belated help-haiti drabbles: set I
title: drowning on dry land
fandom: lost
character(s)/pairing(s): charlie, references to charlie/claire
rating: pg13
word count: 326
spoilers: season 3
summary: his chest feels tight and he can’t seem to stop spitting up strange, tinted water like the fifth chinese brother who swallowed the sea. follow-up to your teeth are black with wine as you place those lips on mine.
The house creaks like it’s alive and grumpy about it.
He can’t say exactly how he got here, or why the cluster of little yellow houses seems so goddamn familiar, but he is sure that questioning it would be useless. Questions with no one to answer with any semblance of authority are useless and only serve to eat away at him, like moths in his pockets, allowing time slip away and down his legs. He spends his days plucking at a guitar that feels like his, bears the same scratches and fits just right in his arms, but isn’t quite the same. The notes are all a touch too sour and tuning doesn’t seem to help, no matter how many minute twitches he forces on the pegs. His singing voice sounds odd, almost as if he’s underwater instead of sitting on the front porch or at the breakfast table. His chest feels tight and he can’t seem to stop spitting up strange, tinted water like the fifth Chinese brother who swallowed the sea.
He doesn’t like the look of water anymore, nor the way it feels slipping over his skin, nor the sound of it tickling the kitchen sink. He can’t hear the lapping of the ocean anymore, not like camp, but the clear equivalent poured into a tall glass mocks him from the counter, occasionally releasing a tiny bubble to make a break for the top and startling him every time.
And sometimes he can hear Claire. Her laugher is in the wind, within the hollow of his guitar; the finer strings of his guitar feel like her hair and he finds it harder and harder each day to shake his head and murmur that it’s all in his imagination. He’ll catch a glimpse of blonde out of the corner of his eye, but they always disappear through the trees or around the siding of another empty house. He eventually gives up searching.
He’s alone.
title: drink to forget the bottle
fandom: lost
character(s)/pairing(s): sayid/ana
rating: pg
word count: 330
spoilers: season 2
summary: she’s still got the bottle of vodka she must have swiped from sawyer gripped tight, and he thinks that fate must be cruel to make him the one to find her like this.
Sayid follows the sound of sloshing liquid and the light of a stray signal fire, rounding a tree, to find her. She’s a catastrophe; her hair a bird’s nest thrown over one shoulder, legs spread wide, shirt riding up over her hips. Her torch is staked precariously in the sandy dirt, and at this rate she’s liable to set the whole forest on fire.
Sayid sighs.
Ana’s eyes dart toward the sound, and it’s as if she’s noticing him without really seeing him. Like she’s seeing through him.
“I’m drunk.”
The way she forms the words, you’d think they tasted funny, like lemonade and coffee and too big for her tongue.
“So it would seem. Why are you so far from camp?”
Ana lazes into his side as he helps her stand, grabbing the wayward torch with his free hand. She’s still got the bottle of vodka she must have swiped from Sawyer gripped tight, and he thinks that fate must be cruel to make him the one to find her like this.
Her response is murmured. “Didn’ want nobody feeling sorry for me,” and he’s sure that if he wasn’t close enough to feel her breath on his neck he wouldn’t have caught it. He wants to bite out that the people at camp probably hate her too much for that, that she makes herself easy to despise. But he doesn’t. And she probably wouldn’t remember in the morning anyway.
They can see camp, close enough that he can make out the silhouette of her tent on the outskirts, by the time she speaks again.
“You know how you know you’re a bad person?” He pauses briefly at that before pulling the tarp back and gently depositing her half-unconscious body on her cot.
“How?” he questions curiously, stepping back after rolling her onto her side.
She’s slipping into a deep sleep when she answers her own query.
“When you’d do it all over again and don’t regret a thing.”
title: break my fingers on this phantom limb
fandom: lost
character(s)/pairing(s): claire/kate
rating: pg13
word count: 294
spoilers: season 4
summary: you're being haunted by her absence.
You’re being followed. At first you think it’s the police, surveilling your house to catch you in a second crime when the first didn’t stick. Then you wonder if your nightmares have come to fruition, that a billowing black smoke stole away inside your pockets, inside the hollow of your ears, and hitched a ride off the island and that now it’s watching you. But the first sounds paranoid and the second truly insane, so you try to ignore it, biting down the urge to scream when the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.
It’s a twist inside your gut when you lift Aaron into your arms, holding his little body close, that makes you realize it. The dream of her panicked shouts only confirms what you already knew: it’s Claire.
You’re being haunted by her absence. You can still feel the ghost of her hands on your shoulders, or your fingers curling over her forearms. You feel the hot press of her breath on your neck at night and her hip under your fingertips in the morning. You’d swear that the wind brushing the hairs from your forehead is her touch and you curl into yourself when you realize the whole thing sounds nuts. She is the empty place inside you, the phantom limb you didn’t even know you had until it was being cut from you. The pain might be imaginary, but so so real.
Her blue eyes peer at you from the darkness and it’s like a silver bullet striking you in the heart. It wrenches apart your ventricles and nestles deep down inside; it’ll itch until you find the magnet to tear it out. Until you make it right.
You have to go back to find her.
fandom: lost
character(s)/pairing(s): charlie, references to charlie/claire
rating: pg13
word count: 326
spoilers: season 3
summary: his chest feels tight and he can’t seem to stop spitting up strange, tinted water like the fifth chinese brother who swallowed the sea. follow-up to your teeth are black with wine as you place those lips on mine.
The house creaks like it’s alive and grumpy about it.
He can’t say exactly how he got here, or why the cluster of little yellow houses seems so goddamn familiar, but he is sure that questioning it would be useless. Questions with no one to answer with any semblance of authority are useless and only serve to eat away at him, like moths in his pockets, allowing time slip away and down his legs. He spends his days plucking at a guitar that feels like his, bears the same scratches and fits just right in his arms, but isn’t quite the same. The notes are all a touch too sour and tuning doesn’t seem to help, no matter how many minute twitches he forces on the pegs. His singing voice sounds odd, almost as if he’s underwater instead of sitting on the front porch or at the breakfast table. His chest feels tight and he can’t seem to stop spitting up strange, tinted water like the fifth Chinese brother who swallowed the sea.
He doesn’t like the look of water anymore, nor the way it feels slipping over his skin, nor the sound of it tickling the kitchen sink. He can’t hear the lapping of the ocean anymore, not like camp, but the clear equivalent poured into a tall glass mocks him from the counter, occasionally releasing a tiny bubble to make a break for the top and startling him every time.
And sometimes he can hear Claire. Her laugher is in the wind, within the hollow of his guitar; the finer strings of his guitar feel like her hair and he finds it harder and harder each day to shake his head and murmur that it’s all in his imagination. He’ll catch a glimpse of blonde out of the corner of his eye, but they always disappear through the trees or around the siding of another empty house. He eventually gives up searching.
He’s alone.
title: drink to forget the bottle
fandom: lost
character(s)/pairing(s): sayid/ana
rating: pg
word count: 330
spoilers: season 2
summary: she’s still got the bottle of vodka she must have swiped from sawyer gripped tight, and he thinks that fate must be cruel to make him the one to find her like this.
Sayid follows the sound of sloshing liquid and the light of a stray signal fire, rounding a tree, to find her. She’s a catastrophe; her hair a bird’s nest thrown over one shoulder, legs spread wide, shirt riding up over her hips. Her torch is staked precariously in the sandy dirt, and at this rate she’s liable to set the whole forest on fire.
Sayid sighs.
Ana’s eyes dart toward the sound, and it’s as if she’s noticing him without really seeing him. Like she’s seeing through him.
“I’m drunk.”
The way she forms the words, you’d think they tasted funny, like lemonade and coffee and too big for her tongue.
“So it would seem. Why are you so far from camp?”
Ana lazes into his side as he helps her stand, grabbing the wayward torch with his free hand. She’s still got the bottle of vodka she must have swiped from Sawyer gripped tight, and he thinks that fate must be cruel to make him the one to find her like this.
Her response is murmured. “Didn’ want nobody feeling sorry for me,” and he’s sure that if he wasn’t close enough to feel her breath on his neck he wouldn’t have caught it. He wants to bite out that the people at camp probably hate her too much for that, that she makes herself easy to despise. But he doesn’t. And she probably wouldn’t remember in the morning anyway.
They can see camp, close enough that he can make out the silhouette of her tent on the outskirts, by the time she speaks again.
“You know how you know you’re a bad person?” He pauses briefly at that before pulling the tarp back and gently depositing her half-unconscious body on her cot.
“How?” he questions curiously, stepping back after rolling her onto her side.
She’s slipping into a deep sleep when she answers her own query.
“When you’d do it all over again and don’t regret a thing.”
title: break my fingers on this phantom limb
fandom: lost
character(s)/pairing(s): claire/kate
rating: pg13
word count: 294
spoilers: season 4
summary: you're being haunted by her absence.
You’re being followed. At first you think it’s the police, surveilling your house to catch you in a second crime when the first didn’t stick. Then you wonder if your nightmares have come to fruition, that a billowing black smoke stole away inside your pockets, inside the hollow of your ears, and hitched a ride off the island and that now it’s watching you. But the first sounds paranoid and the second truly insane, so you try to ignore it, biting down the urge to scream when the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.
It’s a twist inside your gut when you lift Aaron into your arms, holding his little body close, that makes you realize it. The dream of her panicked shouts only confirms what you already knew: it’s Claire.
You’re being haunted by her absence. You can still feel the ghost of her hands on your shoulders, or your fingers curling over her forearms. You feel the hot press of her breath on your neck at night and her hip under your fingertips in the morning. You’d swear that the wind brushing the hairs from your forehead is her touch and you curl into yourself when you realize the whole thing sounds nuts. She is the empty place inside you, the phantom limb you didn’t even know you had until it was being cut from you. The pain might be imaginary, but so so real.
Her blue eyes peer at you from the darkness and it’s like a silver bullet striking you in the heart. It wrenches apart your ventricles and nestles deep down inside; it’ll itch until you find the magnet to tear it out. Until you make it right.
You have to go back to find her.