Charlie saw the look on Elijah’s face and began to shake some. He was never comfortable losing people…he normally just pushed it out of his mind, but in the two years that they’ve been together, Dez was the one who understood without having to say it. They were the mirror image of each other, opposite enough to seen distant, but it was the stuff inside them both that seemed to bring them together. He knelt down at the man’s side and took his hand. He brought it to his lips to give it a small kiss. He didn’t mind, he was family. Fuck everything else.<br/><br/>Lizzie was talking to him. He knew she was mad, but at what didn’t quite matter at the moment. Tony was gone, and Elijah checked out. He couldn’t blame either one of them, but one thing the woman beside him said had stuck. They had to bury him. It wasn’t because of pestilence or safety concerns, not to him, it was because he deserved it. He…deserved…to not just sit out to bake in the sun. He couldn’t do a good job by himself, but he was sure he could do enough. The woman was still angry…apparently Elijah had taken something from their camp. “Desperate people do desperate things…” was all he bothered saying, as he took the dead snake and placed it on Desmond, before lifting the man up.<br/><br/>The hiss he released from the effort sounded a bit like a snake itself, and the look he gave Lizzie as he held Dez was just as threatening “You got your bag back…excuse me…I have something to take care of.” He awkwardly got the guy out of the hut, and carried him to the spot he thought of. It was overlooking the beach just enough to consider it a decent view. He hoped he liked it, because he couldn’t carry him any farther. He set both Dez and himself down in a heap, and breathed hard, but his eyes were wide and searching, and before long he got the storm torn piece of tree he wanted. He used his weight to break the piece off the rest of the split palm, and then dug.<br/><br/>He dug until his muscles burned, and his hands felt all but frozen to the wood he was using, and even then he still only managed to clear enough for a shallow grave. He crawled to Desmond as he laboriously breathed, muttering “I’m sorry…it’s the best I can do, buddy”, and hoping he could understand. Hoping anyone could understand. He pulled Dez in, then made sure to grab the snake. Charlie gently lifted the dead man’s head and wrapped the snake around him just so, he then forced the snake’s mouth open by experimentally pressing along its head. He made sure that the snake bit into its own body, and fashioned a bit of a snake tie out of it.<br/><br/>“There you go…going out in style” Charlie had to smile. As the man that gave him the idea for the leaf skirt, he was sure that his soul could appreciate using that bastard snake this way. It helped…more than he knew at the time. Their world was private, and he wouldn’t have noticed if anyone else was around. “Desmond…The island’s less of a place without you, and I think my loss may be greater than I can tell right now…” He’d shed a tear and wiped it angrily “You’ll be missed, brother.”<br/><br/>He then sat on the edge of the hole and felt like he was running on batteries that were dying down. He couldn’t even bring his body to push back the dirt he had dug…only putting his back on the mound next to the hole to stare at the sky. Any one of them…any one of them could have got hit by that nasty bastard. There’s just something to be said about life sometimes. With that in mind, he continued to star as his mind stared on.<br/>