fic: the collection box is full (lost)
the collection box is full
lost. they are all making mistakes in the name of things unreal, unclear; men die and wander as ghosts and they are all stupid enough to look for an escape. claire, claire/desmond. 1659 words. rated r. spoilers through 4.02.
i tried to learn your language
but fell asleep half-undressed
unrecognizable to myself
(broken harp; pj harvey)
She imagines if she ever leaves here she will come to keep goldfish swimming in glass.
She can’t explain it. The idea of confined spaces and clear limits and transparency are all finding a special place within her.
She never thought she would come to revel in the idea of being trapped.
Claire is making mistakes here, fighting for swallows and sparrows and little things that can fly and allowing missteps to be taken if only out of memory for the dead, and come on now, dear: that’s how they all got there in the first place, eh? Heroism and bravery and tightly clenched fists can only take you so far before the bottom will give out, before things like luck unravel in the name of fate.
There is Aaron now to think of; too bad her intentions have slipped down to the blind, the misdirected and the misfired.
Pretty little dead boys haunt the island in style, a shuffle of feet and sand spray, no footprints left behind.
Sometimes she forgets these things - that when people go they’re never coming back. In the past there had been Mother, but here there is Boone, Eko and Charlie, all slipped away, tucked out of reach.
There used to be quiet thoughts from her, at first. When the island was still fresh and new and the crash of the waves held some kind of peace, she had been convinced they were dead. She was sure it was the afterlife, or maybe, if she wants to be cute here, the waiting room of the afterlife.
Time dragged on, in funny ways, the sea stretching closer and closer up the beach, towards her. People died, just as it always were. People died.
Loneliness now tries, hard.
What she really is attempting here is to let quiet fury take its place.
She is coming around to ideas of specialization, that they each have a role here to play. Locke as shaman and Desmond as the lost prophet, Charlie the martyr sunk at sea.
It makes her question her own place, of course. This is to be expected. What is not to be expected are the creeping tendrils of fear that try to wrap and hold as her mind even ventures along these lines.
Perhaps, she will think, and immediately regret it, I have already served mine.
Aaron will claw quietly at her arms and she will hold him even tighter, swaddling clothes and baby cradles.
When the first bullets shatter and this girl goes down with the weight and the speed of them, Claire forgets to breathe.
It is a moment of pure panic - Ben with the gun, Locke’s look of confusion, the blood on Ben’s face, the girl on the ground, the violence laced through Sawyer, through Ben, through Locke, through them all, a sickening, spreading web of blood and death and girls that fall silent to the ground.
Her own mouth opens in a silent “O” but the words do not escape. And there are words, too many of them, lending themselves to the already consuming terror of the jungle, words like I shouldn’t be here, I made a mistake, I shouldn’t have followed them, I should have stayed with them, I should have stayed with him -
Where’s Desmond? I have to find Desmond.
The final thought leaves her ill at ease. Aaron is heavy against her chest.
The girl rises from the leaves and Claire remembers to take a breath. It shudders.
She thinks of him and is relieved to feel hatred swelling. It curiously calms.
Nothing is ever as it seems, and the island is no exception.
Things shift like priorities and there are only so many places to wander and hide and to scatter. They find them, a soft clearing and painfully bright sky, the two groups merging again.
Jack looks too serious and stern for good news to travel with him and Kate appears wary, Sayid watches strangers and Desmond wears blue.
Words and brute force are exchanged as dialog alike, Locke promising grim futures and reprisals and Jack shouting meaninglessly overtop him. The strangers watch on, eyes fixed on Ben and the rope and the dried, caked blood; it is macabre, it’s strange, there is the surface of these things and all the limitless layers beneath, one truth giving way to one lie giving way to one truth, deeper and deeper it burrows.
She watches. They are all such towering, stupid fools. Jack yells and Locke fears and Ben breathes trouble, Desmond wears blue and little ghost boys grow into men as they trek the jungle with whispers.
Charlie sinks with stones.
They walk and Locke runs.
He hides.
The strangers train guns on Ben and speak in low tones about helicopters and seats and frightening words like too many people.
Desmond lingers close as they walk. She watches the way his fingers curl into fists, and then unfold.
He doesn’t say a word to her.
When he does, his first words are, “I’m sorry.”
She likes to imagine some things are already written in the stars.
“Let’s us off the hook nicely then, eh?” Desmond chuckles, and she frowns. That wasn’t what she meant at all.
He leans back against the sand and she watches, the corner of her eye, and in the dark he is little more than a shadowed silhouette.
“That wasn’t what I meant.” She pulls her knees to her chest, cultivating the petulance of her words even further.
The flat of his palm rests on her kneecap, pulls that right leg towards him; he spreads her legs open. His fingers come to rest on the inside of her knee, curving upward along her thigh.
“’Course not.” His voice carries thick in the night and the sand is rough against her bare elbows.
Neither of them moves further from here.
He didn’t really sound like he believed her anyway.
He hadn’t.
They leave the beach.
They -
One two three four five six of them leave.
They leave in secret, in the night. It is the chop chop chop of turning blades the rest of them awaken to.
They wait.
There is nothing more to do than that.
(Locke runs and hides, Sawyer loads bullets, Desmond wears blue, ghosts wander open and it isn’t safe it isn’t safe it isn’t safe rings too clear in Claire’s head).
He kisses her in the dark, and she lets him, she allows for that, but she doesn’t close her eyes, she doesn’t let the lashes flutter against his face. They remain bright, open, the night dark, nothing to see, too close to the target anyway. There is his hand gripping the back of her head and the rough pull of his fingers in loose blond hair. Her hands rest light against his chest, worn fabric giving way to rough skin and she earns a moan from him, bit back, her own mouth absorbing it.
She lets him kiss her, lets him pull her close against him because sometimes allowances have to be made. Sometimes anger and sadness and fear can only pull so far, can only fail so many times as company before other sources of emotion and comfort or whatever are sought.
She is young and she is stupid, and they’re all stupid, chasing demons through leaves and trying to find truths in a world engineered to spill otherwise. They’re stupid and he’s stupid and his hands speak like time, too many calluses and too much dirt and ache to them when they pull at her clothes, like what lies underneath will explain it all away. It won’t, and she knows this but she’s stupid and she’s guessing, grasping at straws and stumbling over things like buttons and pants and the bend of his hip to thigh and the way his beard scratches against her collarbone and she has never been with a man with a beard before and it strikes her as foreign, strange, the accent of his sighs scraping against her ear falling into a similar category. She is guessing here, guessing, and Aaron sleeps and her pants catch on her knees, dried seawater turning them unyielding and coarse, but he might be stupid too - no, he definitely is stupid too, leaving her, leaving Aaron, leaving Charlie to swallow the ocean whole - but he must know that this, all hands on bare skin and the steady desperation threatening limbs and insides and hearts and everything, isn’t going to fix a thing.
He knows and she know, but still she lets him kiss her and she lets him drag her down.
The fragility of the human condition, she thinks, and perhaps she would laugh if this were a different time, a different place, if his mouth wasn’t crawling the expanse of her neck and if it wasn’t one, two, three fingers against and then in, maybe she would laugh. Instead it’s a kind of keening moan that echoes, followed quickly by a harsh, “got to be quiet!” from him, ragged in ways she doesn’t like to think about; it makes her hips buck.
She comes hard against his fingers, the pale underside of her wrist between her teeth in the name of silence.
He comes messy against her, the sharp curve of her hip and her name repeated in whispers.
The trees sway and open fields beckon.
“This place is wrong,” she says, and Desmond shakes his head.
She looks for ghosts and he looks for answers and hope, things written on her body she can’t see.
The sky remains clear and she watches.
She just isn’t sure what for.
fin.
lost. they are all making mistakes in the name of things unreal, unclear; men die and wander as ghosts and they are all stupid enough to look for an escape. claire, claire/desmond. 1659 words. rated r. spoilers through 4.02.
i tried to learn your language
but fell asleep half-undressed
unrecognizable to myself
(broken harp; pj harvey)
She imagines if she ever leaves here she will come to keep goldfish swimming in glass.
She can’t explain it. The idea of confined spaces and clear limits and transparency are all finding a special place within her.
She never thought she would come to revel in the idea of being trapped.
Claire is making mistakes here, fighting for swallows and sparrows and little things that can fly and allowing missteps to be taken if only out of memory for the dead, and come on now, dear: that’s how they all got there in the first place, eh? Heroism and bravery and tightly clenched fists can only take you so far before the bottom will give out, before things like luck unravel in the name of fate.
There is Aaron now to think of; too bad her intentions have slipped down to the blind, the misdirected and the misfired.
Pretty little dead boys haunt the island in style, a shuffle of feet and sand spray, no footprints left behind.
Sometimes she forgets these things - that when people go they’re never coming back. In the past there had been Mother, but here there is Boone, Eko and Charlie, all slipped away, tucked out of reach.
There used to be quiet thoughts from her, at first. When the island was still fresh and new and the crash of the waves held some kind of peace, she had been convinced they were dead. She was sure it was the afterlife, or maybe, if she wants to be cute here, the waiting room of the afterlife.
Time dragged on, in funny ways, the sea stretching closer and closer up the beach, towards her. People died, just as it always were. People died.
Loneliness now tries, hard.
What she really is attempting here is to let quiet fury take its place.
She is coming around to ideas of specialization, that they each have a role here to play. Locke as shaman and Desmond as the lost prophet, Charlie the martyr sunk at sea.
It makes her question her own place, of course. This is to be expected. What is not to be expected are the creeping tendrils of fear that try to wrap and hold as her mind even ventures along these lines.
Perhaps, she will think, and immediately regret it, I have already served mine.
Aaron will claw quietly at her arms and she will hold him even tighter, swaddling clothes and baby cradles.
When the first bullets shatter and this girl goes down with the weight and the speed of them, Claire forgets to breathe.
It is a moment of pure panic - Ben with the gun, Locke’s look of confusion, the blood on Ben’s face, the girl on the ground, the violence laced through Sawyer, through Ben, through Locke, through them all, a sickening, spreading web of blood and death and girls that fall silent to the ground.
Her own mouth opens in a silent “O” but the words do not escape. And there are words, too many of them, lending themselves to the already consuming terror of the jungle, words like I shouldn’t be here, I made a mistake, I shouldn’t have followed them, I should have stayed with them, I should have stayed with him -
Where’s Desmond? I have to find Desmond.
The final thought leaves her ill at ease. Aaron is heavy against her chest.
The girl rises from the leaves and Claire remembers to take a breath. It shudders.
She thinks of him and is relieved to feel hatred swelling. It curiously calms.
Nothing is ever as it seems, and the island is no exception.
Things shift like priorities and there are only so many places to wander and hide and to scatter. They find them, a soft clearing and painfully bright sky, the two groups merging again.
Jack looks too serious and stern for good news to travel with him and Kate appears wary, Sayid watches strangers and Desmond wears blue.
Words and brute force are exchanged as dialog alike, Locke promising grim futures and reprisals and Jack shouting meaninglessly overtop him. The strangers watch on, eyes fixed on Ben and the rope and the dried, caked blood; it is macabre, it’s strange, there is the surface of these things and all the limitless layers beneath, one truth giving way to one lie giving way to one truth, deeper and deeper it burrows.
She watches. They are all such towering, stupid fools. Jack yells and Locke fears and Ben breathes trouble, Desmond wears blue and little ghost boys grow into men as they trek the jungle with whispers.
Charlie sinks with stones.
They walk and Locke runs.
He hides.
The strangers train guns on Ben and speak in low tones about helicopters and seats and frightening words like too many people.
Desmond lingers close as they walk. She watches the way his fingers curl into fists, and then unfold.
He doesn’t say a word to her.
When he does, his first words are, “I’m sorry.”
She likes to imagine some things are already written in the stars.
“Let’s us off the hook nicely then, eh?” Desmond chuckles, and she frowns. That wasn’t what she meant at all.
He leans back against the sand and she watches, the corner of her eye, and in the dark he is little more than a shadowed silhouette.
“That wasn’t what I meant.” She pulls her knees to her chest, cultivating the petulance of her words even further.
The flat of his palm rests on her kneecap, pulls that right leg towards him; he spreads her legs open. His fingers come to rest on the inside of her knee, curving upward along her thigh.
“’Course not.” His voice carries thick in the night and the sand is rough against her bare elbows.
Neither of them moves further from here.
He didn’t really sound like he believed her anyway.
He hadn’t.
They leave the beach.
They -
One two three four five six of them leave.
They leave in secret, in the night. It is the chop chop chop of turning blades the rest of them awaken to.
They wait.
There is nothing more to do than that.
(Locke runs and hides, Sawyer loads bullets, Desmond wears blue, ghosts wander open and it isn’t safe it isn’t safe it isn’t safe rings too clear in Claire’s head).
He kisses her in the dark, and she lets him, she allows for that, but she doesn’t close her eyes, she doesn’t let the lashes flutter against his face. They remain bright, open, the night dark, nothing to see, too close to the target anyway. There is his hand gripping the back of her head and the rough pull of his fingers in loose blond hair. Her hands rest light against his chest, worn fabric giving way to rough skin and she earns a moan from him, bit back, her own mouth absorbing it.
She lets him kiss her, lets him pull her close against him because sometimes allowances have to be made. Sometimes anger and sadness and fear can only pull so far, can only fail so many times as company before other sources of emotion and comfort or whatever are sought.
She is young and she is stupid, and they’re all stupid, chasing demons through leaves and trying to find truths in a world engineered to spill otherwise. They’re stupid and he’s stupid and his hands speak like time, too many calluses and too much dirt and ache to them when they pull at her clothes, like what lies underneath will explain it all away. It won’t, and she knows this but she’s stupid and she’s guessing, grasping at straws and stumbling over things like buttons and pants and the bend of his hip to thigh and the way his beard scratches against her collarbone and she has never been with a man with a beard before and it strikes her as foreign, strange, the accent of his sighs scraping against her ear falling into a similar category. She is guessing here, guessing, and Aaron sleeps and her pants catch on her knees, dried seawater turning them unyielding and coarse, but he might be stupid too - no, he definitely is stupid too, leaving her, leaving Aaron, leaving Charlie to swallow the ocean whole - but he must know that this, all hands on bare skin and the steady desperation threatening limbs and insides and hearts and everything, isn’t going to fix a thing.
He knows and she know, but still she lets him kiss her and she lets him drag her down.
The fragility of the human condition, she thinks, and perhaps she would laugh if this were a different time, a different place, if his mouth wasn’t crawling the expanse of her neck and if it wasn’t one, two, three fingers against and then in, maybe she would laugh. Instead it’s a kind of keening moan that echoes, followed quickly by a harsh, “got to be quiet!” from him, ragged in ways she doesn’t like to think about; it makes her hips buck.
She comes hard against his fingers, the pale underside of her wrist between her teeth in the name of silence.
He comes messy against her, the sharp curve of her hip and her name repeated in whispers.
The trees sway and open fields beckon.
“This place is wrong,” she says, and Desmond shakes his head.
She looks for ghosts and he looks for answers and hope, things written on her body she can’t see.
The sky remains clear and she watches.
She just isn’t sure what for.
fin.