fanfiction request for slybrunette
Title: Perfect Strangers
Fandom: Lost
Character/s: Jack, Charlie/Claire/Aaron
Rating: PG
Genre: fluff
Prompt/s: rumour, symmetry
Summary: The morning after “One of Us” Jack goes to Claire’s tent and watches her family sleep.
Disclaimer: Title is from a song by INXS, lyrics in cut are from “Such Great Heights” by Iron and Wine and the characters/situations within are based on the creations of other people far richer than I. No profit is being made etc. so please don’t sue me.
Dedication: requested by slybrunette as part of my 100th Lost fanfiction celebration
~*~
When Jack goes to check on Claire early in the morning, he lifts the edge of their tarp to find her, Charlie and Aaron all still fast asleep, wrapped around each other in a sleepy, familial cocoon.
They look exhausted he thinks, but happy. How they both managed to sleep together on such a narrow bed is beyond him however. How they managed to squeeze Aaron in between them is even more of a mystery but between the three of them, they’ve created an almost perfect symmetry using just their bodies.
He pauses at the entrance to the tent - one hand still on the adjustable front tarp that can be raised or lowered, depending on how much shelter (or privacy) those within need - and watches them for a quiet moment.
Forehead touches to forehead, bodies contracted, knees tangled one on top of the other in a tidy pile, one hand tucked under the cheek as a pillow so the other can rest on the others waist. Aaron fits snugly between their torsos, flat on his back, still swaddled tightly in his blanket.
Jack smiles suddenly and almost chuckles out loud before he catches himself. Their combined body language is surprisingly amusing to him - it’s a classic protective instinct, the two parents circling their young with their own bodies in case a predator should attack.
It’s been obvious since he got back that Charlie and Claire have reconciled their differences whilst he’s been gone. He’s fairly certain that it started before he left - and wasn’t Claire holding Charlie’s hand at Ana Lucia and Libby’s funeral? He can’t really remember now, it was too long ago. But watching them now, remembering their body language when they were interacting with each other yesterday and the day before (Charlie looking after Aaron, holding Claire when she was sick, cleaning the blood tenderly from her face with a damp cloth) Jack is beyond certain that the whispered rumours he’s picked up on since he got back are - for once - completely true and not just island gossip.
The two of them are apparently somewhat of an item.
He thinks back to the first he ever saw the two of them together - Charlie not even a week into heroin withdrawal, Claire eight months pregnant, walking into the caves together, laden down with Claire’s bags.
Jack was far too surprised that they were even friends to ask how Charlie had convinced Claire to move up to the caves with him when all his own efforts as a doctor had failed. In his orderly world, drug addicts and young mothers just didn’t mix well. It was an established reality.
Which just goes to show, Jack thinks as he lets the tarp fall back to its original place and pads away quietly through the sand. Even the best of us must sometimes eat our words.