Fic: A Design, An Alignment, A Cry (Of My Heart To See) (1/1)
Title: A Design, An Alignment, A Cry (Of My Heart To See)
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Daniel/Charlotte, Juliet/Sawyer, mild/past Sawyer/Charlotte, brief Eloise/Charles, mentioned Penny/Desmond, mentioned/past Charlotte/Miles
Word Count: 7,645
Summary: These are the things that are worth risking everything for. For valhalla37, who requested S6, with Sawyer/Charlotte but ultimately Daniel/Charlotte, and some Juliet/Sawyer thrown in for good measure for my help_chile Auction. General Spoilers Through Season Six.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot. Title belongs to Mumford & Sons.
Author’s Notes: To the wonderful valhalla37: of course you know that I’m dreadfully sorry that your auction fic has taken me so long, but I just want to say that again: I am SO SORRY that your auction fic has taken so long. And I’m also sorry if it’s not the sort of thing you were looking for. I played a lot with this -- experimented with form and POV and implication and exposition, pushed the envelope on just how vague I could be without delving too far into confusion; I’m not sure any of it succeeded, but I did want to try something... pseudo-unique for you, with this. There are a number of plot holes, and most things are unresolved and unexplained -- part of that was a result of trying to create a feel of uncertainty, of the unreality of S6 and the sideways-verse as it unfolded; but admittedly, some of it’s not. I didn’t want to tell the story, so much as imply it, and let the gaps kind of... be, if that makes any sense. It probably doesn’t, but yeah. Anyway: I hope, regardless of all of that, you enjoy it.
A Design, An Alignment, A Cry (Of My Heart To See)
_________________________
In the moment that he throws her out, pulse thrumming in his temples and blood rushing, bursting hot behind his eyes -- in that moment, he knows the difference between mistakes and regrets.
This is a mistake, Jim thinks, knows as he watches her rush, all wrapped up in her sheet -- green sheet, kinda shiny, and he don’t do shiny, or green; this is a mistake.
But there are bigger things he’s done -- will do -- to pin on regret.
_________________________
That night, Jim dreams of the smell of boiling pasta, of sunflowers -- the taste of merlot in his mouth, on a tongue that’s not his own -- and a little girl, with ginger curls and a smile filled with baby teeth to match her baby blues, who he snags an Apollo Bar from the cafeteria for when he’s running late from his shift, because she’s absolutely not allowed chocolate before dinner.
There’s also water, and trees, and a shoreline traced with foam, but those -- they’re peripheral; get lost upon waking before he even blinks the sleep from his eyes.
_________________________
_________________________
He doesn’t even say hello when she calls; it’s more the rustle of sheets and his incoherent groaning that lets her know he’s there at all.
“Your friend, Jim,” is her greeting, and the snort she gets in response indicates that Miles’ REM cycle was clearly not as rudely interrupted as he’d have liked her to believe.
“God, I wish I could have been there,” he says, almost wistful. “How big of a disaster was it? Is his apartment complex still standing? Did you even make it past the restaurant? I didn’t see any gaping, apocalyptic holes where a fine dining establishment once stood on my way home last night, but that doesn’t mean-”
“Miles,” she stops him. “He’s definitely the one.”
“Aww, when should I be expecting the engagement announcement in the mail?”
“He’s Sawyer.”
Miles is quiet, like she expected he might be; like he shouldn’t be, because they were pretty damn sure -- he was a shadow, before, in their memories, but the newspaper clippings, the folder with the name: it took the dark away, and his face was clear now, in her mind.
“So it’s not a coincidence.”
Charlotte laughs humorlessly. “Did you really think it was?”
“No, but...” and she can see him, the way Miles passes a sad hand across his face and breathes deep between his knuckles. “He’s my friend, Char. My best friend. I didn’t want this for him.”
He doesn’t believe in this like she does.
“What does he know?”
“I’m not sure,” Charlotte replies, a little curtly, clutching her shawl around her as she fights back a shiver; this would be the absolute last time she wore something so damn slinky without a proper coverup, for emergencies. “If anything, it’s just little things, at this point. Nothing major, not enough to raise suspicion. Easily ignored.”
“But you think it’ll start? That it’ll get worse?”
“Does it make me a terrible person if I said that I hope so?” And it’s not because he threw her out in the middle of the night, either. But the more of them that know...
The more of them that know, the better their chances are of getting back, of going home. Strength in numbers, and all of that.
“Yeah,” Miles huffs, “it kind of does.”
“Look,” she bites out at him across the line; “my hair’s a mess, my makeup’s smeared halfway ‘cross my face, and I’m standing on a street corner at three in the bloody morning, Miles, in a cocktail dress that barely covers my arse,” she heaves a heavy breath, rubs her hands against her bare arms. “Terrible person that I am, I’d prefer not to top off such a wonderful evening with getting propositioned by LA’s best and brightest off of Hollywood Boulevard, thank you kindly,”
“You’ve been watching Pretty Woman again, haven’t you?”
She rolls her eyes, and snaps back: “Can you just come and pick me up?”
“Do you want me to use the siren?”
She chokes a reluctant laugh, because that’s Miles -- like a social component of the bomb squad, ready to diffuse any situation. She thinks he missed his calling on the Force. “The lights, I think, will be sufficient.”
“Give me fifteen minutes.”
“Whatever solicitations I have to fight off before you get here are coming out of your paycheck on principle.”
“How about dinner on Saturday, and we’ll call it square?”
“I’ll take it under advisement,” she shoots back, caught between annoyance and amusement. “Just make it snappy, Detective Chang.”
_________________________
_________________________
Jim comes by her place too soon, and her prides still a bit bruised, all things considered. She says nothing that he doesn’t deserve, and to be honest, she’s glad to see the back of him when he goes.
But yeah, Charlotte feels a little bad when he leaves the sunflower, when she finds it at her feet the next morning, shriveled and broken and terrified of things it doesn’t understand.
No one just picks sunflowers out of the blue.
_________________________
She waits a week before she does anything about anything, before she decides it’s time to clear the air -- out of necessity, if nothing else. Before she swings by, though, she picks up a bag of ranch-flavored sunflower seeds, for the sake of symbolism; balances them with the drinks in her crook of her elbow as she climbs his stairs. He looks surprised to see her when he answers the door; she feels a little surge of victory at that.
“I wasn’t lying,” she starts, leaning against the doorframe with her free hand tucked awkwardly in her jacket pocket; “you did blow it.” She shoves the beer in her hands against his chest and drops her hold, lets him catch it as she slips into his apartment and waits for him to follow.
“But I can recognize an olive branch when it’s being offered, so,” she tosses her hands up and turns back toward him, “Maybe we can try something else.”
“Somethin’ else?” he asks, half cautious, but his tone’s too much of a purr beneath the confusion, his gaze gleaming a little too brightly with lust, and she narrows her eyes at him as she approaches, pulling a can from the ring of the six-pack and popping the tab, swigging fast before she deigns to clarify.
“Friends,” she says, with a hint of disgust in her tone. “Do you know what that word means, James?”
“Friends,” he repeats, like there’s a chance in hell that he doesn’t.
“Yes,” she rolls her eyes dramatically. “It means having the luxury of enjoying the unparalleled company of yours truly without the burden of mind-numbingly brilliant sex.”
She drinks again from her beer, sits down on his couch like he’s given her an answer, as if she’d been waiting for one at all; he doesn’t follow, simply hovers, and she tries not to make it strange, uncomfortably -- tries to ignore the tension that’s tight between them.
“I’m sorry,” he says finally, like it hurts to admit. From what she’s learned of him in passing, from what remembers of him, it probably does.
She thinks back to what she knows -- what she’s read and heard, and seen -- and maybe he doesn’t understand yet, but it doesn’t really matter. She’s the bigger person, and she’ll say it, because she means it.
“I know,” she answers softly as he sinks onto the couch, a cushion empty between them as they gravitate toward opposite sides. “Me too.”
_________________________
Jim was nine years old. Nine years old.
It doesn’t seem right, somehow; and not for the same tired reasons, the same ache in his chest when he remembers, when he can smell his mama’s blood and the gunpowder cloud that spread when his daddy hit the mattress, pressing the boxspring hard against his back as he’d trembled under the bed -- it’s different.
He was nine years old, says so in black and white. The dates add up, the numbers match. The picture’s just like he remembers; he’d smiled different back then.
It’s just that -- he could have sworn that he’d been eight.
_________________________
_________________________
“What’s that you’re reading?”
She tries not to startle at the intrusion, the welcome interruption in her morning routine of coffee and a muffin at the museum café; she closes the Moleskine that’s never far away, these days and makes herself grin like it’s casual, like it means nothing when she meets those big brown eyes.
“Quantum physics,” she says, and the ways his expression quirks, a little taken aback -- it’s so familiar, and yet so foreign. She thinks she still would have fallen for this Daniel, if the world were different and things were new.
It takes him a moment to reply, like he’s weighing truths in his mind. “You’re serious.”
Her grin’s a little more genuine when she nods. “Very much so.” She wonders, a little, if he writes the same equations, the same notes in the margins in his dreams -- if maybe he just doesn’t remember the dreams like she does.
“Huh,” he huffs, breathy and light, and she misses that: the airy, barely-there tone he always spoke in: ephemeral, even when it wouldn’t fade.
Her smile turns into a smirk as she raises an eyebrow. “Don’t I look the type?” she asks, a playful edge to her voice, and she wants to laugh when he rocks back on his feet and lifts his hands, palms out in apology.
“I didn’t mean,” he starts, and she does laugh, then; sees the sparkle that the sound ignites in his eyes.
“It’s fine,” she assures him, and he doesn’t take too long to nod, worrying his lip between his teeth. “Come here often?” she asks, tries to tamper down her hopes that he’ll remember the way she’d asked him that, in the middle of the ocean, when they’d both watched the sunset off the stern of that godforsaken freighter, and he’d laughed, a little hysterical -- the first time they’d ever really talked.
“I never come here,” he says, stoic, eyes far away for a long moment before he blinks, seems to remember himself. “I’m sorry,” he starts again, shakes his head until his hair falls across his face. “That’s just...”
“Don’t,” she stops him, her smile sobered now, but still there; she doesn’t need to hear him try to justify what he doesn’t understand. “It’s okay.”
She’s about to go back to her reading, take a sip of her café mocha when he seems to startle back; she’s not sure if it’s better that he’s here, with her, or that he stays wherever he was, so that the memories can start to take hold.
“I’m, wow,” he wrings his fingers together for a second, and she remembers that little quirk of his, loves that in him. “Where are my manners?” he reaches out, lets his extended hand hover between them as he fumbles, just a bit. “I’m-”
“I know who you are, Mr. Widmore.” She smiles tightly, though not unpleasantly -- doesn’t take his hand, knows he isn’t ready; isn’t sure she’ll be able to bear the way he’ll simply smile like she’s anyone when his touch, she’s certain, will undo her.
He blinks, cocks his head, and it’s endearing as it ever was. “You do?”
“If it weren’t enough that your photo is plastered,” she gestures to the large-scale posters for his upcoming performance that are hanging every thirty yards from the lofty ceilings outside the café; “ quite literally everywhere in this place,” she waits for him to blush as he takes in the over-saturation of his own face in the vicinity, the cover of his last album stretched ten-feet tall. “Would you be put off if I said I was a fan?”
His blush deepens, but his smile stretches ten feet wide, evens things out. “I’d be flattered.”
She giggles, just a little; can’t help it. “Then I’m a fan.”
“Then I’m flattered.”
He takes her in, silently, for a long stretch of moments, the smile on his face never fading; stops short when he seems to catch the sight of the employee badge hanging off of the lanyard at her neck. “You work here?” he asks, sounding intrigued.
She remembers, one time, his lips upon her neck.
“Yes,” she answers over the flutter in her chest. “Assistant curator.”
“That’s impressive.” It’s meant as a compliment; he doesn’t sound surprised.
She dips her chin in acknowledgment. “I enjoy it.”
He seems to take a cue from her short reply; she doesn’t intend it, but maybe it’s for the best. “Should I leave you to your drink in peace... I,” he pauses, and the blush is back, and no, it’s not for the best that he wants to leave, because seeing him at all is why she gets up in the morning, some days. “I’m sorry,” he says, ducking his head and looking almost bashful, his voice so soft she’d have to strain if she didn’t know it so well. “I didn’t get your name.”
It kills her, a little, that he has to ask. “It’s Charlotte.”
“Right,” he breathes, and the tone of his voice catches something inside of her, unsettles something she thought she could withstand. “Jesus, yeah. Right.”
She steels herself against the memory of introducing herself against the waves, of sitting on the sand, thighs touching and knees bumping at the side, of tasting his tongue in her mouth beneath the trees. “I’m actually finished,” she brightens falsely, like harsh florescent lighting against the shine of the sun. “But it was lovely speaking with you, Mr. Widmore.”
She stands, brushes her things into her shoulder bag as she pushes in her chair, the click of her heels cracking like ice against the floor once, twice before he speaks.
“Wait,” he says, and he doesn’t have to ask; she’s been waiting. “Charlotte.” He doesn’t follow, just stares until she can feel it, until she meets his eyes and they both swallow hard. “Call me Dan.”
She grins a little in parting before she turns to leave. “Have a good morning, Dan.”
It makes her day, more than it should, when he calls after: “And you.”
_________________________
It’s a Saturday night, and they’ve both drank too much: stretched across the couch and the loveseat, respectively -- they’ve learned their lesson.
His head is tipped back across the arm of the couch, lolling a bit as he breathes: Pierre’s told her what he remember of the Security team, of the Doctor-turned-mechanic who was too smart for her own good; she wonders, for a moment, what he looked like sprawled across a garish sofa in a tiny house on an Island in the middle of anywhere, with the woman he loved curled loose against his side.
She hears the click of her stereo as it switches through the discs, resumes playing through her collection of Daniel Widmore’s greatest performances; it takes just the first three notes of the track before she heaves a heavy sigh and falls into the cadence -- it’s her favorite, this one simple song.
“The Glass Ballerina,” she says, slow, careful on the words. “S’my favorite piece. Sometimes, when I’m down, or I’ve had a bad day at work-”
“Yeah, ‘cause workin’ the museum’s so goddamn stressful,” Jim interrupts with a snort, a little too merry; “those little Eskimo doll thingys might come out an’ bite ya.”
“Oi,” she protests, halfheartedly. “They’re not dolls, and they’re not little, the sizing is true-to-life-”
“Or those taxidermied mastodons,” Jim continues, grin wide and a little bit sloshed as he hangs, loose-limbed, off the cushions.
“They’re mammoths, actually.”
He blinks, raises his head a little and stares at her a bit blearily. “There’s a difference?”
“Mmmm,” she hums, licks the sweet tang of wine from her lips as if there’s anything left there, like ambrosia and notes half-missed as she listens, taps her foot to the crescendoing swell of the keys.
“Whatever,” Jim sucks the rest of his beer down, lips popping around the mouth of the bottle as he continues to wean himself back from the hard stuff for the night. “Can’t say I pity you and your god-awfully taxing job keeping tabs on downtown LA’s the stuffed animal collection.”
“The sheer extent of your crassness should amaze me,” she sighs, studies the pattern splattered against the ceiling, the dips and grooves tracing the tempo of the track in the background. “It’s a reflection of just how uncultured you really are that it doesn’t.” She points an idle finger in his direction without looking to see if she’s even pointing at him, if he’s even looking. “You should be ashamed.”
He laughs, but she thinks that maybe he’s laughing at something else, something far away.
“But no,” she presses on, like it matters when it doesn’t, because the silence that’s left over’s cold and too empty. “I mean, this song... it just...” she trails off, hopes the echo of unanswered queries and unfinished business will keep them warm until the quiet passes; until Jim breaks back in with a rough scratch of voice, of speech.
“S’like a...” she can hear him swallow, in the quiet that stretches before he finishes the thought: “A constant.” The tone of his voice is bewildered, from more than just the drinks; he doesn’t know where the term came from, why it’s so fitting.
He doesn’t know, but he will.
She smiles broadly as the last tinkling strands of the song hit, resonate, and disappear, warm inside her chest.
“Exactly.”
_________________________
_________________________
He dreams of a woman, sometimes; he thinks, at least, that he does.
He smells lilac and freesia over the antiseptic bite of sterile, nauseating hospital; and he’s not above acknowledging that he’s a little bit lonely -- enough that the scent of a woman might send his imagination ablaze in coming up with a vision to match: blonde hair and blue eyes and a soft, careful smile that guards a laugh that sounds like home.
He tries his damnedest to find a victim to check up on at St. Sebastian for the better part of a month before he gives it up as a lost cause.
Whoever she is, though, if she’s even real at all -- he doesn’t stop dreaming of her.
_________________________
She feels silly, like a secret agent -- no, more like a woman who plays a secret agent on television, and does so very poorly; out of place and awkward in her own skin, language stilted and tone overborne.
Miles hands her the Venti Starbucks cup she doesn’t need but very much wants, and she lets the heat and caffeine calm her unduly fried nerves; they’re not doing anything wrong, they’re not toying with anyone’s lives; no more than fate and someone’s fucked up sense of humor already has -- already will -- anyway. “Has he figured it out yet?”
“Not yet,” she burns her tongue, swears under her breath and watches the smirk pull at Miles’ lips while he sips at his tall coffee. “I think he might be getting close, though.”
“Good.”
Sometimes, it’s strange, between them; sometimes she remembers fucking him in their dank quarters, the very first night on that goddamn vessel headed for the middle of nowhere, with the sound of waves sloshing hard against the hull, and she wonders whether or not that’s something that’s come back for the both of them, or just for her.
Sometimes, it’s strange because she wants to ask him if he ever heard her voice among the masses, the whispers beyond -- if he knew when she was going to die before she read the truth in Daniel’s eyes, before she whispered and bled and sputtered out, useless on the jungle floor.
Sometimes, it’s strange.
_________________________
She’d said that Jim was ‘close.’ She’d honestly believed it, too.
Close, it turns out, was something of a grievous underestimation.
It takes three days before James Ford blacks out while chasing a suspect through alleyways too smooth to blame terrain, too narrow for interference; falls down on the asphalt and rubs holes in the knees of his jeans, never hears the cuffs clank against the ground or the footsteps of the perp as he runs, flees -- smoke and light on his tail.
When his partner finds him, he stares at Miles Chang with new eyes and the name Straume on his lips before he chokes, blood split hot at the corner of his mouth: “You came on a Freighter.”
_________________________
They look at one another for a long time; look at everything but each other for longer. She can feel the pressure of the questions he won’t ask; and he’s still, sitting there, nearly vibrating with a need, a need to know.
“Daniel.” She says his name like it could hold all of the answers for anyone, not just for her.
“The piano man,” James nods, pauses for a moment. “Fuck, the whole hat thing,” he shakes his head, and Charlotte laughs, a little sad; “Looks different,” James settles on, and it’s a little true, though maybe not enough: the same soulful eyes that stare out from album covers and watch from across crowded rooms and empty exhibits alike are the same as the ones she’d met when they’d stepped off dry land, the same that had stared, a little lost, as they’d both gotten their sea legs, found there footing.
Were the same as the ones that said they were in love with her, in a tent in an impossible place, in an impossible time.
She might be biased, though.
“I started remembering him,” she says, as if it does the way she’d dreamt of him -- the way she’d been dreaming of him from the start -- as if anything could do the way he haunted her justice. “So I asked Pierre.”
“It’s not a coincidence that Miles and I are friends. When we shook hands for the first time...” She remembers gripping tight to him as she swayed, remembers seeing his face, red and damp in the spray of the sea at nightfall, remembers the faint impression of cutting straight through time and of dying in the arms of someone she adored; remembers coming to and seeing red, in the real world, at the curve of Miles’ nose, remembers the taste of bile as she’d run to the Ladies’ Room and lost her breakfast.
She shrugs off the nausea that always accompanies the thought, and pushes on.
“Once we knew, we started comparing notes, so to speak. Pierre remembered the Initiative from this timeline -- Miles was just a baby when he was relocated and later relieved of his post once the program disbanded. But he still had contacts, friends from his time there. He helped us fill in a few of the gaps, read between lines that didn’t make much sense.”
She reaches across the table, behind a bowl of fruit that only serves to turn her stomach all the more -- grabs for the nondescript little journal that holds the closest thing to answers that she has.
“He also managed to find this.”
She opens the log expertly -- she knows the pages beneath her fingertips by rote, now -- and flips it to face Jim, slides it closer so that he can see. “1977,” she points at the date on the yellowed pages. “These are records, from Ann Arbor.” She smiles, doesn’t mention yet that they’ve run analyses, dated the paper: it’s from that decade, but it’s not that old.
“You see the handwriting?” her fingers trace the ink, reverent, and it feels wrong, somehow; feels right. “It’s definitely his. We’ve left this lying around lately, to see if he recognizes any of it.” She shakes her head, tries not to lose anything in the mire of so many mornings when she’d placed the book deliberately on Pierre’s desk for the days where Daniel would come in to meet about the concert, when she’d run straight into the man as he left, angled just right so that the journal would flop open, hopefully near his feet.
Her voice is rough when she speaks again: “They’re instructions, documents, equations. Little ideas and half-baked thoughts, times and dates and things he remembered, things he recorded.”
He narrows his eyes, squints a little -- she can’t help but see the old photograph that’s clipped to another page, farther back, where he’s wearing his glasses; he studies the list of names: Kwon, Austen, Straume, Shephard, Jarrah, Ford, Carlson, Goodspeed, Reyes, Chang, Widmore, Burke, Lewis...
She tends to stop there.
“They don’t make much sense, really, not to me,” she says, and it’s only half of a lie. “And not to anyone I’ve been able to contact or speak to. Pierre’s made heads or tails of a few things, between himself and his colleagues, but it wasn’t until the dreams, the...” she coughs, clears her throat until it stings; “flashes started happening, that things started slotting into place.”
“Touching people,” she continues, miming the words with the brush of her own fingers across the center of her palm -- he isn’t watching, she doesn’t know why she bothers; “reading things, certain colors or scents, sounds,” like fruits and salt and petrol, or seeing the letters of her name in a slanted script; “for me, at least, that’s what triggers it, starts the flow of the memories.” And she’s sure, she’s sure that’s what they are -- precious bits of herself that she’d simply misplaced for a time, not forgotten.
“I can’t tell when it’ll happen, can’t control what or how much I’ll see.” Sometimes it’s next to nothing, or just a glimpse, the hint of something more; sometimes it’s a deluge, or the tip of an iceberg that reveals itself later, comes to her when she sleeps. “It wasn’t until I found Miles that I realized it wasn’t just me, and it wasn’t until we found the journal that we understood they weren’t just visions, hallucinations,” “they were recollections. They’d happened.”
_________________________
“They’d happened.”
He swallows hard when she bites her lips, lost in her own vague impressions of a life never lived; he wonders, idly, what all she’s seen, how much. He lets his eyes slide shut, sucks on his tongue to keep his bearings, and the feeling of wearing the cuffs, suddenly, is just as keen as the rush of slapping them on. The weight around his wrists is more sure, more solid than the badge beneath his fingers ever grew to be.
He knows real when it comes for him, when it makes him sit up and take fucking note.
He opens his eyes, and everything’s just a little too bright, a little too close. “So, what is this place, then?” He knows that she knows what he means, know she hears him asks if it’s real, ask what’s real at all, if anything ever was.
She takes a moment to respond.
“I think,” she pauses, glances around as if the answer’s etched somewhere, hiding in plain sight; “it feels real. But I think it’s not... quite.”
She heaves a sigh, and he watches her breasts shift under her blouse out the corner of his eye. “I think, even if it is real, we can’t stay here. Not like this. We have to remember.”
She’s decided, he can tell; despite the quiet unease in the pit of his gut, he’s not nearly as sure. “Why?”
She blinks, blank: “Excuse me?”
“Why do we have to remember?”
The scrunch of her eyebrows, the way her head tilts on the axis and considers him, sidelong; she can’t even fathom the question, can’t imagine any why. “Why wouldn’t we?”
“Things are fine here.” He looks around, takes in paisley prints and checkered curtains and thinks about how nothing in this place has been smeared with blood or nuclear radiation or electro-whatchamacallits of any size, shape, or sort; nothing, except for the two of them. “We’ve all got decent lives, at the least.” Lives, he thinks, being the key point -- they’re alive, here, all of them. That’s got to count for more than flashes and promises that might not be real, might not be true, no matter how incredulously Charlotte’s staring at him, no matter how much hurt she’s wrestling, just behind that glance.
“Got lives here that’re better’n the other ones, at least.” And it’s cold, the realization as it sinks in, as he can feel his finger on a trigger to kill instead of protect. “Better than what we were.”
“Doesn’t it bother you?” she breaks in, voice strained and eyes narrowed. “Doesn’t it eat at you that there was a whole other life we must have led, different versions of ourselves?” And her blue eyes are someone else’s, if only for the last half of a second, barely even there -- someone he knows from more than just dreams.
“Wouldn’t it drive you mad to have just the taste of it, that inkling?” she presses, urgent, leans closer as if it’ll do a bit of good. “To never know for sure what it was, who you were?”
He swallows, careful; clears the doubts and the wants and tries to hold on to the fact that the chair under him, the table beneath his hands is what’s real; that feeling and knowing aren’t always just the same. “Maybe it’s better that way,” he murmurs, closes his eyes before he remembers the images that’ll flood when he does; blinks back too quick, a little dizzy. “I was a damn fugitive. I was a murderer. Then Miles, he was playing Haley Joel for lunch money. And you?”
She flinches, knows exactly what he’s going for as he reaches over to the journal, runs his finger to the place that says her name, occupies two lines like a handful and more of them do -- Date of Birth like she’s always known, and them, impossibly:
“Pretty sure D.O.D. ain’t referring to the Defense Department, Ginger.”
He almost feels guilty for saying it out loud; almost, until she squares her jaw and keeps on staring until it nearly burns, until he nearly cracks.
“And maybe it’s real, maybe it’s not,” he says, tries to convince them both; “Maybe we’re all sharing some weird-ass nu-age shared-dreaming, Enya-fuckery of whatever. Who knows.” He gestures flippantly to the journal splayed open between them, blue and black and red inks detailing double lives and too much loss, too many deaths. “But all we got saying otherwise is the goddamn diary of Alicia Keys.”
He remembers that diary being thicker; being different.
Charlotte’s quiet for a second; doesn’t look at him, or the writing, but seems instead of study the edges, the fringes of every page.
“Take it,” she finally says, still avoiding his eyes; “read it.” And she closes it, smoothes the crease and folds her fingers around the binding as she holds it out for him, waits until he grabs it, won’t take no for an answer.
And her gaze flicks up to his, catches and tugs; “Then tell me if it’s not worth the risk.”
_________________________
_________________________
_________________________
She’s buying a pack of gum in the gift shop -- spearmint, because it’s all they have -- and he’s just walking in as she tosses the receipt in the trash and pops a piece in her mouth, pocketing the wrapper. His eyes dart between the corners of his space like he’s trying to map it, figure it out, and she wonders if there’s any reality, any version of existence where he doesn’t look at little bit out of place, where he isn’t a little bit lost.
She knows he’s walking toward her, doesn’t see her; she steps forward instead of back, deliberate, collides with the point of his elbow and doesn’t wince, tries to look surprised.
Is pretty sure she just looks desperate. Or utterly inept.
Either way, she’s ready.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she stutters, only half rehearsed as he helps her gather the things she more threw down than dropped, for effect. “It’s just,” she looks up, meets his gaze and stills as he steadies her with a hand on her arm.
“Sorry,” she murmurs, can’t look down and can’t pull away. “Have a good day, Mr. Widmore.”
She’s not sure her legs are fit to hold her as she stands.
“Haven’t I told you to call me Dan?” And his voice; god, but his voice is so soft and gentle, so warm, and it’s sunrise on the shore before time was relative and words mattered, and she can nearly hear the lapping of the water at the beach in the rush of her blood, the thrum of her heart.
“It’s Charlotte, right?” he says, only it’s not a question, not really. “I remember.”
The hope that flickers is nothing short of useless, nothing close to sure. “Do you?”
She prays he doesn’t hear how breathless she sounds, how much she aches.
“You work for the museum,” he says with a smile that breaks bigger things that she thought could fit inside of her, than she’d ever guessed she had the room to hold. “We’ve met before.”
“Right.” She turns on her heel and walks away; her Daniel, she knows, would have followed.
_________________________
_________________________
The salad course is just being cleared when Daniel clears his throat, catches his mother’s attention as his father excuses himself to the restroom before their main entrées arrive.
“I have a meeting with a producer in Guam,” he starts, knowing they don’t understand what this means, how much he’s wanted to work with the man he’s finally managed to arrange some face time with. “I’m flying out-”
His mother cuts him off with a stern: “When?”
“Next week sometime,” he starts, not because he doesn’t know, but because his mother certainly doesn’t need to.
“Which day?” Perhaps Eloise knows her son too well, but Dan thinks it’s more the fact that she doesn’t take no for an answer, from anyone.
“I think,” he prevaricates for a moment, just until his mother’s sour expression begins to border on real contempt. “March 16th.”
Dan doesn’t know what it is that overtakes his mother’s expression, but it’s something he’s never seen before. He’s glad, for that.
“Daniel, darling,” she says, in that too-sweet voice she uses, that falters a little in a sing-songy kind of way and makes his stomach churn, because it takes him back to things he can’t quite place a finger on, things in the past that he can’t quite recall, but that he knows should put the fear of God in him, that should chill him to his core. “I think you should fly out the next day.”
He narrows his gaze at her, can’t resist the need to challenge, to ask when he should just leave it alone. “What does it matter? I don’t have anything else planned.”
His mother purses her lips, thinks for too long, and he knows it’s a poor kind of excuse that she manages in the end. “Your sister?” Eloise starts, unsure, her gaze moving sharply between her son and the direction of the restrooms, searching out her husband for some kind of support. “She wants us to meet her new... friend.”
“Friend?” he asks, surprised, because Penny doesn’t introduce her “friends” to her family. Ever. And of course, Dan understands why. “Really?”
“Well, he’s hardly new to your father,” she smiles -- too strained, even for her. “It’s that Hume fellow, who works for him.”
She doesn’t quite notice the way her son stills when she says it, the way his eyes glaze a little in the low lighting of the restaurant as soon as that name leaves her lips.
She doesn’t want to notice.
“There’s a performance of Carmen at the Music Center that night,” she continues, while Daniel doesn’t waver, doesn’t move; doesn’t see her, or hear her, and something in her understands that, knows it’s too late. “I was, well, I was hoping we all could go, and then perhaps a late dinner? To get better acquainted? I thought...” she trails off, catches sight of her son’s unseeing eyes as her breath sticks in her throat, her heart heavy in her chest as she waits for it to settle, to pass; waits for the ground to shift and swallow everything she’s built, everything she thought she’d finally outrun.
He blinks, and his hands are shaking, and she certain, now, that he’s lost.
“Mother,” he says distractedly as he stands, doesn’t even look her way; “excuse me.”
He’s out the door of the establishment by the time she whispers it, by the time she lets herself remember the feeling of the blood from his chest on her hands. “He knows.”
“Knows what, my dear?” Charles comes behind her, settles back into his chair as his eyes trail Daniel where he jogs toward his car on the other side of the glass. “That you’re a micro-managing, manipulative hussy?” He presses a quick kiss to the corner of her jaw, smoothes her hair reassuringly as he teases her, the smile of his lips pressed into her skin; “I suspect he riddled that out years ago.”
Not for the first time, Eloise Widmore blesses her husband’s abysmal memory.
_________________________
It was new for her, then; new and fresh and just barely growing wings -- and it was warm and wonderful in so many ways, kept the chill breeze of the shore at bay, that ominous cool of danger and death that settled hard between the trees in that place, that hellish sanctuary that killed and revealed, where every defining moment in her life had taken root, come to fruition.
Her first steps. Her first words. Her first dig, first find.
Her first real love; the first time she learned the difference between the word and the feeling.
Sometimes she wonders if it’d been more, if she’d have let it blossom and swell; if she’d have let herself go, and loved him sooner, stronger, better -- loved him then like he’d loved her, like she knows she loves him now; she wonders if maybe, just maybe, it would have been enough.
Sometimes, she lets his concertos paint the backdrop as she cries herself to sleep.
_________________________
“Charlotte.” She knows the voice, knows it’s too early for him to be here for anything other than what she wants, what she won’t ever have again.
“Morning, Mr. Widmore,” she says, brightly as she can manage, and she forces herself to keep walking toward her office, to start her day and check her e-mail and her voicemail and ignore, just ignore how broken and scared that voice sounds; to forget that the voice sounds like Daniel, because there’s a difference, a recognition that was lost before, and it’s never been more clear that it was missing until it’s back again, until it’s there.
“Charlotte,” he says again, and this time the sound is lower, damp and strangled, and it takes her back to places she needs to be, places she’s afraid to go without him.
“Sorry,” she turns, tight and restrained, even as the dams start to creak in her chest; corrects herself: “Dan.”
She catches the way he shakes his head out of the corner of her eye as she turns; her peripheral vision doesn’t catch the way he reaches out and grabs for her arm. “Charlotte,” he whispers, and for the longest of moments, neither of them move; he’s warm at her back, as he pulls her close at the shoulder so that she’s pressed against him, but she won’t look. She won’t.
“Come with me,” he says softly, and it means more than she’d dare to dream in this place, this life that never was.
“Where?” It’s a safe question, in it’s way; it’s a question that holds the future and so much of herself inside of it that it’s terrifying, letting it go.
“Anywhere,” he breathes, and he stares for just a moment before he takes his touch away, and she nearly whimpers in the space between before his hands are on her shoulders and are drawing her into his chest, are wrapping her tight and keeping her close as he frames her face with his palms.
“God, Charlotte,” he exhales, and she can taste him on the air -- same as ever. “Come with me for coffee,” he murmurs, and she can feel it in his chest, vibrating through her own; “for dinner.” He dips his chin so that the tip of his nose brushes her cheekbone, sends a shiver through her that passes through him just as quick. “Come with me to my car, to my place,” and his breath is shaky when it blows against her skin, when he whispers into the throbbing beat of her heart at her temples, lets his stubble graze against her forehead and catch delicately in her hair: “Come with me forever.”
And she kisses him before he gets the chance, desperate and longing and full, and when he kisses back, there’s the need there, the same hesitance and heat, but it’s wider now, it’s deeper, and she remembers what happiness is -- the real kind, the kind that damns and saves.
“Forever,” she whispers, her lips catching on Dan’s as he kisses away the syllables, swallows the word; “that might be nice.”
He draws back, his chest heaving quick and heavy against her as he stares with a wonder, a joy she forgot she understood, forgot she could feel as well as see; he kisses her again, and she thinks that yeah, forever’s good.
_________________________
_________________________
Charlotte tells him they have to get on a plane; have to go back, because what they’re remembering is who they really are, and there are things left unfinished, and people that need saving, and if they’ve got a shot in hell at redemption for all of the things they’ve done wrong, taking the easy way out and staying in this half-assed hunk of dreamland ain’t gonna solve a goddamn thing.
He waits until the gate’s about to close to buy the damn ticket; nearly misses his chance.
That’s fate, maybe.
The only seat he could get was First Class; he doesn’t see anyone else, doesn’t know if he’s alone, and his palms are sweating when the stewardess asks if he’d like a drink.
He’s asleep before she comes back with his Jack and Coke, thirty-thousand some feet above a world that doesn’t matter -- never did.
He dreams.
_________________________
He wakes, lids heavy with sleep and time and space, and he’s blinded by sun and shade with the rush of water and the sluice of sand underfoot keeping beat; it’s more like home than he thought it might be.
“James,” he hears, and he knows that voice, the scent of lilac and freesia and sweat and sun and him mixed with her in a way he didn’t know could work so well, except of course he knows; he always knew. “James.”
He barely sees the red curls, the dark hair and the mud-stained shirt-and-tie that are all he can make out of the people standing beyond, watching; he doesn’t mind not knowing, not being sure of them, because the touch of careful hands on his arms, his chest -- the touch of hands that he knows keeps him steady, brings him back.
The rough grit of the beach beneath him is outweighed by that touch, by the way that one hand doesn’t father, warm except for the strip of one finger on the left, where the metal of a ring bites cold against him, real and sure; where a wave of blonde tickles across his nipple as he lifts up, bends closer; as deep blinding blue meets his eyes when they focus, when they clear.
Whatever happens, he’s got this.
_________________________
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Daniel/Charlotte, Juliet/Sawyer, mild/past Sawyer/Charlotte, brief Eloise/Charles, mentioned Penny/Desmond, mentioned/past Charlotte/Miles
Word Count: 7,645
Summary: These are the things that are worth risking everything for. For valhalla37, who requested S6, with Sawyer/Charlotte but ultimately Daniel/Charlotte, and some Juliet/Sawyer thrown in for good measure for my help_chile Auction. General Spoilers Through Season Six.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot. Title belongs to Mumford & Sons.
Author’s Notes: To the wonderful valhalla37: of course you know that I’m dreadfully sorry that your auction fic has taken me so long, but I just want to say that again: I am SO SORRY that your auction fic has taken so long. And I’m also sorry if it’s not the sort of thing you were looking for. I played a lot with this -- experimented with form and POV and implication and exposition, pushed the envelope on just how vague I could be without delving too far into confusion; I’m not sure any of it succeeded, but I did want to try something... pseudo-unique for you, with this. There are a number of plot holes, and most things are unresolved and unexplained -- part of that was a result of trying to create a feel of uncertainty, of the unreality of S6 and the sideways-verse as it unfolded; but admittedly, some of it’s not. I didn’t want to tell the story, so much as imply it, and let the gaps kind of... be, if that makes any sense. It probably doesn’t, but yeah. Anyway: I hope, regardless of all of that, you enjoy it.
A Design, An Alignment, A Cry (Of My Heart To See)
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In the moment that he throws her out, pulse thrumming in his temples and blood rushing, bursting hot behind his eyes -- in that moment, he knows the difference between mistakes and regrets.
This is a mistake, Jim thinks, knows as he watches her rush, all wrapped up in her sheet -- green sheet, kinda shiny, and he don’t do shiny, or green; this is a mistake.
But there are bigger things he’s done -- will do -- to pin on regret.
_________________________
That night, Jim dreams of the smell of boiling pasta, of sunflowers -- the taste of merlot in his mouth, on a tongue that’s not his own -- and a little girl, with ginger curls and a smile filled with baby teeth to match her baby blues, who he snags an Apollo Bar from the cafeteria for when he’s running late from his shift, because she’s absolutely not allowed chocolate before dinner.
There’s also water, and trees, and a shoreline traced with foam, but those -- they’re peripheral; get lost upon waking before he even blinks the sleep from his eyes.
_________________________
_________________________
He doesn’t even say hello when she calls; it’s more the rustle of sheets and his incoherent groaning that lets her know he’s there at all.
“Your friend, Jim,” is her greeting, and the snort she gets in response indicates that Miles’ REM cycle was clearly not as rudely interrupted as he’d have liked her to believe.
“God, I wish I could have been there,” he says, almost wistful. “How big of a disaster was it? Is his apartment complex still standing? Did you even make it past the restaurant? I didn’t see any gaping, apocalyptic holes where a fine dining establishment once stood on my way home last night, but that doesn’t mean-”
“Miles,” she stops him. “He’s definitely the one.”
“Aww, when should I be expecting the engagement announcement in the mail?”
“He’s Sawyer.”
Miles is quiet, like she expected he might be; like he shouldn’t be, because they were pretty damn sure -- he was a shadow, before, in their memories, but the newspaper clippings, the folder with the name: it took the dark away, and his face was clear now, in her mind.
“So it’s not a coincidence.”
Charlotte laughs humorlessly. “Did you really think it was?”
“No, but...” and she can see him, the way Miles passes a sad hand across his face and breathes deep between his knuckles. “He’s my friend, Char. My best friend. I didn’t want this for him.”
He doesn’t believe in this like she does.
“What does he know?”
“I’m not sure,” Charlotte replies, a little curtly, clutching her shawl around her as she fights back a shiver; this would be the absolute last time she wore something so damn slinky without a proper coverup, for emergencies. “If anything, it’s just little things, at this point. Nothing major, not enough to raise suspicion. Easily ignored.”
“But you think it’ll start? That it’ll get worse?”
“Does it make me a terrible person if I said that I hope so?” And it’s not because he threw her out in the middle of the night, either. But the more of them that know...
The more of them that know, the better their chances are of getting back, of going home. Strength in numbers, and all of that.
“Yeah,” Miles huffs, “it kind of does.”
“Look,” she bites out at him across the line; “my hair’s a mess, my makeup’s smeared halfway ‘cross my face, and I’m standing on a street corner at three in the bloody morning, Miles, in a cocktail dress that barely covers my arse,” she heaves a heavy breath, rubs her hands against her bare arms. “Terrible person that I am, I’d prefer not to top off such a wonderful evening with getting propositioned by LA’s best and brightest off of Hollywood Boulevard, thank you kindly,”
“You’ve been watching Pretty Woman again, haven’t you?”
She rolls her eyes, and snaps back: “Can you just come and pick me up?”
“Do you want me to use the siren?”
She chokes a reluctant laugh, because that’s Miles -- like a social component of the bomb squad, ready to diffuse any situation. She thinks he missed his calling on the Force. “The lights, I think, will be sufficient.”
“Give me fifteen minutes.”
“Whatever solicitations I have to fight off before you get here are coming out of your paycheck on principle.”
“How about dinner on Saturday, and we’ll call it square?”
“I’ll take it under advisement,” she shoots back, caught between annoyance and amusement. “Just make it snappy, Detective Chang.”
_________________________
_________________________
Jim comes by her place too soon, and her prides still a bit bruised, all things considered. She says nothing that he doesn’t deserve, and to be honest, she’s glad to see the back of him when he goes.
But yeah, Charlotte feels a little bad when he leaves the sunflower, when she finds it at her feet the next morning, shriveled and broken and terrified of things it doesn’t understand.
No one just picks sunflowers out of the blue.
_________________________
She waits a week before she does anything about anything, before she decides it’s time to clear the air -- out of necessity, if nothing else. Before she swings by, though, she picks up a bag of ranch-flavored sunflower seeds, for the sake of symbolism; balances them with the drinks in her crook of her elbow as she climbs his stairs. He looks surprised to see her when he answers the door; she feels a little surge of victory at that.
“I wasn’t lying,” she starts, leaning against the doorframe with her free hand tucked awkwardly in her jacket pocket; “you did blow it.” She shoves the beer in her hands against his chest and drops her hold, lets him catch it as she slips into his apartment and waits for him to follow.
“But I can recognize an olive branch when it’s being offered, so,” she tosses her hands up and turns back toward him, “Maybe we can try something else.”
“Somethin’ else?” he asks, half cautious, but his tone’s too much of a purr beneath the confusion, his gaze gleaming a little too brightly with lust, and she narrows her eyes at him as she approaches, pulling a can from the ring of the six-pack and popping the tab, swigging fast before she deigns to clarify.
“Friends,” she says, with a hint of disgust in her tone. “Do you know what that word means, James?”
“Friends,” he repeats, like there’s a chance in hell that he doesn’t.
“Yes,” she rolls her eyes dramatically. “It means having the luxury of enjoying the unparalleled company of yours truly without the burden of mind-numbingly brilliant sex.”
She drinks again from her beer, sits down on his couch like he’s given her an answer, as if she’d been waiting for one at all; he doesn’t follow, simply hovers, and she tries not to make it strange, uncomfortably -- tries to ignore the tension that’s tight between them.
“I’m sorry,” he says finally, like it hurts to admit. From what she’s learned of him in passing, from what remembers of him, it probably does.
She thinks back to what she knows -- what she’s read and heard, and seen -- and maybe he doesn’t understand yet, but it doesn’t really matter. She’s the bigger person, and she’ll say it, because she means it.
“I know,” she answers softly as he sinks onto the couch, a cushion empty between them as they gravitate toward opposite sides. “Me too.”
_________________________
Jim was nine years old. Nine years old.
It doesn’t seem right, somehow; and not for the same tired reasons, the same ache in his chest when he remembers, when he can smell his mama’s blood and the gunpowder cloud that spread when his daddy hit the mattress, pressing the boxspring hard against his back as he’d trembled under the bed -- it’s different.
He was nine years old, says so in black and white. The dates add up, the numbers match. The picture’s just like he remembers; he’d smiled different back then.
It’s just that -- he could have sworn that he’d been eight.
_________________________
_________________________
“What’s that you’re reading?”
She tries not to startle at the intrusion, the welcome interruption in her morning routine of coffee and a muffin at the museum café; she closes the Moleskine that’s never far away, these days and makes herself grin like it’s casual, like it means nothing when she meets those big brown eyes.
“Quantum physics,” she says, and the ways his expression quirks, a little taken aback -- it’s so familiar, and yet so foreign. She thinks she still would have fallen for this Daniel, if the world were different and things were new.
It takes him a moment to reply, like he’s weighing truths in his mind. “You’re serious.”
Her grin’s a little more genuine when she nods. “Very much so.” She wonders, a little, if he writes the same equations, the same notes in the margins in his dreams -- if maybe he just doesn’t remember the dreams like she does.
“Huh,” he huffs, breathy and light, and she misses that: the airy, barely-there tone he always spoke in: ephemeral, even when it wouldn’t fade.
Her smile turns into a smirk as she raises an eyebrow. “Don’t I look the type?” she asks, a playful edge to her voice, and she wants to laugh when he rocks back on his feet and lifts his hands, palms out in apology.
“I didn’t mean,” he starts, and she does laugh, then; sees the sparkle that the sound ignites in his eyes.
“It’s fine,” she assures him, and he doesn’t take too long to nod, worrying his lip between his teeth. “Come here often?” she asks, tries to tamper down her hopes that he’ll remember the way she’d asked him that, in the middle of the ocean, when they’d both watched the sunset off the stern of that godforsaken freighter, and he’d laughed, a little hysterical -- the first time they’d ever really talked.
“I never come here,” he says, stoic, eyes far away for a long moment before he blinks, seems to remember himself. “I’m sorry,” he starts again, shakes his head until his hair falls across his face. “That’s just...”
“Don’t,” she stops him, her smile sobered now, but still there; she doesn’t need to hear him try to justify what he doesn’t understand. “It’s okay.”
She’s about to go back to her reading, take a sip of her café mocha when he seems to startle back; she’s not sure if it’s better that he’s here, with her, or that he stays wherever he was, so that the memories can start to take hold.
“I’m, wow,” he wrings his fingers together for a second, and she remembers that little quirk of his, loves that in him. “Where are my manners?” he reaches out, lets his extended hand hover between them as he fumbles, just a bit. “I’m-”
“I know who you are, Mr. Widmore.” She smiles tightly, though not unpleasantly -- doesn’t take his hand, knows he isn’t ready; isn’t sure she’ll be able to bear the way he’ll simply smile like she’s anyone when his touch, she’s certain, will undo her.
He blinks, cocks his head, and it’s endearing as it ever was. “You do?”
“If it weren’t enough that your photo is plastered,” she gestures to the large-scale posters for his upcoming performance that are hanging every thirty yards from the lofty ceilings outside the café; “ quite literally everywhere in this place,” she waits for him to blush as he takes in the over-saturation of his own face in the vicinity, the cover of his last album stretched ten-feet tall. “Would you be put off if I said I was a fan?”
His blush deepens, but his smile stretches ten feet wide, evens things out. “I’d be flattered.”
She giggles, just a little; can’t help it. “Then I’m a fan.”
“Then I’m flattered.”
He takes her in, silently, for a long stretch of moments, the smile on his face never fading; stops short when he seems to catch the sight of the employee badge hanging off of the lanyard at her neck. “You work here?” he asks, sounding intrigued.
She remembers, one time, his lips upon her neck.
“Yes,” she answers over the flutter in her chest. “Assistant curator.”
“That’s impressive.” It’s meant as a compliment; he doesn’t sound surprised.
She dips her chin in acknowledgment. “I enjoy it.”
He seems to take a cue from her short reply; she doesn’t intend it, but maybe it’s for the best. “Should I leave you to your drink in peace... I,” he pauses, and the blush is back, and no, it’s not for the best that he wants to leave, because seeing him at all is why she gets up in the morning, some days. “I’m sorry,” he says, ducking his head and looking almost bashful, his voice so soft she’d have to strain if she didn’t know it so well. “I didn’t get your name.”
It kills her, a little, that he has to ask. “It’s Charlotte.”
“Right,” he breathes, and the tone of his voice catches something inside of her, unsettles something she thought she could withstand. “Jesus, yeah. Right.”
She steels herself against the memory of introducing herself against the waves, of sitting on the sand, thighs touching and knees bumping at the side, of tasting his tongue in her mouth beneath the trees. “I’m actually finished,” she brightens falsely, like harsh florescent lighting against the shine of the sun. “But it was lovely speaking with you, Mr. Widmore.”
She stands, brushes her things into her shoulder bag as she pushes in her chair, the click of her heels cracking like ice against the floor once, twice before he speaks.
“Wait,” he says, and he doesn’t have to ask; she’s been waiting. “Charlotte.” He doesn’t follow, just stares until she can feel it, until she meets his eyes and they both swallow hard. “Call me Dan.”
She grins a little in parting before she turns to leave. “Have a good morning, Dan.”
It makes her day, more than it should, when he calls after: “And you.”
_________________________
It’s a Saturday night, and they’ve both drank too much: stretched across the couch and the loveseat, respectively -- they’ve learned their lesson.
His head is tipped back across the arm of the couch, lolling a bit as he breathes: Pierre’s told her what he remember of the Security team, of the Doctor-turned-mechanic who was too smart for her own good; she wonders, for a moment, what he looked like sprawled across a garish sofa in a tiny house on an Island in the middle of anywhere, with the woman he loved curled loose against his side.
She hears the click of her stereo as it switches through the discs, resumes playing through her collection of Daniel Widmore’s greatest performances; it takes just the first three notes of the track before she heaves a heavy sigh and falls into the cadence -- it’s her favorite, this one simple song.
“The Glass Ballerina,” she says, slow, careful on the words. “S’my favorite piece. Sometimes, when I’m down, or I’ve had a bad day at work-”
“Yeah, ‘cause workin’ the museum’s so goddamn stressful,” Jim interrupts with a snort, a little too merry; “those little Eskimo doll thingys might come out an’ bite ya.”
“Oi,” she protests, halfheartedly. “They’re not dolls, and they’re not little, the sizing is true-to-life-”
“Or those taxidermied mastodons,” Jim continues, grin wide and a little bit sloshed as he hangs, loose-limbed, off the cushions.
“They’re mammoths, actually.”
He blinks, raises his head a little and stares at her a bit blearily. “There’s a difference?”
“Mmmm,” she hums, licks the sweet tang of wine from her lips as if there’s anything left there, like ambrosia and notes half-missed as she listens, taps her foot to the crescendoing swell of the keys.
“Whatever,” Jim sucks the rest of his beer down, lips popping around the mouth of the bottle as he continues to wean himself back from the hard stuff for the night. “Can’t say I pity you and your god-awfully taxing job keeping tabs on downtown LA’s the stuffed animal collection.”
“The sheer extent of your crassness should amaze me,” she sighs, studies the pattern splattered against the ceiling, the dips and grooves tracing the tempo of the track in the background. “It’s a reflection of just how uncultured you really are that it doesn’t.” She points an idle finger in his direction without looking to see if she’s even pointing at him, if he’s even looking. “You should be ashamed.”
He laughs, but she thinks that maybe he’s laughing at something else, something far away.
“But no,” she presses on, like it matters when it doesn’t, because the silence that’s left over’s cold and too empty. “I mean, this song... it just...” she trails off, hopes the echo of unanswered queries and unfinished business will keep them warm until the quiet passes; until Jim breaks back in with a rough scratch of voice, of speech.
“S’like a...” she can hear him swallow, in the quiet that stretches before he finishes the thought: “A constant.” The tone of his voice is bewildered, from more than just the drinks; he doesn’t know where the term came from, why it’s so fitting.
He doesn’t know, but he will.
She smiles broadly as the last tinkling strands of the song hit, resonate, and disappear, warm inside her chest.
“Exactly.”
_________________________
_________________________
He dreams of a woman, sometimes; he thinks, at least, that he does.
He smells lilac and freesia over the antiseptic bite of sterile, nauseating hospital; and he’s not above acknowledging that he’s a little bit lonely -- enough that the scent of a woman might send his imagination ablaze in coming up with a vision to match: blonde hair and blue eyes and a soft, careful smile that guards a laugh that sounds like home.
He tries his damnedest to find a victim to check up on at St. Sebastian for the better part of a month before he gives it up as a lost cause.
Whoever she is, though, if she’s even real at all -- he doesn’t stop dreaming of her.
_________________________
She feels silly, like a secret agent -- no, more like a woman who plays a secret agent on television, and does so very poorly; out of place and awkward in her own skin, language stilted and tone overborne.
Miles hands her the Venti Starbucks cup she doesn’t need but very much wants, and she lets the heat and caffeine calm her unduly fried nerves; they’re not doing anything wrong, they’re not toying with anyone’s lives; no more than fate and someone’s fucked up sense of humor already has -- already will -- anyway. “Has he figured it out yet?”
“Not yet,” she burns her tongue, swears under her breath and watches the smirk pull at Miles’ lips while he sips at his tall coffee. “I think he might be getting close, though.”
“Good.”
Sometimes, it’s strange, between them; sometimes she remembers fucking him in their dank quarters, the very first night on that goddamn vessel headed for the middle of nowhere, with the sound of waves sloshing hard against the hull, and she wonders whether or not that’s something that’s come back for the both of them, or just for her.
Sometimes, it’s strange because she wants to ask him if he ever heard her voice among the masses, the whispers beyond -- if he knew when she was going to die before she read the truth in Daniel’s eyes, before she whispered and bled and sputtered out, useless on the jungle floor.
Sometimes, it’s strange.
_________________________
She’d said that Jim was ‘close.’ She’d honestly believed it, too.
Close, it turns out, was something of a grievous underestimation.
It takes three days before James Ford blacks out while chasing a suspect through alleyways too smooth to blame terrain, too narrow for interference; falls down on the asphalt and rubs holes in the knees of his jeans, never hears the cuffs clank against the ground or the footsteps of the perp as he runs, flees -- smoke and light on his tail.
When his partner finds him, he stares at Miles Chang with new eyes and the name Straume on his lips before he chokes, blood split hot at the corner of his mouth: “You came on a Freighter.”
_________________________
They look at one another for a long time; look at everything but each other for longer. She can feel the pressure of the questions he won’t ask; and he’s still, sitting there, nearly vibrating with a need, a need to know.
“Daniel.” She says his name like it could hold all of the answers for anyone, not just for her.
“The piano man,” James nods, pauses for a moment. “Fuck, the whole hat thing,” he shakes his head, and Charlotte laughs, a little sad; “Looks different,” James settles on, and it’s a little true, though maybe not enough: the same soulful eyes that stare out from album covers and watch from across crowded rooms and empty exhibits alike are the same as the ones she’d met when they’d stepped off dry land, the same that had stared, a little lost, as they’d both gotten their sea legs, found there footing.
Were the same as the ones that said they were in love with her, in a tent in an impossible place, in an impossible time.
She might be biased, though.
“I started remembering him,” she says, as if it does the way she’d dreamt of him -- the way she’d been dreaming of him from the start -- as if anything could do the way he haunted her justice. “So I asked Pierre.”
“It’s not a coincidence that Miles and I are friends. When we shook hands for the first time...” She remembers gripping tight to him as she swayed, remembers seeing his face, red and damp in the spray of the sea at nightfall, remembers the faint impression of cutting straight through time and of dying in the arms of someone she adored; remembers coming to and seeing red, in the real world, at the curve of Miles’ nose, remembers the taste of bile as she’d run to the Ladies’ Room and lost her breakfast.
She shrugs off the nausea that always accompanies the thought, and pushes on.
“Once we knew, we started comparing notes, so to speak. Pierre remembered the Initiative from this timeline -- Miles was just a baby when he was relocated and later relieved of his post once the program disbanded. But he still had contacts, friends from his time there. He helped us fill in a few of the gaps, read between lines that didn’t make much sense.”
She reaches across the table, behind a bowl of fruit that only serves to turn her stomach all the more -- grabs for the nondescript little journal that holds the closest thing to answers that she has.
“He also managed to find this.”
She opens the log expertly -- she knows the pages beneath her fingertips by rote, now -- and flips it to face Jim, slides it closer so that he can see. “1977,” she points at the date on the yellowed pages. “These are records, from Ann Arbor.” She smiles, doesn’t mention yet that they’ve run analyses, dated the paper: it’s from that decade, but it’s not that old.
“You see the handwriting?” her fingers trace the ink, reverent, and it feels wrong, somehow; feels right. “It’s definitely his. We’ve left this lying around lately, to see if he recognizes any of it.” She shakes her head, tries not to lose anything in the mire of so many mornings when she’d placed the book deliberately on Pierre’s desk for the days where Daniel would come in to meet about the concert, when she’d run straight into the man as he left, angled just right so that the journal would flop open, hopefully near his feet.
Her voice is rough when she speaks again: “They’re instructions, documents, equations. Little ideas and half-baked thoughts, times and dates and things he remembered, things he recorded.”
He narrows his eyes, squints a little -- she can’t help but see the old photograph that’s clipped to another page, farther back, where he’s wearing his glasses; he studies the list of names: Kwon, Austen, Straume, Shephard, Jarrah, Ford, Carlson, Goodspeed, Reyes, Chang, Widmore, Burke, Lewis...
She tends to stop there.
“They don’t make much sense, really, not to me,” she says, and it’s only half of a lie. “And not to anyone I’ve been able to contact or speak to. Pierre’s made heads or tails of a few things, between himself and his colleagues, but it wasn’t until the dreams, the...” she coughs, clears her throat until it stings; “flashes started happening, that things started slotting into place.”
“Touching people,” she continues, miming the words with the brush of her own fingers across the center of her palm -- he isn’t watching, she doesn’t know why she bothers; “reading things, certain colors or scents, sounds,” like fruits and salt and petrol, or seeing the letters of her name in a slanted script; “for me, at least, that’s what triggers it, starts the flow of the memories.” And she’s sure, she’s sure that’s what they are -- precious bits of herself that she’d simply misplaced for a time, not forgotten.
“I can’t tell when it’ll happen, can’t control what or how much I’ll see.” Sometimes it’s next to nothing, or just a glimpse, the hint of something more; sometimes it’s a deluge, or the tip of an iceberg that reveals itself later, comes to her when she sleeps. “It wasn’t until I found Miles that I realized it wasn’t just me, and it wasn’t until we found the journal that we understood they weren’t just visions, hallucinations,” “they were recollections. They’d happened.”
_________________________
“They’d happened.”
He swallows hard when she bites her lips, lost in her own vague impressions of a life never lived; he wonders, idly, what all she’s seen, how much. He lets his eyes slide shut, sucks on his tongue to keep his bearings, and the feeling of wearing the cuffs, suddenly, is just as keen as the rush of slapping them on. The weight around his wrists is more sure, more solid than the badge beneath his fingers ever grew to be.
He knows real when it comes for him, when it makes him sit up and take fucking note.
He opens his eyes, and everything’s just a little too bright, a little too close. “So, what is this place, then?” He knows that she knows what he means, know she hears him asks if it’s real, ask what’s real at all, if anything ever was.
She takes a moment to respond.
“I think,” she pauses, glances around as if the answer’s etched somewhere, hiding in plain sight; “it feels real. But I think it’s not... quite.”
She heaves a sigh, and he watches her breasts shift under her blouse out the corner of his eye. “I think, even if it is real, we can’t stay here. Not like this. We have to remember.”
She’s decided, he can tell; despite the quiet unease in the pit of his gut, he’s not nearly as sure. “Why?”
She blinks, blank: “Excuse me?”
“Why do we have to remember?”
The scrunch of her eyebrows, the way her head tilts on the axis and considers him, sidelong; she can’t even fathom the question, can’t imagine any why. “Why wouldn’t we?”
“Things are fine here.” He looks around, takes in paisley prints and checkered curtains and thinks about how nothing in this place has been smeared with blood or nuclear radiation or electro-whatchamacallits of any size, shape, or sort; nothing, except for the two of them. “We’ve all got decent lives, at the least.” Lives, he thinks, being the key point -- they’re alive, here, all of them. That’s got to count for more than flashes and promises that might not be real, might not be true, no matter how incredulously Charlotte’s staring at him, no matter how much hurt she’s wrestling, just behind that glance.
“Got lives here that’re better’n the other ones, at least.” And it’s cold, the realization as it sinks in, as he can feel his finger on a trigger to kill instead of protect. “Better than what we were.”
“Doesn’t it bother you?” she breaks in, voice strained and eyes narrowed. “Doesn’t it eat at you that there was a whole other life we must have led, different versions of ourselves?” And her blue eyes are someone else’s, if only for the last half of a second, barely even there -- someone he knows from more than just dreams.
“Wouldn’t it drive you mad to have just the taste of it, that inkling?” she presses, urgent, leans closer as if it’ll do a bit of good. “To never know for sure what it was, who you were?”
He swallows, careful; clears the doubts and the wants and tries to hold on to the fact that the chair under him, the table beneath his hands is what’s real; that feeling and knowing aren’t always just the same. “Maybe it’s better that way,” he murmurs, closes his eyes before he remembers the images that’ll flood when he does; blinks back too quick, a little dizzy. “I was a damn fugitive. I was a murderer. Then Miles, he was playing Haley Joel for lunch money. And you?”
She flinches, knows exactly what he’s going for as he reaches over to the journal, runs his finger to the place that says her name, occupies two lines like a handful and more of them do -- Date of Birth like she’s always known, and them, impossibly:
“Pretty sure D.O.D. ain’t referring to the Defense Department, Ginger.”
He almost feels guilty for saying it out loud; almost, until she squares her jaw and keeps on staring until it nearly burns, until he nearly cracks.
“And maybe it’s real, maybe it’s not,” he says, tries to convince them both; “Maybe we’re all sharing some weird-ass nu-age shared-dreaming, Enya-fuckery of whatever. Who knows.” He gestures flippantly to the journal splayed open between them, blue and black and red inks detailing double lives and too much loss, too many deaths. “But all we got saying otherwise is the goddamn diary of Alicia Keys.”
He remembers that diary being thicker; being different.
Charlotte’s quiet for a second; doesn’t look at him, or the writing, but seems instead of study the edges, the fringes of every page.
“Take it,” she finally says, still avoiding his eyes; “read it.” And she closes it, smoothes the crease and folds her fingers around the binding as she holds it out for him, waits until he grabs it, won’t take no for an answer.
And her gaze flicks up to his, catches and tugs; “Then tell me if it’s not worth the risk.”
_________________________
_________________________
_________________________
She’s buying a pack of gum in the gift shop -- spearmint, because it’s all they have -- and he’s just walking in as she tosses the receipt in the trash and pops a piece in her mouth, pocketing the wrapper. His eyes dart between the corners of his space like he’s trying to map it, figure it out, and she wonders if there’s any reality, any version of existence where he doesn’t look at little bit out of place, where he isn’t a little bit lost.
She knows he’s walking toward her, doesn’t see her; she steps forward instead of back, deliberate, collides with the point of his elbow and doesn’t wince, tries to look surprised.
Is pretty sure she just looks desperate. Or utterly inept.
Either way, she’s ready.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she stutters, only half rehearsed as he helps her gather the things she more threw down than dropped, for effect. “It’s just,” she looks up, meets his gaze and stills as he steadies her with a hand on her arm.
“Sorry,” she murmurs, can’t look down and can’t pull away. “Have a good day, Mr. Widmore.”
She’s not sure her legs are fit to hold her as she stands.
“Haven’t I told you to call me Dan?” And his voice; god, but his voice is so soft and gentle, so warm, and it’s sunrise on the shore before time was relative and words mattered, and she can nearly hear the lapping of the water at the beach in the rush of her blood, the thrum of her heart.
“It’s Charlotte, right?” he says, only it’s not a question, not really. “I remember.”
The hope that flickers is nothing short of useless, nothing close to sure. “Do you?”
She prays he doesn’t hear how breathless she sounds, how much she aches.
“You work for the museum,” he says with a smile that breaks bigger things that she thought could fit inside of her, than she’d ever guessed she had the room to hold. “We’ve met before.”
“Right.” She turns on her heel and walks away; her Daniel, she knows, would have followed.
_________________________
_________________________
The salad course is just being cleared when Daniel clears his throat, catches his mother’s attention as his father excuses himself to the restroom before their main entrées arrive.
“I have a meeting with a producer in Guam,” he starts, knowing they don’t understand what this means, how much he’s wanted to work with the man he’s finally managed to arrange some face time with. “I’m flying out-”
His mother cuts him off with a stern: “When?”
“Next week sometime,” he starts, not because he doesn’t know, but because his mother certainly doesn’t need to.
“Which day?” Perhaps Eloise knows her son too well, but Dan thinks it’s more the fact that she doesn’t take no for an answer, from anyone.
“I think,” he prevaricates for a moment, just until his mother’s sour expression begins to border on real contempt. “March 16th.”
Dan doesn’t know what it is that overtakes his mother’s expression, but it’s something he’s never seen before. He’s glad, for that.
“Daniel, darling,” she says, in that too-sweet voice she uses, that falters a little in a sing-songy kind of way and makes his stomach churn, because it takes him back to things he can’t quite place a finger on, things in the past that he can’t quite recall, but that he knows should put the fear of God in him, that should chill him to his core. “I think you should fly out the next day.”
He narrows his gaze at her, can’t resist the need to challenge, to ask when he should just leave it alone. “What does it matter? I don’t have anything else planned.”
His mother purses her lips, thinks for too long, and he knows it’s a poor kind of excuse that she manages in the end. “Your sister?” Eloise starts, unsure, her gaze moving sharply between her son and the direction of the restrooms, searching out her husband for some kind of support. “She wants us to meet her new... friend.”
“Friend?” he asks, surprised, because Penny doesn’t introduce her “friends” to her family. Ever. And of course, Dan understands why. “Really?”
“Well, he’s hardly new to your father,” she smiles -- too strained, even for her. “It’s that Hume fellow, who works for him.”
She doesn’t quite notice the way her son stills when she says it, the way his eyes glaze a little in the low lighting of the restaurant as soon as that name leaves her lips.
She doesn’t want to notice.
“There’s a performance of Carmen at the Music Center that night,” she continues, while Daniel doesn’t waver, doesn’t move; doesn’t see her, or hear her, and something in her understands that, knows it’s too late. “I was, well, I was hoping we all could go, and then perhaps a late dinner? To get better acquainted? I thought...” she trails off, catches sight of her son’s unseeing eyes as her breath sticks in her throat, her heart heavy in her chest as she waits for it to settle, to pass; waits for the ground to shift and swallow everything she’s built, everything she thought she’d finally outrun.
He blinks, and his hands are shaking, and she certain, now, that he’s lost.
“Mother,” he says distractedly as he stands, doesn’t even look her way; “excuse me.”
He’s out the door of the establishment by the time she whispers it, by the time she lets herself remember the feeling of the blood from his chest on her hands. “He knows.”
“Knows what, my dear?” Charles comes behind her, settles back into his chair as his eyes trail Daniel where he jogs toward his car on the other side of the glass. “That you’re a micro-managing, manipulative hussy?” He presses a quick kiss to the corner of her jaw, smoothes her hair reassuringly as he teases her, the smile of his lips pressed into her skin; “I suspect he riddled that out years ago.”
Not for the first time, Eloise Widmore blesses her husband’s abysmal memory.
_________________________
It was new for her, then; new and fresh and just barely growing wings -- and it was warm and wonderful in so many ways, kept the chill breeze of the shore at bay, that ominous cool of danger and death that settled hard between the trees in that place, that hellish sanctuary that killed and revealed, where every defining moment in her life had taken root, come to fruition.
Her first steps. Her first words. Her first dig, first find.
Her first real love; the first time she learned the difference between the word and the feeling.
Sometimes she wonders if it’d been more, if she’d have let it blossom and swell; if she’d have let herself go, and loved him sooner, stronger, better -- loved him then like he’d loved her, like she knows she loves him now; she wonders if maybe, just maybe, it would have been enough.
Sometimes, she lets his concertos paint the backdrop as she cries herself to sleep.
_________________________
“Charlotte.” She knows the voice, knows it’s too early for him to be here for anything other than what she wants, what she won’t ever have again.
“Morning, Mr. Widmore,” she says, brightly as she can manage, and she forces herself to keep walking toward her office, to start her day and check her e-mail and her voicemail and ignore, just ignore how broken and scared that voice sounds; to forget that the voice sounds like Daniel, because there’s a difference, a recognition that was lost before, and it’s never been more clear that it was missing until it’s back again, until it’s there.
“Charlotte,” he says again, and this time the sound is lower, damp and strangled, and it takes her back to places she needs to be, places she’s afraid to go without him.
“Sorry,” she turns, tight and restrained, even as the dams start to creak in her chest; corrects herself: “Dan.”
She catches the way he shakes his head out of the corner of her eye as she turns; her peripheral vision doesn’t catch the way he reaches out and grabs for her arm. “Charlotte,” he whispers, and for the longest of moments, neither of them move; he’s warm at her back, as he pulls her close at the shoulder so that she’s pressed against him, but she won’t look. She won’t.
“Come with me,” he says softly, and it means more than she’d dare to dream in this place, this life that never was.
“Where?” It’s a safe question, in it’s way; it’s a question that holds the future and so much of herself inside of it that it’s terrifying, letting it go.
“Anywhere,” he breathes, and he stares for just a moment before he takes his touch away, and she nearly whimpers in the space between before his hands are on her shoulders and are drawing her into his chest, are wrapping her tight and keeping her close as he frames her face with his palms.
“God, Charlotte,” he exhales, and she can taste him on the air -- same as ever. “Come with me for coffee,” he murmurs, and she can feel it in his chest, vibrating through her own; “for dinner.” He dips his chin so that the tip of his nose brushes her cheekbone, sends a shiver through her that passes through him just as quick. “Come with me to my car, to my place,” and his breath is shaky when it blows against her skin, when he whispers into the throbbing beat of her heart at her temples, lets his stubble graze against her forehead and catch delicately in her hair: “Come with me forever.”
And she kisses him before he gets the chance, desperate and longing and full, and when he kisses back, there’s the need there, the same hesitance and heat, but it’s wider now, it’s deeper, and she remembers what happiness is -- the real kind, the kind that damns and saves.
“Forever,” she whispers, her lips catching on Dan’s as he kisses away the syllables, swallows the word; “that might be nice.”
He draws back, his chest heaving quick and heavy against her as he stares with a wonder, a joy she forgot she understood, forgot she could feel as well as see; he kisses her again, and she thinks that yeah, forever’s good.
_________________________
_________________________
Charlotte tells him they have to get on a plane; have to go back, because what they’re remembering is who they really are, and there are things left unfinished, and people that need saving, and if they’ve got a shot in hell at redemption for all of the things they’ve done wrong, taking the easy way out and staying in this half-assed hunk of dreamland ain’t gonna solve a goddamn thing.
He waits until the gate’s about to close to buy the damn ticket; nearly misses his chance.
That’s fate, maybe.
The only seat he could get was First Class; he doesn’t see anyone else, doesn’t know if he’s alone, and his palms are sweating when the stewardess asks if he’d like a drink.
He’s asleep before she comes back with his Jack and Coke, thirty-thousand some feet above a world that doesn’t matter -- never did.
He dreams.
_________________________
He wakes, lids heavy with sleep and time and space, and he’s blinded by sun and shade with the rush of water and the sluice of sand underfoot keeping beat; it’s more like home than he thought it might be.
“James,” he hears, and he knows that voice, the scent of lilac and freesia and sweat and sun and him mixed with her in a way he didn’t know could work so well, except of course he knows; he always knew. “James.”
He barely sees the red curls, the dark hair and the mud-stained shirt-and-tie that are all he can make out of the people standing beyond, watching; he doesn’t mind not knowing, not being sure of them, because the touch of careful hands on his arms, his chest -- the touch of hands that he knows keeps him steady, brings him back.
The rough grit of the beach beneath him is outweighed by that touch, by the way that one hand doesn’t father, warm except for the strip of one finger on the left, where the metal of a ring bites cold against him, real and sure; where a wave of blonde tickles across his nipple as he lifts up, bends closer; as deep blinding blue meets his eyes when they focus, when they clear.
Whatever happens, he’s got this.
_________________________