Title: Suitcase
Original post date: 14th January 2006
Spoilers: Up to The 23rd Psalm
Summary: They began with a suitcase – will they end with one too? Charlie sits on the beach after Claire kicks him out.
Disclaimer: So...I don't own Lost... man I hate having to write disclaimers! I'm so going to write more of my own original stuff again just so I don't have to put a disclaimer in at the top
They met because of a suitcase.
It wasn't anything special, just a plain old suitcase. Ordinary. Except for the fact that its wheels were hardly suited to rolling across the sand of the beach and she was far too pregnant to be trying to drag it along – at least in his opinion. What if she had hurt the baby? No that would not do at all. So he had helped her, and then they had talked and he had found himself wanting to make her smile because her smile made him want to smile too.
It had been the beginning.
He didn't have a suitcase to put her peanut butter in but he had a bag. Just an ordinary, black shoulder bag that he crammed with all his odds and sods – including that empty jar he had found, mercifully unbroken. Who brings jars on planes he wondered? But he didn't care for long. Why did it matter? She carried her own bag up to the caves even though he personally thought it was too heavy for her.
'It's fine, really. I can manage it Charlie,'
She tried to carry that bag back to the beach before too long. It hadn't made it down there until much later however, and he didn't find it until later still, soon before it was returned to her. He felt guilty having searched in it for something he ought not to have but she never asked him about it and he never told her.
And then there was the final suitcase.
She had deliberately dropped his guitar on the ground right in front of him, not a care in the world. His suitcase was already there beside it.
'Just go.'
And he had. He had gathered up his suitcase and walked away from her. There was no use in arguing anymore. Just an apology wasn't going to cut it this time. But his suitcase wasn't heavy until he began to walk away from her.
As he sat alone later on he thought back to their first meeting. That had been because of a suitcase hadn't it? The thought that perhaps their final goodbye had just been formed over a suitcase as well left a bitter taste of irony in his mouth.
He looked over at his suitcase, just sitting there, completely innocuous, and felt a sudden surge of anger at...himself? Claire? The drugs? The bloody suitcase?
Charlie reached out a hand and savagely knocked the suitcase over so that it lay in the sand.
He already knew the answers to all of his questions. He knew who he was angry at, and he also knew that it would end with this suitcase.