Fic: The Forsaken (Charles/Eloise)
Title: The Forsaken (1/6)
Characters: Charles/Eloise, Ensemble
Disclaimer: Lost is not mine. Seriously? Seriously.
Rating: PG13
Words: 1900
Spoilers: Up to The Incident
Summary: It starts and ends with a prophecy, but there’s really nothing divine about the mess Charles and Eloise made over the course of sixty-five years. Many thanks to angeldylan628 for her beta duties. For lenina20’s prompt Charles/Eloise “past”. Won Best Series at lost_fic_awards.
x x x
Between the beginning and the end, they will keep coming: the righteous and the sinners, the strong and the weak, the saved and the fallen. Only one of them truly belongs. You will know them by their innocence. You will recognize their unique connection to this place. You will test them as they test you. I trust you, Richard, to find my replacement among the forsaken before it is too late.
- Jacob
x x x
1942 - Prelude
Charles is found washed up on the island’s west beach with a life preserver marked SS Sarpedon encircling his narrow hips. Seaweed lies tangled in his mop of dark curls and his pale skin is bruised and puckered from its ocean journey. Richard loses count of how many times the boy heaves and coughs up mouthfuls of salt water. When he’s finally emptied his body, his tears begin and he cries for “Siti.”
That’s the last time Richard is ever witness to Charles’s tears. The boy recovers his strength quickly and expresses no remorse over his castaway status. He later confesses that he had stolen a lifeboat from the passenger ship taking his mother and sisters back to England. A storm foiled his plans to row all the way back to occupied Singapore where he would rescue his father from a prisoner of war camp, kick the Japanese off the Widmore tea plantation, and reunite with his beloved nursemaid Siti. It was the first of Charles’s great plans and not the last to involve waging war to claim a piece a land he thought belonged to him.
No one is sure when or how Eloise arrived on the island. One afternoon Richard finds her sitting under a tree in a meadow. From the amount of mango rinds and banana peels at her feet, the girl has been there for a while. She’s dressed in a remarkably clean white pinafore tied with a purple satin sash and shiny black shoes. One blonde braid remains tightly wound, while the other has come loose and flutters in the breeze. She’s carrying a little straw purse which she proudly shows Richard contains a pair of white gloves stained with mango juice, a crinkled program for a 1935 Savoy Theatre production of The Pirates of Penzance, and a small bone which she insists belongs to a dinosaur. All she’ll tell Richard is that her name is Eloise Martha Hawking and that she is five years old and tomorrow is her birthday. He takes one of her sticky hands in his and escorts her back to camp.
It escapes no one’s notice that Charles is put out by Eloise’s appearance. For almost two months he had been the camp’s darling foundling, and now he has to share the spotlight. When his tantrums only gather glares, he takes to impressing the adults with his feats of bravery. He climbs the highest trees and catches poisonous snakes. He learns how to shoot and then make his own bow and arrows. One day he limps back to the camp and explains he was kicked by a wild horse he tried to ride. Still all Eloise has to do is call an insect by its Latin name or hit a pile of rocks with her sling shot, and she gathers all the coos.
Soon there is no competition. On the day Eloise turns seven, she tells Charles a story he recognizes as Alice in Wonderland and snickers when she offers to take him to see the white rabbit. Richard overhears her tale and asks her to show him what she means. Charles begrudgingly tags along and she leads them to a grassy knoll where she points to a small round hole next to a boulder.
“This,” Eloise explains with a precocious flourish of her tiny hand, “is where I came from.”
Charles begins to roll his eyes until he notices Richard’s go wide. Seventeen days later, when the digging is stopped and the wheel installed, they find a way off the island that doesn’t require entrance by land or by sea. It’s not the last time Eloise follows her past and leads them through an underground journey that changes the course of history.
When Richard returns from the other side, sunburnt and dusty and holding a Tunisian newspaper from 1921, he declares with pride and relief that when Eloise turns eighteen she’ll be their new leader. It’s not the first or last time Richard thinks he’s interpreted Jacob’s prophecy correctly.
1954 - Coronation
As usual, Eloise hears Charles before she sees him. First there are the pounding hooves that always announce his arrival. These substitute as his greeting and before he even dismounts he starts barking questions that sound like orders.
“What the hell are you doing, Eloise?”
As usual, she ignores him and dumps the wheelbarrow full of sand down the hole. She adds two more buckets of water and a shovelful of gravel transported from the quarry. Eloise leans over the stone wall to take a look at her progress. After almost a full day’s work, she’s managed to fill the hole in a third of the way with her crude recipe for cement. As she heads back to the beach for another load of sand and water, Eloise wipes her palms across her pants, leaving traces of dirt, sweat, and blood from her opened blisters.
The horse stomps and whinnies when Charles gets off, and over the squeaky wheels she can hear him whisper something sweet to calm it. Any tenderness has vanished by the time he blocks her path. She could just go around him but she’s tired and uses his posturing as an excuse to rest.
“Get out of my way.”
“Everyone’s looking for you. Did you think to run this…,” he gestures back to what she still calls The Rabbit Hole but everyone else refers to as The Passageway, “…by Richard? Or anyone?”
She straightens up even though it causes her shoulders and back to ache even more, and matches his icy glare. “I’m in charge now.”
“So this is how it’s going to be?” He looks her up and down, pretending to be shocked. “Little Ellie plays dictator, and we all grovel at her feet and say, ‘Whatever you think is best, your majesty.’”
“I’m doing this to protect us, not that you’d understand.” She pushes hard and the wheelbarrow knocks his right kneecap. He curses and clutches it and stumbles out of her way. It doesn’t slow him much, and soon he’s following behind her like an angry puppy.
“If it’s so important, why are you out here by yourself? You could have had all your royal subjects working as slaves.”
“It’s something I had to do.”
It’s true that she feels responsible for The Passageway since it was her discovery, but Charles was right about her purposeful deceit. She was going behind everyone’s backs because a decade’s worth of Richard grooming her and preparing everyone else for her leadership did not mean there would be a seamless transition overnight. Turning eighteen had not stopped people from referring to her as Little Ellie and giving her braids a playful tug. How could she lead them if they did not take her seriously? Today’s act would undoubtedly be read as a rash unilateral and possibly immature decision. But given the camp’s recent attack by the people who claimed to be time travellers, Eloise felt it in her bones that The Passageway needed to be closed before anymore twitchy scientists and murderers poured out.
“How is this helping us? You’re cutting us off from our quickest supply route and your own research!”
“Charles...” She stops unexpectedly and spins around, coming face to face with him. Their noses are only inches apart and she’s so close she decides she must be inhaling his exhales. Only a shortness of oxygen could explain the dizziness that overtakes her. She takes a step back. Once there’s a little distance between them, she finds her voice again. “If those people were from the future, then what is down there is more powerful than we ever imagined. We need to shut it down and end this now.”
He frowns. “But they didn’t come through The Passageway. They just disappeared!”
“There has to be a connection, and I can’t risk them returning. Richard may be fascinated with them, but I can’t forget the old man, who I may remind you killed Lester and Theo, promised to come back. It’s my job now to protect the camp and this island.”
If she’s not mistaken, Charles’s mood shifts at the mention of the two men they had lost. The defiance he so often wears crumbles and is replaced with something close to shame.
“About Theo…,” Charles begins, then drifts off; his eyes fall to the ground and his feet do a nervous shuffle.
Eloise had never seen him look so unsure. This novel display of vulnerability softens her heart. He must feel responsible for losing them on a raid he had been put in charge of, she thinks. Or perhaps he’s feeling something close to survivor’s guilt. It’s up to her now to rebuild his confidence. That’s what a good leader would do, not let anyone fall apart.
“Charles, that wasn’t your fault. Theo died defending the island.”
He appears to think about her absolution, then swallows hard and looks up at her. “We all do what we have to do.”
“That’s right.”
She feels compelled to offer him more reassurance and goes to put her hand on his shoulder, only to unexpectedly graze his cheek with the back of her hand. He flinches at her touch but does not recoil, only stares at her quizzically. In response, she jerks her hand away and he catches it with his own, and holds it tight against his chest. A heat flares in her face that has nothing to do with working all day under the sun. Suddenly she sees Charles not as the boy who spent their childhood wanting nothing to do with her or the young man who had been a constant thorn in her side, but something else entirely.
Eloise thinks Charles might be pondering the same thing when his familiar scowl returns, and the moment is lost.
“Ellie, what have you done to yourself?” He unfolds his grip and studies her mangled palm. Then he plucks her other hand and clucks his tongue at its matching blisters. “This is ridiculous. You know better.”
She snatches her hands away from him. “I’m fine.”
“You have to take care of yourself. We can’t lose you.” He says this with a healthy dose of his customary arrogance, but underneath that there is enough softness that Eloise wonders if their moment had not been lost for good.
She crosses her arms. “Well then, will you help me fill the passageway?”
“Is that an official order?”
“It is.”
Charles stands at attention and offers her a mock salute, accompanied by a flash of his rare smile. “Then I have no other choice but to obey.”
He picks up the wheelbarrow’s handles and pushes it down the path to the beach. Eloise watches his walk, half march, half swagger, clearly all for her benefit. It would be amusing if she was not suddenly struck with a forbidding sense that Charles would prove to be her undoing.
“We all do what we have to do,” she repeats his words to herself
x x x
To be continued here.
Characters: Charles/Eloise, Ensemble
Disclaimer: Lost is not mine. Seriously? Seriously.
Rating: PG13
Words: 1900
Spoilers: Up to The Incident
Summary: It starts and ends with a prophecy, but there’s really nothing divine about the mess Charles and Eloise made over the course of sixty-five years. Many thanks to angeldylan628 for her beta duties. For lenina20’s prompt Charles/Eloise “past”. Won Best Series at lost_fic_awards.
x x x
Between the beginning and the end, they will keep coming: the righteous and the sinners, the strong and the weak, the saved and the fallen. Only one of them truly belongs. You will know them by their innocence. You will recognize their unique connection to this place. You will test them as they test you. I trust you, Richard, to find my replacement among the forsaken before it is too late.
- Jacob
x x x
1942 - Prelude
Charles is found washed up on the island’s west beach with a life preserver marked SS Sarpedon encircling his narrow hips. Seaweed lies tangled in his mop of dark curls and his pale skin is bruised and puckered from its ocean journey. Richard loses count of how many times the boy heaves and coughs up mouthfuls of salt water. When he’s finally emptied his body, his tears begin and he cries for “Siti.”
That’s the last time Richard is ever witness to Charles’s tears. The boy recovers his strength quickly and expresses no remorse over his castaway status. He later confesses that he had stolen a lifeboat from the passenger ship taking his mother and sisters back to England. A storm foiled his plans to row all the way back to occupied Singapore where he would rescue his father from a prisoner of war camp, kick the Japanese off the Widmore tea plantation, and reunite with his beloved nursemaid Siti. It was the first of Charles’s great plans and not the last to involve waging war to claim a piece a land he thought belonged to him.
No one is sure when or how Eloise arrived on the island. One afternoon Richard finds her sitting under a tree in a meadow. From the amount of mango rinds and banana peels at her feet, the girl has been there for a while. She’s dressed in a remarkably clean white pinafore tied with a purple satin sash and shiny black shoes. One blonde braid remains tightly wound, while the other has come loose and flutters in the breeze. She’s carrying a little straw purse which she proudly shows Richard contains a pair of white gloves stained with mango juice, a crinkled program for a 1935 Savoy Theatre production of The Pirates of Penzance, and a small bone which she insists belongs to a dinosaur. All she’ll tell Richard is that her name is Eloise Martha Hawking and that she is five years old and tomorrow is her birthday. He takes one of her sticky hands in his and escorts her back to camp.
It escapes no one’s notice that Charles is put out by Eloise’s appearance. For almost two months he had been the camp’s darling foundling, and now he has to share the spotlight. When his tantrums only gather glares, he takes to impressing the adults with his feats of bravery. He climbs the highest trees and catches poisonous snakes. He learns how to shoot and then make his own bow and arrows. One day he limps back to the camp and explains he was kicked by a wild horse he tried to ride. Still all Eloise has to do is call an insect by its Latin name or hit a pile of rocks with her sling shot, and she gathers all the coos.
Soon there is no competition. On the day Eloise turns seven, she tells Charles a story he recognizes as Alice in Wonderland and snickers when she offers to take him to see the white rabbit. Richard overhears her tale and asks her to show him what she means. Charles begrudgingly tags along and she leads them to a grassy knoll where she points to a small round hole next to a boulder.
“This,” Eloise explains with a precocious flourish of her tiny hand, “is where I came from.”
Charles begins to roll his eyes until he notices Richard’s go wide. Seventeen days later, when the digging is stopped and the wheel installed, they find a way off the island that doesn’t require entrance by land or by sea. It’s not the last time Eloise follows her past and leads them through an underground journey that changes the course of history.
When Richard returns from the other side, sunburnt and dusty and holding a Tunisian newspaper from 1921, he declares with pride and relief that when Eloise turns eighteen she’ll be their new leader. It’s not the first or last time Richard thinks he’s interpreted Jacob’s prophecy correctly.
1954 - Coronation
As usual, Eloise hears Charles before she sees him. First there are the pounding hooves that always announce his arrival. These substitute as his greeting and before he even dismounts he starts barking questions that sound like orders.
“What the hell are you doing, Eloise?”
As usual, she ignores him and dumps the wheelbarrow full of sand down the hole. She adds two more buckets of water and a shovelful of gravel transported from the quarry. Eloise leans over the stone wall to take a look at her progress. After almost a full day’s work, she’s managed to fill the hole in a third of the way with her crude recipe for cement. As she heads back to the beach for another load of sand and water, Eloise wipes her palms across her pants, leaving traces of dirt, sweat, and blood from her opened blisters.
The horse stomps and whinnies when Charles gets off, and over the squeaky wheels she can hear him whisper something sweet to calm it. Any tenderness has vanished by the time he blocks her path. She could just go around him but she’s tired and uses his posturing as an excuse to rest.
“Get out of my way.”
“Everyone’s looking for you. Did you think to run this…,” he gestures back to what she still calls The Rabbit Hole but everyone else refers to as The Passageway, “…by Richard? Or anyone?”
She straightens up even though it causes her shoulders and back to ache even more, and matches his icy glare. “I’m in charge now.”
“So this is how it’s going to be?” He looks her up and down, pretending to be shocked. “Little Ellie plays dictator, and we all grovel at her feet and say, ‘Whatever you think is best, your majesty.’”
“I’m doing this to protect us, not that you’d understand.” She pushes hard and the wheelbarrow knocks his right kneecap. He curses and clutches it and stumbles out of her way. It doesn’t slow him much, and soon he’s following behind her like an angry puppy.
“If it’s so important, why are you out here by yourself? You could have had all your royal subjects working as slaves.”
“It’s something I had to do.”
It’s true that she feels responsible for The Passageway since it was her discovery, but Charles was right about her purposeful deceit. She was going behind everyone’s backs because a decade’s worth of Richard grooming her and preparing everyone else for her leadership did not mean there would be a seamless transition overnight. Turning eighteen had not stopped people from referring to her as Little Ellie and giving her braids a playful tug. How could she lead them if they did not take her seriously? Today’s act would undoubtedly be read as a rash unilateral and possibly immature decision. But given the camp’s recent attack by the people who claimed to be time travellers, Eloise felt it in her bones that The Passageway needed to be closed before anymore twitchy scientists and murderers poured out.
“How is this helping us? You’re cutting us off from our quickest supply route and your own research!”
“Charles...” She stops unexpectedly and spins around, coming face to face with him. Their noses are only inches apart and she’s so close she decides she must be inhaling his exhales. Only a shortness of oxygen could explain the dizziness that overtakes her. She takes a step back. Once there’s a little distance between them, she finds her voice again. “If those people were from the future, then what is down there is more powerful than we ever imagined. We need to shut it down and end this now.”
He frowns. “But they didn’t come through The Passageway. They just disappeared!”
“There has to be a connection, and I can’t risk them returning. Richard may be fascinated with them, but I can’t forget the old man, who I may remind you killed Lester and Theo, promised to come back. It’s my job now to protect the camp and this island.”
If she’s not mistaken, Charles’s mood shifts at the mention of the two men they had lost. The defiance he so often wears crumbles and is replaced with something close to shame.
“About Theo…,” Charles begins, then drifts off; his eyes fall to the ground and his feet do a nervous shuffle.
Eloise had never seen him look so unsure. This novel display of vulnerability softens her heart. He must feel responsible for losing them on a raid he had been put in charge of, she thinks. Or perhaps he’s feeling something close to survivor’s guilt. It’s up to her now to rebuild his confidence. That’s what a good leader would do, not let anyone fall apart.
“Charles, that wasn’t your fault. Theo died defending the island.”
He appears to think about her absolution, then swallows hard and looks up at her. “We all do what we have to do.”
“That’s right.”
She feels compelled to offer him more reassurance and goes to put her hand on his shoulder, only to unexpectedly graze his cheek with the back of her hand. He flinches at her touch but does not recoil, only stares at her quizzically. In response, she jerks her hand away and he catches it with his own, and holds it tight against his chest. A heat flares in her face that has nothing to do with working all day under the sun. Suddenly she sees Charles not as the boy who spent their childhood wanting nothing to do with her or the young man who had been a constant thorn in her side, but something else entirely.
Eloise thinks Charles might be pondering the same thing when his familiar scowl returns, and the moment is lost.
“Ellie, what have you done to yourself?” He unfolds his grip and studies her mangled palm. Then he plucks her other hand and clucks his tongue at its matching blisters. “This is ridiculous. You know better.”
She snatches her hands away from him. “I’m fine.”
“You have to take care of yourself. We can’t lose you.” He says this with a healthy dose of his customary arrogance, but underneath that there is enough softness that Eloise wonders if their moment had not been lost for good.
She crosses her arms. “Well then, will you help me fill the passageway?”
“Is that an official order?”
“It is.”
Charles stands at attention and offers her a mock salute, accompanied by a flash of his rare smile. “Then I have no other choice but to obey.”
He picks up the wheelbarrow’s handles and pushes it down the path to the beach. Eloise watches his walk, half march, half swagger, clearly all for her benefit. It would be amusing if she was not suddenly struck with a forbidding sense that Charles would prove to be her undoing.
“We all do what we have to do,” she repeats his words to herself
x x x
To be continued here.