Who Knows Best
Title: Who Knows Best
Characters: Kate, Charlie, Claire
Rating: PG
Spoilers: 4.13/14 "There's No Place Like Home"
Disclaimer: Not mine.
lostsquee luau: For toestastegood, who requested Charlie.
Claire may haunt her dreams at night, but in the waking hours of the day, it's Charlie that she sees.
Kate doesn't tell a living soul about either. Both visions terrify her - not only for what they say but for what they mean.
She's either going crazy, just like Hurley, just like Jack...
Or they're the ones who've been sane all along and she's simply been wrong.
It gets to the point where she's terrified to go to sleep and too scared to be awake.
Claire tells her: Don't you dare take him back.
Charlie tells her the opposite. You have to go back. You have to take him back.
You're not supposed to raise him.
Her heart tells her that Claire's voice is the voice of reason.
Her mind tells her that her heart is wrong. She can feel it in her bones, and the sinking, twisting feeling in her stomach only grows worse with every passing day.
Every morning she looks at her reflection in the mirror and tells herself that this is how it is supposed to be. Aaron is supposed to be hers. She will keep him safe, love him as her own. He saved her; she is supposed to save him.
If you want to help him, take him back. Charlie says from behind her but by the time she whirls around, there is nothing but air in the place that he stood.
Her thoughts race back to the island and Charlie and Claire's tumultuous back and forth over his place in her child's life.
Charlie was not his father. Any more than she is really Aaron's mother.
It makes Kate think of her own life. Diane, Wayne, Sam.
Her own mother never knew best. Never. The only person she ever trusted was the man who was not her father.
Only him.
Every night, against her will, she starts to trust Claire less and less and every morning she starts listening to Charlie more and more. He keeps coming to her until Kate can't deny it anymore.
When she calls Jack, her voice and her hands shaking and Aaron crying in her arms, she doesn't have to say anything.