A/N: Woodshavings is my beta. She is to be worshipped accordingly.

When Kate is ten years old, she meets her first knight in shining armor.

He saves her with a smile and a bop on the nose, leaving her with a brand new lunchbox and the words "Be good, Katie."

In a few years, just as Kate begins to discover her body, she thinks of him. Tom hasn't hit his growth spurt yet and decent men are few and far between in the annals of Kate's life. Late at night –while her mother pulls the late shift at the diner and a drunken Wayne finally passes out on the couch- she reaches underneath the sheets and gently touches herself as she conjures up blue eyes and blonde hair, a plaid shirt and a friendly smile. She imagines that he's still out there, watching over her from afar. Someday he will save her, of that she's certain.

Some nights it isn't her Good Samaritan that she thinks about at all.

Some nights the man she sees behind her eyelids as she strokes between her thighs is someone she's certain doesn't exist. Nonetheless, he visits her in these private moments, a handsome man always dressed in black with flecks of salt and pepper in his hair. His eyes are sad when she comes, and if she could she would take his pain away; she'd give him back what she knows he has lost.

Wayne mumbles something in his sleep from the other room and her imaginary man disappears. He's the other half of her, she thinks, as she drifts off to sleep. They both just want to be free.

Somewhere along the way, Kate realizes that knights in shining armor don't exist, and even if they did, they certainly aren't going to save her.

She's twenty-four when she decides to save herself.

Kate meets her one-time savior. Even with the light of the fire setting his features aglow he manages to look far colder than she remembers. She wonders if time has distorted her memory of him or if it's simply because he's dead.

It hurts more than she thought, having this last vestige of childhood hope destroyed. Like everyone else in her life, he gets toppled off the pedestal she placed him on all those years ago.

This betrayal of memory fuels her anger as she lashes out at him, but somewhere in the back of her mind she wonders -with a grim curiosity that vacillates towards embarrassment before she finally swings back to defiance- if Jacob ever sat in his lighthouse, watching her moan as she fantasized about his hands tracing the curves of her body.

He, of course, gives nothing away. The fire burns out, and Jack is the new Jacob.

Kate's met the other man too, of course; she just hasn't figured that out yet.

She leaves the island, but it doesn't leave her.

Six months later Kate moves out of Claire's house, unable to stand the sound of a little boy laughing with his mother any longer. She has nowhere to go, but that is hardly new.

Kate lets her unconscious mind guide her (that's what she tells herself, anyway) and in no time at all she's knocking on Richard's door. Afterwards (her life is comprised completely of afterwards these days; before can't exist if she wants to keep her sanity) they lay in bed and talk. He tells her the stories she'd been too scared to ask about, stories she never expected to hear. He tells her about his dying wife and the doctor he accidentally killed, a ship caught in a storm and a slave chained to certain death. He tells her about absolution lost and immortality gained.

When he starts describing his time with Jacob, Kate suddenly grows bold. She tells Richard about the man in the general store and her subsequent teenage crush. Richard starts laughing then and Kate, for the first time she can remember, is unafraid to join him.

Richard tells her about Samuel last, and Kate laughs even harder.

Kate leaves nothing behind when she goes.