Disclaimer: I own nothing "Lost" related whatsoever.
She Burns
Claire Littleton had visited Hell before.
She visited Hell when she was seven and Mother had slapped her for snitching that Mars Bar from the market. She hadn't even really wanted it, but she was hungry and Mother had said "No sweets before dinner, Claire," and she knew how Mother hated coconut. And for some reason she didn't quite understand, she had wanted to make her mother angry.
So she took the candy bar, and burned for her crime.
She had burned again at twelve, when Daddy died. This was a different kind of Hell, a Hell where everything was black ashes and sympathetic faces, and there was no one to tuck her into bed with gentle hands and tobacco blazers. It was a cold Hell, and Mother's piercing gaze watched her pitilessly from every sooty corner.
It was a Hell she had decided to adopt, and wore it with icy fury on her sleeve. Mother hated her for it, which at once made it easier and harder to bare.
When she was nineteen, Claire came Hell again, but this time Hell was named Thomas, and had dark hair and cold blue eyes that made him seem so romantically remote. This Hell was two pink lines on a strip that made her vomit and cry, and it was the sound of a door slamming shut forever. In this new Hell, her stomach grew and Thomas shrank until he disappeared. Seven burning months passed like this, with a crazy psychic on her trail, a burgeoning terror as her due date loomed like a thundercloud, and countless, endless bills. She had doctor's bills and rent to pay for the spacious apartment she couldn't afford. She had food bills because no matter what she ate she was still sallow and hungry, and apparently her old diet of chips and coffee wasn't good for the baby. She had to pay for the adoption forms, and she had to pay Malkin when she returned to him twice in a panic, and she had to pay the phone bills when he called her in the middle of the night.
It was in this new Hell that Claire Littleton learned that her life was not truly her own to live.
So this time, she went to Hell herself instead of waiting for it to take her again. She went because she was eight months pregnant and she had no money, and Malkin was the only one who was offering a way out.
Claire Littleton was almost twenty when she boarded flight 815 to Australia and went to Hell for the final time.
Something was wrong.
Claire felt her breath freeze in her chest, heard her pulse crash in her ears as though for the first time. She blinked back inexplicable tears and swallowed, trying to force away the crippling, crushing, familiar terror through sheer strength of will.
Confusion swirled through her mind like poisonous gas. What was going on? What horror had been unleashed to break this awful tide inside of her? It didn't make sense, she couldn't understand...
She had been kneeling in the cave with Charlie, clutching her precious, perfect Aaron to her chest almost dizzy with joy and glorious relief. The new night around them was peaceful and sedate, as though all the stifling anxiety that had plagued the day had dissipated when Charlie had returned with her son. Light, quiet breeze slipped around them, dispelling any vestiges of sweat and pain, and for the first time since she she could remember, she was... happy.
And without warning, without any signal at all, she had been plunged into a Hell unlike any she had known.