Bad Man
Title: Bad Man
Fandom: Lost
Characters: Charlotte, Daniel.
Warnings: Spoilers for This Place Is Death.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Charlotte remembers her encounter with a strange man in her childhood.
Charlotte has a very active imagination.
That line had appeared in one of Charlotte's old school reports, back when she was at primary school in Bromsgrove. Charlotte had laughed it off at the time. If anything, she'd just been pleased it wasn't anything worse, considering how much that teacher had hated her. But her mother had been so angry at the time, storming up to the school and demanding to know what had been meant by the comment.
Charlotte's teacher had laughed awkwardly as she got out one of Charlotte's workbooks.
"She tells a lot of stories about this island..."
Charlotte hadn't always been called Charlotte Staples Lewis, and she hadn't always lived in England, either. She thought she'd been four years old on the day she had her first encounter with the strange man, but she couldn't be sure. For a long time, there was doubt in her mind about whether it had happened at all.
"You've never lived on an island, Charlotte," her mother used to say. "It's just a game that you liked to play when you were younger."
At first, she'd laughed indulgently. But later, especially if Charlotte ever mentioned it around other people, her mother became much more agitated than a mere game would have warranted.
A lot of what Charlotte did remember was vague and insubstantial - an octagonal shaped logo, polar bears, the word DHARMA.
The only clear memory Charlotte did have of the island was of not long before she left. She'd been sat on the lawn of her house in the Barracks, pulling at the grass beneath her, sulking.
"Why do we have to leave here?" she had demanded. "I like it here. I don't want to leave and go to horrid England."
"Stop whining," her mother had snapped. "We just have to leave. You wouldn't understand why."
Charlotte had got up on her unsteady legs and toddled to the doorway.
"But why can't Daddy come with us?" Charlotte had sulked. "Why does he get to stay here, and we have to leave?"
"Because he can't!" Charlotte's mother had lost her temper at this. "Go outside,find something to do and let me pack."
Charlotte stuck out her lower lip and swallowed hard as she walked away from her mother. Horrid Mummy. It wasn't fair that she was taking Charlotte away from her daddy, from her home. Charlotte hated her.
"What's wrong?"
Charlotte glanced up to see a man with short brown hair a short distance away, looking at her. Not far behind were some other people, but she couldn't see them clearly because the sun was in her eyes.
"Who are you?" she asked. She noticed that he wasn't wearing the DHARMA overalls the rest of her people wore. "Are you one of them? Are you a bad man, a Hostile?"
The man shook his head. "Why were you crying just now?"
"Because I have to go away." Charlotte explained. "Mummy's taking me away from here, from Daddy, to a horrible place called England."
She waited for the man to say something, maybe to offer sympathy. But the man's face seemed to change, recognition flooding his features.
"Your mother's right," he yelled, grabbing Charlotte by the shoulders. "You have to leave this island, go far away and never come back! Do you hear me? Never come back to this island, Charlotte, or you will die! Do you understand me, Charlotte? Die!"
Terrified, Charlotte had wrenched herself out of the man's grip. "You're crazy," she sobbed. "You are a bad man! Why are you saying all those horrible things to me?"
"You don't understand," the bad man pleaded. "I'm trying to save you..."
But Charlotte had fled, slamming the door of her house behind her.
In Bromsgrove, her mother told people they had come from Essex originally and that Charlotte's father had died. They changed their names; her mother became Jeanette, she became Charlotte. Soon, Jeanette met a man called David Lewis, and they married.
"David is your daddy now," Jeanette told Charlotte. He fussed over her, ruffled her hair and called her Lotty, which she didn't like. But he was kind, he did try to be a father to her, but Charlotte always knew he wasn't, not really.
In time, Charlotte found it more difficult to picture her other daddy's face. But she never forgot that she'd had another daddy. Nor did she forget the octagonal logo, the polar bears, the place she once called home.
Sometimes she tried talking of it to her sisters, the children her mother shared with David. But whenever she mentioned it, her mother would shout at her.
"Polar bears don't live in the jungle!" she would say. "There is no island. This game's getting old now, Charlotte." Meanwhile her sisters would giggle "Oh, not that old island again, Lotty."
If her mother hadn't kept insisting that the island didn't exist, maybe Charlotte would have taken the words of the bad man more seriously. Instead, she began to wonder whether she had made him up, along with the rest of the island. Certainly, as she grew older, it became more and more difficult for her to picture his face, until eventually he became nothing more than a shadowy face occasionally appearing in her nightmares.
But deep down, there was a part of Charlotte that was convinced that the island was out there somewhere, and that one day she'd get back to where she was born.
David hadn't understood why Jeanette had objected to Charlotte becoming a cultural anthropologist. He'd believed that the island was all in Charlotte's mind. But Jeanette had always known why Charlotte was pursuing that career path.
Because Charlotte hoped it would lead her back to the island again.
She knew how her mother felt. But Charlotte was an adult now, and there was nothing her mother could do. So Charlotte set off for the University of Kent, and then to Oxford in 2000 to study for her Ph.D.
Not long after she started there, she heard some rumour about a professor who had been forced to leave, It wasn't clear why; depending on who was telling the story there was a different version of events, some of them clearly ridiculous. Eventually, there was an embargo placed on that subject, and Charlotte, who had never been that interested anyway, forgot all about it.
So she never knew that she had narrowly missed crossing paths with the "bad man" at her university.
In time, she graduated from Oxford, joined several anthropological expeditions. Everywhere she went, she found herself thinking "Was it here? Are these the people called Hostiles?"
But it wasn't until she went on the trip to Tunisia that Charlotte finally knew her memories were real.
The woman with her hadn't understood how a polar bear's skeleton came to be in the middle of the desert, had been sure it was a hoax. But Charlotte knew exactly what this discovery meant.
And the logo on the polar bear's collar was exactly what she remembered from her childhood. Here was proof that the DHARMA Initiative existed.
All Charlotte needed to do now was find her way back there.
It wasn't long after that when Charlotte received the call. The man on the other end identified himself as Matthew Abaddon, saying he'd been contacted by someone from the Tunisia expedition and knew about her find.
Mr. Abaddon had been able to fill in a few blanks for her, confirming exactly when she had left the island. Daddy was dead, killed in 1992 when the people she knew as the Hostiles had initiated a purge of the DHARMA Initiative. The island was now under the control of the Hostiles, specifically a man named Benjamin Linus, who had previously been under DHARMA employ.
And he told her of an expedition being organised by his employer, Charles Widmore. "If you board this freighter," Mr. Abaddon informed her, "You'll be able to get back to where you were born. We can bring your people home again."
She boarded at Fiji, was greeted by a woman named Naomi Dorrit. When Naomi had heard Charlotte's accent for the first time, she'd immediately plastered a smile across her face and exclaimed "A fellow Brit!" Charlotte had laughed and nodded politely, not bothering to correct her.
Some of the people on the boat had seemed a little strange, such as Miles, the man who talked to ghosts. And she knew there had been an odd exchange between him and the deckhand Kevin Johnson, who he seemed to think was on board under a false name. Johnson was pretty strange himself, never looking anyone in the eye and not speaking unless he was spoken to.
She'd not been on the freighter long when a man came up to her.
"Great view, isn't it?" he asked.
Charlotte was about to make some polite reply and move on, but then she turned and looked at the man properly.
"You seem familiar, have we met before? Only I'm sure I recognise your face."
The man frowned, shook his head. "I don't think so."
Charlotte held out her hand. "I'm Charlotte. Charlotte Lewis."
The man shook her hand firmly. "I'm Daniel Faraday."
She doesn't know where or when she is any more. She doesn't understand what's happening to her, although she thinks Daniel does.
Moments from the different time periods flash through her mind.
I love Geronimo Jackson.
I'm not going to leave her behind.
Why can't Daddy come with us?
Charlotte, it's Daniel. Talk to me.
You are a bad man!
You've...been here before?
She sees the bad man clearly again for the first time. And she sees the man in front of her now.
She realises they are the same man.
It's strange, Charlotte thinks as she loses consciousness, that the bad man's the one who was keeping me safe after all.
Fandom: Lost
Characters: Charlotte, Daniel.
Warnings: Spoilers for This Place Is Death.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Charlotte remembers her encounter with a strange man in her childhood.
Charlotte has a very active imagination.
That line had appeared in one of Charlotte's old school reports, back when she was at primary school in Bromsgrove. Charlotte had laughed it off at the time. If anything, she'd just been pleased it wasn't anything worse, considering how much that teacher had hated her. But her mother had been so angry at the time, storming up to the school and demanding to know what had been meant by the comment.
Charlotte's teacher had laughed awkwardly as she got out one of Charlotte's workbooks.
"She tells a lot of stories about this island..."
Charlotte hadn't always been called Charlotte Staples Lewis, and she hadn't always lived in England, either. She thought she'd been four years old on the day she had her first encounter with the strange man, but she couldn't be sure. For a long time, there was doubt in her mind about whether it had happened at all.
"You've never lived on an island, Charlotte," her mother used to say. "It's just a game that you liked to play when you were younger."
At first, she'd laughed indulgently. But later, especially if Charlotte ever mentioned it around other people, her mother became much more agitated than a mere game would have warranted.
A lot of what Charlotte did remember was vague and insubstantial - an octagonal shaped logo, polar bears, the word DHARMA.
The only clear memory Charlotte did have of the island was of not long before she left. She'd been sat on the lawn of her house in the Barracks, pulling at the grass beneath her, sulking.
"Why do we have to leave here?" she had demanded. "I like it here. I don't want to leave and go to horrid England."
"Stop whining," her mother had snapped. "We just have to leave. You wouldn't understand why."
Charlotte had got up on her unsteady legs and toddled to the doorway.
"But why can't Daddy come with us?" Charlotte had sulked. "Why does he get to stay here, and we have to leave?"
"Because he can't!" Charlotte's mother had lost her temper at this. "Go outside,find something to do and let me pack."
Charlotte stuck out her lower lip and swallowed hard as she walked away from her mother. Horrid Mummy. It wasn't fair that she was taking Charlotte away from her daddy, from her home. Charlotte hated her.
"What's wrong?"
Charlotte glanced up to see a man with short brown hair a short distance away, looking at her. Not far behind were some other people, but she couldn't see them clearly because the sun was in her eyes.
"Who are you?" she asked. She noticed that he wasn't wearing the DHARMA overalls the rest of her people wore. "Are you one of them? Are you a bad man, a Hostile?"
The man shook his head. "Why were you crying just now?"
"Because I have to go away." Charlotte explained. "Mummy's taking me away from here, from Daddy, to a horrible place called England."
She waited for the man to say something, maybe to offer sympathy. But the man's face seemed to change, recognition flooding his features.
"Your mother's right," he yelled, grabbing Charlotte by the shoulders. "You have to leave this island, go far away and never come back! Do you hear me? Never come back to this island, Charlotte, or you will die! Do you understand me, Charlotte? Die!"
Terrified, Charlotte had wrenched herself out of the man's grip. "You're crazy," she sobbed. "You are a bad man! Why are you saying all those horrible things to me?"
"You don't understand," the bad man pleaded. "I'm trying to save you..."
But Charlotte had fled, slamming the door of her house behind her.
In Bromsgrove, her mother told people they had come from Essex originally and that Charlotte's father had died. They changed their names; her mother became Jeanette, she became Charlotte. Soon, Jeanette met a man called David Lewis, and they married.
"David is your daddy now," Jeanette told Charlotte. He fussed over her, ruffled her hair and called her Lotty, which she didn't like. But he was kind, he did try to be a father to her, but Charlotte always knew he wasn't, not really.
In time, Charlotte found it more difficult to picture her other daddy's face. But she never forgot that she'd had another daddy. Nor did she forget the octagonal logo, the polar bears, the place she once called home.
Sometimes she tried talking of it to her sisters, the children her mother shared with David. But whenever she mentioned it, her mother would shout at her.
"Polar bears don't live in the jungle!" she would say. "There is no island. This game's getting old now, Charlotte." Meanwhile her sisters would giggle "Oh, not that old island again, Lotty."
If her mother hadn't kept insisting that the island didn't exist, maybe Charlotte would have taken the words of the bad man more seriously. Instead, she began to wonder whether she had made him up, along with the rest of the island. Certainly, as she grew older, it became more and more difficult for her to picture his face, until eventually he became nothing more than a shadowy face occasionally appearing in her nightmares.
But deep down, there was a part of Charlotte that was convinced that the island was out there somewhere, and that one day she'd get back to where she was born.
David hadn't understood why Jeanette had objected to Charlotte becoming a cultural anthropologist. He'd believed that the island was all in Charlotte's mind. But Jeanette had always known why Charlotte was pursuing that career path.
Because Charlotte hoped it would lead her back to the island again.
She knew how her mother felt. But Charlotte was an adult now, and there was nothing her mother could do. So Charlotte set off for the University of Kent, and then to Oxford in 2000 to study for her Ph.D.
Not long after she started there, she heard some rumour about a professor who had been forced to leave, It wasn't clear why; depending on who was telling the story there was a different version of events, some of them clearly ridiculous. Eventually, there was an embargo placed on that subject, and Charlotte, who had never been that interested anyway, forgot all about it.
So she never knew that she had narrowly missed crossing paths with the "bad man" at her university.
In time, she graduated from Oxford, joined several anthropological expeditions. Everywhere she went, she found herself thinking "Was it here? Are these the people called Hostiles?"
But it wasn't until she went on the trip to Tunisia that Charlotte finally knew her memories were real.
The woman with her hadn't understood how a polar bear's skeleton came to be in the middle of the desert, had been sure it was a hoax. But Charlotte knew exactly what this discovery meant.
And the logo on the polar bear's collar was exactly what she remembered from her childhood. Here was proof that the DHARMA Initiative existed.
All Charlotte needed to do now was find her way back there.
It wasn't long after that when Charlotte received the call. The man on the other end identified himself as Matthew Abaddon, saying he'd been contacted by someone from the Tunisia expedition and knew about her find.
Mr. Abaddon had been able to fill in a few blanks for her, confirming exactly when she had left the island. Daddy was dead, killed in 1992 when the people she knew as the Hostiles had initiated a purge of the DHARMA Initiative. The island was now under the control of the Hostiles, specifically a man named Benjamin Linus, who had previously been under DHARMA employ.
And he told her of an expedition being organised by his employer, Charles Widmore. "If you board this freighter," Mr. Abaddon informed her, "You'll be able to get back to where you were born. We can bring your people home again."
She boarded at Fiji, was greeted by a woman named Naomi Dorrit. When Naomi had heard Charlotte's accent for the first time, she'd immediately plastered a smile across her face and exclaimed "A fellow Brit!" Charlotte had laughed and nodded politely, not bothering to correct her.
Some of the people on the boat had seemed a little strange, such as Miles, the man who talked to ghosts. And she knew there had been an odd exchange between him and the deckhand Kevin Johnson, who he seemed to think was on board under a false name. Johnson was pretty strange himself, never looking anyone in the eye and not speaking unless he was spoken to.
She'd not been on the freighter long when a man came up to her.
"Great view, isn't it?" he asked.
Charlotte was about to make some polite reply and move on, but then she turned and looked at the man properly.
"You seem familiar, have we met before? Only I'm sure I recognise your face."
The man frowned, shook his head. "I don't think so."
Charlotte held out her hand. "I'm Charlotte. Charlotte Lewis."
The man shook her hand firmly. "I'm Daniel Faraday."
She doesn't know where or when she is any more. She doesn't understand what's happening to her, although she thinks Daniel does.
Moments from the different time periods flash through her mind.
I love Geronimo Jackson.
I'm not going to leave her behind.
Why can't Daddy come with us?
Charlotte, it's Daniel. Talk to me.
You are a bad man!
You've...been here before?
She sees the bad man clearly again for the first time. And she sees the man in front of her now.
She realises they are the same man.
It's strange, Charlotte thinks as she loses consciousness, that the bad man's the one who was keeping me safe after all.