A/N: Hey guys. Sorry for not updating, but blah blah blah jobs. My new goal is to update once a week, so hopefully I can stick to that. I also tried to keep this as canonical as possible with Jack's car and his alcohol. But I must say it gets a little confusing with the pronouns. As a common rule whenever 'he' is used and it's Jack POV chapter it 95% of the time refers to Jack. Just thought I might shed a bit of light on that.
Oh also, I skipped the courtroom stuff because my brain has 0% knowledge of how that works.
Thanks to everyone who read/reviewed/alerted/favorited.

Left Behind

Chapter 32

What Juliet Did

The pads of his fingers, slick with sweat, slip from his keys as he turns the ignition off in his Bronco. The radio crackles out and the slight shaking of the vehicle subsides just as another minute ticks away on the clock. Taking a deep inhalation of the air conditioned atmosphere which is quickly dissipating, he rubs his sweaty palms against his black slacks as he waits for her to walk into the dim underground garage.

His throat is dry because he's nervous as hell. He's been trying all day to bring himself to count to five, but by the time he gets to three, he's sidetracked by thinking about her, about the fact that their lives can finally start again, even if it is for a small amount of time.

The last thing she told him before he boarded a flight for L.A. with Lapidus, Sawyer, Hurley and Aaron, was how this, her being imprisoned, shouldn't stunt his life. He knows that she wants him to live as normally as possible, but he's never been a fan of normal. He knows that she wants him to continue to do the things he loves, which is part of the reason he's requested reinstatement as a doctor. But she doesn't understand that she and this baby are the biggest part of his life now, and he can't be in motion again until they're all together.

He refuses to buy a house, not without discussing it with Kate first. They need to agree on things. He made that mistake with Sarah, surprising her by buying a house that he thought she'd love. It turns out that he didn't know her too well. Now he needs to do everything with Kate, survey the neighborhoods for the best schools, argue over paint colors and couch patterns; even have the awkward talk about bedrooms because they're really deciding how many children they'll have.

His thoughts dissolve at the idea of having more children. Although it excites him, he thinks they need to deal with the present. The baby, he prays is a girl. Not for the old reasons, how he might fail a son because his father failed him, but because a girl would look more like Kate, act more like Kate and he wouldn't have to question her biology when staring at her little face every day.

When he's not obsessing about his future with Kate, he tries to understand the procedure Juliet did. Could she really make Kate pregnant by just using blood? If anyone could do it, it was Juliet. She had the incite and the intelligence, but her personal matters were cooped up so tightly, that he wished he'd gotten to know her better. Wish he'd talked to her about their profession.

At night sometimes he has dreams that replay her death so clearly that he wakes up in a hot sweat that feels like her blood covering his body. She was forced to do what she did, and she was trying to help them. She could've used Sawyer as a donator, but instead she picked him. Maybe she saw him interact with Kate, saw the way he would devote himself to her, saw the way that she relaxed when he was around her and the way his forgiveness towards her was almost immediate.

Maybe it was in the file. That he'd wanted children so badly with Sarah, but she didn't want to give up her freedom or body yet. Time passed and he just stopped asking if she was ready. More time passed and a false pregnancy test chased her away. He loved Sarah, but he was more devoted to his job. Maybe Juliet did this to make him realize that there were more important things than his job.

Now, out of pure guilt, he remembers her dying after a barrage of bullets hailed through her body from a firing brigade of Others. How she dropped flaccid to the ground and her blood made the dirt around her body muddy. How she grinned at him with mirth thirty seconds before being massacred. How she knew that Kate was pregnant and that he, supposedly was the father. How that day before they left to go into the jungle, she spewed all this information about island pregnancies to him. About what to do and what happens at what month. She went into specific details about procedures he had no concept of understanding at the time. How she told him all this because she knew she was going to die.

Lucidity returns as his remorse is momentarily forgotten. Through two large sets of glass double doors she walks into the garage, her head hangs down creating a wall of ringlets that hide her face in shame. She stops at a chipped yellow line painted in the asphalt. The only thing she has is a backpack pasted with sand that he hasn't seen since the island.

"Kate," he slams his door and jogs over to meet her, the warmth swelling in his heart because he finally feels that his life can start again.

She turns towards him with a weak smile that he's seen only once before, when he returned to her after leaving the beach. Her eyes are lifeless from her fatigue, seemingly skimming over everything without comprehending a thing. In an instant he knows something is wrong. He wants to help her, never wants to stop, but the space between them feels stressed, like the air is frozen, "I can't go with you Jack."

The words are blunt, but they cut like the sharpest knife. He stops approaching her, shoes no longer clicking on the ground and it feels like his tongue is swollen, "What?"

"I can't go home with you," her eyes grow glassy like this is hurting her more than him. She bows her head, unable to look at him anymore, "I need to be alone for a little while."

"You were just alone for three weeks," He can't help the bitter taste of the words as they spew out of his mouth.

His question doesn't extract the same response from her, instead she keeps her submissive tone, "I need to be alone where I'm free."

"Why," he steps forward and grabs her arm, fingers pressing over the cool, smooth skin.

"After all this Jack," when she glances up at him, her eyelashes fan and the first two tears escape from the corners of her eyes, "don't I deserve to be alone just for a little while?"

Relaxing his hand, he tries to gain control of his voice as feelings of sorrow and resentment replace the excitement he felt only moments ago. She's going to leave him again. Her hand slips into his, and when he looks into her eyes again they're pleading with him. He sighs and rubs a thumb over her knuckles, "Yeah, you do."

"It's not your fault Jack," of course she can sense his equal recriminations, "I know why you didn't come visit me."

"Your lawyer said that would go easier on you if they didn't think you were involved," He should've told that lawyer that he didn't care what she thought. That this was the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with, that she's carrying a baby he loves, that what the judge and the jury and the press thought didn't matter. "I just wanted you to get out of jail."

"And look how well that worked."

"You're out of jail."

"But I have to go back."

"Only to court, and that's after you have the baby Kate," he wishes she could see how important it is that they get to spend this time together.

Though he speaks with mild indignation, her reply is a small but sincere smile, "You were there?"

"Yeah," he shares the smile and the air grows in temperature, "you looked beautiful."

She still does because she's wearing the same thing, a simple white maternity dress that bunches around her stomach in a loose bow and falls to just above her knees. When he first saw her in the courtroom from his vantage point in the back left corner, he couldn't believe how she looked. In three weeks her stomach has exploded outward in size. The last time he saw her, it was awkward and slanted where the baby laid, now it's rounded outwards like she's stuck a beach ball underneath her shirt.

He remembers beaming and nodding at the stranger beside him in the audience as she waddled towards the stand for questioning, how he was proud of her for doing this the right way, how he was proud of himself because she loved him. He wore a more secretive smile when Kate got nervous, with her pregnancy she grew a terrible tell of placing her arms on her stomach when she became nervous, like she was defending the baby. He thinks he still feels proud, that it's just diluted a little bit by his confusion.

Reaching into his pocket he retrieves his wallet, "take this," he pulls out a credit card and forces it into her hand.

"Jack—"

"Stay in a nice hotel," he closes her hand around the card and lets his fingers linger for a moment, "Just, don't go too far away, okay?"

She smiles at him and nods, "Okay."

"Take this too," he hands her his cellphone, "It's got my home number programmed in. Maybe you could call me tomorrow or the next day just so I know that you're okay."

Her lower lip trembles, maybe from his actions, or maybe from her own but she nods and breathes a noiseless, "yes." Then she flings her arms around his neck and her stomach almost knocks the air out of him.

He laughs into her tamed hair, reveling in how her scent is still recognizable and how hard it is to wrap his arms around her once frail body. He remembers how she looked on the beach when he returned, how disheveled and lost she was before they found each other. Then he realizes that she wants to leave again.

The door at his new apartment sticks, the rubber stopper lining the bottoms shrieks across the dark oak floors until it crawls under the ledge and stops the door. He forgets this as he runs right into the corner of the heavy painted wood door.

Recoiling a foot or so, he runs a hand over the stinging indent on his forehead and grunts when he finds traces of blood in the grooves of his fingertips. Using the rage that's been burning in him all day from misunderstandings, his hands assault the door until a deep crack resonates through the empty hallway. The door surrenders, opening easier but hanging looseon the hinges and there's five points of red residue where his hand can into contact with the white paint.

He slams the door behind him, not caring if the elderly couple next door or the single mom across the hall call the Super. He feels trapped, like he did on the island, like Kate's condition is his fault and there's not a damn thing he can do to make it right. She doesn't even know half of the problem, she doesn't know that since they've been back, Sawyer's obsessing over a daughter that he's never met and is prepared to do anything he needs to in order to assuage the guilt he's feeling. This includes the undying need to know if he's the biological father of Kate's unborn child because he doesn't want to mess up the sacred relationship between father and child again.

What Sawyer doesn't realize is that he and Kate finally have a sound relationship, that whether Sawyer is the father or not, this baby brought them together and he is ready to raise the child as his own even if he isn't the father. Sawyer wanting to fill this requirement is already causing riffs between himself and Kate. The conman said he didn't tell her about the renewed doubt of the baby's paternity, but he is a conman after all.

He throws his keys at the wall so hard that they chip off the paint. Beads of sweat pop up on the back of his neck as he slackens his tie and drops his suit jacket on the back of his kitchen chair. His want for everything to be uncomplicated is making his stomach churn and clench like a fist. He just wants to relax, to not feel the incessant panic that he did on the island, but the feeling is constant.

He moves into the kitchen, it's small in size, but all the appliances are up to date, he even bought a new coffee machine in case he starts work before the baby was born, but now it seems so fruitless.

Without hesitation, he moves to the last cabinet and divides the dishes to reveal what he's been craving since Kate left him in that garage without a second glance. The clear, unopened bottle of vodka stands tall in the dusty crook of the cupboard. The bottle is cooler than he expected when he grabs the neck and heavier when he has its full weight in his hands.

Throughout the last three weeks, he can't count how many times he's wanted to crack open the bottle and just drink until everything went away, but the thought of Kate and how it would be to have her with him indefinitely without any strings and just know that they were finally free. Now that doesn't seem like a good enough reason.

Out of habit, he reaches into his slack pockets to search for his keys to open the bottle, but instead of the familiar jingle comes a muffled crumple. He pulls out a folded piece of paper and already knows what it is; he's only been showing it to everyone who passed him on the street for the last three weeks.

Setting the bottle down on the counter, he flattens out the paper and smiles at the faces he's memorized. He remembers when the doctor first handed him the picture of the ultrasound, like he could foresee what they were going to have to go through or how hard it would be. The doctor caught him just before he left the building and stated, "I believe this belongs to you," while handing him the perfect profile of the baby.

He stares at the baby's nose, at its perfect head and its perfect balled hands. The way that it's ensconced in a semi circle with its knees bent and its feet in the air. He tries to count the fingers and toes, but the white outline of the digits seem to blend together. He wishes he knew the gender, but the doctor was right, the baby was clever enough to be in a position where it is impossible to tell. He smiles, leaning against the counter and forgetting the vodka because it's definitely Kate's baby.