Title: There's Beauty in the Breakdown
Rating: PG
Summary: Standing by her mother’s bedside, as the machines emit their familiar beeps, as she lays in the same bed she’s been in for almost two years now, makes it all the more clear to her the reality of the situation, the reality of her world.
Disclaimer: I don't own Lost. At all. I wish, but alas...
Author's Note: Claire won. Wow, guys. I gotta say, I'm a little surprised. But, nonetheless, here she is. :) I promise, this is the last post from me tonight. Set after 'Through the Looking Glass', spoilers for said.



“Hi Mum.”

Claire enters her mother’s hospital room timidly. It’s been a long time, too long, since she’s seen her. She feels like a completely different person than the girl she was the last time she was in this room. Maybe she is.

Aaron giggles in her arms and she holds him a little tighter. He’s almost one and becoming quite the handful to take care of on her own. But that isn’t why she holds him as if she’s terrified of dropping him. She holds him as close to her as he can possibly be because she needs him, because she isn’t sure if she has the strength to do this.

Jack had offered to come with her, but Claire felt the situation was too awkward. This was something that she needed to do on her own. Jack is back at the hotel now, with the rest of them, no doubt waiting on her return nervously.

They’re all treating her like she’s fragile, like she’s going to cry at the drop of a hat or try to wrap her rental car around a tree. Sometimes – on her worst days – that concern is warranted. Other times, it’s simply annoying to put up with.

Charlie is gone. She’s angry, yes, but was given to understand that was the first step on the path to acceptance.

Standing by her mother’s bedside, as the machines emit their familiar beeps, as she lays in the same bed she’s been in for almost two years now, makes it all the more clear to her the reality of the situation, the reality of her world.

“It’s been a long time,” she says, sitting down in a chair with her son, who seems content, if only for now, to squirm around in her lap. “This is Aaron. Your Grandson. I wish you could meet him.”

Claire is used to talking to her mother and not getting a response, but it doesn’t hurt any less. Not even after al this time. She sighs and looks down at her son, then back up to her mother. “I wish Charlie was here too,” she says, as long as she’s wishing for things. “And Shannon too.” She smiles, sadly, at the memory of her friend, the pain of who’s death is still very fresh. “Even…”

She laughs, ironically, and shakes her head. She looks about the room and remembers a day that seems so far off. If she looks very hard, she can see him, in his crisp, clean, expensive suit, his slick gray hair. She wishes she had made the effort when she had the chance, that she weren’t still so angry with him.

Jack says she just would have been horribly disappointed, but Claire isn’t sure she cares. Some days, she thinks she would trade having a crummy father for none at all. She’s fairly certain that Jack would make that trade.

“I met my father,” she tells her mother. Claire tries to imagine what she would say if she were awake. Her Aunt Lindsey seemed to have a lot to say. Claire wasn’t, however, very interested, so Lindsey ended up keeping a lot of her thoughts to herself. Her Aunt didn’t believe in talking if no one was going to listen to her.

She thinks of Jack next, of the inexplicable path that had lead her to him, to her family. She smiles, fondly, then says, “And my brother.”

It’s the first moment in a long while that Claire has had to sit in peace, to let her mind wander, uninterrupted, over the things that she's gained and the things that she's lost, to weigh one against the other and ask herself the big question: was it worth it?

Gaining a child, losing her friend. Getting a brother, losing a love. Stepping out of one makeshift family and into another. Is it fate, Claire wonders. Is this the way things are supposed to be? Is her happiness always destined to be bittersweet?

She doesn’t know anything for sure anymore. She can’t seem to make sense of what had happened to her, or of the people that she had gone through it with. Maybe she’s still too close to it all. Maybe time does heal all wounds.

A sigh falls from her lips and she shakes her head. She’d had the optimism slowly beaten out of her for three months straight, to the point where she almost doesn’t have any left.

Time gives you distance, not healing. It separates you from the things that cause you pain, but the pain doesn’t disappear. It lingers, dormant, below the surface. Always.

She knows this from looking at her mother’s unmoving body and knowing that she has been the same all this time, that she will likely stay this way forever. Claire had emptied all of her tears onto her mother’s bed the last time she was in this room. She doesn’t think she could cry now if she tries.

She no longer knows how to grieve for someone who isn’t dead, any more than she knows how to grieve for someone that she never really knew at all.

Her mother lays in between life and death, leaning towards the later. The man that she knew to be her father had died in this very city days before Oceanic 815 had take off into the air. And she couldn’t cry for either of them. Her parents were both dead, or dying. Charlie was buried in a shallow grave, on an island that Claire could never find on a map (even if she tried), along with Shannon, Libby, Ana, and all of the others. But Claire couldn’t cry for them either. She didn’t have anything left in her. No more grief. No more sorrow. Just pain and loss and bitter emptiness.

It makes no sense to her, and it probably never will. She has the sense to see, however, that this is her crossroads. This is the place and the time where she will decide if her life is going to be about the doors that have been opened to her, the places that she can now go and the people that she can go there with, or if she will allow herself to be forever defined by the things that she could have been, by the people that she has lost.

Her son bounces, happily, in her lap, unaware of and oblivious to the storm in his mother’s mind. He looks up at her and giggles and smiles and she smiles back down at him.

She hasn’t decided yet, what she’s going to do, or really, which way is it. But clarity will find her, eventually. She needs to give it more time, more time and the world will start to make sense, stop spinning.

“I missed you, Mum,” Claire says, leaning forward and taking her son with her. “I miss you.”

Seeing her mother reminds Claire of all of the things that she’s lost, of people that should be standing next to her but aren’t. But she can’t help but think of the people that are with her, that are waiting for her back at the hotel where they were being put up free of charge. Family by blood or family by choice, but family all the same.

And after all that she has lost, she finds that she can see be thankful for that.

Looking down at her child once more, she finds him laying drowsily with his head resting on her chest. She smiles and gathers him up in her arms. “You ready to go home, sweetie?” she asks. He looks up at her with a sleepy nod. Claire nods back and smiles. “Yeah, me too.”

She stands with him in her arms and looks around her mother’s room. She hopes she’s purged some of her thoughts here, that they won’t follow her home. “Wave bye bye to Grandma, honey,” she says, sadly, close to crying but still unable to get there.

Aaron waves widely, enthusiastically. “Bye bye,” he says through a yawn. Claire smiles and laughs and looks at her mother one more time before hitching her son up higher on her hip.

“Bye Mum,” she says, before taking a deep breath and starting back down the hallway she thinks she could walk in her sleep.