2Notes: This is an AU of the Sideways verse in which no one is dead (purgatory shmurgatory) and the island still exists topside.
Massive amounts of applause and adoration should be heaped upon my beta, woodshavings, for putting up with my wacky grammar and groan-inducing hamburger jokes.
to echoes strung on pure temptation
It is a rule Mother put into place; a rule Jacob never bothered to change.
After all, the job he has to do require absolute focus; the guardian of light cannot afford to become distracted. Jacob's touch would only bring complications -just ask Ricardus- so he retreats into a monk-like existence, adopting a rule that removes desire from his repertoire. (Just like she always intended.)
He doesn't see it as castration.
It is a rule Jacob never bothered to change; Jacob is no longer in charge.
Jack has a son and a sister and a nephew, so Hugo steps up to the plate, Benjamin Linus in tow. It is a dynamic they spent another lifetime perfecting, though neither one of them can remember just how long that was.
Jacob doesn't think much of it when he sees Libby step off the sub, or when he sees Hugo take her hand without a moment's hesitation, but then again the fire containing his ashes had already burnt out by the time Benjamin had started doling out advice to the island's newest protector.
"That's the way Jacob ran things," Benjamin had said, "maybe there's another way, a better way."
This is the better way, apparently.
Hugo isn't doing this alone.
As it turns out, what you don't know can -will- hurt you.
He stumbles upon Kate sometime later in the jungle, and he takes a moment to remember Iowa and lunchboxes and thanks mister before Kate lays into him, all venom and fire, driven by the fact that Jack decided to stay behind for his son (there will always be something he chooses over her), playing happy family with Aunt Claire and baby Aaron, and once again Kate's the piece that doesn't fit. (He doesn't need to tell her that she never will. She already knows this.)
As each accusation falls out of her mouth she steps closer (proximity is so much better to condemn him for his role in her misery, he who held himself aloft of the people he brought here for so very many years), until he feels the heat of her body and the warmth of her breath against his skin.
His mind and his body are no longer his own as he takes her in, her anger such a faraway thing as he maps the length of her neck and the shape of her breasts and wonders what it would be like to touch, just this once. If he could have what had been denied him for so long, even before he had the weight of the world on his shoulders.
The suddenness of the ache catches him off guard. Jacob realizes that his breathing has turned heavy at the same time he notices that Kate's no longer yelling at him, but has in fact gone completely quiet, staring at him with an unreadable expression on her face. (Funny, he's usually the unreadable one around here).
It is yet another few seconds before he registers just how hard he is.
He disappears (escapes) into the jungle, leaving Kate standing all alone once more. He doesn't feel guilty about this; after all, she should be used to it by now.
Be good, Katie.
He doesn't let himself breathe again until he's in the safety of his home (the scene of his death), now gazing into the fire. (Somehow it doesn't burn as hot as she did.)
It takes every ounce of willpower he possesses to rid himself of his erection; the memory of her is not so easily exorcised.
He doesn't fit either.
He wakes in the night, aching, reaching for the ghost of a woman who touches him only in his dreams.
His efforts have all been in vain. She will not leave him be.
He reaches down and for the first time in almost two millennia he touches himself. It doesn't take long (Mother isn't here to catch him, to berate him for being weak like the bad people are); the memory of his brief encounter with Kate still lingers, fresh in his mind, and before he can resurrect enough old guilt to stop himself, he's crying out into the night, open-mouthed and body trembling as he comes.
Everything old is new again.