(no subject)
Title: Where Were You When I Wanted To Fly
Fandom: Lost
Characters/Pairings: Jack, Claire
Word Count: 1,150
Rating: PG-13
Author's Note: Non-shippy. I make a point of that because my tendencies as of late and I know a lot of people just aren't down with that.
Summary: AU, with some S4 throwbacks. Between his mother and Claire's tendency to disappear, they don't see each other again until February.
“That little bitch.”
He hasn’t heard his mother’s voice so full of venom in years. They’d been better, since he’d been back, they’d gotten along better. Now that she’s in the picture however -
It’s her chosen way of referencing Claire it seems, at least today, this week. It varies. Usually it can all be brought back to the sentence “your father would still be alive if it wasn’t for that little bitch”.
Jack can’t, physically can not, bring himself to tell her that’s nothing more than wishful thinking. Everyone needs someone to blame.
---
The kids at school used to ask “where’s your daddy?” when she was a child. Then it became “what did you do to make him leave?”, like it was something she had complete control over. Like somehow she was a failure because she couldn’t make him stay.
At least the kids with divorced parents knew who their father’s were. Knew their faces, their traits, stories about their lives. All she knew about her father could be found in Aunt Lindsay’s words, chastising her mother, during her more rebellious years filled with piercings and hair dye: “she’s irresponsible, just like her bastard of a father. You really want her to take after him?”
She’d just decided that maybe he was a man she didn’t want to know when he finally showed up, and by then what she wanted didn’t matter anyway.
---
Jack quits one day. Flushes his pills down the toilet, dumps the vodka down the sink.
His Christmas present is withdrawal and it still isn’t the worst Christmas he’s ever had.
---
The shadows and the silence get to be too much by the twenty-third and she locks up her apartment and spends the night in an old gray chair in the middle of LAX.
She watches the people, coming and going, and pulls her light jacket around her shoulders tighter, falling asleep to the tune of something other than loneliness.
Claire dreams of planes, planes that don’t crash, and all the places she’d meant to run away to but never got the chance.
---
They don’t see each other again until February. Between his mother and Claire’s tendency to disappear, usually by way of locking herself in her cheap little apartment and unhooking her phone because it’s not like they can really run away, not without the cameras or someone finding out who she is (you know, the dead girl from 815, turns out she’s alive, and he can hear those headlines already), it’s become more of a hard-fought chore.
“I’m okay,” she answers the ‘how are you’ that wasn’t even asked in the first place. “It’s just, you know - “ and he does and she knows and so she doesn’t even bother finishing, just plays with her hands in her lap, while they both try to ignore the smell of diesel that’s seeping in through the half-open door of the small diner.
“We should try to...” he trails off too, not sure what he means even as he says. Stay in touch? See each other more often? Or ever? He doesn’t know. He just knows she’s the last one of them who’s still talking to him and sometimes, most times, he needs that.
She nods her reply.
They always did better when words weren’t involved.
---
Sometimes she thinks that if she’s survived all of this - the plane crash, being kidnapped, having her son taken and raised by another woman, never seeing him again, and having to live in hiding now that she’s back - then nothing is going to bring her down.
Sometimes she thinks she’s invincible.
It’s times like those that find her in bars, drinking until standing up again is a challenge. It’s times like those where she’ll shout along to the radio as she drives back home, because there’s no one around to take away her keys.
It’s a sucker bet, but she’s been lucky so far.
---
He calls her, a week after the diner. He means to make good on what he said. He does want to see her, he doesn’t want to drift away from her too.
Jack doesn’t even get her machine. Nothing. The phone just rings on and he gets tired of hitting redial.
She’ll call him, he tells himself - she meant it too, maybe, hopefully, and he sets the phone back in its cradle.
---
She watches the phone flash his name, say his number out loud, but she doesn’t answer, merely checking to see if the answering machine is turned off.
It is.
Her hand cradles the neck of a whiskey bottle (time spent on the island means her taste has changed in line with those who had hoarded the alcohol - namely Sawyer - because beggars can’t be choosers), and she leans back against the cold wall and takes a swig.
---
The phone rings while he’s in the shower and he’s in such a hurry that he doesn’t bother with the caller ID.
“Claire.”
There’s a long pause. “It’s your mother, Jack.”
He swallows his disappointment.
---
Forty-two times.
The phone rings forty-two times. Then it stops.
Part of her starts to realize that there just isn’t anyone around to save her anymore.
(Three months of Charlie, then Sawyer, then Jack when she’d first gotten back, and she seems to have forgotten what that’s like, to have to rely on herself.)
---
He’s still in the habit of waking up and expecting to see the sun in his eyes. In the habit of feeling sand under him, of hearing the ocean.
She was three tents away from him. If he wanted to talk to her then all he had to do was walk twenty feet. But he almost never did.
Now that he wants to he can’t.
He doesn’t even know where she lives.
---
“Sometimes I spend the night in airports.” It’s both an admittance and a lie. Admitting because he doesn’t know this, but lying because he thinks that’s why she wouldn’t answer her phone. Not because she was drunk and she didn’t trust her voice not to shake.
His brown eyes focus in on the ground, in that way that she knows means he’s thinking. She hopes he doesn’t think too hard about it; she’s only prepared for so many questions, the ones she’d already accounted for. Lies have become her second nature; it comes with the territory, she thinks, through dark sunglasses. “I used to fly every Friday. Los Angeles to Sydney and back again.”
She certainly hadn’t accounted for that, and so, theoretically, that’s probably why she blurts, “We’re really not great at letting go are we?”
It’s been so long since she’s seen him laugh. It makes something flutter in her stomach and her breath comes easier, and she thinks maybe if they could get to that point where they had each other, without ignored phone calls and avoided gazes, they wouldn’t need airports anymore.
Fandom: Lost
Characters/Pairings: Jack, Claire
Word Count: 1,150
Rating: PG-13
Author's Note: Non-shippy. I make a point of that because my tendencies as of late and I know a lot of people just aren't down with that.
Summary: AU, with some S4 throwbacks. Between his mother and Claire's tendency to disappear, they don't see each other again until February.
“That little bitch.”
He hasn’t heard his mother’s voice so full of venom in years. They’d been better, since he’d been back, they’d gotten along better. Now that she’s in the picture however -
It’s her chosen way of referencing Claire it seems, at least today, this week. It varies. Usually it can all be brought back to the sentence “your father would still be alive if it wasn’t for that little bitch”.
Jack can’t, physically can not, bring himself to tell her that’s nothing more than wishful thinking. Everyone needs someone to blame.
---
The kids at school used to ask “where’s your daddy?” when she was a child. Then it became “what did you do to make him leave?”, like it was something she had complete control over. Like somehow she was a failure because she couldn’t make him stay.
At least the kids with divorced parents knew who their father’s were. Knew their faces, their traits, stories about their lives. All she knew about her father could be found in Aunt Lindsay’s words, chastising her mother, during her more rebellious years filled with piercings and hair dye: “she’s irresponsible, just like her bastard of a father. You really want her to take after him?”
She’d just decided that maybe he was a man she didn’t want to know when he finally showed up, and by then what she wanted didn’t matter anyway.
---
Jack quits one day. Flushes his pills down the toilet, dumps the vodka down the sink.
His Christmas present is withdrawal and it still isn’t the worst Christmas he’s ever had.
---
The shadows and the silence get to be too much by the twenty-third and she locks up her apartment and spends the night in an old gray chair in the middle of LAX.
She watches the people, coming and going, and pulls her light jacket around her shoulders tighter, falling asleep to the tune of something other than loneliness.
Claire dreams of planes, planes that don’t crash, and all the places she’d meant to run away to but never got the chance.
---
They don’t see each other again until February. Between his mother and Claire’s tendency to disappear, usually by way of locking herself in her cheap little apartment and unhooking her phone because it’s not like they can really run away, not without the cameras or someone finding out who she is (you know, the dead girl from 815, turns out she’s alive, and he can hear those headlines already), it’s become more of a hard-fought chore.
“I’m okay,” she answers the ‘how are you’ that wasn’t even asked in the first place. “It’s just, you know - “ and he does and she knows and so she doesn’t even bother finishing, just plays with her hands in her lap, while they both try to ignore the smell of diesel that’s seeping in through the half-open door of the small diner.
“We should try to...” he trails off too, not sure what he means even as he says. Stay in touch? See each other more often? Or ever? He doesn’t know. He just knows she’s the last one of them who’s still talking to him and sometimes, most times, he needs that.
She nods her reply.
They always did better when words weren’t involved.
---
Sometimes she thinks that if she’s survived all of this - the plane crash, being kidnapped, having her son taken and raised by another woman, never seeing him again, and having to live in hiding now that she’s back - then nothing is going to bring her down.
Sometimes she thinks she’s invincible.
It’s times like those that find her in bars, drinking until standing up again is a challenge. It’s times like those where she’ll shout along to the radio as she drives back home, because there’s no one around to take away her keys.
It’s a sucker bet, but she’s been lucky so far.
---
He calls her, a week after the diner. He means to make good on what he said. He does want to see her, he doesn’t want to drift away from her too.
Jack doesn’t even get her machine. Nothing. The phone just rings on and he gets tired of hitting redial.
She’ll call him, he tells himself - she meant it too, maybe, hopefully, and he sets the phone back in its cradle.
---
She watches the phone flash his name, say his number out loud, but she doesn’t answer, merely checking to see if the answering machine is turned off.
It is.
Her hand cradles the neck of a whiskey bottle (time spent on the island means her taste has changed in line with those who had hoarded the alcohol - namely Sawyer - because beggars can’t be choosers), and she leans back against the cold wall and takes a swig.
---
The phone rings while he’s in the shower and he’s in such a hurry that he doesn’t bother with the caller ID.
“Claire.”
There’s a long pause. “It’s your mother, Jack.”
He swallows his disappointment.
---
Forty-two times.
The phone rings forty-two times. Then it stops.
Part of her starts to realize that there just isn’t anyone around to save her anymore.
(Three months of Charlie, then Sawyer, then Jack when she’d first gotten back, and she seems to have forgotten what that’s like, to have to rely on herself.)
---
He’s still in the habit of waking up and expecting to see the sun in his eyes. In the habit of feeling sand under him, of hearing the ocean.
She was three tents away from him. If he wanted to talk to her then all he had to do was walk twenty feet. But he almost never did.
Now that he wants to he can’t.
He doesn’t even know where she lives.
---
“Sometimes I spend the night in airports.” It’s both an admittance and a lie. Admitting because he doesn’t know this, but lying because he thinks that’s why she wouldn’t answer her phone. Not because she was drunk and she didn’t trust her voice not to shake.
His brown eyes focus in on the ground, in that way that she knows means he’s thinking. She hopes he doesn’t think too hard about it; she’s only prepared for so many questions, the ones she’d already accounted for. Lies have become her second nature; it comes with the territory, she thinks, through dark sunglasses. “I used to fly every Friday. Los Angeles to Sydney and back again.”
She certainly hadn’t accounted for that, and so, theoretically, that’s probably why she blurts, “We’re really not great at letting go are we?”
It’s been so long since she’s seen him laugh. It makes something flutter in her stomach and her breath comes easier, and she thinks maybe if they could get to that point where they had each other, without ignored phone calls and avoided gazes, they wouldn’t need airports anymore.