lost fic: your shadows tell a story (multiple pairings)
Title: your shadows tell a story
Character(s)/Pairing(s): charlie/claire, jack/juliet, jack/sawyer, sawyer/kate, sayid/kate
Rating/Word Count: pg-13, 1,651 words
Summary five snippets, five different lives, five conversations they never got to have
A/N: Written for lostfichallenge, challenge 104 free-for-all. I decided to write all the ships I didn't write enough of.
There is an infinite amount of outcomes. Not all of them end with a plane crash. Not all of them end with doctors and conmen and murderers and drug addicts. Sometimes they're policemen and housewives and big brothers. Not all of them end happily.
The constant - always some of them will cross paths.
i. Claire grows up with Christian as a father. Charlie and Claire meet in rehab
Claire practices good bye in the mirror. Jack told her there were seven different ways to say it. She tries heartbroken and angry and acceptant. They all look hollow, like cracks on the reflecting glass. The other four she forgot long ago.
She tucks her hair behind her ear. Listens to his music echo down the halls.
Charlie's been in and out of rehab for seven years now. Her son waits by the window every day he's gone, only his eyes peaking over the large throw pillow he rests his chin on. Aaron is seven, and half his birthdays have been spent watching mommy clean up his 'father.' The other half Charlie wasn't there.
Charlie's trying, she knows that. He's always trying. Claire knows that feeling, knows that people can conquer and accomplish. She’s already done it. Now she's trying again, too, in her own way now - end the cycle and start fresh.
Because they love each other so deeply that they sometimes forget they're destroying everything else in their lives, including Aaron, to hold onto something so intangible. They were a dysfunctional unit from the start. This is what she’s been told.
Her brother's voice plays on loop in her head. "If you don't do this" It's common for Jack to start a sentence, and never finish it.
Even if he can't commit to the words, she hears them anyways. They are her father’s words - unwanted advice, life lessons. Where Jack withstood to pressure, Claire crumbled, always the weaker sibling.
The music downstairs stops and there is laughter. Aaron's giggles and Charlie's whole heart fill her house on days like this - good days, and she realizes that the music is not just Charlie's, but Aaron's as well. She shakes her head. What could Jack possibly know about this?
I won't give up on you, she promises, her voice a whisper to the woman staring back at her in the mirror - meant to carry through the halls to the tune of the music below.
Maybe it's all a lie, but this lie is her only source of strength.
ii. Jack’s father thinks Jack has what it takes. Juliet’s the only one who knows better.
As a young man, Jack is reckless. He's loud and cocky and parents never like him. It probably has to do with the fact that girls never really keep his attention. He finds out later in life there's a legitimate reason for that.
It's something he grows into rather than out of. He learns how to hone his arrogance into something useful. At twenty-two though he is just annoying and full of himself, and Juliet is not amused.
Neither is her father, whose fists clench every time Jack's name gets mentioned and glares holes into the windows of Jack's Jeep, whenever he brings her home for a long weekend.
And Juliet gets it, that frustration. She feels it when Jack smirks against her collarbone whenever she makes the slightest noise of approval when they make love or when he fakes humility after acing a test, overworked support for Juliet’s B’s and C’s.
The difference is Juliet knows that under all that chest thumping, Jack is insecure and hiding a thousand secrets no one will ever know.
It's why she lets him into her dorm room at three in the morning when she can smell the alcohol and confusion on his breath. Loving him is like playing with fire, exhilarating once you know what you’re doing, painful and damaging working your way through the minefield. She’s still got one foot in each camp.
But it’s those nights when his inhibitions have swallowed him whole, when he is at his most hollow. The smoke screens evaporate and she can see a man worthy of loving. A different man, strong by circumstance and not birthright.
Those moments are stark contradictions to every other day, but sometimes, they collide. When Juliet finds out she's pregnant, she tells Jack that her father will probably kill him.
Jack's smile widens. He knows where to find me
Juliet smiles back. It’s a start.
iii. Sawyer is James and Jack is Jack. There’s no Kate between them
Jack sees him around.
James is kind of hard to miss. There's a presence - a hundred names, a thousand stories. It circles him, creates a barrier between him and the rest of the world. Jack thinks it must be lonely.
Jack finds him lingering by the vending machines and in the triage center or even stuck behind a curtain, lopsided grin and dimples stretched across his face. Then, Jack's fingers tremble on broken skin, a stitch here and there. He never questions the timing. How he's always doing an ER rotation when James or his partner decide to get shot or stabbed.
James smiles too wide when the pain comes, clutches too hard at Jack's free arm, leaving crescent shaped marks in the soft skin above his wrist. He never says sorry.
James is always around and sometimes it's without reason. Sometimes it's just to watch, prop himself up on the nurse's station or a free bed and watch Jack move around the ER. Eyes like a hawk, zeroed in on him and maybe a weaker man would fold under that kind of pressure. But Jack likes the challenge.
And sometimes James doesn't come inside, but Jack will find him anyway, lingering around the back entrance where the ambulances roll in. Jack will lean against the brick wall next to James, nudge his shoulder with his own.
"Thought you hated hospitals?" Jack says.
James mutters something about the bigger picture, words caught between the cigarette falling from his lips and the breeze carrying sirens across the ambulance bay.
Jack won't say anything now, but later, after James presses him against this same wall and silences his analytical quagmire of a mind with a blindsiding kiss, it will all make sense.
iv. Kate sets a fire. No one ever knows
She graduates from Northern Iowa, backpacks through Europe. It starts with a group of friends that dwindles down until it's just her and Tom, and even he can't outlast her. She spends the last three months of her year in Europe by herself. She's ashamed to admit she loves it best.
With two weeks left, she meets an American in Munich named Sawyer, who stumbles over his own name, yet manages to recover quite peacefully. He's got southern charm and a thick accent to match it. He stares too long, long enough that she feels her secrets being pulled out of her skin like tabs in a binder. His eyes never leave her skin, not even when it's occupied by his lips and teeth and blunt fingernails.
She comes home (or maybe he leaves first, she never does remember), settles down in Iowa, marries Tom, and lives her mother's life.
Every few years he shows up in town, dimples and leather and smelling like grease. She always forgets to ask how he found her that first time. He sits behind the counter and trades stories with the locals about women and cars and villains. He's got a tale for every cup of coffee she serves.
He stays until he makes her smile, makes her remember. Truth is she never forgets those stale air nights in Munich with slick skin and labored breathing as their only company. She's just really good at pretending otherwise - pretending that Tom and their little boys are her whole life, and a few weeks from ages ago don’t define her more than everything before and everything since.
It takes her a decade and a half to ask him why he doesn't just stick around, and her whole body trembles with the nerve it takes to ask the question, especially when he looks up at her with a dark, narrowed gaze.
I run, you con. Tigers don't change their stripes.
She’s heard it a thousand times before. Half the time it’s the truth.
v. Kate didn't set a fire. The house still exploded
He's a good man.
This is how Sayid's family describes him. Kate finds it strange. Good is such a loose word. It blankets a whole bunch of traits she knows he doesn't have. It forgets things, important things.
There's a darkness inside him. The same that courses through her veins. Invisible to most, slow-growing and trickling like a leaky faucet, it makes itself known at random intervals. It's a glimmer in the eye that only Kate recognizes. Pure, unfiltered anger.
That anger never manifests in front of her, never will. Kate recognizes that too. Still fears it. Knows it gets channeled somewhere else - onto someone else. As much as it scares her, it also comforts her to know that good can have many faces, many sides.
he's a good man, Kate says to herself as she scrubs the blood from his dress shirt. Another business trip, another how long will you be gone, an i don't know, a kiss on the hand, a blood soaked return (once it was cinder, she smiled, grateful, relieved - what kind of woman is she?). He never hides it - what he does, what he is.
He's a good man. She knows it's the truth. She can see him through their laundry room window fixing the mailbox for the widow across the street, letting her young sons pester him with questions while he works. His smile is an eclipse.
The truth, Kate knows, is relative.
Character(s)/Pairing(s): charlie/claire, jack/juliet, jack/sawyer, sawyer/kate, sayid/kate
Rating/Word Count: pg-13, 1,651 words
Summary five snippets, five different lives, five conversations they never got to have
A/N: Written for lostfichallenge, challenge 104 free-for-all. I decided to write all the ships I didn't write enough of.
There is an infinite amount of outcomes. Not all of them end with a plane crash. Not all of them end with doctors and conmen and murderers and drug addicts. Sometimes they're policemen and housewives and big brothers. Not all of them end happily.
The constant - always some of them will cross paths.
i. Claire grows up with Christian as a father. Charlie and Claire meet in rehab
Claire practices good bye in the mirror. Jack told her there were seven different ways to say it. She tries heartbroken and angry and acceptant. They all look hollow, like cracks on the reflecting glass. The other four she forgot long ago.
She tucks her hair behind her ear. Listens to his music echo down the halls.
Charlie's been in and out of rehab for seven years now. Her son waits by the window every day he's gone, only his eyes peaking over the large throw pillow he rests his chin on. Aaron is seven, and half his birthdays have been spent watching mommy clean up his 'father.' The other half Charlie wasn't there.
Charlie's trying, she knows that. He's always trying. Claire knows that feeling, knows that people can conquer and accomplish. She’s already done it. Now she's trying again, too, in her own way now - end the cycle and start fresh.
Because they love each other so deeply that they sometimes forget they're destroying everything else in their lives, including Aaron, to hold onto something so intangible. They were a dysfunctional unit from the start. This is what she’s been told.
Her brother's voice plays on loop in her head. "If you don't do this" It's common for Jack to start a sentence, and never finish it.
Even if he can't commit to the words, she hears them anyways. They are her father’s words - unwanted advice, life lessons. Where Jack withstood to pressure, Claire crumbled, always the weaker sibling.
The music downstairs stops and there is laughter. Aaron's giggles and Charlie's whole heart fill her house on days like this - good days, and she realizes that the music is not just Charlie's, but Aaron's as well. She shakes her head. What could Jack possibly know about this?
I won't give up on you, she promises, her voice a whisper to the woman staring back at her in the mirror - meant to carry through the halls to the tune of the music below.
Maybe it's all a lie, but this lie is her only source of strength.
ii. Jack’s father thinks Jack has what it takes. Juliet’s the only one who knows better.
As a young man, Jack is reckless. He's loud and cocky and parents never like him. It probably has to do with the fact that girls never really keep his attention. He finds out later in life there's a legitimate reason for that.
It's something he grows into rather than out of. He learns how to hone his arrogance into something useful. At twenty-two though he is just annoying and full of himself, and Juliet is not amused.
Neither is her father, whose fists clench every time Jack's name gets mentioned and glares holes into the windows of Jack's Jeep, whenever he brings her home for a long weekend.
And Juliet gets it, that frustration. She feels it when Jack smirks against her collarbone whenever she makes the slightest noise of approval when they make love or when he fakes humility after acing a test, overworked support for Juliet’s B’s and C’s.
The difference is Juliet knows that under all that chest thumping, Jack is insecure and hiding a thousand secrets no one will ever know.
It's why she lets him into her dorm room at three in the morning when she can smell the alcohol and confusion on his breath. Loving him is like playing with fire, exhilarating once you know what you’re doing, painful and damaging working your way through the minefield. She’s still got one foot in each camp.
But it’s those nights when his inhibitions have swallowed him whole, when he is at his most hollow. The smoke screens evaporate and she can see a man worthy of loving. A different man, strong by circumstance and not birthright.
Those moments are stark contradictions to every other day, but sometimes, they collide. When Juliet finds out she's pregnant, she tells Jack that her father will probably kill him.
Jack's smile widens. He knows where to find me
Juliet smiles back. It’s a start.
iii. Sawyer is James and Jack is Jack. There’s no Kate between them
Jack sees him around.
James is kind of hard to miss. There's a presence - a hundred names, a thousand stories. It circles him, creates a barrier between him and the rest of the world. Jack thinks it must be lonely.
Jack finds him lingering by the vending machines and in the triage center or even stuck behind a curtain, lopsided grin and dimples stretched across his face. Then, Jack's fingers tremble on broken skin, a stitch here and there. He never questions the timing. How he's always doing an ER rotation when James or his partner decide to get shot or stabbed.
James smiles too wide when the pain comes, clutches too hard at Jack's free arm, leaving crescent shaped marks in the soft skin above his wrist. He never says sorry.
James is always around and sometimes it's without reason. Sometimes it's just to watch, prop himself up on the nurse's station or a free bed and watch Jack move around the ER. Eyes like a hawk, zeroed in on him and maybe a weaker man would fold under that kind of pressure. But Jack likes the challenge.
And sometimes James doesn't come inside, but Jack will find him anyway, lingering around the back entrance where the ambulances roll in. Jack will lean against the brick wall next to James, nudge his shoulder with his own.
"Thought you hated hospitals?" Jack says.
James mutters something about the bigger picture, words caught between the cigarette falling from his lips and the breeze carrying sirens across the ambulance bay.
Jack won't say anything now, but later, after James presses him against this same wall and silences his analytical quagmire of a mind with a blindsiding kiss, it will all make sense.
iv. Kate sets a fire. No one ever knows
She graduates from Northern Iowa, backpacks through Europe. It starts with a group of friends that dwindles down until it's just her and Tom, and even he can't outlast her. She spends the last three months of her year in Europe by herself. She's ashamed to admit she loves it best.
With two weeks left, she meets an American in Munich named Sawyer, who stumbles over his own name, yet manages to recover quite peacefully. He's got southern charm and a thick accent to match it. He stares too long, long enough that she feels her secrets being pulled out of her skin like tabs in a binder. His eyes never leave her skin, not even when it's occupied by his lips and teeth and blunt fingernails.
She comes home (or maybe he leaves first, she never does remember), settles down in Iowa, marries Tom, and lives her mother's life.
Every few years he shows up in town, dimples and leather and smelling like grease. She always forgets to ask how he found her that first time. He sits behind the counter and trades stories with the locals about women and cars and villains. He's got a tale for every cup of coffee she serves.
He stays until he makes her smile, makes her remember. Truth is she never forgets those stale air nights in Munich with slick skin and labored breathing as their only company. She's just really good at pretending otherwise - pretending that Tom and their little boys are her whole life, and a few weeks from ages ago don’t define her more than everything before and everything since.
It takes her a decade and a half to ask him why he doesn't just stick around, and her whole body trembles with the nerve it takes to ask the question, especially when he looks up at her with a dark, narrowed gaze.
I run, you con. Tigers don't change their stripes.
She’s heard it a thousand times before. Half the time it’s the truth.
v. Kate didn't set a fire. The house still exploded
He's a good man.
This is how Sayid's family describes him. Kate finds it strange. Good is such a loose word. It blankets a whole bunch of traits she knows he doesn't have. It forgets things, important things.
There's a darkness inside him. The same that courses through her veins. Invisible to most, slow-growing and trickling like a leaky faucet, it makes itself known at random intervals. It's a glimmer in the eye that only Kate recognizes. Pure, unfiltered anger.
That anger never manifests in front of her, never will. Kate recognizes that too. Still fears it. Knows it gets channeled somewhere else - onto someone else. As much as it scares her, it also comforts her to know that good can have many faces, many sides.
he's a good man, Kate says to herself as she scrubs the blood from his dress shirt. Another business trip, another how long will you be gone, an i don't know, a kiss on the hand, a blood soaked return (once it was cinder, she smiled, grateful, relieved - what kind of woman is she?). He never hides it - what he does, what he is.
He's a good man. She knows it's the truth. She can see him through their laundry room window fixing the mailbox for the widow across the street, letting her young sons pester him with questions while he works. His smile is an eclipse.
The truth, Kate knows, is relative.