(no subject)

[slybrunette]

Title: Holograph
Fandom: Lost
Pairing: Kate Austen/Sun Kwon
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1,718
Prompt: #95 - Lies for slash_100
Progress: 25/100
Summary: AU. Sometimes the line between what's real and what isn't becomes blurred.

 

Laughter shakes her chest, melding with the giggles coming from the passenger’s side. Kate grips the steering wheel until her knuckles turn white, not wanting to lose hold and go out of control. The pickup’s headlights turn the crops pale, as if a Godly-glow shined down on them seconds before being plowed under and disappearing beneath the rusted front fender. Sun glances back and affirms that they leave nothing but matted down corn stalks in their wake.

 

“Jones is gonna be so pissed!” Kate snorts, imagining the look on the ornery middle-aged man’s face when he sees what happened to his field.

 

“Yeah,” Sun tries to mask the worry with laughter, “I just hope he doesn’t know it was us.”

 

“Don’t worry,” Kate turns to Sun briefly as they break onto the main road, giving Sun a reassuring glance, “There’s no way he’s gonna-“ she gasps as she returns her eyes to the road and slams on the breaks, hair falling into her face as her body jolts forward.

 

A woman is standing smack dab in the middle of the road. She stares blankly at them, the untied bathrobe hanging off her shoulders and her hair wild, before eerily slowly turning toward the field and disappearing beyond the thick crops. The only evidence that it wasn’t all a drunken illusion being the gentle sway of the stalks where she had entered.

 

“Weird.” Sun whispers in a breath. Kate sits for a moment, simply staring at the spot where their headlights had previously fallen on the woman, but now only capture gravel.

 

“Yeah.” She responds finally. “We should probably head back. It’ll be dawn soon.” Kate shakes her head as if shaking off cobwebs and drives in the direction of their houses.

 

…

 

Hands shove her roughly from behind, toward a small back room. Kate lurches forward as they give her a final push, sending her almost flying into the desk. She spins around and braces herself against the edge as the door slams shut. The figure pulls off the ski mask, her black hair falling onto her shoulders.

 

“Nice handling the man with the gun. I thought it was all over” By Sun’s smile she can tell she had never been very worried.

 

Kate laughs, the small indentations of dimples forming on her cheeks.

 

“No you didn’t. You knew I’d take care of it.”

 

Sun grins back before stepping forward and cupping Kate’s face in her hands. Their kiss is rough; teeth scraping at lips, lots of tongue, deep but somehow shallow at the same time, anything but coy. Kate breaks away before it’s necessary.

 

“What’s wrong?”

 

Sun’s voice comes like from the end of a tunnel, strangely far away even though Kate is still in her arms.

 

“Something isn’t right.” The voice is from somewhere else, although she can feel her vocal chords hum in her throat.

 

“Kate? Kate!”

 

The words start low and soft, but eventually they build up and shake Kate from the strange state she seems to have fallen into. Kate nods her head.

 

“Yeah I’m fine, let’s do this. Remember-“

 

“Don’t hold back, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.”

 

Stars burst across her eyelids as Sun’s fist connects with Kate’s cheek. She hadn’t really appreciated Sun’s strength until now.

 

…

 

The water parts around Kate’s hands as she dives into the water. She goes under and up, breaking the surface and gulping down air. Another bobs up and gasps beside her, sloshing around in the water. Kate glances over at Sun and smiles mischievously before ducking under again. She’s only a few feet below the surface when her toes stroke skin and she knows Sun is following her.

 

Kate twists around, hair floating like a mermaid’s around and above her, and catches Sun’s eye. They hang suspended for a few moments, just watching each other. Bubbles blossom from Sun’s nose as she breathes out oxygen. Then it happens.

 

It’s like someone is slowly turning down the volume on the world; the water rushing past her ears, Sun’s water-logged voice as she asks what’s wrong, it all goes silent and the world starts to slow down. That’s when she hears someone calling out her name. It’s a small mumble but Kate could have sworn she heard it. She glances around, toward the murky bottom, continuous aqua that surrounds her, then the wavy light from above. It reminds her that she needs to breathe.

 

Kate can feel the air surrounding her and suddenly she’s cold, but she pants from being deprived of air despite the chills.

 

“Kate? Are you okay?”

 

She doesn’t look to the voice, just wildly around at the waterfall, the cliffs, the jungle beyond the shore and she thinks she catches a glimpse of a woman in a bathrobe before she hears it again.

 

“Katherine!” Sun’s lips move but it’s not her voice. It’s low and deep, like a man’s. “Katherine wake up! Snap out of it!” Kate squints in confusion. Something is wrong, this is all wrong. She spins in the water, the sunlight and glare from the gentle ripples almost blinding her, and then all she can see it white. 

 

“Katherine?” Kate jumps at the voice because it’s right beside her now. His eyes are dark blue as he looks at her in concern. She doesn’t know this person.

 

“Who are you?” There is confusion and fear clearly recognizable in her voice, but as she speaks she looks beyond the man’s face and sees a white wall. There aren’t supposed to white walls on an island, are there? “Where am I, what’s going on?”

 

“Katherine just keep calm.”

 

“Don’t call me Katherine!” The anger is sudden but strong, “ My name is Kate, no one calls me Katherine.”

 

“That’s good.” He almost smiles, “You’re more lucid today, a week ago you were calling yourself Maggie.” The name strikes a memory like a match, but just as quickly as it was ignited, it’s smothered again and she can’t remember anymore.

 

“Where am I?”

 

Kate glances around and notices for the first time that she’s not alone. She’s sitting in a large room, light streaming in from bay windows. She doesn’t realize they’re barred, at least at first. A man sits in a chair by the window, fist surfing through the air as if he was stitching something, and a younger man plays with choo-choo trains on the floor. When he glances up he smiles at her crookedly. That’s when she sees the woman standing in the door; the same woman in a bathrobe that she had seen earlier.

 

“You’re in Whiteridge Mental Hospital.”

 

“But I’m not crazy.” She glances back at the man. She guesses by the lab coat that he’s supposed to be a doctor.

 

He knits his eyebrows, “No. No of course not.” His voice softens and she can tell he thinks he’s lying to her. “You have hallucinations, that’s all.”

 

“Hallucinations? What the hell are you talking about?” Kate can feel the frustration build, but then she remembers something. “Where’s Sun?” She was there just a second ago…

 

“Sun?” he actually seems confused and he opens a folder with her name on it, running an index finger through the text. "Sun-Soo Kwon?” Kate nods. “Sun-Soo Kwon. Age thirty-five…” he’s reading from a list judging by the monotone quality of his voice, “… Date of birth June sixth. Date of death September twenty-third. It looks to say that she was killed in an automobile crash about seven years ago. You were riding in the passenger’s seat.” Kate shakes her head. That can’t be. She doesn’t remember any car crash and she would certainly remember if Sun died in one. “You don’t recall this?” Kate continues to shake her head. “It says here that that was when the episodes began. You would go into catatonic states for a few minutes and then you would be fine, but then they began to last longer. You would mix memories from you past with memories of her and it got to the point where you couldn’t separate them anymore. Eventually we had no choice but to put you in here.”

 

“Why are you lying to me?” her voice rises and her cheeks flush pink. After all, what kind of person would say something like that? “How can you say that?”

 

“Because it’s true Katherine. We can give you drugs and counseling but it the end the ability to get better is yours and only yours.”

 

This can’t be happening. Sun was just here, she was right next to her, laughing, breathing. No.

 

“No,” Kate says aloud and the doctor, or whoever, looks surprised.

 

“What do you mean ‘no’?”

 

“I’m not going to believe that she’s dead or that I’m crazy just because you say so. I’m not going to let her go. Ever.”

 

The man rises and steps back, as if he’s finally given up on her. That’s when she hears the voice again, but this time she lets it in, lets the warm feminine tone wash over and around her.

 

“Ka-ate.” It’s soft and beckoning, almost sing-song, not like the one she heard before, with sharp and forceful sputters. “Ka-ate.”

 

She closes her eyes and there’s a soft breeze blowing through her hair.

 

When her eyelids flutter open she sees nothing but sky. Blue abyss and fluffy white. She wiggles her fingers and can feel crunchy grass between them and under her body. Another shoulder rests against her’s, warm and close.

 

“Where did you go Katie?”

 

Kate shifts her eyes but not her head and can just make out the tip of Sun’s nose in the corner of her eye.

 

“Nowhere important,” she waves off nonchalantly. After all, why does reality matter when this— whatever this is— is so much better? Why is the real supposed to be superior?

 

“I didn’t know if you were coming back. You worried me for a while.” Sun’s words are unsure but her relaxed tone says that she never doubted Kate.

 

“You don’t have to worry.” Kate threads her fingers through Sun’s and brings their interlocked hands to her lips. “I won’t ever leave you again.”

 

So the two lie there, grass beneath them, each other beside them and the sky above them, simply watching clouds. And somehow what’s true or what’s real isn’t what matters anymore.