Note: Wanted to get this completed before the final episode of Lost and I did! So I guess this is sort of my tribute fic. It's been a great six years. The show may be over, but these characters will forever live on. Enjoy!
Their reunion is, for lack of a better word, short. He's pulling her to him, his hands still sweaty from the performance when her water breaks. Chairs are thrown back heedlessly as people rush over, their worry palpable.
She grabs for his hand and says, "don't you leave me."
He wouldn't dream of it.
///
The nightmares start a day after Aaron and Claire are discharged from the hospital.
Charlie dies in swimming pools and lakes and the ocean. It rains and he is swallowed up inside puddles that suffocate and never end. Someone robs him and points a gun at his temple, firing and leaving him to drown in a puddle of his own blood. He dies over and over again and there is nothing she can do to stop it.
She wakes to her own screams, her own blood on her hands, her own heaving chest – a mirror to a different time and place. The baby wakes, but Charlie grasps her arms and embraces her and kisses the top of her head. "We're not there anymore. Nothing bad can happen here. Shh, shh."
He quiets her cries, but she is still afraid. She is afraid the bad has already started and cannot be stopped. She shakes.
///
"I'm afraid."
"Don't be, love. I'm different, this is different."
"It'll come back. There will always be death."
///
If you grip sand in your hand too tightly it will slip through your fingers anyway. That's what happens with Charlie. Events come slowly but surely. One day is a nicked chin from shaving, the next it's a slip on the tile after a shower. Then comes the mugging and the bash of a head against a diving board while diving into Jack's swimming pool.
It's as if fate is trying to remind her of what happened before and what will happen again. She holds on as tightly as she can, but he's slipping, slipping away with every moment.
///
She's not even fully awake when she says it, but he hears her. "I'm scared," she says, her eyes still closed.
This time he doesn't answer.
///
Charlie dies on a dark and rainy L.A. day. Aaron is in his stroller and Claire is wrestling with a wild umbrella when a car skids past a red light and into the intersection where they are crossing. Charlie shoves Claire and the stroller out of the way, leaving the car to hit him instead. He flies into the air before crashing down violently into the road, his head landing in a rain puddle and blood staining his lips.
"Charlie!" Claire cries from the ground, the volume of her voice lost in the pavement. Her jeans are torn open at the knee and her chin is bleeding. All this doesn't matter. Aaron is safe but howling, unhappy with the sudden rush of speed and the unpleasant rain on his skin. Aaron's cries mirror her struggle up from the ground, stings her ears as the gravel assaults her palms, marking them. By the time Claire reaches Charlie's fallen body, a crowd is encircling the scene. She hears someone shout for 911 and dimly realizes it's her own wail into the wind.
It's on her bleeding knees that Claire gingerly places Charlie's upper torso in her lap, stroking his blonde hair from his face. He is still conscious, but barely. Even so, he attempts a smile when he sees her face above his own. "Love," he tries to say, but he's sputtering and his chest heaves with a wheeze.
She's sobbing, pulling him to her, chanting her love for him like a witch doctor. As if her words will heal him, as if holding him tightly will stop him from leaving again. "Don't you leave me!"
He does.
end.