FIC: Alone (LOST)
Jan. 17th, 2006 06:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)

[music| ]
TITLE: Alone
RATING: PG-13. Angst. A bit of language.
DISCLAIMER: Sure, they're mine. That's why I waste my time writing fanfic instead of, you know, actually working with the show and telling Dom Monaghan that his contract requires giving me daily full-body massages. Yeah, right. *goes off to cry*
ARCHIVE: Just ask, I'd love to give permission.
SUMMARY: Claire thinks about recent events.
SPOILERS: Up through “All The Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues”. Mostly for “Cowboys” and “Raised by Another”.
PAIRINGS: Charlie/Claire. Who else?
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She sits there, huddled under a blanket and staring with unseeing eyes at Ethan, and thinks.
Her head hurts, her stomach hurts, and she is so afraid.
Afraid for herself, yes, and for her baby, but mostly for him. She can't erase the image from her mind of Ethan blindfolding him, tying vines around his neck, and stringing his body up from the trees.
He was so brave through all of it.
She wasn't.
She cried and screamed and begged Ethan to stop. Ethan didn't listen.
She's sure he's dead now, and that scares her more than anything. Scares her more than polar bears and plane crashes and dehydration and madmen with knives who want her baby all put together—he's dead just keeps running through her head over and over and she ends up bursting into tears until Ethan gets irritated and tells her to shut up or die.
He's dead.
He's dead.
She sees him swinging there high in the trees, and she struggles against another round of sobs.
She has to be strong for the baby.
He'd want her to be strong for the baby.
He envied her for her strength, he'd said. He'd said he wished he could be as strong as she was.
She has to be strong.
She wants to cry, she wants to die, but she has to be strong.
She wishes he was with her, holding her hand, telling bad jokes to try to make her feel better, calling her love and telling her that everything will be okay. She hates being alone.
Then she tells herself she's a horrible person. He died for her, to keep her safe, and all she can do is blame him for not being there with her?
She wouldn't want him to be here anyway. He doesn't deserve to go through this terror.
But she misses him.
She thinks she should want Jack, who would be able to help her physically. She thinks she should want Locke, with four hundred knives and the skill to use them. She thinks almost any man among the survivors would probably be more useful than him—he really isn't much use in a crisis, to be honest, and he rarely seems to know what he's doing, and he seems to have even more demons than she does—
But she wants him to be beside her. He would make her feel better.
He isn't scared by her—by her pregnancy or her unmarried state or her obvious vulnerability.
Wasn't.
He wasn't scared by her.
She can't get into the habit of thinking him in the past tense, and then decides that she doesn't particularly want to.
She doesn't want to accept that he's dead, even though she knows he is.
She almost starts crying again.
She's so cold, despite the blanket Ethan has so kindly provided her with.
She gets the bizarre feeling that Ethan is under the impression that this is taking care of her. She wants to tell Ethan that she'll gladly trade the blanket and the 'care' for him back beside her.
He promised he wouldn't leave her.
So did Thomas. Thomas promised that they could do this, that this could be like the best thing ever.
He made no such promises. He just wrapped her in a blanket and sat beside her and took her hand and said he wouldn't leave her alone.
Then why is she so cold now?
She wants to tell him to bring her another blanket, and to put his arms around her.
But he's not there for her to tell.
She needs someone to blame, so she blames Thomas, and Malkin, and even Rachel for taking her to see Malkin and Melissa for introducing her to Thomas.
Thomas and Malkin and Rachel and Melissa, she blames them for the crash and the island and Ethan and the image of him swinging from a vine, dead, blindfolded, and she can just make out the letter E on his hand…
She shudders and tries not to vomit and she's so scared and it's so cold, a tropical island shouldn't be this cold…
She feels so alone, and even when the baby kicks her, in a friendly reassuring way, it doesn't keep her from feeling alone.
She wants so bad for him to be there with her.
It scared her when he promised to stay with her. It scared her when he brought her tea in the jungle and teased her and offered to be her confidant. It scared her when he chased after her and offered to carry her bag. It scared her, because it all smacked of the nice guy things Thomas had once done, and that meant he might leave her too, just like Thomas did.
So she tried to push him away. She spoke coldly to him and rejected his offers and told him flat out that he just wanted to save her because of the baby.
He didn't act like Thomas would have. He didn't run. He barely seemed to acknowledge what she was doing. He just kept on, kept making friendly advances, kept trying to help her and reassure you.
He's not Thomas, she finally convinced her heart. There's no reason to be scared.
And at the exact moment her fear started fading…this happened.
And now he's dead.
He's dead, and she never got to tell him that she wanted to be his friend. She never got to tell him that she might, just might, want to be more than…
Ethan took her bag, almost first thing. She wishes Ethan hadn't, because there are things in there that might make her feel better now. Things that remind her of him.
Like her peanut butter jar, full of 'extra smooth' peanut butter. Like her journal, which contains, among other things, a dozen anecdotes about him. Like the blanket he wrapped around her shoulders as he promised to stay with her.
The baby kicks again and she sucks in a breath.
She tries to imagine scenarios. She tries to imagine that he survived—that one of the survivors found him in time, that Jack worked medical miracles—that even now he's on their trail trying to rescue her. But she can't make herself believe them, and she ends up just feeling more miserable.
She knows he's dead. In her heart of hearts, she knows he's dead.
She wraps her arms around herself and her baby and rocks herself back and forth slowly.
He promised he'd never leave her alone, and she tries to lean on that. Tries to tell herself that he's with her, even now, that his soul hasn't left her even if his body has. But she can't feel his familiar, warm, comforting presence.
I won't leave you, Claire, he said.
Then why does she feel so alone now?
FIN