(no subject)
Title: This House Smells Of Ghosts
Fandom: Lost
Characters/Pairings: Claire, many others
Word Count: 1,311
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Up to 4.10 - Something Nice Back Home. My crack-ish theory on Claire's whereabouts.
Author's Note: For once I think I really put my heart and soul into something. It's weird but bear with me guys, so is the show.
Summary: She remembers how Sayid and Sawyer had both spoken of whispers in the jungle and wonders if that's what she's hearing now. That doesn't explain why she feels like she knows them.
Her eyes open on a wall and she would jump if she had the energy. Wood, five deep scratches into it - nail marks she thinks but chooses to ignore - and she rolls onto her other side, relieved to see at least twenty feet of open space before her. She isn’t closed in.
“What’s she doing here?”
“You’re not supposed to talk.”
Her eyes dart around, searching her surroundings for the owners of the disembodied voices. She’s alone. Completely.
“What am I supposed to do? Sign?”
“Would you knock it off?”
“Or you’re going to what? What more damage could you possibly do?”
Claire sits up, trying to follow the voices, trying to understand why they sound so familiar. They’re moving too fast for her to keep up with and her head feels woozy, her limbs heavy, and it occurs to her that she’s probably been drugged. That means there has to be someone here. Someone who got her here.
Her dad. It had been her dad right? Yes, him, mere feet in front of her. With Aaron.
“Aaron?” She calls, aloud, and the sound of her own voice startles her, so much louder than the others. There’s no cry; she can’t see her son.
There’s a laugh. Bitter and mocking and if she had to guess female.
“Would you…”
“Shh.”
She gives up trying to listen. “Is someone there?”
Only the silence greets her.
“Please,” she implores, “is someone there? Where’s my son? Where’s Aaron?”
“He’s -“
“Shh.”
She tries to focus on that first voice. Tries to connect it to a face. She knows it. She knows all of them. But names and faces swim in her mind and none of them make any sense.
She needs to come out of this. She needs to shake this off and focus. And then she needs to get out of here.
When her feet hit the ground she falls back onto the surface she was laying on, her legs failing her and sending her back down.
“You should stay still.”
“Why are you giving her advice?”
“She didn’t do anything to us.”
“You’re worse than him.”
“Where did he go?”
“I don’t know. It’s not like I can see him.”
She remembers how Sayid and Sawyer both spoke of whispers in the jungle and she wonders if that’s what she’s hearing. If she’s hearing the whispers of those people.
That doesn’t explain why she feels like she knows them. That only points toward this all being in her head.
She gets up again, this time finding her footing and making her way to the door. She pulls it and it opens and she breathes a sigh of relief a half-second before it slams back in her face with a gush of wind. The trees outside, seen through the dirty windows, never sway. She tries the door again and it doesn’t budge.
“You can’t leave.”
Claire tries talking to them, instead of at them. “Why not?”
That same laugh. “If we’re not going anywhere, you’re certainly not.”
Which points to them being held there, somehow, in this small, seemingly abandoned cabin that she doesn’t remember coming to. That her father brought her to. He had, hadn’t he? But why?
“Who are you?” She asks, so many questions.
“Don’t answer that.”
“Crap. Shh.”
What happens next can only be described as the absence of sound. The air stills, in that way you’d think it would if someone had learned how to stop time, and sound ceases. Nothing creaks, the voices silence, she can’t ever hear herself breathe, can’t hear her own heartbeat.
In front of her own cloudy eyes, something snakes through the air, something small and fast and black as pitch, and it resembles smoke but without the odor, without a source. It’s there and gone before she can blink and the voices are gone and she thinks now she is truly alone.
Whereas the voices were unnerving two minutes ago now they seem oddly comforting, a luxury she has lost.
She tries the door again. Nothing. The windows around her are nailed shut. There’s no other exit and no lock to try to pick. She can’t leave.
Claire’s thankful that she’s too numb to cry otherwise she would, and that wouldn’t help anybody.
She sits there for what feels like forever, but is probably only a few minutes if she was keeping score, before anything else happens. Before she senses a change in the air, once more, and that nagging feeling that she’s not alone, but they don’t want her to know that. Someone or something doesn’t want her to know that.
She thinks her head is clearing up now. She’s noticing these subtle things; it has to be.
“The wall in the back.”
Her head snaps around, in the general direction of the voice. There’s no one there. She didn’t expect there to be.
This voice is different. Kinder, good intentioned, and it soothes her enough that she rises and follows it’s directions. Directions she doesn’t completely understand once she gets there.
“Look closer.”
That voice. She knows that voice.
“Look closer,” it repeats, urgently.
Her hands feel around the wood, feel the cracks and the slats and looks for something of interest. Her nail breaks and a splinter works it’s way into her palm and still she looks and feels until she gets a hold of something that feels out of place. A way out.
“Good.”
She shakes her head, starts prying it open. A minute later it’s loose and there’s a window in front of her, this one not nailed shut.
“Good luv, now go.”
There. She gets the window open right as the intonations strikes her, right as the term of endearment becomes familiar and it all makes perfect crystal clear sense. The names and the faces and the voices and -
“Charlie.”
The fact that she doesn’t hear anything is what gives her the confirmation that yes, she was right. And that means that this is worse than she thought.
He’s dead and he’s trapped here, if what the voices said earlier is true. Voices of people she remembers from what feels like forever ago. Voices of the dead but not quite gone souls who met their maker on this island.
This place reeks of death and ghosts and places that shouldn’t exist full of people who don’t belong and someone wiser than her would stop and wonder if maybe she’s one of them but she can not do that because she has things to live for, people to live for, and she needs to get out of here and forget that they - and him - ever existed.
But she wants to know something first. “Why am I here?”
There’s no answer and for a moment she thinks she might not get her answer. Then:
“He can’t be raised by another Claire.”
His words echo Malkin’s from months earlier and it doesn’t feel like an answer until she repeats it in her head.
She’s here because they know that. She’s here because they don’t want her to raise him. She’s here because they know how this ends and it’s in their favor. They need him.
It had been a warning and she’s just coming to understand the severity of it.
She doesn’t ask anymore questions. She can’t feel him anymore. She can’t feel him and it hurts but it also gives her strength because it means he’s still there, on some plane, and he’s still watching out for her and this is what has to happen.
Claire climbs out that window, taking off the minute her feet hit the ground, with no idea where they’ll lead her other than away from the cabin. She will find Aaron and Sawyer and Miles eventually, they’ll be looking for her, and somehow she knows that when she does everything will be okay.