Title: They Know
Author: Cat
Rating: PG
Pairing: Jack/Kate
Archive: Ask first please, except if you’ve been given permission to take my stuff without asking first.
Author’s Note: I know this is super cliché, with a very fluffy ending, but I had this idea in my mind and it just wouldn’t let me go until I wrote it out, so I did. Plus it’s a nice break from the longer fic I’m working on.
Summary: They all know. And Kate has to deal with it. Hopefully not alone.
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It had always been a possibility. They had never talked about it openly but they had hinted here and there that they had to do their best to avoid such an occurrence. However, they knew it could spring on them at any moment. It was logical. It had happened since the beginning of time. They knew all this.
But when it happened, it was a shock to Kate and she desperately wished she could go back in time and do things differently.
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Claire knew. She probably figured it out at the same time as Kate had.
One day she came up to Kate, Jonathan - fourteen months old then - gathered in her arms. She said barely above a whisper, “There are worse things in the world, you know.” She smiled at her baby boy and kissed his cheek tenderly. Jonathan pulled a thread of her hair in reply. Claire kissed him again.
She looked at Kate, her face expressionless except for her eyes that said much more than the rest of her face ever could.
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Sawyer also knew. For someone who talked so much, he sure observed a lot as well. Especially Kate.
When Kate was brooding on the beach, watching the waves crash onto the shore, he sat down next to her, uninvited – not that he cared.
“I bet you wish that dreaded time of the month came this time, huh? But it didn’t come last time and it’s not gonna come this time. It’s not gonna come for several months.”
Kate didn’t say anything for a long time. She just sat there, playing what Sawyer had said to her - what she had said to herself - over and over in her mind. After long minutes of silence with Kate looking out the distant and Sawyer’s eyes fixated on Kate, she asked, “how did you guess?”
Sawyer wanted to smirk. Really bad. But he knew this was distressing for Kate; more distressing than anything she had experienced on this God forsaken island. So he restrained himself. He simply answered, “ain’t that hard, Freckles. It’s easy to tell when you’re in your week and I ain’t even talking about those damn PMS. You girls all sit still for a few days. Pretty easy to figure out what’s going on. I noticed that you didn’t sit still last month and you sure ain’t sitting still this month.”
Kate didn’t respond. She got up and walked away. But before she could be out of hearing range, Sawyer shouted out, “and he knows Kate. He’s a goddamn doctor, for God’s sake. He probably figured it out even before you did.”
-----
Jack knew. Probably has known for some time and he hadn’t said anything to her. Maybe he just didn’t want to have anything to do with it, anything to do with her. He was probably hoping that it wasn’t true, that he had guessed wrong. He was waiting for her to say something because until she did, it wasn’t really true.
One night, she told Jack she wanted to be by herself and that she’d spend the night on the beach. She hoped he wouldn’t take it as a suggestion to join her because honestly, it was what had gotten them in this mess in the first place.
Her wishes weren’t fulfilled; forty minutes later she felt Jack approach and lie down next to her. He gently stroked her arm and kissed her shoulder. Kate didn’t turn around. She just said, “not tonight, Jack.”
She had expected Jack to groan, to protest, to ask why, to at least make a noise of discontentment. But he kept stroking her arm and he whispered, “no. Not tonight.”
That’s when she realized that Jack knew. He didn’t know like Claire knew. He didn’t know like Sawyer knew. He understood what this meant. He shared all her anxieties, her fears, and her agitation. Because Jack knew like she knew.
She slowly turned around and took the hand that Jack had been touching her with, and placed it on her stomach. “It’s growing,” she whispered, her eyes fixed on him. He looked down at his hand over her stomach for a few seconds then looked into her eyes. “It’s growing,” he repeated. He moved his hand around her waist to rest it at the small of her back. He pulled her toward him and she wrapped her arms around him, her face buried in the crook of his neck. She inhaled sharply, taking in all the odors that were purely “Jack”, the smells that always excited her, those that turned her on two months ago when a life was created.
“We’re going to be okay,” Jack said softly in her ear.
Maybe it wasn’t realistic, maybe it was too optimistic, but she believed him and that was all that mattered.
-----
The end.
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