AUTHOR: Mnemosyne
Disclaimer: Not mine, yada, yada.
SUMMARY: "Claire calls him the Scarred Man, and he knows she means it as an endearment." Charlie muses on what it means to be a hero.
RATING: PG-13
CHARACTERS: Charlie/Claire, Charlie-POV
SPOILERS: Through the season finale, "Exodus."
NOTES:
There's no way I can apologize enough for being away from my beloved Lost fandom for so long. I just… making vague hand motions and weeping into a dainty lace handkerchief Just… Just read, yes? I'll try to make myself look less of a mess. drying face on Charlie's shirt sleeve and whimpering
Say it will be all right
And I shall believe…
Sheryl Crow, "I Shall Believe"
Claire calls him the Scarred Man, and he knows she means it as an endearment.
"The Nine of Wands," she tells him one day, as Aaron is sleeping quietly nearby. Always nearby; neither of them has let him get further than an arm's reach away since the kidnapping.
"The Nine of what now?" he asks, absently tuning his guitar.
"Nine of Wands. It's a card in the tarot deck." She's folding laundry, and it feels like home. Charlie thinks if he looks up at just the right angle he'll find himself in a suburban living room, waiting for Oprah to start. "It's a set of nine wands set up like pickets, being guarded by a battle-scarred soldier."
"Hey yeah?" he says, giving her a smile. "What's it mean?"
She shrugs, giggling a little as she neatly pats the creases in one of his t-shirts. "Rest. Rejuvenation. Continued Faith. It's about marshalling yourself before going back into battle." She smiles at him, smoothing a hand over one of Aaron's blankets before folding it crisply down the center. "It also means obstinacy, which suits you perfectly."
Charlie chuckles, letting his hands rest on his guitar. "Are you saying I'm pig-headed?"
"Obstinate. You don't back down without a fight." Her eyes soften, and she reaches out to touch his hand, as she's been doing since he brought Aaron back to her; she's touched him more in the intervening weeks than she'd touched him in the month leading up to that day. "It's what made you bring back my baby, Charlie. It's what gave you that scar. I wouldn't change you for anything."
Charlie gives her a smile in return. She squeezes his hand before letting go so she can focus on her laundry once again.
The Scarred Man. Somehow it doesn't make him feel rugged and daring. It makes him feel foolish. The way Claire says it, listeners would think he was some kind of battle-tested warrior, not a rock star junkie with track marks behind his knees who still gets the shakes if he thinks too hard about heroin. Hell, even thinking the word makes him flinch. He hasn't told her yet that he got the scar on his forehead from running blindly into an obvious trap, nor that he howled like a baby when Sayid cauterized the wound. Jack would have been more careful, he thinks sourly. Sayid told me not to do it. Even Sawyer's got more sense than to dive on something that blatant.
Don't be ridiculous, he tells himself. Claire would understand. She doesn't think you're bloody Superman.
But see, that's what scares him, because he's not entirely sure she doesn't.
There's something of hero worship in Claire's eyes these days. She'd never offered to do his laundry before; that's come on lately; ever since he brought back Aaron. At night she insists on getting dinner for the pair of them, and he notes that she always gives him a bigger portion than she keeps for herself. When she's fussing over getting Aaron settled he invariably ends up switching dishes with her, though Charlie's almost positive if she found out she'd only see it as more evidence of his worth: sacrificing his own welfare so that she can get more substantial nourishment. It would never occur to her that he's doing it because she's eating for two and he has no appetite anymore. Not since he picked up that bloody Virgin Mary.
Bloody Mary.
Heh, that's good.
Christ, he needs a drink.
That's what Claire just doesn't understand. He's no hero; he never has been. When Rousseau took Aaron it was as much his fault for leaving the two women alone together as it was Danielle's fault for kidnapping the boy in the first place. Charlie had seen she was a few cards short of a deck, yet he'd run off like a rabbit to do her bidding. He should have insisted Claire go with him; better yet, he should have taken Danielle along. Yes, that would have been better. If she was so desperate to chat with Sayid, well, he'd show her the way, then get back to the business of getting Claire and Turniphead packed for the trip to the caves. Clean. Neat. Turniphead would have been safe and he wouldn't have become Claire's Scarred Man.
Coulda shoulda woulda…
Charlie likes to make lists to keep his frenetic thoughts in check, and lately he's been making a list of Ways Claire Thinks I'm a Hero. At the top of the list is Rescuing baby Aaron; that's the one that cemented him in her eyes. Just below that is Killing Ethan. That one scared her at first, but she's warmed up to him since then, which is tied directly into number three on the list, She remembers peanut butter. Perhaps nothing heroic, but to an amnesiac a single hazy memory is better than a year's worth of fresh experience.
Sometimes, at night, when she's sleeping nearby and he's sitting up by the fire, he wonders when she'll remember number four: I died for her.
Will she remember the way his feet kicked in the air, or how his hands scrabbled at the vines? Will she remember screaming? Will she remember Ethan dragging her away as Charlie dangled helplessly behind them, eyes burning and bulging behind his blindfold as she disappeared into the brush? He can't remember if he was crying at the time; he hopes he wasn't. That's not very heroic, crying as the rope chokes the life out of you. He thinks he prayed for the weight to snap his neck and end it all quickly, but of course that couldn't happen without a quick fall and a sharp jerk. Will she remember him hanging there, dying for her?
Will she remember?
Does he want her to?
This is too much for him. He can't handle being a hero. When you're a hero people expect things of you. They expect you to know what to do in any situation. They expect you to be Jack. Charlie's not Jack; he wouldn't even know where to begin. Charlie's just a druggie has-been with delusions of grandeur, and the fact that he knows they're delusions of grandeur just makes the whole situation more pathetic.
What will he do if something happens to Claire or the baby again and he can't help? That scares him more than anything, because truth be told the only thing keeping him from smashing that little Madonna open on the nearest rock is the way Claire looks at him when he sings Aaron lullabies. He doesn't know what he'd do if she stopped looking at him like that; or worse yet, if she started looking at him with loathing. Charlie knows he's not a hero, but so long as Claire doesn't know, he can go on pretending he's worth more than gum on the sole of her shoe. Maybe if he lets himself believe the lie long enough it will start to become the truth; maybe he'll start believing he really can do anything. Would it still be a lie then, if he believed it, too? Could he somehow fake others into believing it as well? Was there such a thing as belief-driven reality? After all, if everyone on the island believed he was a good guy in a white Stetson with pearl handled revolvers, then he could become that person. He'd perfected the art of metamorphosis over the years, in his unceasing quest to get a hit. If the target needed to be schmoozed, he could be a silver-tongued angel; if they needed to be bullied, he could be a rat bastard. It was just a matter of reading the situation and patterning his mannerisms accordingly.
Only… the problem is… Claire's not just a target. Claire's Claire. And if something goes wrong with his act and she gets hurt…
Whenever he gets to this point in the thought process, he envisions a house of cards crumbling in slow motion, tossed by a gust of wind from an unseen doorway. Because that's all it is: a house of cards, built on straw, using spit for glue. It may look solid as brick, but one sideways glance from a wolf at the door and the whole thing falls apart, and this damn island is full to the brim with wolves.
"Charlie?"
He looks up, realizing too late he's been brooding. Claire has special radar that can tell when he's brooding anywhere within a sixty foot radius. "Hmm?"
"Are you all right? You haven't hummed a single note for the past minute or so."
He gives her a lazy smile, feeling his tongue turn to silver as he speaks. "Fine, luv. Just got a tricky lyric I'm trying to write in my head."
"Can I help?"
"Got a rhyme for ninja?"
She laughs, dropping a final pair of sweatpants on her laundry pile. "No."
"Then I'm afraid not, luv. But thank you for offering." He winks and strums his guitar in amiable fashion, waiting for her answering giggle before letting himself lapse into pensive silence once more.
That was a close one. He almost spilled it there. Almost asked her to knock three times on his chest to verify that he is, in fact, as hollow as a wicker man. No warm, heroic tendencies filling up the cockles of this heart; just blind terror that one day Claire is going to see him for who he really is.
Charlie watches her start to sort through the pile of laundry, separating his from hers and stacking each piece neatly by its appropriate bedroll. That was how he knew she'd warmed up to him: when she asked him to sleep near her and Aaron, rather than merely close by. He never thought he'd dread sleeping near Claire, but he's slept uneasily ever since then, knowing she wakes up in the night to watch him with soft, thoughtful eyes as she tries to unravel his secrets. No doubt she thinks he's deep, nuanced, and emotionally vulnerable, like all the best romance novel heroes. She'd never believe he was a sniveling junkie who'd rather hide in a hole than ever have to kill another man for her; than ever have to die for her again.
That's why he keeps that statuette always close at hand. He doesn't know how to handle this hero thing, but he remembers that the heroin always made him feel invincible, and aren't all the best heroes invincible? That's what makes them heroes. They take the punches and bounce right back.
"It's about marshalling yourself before going back into battle."
Which battle then? The one where he fights to stay off the junk, or the one where he struggles to find good hiding places so he can snort in peace? The cynics are right -- you can make those cards mean anything you want them to mean.
Claire's moving her mouth silently as she sorts, and Charlie realizes with a jolt of amused awe that she's trying to find a rhyme for ninja.
How the hell is he supposed to be human in front of this woman?
There may be no I in team but there's a hero in heroin, and Charlie's not convinced it's coincidence.
THE END