Current mood:	hot
Current music:	"Better Man" Pearl Jam
Entry tags:	aaron, hurley, jack, kate, lost, sayid, sun

[lost] bless her child
Title: Bless Her Child
Author: trysts
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: lostfichallenge #72: oceanic six
Character/Pairing: the oceanic six
Spoilers/Warnings: post-rescue, up to 4x12 pt. 1
Author's Notes: I'm going crazy over how Kate =/= Aaron. Don't give her babies, Jack and Sawyer! What about that whole "raised by another" thing? Isn't that important?



Aaron cries from the moment the plane takes off. He cries in Kate’s arms, he cries in Sun’s. He cries in Hurley’s. His face is scrunched up and unhappy, and his tiny baby fingers curl into fists as he screams and screams and screams.

Kate tries to hush him, rocking him back and forth, sometimes with the swaying of their plane, sometimes against it. Sun tries blankly in front of her, unaware or uncaring of Aaron’s wails, her hands in her lap, her face pale and unreadable.

“Shh,” Kate says. “Shh. Aaron.”

No one says anything to her, not as she struggles, pressing Aaron against her chest, stroking his smooth head, trying to copy all the movements she’s seen Claire do, but never paid much attention to. But she wishes she had. Oh she wishes.

She’s not sure how long she tries to stifle Aaron’s shrieks. The woman from Oceanic has to leave them to escape Aaron’s damning cries. His fingers clench at Kate’s shirt, and he tries to bite at her fingers, and he kicks and screams and kicks.

Then she says, “I can’t—I can’t make him stop crying.”

Tears are rolling down her cheeks, and it’s the first time she’s cried since they’ve gotten off the island. She didn’t cry, not when she clenched Jack’s bleeding body to her, not when she kissed Sawyer goodbye, not when he disappeared into the green of the island jungle.

But she’s crying now, small pearl-shaped teardrops that roll down her cheeks as thick, wet tears roll down Aaron’s cubby face. As he refuses to be comforted by the soothing circles Kate draws along his chest, and along his head.

Heaving sobs escape Kate’s chest as she looks down into Aaron’s reddening face, as her ears bleed with his howls.

Jack looks up and shifts, almost as if to draw the baby into his arms, but then he stops and looks back down and stares at his hands, at the crisscrossing lines of his palms. He closes his eyes, once—a second time. He’s drowning out all the noises except the sound of the air rushing against the side of the plane that is taking him home.

Aaron screams. At him. At Kate. At all of them.

Hurley’s carried Aaron the most other than Kate, but he doesn’t make the offer this time. He just stares at Aaron, watching as he struggles and squirms in Kate’s grasp, and he remembers—remembers that they’re dead.

Kate presses Aaron’s head against her neck, patting his back, and Aaron sinks his toothless mouth into her skin, trying to bite and his tiny fingers rack down her face, and he’d draw blood if he could.

Finally, Sayid shifts and holds out his arms. He says nothing as Kate looks at him, and says nothing as she passes him the baby.

Sayid looks down at Aaron and Aaron looks up at him and opens his mouth and screams again. Kate winces, like needles are being slowly pressed into her skin, and she presses her arms against her chest like she’s still holding a baby.

Then Kate looks away, too, and for a long time there is only the sound of Aaron’s cries and the sound of the plane swaying in the wind.

At first, Kate doesn’t think she’s hearing anything real. Thinks she’s hearing the last remnants of the island, of her guilt and her regrets, but then she sees Sun turn her head, sees Hurley blink into focus.

She hears it too, then.

“—ses blancs moutons avec les anges si purs la mer bergère d'azur infinie.”

There is nothing tonal about Sayid’s voice, and he is perhaps that worst singer Kate has ever heard, but there’s something eerily perfect about it, his voice rising with each rush of wind against the window behind her head.

His dark finger traces a line down Aaron’s cheek, and Kate wonders what Sayid sees in Aaron’s face. Who he sees, because there is such great sadness in those eyes of his, and it breaks her heart more than anything else ever has.

Sun’s watching him, too, her eyes widening, her fingers closing protectively over her stomach. She sucks in a hard breath, her lips moving with Sayid’s voice though she does not know the words, her hands shaking.

Hurley lowers his head, presses his lips together, trying not to cry. He isn’t mouthing the words like a prayer, but his fingers are clasped together, his chest is moving with small sobs and he is rocking back and forth like he’s soothing a child, too.

Kate turns her head. Turns and sees—

Jack is watching too. He looks at Sayid, holding the baby, like he’s trying to absorb this moment, trying to convince himself that this is what the picture is supposed to look like. Maybe that Aaron’s really Kate’s son.

“Voyez ces oiseaux blancs et ces maisons rouillées.”

But he’s not, and they both know it.

It’s like everything fades away, the plane that’s taking them home and the pilots in front and the island behind them and the gunshots still powdering the air, and it’s only them. The six of them, and Sayid’s off key voice singing a baby down to sleep.

Sayid’s eyes are wet, but he’s not crying. He’s not looking at Aaron anymore. It hurts too much.

Kate thinks then that she hopes that they never land so they can go on like this. Sun, looking at them with no hatred, Jack believing in his own goodness again, Hurley praying over and over in small mumbles, Sayid holding them all together with his voice, and Kate—

Just her. Just Kate.

“La mer les a bercés le long des golfes clairs et d'une chanson d'amour la mer a bercé mon cœur pour la vie,” Sayid stops, his voice abruptly dying off and it’s like they’ve been shot and someone’s dumped them in a ditch.

Aaron stops crying. He stops and looks at Sayid as if seeing him for the first time.

Everything is silent, and Kate wonders why it makes her want to cry all over again.

“Dude, that was a pretty song,” Hurley says, and actually manages a smile. That breaks Kate’s heart, too. “Where’d you learn that?”

“Shannon taught me,” Sayid says, and then looks down at Aaron, then at Kate. He hands the baby back to her and Kate thinks she must have imagined it, hearing Sayid say softly, so softly, under his breath, “Sometimes I hear it in my dreams.”

And like that, the moment is broken. They all remember what they don’t want to remember. Shannon didn’t die on the island. The water swallowed her up, and she died cold and alone in the ocean, strapped into her seat. And Sayid never loved her, never knew her.

But he did. He did.

Kate never loved Sawyer, Jack never met Juliet, Claire never had her baby, Charlie didn’t die for all them, and somewhere, someplace a Scottish man is still marooned and alone with his own insanity because no one has ever found him. None of it happened, because it was only the six of them alive on an island where there were no smoke monsters and no hatches and no whispering voices of dead, gone souls.

Except every bit of it is a lie.

Jack drops his eyes again, and Hurley’s face crumbles, and Sun’s body goes stiff with her hate, and Sayid runs his hand through his hair before looking back out the window, into the blue sky. Kate holds Aaron to her like a rock in a storm.

Aaron sleeps against Kate’s chest, silent and peaceful, soothed by the dead.