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The crowd scatters—no one wants to be there, really. What's done is done.
He recalls her expression, like a cornered animal. Sawyer thought he’d watch her gaze turn bitter, hostile against him. Somehow, it would have made this all easier.
Instead, she drops down to her knees, gathers things that were never hers, scattered in the sand. The small toy plane catches his eye, she reaches for it first. Her eyes look distant, her mind somewhere else.
She doesn’t even look at him. It feels like broken glass trapped under his skin.
***
He finds her by the fire.
He circles the light, hides away from her gaze, silently watches her standing there. His feet halt to a stop before his mind can catch up; there comes the urge to crawl back into his tent, he’s cowed—hates feeling like this, hates that she makes him feel like this, in all her indifference.
Sawyer comes to her anyway, because he feels the time ticking by, slipping away faster. A part of him is restless, restless to leave tomorrow, restless that he might change his mind. Fuck it , he takes the chance.
“Freckles,” because that’s familiar and easy on his tongue, and it's what he resorts to when he doesn’t know what else to say.
She acknowledges his presence with the slightest flick of her eyes.
When she holds his gaze, Sawyer tries searching for something sharp in her eyes, something he can cut himself with—to no success. She looks pensive at best, tired at worst—mostly numb. Like a caged animal , and how was he, the one (almost) escaped from the cage, supposed to face her.
Still. Seeing her like this, face lit by the fire, rekindles the memory of that night in the woods; just them, no masks.
“You never asked me,” the indifference in her eyes gives way to something deep, something true and raw and evasive—mask's off, again. “What I did.”
It's a question, a prod, a challenge. He wonders if she secretly urges him to take the hook, to just rip the bandaid off and ask her. Sawyer also knows it's the very first thing Jack asked her after finally breaching that damned suitcase.
Instead, he plays a blank card. Delays the game.
“You told me,” he quips, cunning smile and all, “unless you’re in for shoplifting.”
Kate scoffs, and the faintest ghost of a laugh on her lips is enough to lift the tightness off his chest.
When she is silent once again, he adds. A challenge of his own, a testing of waters—of where exactly they stand now.
“I told you something too,” he shoots “You also never asked.”
She knows what he means, because of course she does. And just like that, they are both back in the woods, back in that night—Sawyer can tell from the way her eyes glimmer familiarly, and knows his must be the same.
“I thought it didn’t matter,” she shrugs, only half a lie “Not here, anyways.”
A part of him expected her to ask him—wanted her to ask him. Wanted her to care enough to do so. Wanted to tell her everything all over again, just so she could stare him down like he was a run-over dog and tell him how much she pitied him.
Kate must notice the way the upward tilt of his lips shifts down, because she adds.
“You showed me the letter. If you wanted me to know something, you’d have told me.”
But it was never about being straight to the point, not when it came to them. It was about playing the game—a game they invented without even realizing, a game whose rules were made along the way. And it seemed they had reached their final round; but alas, they had far too many cards to lay down and much too little time.
The ‘I thought we’d have more time' part goes unsaid.
Sawyer must know that too, because he lays down his hand just like that.
“I killed someone I shouldn’t have.”
Kate repays him in the same coin, shows him her hand; it was how their fickle trust worked.
“I killed my father.” She says it easier than he did, maybe because she’d lived with it way longer than he did. “I waited for years before doing it, somehow I always knew I would.”
Her hand was, afterall, stronger than his.
“Did you regret it,” or maybe not. Sawyer knew how to work his way around a weak hand, knew how to play the strings she didn’t even know she had—and truth be told, he was pretty good at it.
The question rang new in her ears, first time someone asked her that. Tom never did, neither did the marshal, nor Diane—they just assumed she did regret it, when she got caught.
Her eyes sting when she answers, the old knot in her throat finally releasing.
“No.”
It sends a shiver down his spine, makes his blood turn cold for a moment—but still, that ‘no’ means something to him. Sawyer takes it, stores it away somewhere private and safe; for another time , he tells himself.
For a brief moment, he wonders how different his life would have been—if he had caught Sawyer at 19 instead of catching the man's name for himself. How differently he would have chipped his time away, freed from the weight of vengeance, but set to run till the end of his days.
The closest he'll come to understanding it is understanding her , as tricky as it seems, Sawyer thinks he might be getting the hang of it.
“How are you gonna get away,” hell, how am I supposed to find you again .
“Maybe the rescue plane will crash,” she says flatly.
He laughs. Then, fishes for something else to say, something—anything, but her eyes are back on the fire, gazing at something beyond him—beyond them both.
He seizes the moment to commit her face to memory—every single freckle; just like this, he likes her by the fire. He will always remember how she looked that night in the woods.
She spares him the soft edge of a smile, that he thinks he does not deserve, after what he'd done that afternoon. "I'll figure something."
"Sure you will". Then, “See you around, Freckles,” and she knows he doesn’t mean the island. It's a tease, a jab at fate itself, who knows.
Cards are laid, game is over. That's it. It downs on her, more suddenly than gradually, how fast it all unfolded, how fast it's all coming to an end. The realization prickles like a thorn under her nail.
Sawyer is smiling, a sheepish sad smile—now that she thinks about it, all his smiles had an edge of hurt to them. Kate can't help but think that he looks a little awkard, a little fidgety. He's standing there, one last look around, it'll all amount to nothing more than a memory for the road, something he will remember hazily years down the line.
A vague notion takes form in the back of her mind. Suddenly, it’s as if she’s watching herself leave; leave her hometown, leave every other town that came after. Watching it all unfold from a third eye's view.
Kate was never good at goodbyes; she always runs before they come, runs fast and far enough that they won't reach her. But now, she's the one staying—he’s the one leaving—, and it’s a foreign feeling, one that makes her fingertips itch, a different one than that of running. It's heavy, something invisible weighs her down, pins her still—so different from feeling like the ground is shaky beneath her feet when she leaves everything and anything familiar behind.
Kate wonders if this is how Kevin, Tom, her true father, her mother, all felt. And then she realizes something; something that had always been there but remained uncharted all along, now lit by a stray spark. It lifts a small portion of the ever present weight in her chest.
She regards the man in front of her, really looks at him. He flips a patch of sand with his shoe, standing around like a dog waiting—hoping for something to be thrown its way. Or holding onto something, only for a brief moment, before he knows he'll have to let it go.
Her fingers itch with the urge to reach out. Instead, she tells him what she’d wished to hear all those years ago.
“Be safe, Sawyer.” … "Good luck".