Title: Until It Burns Me Numb
Rating: PG
Summary: Jack may spend every minute of every day thinking about what happened, but Kate spends every minute of every day trying to forget.
Disclaimer: I do not own Lost. At all. I wish but alas...
Author's Note: Used for philosophy_20, prompt #17: lack of god. The title is from, and the fic is inspired by, the Vienna Teng song "Nothing Without You". Set post 'Through the Looking Glass'.



Just looking at Jack hurts. Down to her bones. Aches. Burns. Maybe it’s because she remembers the man he used to be, maybe it’s because that man is rapidly fading away before her eyes. She’d watched that beard growing on his face since, well, since the day they’d come back from the island. Jack had been shell-shocked, stared at everything like he was in wide-eyed shock of even his own existence.

When shock gave way to depression, to obsession, she didn’t know. To be perfectly honest, she was gone by then. Because seeing Jack had hurt then too. Too much. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

She doesn’t know why she goes to him when he calls. She doesn’t know why she’d even picked up the phone. All she knows is that she’d heard something familiar in Jack’s voice, something that made her feel the void in her life, the space Jack had once filled, so acutely that she had agreed to see him before she knew what she was doing.

Leaving Jack had been one of the hardest things she had ever done. Coming back, she finds, is just as hard. Because Jack is the same man he was when she’d left him; dark, haunted, broken. And she can’t bear to see Jack that way. She keeps her distance, purposely, but he reels her in. With his words, with his eyes, until they burn her too.

He says they need to go back. There’s nothing in the world she wants less than to hear those words, than to think about the island. There’s nothing she can do about the past but ignore it and keep her gaze faced forward. There’s nothing Jack can do but look back and torment himself with everything he did wrong.

Kate walks away from Jack again, not because she wants to, but because she needs to. Kate pulls her car away from where he stands without looking back because she needs to be far away from the man Jack has become, from the haunting memories that he brings with him.

Jack may spend every minute of every day thinking about what happened, but Kate spends every minute of every day trying to forget.