When Hope Dies
oOo
"This time...this time you have to die."
Charlie decided that he truly hated those words. Hated them with every cell in his body. Not just because of what they meant, but because of what they did. They stopped his life, completely ended it right then. They shut the lid on everything he'd been through and snapped on the lock. Done. Gone. Over. No going back.
But he hated them for a different reason, too. He despised those words because they made him think he had no second chance, or third if you counted the plane crash. They crushed his hope, and to lose hope is a dangerous thing but that didn't really matter for him, did it? He was going to die anyway.
That's the thing though, it did matter then. It mattered a whole bloody lot. Because when someone loses hope like that, when they think they have nothing to lose, they become irrational and impulsive and just don't care what happens to them anymore.
And Charlie's hope was gone. It was smashed to bits the same moment he gave Desmond a sound whack in the skull with the paddle. It broke into tiny, irreparable pieces when he tucked his Greatest Hits into his mate's shirt and hoped that Claire would understand why he did all of this.
He became foolish and threw caution to the wind. And, because of his idiocy, he was beaten up by blood girls for chrissake. But that's beside the point, really. What mattered was that after Desmond helped him, after he talked to Penny over the computer, and after that crazy eye-patched bugger blew himself up with the window to flood the room, Charlie saved everyone, right? Because he had no hope left, he managed to do it.
Because he had no hope left, he wasn't scared. He wasn't afraid to die anymore, he knew it had to happen so that Claire and Aaron could go home and be safe. It was his last stand at protecting them (he had promised Claire that he would) and that was all he could think about as his world faded, praying that Desmond would understand the messily scrawled message on his palm.
A selfish part of him, however, did hope that Claire would never forget him. Hoped that she would one day tell Aaron of the crazy dreamer who dove underwater to flip a switch and save the survivors of Oceanic 815.
The Sacrificial Rockstar.
Yeah. He liked that.
He...he liked that a lot...
A/N: So I loved Charlie and didn't want him to die and got pretty pissed when he did. Don't be surprised if I start posting an AU story of what would happen if Charlie survived. In fact, I'm kinda already working on it *thumbs up*. Review please! Always loved!