gone and left my baby blue
Title: gone and left my baby blue
Fandom: LOST
Characters: Esau, Claire
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 506
Summary: He hates her like a broken record and she'll never know the difference.
The young woman's voice carries, soft and lilting, across the island to where Esau sits in the dark, wearing her father's face. The song she sings to her newborn is annoyingly familiar, scratching at the back of his mind like a forgotten dream.
(pocket full of starlight, never let it fade away)
The same thing every night, like it's the only song she knows. Even after she falls silent it nags at him, and he grabs the lute for the first time in years, just to get it out of his head.
An uninvited lump forms in his throat as he begins the clumsy strumming. A vision assaults him, not from Christian, but something from his own memory-
He squirmed in the grass, damp from a recent storm, as his mother handed him a bowl of something that vaguely resembled soup. He wrinkled his nose. "No, thank you. I'm not hungry."
She cast a weary glance at the Other Child, the perfect son, who never talked back or broke things or woke up crying in the middle of the night. My replacement, Esau never said aloud.
She sat with a huff and he had to hold back a laugh as she tasted her own cooking. "Spices," she muttered. "It's not my fault I can't get the right spices."
Esau's stomach growled, and although one could never tell with that blank stare, he was pretty sure the Other Child was silently mocking him.
On the beach, Claire begins her nightly serenade, and the dream dissolves. Her voice is so sweet it almost makes him ill. It's an unearthly sound (my perfect little angel, he remembers Christian saying) and it hurts like a fist to the gut. Hurts because the innocent blond pixie is exactly what his mother should have been.
The more she sings, the more he plays, and the more it hurts. He knows he should stop, break the instrument over his knee, and toss it into the ocean, but his fingers keep moving, and the memories open up like old wounds.
(when your troubles start multiplying, some starless night)
He would pick at the strings, the wounds, until he bleeds, if he could. He can't help wondering now, if that was his mother's doing. He recalls a time he beat up Jacob just to see if he would bleed. And Jacob, rubbing a hand over his split lip, smirked at him with their mother's impish eyes, as if the whole thing was one big joke. The all-knowing Jacob, curse him, just didn't get it.
But then, how could he? She'd built the little rat a perfect world where everything was black and white, and lullabies actually meant something. And Esau... Esau she'd stuck in a reality where colors were just colors and the songs were nothing but splotches of ink on yellowed parchment.
(and still she says, "Why can't you be more like your brother-")
Save it for a rainy day, and the song ends, and Claire coos, "Mommy loves you, Sweetheart."
The string snaps.
Fandom: LOST
Characters: Esau, Claire
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 506
Summary: He hates her like a broken record and she'll never know the difference.
The young woman's voice carries, soft and lilting, across the island to where Esau sits in the dark, wearing her father's face. The song she sings to her newborn is annoyingly familiar, scratching at the back of his mind like a forgotten dream.
(pocket full of starlight, never let it fade away)
The same thing every night, like it's the only song she knows. Even after she falls silent it nags at him, and he grabs the lute for the first time in years, just to get it out of his head.
An uninvited lump forms in his throat as he begins the clumsy strumming. A vision assaults him, not from Christian, but something from his own memory-
He squirmed in the grass, damp from a recent storm, as his mother handed him a bowl of something that vaguely resembled soup. He wrinkled his nose. "No, thank you. I'm not hungry."
She cast a weary glance at the Other Child, the perfect son, who never talked back or broke things or woke up crying in the middle of the night. My replacement, Esau never said aloud.
She sat with a huff and he had to hold back a laugh as she tasted her own cooking. "Spices," she muttered. "It's not my fault I can't get the right spices."
Esau's stomach growled, and although one could never tell with that blank stare, he was pretty sure the Other Child was silently mocking him.
On the beach, Claire begins her nightly serenade, and the dream dissolves. Her voice is so sweet it almost makes him ill. It's an unearthly sound (my perfect little angel, he remembers Christian saying) and it hurts like a fist to the gut. Hurts because the innocent blond pixie is exactly what his mother should have been.
The more she sings, the more he plays, and the more it hurts. He knows he should stop, break the instrument over his knee, and toss it into the ocean, but his fingers keep moving, and the memories open up like old wounds.
(when your troubles start multiplying, some starless night)
He would pick at the strings, the wounds, until he bleeds, if he could. He can't help wondering now, if that was his mother's doing. He recalls a time he beat up Jacob just to see if he would bleed. And Jacob, rubbing a hand over his split lip, smirked at him with their mother's impish eyes, as if the whole thing was one big joke. The all-knowing Jacob, curse him, just didn't get it.
But then, how could he? She'd built the little rat a perfect world where everything was black and white, and lullabies actually meant something. And Esau... Esau she'd stuck in a reality where colors were just colors and the songs were nothing but splotches of ink on yellowed parchment.
(and still she says, "Why can't you be more like your brother-")
Save it for a rainy day, and the song ends, and Claire coos, "Mommy loves you, Sweetheart."
The string snaps.