Recollection
Title: Recollection
Characters: Claire + rest of S1 ensemble
Rating: PG
Spoilers: 1.15 “Homecoming”
Disclaimer: Not mine.
lostsquee luau: For falafel_fiction, who requested the S1 ensemble.
Claire flips idly through the pages of her diary, skimming the contents. It’s not a flippant gesture; she wants to read her words, but the prospect of it all seems frightening and all too overwhelming.
Stopping at the next blank page, she gingerly writes what someone told her was the correct date and then scrawls: I don’t remember.
Only after she writes it down does she realize she’s comparing her cramped letters to the one on the page previously, just to see if it matches.
It’s such a disconnect. It’s without a doubt her handwriting, but these are not her memories. Everything she reads is brand new and she feels it both sharply and distantly, like a feeling of horrible foreboding de ja vu.
She’s carefully sorting out who is who among the crowd and what she used to think of them. Tries to figure out what she thinks of them now.
Her diary is filled with notes about Jack. She felt badly for him, thought he was wearing himself thin, running ragged, but she was relieved he was there. He was going to the caves and she thought maybe she should go.
Her dealings with the doctor so far seem pretty much in line with what she used to think. He has the distinct harried look of someone with way too much on his plate but she’s still glad he’s here. She doesn’t want to think about delivering this baby without him.
Her words follow Jack and Kate around like she had been watching a soap opera. She must have been bored because she has things jotted down like: Jack and Kate disappeared into the jungle for hours today. Three hours. Kate came back smiling, I wonder if they did something. An actual winking smiley face follows that.
Some time since she'd come here, she had seemingly regressed to high school.
She doesn’t know what’s changed, but these days Kate seems more interested in Sawyer, the scruffy man with the wicked smile who, speaking of high school, makes her feel like she did when the older boys smiled and winked at her from behind the wheels of their cars as they rolled by in the school parking lot. Sawyer makes her feel like he knows something about her that she doesn’t and he maybe wants to lean in really close and whisper the secret in her ear.
Her diary informs her that she didn’t like Sawyer very much, before. Kind of found him obnoxious. Maybe he’s settled down a bit since then. Or maybe she’s changed. Hard to know.
From what she can tell, she used to really like Hurley. It seems everyone else does too. Didn’t understand Sun and Jin because sometimes Jin seemed to be so kind and other times seemed like a complete asshole. That made her understand Sun even less.
She felt sympathetic for Michael, and a bit bothered and angered by him because she saw her own fear reflected in his face every day. She still sees it now. He’s trying to hard to be a father and he’s just…not very good. Claire wonders if she will be better. Scolds herself because she has no right to judge.
Michael isn’t the only one she used her diary to scorn, however. Shannon gets a ripping almost every day, like clockwork. Apparently a real bitch. The kind of girl she would have gossiped about with her girlfriends back home. She’s with Sayid all the time now and from what Claire’s seen, seems amiable enough.
Sayid doesn’t talk to her often - he seems quiet, intense, introspective. He looks at her though; she catches him watching her every now and again, a careful and concerned look in his eyes. She remembers how he took charge when Ethan was coming back for her, very strong and decisive. When someone - she’s not sure who…Scott? Steve? - mentions in passing that Sayid used to be a soldier, she isn’t surprised.
All the she writes about Boone, who she thinks is either Shannon’s stepbrother or ex-boyfriend (she keeps getting conflicting reports), is that she thinks he’s kinda cute. He must not have done a whole lot except almost drown a few days in, which she had noted with many exclamation points.
Boone’s not around now. He’s always off in the jungle with Locke.
Locke. There are a lot of question marks whenever she writes about him. A bit of awe, a bit of gratitude, a little confusion and fear. She used to respect him, feel safe around him, but now all she feels is unsettled whenever he’s near.
But Charlie trusts him, and that makes her worries ease. Charlie. She can almost see the smiles in the swoops and dips of her writing whenever he comes up, which is often. They must have been pals.
It’s a bit hard to reconcile the man who’d had coldly shot her kidnapper four times in the chest with the unfailingly kind man she paints in her journal, but somehow, deep down, she knows that Charlie is a good person. A good friend. Maybe more.
She smiles and thinks of peanut butter without really knowing why.