddy is?"
"You went to see Clem," she realised. Where else would that be coming from?
"'Course I did," he agreed. "I told ya I would."
"And?" She hadn't paid them a visit since she decided to give Aaron up. She couldn't face hearing any more of Cassidy's bitter remarks about Jack when the pain of losing him was still so raw and she hadn't known what to say about Sawyer anyway. She figured that it was up to him to make contact.
"And she's just like you said." His expression softened into a smile before he covered it with a mock scowl. "Now quit tryin' to change the subject."
He was quiet for a moment; when he spoke again, his voice was edged with grief. "You know how badly I wish it'd been me instead o' her? That I could trade my sorry existence for hers? I keep tellin' myself that what's done is done, when the truth is, I'd give anythin' to change what happened that day. She died thinkin'…"
He shook his head, and she knew that this was something that he would never share with her. There were parts of her relationship with Jack that she would never share with him either. They were too personal, too close to home, and they weren't those kinds of friends.
"That ain't important. What is important is that you got a second chance here. You really wanna throw that away?"
He was right: she had what some people could only dream of, him included. But even so, there was still a part of her that wished that he had stayed dead, stayed on the island or in Tunisia, just stayed in the past so that she could keep moving forward, instead of back to the place that she'd found herself in when she first lost him. "I know I should be happy that he's alive, but I just want him back, James. I miss him so much." It was like a physical ache.
"Hey, it's gonna be all right," he told her, wrapping her up in another hug. He paused, as if remembering something before adding, "If it's meant to be, it's meant to be…"
(Don't worry, this is not about to become a triangle story. There's enough drama as it is!)
Next chapter: Jack is jealous of Sawyer and confronts Kate about his conversation with Claire... ;)