Title: What Goes Around Comes Around
Rating: PG
Summary: The current brings everything back. One way or another, everything comes back around.
Disclaimer: I do not own Lost. At all. I wish but alas...
Author's Note: Set post-'Through the Looking Glass'. Kinda/sorta dark.



The current brings everything back. One way or another, everything comes back around.

Claire holds three bags of brown powder she broke out of the middle of a statue of the Virgin Mary in her hands. She had once forced these in Charlie’s face, disgust, revoltion written across her features. But now, she rolls them around in her hands with rapt fascination, watches them turn and shift.

She ponders them at length, wonders why they were so important to Charlie at one point, and, at the same time, understands. Now. There are nights, now, when she thinks that all she will ever feel is pain. Emptiness. Loss. It was never about the drugs, she knows. It was about escaping the pain.

She will never know what drove Charlie to this moment, to the crossroads that would very likely determine a large part of the rest of his life. She would never know what had lead him to see the salvation he was desperately searching for in the bottom of these bags, in the blissful oblivion that they had brought him. She will never know.

The list of things that she will never know about Charlie grows every day, because it is all that she can think about. She can only think of the man that she had been falling in love with, about all of the things that she would never be able to ask him, to do with him, to know about him.

And, about the day when the current would bring him back around as well.

Claire rolls the bags around in her hand, watches the powder shift inside of them, like the sand beneath her feet. There will come a time, very soon, when they will call for her, when it will finally be time to leave this place, and everything in it, behind. To go back and pick up the lives that they had left behind.

She’ll go. But she thinks she’ll take one of these with her. As a reminder. Just in case.