Dedicated to Dom Monaghan, who made me love Charlie so much that I cry for him every time.
The Five Stages
One: Denial
Charlie sat on a stretch of sand a fair distance down the beach from camp, staring distantly out at the calm ocean as though not really seeing it. A cool breeze was blowing, tugging gently at his hair, as he wrapped his arms around his knees, thinking.
It was almost five a.m., and the sun was just visible on the horizon, staining the eastern sky a soft, pastel pink. This was a picture-perfect scene, and normally Charlie would have taken time to bask in the wonder of it, a rare piece of quiet beauty to break the pattern of chaos, but not today; there was far too much weighing on his mind. He kept recalling the previous night, kept replaying Desmond's words over and over in his head: 'No matter what I try to do... You're gonna die, Charlie...' He'd been pondering that conversation, and its implications, all through the night, having been unable to fall asleep due to his inner turmoil. Predicting the future was impossible, he kept telling himself. Desmond couldn't have seen Charlie die, because that would be...well, impossible. Completely impossible. He was a fool for ever believing the man in the first place; there was no way that Desmond could be right. Charlie was fine, he was going to be fine.
No matter how many times he thought these things, he never managed to convince himself.
But denying it was all he could really do. Saying that it wasn't true wouldn't make it so, and Charlie knew this - plus, Desmond's strange, inexplicable psychic powers hadn't been wrong yet - but prolonging the moment when he finally accepted the facts, no matter how unrealistic they seemed, was the only way he could stop himself from losing his mind. If Charlie started to believe Desmond's ominous warning, then he'd end up seeing death everywhere, unable to go anywhere or do anything for fear that he'd be killed.
Head pounding as he continued to watch the rippling water before him, Charlie closed his eyes and tried to forget everything that had happened last night. It wasn't real, he insisted to himself. There's no way.
At that moment, denial was all he had.