Flesh and Blood, Flesh and Bone

[elliotsmelliot.livejournal.com]

Characters: Jack/Kate, Penny

Rating: PG 13

Genre: Future Fic
Spoilers: up to and including the season three finale

Disclaimer: I don’t own Lost. This is what it would look like if I did
Summary: With everything slipping away, Kate and Jack find something to hold onto.

Author Notes: This is chapter 6/6. You can find the other parts here:  Neither Here, Nor There Part I, Now and Then, Here and There Part II, Between the Wish and the Thing Part III, A Place with it's own Harvest Part IV, Having the Colour of Emeralds Part V.

 

x x x

 

The autumn and winter were dotted with milestones. There were literal ones, actual signposts measuring distances and offering direction, and the figurative ones, legacies and turning points.

 

The anniversary of the crash came and went. While Jack had raised a glass in memory of his father earlier that week, there was no such poignant moment on the 22^nd. Marking the actual date seemed pointless when he thought about it every day, agonized over it every night. There had been an event in Sydney to commemorate the dead, the missing, as some optimists had chosen to call them since Jack and Kate’s rescue. They had been invited but nobody expected them to attend, no one expected them to want to fly again.

 

He had spent the day as he had the three weeks before, moving between Kate’s house and the hospital, trading off so one of them was always with Ellen. The day stood out from the others only because his bewildered mother had shown up and demanded to know if the child that Jack was spending all his time with was a Shephard. Jack had said no but then Kate had embraced her, whispered something, and Margo had burst into tears. Now she too participated in the vigil, driving up every few days to murmur stories about curious rabbits and naughty mice.

 

It seemed impossible that the press had yet to discover Ellen. Out all the improbable things he and Kate were juggling, this seemed the least likely secret to be kept. Countless people should had noticed Kate’s pregnancy, recognized her from the rescue press coverage and done the math. Even if that had inexplicably escaped public notice, since then Ellen’s medical charts had passed through dozens of hands from San Diego to Los Angeles to Baltimore. Undoubtedly, he had thought, the urge to gossip or make some money off a tragic and therefore profitable epilogue would have trumped anyone’s sense of kindness, professional obligation, loyalty to a fellow doctor and possibly whatever Sam or his mysterious superiors might be doing to control the story. But nothing. All the excitement and grief that followed Ellen’s birth had remained private, as sheltered as the fucking island.

 

By mid-October Ellen had gained enough weight that her doctors actually contemplated releasing her for the weekend. He had watched Kate give her daughter her first real bath, Ellen’s normal lethargy replaced with delightful gurgling. But then the fever returned, her tiny legs swelled, and her shortness of breath increased. The weight she gained dropped and they were back where they started. Medicines were changed and surgery was contemplated but there was no apparent virus to fight or repairs to be made.

 

Ellen hung on, stubborn, resilient for two more weeks, and then slipped away the day before Halloween.

 

She was there and then she wasn’t.

 

He had driven them home, eyes so focused on the brown Honda in front with the empty car seat in the back and some stuffed red dog looking out the rear window that he almost missed the exit. Kate’s sobs had turned to hiccups by the time he pulled into the driveway. He was at the front door before he realized she had gotten back into the car, was pulling out without saying a word. He let her go, went inside and poured himself a drink.

 

He was more than halfway through the bottle when she returned, eyes still red and glassy but she looked more grounded than he had seen her in weeks.

 

“Where’d you go?”

 

“For a walk.”

 

“The park?”

 

“No, the beach. I finally went to the beach.” She sat beside him on the couch, pick up his glass, sniffed it and took a sip. She frowned and got up, returning with a beer. “I always wanted to go to a beach when I was a kid. We’d go fishing at Clear Lake and there was a little stripe of sand along the shore. Sometimes we’d have a cook out there and I would build castles and dig holes. But it wasn’t until my mom took me to Florida, after the divorce, that I realized a beach wasn’t really beach unless there was an ocean.”

 

“Living here, I took all that for granted. I wanted to see snow.”

 

“I always loved the first snow, snow at Christmas, and snow days, but unless you skied, the rest was just a pain.”

 

“One time I made a snowball from the frost in my freezer and threw it at Lana Smithers, the girl across the street. It fell apart before it hit her. She laughed and tackled me.”

 

“That’s what you get for picking on girls.”

 

“She was twice my size, that’s what I get for being stupid.”

 

They both laughed and then caught themselves. The easy conversation dissolved as quickly as it started, replaced by a heavy silence. Jack poured another drink and Kate left hers untouched. He’s not sure how long they sat like that, side by side, not even lost in thought, just sitting, waiting, unsure of what to do next.

 

She was there and then she wasn’t.

 

Then all of a sudden, like Jack had missed something, been somewhere else for a moment, Kate was nestled on top of him, knees aside his thighs, holding his head, kissing him. He couldn’t help pull away; the timing of it all nipped at his conscience and tweaked his jealously.

 

This wasn’t about them.

 

She ignored his resistance, pulled him back, grinded against him. He groaned and she whispered something in return, so low that all he heard was his name, maybe it was only his name. He caught her head and pushed it up so he could search her face. She stared back, eyes flashing with resentment at his need for some sort of confirmation.

 

“Jack,” she said it again, simply, not a plea or a query or even an invitation, just his name.

 

He released her head and she kissed him again. Their teeth knocked and he opened his mouth, surrendered.

 

For now it didn’t matter.

 

x x x

 

“Did you know that there are three species of Turkey, two native to America and one from here? Isn’t that a coincidence? Aren’t you curious to know how the Fijian one compares?”

 

This is how Penny tried to woo Jack and Kate to spend Christmas with her in Fiji. There was more, something about her grandmother Trudy’s trifle recipe being faxed from Kent and tickets to the island’s Annual Yam Festival. She had sounded so excited, so desperate for the company, that Jack felt they should go.

 

Unfortunately he was scheduled to be on call over Christmas so they deferred the invitation until New Year’s. He was back at work part time. Tuesdays through Thursdays he was at St. Sebastian, doing consultations and minor surgeries, finding his footing again. The rest of week he spent with Kate in San Diego, working together to compile detailed records of every Oceanic passenger and crew member, hoping that Sam’s comment about a special interest in people on the flight would take them somewhere.

 

Jack stayed in touch with Nelson and Wi, the mathematicians from Princeton who were part of the Global Consciousness Project, an independent research group who analyzed data generated from an international network of random event generators. The project tested a theory that events having a significant human impact may affect the randomness of the data, suggesting when the numbers appeared less random; it was an indication that mind and matter are intertwined in some fundamental way. Jack thought it sounded pretty ridiculous especially when Nelson described the project’s practical application as “smile and the world smiles with you”. However, who was he to judge, after all he had handed them a set a numbers supposedly meant to save the world.

 

Although they predicted it could take decades to unravel a mathematical explanation for the hatch computer code, Jack received weekly ruminations from Nelson about the numbers’ possible significance. Some suggestions sent him back to his college textbooks. What did it mean if all but one of the numbers, if rearranged, were part of the first four known perfect numbers? The historical connections were equally obscure, one being a reference to Stanisław Lubieniecki a Polish astronomer who was born on August 23, 1623 and was noted for his illustration of 415 comets and his commitment to Socinianism, the belief that God's omniscience did not limit human free will. Jack’s favourite of Nelson’s theories was how all the numbers were found to be those of retired Yankees. Would it be so far fetched at this point that George Steinbrenner was behind everything?

 

Meanwhile Penny had been trying to retrace Michael’s route or had been until November when Hurricane season arrived with a roar. Robert, her captain, insisted on docking in Fiji until April and was only willing to take the Redux out if three days of clear weather were predicted.

 

Despite their lack of progress, Jack felt better than he had since he returned. Keeping busy helped hold the ghosts at bay. Touching Kate reminded him that he could feel something other than anger or regret.

 

It was her idea to go to church on Christmas Eve. She had been attending off and on since Ellen died, not so much the services but going to talk to the minister who was also the chaplain from the Children’s Hospital. Jack had never been a regular churchgoer, just at the holidays, and then once he left for college the obligation to do even that ended. He remembers missing it a little, once he stopped going, missing the familiarity of it all.

 

They skipped the earlier nativity play and went to the midnight mass. Being around children was still too hard.

 

“Lift up thy eyes, and look from the place wherein thou now art, to the north and to the south, to the east and to the west.”

 

The minister had a nice soothing voice. Jack tried to listen to the sermon, something about Abraham’s choices building the foundation for Christ’s birth, but his mind wandered, kept coming back to last Christmas.  

 

He hadn’t remembered the date until Claire had pointed it out. It was two days after he had made contact with Naomi’s people. They had been lying in some underbrush, her hand covering Aaron’s mouth in case he cried out. They didn’t know where anyone else was, if anyone else was still alive. Unfamiliar voices called back and forth, gunshots echoed in the distance, he couldn’t tell from which direction they came. He kept thinking they were all going to die here and it would be his fault.

 

Then Danielle had come out of nowhere, gestured for Claire and Jack to follow her, and led the way to a camouflaged hole in the ground. Ben and Alex were already in there. It was just wide enough for them all to sit down, knees tucked up to their chests.

 

Before Claire dropped off to sleep she had squeezed Jack’s hand and said softly, “Merry Christmas”.

 

It was Kate who held his hand now, would murmur the same words to him tonight, not in some hole in the ground, but pressed against him in their bed. Yet in many ways he was still in that hole, waiting and wondering, worried about everyone else, blaming himself.

 

x x x

 

Trust Jacob.

 

She could always go back. That’s what she kept telling herself as she paddled through another wave. She could turn on the motor at anytime, find her way back to the Redux.

 

Trust Jacob.

 

Every night last week Penny had the same dream. She was on the Redux dinghy in the middle of the ocean. She had nothing with her but a paddle, a bailer and a bottle of water. Unlike now where the waves tossed her back and forth, and her clothes, skin and hair were slick and stiff with a layer of salt, in the dream she had been gently propelled toward an island. On the shore a figure stood waiting bathed in sunlight. It was Desmond. She had rushed from the boat, run through the water and flung herself into his arms.

 

Throughout the sequence, a man’s voice, not Desmond’s, kept telling her to trust Jacob.

 

Jacob. There was no Jacob on the passenger manifest or crew list. No mention of a Jacob in her Aunt’s diary or any other Dharma material. She had called Kate and asked her, about the name. Kate thought it was a little familiar, maybe someone she had never met from Others’ camp. Penny hadn’t mentioned the dream, didn’t want to admit what she had been contemplating.

 

Trust Jacob.

 

The voice had sounded so sure and Desmond’s presence had felt so real. His leanness, the ways the muscles stood out on his thin frame. His skin was darker and his hair lighter, longer than she remembered, but it was him. She woke up feeling his arms still around her, almost cracking her ribs, his beard tickling her cheeks.

 

So she had set out early on Christmas morning. It was a beautiful clear day and she piloted the Redux south out to sea. Around noon she had eaten a turkey sandwich and watched a flock of pelicans dive for fish. When she was finished her lunch she stopped the boat and dropped anchor. It wouldn’t touch bottom but its weight would hopefully keep the boat from drifting too far. She lowered the dinghy and climbed down. She would give herself a few hours, for what she was not sure, maybe just to prove to herself how foolish this all was.

 

Before she left, she had noted the Redux’s position in the log and the time she left. She took off her watch and left it on the counter. Robert would throttle her if he knew what she was doing but he had gone home to England for the holidays and wouldn’t be back until the end of January. Kate and Jack were arriving at the end of the week. She imagined them laughing with her over her little adventure.

 

She paddled for what felt like a little over an hour when the wind picked up and the sky darkened. She should had turned on the motor then and travelled back the Redux which she could still see behind her, a bobbing dot, but she pressed on promising herself another few minutes.

 

The storm seemed to come from below, twisting her around. The sun disappeared and rain pelted down. She stopped paddling and just hung on as the dinghy whipped around. The storm appeared to only last for an instant but when the sky cleared and ocean became flat again the Redux was no longer in sight. Whether it was behind her now or in front, she had no idea.

 

Trust Jacob.

 

Penny couldn’t tell if she had heard the voice this time or if was she was only remembering the words. At this point it didn’t seem to matter. She picked a spot on the horizon and paddled toward it. Maybe this is what she wanted all along, a point of no return.

 

The weather fluctuated from calm to chaotic; the current seemed to have no particular rhythm. If it was still, she rested, if it grew rough, she paddled. She ignored the motor, it didn’t seem right to use it. Several times she thought she saw something in the distance, a vessel or land but it turned out to be nothing.

 

She truly could not estimate how long she was out there, how much time had passed, hours or days. She could have been awake or dreaming when she saw pelicans again, a sign she was near coastal waters. She paddled, following the birds’ path and soon she could make out an edge of land

 

Her heart leaped when she saw someone, a silhouette against a rocky coastline. Unlike her dream it was dusk and she couldn’t see clearly. As she paddled toward the figure, the person waded into the water to meet her. The dinghy’s hull scrapped against rocks and she dug the paddle in between them. The man came closer but she didn’t have to wait to see his face to know it wasn’t Desmond.

 

There was no time for disappointment to sink in because the stranger held out his hand and said her name. “Penelope?”

 

She nodded and he helped her out of the boat. Her legs were stiff from kneeling and they buckled when she stood. She stumbled and fell onto her hands and knees into the shallow water. The man half pulled her, half carried her to beach.

 

He gave her some water from a bottle. Her teeth were chattering so much, she could hardly swallow.  

 

When she caught her breath, she asked, “Are you Jacob?”

 

“No,” he looked at her thoughtfully, “I’m John.”

 

x x x

 

More author’s notes: Thanks to all who followed this far. It’s been a wild ride for me to write this. It started because I wondered if the flash forward was meant to imply that only Kate and Jack had got off the island. If so, how and when, and what were the chain of events that what would have led to Kate’s aloofness and Jack’s desperation (and awful beard!)? This is half of that answer. There is probably more to come but I think these six parts work on their own.

 

It was also fun to research details for this story. Although most barely made it into the text I now feel confident of my knowledge of South Pacific geography, San Diego hospitals and state parks, spelling bee winning words and boat mechanics. If you’re interest, the Global Consciousness Project is real, as is the polish astronomer who I found by Googling the date 1623 and hoped something interesting would turn up. Also, special thanks to Lostpedia. Having only watched most episodes once when they aired I depended a lot on the site’s episode summaries, character profiles and timelines. That is also where I stole the connection between the numbers and the Yankee players.