Charlie stalked away, hands in his pockets. He wished he had those drugs. Now was an ideal time to get stoned. How could she forget him? His eyes fell to his torn shoes, their checkerboard pattern stunning his stinging eyes.

He lost track of time. All he knew was that he had to get as far from that place as he possibly could. How could this have happened to him? Why did everything always, always happen to him? He hated his life. He stared down at his dirty hands, at the tan-line that the tape had caused, a little pale ring around each of the fingers on his left hand, three of them. One piece of tape was left. He glared at it, and it just stared back at him, a big, blatant, "L", as if it were taunting him, "Loser!"

"Who asked you!" he shouted, tearing at the rotten piece of tape with soiled and cracked fingernails, "Goddamn it! Who asked you!" He brought the finger frantically to his mouth and began shredding the tape with his teeth. He heard it rip, almost like cloth, as it fought to stay on. "Get off!" he shouted, "I am not a loser! I AM NOT A BLOODY LOSER!" He tore at it more fiercely with his teeth, and finally the defiant, sarcastic letter fluttered in pieces to the ground. Charlie stared hard at it, panting, trying to calm himself down. "I," he panted, pointing at the scrap of tape, "am not a bloody –"

Charlie heard a muffled rustling, and then a dull thump, thump, thump,as of boots on damp clay. He turned, but saw no one. The first thought that crossed his mind was the Creature. Could it be? – No, the Creature was much noisier than that.

"Locke?" he called. No answer came, but the footsteps stopped. Charlie listened hard, but whoever – or whatever – it was, had stopped advancing.

"Dumbass," he scolded himself, "you can't hear Locke when he's hunting."

Boone, then?

No, Boone and Locke were attached at the hip. "And the lips," Charlie allowed himself a dirty little joke but his laughter was suppressed and nervous. If it wasn't Locke, Boone, or the Creature, then who – or what – was it?

The French lady?

"Danielle?" called Charlie. A muffled shuffle was audible – but this time from the opposite direction of the first sound. "Danielle?" Charlie panicked, spinning. "Bonjour, um..." – Damn him for taking Spanish! "Danielle," he called, "I come in... peace, and... um... I didn't mean to..."

He stopped. The dull thump... thump... thump... had returned. Charlie listened. It was coming from behind him, and it was coming closer. He hesitated, and then asked one last time, "Danielle?"

"Bonjour," mocked a very masculine voice.

Paralysis set in. He knew that voice. He wanted to run. He needed to run. But the paralysis kept him fixed to the spot. The feeling of being capable of nothing, the inability to move, made withdrawal almost enviable. He would much rather have been twitching and ticking at grotesque, uneven intervals than just standing there, unable to react. Finally his mind gave him some control, and he turned.

The face was the same: the curved nose, the crooked mouth, the sunken cheeks, the cold black eyes. But now that ominous profile that haunted his every waking moment and his nighttime dreams was pockmarked with bloody gashes running the length of the concave cheeks, a perfect set of four, as if he had been attacked by a polar bear, or a wild cat – or a woman.

Claire.

Ethan smiled at his shock, one deadly hand in a tattered pocket, the other hanging by his side, ready to strike. "I thought I hanged you," Ethan commented.

Charlie hesitated, the words fumbled by his numb lips, "Y-y-you d-did." He then repeated it for good measure, with just as much fear in his voice, "You did."

"And yet here you are, right as rain." Ethan went on conversation-like, unmoving, unblinking.

"Y-yeah," agreed Charlie, not sure what to say, licking his dry lips. There was no way this man could be human. No human could converse death and murder with the airi-ness of discussing the weather unless they were maniacally twisted, which Charlie knew this man must be.

"How odd." Ethan shook his head unblinkingly, his gaze never leaving Charlie's face. "How very odd. – But of course, I suppose you had the good doctor on your side, didn't you?" He blinked for the first time and a new glaze of cold reflection shimmered in his sunken eyes. The hand not in the pocket had begun to move, as if of its own accord, as he stared at Charlie, and the rusty blood on his face began to shine as if it pulsed anew.

Charlie swallowed, unable to speak, and nodded, straining every muscle in his locked neck. His heart raced faster with every nod, as if his head were drawing the blood from the well of his heart, forcing it to pump faster to refill the emptiness that Claire had caused it.

"Charlie," said Ethan, smiling wickedly, almost as if he were taunting the young man. Suddenly, in a flash of movement too quick for Charlie to catch, Ethan's hand was around his neck, pinning him to a tree. Charlie gave a gasp of surprise, his hands flayed out like spiders on the wind – muddy, rusty spiders that smelt of grass, and fruit, and ash, and blood, and heroin. The spiders at once attached themselves to the most sensible perch by Charlie's sides on the trunk. Ethan was no longer smiling, and his eyes were so empty and cold that Charlie felt he could easily have fit a finger through one of the gaping holes – and instantly gotten frostbite.

"You're supposed to be dead." Ethan said in a low voice, almost a canine growl. "I tried to kill you so you couldn't talk. But it's too late for that, isn't it? ISN'T IT!" He repeated the question forcefully before Charlie had a chance to answer, shaking him hard until he could almost hear the reduced young man's bones rattling. Charlie choked, but no tears came, and shook his head. "LIAR!" screamed Ethan, now beginning to gain what could be called almost human qualities. He shook Charlie harder, but he just shook his head more vigorously.

"I told them nothing!" he sobbed, "I can't remember anything!"

Ethan was silent, staring at the wreck of what was once a proud Rock God, riding a high hobby-horse on top of the world, who now took Tylenol instead of heroin and who could hardly remember the chorus of his own songs. Ethan tightened his grip around the man's throat and reveled in the ka-choke, ka-choke that issued from Charlie's mouth like an old engine trying to start. "You bring her back to me," Ethan growled in a low voice, bringing their faces close together threateningly, listening to Charlie's desperate choking, "or I will kill one of them. And this time, I won't screw up."

He dropped Charlie, and the little Rock God fell in a crumpled heap at the roots of the tree, holding his throat and coughing. When he looked up, Ethan was gone.