Hey! I always wondered what type of interaction Jack and Kate had the morning after his appendectomy. So I'm writing another one-shot that explores their thoughts and feelings about their ever present misunderstandings, the growing possibility of rescue, and their future if rescue does indeed come.

WARNING: Jack is less of an idiot in this one. LOL. God bless him. Enjoy!

She tossed and turned on her make-shift bed, staring blankly at her tent's ceiling, trying with all of her might to catch and hold onto sleep for more than twenty minutes at a time. It was dawn, she could tell by the dim light dancing over the early morning clouds. She sat up, her clothes a tad damp from the humidity in the air. She felt a light breeze push the flap of her tent's opening to the side, casting a nice, cool breeze over her skin.

She knew from the moment she retreated to her tent that she wasn't going to be able to sleep. She rose against the residual lumps of dread that still choked her. He was okay, there was nothing to be afraid of anymore. Even though she didn't lose him last night, she would lose him eventually, if rescue ever did come, which was still a possibility that she knew he wouldn't give up on. She moved out of her tent, scorching a path straight to his.

She pulled at the opening of his tent and entered. He lied in bed asleep, shirtless, a light fleece blanket covering everything below his waist. His lower abdomen was bandaged, white surgical gauze wrapped tightly around him. An arm was slung over his face, his forearm covering his eyes; the meticulous bleeding red and bright yellow flames and stars of his tattoo caught her eye instantly, always making him look more dangerous than she knew him to be. She wanted to touch him then, to trace the eccentric design with her fingertips, realizing that he was never going to reveal their origin, teasing her relentlessly every time she asked. Why a straight-laced spinal surgeon of all people would have such abstract artwork outlined anywhere on his body she would never understand, but it showed her just how much she still had to learn about him. It was another piece of this man's story that she desperately wanted to know.

She kneeled in the sand by his side, her gut-wrenching cries so quiet that they sounded more like a whisper in the wind that suddenly blew through the flap of the entrance. Her hands covered her face as she tried to get a hold of her emotions. She sniffled and huffed as she wiped at her eyes, desperate to keep it together.

His arm slid away from his face, his eyelids rising, blinking until he was absolutely sure that he saw what he thought he was seeing. Her dark curls created a curtain over her face, her back slumped over in misery. He couldn't see the tiredness in her eyes, but he could tell that she hadn't slept for most of the night.

"Kate?" Jack asked, fatigue and surprise evident in his tone.

Her eyes met his, the devastation and fear in her features made his breath hitch.

"Hey!" Kate said with a relieved smile, her cheeks stained with tears, her face lighting up at the sound of his voice.

"What are you—?" He asked, trying to sit up.

"Don't try to move." She instructed, her hands resting against his shoulders, urging him to relax. "I just wanted to make sure you were okay."

"By hovering over me like a mother hen?" He asked jokingly, now sitting up on the anchor of his folded arms.

"It wouldn't be the first time." She said with a hint of a smile.

He grinned, his light giggle filling the tent.

"Well, at least you didn't have to drug me this time." He said, watching her eyes tint with bashful mischief.

It was her turn to laugh, the first time she genuinely had since that moment before he told her that she should tag along with Sayid to the barracks, their flirting and playful banter so natural that she forgot all about the circumstances at hand, and most of all, she had forgotten that she had unfinished business with Sawyer, a fact that Jack wouldn't let her forget, even though she already had.

Her fingers swiped over an exposed collarbone. Scorching heat emanated from his damp skin, making her blood singe with sexual awareness, that fiery, combustible chemistry that always existed between the two of them roaring with a vengeance. The man just had surgery, she told herself, in order to reprimand her treacherous thoughts, feeling like scum for admiring his build in his fragile condition. In her defense, it wasn't every day that she saw him like this, his eyes blinking away the last remnants of sleep, his hair disheveled and his broad, shaven chest glistening in the glow of the dawning sun. She swallowed hard.

"What time is it?" He asked after a pause.

"It's early." She said.

He huffed in restlessness, his long fingers squeezing the bridge of his nose, trying to concentrate on something other than the excruciating pain in his lower abdomen. The throbbing in his chest rose from the affected area and radiated into every bone and muscle, causing him to ache everywhere, making him feel like one big pressure point.

"I shouldn't have bothered you. You're tired and obviously in pain. You should lie back down and try to get some more sleep." She said, worried that she was making his recovery more difficult by disturbing his rest.

"As if I can actually sleep if given the chance. I'm fine." He groaned, sitting up a little more, reaching for his shirt and pulling it over his head, but struggling to pull it over the rest of him.

She helped him and once he was fully clothed again, she silently groaned her disappointment, her view of him now completely obstructed.

"Can you hand me that bottle over there?" He asked, pointing at a Dharma-labeled water bottle on the opposite side of the tent.

She grabbed it, opened the top and handed it to him, watching as he sat up carefully. He picked up a prescription bottle from the side of his bed, dropping two pills into his palm and downing them with the water. She wanted to ask what they were for, but he was a doctor afterall, and he knew what he was doing. Although, he did lie to her face, trying to sway her into believing that a swollen appendix was a common stomach bug, which made her even more protective of him than she already. If he wasn't going to look out for himself, she would do it for him.

"I need some fresh air." He said after a few deep breaths. "Wanna help me break out of here?"

"Jack, you really shouldn't be doing this." She said, the familiar sound of her voice advising him to slow down made her smile against the panic rising in her chest, because his stubbornness never heard a word she said anyway.

"What if your stitches tear? What if…?"

"I'm a doctor, Kate." He whispered, his voice so sexy yet steaming with impatience. "An appendectomy is the most common surgical procedure known to medicine. The recovery time is minimal and the survival rate is well above the average of most evasive surgeries."

If he thought he was going to gloss over all of their extenuating circumstances with impressive facts and figures, he had another thing coming.

"But not everyone wants to be awake for their own surgery, let alone be forced to have it performed on a mysterious Island somewhere in the South Pacific with little to no anesthesia and improperly sterilized equipment. Do you expect me to believe that you can recover from something like this overnight and then opt to get up the next morning like it never even happened?" She scolded him, her frustration towards him mounting.

"Kate, Juliet did a great job and I just wanna take a walk down the beach, not run a marathon through the jungle. Now would you please help me up?" He asked, just as irritated as she was, especially with the fact that she felt like he needed to be reminded of what his body just went through.

"What if Juliet catches us?" She asked.

He smiled. "I'll make you a deal. If Juliet catches us, you can blame it all on me, which is actually not too far from the truth."

"Deal, but at the exact moment I sense that it's too much too soon and you don't tell me because you're so damn stubborn, we are turning right around and you're going back to bed. Got it tough guy?" She warned.

"Yes, ma'am." He said with a smile.

She helped him stand and find his balance; his long arm slumped over her shoulders, his lean form straightened to his full height, making her feel so small and fragile by his side. They stepped onto the sand of the beach they called home for far too long. It was a ghost town at the moment, everyone still asleep in their tents. It was like they were the only survivors left to tell the harrowing tale of the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815.

They moved towards the water, stopping a few feet away from the slow tide. He stumbled a bit, but caught his footing when Kate wrapped both arms around his waist in response, ready to go down with him and drag him back to his tent like she promised if he even twitched his brow in agony.

"You okay?" She asked.

"I am now." He said, staring down at her. At some point in time, the number of arms that held onto her went from one to two, and to his surprise and satisfaction, she didn't pull away. If anything, she invited him to tighten the embrace.

She grinned shyly, the moment so private and charged with this cosmic electricity that made her sweat. The pink and purple hues that stretched over the morning sky shown in the eyes that were glued to her face, making the emotion in them sparkle. If anyone were to see them like this, they would think that they were a young happy couple taking a stroll down the beach. If only it were that simple, because nothing between them ever was. What she would give for that image of two carefree people who were together without the weight of past mistakes and weighing on their shoulders to be accurate.

"I think we should take a break for a second." She said.

She was waiting on him to put up a fight, but he relented. She helped him to slowly settle into the sand and then plumped down next to him.

"Do you really believe that we're gonna get off this Island?" She asked.

"Yes." He said.

"What about what Faraday said? That the freighter wasn't meant to rescue us? I mean, we got our hopes up and now it doesn't seem like anything is going according to what we planned." She said.

"I don't care what he said. If there's even a slim chance that we can get off this Island, I'm taking it." He said with the determination and stubbornness that was so natural for him, that made her believe in him even more than she already did.

"I'm sorry that I couldn't stop Bernard from putting you under. You were just in so much pain and…I…" She said mournfully, the image of him catching her eyes, the sound of him begging her not to let him do it punched a hole through her resolve, fleeing from the tent as soon as he fell under the effects of the anesthesia, so scared she shook with the fear.

"It's okay. Juliet made the right call." He said affectionately.

She was tempted to bring up what happened between him and Juliet, this forbidden kiss that Juliet had the feeling was for another purpose than the two people taking part in it. She always hated that Juliet was there for Jack the one time she couldn't be, when she had to leave him behind to fend for himself, because he wouldn't allow her in anymore, how she'd broken his heart so terribly that he even looked at her differently, while moving closer to Juliet, trusting her with decisions and secrets that he once called on her to help him deliberate and keep.

She believed what Juliet had told her, that Jack only kissed her because he couldn't have who he really wanted; she just needed to hear it from the horse's mouth. She wondered how she could have confused this loyal, complicated man so much as to force him into the arms of another woman, just to resolve the loss he thought he would suffer through again, when all she really wanted to do upon seeing him again was hold him close and then closer, and kiss him hard and then harder. She thought she was doing him a favor by letting him go, when in actuality, and by Juliet's estimation, she was only hurting him to the point of permanent destruction, when she really loved him beyond the point of reason. She would rather stick a million knifes through her own heart than to ever put him through that kind of hell again.

"What Juliet said…about the kiss. Was it true?" She asked.

"Yeah, it was. Definitely not my most brilliant move." He confessed with a sigh. "I wanted to deny the undeniable, that my feelings for you would never change."

She stared at him with that look that always made him want to wrap his arms around her, to protect her from whatever storm they saw on the horizon. She looked both ecstatic and miserable about what he just confessed, but he didn't know which emotion reigned supreme. He decided that it was best to let her admit what she wanted to when she was ready. That was always his surefire game-plan when it came to getting anything out of her.

"It's okay. You don't have to say anything." He said with a sad smirk, his head hung, then lifting towards the slight rays of sunlight drifting over his face.

Her eyes drowned in tears at how much her silence devastated him."That's the thing, Jack. You have no idea just how much I want to say something, anything, how much I want to give into this larger than life draw between the two of us, but how can I promise you a future that I'm not even sure I have to give to you?"

"So, that's why you stayed at the barracks. You were running again, or at least thinking about it." He said.

She let out a tortured grunt. She expected this, this ring of disappointment in his tone. She hated it when he sounded that way. He still didn't understand why she did what she did. She had to make him understand.

"If we get off this Island Jack, I'll be behind bars, probably for the rest of my life. How is that fair to you? To either of us? To talk about our feelings, to put them out there when nothing can come of them? It hurts too much." She swiped at the tears that finally fell down her cheeks.

His eyes narrowed. "Three days after we crashed, we sat on this very beach, and I told you that we all deserve a second chance. I didn't say that because it sounded nice. It's the truth."

"Jack, you can't—" She began.

"I can't what? Love you because you're gonna have to face some ugly demons when we're rescued? Feel anything for you whatsoever because you think that you're a horrible person who doesn't deserve it? That's ridiculous Kate, and you know it." His tone laced with exasperation, yet he remained calm, careful not to push.

The man was always so logical, so to-the-heart-of-it-all. Why was she still trying to deny him at this dangerous stage, when she was so in love with him she hung on his every word to find some underlying message of his commitment to her, when she actually felt sick to her stomach when he was in surgery, fidgeting and crying like a petrified wife in the waiting room, desperate for good news, and when no overnight sleepover with Sawyer could distract her from what she was feeling? He deserved so much more than her, which was why she thought that setting up to play house with someone on her level would be easier than being dragged into a jail cell and having Jack hear about all the demeaning crimes she committed, proving him wrong, making him believe that she was a horrible person who didn't deserve his love or compassion.

But with the dawn came the heavy realization that she would always have that flaming, powerful desire to see things through with Jack, to leave the Island with him and never look back. Everything was so uncertain, so up-in-the-air for her and her future, but her feelings for him always kept her securely grounded, always made her stay and face the facts, no matter how difficult it was. The bricks of distance and silence that she tried to use to resurrect that wall again were already crumbling.

"Do you always have to be so reasonable?" She sighed in defeat, biting at her lower lip flirtatiously.

He laughed. "Yes, especially when you're being so unreasonable."

"But do you really understand, even a little bit, about why this is so hard for me?" She asked.

The dilemma she found herself right in the middle of made her head swell and her heart flood. Running or Jack. She had to choose, but she knew that a part of her already had, or else she wouldn't have come back to the beach.

"Yeah, I do, and it's hard for me too. We don't really fit into each other's lives in the real world, and, yes, it would be a challenge to go for what we want once we get off this Island." The truth really did hurt, he realized. "But that doesn't have to mean that we just turn those feelings off, because I know that I can't, and I know that you can't either. It's not in our nature, Kate."

She bowed her head, her curls creating another drape for her to hide behind. He was right. It wasn't something she could ever conceal, everyone on the beach picking up on her captivation with him right off the bat, even Sawyer continually made snippy, jealous comments that pinpointed her emergent emotions towards the Doc. She hid a lot about herself in the past five years, her name, her story, her existence, and then he comes along to drag her out of the dark hole she'd been living in for so long that she didn't know how to live in the light anymore. Even more tragically, she didn't know how to let him go.

His curled finger slid over the skin of her chin, urging her to look up at him. He saw the tears before they even fell, each trickle down her freckled cheeks ripping straight through him. His thumb dabbed at the wetness under each eye, then trailed down her face to wipe away any remnants of how sad she was about all of this, about what she wanted, but still didn't believe she could have.

"Kate. Do you trust me?" He asked, his deep auburn brown eyes open wide, so piercing yet soft and harmless that she felt another flake of love for this man melt into her heart.

"Of course I do." She said with uncontested honesty.

"Then you have to believe that we're getting off this Island, and that whatever you're up against, we can get through it. Together."

She nodded, her lips pulled into a smile full of hope, with an edge of trepidation towards what he was offering her. He couldn't blame her for being scared, her situation nothing that he could ever claim to understand or even have experience dealing with, but he was willing to try, so eager to learn, for her.

"Nothing needs to be decided right this second." He said. "We'll just…wait, and take it one day at a time. Okay?"

He reached for her hand then, his palm rubbing against hers and his long fingers wrapping around the rest of it, so warm and sure. She looked down at their hands tangled together, hers completely drowning in the fullness of his.

"Okay." She said.

They stared into each other's eyes for what felt like years, but mere minutes in reality. Suddenly, he looked even more tired than she felt, his eyes struggling to stay open, but content to get lost in the green ocean of hers for just a little while longer.

She broke the spell, their hands still tied into an irresistible knot. "We should get you back to bed."

Once they were inside his tent, she helped him get comfortable in his bed. His eyes started to drift close, and when they finally did, his body went completely still, lost in slumber. She stared for awhile, actually wondering if she would ever get bored with the view of this beautiful man in the throes of rest. She suddenly looked down at the pill bottle that still lied next to his bed. Her curiosity peaked again; she picked it up and read the label. Sleeping pills. She smirked teasingly. No wonder he got so tired so quickly. He was right afterall, finding solace in the fact that she didn't have to secretly grind them into a dusty powder and swirl them into a cup of fruit juice, forcing the sleep that he so desperately needed onto him.

When she was sure that he was deep enough in sleep to continue to stay that way, she adoringly swiped her hand over the side of his face, her fingers lightly stroking his cheek, her palm tickled by the stubble peppered along his jaw. She leaned over him and laid a supple kiss to his lips, lingering devotedly over the taste of him for longer than she anticipated, but for as long as she needed.

She retreated with a full grin, an impatient groan rumbling from his chest the moment she did. She watched as his mouth drew into a sleepy, dreamy smirk, his breathing finally settled into a blissful calm.

And then she was gone.