Aaron starts crying only a minute or so after Jack makes that call to Naomi's boat, and he doesn't stop no matter what Claire tries. Through process of elimination she's decided that he's not tired, or hungry, and he's got a clean diaper. There is no physical reason he should, and yet he does so to no end.
She stays towards the edges of the large group, trying not to bother them with her son's cries, though they all seem in such good spirits that she doubts it would affect them all that much. Rescue is on its way. They should all be happy. She should be happy. But with a screaming baby, and that same nervous feeling in her stomach that she's had since they left the beach, she can't even fake it.
Kate leaves her position near Jack, where she's been for the past half hour or so, like she's afraid to let him out of her sight, and takes a seat next to her, unfazed by the baby's cries, though at times she seems bothered by the baby itself. Kate doesn't seem all that crazy about children and Claire sometimes wonders if that's a coping mechanism or she just doesn't like kids.
"Do you think babies can sense things?" Claire asks, rocking Aaron in her arms gently, and it seems to calm him a bit.
Kate shrugs. "I think people can sense things if they have a strong enough connection to someone. It's like how they say twins feel each other sometimes, like they know when something's wrong with the other one. It kind of applies to everyone." She sounds like she's speaking from personal experience, and her eyes wander to where Jack is now pacing, phone gripped in his hand like it's his lifeline (and it is, to a degree). "Babies are people too."
Claire nods, and looks down at her son whose grasping at the air with his tiny hands, quieting down finally. She wonders if her hearing will ever return to normal.
"You think that's why he was crying? You think he sensed something's wrong?" Kate asks, vision returning to Claire.
"I know it sounds crazy, but yeah, I do." Claire replies, and she knows Kate doesn't really buy into this kind of stuff normally, but she seemed to make an exception a moment ago.
"It's not crazy." Kate tells her, standing up, and placing a comforting hand on Claire's shoulder, as she says, "I'm sure Charlie's fine."
Claire's gut feeling, and her child's cries, tell her otherwise.
---
When Desmond comes running out of nowhere Claire feels all of that trepidation fall away. She rises, sleeping baby in her arms, and waits for Charlie, probably lagging behind him.
He never comes.
"Naomi's people, they aren't who she claims they are." Desmond rattles off, breathing heavily, echoing Ben's words, and Jack looks like he's either going to hit someone or cry.
They argue back and forth for a minute or so, and then Jack's on the walkie trying to get in touch with the rest of their people back at the beach, and Desmond's wandering around looking like he lost something.
She takes the opportunity to grab onto his arm, get him to look at her when she asks, "Where's Charlie?"
Desmond's face goes grave.
"He didn't make it."
---
Jack never does get in touch with the beach camp, even though he tries for hours until it's nightfall, and only then it's Kate who tells him, through something that sounds suspiciously close to a chocked sob. "Sayid said we had to keep moving."
In the morning that's just what they do.
---
They're moving aimlessly. Jack has no plan, no sense of direction. Right now it just seems to be to get as far away from the beach as possible. Right now it just seems to be to get as far away from the beach as possible. As far away from these people, this new threat, as possible.
She doesn't think that in itself is a half bad plan, but she doesn't say that to anybody. Actually, she doesn't say anything to anybody at all.
---
It's the fifth day on the move, and Claire left Aaron with Sun (and it's miracle that she's holding up at all) so she can wash up, when the brush rustles. For a second she imagines it's them, this new group of unknowns, and she almost welcomes them and the swift death they seem to bring. Almost, because she catches herself and remembers Aaron, the one thing she does have to live for, and in that second she snaps out of whatever trance she's been in for the past few days.
And when that man stumbles out of the brush she swears she would've killed him (and if she hadn't been paying close attention she would've gone through with it) had it not been for his face. Broken and bloody and Sawyer.
"Hey Mamacita," he greets her, steps forward, nearly trips (or maybe his legs just give out, because she remembers him being more graceful that that), and in an instant she reaches out to steady him.
Sayid follows him out of the bushes moments afterwards, and she yells Jack's name so loud that the birds rush from their hiding places among the trees.
---
The two of them, Sawyer and Sayid, are the only ones still alive, and she can't say she's all that surprised.
They won't talk much in detail, but she knows Sayid tells Jack stuff that would probably make her blood run cold and she tries not to think about how Bernard, or Jin, or Hurley met their makers (Juliet never factors in because she isn't one of them, not truly, and not from the start) just like she never asks Desmond how Charlie died.
Whatever happened though, she knows she was lucky not to witness it.
Sawyer doesn't sleep for three days straight.
---
Claire thinks they all expected her to be more devastated than she is. They expected her to be a crying, irreparable mess, and since she isn't they don't really know what to do or say. She really wishes they'd stop worrying about her and focus on Sun and Rose.
She's got Aaron, Sun's got a death sentence, and Rose has memories. She certainly isn't the one who drew the short straw.
---
The only reason, the only way, they would go back is if those people were all dead and gone. And so Jack leads them back to the beach.
Her tent is among those that were destroyed in their little experiment in fire power and she's halfway through gathering materials to rebuild her shelter when Sawyer stops her.
He offers her his tent, says he's not much on sleeping lately, and besides it's far better than anything she could build. And he's not wrong because the damn thing is still standing in all its glory thanks to it's positioning out of the way of the area where most of the explosives went off.
She doesn't ask why he makes such a generous offer just says "okay" and "thank you" and she and Aaron relocate for a few days.
Sawyer spends nights watching the flames of the fire, sometimes across from Sayid (like they share something now) and sometimes, more often than not, he's alone. When he sleeps it's under the stars, and from the look on his face he prefers it that way.
This is where she begins to realize that this isn't all about the beach. There's something else.
---
Sawyer avoids Kate like some kind of plague, and she wonders when that fell through.
When Kate comes back with a sprained ankle, and Jack fusses over her for nearly an hour, (and it's the first time he's seemed like Jack since the beach turned into the site of a small scale massacre) she finally makes a move in the form of a kiss. She doesn't see Sawyer coming around the corner, doesn't realize what she's really done.
Somehow, he never seems to mad with Jack. Just like when he was with Kate, brief as that was, Jack never gave him the cold shoulder. It almost makes her smile to see those two have finally grown up.
He does seem more reclusive, and that's why she stops in front of where he's lounged in his airline chair with a book and says, "If you want to talk, you know…"
Sawyer practically stares through her with those piercing blue eyes of his and it makes her shiver, though it's not cold. "Dying to know what keeps me up at night are you?"
"It's not…I just thought maybe you'd like to talk." She stumbles over her words, and she doesn't know why he makes her nervous. He's long since proven that he isn't as dangerous as he wants people to think.
"No can do," he tells her, and he almost pulls off his normal appearance of cocky indifference, but not quite.
She may walk away, but he's only won the battle, not the war.
---
"Where are you going?"
He finds her packing up her stuff haphazardly, no rhyme to it since all she is doing is moving fifty-odd feet away from him, but still she feels the need to pack. Symbolism of sort, and she has to transport it somehow.
"I figured we should leave before we overstayed our welcome." She tells him, a lie. He wasn't about to kick her out and she's trading down but in a way she's passive aggressively trying to get answers out of him the only way she knows how.
"Who'd you get to build you your very own home sweet home?" She doesn't know why he's interested.
It touches a nerve. "I can take care of myself."
"Right," he says, and for once it's not sarcasm or doubt. She picks up a shirt that she knows isn't hers, but one of Charlie's that must've gotten mixed in with her luggage, as she asks, "That why you aren't all down in the dumps about the hobbit leaving you all by your lonesome?"
It's tasteless, and it may be just part of who Sawyer is, but that doesn't make it especially forgivable. Her eyes instantly narrow, and her movements are harsher, jerkier, and she's glad that she can see a tinge of regret on his face.
Then she says something equally as petty, as mean, and probably just as untrue, but somehow it feels good. "People already hate you enough; it's not something you have to keep working at."
She leaves in a huff.
---
She's not as innocent and breakable as he once thought.
He knows that now.
---
She wakes up to screams. It isn't until strong hands find her arms that she realizes they're her own.
Chorus of "what's going on" and she grasps at limbs that feel unfamiliar. Absent is the scar that ran down Charlie's forearm, the one that she could never quite see unless she squinted, but could feel all the same, the one she never asked about (she wishes she had, she wishes a lot of things now) but she can feel the muscles under her fingers much clearer than before.
"Settle down," it's Sawyer's voice who commands her now, who's managed to stop her hands from pushing him away. "Easy, girl."
Jack goes into overdrive because the last time that she woke up screaming the Others kidnapped her. But Claire doesn't remember needles or blood. She remembers water, and the feeling as though she was drowning.
She catches Sawyer glancing her way more than a few times, and he's not ten feet away the rest of the night.
---
It's all she dreams now. Water and death. She thinks she understands why.
The only way to avoid the dreams is to avoid sleep, and so one night when she doesn't think she can manage another night of…this, she sneaks into his tent and drops down into the corner, watching him in the dark. He's awake, staring at her, and they lock eyes, each trying to figure out what to say.
"Do you ever dream about the people you've killed?" He never told her that he's killed, but she can see it in his eyes that he has. She doesn't need the reassurance.
"Didn't use to." His voice is rough, it sounds out of place next to hers. So he does now.
She nods slowly, chews on her bottom lip. "What changed?"
"First time it was an accident. When you plan it though it's different." He watches her carefully, then asks, "What do you want to know for anyway?"
"I dream about Charlie," she admits, lowering her eyes.
"There something I'm not aware of because last I heard he died on one of his and Desmond's little romps, trying to unblock that signal, and you were off with Jack and company."
"He did it to save me." She thinks of all of the flashes Desmond had told her about the day she cornered him and forced it all out in the open. He died trying to stop her from drowning. He was electrocuted in her tent. Now he died trying to get them off the island. Trying to get her off the island.
"And you think that makes you a murderer?" She doesn't say, but she doesn't say no either. Not strictly, but she still can't help but feel responsible, because to some degree she knew what was coming. "Hell if it's that easy then we're all murderers."
---
She kisses him, needy and hungry for something, anything, and he doesn't even act surprised, just kisses her back, and lets his hands move down her body, past the edges of soft cotton panties, and inside her.
For the first time since Charlie died she doesn't feel so empty.
---
They're all broken people on this island.
---
"I killed the man who ruined my life. Strangled him with his own chains." It's not typical post-coital conversation, but with Sawyer it kind of passes for it.
She rolls onto her side to look at him, but she can only see the side of his face as he looks up at the ceiling of this little structure he's put so much work into. "When?" She doesn't ask why, or what he did, doesn't make him divulge more information than he wants.
"Two weeks ago, before all this mess got started." He's talking about the failed rescue attempt, he's talking about the mess on the beach, he's talking about a lot of things. "That's why I don't—"
Claire silences him with a kiss, and she'd say something to try and make it all okay. But there's nothing to say, and it isn't alright.
Admitting is a step in the right direction but it doesn't put people back together.
---
That night Claire doesn't dream of drowning. She doesn't dream at all.