Scars & Stories

…

Summary: Birthday fic for Jemmalynette. Set in season 2. While on their trip to find out whether Henry Gale is lying or not, Ana notices the bruises around Charlie's neck, and the two of them end up swapping stories about their physical and emotional scars.

…

She couldn't sleep.

She'd never been an insomniac before, although she remembered the nights after she'd been shot hadn't exactly been spent sleeping away her physical and emotional agony. Her way of dealing with everything had been to drink until she felt numb, and then pass out when she went past her individual limit. It wasn't a perfect system, sure, but it had kept her demons temporarily at bay.

Ana didn't like the jungle at all. It messed with her head, and, honestly, she couldn't let her guard down here. Not that she could let it down anywhere, mind you, but at least in the city she knew what she was up against, whereas here, anything seemed to go. This place defied all logic and rational thought, and she hated it.

Using a stick to try and keep the last of the fire going, she cast a suspicious glance around. Sayid was now trying to catch up on some sleep after she'd offered to take over his watch, and truthfully their somewhat nice conversation had, if anything, made her even more suspicious that he might try and get revenge while they were out here. She wouldn't blame him, if she was honest, and she couldn't get the image out of her mind of that god-awful moment her finger had pulled back the trigger, launching a bullet straight into the chest of a woman who barely looked older than twenty four.

She prodded the fire fiercely, biting back the urge to scream at the darkness, her entire focus being on keeping the warmth going for as long it could sustain. Opposite her, the sleeping figure stirred, and she glanced briefly at him, studying him for the briefest of moments before realising the fire was more interesting. She didn't know why this Charlie guy had even signed up for this trip, other than a clearly desperate need to feel useful. So far, he'd rubbed her up the wrong way, and she was pretty sure she'd dated guys like him; cocky, insecure men with the need to fix any tense situation with humour. Oh, she was sure he had heart and all that crap, but she'd barely exchanged two words with him before knowing instinctively he didn't trust her, and therefore wasn't worth getting to know.

Just as this particular thought came into her mind, however, he bolted up, sweating heavily, and the glow of the fire highlighted a dark mark around his neck which she couldn't help but stare at. He seemed to possess a necklace of dark bruises, which, although faded, still looked fierce in intensity, and she knew there had to be an interesting story in there, and ordinarily she wouldn't have cared to know it but, well, she wasn't getting any sleep tonight, and even she despised awkward silences.

"Bad dream?" she couldn't help but note with the faintest sneer in her voice which, she'd been told, seemed to come with her voice anyway. Lovely.

Charlie gave her a dirty look she knew she'd probably earned, and proceeded to shove his hands in front of the fire, one hand occasionally sneaking up to massage his neck, and she managed to connect the dots and work out that whatever he'd been freaking out about inside his mind had to be connected to the mark on his neck.

Ana suddenly felt disgusted that her police training skills seemed to have followed her here, and so she quickly pushed away her curiosity, flinching at every little sound the jungle seemed to emit. She pushed back a strand of her hair from her eyes, unable to suppress a deep yawn, which Charlie didn't miss.

"I'm up now, so you can get some rest if you want," he offered, without a trace of warmth in his voice.

She snorted.

"Think I trust you enough to keep watch over us? Not after that childish display earlier."

He smirked.

"What? I had to make sure you weren't coming onto me. Might've ruined the nice little dynamic we three have going on here."

She almost smiled at that, but caught herself just in time.

"Never trust a rock star to do a cop's job," she quipped, before catching his look of surprise. "What? You think I don't know who you are? I know your band."

"I never would've guessed someone like you would've had such good taste in music," Charlie offered, with a snide smile she didn't care for.

"I said I knew your band, not that I liked them," she cut across him coldly, continuing to jab at the fire, even though it was dying.

"Ouch," he responded, covering the area where his heart was, mocking being pained by that remark. "Well aren't you the sweetest character I've ever met."

She allowed herself to smirk at that.

There was a momentary silence that fell between them; it felt as awkward as hell, so she searched for a different topic of conversation that wasn't going to offend one or the other, but seeing how she knew next to nothing about the guy, she wasn't having much luck finding some common ground between them.

For a few moments, all the sounds they heard consisted of the crackling of the fire, the wind whipping through the trees, and the discomforting imitating echoes of the whispers which had caused Ana to panic and fire blindly into the trees. She fidgeted uncomfortably at the reminder, wishing this combination of fear and vulnerability stopped coming together as a pair. She'd rather have the fear but also the emotional equipment to handle the fear to boot, not one or the other.

"You think we're gonna find Henry's wife grave out there?" Charlie suddenly murmured, looking intensely at the darkness, his thoughts elsewhere.

She shrugged.

"Not a clue. If he's lying, at least we'll know. I don't trust him, but at the same time I don't get why he'd send us out here if he wasn't confident there was something to find."

"Might be a trap. Wouldn't be the first time one of those sneaky Other bastards pulled some con like that," Charlie muttered, and a deep flush of humiliation coloured his cheeks, once again tugging at her curiosity strings.

"I take it you've had a run in with them too," she asked, for the first time sensing they might just have had some common ground between them. "Who did they take out of your camp? I never really got that out of Jack."

There was a long pause before Charlie answered, and she could tell it took everything he had not to clam up and just pretend the question didn't need an answer, and she felt almost...empathetic. She knew that feeling; hell, she owned that feeling.

"They killed a guy called Scott," he eventually answered. "Or it might've been Steve. I can't remember. Before that, we had a guy infiltrate our camp. Name was Ethan. Total and utter wanker, if you ask me."

Again, Ana almost had to smile at that. There was a strange twang to Charlie's accent that meant the word wanker came out quite strong, very bitter. She couldn't argue with the sentiment; the Others were screwed up, twisted, psychotic people who chose to be cowards and sneak off with their victims in the dead of night, without giving them chance to fight back, and so anybody who still remembered that they were the enemies, never to be trusted at all, automatically earned themselves a fraction of her respect.

"Who did he take?" she asked, finding she had to prompt Charlie to continue, mostly because even in the darkness she could tell his focus had shifted, his attention nailed to a specific memory, one that evidently gave him pain of some sort.

"Claire," he managed to get out, although that one name seemed to cause him to scrunch up his face with misery, and she remembered that this was the guy who'd ran off with the baby and tried to drown it, and because of her own life experiences, she remembered feeling absolutely disgusted with him, until she'd recalled that this island could drive you to desperate lengths, and, really, she had no place judging anybody else's actions.

"She the Australian with the baby?"

"Yep."

Ana nodded. "You hittin' that?"

Charlie almost choked.

"Say what?"

She threw up her arms in mock despair.

"Geez. You and Jack are exactly the same. I know it's probably not appropriate, given the current circumstances, but the fact none of you have engaged in hot beach sex is, frankly, beyond disturbing."

This comment emitted a rare laugh from Charlie, and she smirked to herself, not quite sure why this pleased her. Maybe it was nice to be around someone who could smile and laugh, although to be fair, nobody had much reason to do either nowadays, and this thought sobered her up.

"You wanna tell me how you got that bruise on your neck?" she asked, deciding to bite the bullet and get the story out of him.

He grimaced.

"Not much to say. Ethan tried to make a grab for Claire. I tried to stop him. Some of his thuggish friends came to help, and they knocked me out. Next thing I know, I'm alone, and they're talking about how to get rid of me because I wasn't what they wanted." He shrugged, chucking a random twig into the still dying fire. "They knocked me out, strung me up from a tree, and if it weren't for Jack and Kate, I would be six feet under by now."

She nodded, accepting this explanation, but she couldn't help feeling a surge of anger for how sadistic the Others were. She knew already they were intelligent cowards with a ruthless side, but now she could add sadistic and heartless to the list.

"Your turn," Charlie said lazily, clearly stabbing for a change in the subject.

She stared coldly at him.

"My turn for what?"

"Your turn to explain your scar," he said, in a tone that might as well have said isn't it obvious?

"I don't have a scar."

"Uh-huh. So the reason you keep touching a certain part of your stomach when you think no one is looking is what, a superstition?"

"Yep. I touch it to keep the noses of annoying guys like you from poking into my business," she snapped, clamming up instinctively.

"Doesn't really work then," he taunted, "given the fact I'm prying now."

"Hm, not hard to see why everyone's avoiding you like the plague," she sneered back, "given your annoying tendency to bother everyone with irritating questions about things that have nothing to do with you."

They exchanged a hefty glare, and fall into a silence that, if possible, was even more awkward than before. Ana gave him a sidelong glance, noticing the fact his fingers still occasionally clawed at his neck, as if trying to remove an invisible noose, and she felt her shoulders slump in the only outward sign of sympathy she would ever show.

"Sorry," she muttered, when the silence threatened to drive her crazy. "That last remark was out of line. In case you haven't noticed, I'm not a people person."

"No, you're not," he agreed, but his tone wasn't harsh, merely flat, as though all the emotion had been drained out of him. "But I don't think I'm so good around people at the moment either."

She lifted her head a fraction, squinting, her fingers tapping restlessly against the ground, creating a rhythm that almost felt soothing to her.

"You know," she said slowly, her thoughts running off her tongue in a way that meant she couldn't control them, "you shouldn't be so quick to spill the secrets that haunt you. People can use that stuff against you."

"Mm..." Charlie was nearly asleep, judging by the sudden lull to his voice. "But if you don't let people in, if you don't trust someone, who's gonna get your back when you need it? Let me tell you, being lonely is one thing, being alone is a whole other thing."

"Sounds the same to me."

"Not really." He yawned. "You have such a cynical way of looking at the world. It's kind of sad."

"Maybe so, but it's kept me alive hasn't it?" she challenged.

"True, but it's not made you happy," he retorted, starting to slump downwards. "Mind you, I'm not one to judge, seeing how right now I seem to have been kicked out Happy Town, wandering somewhere between the Hills of Misfortune and the Valley of Misery."

"You don't seem miserable to me," she said, almost thoughtful.

He opened one eye.

"You're not the only who wears a mask to hide what they really feel. Difference between me and you is, I'm better at hiding it. You're a bloody open book."

"What a load of crap," Ana sneered, losing the momentary warmth she'd possessed.

But she began to wonder all the same, wondering whether keeping her distance, being moody and dispassionate on the days she didn't try to mingle, and then on the days she did, trying too damn hard to pretend she was anything other than the outsider she was, really was as revealing as it sounded. Maybe as crazy as it sounded, trying to be invisible just made her stand out all the more, which was all kinds of screwed up.

She couldn't suppress a yawn, and she realised she was more tired than she'd perhaps realised, but she had to keep herself awake. As well as the obvious reason that she didn't want to let down her guard when she still didn't fully trust her companions would be quick enough to respond if something happened, Ana hated the fact that every time she closed her eyes, she saw a gun being fired, and she never knew which traumatising memory this was associated with, so she always made sure to wake herself before she found out.

She flinched as something landed across her lap, and she gazed suspiciously at what had been thrown at her, her eyes narrowing slightly as she identified it as the blanket Charlie had possessed (she hadn't had the forethought to bring anything like that before, and now she came to think of it, she did feel really cold).

"What's this?" she demanded roughly.

"A blanket," Charlie offered, his tone laced with humour. "It's to keep you warm. You need sleep. I'm offering to take the next watch."

"No. I'm not tired. I can handle this," she said determinedly.

"Stop being a bloody martyr and take the damn offer," Charlie growled, visibly frustrated. "Let me be useful at least once this trip, okay?"

Ana gave him a sidelong glance, trying to determine the sincerity in the offer, and, after a long pause, she reluctantly gripped the blanket with her hands and gave him a curt nod in thanks, not really the kind of person to say anything more than she absolutely had to.

She didn't lie down right away though. Instead, her burning eyes rested on Charlie, and she briefly contemplated telling him her darkest secret, before going against it. That secret of hers would go to her grave, and she couldn't help thinking about those children she'd promised to get home to their mother, and a deep ache emerged in her stomach.

She wasn't a good person; she was rash, angry, embittered by events she still couldn't let go. She didn't dare let anybody get too close to her, and she preferred to be alone, but underneath she knew the reason behind it all was that the one moment she'd been happy, when she'd had people in her life to love and cherish with her entire heart, one moment of vulnerability had cost her everything, and so it had been easier to simply shut off her emotions altogether. Why feel anything when the alternative was to feel every emotion under the sun, including the ones that hurt like hell like pain and devastation?

But tonight, with two different people, she'd come close to letting her guard down. She'd apologised to Sayid, and she'd had an unexpected scolding from a man who perhaps knew just as much as she did about what it was like to have a memory scar you both physically and emotionally so much it affected every move you made from thereon in, affected the way you viewed the world forever.

Ana shook her head, uncomfortable with her own thoughts. She didn't get close to people, not anymore, and the fact tonight had opened her eyes a little to the individual hells people could lock themselves in just because they felt like they deserved to be burned reminded her she wasn't alone in grieving something that she couldn't change, and , honestly, she hated that.

It's always easy to believe you're suffering more than anybody else has suffered before, and it's easier still believing you deserve to suffer, and this was the crux of the problem for Ana. It was a vicious circle, whereby she'd contemplate her life, and then hate herself for the choices she'd made, and then hate herself more for hosting her own pity party, and then would try go back to thinking about something other than the utter tragedy that was her life, and this would bring her right back to thinking about her life again, thus setting off the circle again.

"You know, when the Others attacked our camp, they took a couple of kids I promised I'd get home to their mom," she spoke, her husky voice breaking the silence. "I couldn't save them. That kills me every day, and it's why I don't try and get involved so much with your camp. The closer you get to people, the more likely you are to lose them, and there's only so much hurt a human being is supposed to take."

She stabbed at the ground with a spare stick lying around, her lips pushed so tightly together, they blurred into one indistinct line.

"True," Charlie spoke, sounding inexplicably haunted. "But what's the alternative? Living alone forever? Nah. I couldn't live that way."

I live that way already, she thought, but didn't say anything.

What would be the point in trying to make someone understand the way she thought? It would be like trying to explain sight to a person born blind; there was only so much you describe before you realised the fact you lived in two different worlds was always going to present a barrier, no matter what you did to try and cross it.

She lay down, curled up by the fire, clinging to the last of the heat as she fell into an uneasy sleep. No matter what the outcome of tomorrow was, they would get answers, and she had to be satisfied with that.

But given the topic of conversation she'd shared with both Sayid and Charlie tonight, Ana began to wonder whether the confirmation of Henry being an Other was going to raise more issues than it solved, and thought the logical side of her knew that either way she needed to protect Henry from the onslaught of angry people desperate for justice, a part of her knew should her, Sayid and Charlie prove without a doubt he was lying, she would be at the front of the mob, determined to fulfil the only promise in her entire life she'd been entrusted to keep.