Disclaimer: Don't own Lost. Don't sue.
Spoiler: Yes, if you've been living under a rock or Up to All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues.
A/N: Weird Charlie fic, because I haven't written him in a while. Charlie's PoV, second person, right after Claire's abduction (and y'know, his death…)
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You'd think after dying once everything else would be secondary.
It isn't.
You find that dying half way (for even dying was too big a task for you, it would seem) has not excused you from or made pointless any of the things necessarily needed to survive. You must still drink, eat, and sleep. You are still expected to talk and listen and help with any work maintaining to the survival of the island. Your bones still ache with withdrawal and your heart hurts with every breath that has been granted in this second chance of yours.
Dying has not excused you from anything, except normal company for you find few people willing to meet you eyes now, even when they look at you.
People mince their words around you now and you find that you've never wanted to beat anything to a bloody pulp as badly as you do the bloke who lets Claire's name slip and then looks uncomfortable. He after all is not the one who failed her.
No that, like dying half way, is an accomplishment that belongs solely to you at the moment.
You'd think after dying once everything else would be secondary. The terror of nightmares would be nothing, the dark would no longer frighten you, the heaviness of your bones and the guilt in your heart would be nothing more than mortal things that time would deal away with in the end.
But the mortality of things, which is suddenly all the more apparent to you, provides no comfort and too often you find yourself thinking that despite God's infallibility, He may have made a mistake in bringing you back.
You're afraid now and you don't know what it is you're afraid of. You're not sure what drives you to sleeplessness or pain but its there, lingering like the shadow of death itself. It's not death that frightens you, you decide, but rather the sameness of it all. The new found knowledge that nothing is equal to death but nothing is less than death either.
Nothing is secondary to anything in Life. Not Claire or sleep or guilt or pain, all of it is thrown about on the same bloody plain and man is meant to simply muddle around in it until time itself stopped.
The trick to Life, you decide one afternoon, is distraction, so as to keep your mind occupied while you wait for the next, and hopefully final, end.
The water laps at the shores and the sand gives way to water and you think that somewhere in the jungle Claire and her baby are lost and the guilt flares up at the thought.
You decide that will be your distraction.
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End
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Feedback is Love
