Title: My Mirror Speaks
Author: xperimental
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I don't own them, not that I'd ever admit to owning Charlie anyway.
Summary: Set after Charlie told Angelo that she didn't want to move in with him but before they broke up. Charlie has a particularly revealing late night conversation.

It was 4am on a cloudless night and Charlie Buckton found herself sitting alone on the beach in her unofficial thinking spot up in the dunes, staring out at the waves rolling in. The almost full moon bathed the scene in an eerie white glow, almost like something out of a horror movie and Charlie supposed, considering what her life had become, that it was only fitting.

She hadn't been able to sleep. Fear of another inevitable nightmare and the stress of her most recent relationship woes were making quite the insomniac of her. Angelo had wanted her to be more open, more honest, so she had been. She'd told him that wasn't ready to live with him, that she might never be ready, and he'd reacted like a spoiled five year old who'd just been told he couldn't have ice cream for dinner and had spent the last week giving her the silent treatment.

Even the one place that had always been her refuge, her work, had just become another thing that she didn't want to have to deal with. Her fellow officers had definitely picked up on the tension between the Senior Constable and their new Sergeant, Charlie knew that they were the number one topic of workplace gossip. She felt it every time she stepped into a room and all eyes turned to her as conversations were cut short; she was a laughing stock and she knew it.

Charlie was so deep into her self-pitying funk that she didn't even notice the presence of another person until they were sitting right beside her in the sand.

"Joey!" she squeaked in shock. "W-when did you get back?"

Her former girlfriend just smiled enigmatically at her. "Maybe I never left. And I think that the more appropriate question is why are you sitting all alone on the beach at four in the morning. Let me guess, bad dreams?"

"Among other things," Charlie replied, still a little stunned. "How'd you know?"

"I read about what happened with Hugo in the paper, it sounded pretty intense, and I'm guessing that wasn't even half of the story. It'd make sense if you were having nightmares about it. Am I wrong?"

"No…No, you're not," Charlie admitted. "But I probably shouldn't be talking about this with you." Hugo was definitely not a safe topic for them. But then again, not many things were anymore.

"It's alright, it's not like you have anyone else to talk to," Joey said, drawing her knees to her chest and hugging them. "Besides, if anyone knows what it's like to be tied up and almost drowned, it's me, right?"

Charlie flinched at the reminder of what Robbo had put Joey through. "Right. But still-"

She looked over, saw the determined, expectant look on Joey's face and knew that the younger girl would not be swayed. She also knew that she wanted to talk to Joey. Joey had always been easy to talk to and Charlie had opened up -in small ways at first, but if their relationship had lasted longer, if she hadn't been so stupid, she would've eventually told her about the big stuff- to her because she wanted to, not because Joey pushed her into it before she was ready or threatened to leave her if she didn't.

"I keep having these dreams about Hugo, about being tied up on the boat and him taunting me…" She shook her head, feeling foolish. Hugo was dead, he couldn't hurt her anymore, but she was still having these stupid dreams. Stupid terrifying dreams. "And I'm scared but not for me, for Ruby. If anything happened to me…I'm all she has…not that she even wants me. It's stupid."

"No, it's not. You've been through an incredibly stressful and traumatic event, it's normal that it'd have an effect on you that a week away at some lame beachside resort isn't just going to wipe away."

Charlie nodded an agreement and laughed. "Angelo said that I was probably having the nightmares because I was scared that he was going to have to leave Summer Bay."

"And?"

"And he's sticking around and I'm still having them, so…"

"Well, good….I mean, it's not good that you're having nightmares," Joey added off Charlie's confused look. "I meant that it's good that that wasn't the reason you were having them…because that'd be really pathetic."

"Tell me about it." It had taken everything Charlie had in her, to not roll her eyes and let her forced smile drop when Angelo had given his expert opinion on the cause of her bad dreams.

"I have to say, Angelo sounds like a complete tool."

Charlie wasn't inclined to disagree. "He wants us to buy a house together."

"Why?"

"I have no idea. I told him that I didn't want to live with him and then for some reason he thought that us buying a place together would be a good idea!" Charlie knew that she'd done a very poor job of hiding her reluctance at the thought of moving in with Angelo, so she couldn't understand where he got the impression that them buying a house together was something that she'd even want to consider.

"Seems like he only cares about what he wants."

"You're probably right."

"So why are you still with him?" Joey asked, sounding genuinely curious.

"Because he's all I have," Charlie freely admitted. "Without him, I'd be totally alone." Her mother was dead, her father was in a secure holding facility and barely remembered who she was on a good day, Ruby certainly didn't need her anymore, she had no other real friends. "I mean, you're never going to take me back," she said, trying not to cry when she caught Joey unconsciously nodding her head in agreement. "And anybody else…I'm going to have explain all over again about Ruby and everything, I can't go through that again. He already knows everything and he still wants to be with me. I should be grateful for that….Besides, I have no doubt that if I broke up with him he'd be a nightmare to work with."

Just the thought of having to share the office with him when he was in one of his moods was enough to keep Charlie from breaking up with him. He was bad enough now.

"You really do have the worst taste in men," Joey remarked lightly. "I mean, Grant, the less said about him the better. Then Roman, killed somebody. Hugo, killed somebody…and the rest of it. Angelo, killed somebody-"

"Roman's a good guy," Charlie defended her ex, who had been forced to shoot one of the soldiers under his command in order to save the rest of his unit.

"And Angelo's not?"

"And that doesn't mean anything, anyway," Charlie continued, ignoring Joey's pointed question. "It's just a co-incidence."

"Two is a co-incidence, three is a pattern. Besides, I thought you didn't believe in co-incidences."

Charlie looked down at her hands and remained silent.

"Let's face it, I'm the best person you've ever dated and look how badly you screwed that up."

"I'm sorry."

"It's a bit late for that." Joey smiled sadly. "But thank you, for saying it."

They sat in silence for a long time until Charlie finally broke it. "I can't believe it's only been a year…so much has happened."

"Most of it bad?"

Charlie smiled bitterly. "Pretty much all of it."

She sighed and started running her fingers through the sand. "I can't believe that this is my life now. I mean, a year ago if you'd told me I'd be dating Angelo, that he'd be my boss, that Ruby would be living with Irene because she found out that she was my daughter and my father would murder Grant…I would've thought that you were absolutely insane."

Joey nodded. "You've had a pretty rough time of it. You know, from a completely unbiased outsider's point of view it seems like things really only started going downhill after you started seeing Angelo again."

"Completely unbiased, huh?" Charlie teased.

"Okay, so maybe I'm a little biased but that doesn't make it any less true. You started losing the respect of your colleagues when they found out about it…and if you hadn't of been on a date with him that day, you wouldn't have dislocated your hip, Ruby wouldn't have found out about your scar. And if she hadn't found out about the scar then you never would've had to tell her the truth, she never would've moved out or gone looking for her father. Grant never would've come back into your life, you never would've been driven to kidnap and torture him and your dad never would've killed him."

"It's not fair to blame all that on him," Charlie said, more out of obligation than anything else. "I should've done a lot of things differently too."

Joey raised an eyebrow and laughed. "Sure, like maybe if you'd killed Grant you would've been the one who was promoted to Sergeant."

"Probably," Charlie chuckled.

"But seriously, how did that even happen? I remember that you told me that you had to like study and take a test to be a Sergeant."

"You do…unless you're Angelo. And to be honest, I'm still not clear on the how and why. He acted all shocked when it was awarded to him but then he told Martha that it was part of the conditions of his mission, so he must've known all along." Charlie grimaced, remembering every time Angelo had acted clueless about what would happen now that his mission had been completed and every complaint that he'd made about marine command using him, like he wasn't getting anything out of it, like it hadn't of been his choice to take on the people smuggling case.

"Well, I think that they made a huge mistake. Angelo's hardly the right person to be put in charge of the station…" Joey turned her head to the side and regarded the older woman with intense eyes. "But I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, am I."

"Yeah, I…Wait, how do you know about what I did to Grant? How do you know about any of this?" Charlie frowned in confusion, Joey had been talking about things that she couldn't possibly know.

"Because you do," Joey said simply.

Comprehension slowly dawned across Charlie's features. "You're not really here, are you." She sighed and pressed her hands against her face. "I really am going crazy."

"No, you're not."

"Oh yeah? I bet I'm the only person in Summer Bay who has an imaginary friend."

"I wouldn't be so sure about that." Joey smirked. "Besides, this is a perfectly normal coping mechanism. You needed to open up to someone-"

"So my mind's conjured up the one person I'm comfortable opening up to?" Charlie asked, still a little sceptical of the figure of her imaginations insistence that this was total normal….And did this mean that she subconsciously hated her own boyfriend?

"I guess."

Charlie rolled her eyes at herself. How pathetic could she possibly get? "Where are you, Joey?" she asked. "I mean, where are you really?"

Joey looked at her with sympathetic eyes. "You know I can't answer that."

Of course she couldn't answer that, Charlie had no idea of where in the world her ex-girlfriend was. She hung her head in disappointment.

"But, if you really want to find me, you should speak to Watson."

"Watson?" Why would she know where Joey was?

"She got put in charge of my case, remember?" Joey prompted. "So-"

"She'd have your current contact details," Charlie finished, feeling like she should be kicking herself for not realizing it sooner.

"Uh-huh, and when you do talk to her, would it kill you to be a little nicer? You treat her like crap. Honestly, I can't believe that she's still in love with you."

"What!?!" Charlie squawked in shock at what she had just heard, her head whipping around to find herself face to face with nothing but thin air. Joey was gone, she was alone. She was always alone.

And so alone on the beach, with the sun just starting to peak over the horizon, Charlie Buckton broke down and cried.

END