Summary: When Charlie gets Desmond drunk, Desmond takes a hard look at himself. Takes place during "Flashes."
Grace
It was late in the evening, and Desmond's hands worked the kindling. Striking the sticks required patience, diligence, and a dozen attempts, but always the fire sparked to life in the end. Thus, no single slide of the stick felt like a failure; instead, he knew that each seemingly fruitless gesture brought him one step closer to warmth. He had thought it would always be like that: that knowing the end would make the journey bearable. It hadn't.
"Beautiful evening."
It was a beautiful evening. The breeze was the best part, an invisible, perfectly soothing hand. But Charlie didn't sound like he really thought it was beautiful; he sounded like he was reciting some culturally required liturgy, hastily and with no thought to its meaning.
"Aye," Desmond answered. He noticed Hurley nudge the Englishman with his elbow.
"This morning…" Charlie began hesitantly. His hesitation, unlike Claire's, wasn't from shyness. Desmond could see that. Something quite different was tangling his tongue, something more like a battled-down resentment. "I'm sorry I wasn't more…grateful. Thank you for…helping Claire not drown."
"No harm done," Desmond answered dismissively. He didn't need Charlie's gratitude, even if he had gone out his way to save the man.
"Excellent. I brought a peace offering." Charlie reached into his backpack. Desmond heard the sloshing liquid before he saw the bottle; he received the sound like an animal trained to respond to a dinner bell. "You know, make the truce official," Charlie concluded.
Desmond fought back the urge that was welling up within him. He didn't want to give in to that siren call. He knew what had driven him to drink, but he wasn't quite sure what had made him want to sober up. "Thanks, but no," he answered. "I spent a wee bit too much time drunk as of late." A wee bit. Penny had always said he had a knack for understatement.
"Too good for us, brother?" Charlie asked. "Alright. That's fine. We'll take our drink…go somewhere else."
To Desmond, Charlie sounded like a peevish child threatening lack of friendship on the playground. What did he think, that Desmond would cave and grab the bottle, get pure bawsed just so they could be best pals? He was about to walk away when he noticed the label. "What kind of whisky is that?"
"It's…uh…" Charlie looked at the bottle. "It just says MacCutcheon." He held the label to the Scotsman's eyes, and a low laugh rumbled up through Desmond's throat.
I'll be damned, he thought. MacCutcheon. The whisky I wasn't worthy to drink. He wasn't worthy now, either, but there was no one here who could stop him from taking it.
Of course, there had been no one who could have stopped him from taking Penny, either, not even her father. She would have had him no matter what the old man said. Only Desmond had stopped Desmond from quenching that thirst. And why? Because it's hard to take a drink when you've been told you don't deserve it, even if you're parched, even if you're dying? Unmerited favor…he couldn't accept that then. Oh, no, it was so much easier to believe you could work to make yourself worthy. But now, now he cried, "Alright then! Let's have it!"
Charlie began to pull out some cups. "No," insisted Desmond, "the bottle, brother." If you were going to seize what you didn't deserve, there could be no half measures. You had to possess it whole; you had to take it deep down into your very core; you had to make yourself drunk on it. "I mean, if you've come to drink…let's drink!"
"Alright!" answered Charlie, with a wide smile, looking just a bit infected by Desmond's zeal, "let's drink!"
Charlie handed the bottle to Desmond, and the Scotsman sunk his teeth into the cork, the way he hadn't sunk his teeth into life. He yanked the bottle down and the cork was ejected with a loud pop. "Cheers!" he exclaimed.
"Cheers!" Charlie echoed.
And then a stream of the bitter, burning liquid went right down Desmond's throat in one long, furious, gulp. And the next thing he knew, the three of them were sitting by the fire singing. For a glorious moment there was no Penny, no walking away, no insane race, no world to save. That was, until Charlie said, "So…Desi. Let me ask you something."
"Anything, pal."
"How'd you know Claire was drowning?"
Desmond tried to explain it away by saying he heard her calling for help, but Hurley called his bluff in that understated, laughable way of his. "Well, no, you didn't. We were like a mile away."
Desmond tried to laugh it off, but then Charlie brought up the lightening too. So this was why they had tried to get him drunk. To wrest the truth from him. They were curious. Well, we all know what curiosity did. Desmond pulled himself up. Did these survivors, who had scrambled desperately for a time to escape from this island, who were still half-hoping for escape, did they really want to know he had chosen this fate? "Thanks for the drink, pal."
He began to stumble off, but Charlie shouted after him, "Hey, I don't know what you're doing. You best tell us. Oy! You think because you turn some key, that makes you a hero?"
Desmond had thought it would. He had thought if he just walked away from Penny, if he just walked away from the embarrassing grace she was holding out to him, he could earn her. But that hadn't happened. He was still Desmond. He was still lost. "I'm no hero, brother," he hissed.
"I don't know how you're doing what you are," Charlie goaded, "but I know a coward when I see one!"
Coward. That's what Penny had called him. A coward. A coward for not taking what he didn't deserve. How could that make him a coward? Hadn't he braved the earth, the sea, the sky, the rain, the cold, the heat—hadn't he braved every element on his race around the world? He had braved worse than that. He had braved death in that hatch. He had braved it all. But it was grace….it was grace he couldn't brave. Grace terrified him.
He felt the rage choke him, the impotence, the unworthiness. He threw himself at Charlie. He put his hands around the Englishman's throat and choked, choked hard, trying to choke the word out of him. Coward. Coward. Coward. He yelled something; he didn't know what he yelled.
And then he heard himself admitting it, what he could never admit before: "It doesn't matter what you do!" He screamed it, screamed it through the tears he was fighting down. "You can't change it! You can't change it no matter what you try to do!" You couldn't earn your way into that heaven, not with all the races in the world. You couldn't be a better man until you let that guard down, until you let that grace in, until you let yourself be humiliated by the truth of what you could never become on your own. "You just can't change it!"
The END