Fanfic: Parallels
Title: Parallels
Fandom: Lost
Summary: They could not have been more different. But the losses they suffered made them more alike than anyone could have ever imagined. Margo Shephard and Kate Austen.
She loved him. That was one of the few things that she was sure about in her life. Sure, he was not perfect. He was far, far from it. There wasn't a female nurse, doctor, assistant or administrator whom Christian Shephard did not make a pass at. It did not matter how old or young she was, he had to take a second glance at her. Margo knew that. She was aware of every indiscretion her husband committed. She even knew about the child he had in Sydney. It did not take her long to find out that his trips to Sydney were not of the business nature.But despite all his imperfections, all his shortcomings, she still loved him. And she knew that he loved her. As dysfunctional and as unhealthy as it may sound, she knew that is was her bed he came back to every night, it was her house he called home and it was her shoulder he wept on when they fired him.
She knew he was never coming back to her when he left one early morning without saying goodbye. She knew where he had gone to and that he was never going back. She thought knowing that would make it easier to cope with the truth when it hit her, but nothing can prepare a woman for the dreaded call that her husband is coming back in a wooden box.
She called Jack and made him come over. She yelled at him, berated him, blamed him for his father leaving and guilted him into going after him and bringing him back home. All the things she said to him were a lie. She did not believe a word she told him, but it was the only way to make do task because she could not bear to do it herself.
The morning they were supposed to return, she got dressed and sat by the front door. For hours she just sat still, waiting for her son to return, bringing with him his father, her dead husband. She sat and she sat. Hours turned into days, days into weeks and weeks into months. Eventually, she was mourning a husband and a son. She had no body to bury, to remains to weep over. She only had memories. The memories of a husband she would forever believe needed someone else during his last days, a husband she would forever believe she could not be there for in his darkest hours.
She was left with the memories of a son to whom her last words to were those of disappointment and blame, of anger and disapproval. She was left with the memories of the one true miracle that ever happened to her. She had trouble getting pregnant early in her marriage to Christian Shephard. Deep within her, she knew she might lose him and she could not have that. Their attempts the first few years all failed, and eventually she started to feel him slowly drift away from her. She knew how important it was for him to have a son, just like his father before him had a son and his grandfather before that. There was a Shephard legacy that needed to continue, and if she could not be the mother of the next Shephard male, he would definitely leave her. He would never suggest they go to an expert, but she knew it was only chance for her if she ever wanted the man she loved to not leave her bed. So she did it, in secret, driving once a week for almost two hours, visiting the farthest fertility expert she could find to avoid any raised eyebrows.
It was four years after they became Dr. and Mrs. Christian Shephard when she got pregnant, and nine months later she felt the tears streak down her face when he smiled proudly, holding his newborn son to his chest. He handed him to a nurse and stepped out of the room, proudly giving out cigars and welcoming the pats on the shoulders for his accomplishment.
It was the last time she saw him show any affection towards their son. From the very first years of Jack's life, the two decided that their relationship would be one of struggle. The loved each other, that much she was sure of. But she would never understand their constant need to be adversaries. She pushed Jack to take piano lessons when he was eight, but he fought it. A year later, Christian told him he had to stop, to focus on his studies, but that only made Jack want to take piano lessons, asking his teachers to increase the frequency of his classes.
They fought every day for the rest of their lives. But she heard the tone of Christian's voice when he spoke of his son, the sparkle in his eyes whenever he saw him in the morning or after school. She saw the look of awe and admiration on Jack's face as he watched his father receive honor after another, his constant need for his father's approval and the sobs in his voice when he called from Sydney.
In the months that followed the crash of Oceanic 815, she collapsed in the devastation of losing a husband and a son, of losing her entire family. Her misery, her grief was torn between losing her husband and losing her son. But when he returned to her, her son, her husband's child, she felt overwhelmed. She was given a second chance, something very few people get. It was a chance to repair a fractured relationship, to get to know the man her son had grown to become. She hoped to cherish every moment she had the chance to spend with him, to hold him closer than she ever did and tell him how much she loved him every day. She was not a religious woman, but she prayed every night, thanking whatever heavenly power sent her this miracle again.
The man who came back though was not the same one she sent to Sydney. He was stronger yet more broken, more affectionate yet darker, he was back home, but she had never seen him more lost. When on a stormy evening, three years after his return, she heard a knock at her door, she felt that feeling that mothers claim to have, that sixth sense that told her she'd missed out on a second chance that would never return. The brunette at the door, wet from standing in the rain for too long, spoke slowly, her voice cracked, her face pale and her eyes red and puffy, but Margo Shephard did not hear a single word. A mother could mourn her son for months, could experience the crushing pain of losing her only child, but she could only do it once. The second time was not easier. The second time was harder. The second time was paralyzing. No mother should bury her son. No mother should bury an empty coffin. No mother should bury an empty coffin twice.
…
Kate held him against her chest, feeling his warm, steady breath fall against her cold skin. His small finger held tightly to her shirt, resting just below her aching shoulder but she made no attempt to move it. She pressed her hand to the top of his head, his soft blond hair smooth under her fingertips. Her tears hit the top of her hand and crawled down into his hair. She rocked slowly, more to soothe down her own emotions than anything else. He'd called her "mommy" and ran into her arms. He wrapped his arms around her neck and cried because he had missed her. She held to him tightly, sobbing into his small shoulder, pressing kisses to the side of his head. He clung to her, refusing to leave her and she tried to avoid the sad look of the young blond woman when he asked her "who is that woman, mommy?"
He fell asleep in her arms and she let him. She held him tightly as she watched the early sunrise. She did not fight the tears that came when he stirred in her lap, waking up with a smile on his face. She did not try to hide the sobs that escaped her throat when she said good morning to him, the last time she would do so to him as her son. Three months after leaving the island, he was finally Aaron Littleton. The papers were signed, the issues were cleared, and he had officially become Claire's son again. As it always should have been. For moths he would call her "mommy" before immediately retracting, apologizing with an innocent smile. She secretly loves those moments, the moments when she had a son again. But they only made things harder because five minutes later she would go back to being "aunt Kate", and it would feel like she was losing her son all over again.
She was not related to him, but he was her son. She raised him, loved him, watched him grow, held him when he was sick and lost him like she did the man who was by her side when she was a mother. She lost her son just weeks after losing the man she loved, and she could not breathe just thinking about it.
There was only one thing in Kate Austen's life that ever made sense. It was the one thing that should never have made sense. She was a criminal, a fugitive, who spent most of her adult life lying, cheating and running from the truth, running from anything that threatened her survival. She survived a plane crash, she survived two plane crashes. She time travelled, twice, she participated in the detonation of an atomic bomb. She was escaped jail time when all the evidence proved she committed the crime. She fought a monster made of smoke. She killed a monster made of smoke. But none of that was what shouldn't make sense.
She fell in love. She was loved, unconditionally, for who she was. That was what should not make sense. That was her miracle. It scared her at first, that someone so perfect should care for her. But despite her fear, she found herself falling uncontrollably for this man. And when she thought she might crash, he cushioned her fall. And being so close to him, seeing him for who he truly was, she saw the beauty in his imperfections ran deeper and farther than any perfect model she would have ever imagined. She grew to love his darkness, his shattered soul, his obsessions, his need to be in control and the intensity of when he lost that control. She fell in love with how he loved her, with how he would look at her, fucked up, broken and explosive, and saw someone fragile, someone warm and some he could love, someone he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. She found the chinks in his armor fit perfectly with hers.
She loved him more when his demons came to possess him, when he crashed and burned. She loved that he needed her then more than ever. She loved that she was the only one he could ever need. She loved that she believed him when he says he did it all for her.
She had foolishly hoped that their second time on the island would have been his fresh start, his chance to finally let go of all those ghosts and demons that haunted him. Even as she saw the crimson red seep through the front of his shirt, even when she saw the stab wound, deep and long, she secretly prayed that he could really just sew it up and go back home with her. Even though she saw it in his eyes, she refused to believe it. She knew he did not want to say it, to admit that it was goodbye, but she refused to believe it until she heard it from his lips. He had always been her rock, her constant, her strength, and she needed him to be just that as they stood on the cliff. She needed him to hold her, to ease her fears and tell her everything would be okay. She needed him to be the steady and sure Jack she remembered from that day in the jungle when she'd heard her dead father speak through her feverish friend, that day when he'd refused to let her just walk away from her fears. He'd held her, calmed her down and when she looked up at him, his face sweaty and glistening in the afternoon sun, the jungle around them whispering a secret breeze, she saw what she'd feared to admit for weeks. She kissed him then, and she tasted a promise, a dream and a hope for something big, something bigger than she could have ever imagined.
But that did not happen again. The waves were hitting the edge of the cliff in a deafening alarm of impending darkness. The throbbing pain in her shoulder matched that in his abdomen, and when she reached up meet his lips with hers, she tasted her tears mixing with his. His arm around her waist was as steady and as strong as she remembered it always had been, and he pressed her against his body tighter than he ever had. But it was too short, a brief moment, a stolen moment as they tried to pause the inevitable, to postpone what was unavoidably going to happen. It was the last moment they were allowed to steal from fate.
She thought back to when she was a child, before Sam left and Wayne moved in. She remembered the look on her mother's face every time there was a knock at the door. For a split second, her face would turn ashen white, her breath would choke and her hands would shake. It was always followed with a sigh of relief, and when months later her father would return, she remembered watching from the porch as her mother would run to him and he would pick her up and twirl her around in the front yard, setting her down with a quick kiss.
Kate Austen would never be lucky enough to get that dreaded knock, or the phone call from abroad. She was given the news from the man himself. He kissed her, told her he loved her and walked away to die. She thought that such solid knowledge of what was going to happen would make it easier, would give her time to slowly comprehend it, to come to grasps with it and to accept it. But nothing could prepare her. She looked out the window of the plane, watched as the island became smaller and smaller, watched as it finally disappeared from her life, watched as it disappeared and took with it the one thing that made sense in her life. She watched it disappear and watched as her only chance at happiness, her only chance at love, her only chance at a life disappear with it.
…
They often meet at the cemetery, Margo and Kate. It is never planned, but considering that they both go there regularly, it is not a surprise that they are there at the same time. The two graves are side by side. Two empty graves of a father and his son whose bodies lay somewhere in island in the Pacific.
Margo comes dressed in her finest. Her large black hat hides most of her face, hides the streaks n her cheeks. She stands stoically by Christian's grave. She carries a bouquet, clutches it close to her chest. She doesn't say much, just stands there quietly for the longest time. She eventually places the flowers next to the cold marble headstone, wipes her tears and turns to face her son's grave. She spends a shorter time there, crying unabashedly and places a kiss on the cold marble before she leaves rushedly.
Kate comes dressed in an old pair of jeans and Jack's old Columbia sweatshirt, the one she went to his apartment for. She sits on the ground, facing the headstone and spends hours there. She talks to him, tells him about every moment of her life. She laughs, cries and often yells at him. She quickly apologizes, though, begging him to forgive her, and then she laughs again. She never brings flowers. She sometimes brings pictures, mostly of Aaron and Claire and herself. She brings the newspaper with her, reads the sports section and teases when his favorite teams lose.
When Margo joins her at Jack's grave, she watches the older woman, who cries at the loss of her only son, and it breaks her. She gets up and hugs the woman she'd hoped to one day call her mother in law. Margo, who would under any other circumstance avoid such display of affection, lets her hold her, and she would sometimes wrap her arms around the younger woman, the only woman who would make her son smile the way he did when he was with Kate. They would cry together, sometimes for hours, sometimes until the groundskeeper asks them to leave after the sun had set. Margo would straighten up, fix her hat bid farewell, to her husband and son. Kate would linger a little longer, twisting the ring around her finger until her legs would stop shaking and then she would leave, promising to see him again.