Hugo "Hurley" Reyes (iheartmyshihtzu) wrote in brightlightlogs, @ 2010-05-31 01:20:00 |
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Entry tags: | charlie pace, hugo "hurley" reyes |
Who: Charlie Pace and Hugo "Hurley" Reyes
Where: Hurley and Charlie's new room!
When: Right after this and Charlie goes to see Claire.
What: A completely necessary BFF reunion!
Rating: Probably light.
Status: Incomplete
Charlie was bouncing back from this sudden return a lot easier than he had the first time, and it wasn't like he could complain. One minute he was dead, drowning, giving a last message to Desmond and making the cross before surrendering to his destiny. He felt the darkness and the burn of his lungs, and then his eyes opened here in Vegas. That was a surreal experience, but this time it felt old hat. Comfortable. As long as his heart was beating again, Charlie didn't mind the experiments or the time jumps or the constant confusion. He was alive. Claire not remembering him was a downer, but he thought they could probably work it out. Aaron was there and safe with them, albeit unborn. Next on his list was Hurley, and that at least was the one thing that filled Charlie with uncomplicated joy. They were best friends from early on after the crash, and he never met a better bloke in the world. Charlie hadn't had a real friend in years, before Driveshaft got famous, and this was going to be bloody brilliant. He looked the exact same as the last time Hurley saw him. Same clothes, shoes, hair, etc., because he was literally plucked out of that underground room. He reached the door and knocked, smiling and stretching his arms out in preparation for the hug that was soon to come. Hopefully he'd survive it! Hugo'd seen Kate, and while that was a nice reunion, he'd seen her every day for the last week. She'd only just gone off with Jack and Sawyer and Juliet to set off the bomb. Sawyer... the reunion with Sawyer had been a little more exciting, as reunions went. There had been a three year period when he wasn't even sure if Sawyer was still alive, let alone knowing what he was up to. Charlie's death had been particularly hard on two survivors: Claire, for the obvious reason, and Hugo, who had grown incredibly close over the three months they'd been there. So when the knock on the door sounded, Hugo bounded for the door (Charlie could probably hear it), threw it open and scooped up his minuscule friend in a giant bear hug. For Charlie it'd only been a few months since he saw his friend and forced him to stay on the beach so he wouldn't be in danger, but it felt a lot longer than that. The trauma of his death made everything feel long away in his head, like a dream more than a reality. But once Hurley threw open the door and took Charlie off his feet, the guitarist was laughing and it felt right. Instead of protesting, he just patted Hurley on the back and enjoyed the moment. To be honest, he could use a hug. "If we're going to keep doing this, mate, either put me down or you might as well carry me inside. This will look odd to anyone walking by." They were technically still in the hall, and he craned his head around to shoot an amused look both ways to see if anyone was there. Hugo's sense of decorum had gone out the window, and with Charlie's statement, he realised that this was not considered manly or proper. His mother would have smacked him for it. As much as he loved his mother, it was hard for him not to be overly emotional at this point. But he set the other man down and gestured him into the apartment. "Sorry dude. It's just been three years and you died." Charlie didn't mind all that, he just didn't want people thinking they were crazy. Then again, wasn't everyone in this place crazy? He remembered his time here before with the vampires and the werewolves, not to mention the zombie attack, so two friends hugging was really the last thing to be concerned with. "It's alright, if you weren't so excited I'd be hurt. I'd say what, like my bloody death meant nothing?" Charlie stepped inside and slapped Hurley affectionately on the arm, using his other hand to flick bangs away from his eyes. "I was hoping they'd bring you here eventually, but thought that'd be selfish, yeah? Taking you from your world and sticking you here on my whim." "It's better than the alternative," Hurley answered with a shrug as he closed the door. Alternative, of course, meant that Charlie was back to being dead and Sayid looked like Jack Skellington on a good day. Oh yeah, and somewhere in there Claire had just walked off into the jungle, leaving behind Aaron. Without the hustle and bustle of daily life on the island - and Hurley's mind a little clearer - blowing up that bomb was looking more and more like the worst idea in the history of ideas, but it wasn't as though Hurley had any say about it. That was all Jack's mess, and he'd already made the mistake of not following Jack once. Hurley couldn't stop smiling. This was so much better than some stupid island, even with Ethan Rom and Ben Linus around. He'd have given his right arm and leg to have Charlie and Claire back, and suddenly they were both here! "I'm just glad you even remember me, dude. Jack has no idea who I am, and everyone's from all over time and space here. It's weird. Obi-Wan Kenobi is here." "Things really did get that bad, then?" Charlie got a general overview of it from the old Jack and Kate when he first showed up. Things had sounded dire, and it was like a stab to the stomach to hear all that. When he shut that door, locking Desmond out and him inside, he stupidly felt proud knowing that everything was going to be better now. The water filled up the room, and he wrote the message on his palm, certain they'd be saved and go back to their lives. Instead things just went worse, from what he heard. He should've known better; on the Island, things always managed to get worse. He didn't show up with any clothes or additional items, so there wasn't anything really to move in. "You think Zenner would've at least kept the things I had around last time. I got a beautiful electric bass and was just starting to bond." That just meant shopping was necessary a second time. Heaven forbid he had to spend a few hours in a music store looking for the right guitar. "That's strange, at least everyone knew one another last time. And did you know Jack is Claire's brother? What's that all about?" There were more than a few coincidences between all of them, but it was weird connections like that which made Charlie think destiny did play into this more than any of them wanted to think. "Obi-Wan Kenobi? That's a good addition. The best we had before was the house of Slayers." Hurley went directly to the mini-bar. Somehow it was always magically refilled by the time he got back to his room after being out for a few hours. The alcohol was pretty much untouched each time. The first night he was there, he tried Sawyer's advice. It tasted like ass, so he'd given up and gone for the Mountain Dew. He grabbed two of the bottles, offered Charlie one of them. "Maybe someone else was in your room while you were gone?" It was like Sawyer's 'stash' being taken all over again. At least Charlie wouldn't be a jack-ass about it; he had a good sense of humor. "Or - I don't know." Hurley popped the top on his drink and flopped down on the couch. He had tons of questions for Charlie. What did dying feel like? Did he remember his ghost coming to see him at the hospital? "So... slayers, huh? Zenner can bring tv people into reality? What's up with that?" His first night there before had been spent drunk. His first week in fact. There was nothing like waking up after dying and then being told it was all for nothing. That'd send anyone to a bar, but lucky Charlie, there was a bar right there for him. Then Claire showed up and he had a reason to sober. This time around he didn't have a driving need to get drunk. That was a slippery slope anyway, replacing one addictive crutch with another. He took the Mountain Dew from Hurley with a half-smile; of course Hurley would take caffeine over a pint any day. "No, mate, that's what they do here. When they send you back, all your belongings just disappear with you." There was no goodbyes, no explanations, just here one minute and gone the next. He'd seen it himself a few times. "I just thought it couldn't hurt for them to return everything if they were going to bring me back exactly as I am." Blue eyes momentarily moved to the clear balcony doors, glancing outside. Vegas. There were all sorts of bad things a person could get into in this city. Charlie anxiously ran his hands together, and moved over to the couch to sit down next to Hurley, opening his own Dew. "I don't have a clue, but it was eerie the first few times. A Jedi though, you must be excited. You met him yet?" Hugo wasn't particularly keen on just disappearing. It reminded him of Claire, and how Sawyer and Miles said she just got up, walked away, and disappeared into the jungle. One person disappearing was creepy enough, but if that happened a lot here... When Charlie's gaze shot toward the window, Hurley's followed. Vegas just seemed like his mom's house - gaudy, overdone - with just a bit more space and less trees. "Nah, I haven't met him yet. Kinda... not sure I want to. I mean, he's Obi-Wan. What if he's a huge jerk?" Charlie had been to Vegas before the plane crash, and it didn't exactly have fond memories for him. Vegas was the perfect place for an aspiring rock star ... and the rock star attitude. It wasn't that he wanted drugs. He was confident that he could keep his addiction at bay, that the progress he made on the Island wasn't going to go to waste. But he'd been a junkie for years. He'd only been on the Island for three months. He was secretly nervous about being in the real world again. "He's Obi-Wan. Why would he be a jerk? The only thing bollocks part about the Jedi is their stubborn refusal to let their people fall in love. That would have solved a lot of problems." It was like priests swearing chastity. Sooner or later trouble was going to come from it. Charlie tried to be a good Catholic boy growing up. Look where that got him. "I got a bit of the story after my death from the other Jack and Kate, but not your side of it. I wouldn't mind hearing that bit." At the very least Hurley would find a way to make it amusing. Hurley turned and spared what passed for a glare from his perspective. A withering gaze, it was not. Life had pretty much sucked since Charlie died. It was pretty much one thing after another in a downward spiral of suckiness. "It was crap, man. I can't believe you called me fat just so I wouldn't go with you. I knew it, but then your ghost showed up and confirmed it all. You were my friend, Charlie, and I would have wanted to be there to help you - even if it meant you died, you know?" Hurley glaring? Now that was a rare one! The last time he did that was when Charlie told him he couldn't come with them. And there, he was bringing it up too. Charlie winced visibly and brushed a hand across his eyebrows. "It was too dangerous. They captured me before we managed to turn things our way, and it was complicated enough with me and Desmond." Which was true, but he understood that wasn't enough. He set a hand on Hurley's shoulder. "Knowing I died and watching me die are two different things. I don't regret sparing my best mate that. You might've tried to stop it or gotten killed yourself. I couldn't risk that, Hurley. I was a git, but I'd do the same thing again." After a moment he smiled faintly. "Maybe not the exact same thing. I'd make sure the bloody Russian was dead so he couldn't blow up the wall!" Hurley noted that Charlie hadn't seemed surprised that his ghost had shown up. Did that mean he remembered that? Or was he simply not surprised that ghosts turned up now and again? He'd have to ask later. "Russian? What Russian? Desmond didn't tell us in detail, just said that it wasn't Penny's boat. I volunteered to tell Claire. That was not cool at all." Libby's death, Charlie's death... These were all things that Hurley had two years to process, and he had a feeling they would never make sense. "But dude, after all that, Penny did have a boat that was near where the island was. That's how we all got off the island, man. Desmond and Penny reunited, and it was awesome." "I don't exactly know what Russian, he's the one with the patch over his eye? Or he was the one. He went down with me." Charlie wasn't surprised by anything, and if Hurley said there were ghosts, he'd believe there were ghosts. He'd even believe he was a lottery winner now. Who was he to doubt a bloody single thing at this point? "When I was in there, I spoke with Penny. She told me she had no boat coming to get us then, but she was looking. I'm glad to hear she eventually got there, and Desmond got his happy ending." His relationship with the Scot was complicated at best. There were some times he loathed Desmond for telling him the truth, for putting his eventual death in his mind so often. There was even that moment in the jungle, when they went after Naomi, that Desmond almost let him die on purpose. But Desmond saved his life over and over, until he couldn't anymore. "I'm sorry, mate, I really am. I thought the ends justified the means. I died, and you all got off the Island. Seemed like a fair trade to me." He slouched on the couch and looked at his hands, where usually he wrote words but they were empty for now. "What was that about my ghost?" Hurley's expression flattened, his drink hung still in his hand. He thought about playing stupid for a while, but he'd never been very good at it. Direct questions usually meant Hurley turned tail and ran or blurted them out. "I don't know anything about - " Slumping over, he started over. "Yeah, I sort of thought I was going crazy for a while there because you kept following me, telling me I had to go back to the island." "My ghost did?" His eyebrows furrowed in confusion, because that wasn't something he remembered. "I don't know about that, but it doesn't mean you're crazy, mate. I came from my death. Who knows what happened to me afterward." Charlie was a lapsed Catholic, so he believed in things like the soul and in spirits of a kind. His rational brain often made fun of those beliefs, but he still held them somewhere. "'Sides, after being on a bloody Island with smoke monsters and now resurrected and trapped in Las Vegas ... either we're all crazy or none of us are." Or maybe it was both. "Is that why you did go back to the Island?" Hurley exhaled, brows furrowed. The corner of his mouth turned downward in a frown. Running from Ben into county lock-up... He'd honestly thought he was going to get away from the island, and somehow Jacob had talked him into doing the one thing he told Locke he wasn't going to do. A few simple words and 'you have a choice' and Hurley was as good as on that plane, but he sure as hell wasn't going to let anyone else on it, if he could help it. He'd run right out and bought up every other seat. "Not exactly." Hurley shrugged. "You and Eko and Ana all visited me, and I thought I was going crazy. And then Sayid told me I should do the opposite of what Ben was doing, so I said I killed all the people Sayid did so they'd lock me up and Ben couldn't get me. But I figured out it wasn't me after all. And then this dude - Jacob - he was in my cab when I was leaving, and he gave me this guitar case with an ankh in it and told me I had a choice. But I figured... the Island wasn't done with me. And I couldn't let all of you die, even though you and Libby and Ana and Boone and Shannon had already died. So..." Realizing he'd monologued, Hurley sank back into the couch. "...I came back." Well that was a load of information all at once, and Charlie tried to pick through it as quickly as possible so he could understand what Hurley was saying. His friend always made sense, just as long as people listened long enough to hear it. Charlie didn't have the patience all the time, but he was trying to make up for that now. "Ben is the leader of the Others, yeah? The one we had in the hatch." He knew Ben eventually became more prominent for the survivors, because when the other Kate and Jack tried to explain things to him, the name kept coming up over and over. Usually about what a horrible, manipulative bastard he was. And he killed John Locke. "You didn't want to go back to the Island, so you went to jail, and then a man named Jacob gave you an ankh and said you had a choice." That was the general story he was getting from this right now. What the ankh had to do with anything was beyond him. "He's the bloke on the boards, isn't he? The one who speaks like Yoda and the Others worship." Charlie was trying to keep up, and he hoped he was doing well with that so far. He drank his soda and then patted Hurley on the shoulder. "You did a brave thing, going back. You were off, you never had to think of the Island again. Not everyone would've made that decision." But Hurley would, because he was just good like that. "Yeah, that's Jacob. He just sort of had this weird vibe, man. Definitely like Yoda, only he gives less answers that Yoda ever did. It's all mysticism and crap, and I'm not good with either of those things. I don't understand any of it." Hurley shrugged once more, deciding that now was a good time to drain half his can of soda. Vegas wasn't much more than a more civilized Island from Hurley's perspective. At least he wouldn't have to gather leaves in the jungle for toilet paper. That was quite a relief. Hurley glanced at Charlie once more. "I went back because you wouldn't stop hounding me most days. You scared the pants offa me the first time at a convenience store. I ended up being chased by half the LAPD." "I'm sorry I was such a pain in the arse ghost." Charlie grinned at him and set his drink down, glancing around the apartment. The apartment was identical to his last one, and the one he woke up in elsewhere. "None of it made any sense to me either. Suppose that's why you and me stuck to the camp, yeah? Kept away from the adventure if we could help it. I learned my lesson about that the first few days." Charlie thought at first it would be fun to play the adventurer, but that got much less entertaining when they met Ethan and learned about the Others for the first time. He didn't mind sticking to Claire and the beach after that. "C'mon, Hurley, let's go take a look at the city and you can tell me more of the crazy I missed." |