A/n: Alright, I likely won't be putting up another ones of these for quite a while, but here's a new one for now – significantly less AU than the last one. Enjoy. :)

Gravestones and Graveyards

(Claire, Thomas. Mentions of all dead Losties.)

Sometimes when the weather was nice and sunny, and she was bored, Claire would walk to the cemetery a few blocks away and wander through it. She would read the names on the headstones, glance at the dates to see what the approximate age of the person was, she'd carefully read the various inscriptions and study the trinkets and flowers left on the soil in front of the headstone. She tried to imagine who these people were, what their life was like, and how they died.

She'd get home and Thomas would ask, "Hey, where've you been?"

She would reply that she had gone to the cemetery to walk around.

"Why do you that, Claire?" Thomas would say, shaking his head.

"Because it's relaxing."

"It's creepy. You're walking on a bunch of dead people."

"I don't walk on them, Thomas. I stay on the paths or go beside the graves."

"It's still bloody weird. I wish you wouldn't do that. Normal people don't do that."

So maybe I'm not normal. Claire thought angrily.

She didn't find it morbid or creepy, though. She found it interesting and indeed, relaxing. Perhaps that lady was a gorgeous model who got caught up in a scandal. Perhaps that man was an officer, killed in the line of duty. Perhaps they were both average people with average lives, who were anything but average to the friends and family they left behind.

Maybe the fascination with imagining these people's lives came from the fact that she didn't know them herself. If she had, she of course wouldn't need to imagine who they were. Walking among the gravestones, she decided that if she knew all the people buried here, she wouldn't want to walk among them.

On the island, however, that's not true. Well, it's partially true. There is a graveyard on the island, near the shore but far from the beach where they live. Claire often goes for long walks up and down the shoreline and more often than not, she visits the graveyard, with its wooden crosses sticking up out of the dirt and sand.

She can imagine the lives of a few people who were buried here because she never got to know them well enough. Joanna, Steve (or was it Scott?), Nikki, Pallo… A few more she got to know more and it makes her sad to think how they are gone and that she didn't get to know them ever better: Boone, Shannon, Ana, Libby, Eko…

There's one, though, that she wishes wasn't there. She wishes she could imagine the life of the person buried under that cross, without knowing all the little details, because that would mean she didn't know him and she never had to feel to feel the pain – the constant, aching, consuming pain – of losing him.

Her hand touches the cross, which is really just a symbol of his death in this case. The body was never recovered. She's not sure if that makes it harder or easier to believe that it really happened, and that Charlie – her Charlie, the love of her life – is really gone forever.

A/n: I guess it kind of didn't end up being of graveyards and gravestones so much as Claire losing Charlie, but oh well. Thanks for reading, and reviews are like oxygen. :)