Title: Hope
Fandom: LOST
Pairing: gen
Characters: Charlie, mentions of Desmond, Claire, Hurley, Aaron.
Word Count: 258
Rating: PG for situation.
Prompt: .x. Looking down the barrel of a gun
A/N: Wrote this beforehand during math class, was going through prompt list and realized it worked. So this wasn't exactly written with the prompt in mind. Oh, right, first LOST fic, excuse suckiness :3
Summary: He wasn't giving up, after all.
It wasn't that Charlie was afraid of death. As a druggie, he'd been predisposed to death. And in multiple forms. Given, getting stranded on some unknown island that no one seemed to have bothered to find wasn't something he had necessarily assumed possible. Yet here he was. So apparently, it was possible. And the amount of people who had so far died exceeded anything he could count on his fingers.
In retrospect, he hadn't been that surprised when Desmond told him that he was going to die. Sure, he shouted. Got angry. Was angry. For days. just as quickly, however, he shrugged it off.
Alright. He was going to die.
Dying was just as much a part of living as anything else he'd ever done. It wasn't like dying was something you avoided. No one had ever fully managed that.
Standing in something that could only be defined as an underwater fortress, it wasn't the fact that he was about to die that terrified Charlie. It was how quickly he accepted it; how quickly he ran to shut the door to save Desmond. There was no considering. Even regardless of the fact he'd accepted his impending doom onshore, while he was saying indirect goodbyes to Claire, Hurley, Aaron, and whoever else managed to suddenly cross his path. It was how quickly he realized that 'oh, this is it. This is the end,' while watching water pour through broken glass for just a second before leaping into action.
He wasn't giving up, after all.
He was giving hope.