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spn: dry bones (claire/castiel; r)
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gabbysilang posted these pictures and skeleton!Castiel burrowed its way into my brain and refused to leave. I return him to you now, Gabby, in fic form (ONE YEAR LATE, LOL X| sorry) on the grand occasion of your birth. Happy birthday, you amazing mind, you relentless inspiration! Thanks for being in my life. <333 Have an amazing, amazing everything ever.
Title: Dry Bones
Characters: Claire/Castiel, Jimmy, Amelia
Rating: R for gore and creepiness
Warnings: Highlight to read. Violent imagery, self-harm, animal cruelty, character death, incestuous-by-proxy necrophilia.
Notes: The title is from the song of the same name, performed here by the Delta Rhythm Boys. Thank you very much to Cally, Meto, and Amy for fielding my freak-outs and reading over the draft. You guys rock.
Summary: Skeleton!Castiel AU. Claire has an imaginary friend and violent tendencies, not necessarily in that order. ~4100 words
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weatheredlaw
Her father takes her to the park, her little hand in his. "Push me on the swings!" she says. "Ride the see-saw with me!" Claire at the summit of the slide with her face turned to the sun, looking like the pride and joy of every father and the reason Jimmy's heart swells in time with her raised voice.
"Are you looking? Dad, are you looking? Look!"
She waves at him. He waves back.
+
One day she falls from the monkey bars, as children do.
A blur, some shouting, and Claire becomes aware of empty space opening up around her as people back away. Emptiness pools around her like she is bleeding it, and on the edge of it, commotion. “Call an ambulance!” “Where's her mother?” “Billy, get away from there!”
The cut goes all the way down to the bone and Claire can't look away. She feels sick to her stomach, but there is a glimpse of—
Trickling and streaming, steady. That's how the blood flows, and somewhere far away, her father yells her name. There is the bone, her skeleton, the stick figure of her. Claire puts her fingers in the wound and it hurts, it hurts so much, and she hears herself make an animal sound.
“Claire!”
But she is full of wonder, too. The pain pushes up bile, and her fingernail tap-tap-taps the bone.
“Claire! 'Scuse me, 'scuse – Claire, oh god.”
+
She knows what she looks like now, under all this.
There's a book in the school library that teaches children how the body works by taking it apart. The respiratory system, the nervous system, the digestive system – such false compartmentalization, as if one is actually separate from the other. Claire devises categories where the kidneys and the lungs are part of one system, the esophagus and the ribcage are partners. The brain and the liver are cool-eyed collaborators, confidantes.
She gets to the page about the skeletal system, and looks at the scar the stitches left behind, pink and gnarled on her skin. The scar is a locked door, and behind it lies something precious, or at the very least something dangerous. Maybe the whole body is a locked door. What lies beneath?
At home she's in the bathroom and frowning at the mirror, the body book in hand. Claire palms her hair back from her face, glances at the page, and imitates the grin.
+
“Daddy!” Claire yells, and Jimmy wonders how she can still do that. He let her fall and get six stitches, and here she still is, running to him with a smile that wide and everything forgiven. She's perfect.
He starts picking Claire up from school as a form of atonement. Jimmy would take her to Friendly's for ice cream, or that coffeehouse downtown where they have the cranberry muffins she likes. Today, she tells him, is a cranberry muffin kind of day, so here they are, Claire talking around mouthfuls of sugar as he sips on his coffee and asks leading questions.
“Look,” Claire says, spreading the book on the table between them. She pokes Jimmy's arm with an instructive finger. “Humerus, radius, ulna,” she says, then holds his hand in hers and continues, “carpal, metacarpal, phalanges.”
Claire says 'phalanges' with a hard G. Jimmy wiggles his fingers in her face and corrects her pronunciation.
“I think I saw my tibia," she says.
“Yeah?”
“When I fell.” Claire lifts a pant leg and they look at the scar on her shin. Jimmy frowns; his jaw clenches.
On the drive home, Claire is still looking through the book and you really shouldn't read in a car, it's bad for your eyes, so Jimmy distracts her by teaching her that song his mother liked. She used to put it on the record player, and Jimmy always feels like he's singing it wrong because his voice isn't scratchy and fuzzed from years of wear. His tenor is embarrassingly clear, but he is singing for his daughter now, so neither of them care.
“Ezekiel cried dem,” Jimmy warbles, and Claire answers, “Dry bones!”
By the time he pulls into the driveway, Claire is making up her own lyrics, holding the book in front of her like a hymnal. The manubrium connected to the clavicle, the clavicle connected to the acromion, the acromion connected to the scapula, and hear the word of the Lord.
+
If the body is a locked door, there are a number of things you can use as the key. Claire tries a knife.
At first the cat makes horrible sounds. It's her first time killing anything this big, and it's messy and prolonged. She gets scratches on her hands that will itch later. Maybe next time she should wear gloves.
She's in the woods where her parents don't like her playing alone, and she thinks about how things rarely go well the first time. Not only does it take her longer than she anticipated, but the knife she brought is too big, too awkward for the task she puts it too. Claire has barely begun to remove the meat from the bones when she hears voices— “Noise was coming from over here, swear to god”— so she pushes herself to her feet and runs.
Where is she going to wash her hands?
+
Amelia walks into her bedroom and stops, eyes wide and horrified.
Claire is sitting on her bedroom floor, knife poised over her leg, the scar inviting. There is apprehension on her face.
“Claire!” Amelia shouts, and drops the folded clothes.
Claire tries to think of an excuse. Her mother tells her to hand over the knife. Claire has no choice in the matter, and suddenly Amelia is on her knees and touching her face, her shoulders, her face again.
“Are you okay, baby?” Amelia asks, tears in her eyes. “Tell me what's wrong.”
Claire can't think of a lie. “I'm fine.”
+
A few years in and Dr. call-me-Molly Burnham knows which of her teachers Claire doesn't like, how she feels when her mother yells, and how little Claire sleeps when her father is away. She knows Claire's favorite food (baked ziti) and least favorite food (carrots), favorite color (purple), and least favorite holiday (Easter). Here are a few things that Claire keeps to herself:
One. The eighth time, it was another cat, and she did a good job. Not the best job, but it was the first time she reached satisfactory. She was proud of herself because she knew no one else would be. A swift and quiet death. Clean incisions. The removal of the meat from the bones without marring it overly. It had taken hours, all afternoon, but by the time the sky began to darken, she was done. Claire sat cross-legged on the forest floor, her hands red, her clothes ruined, her knife by her side, serene in the midst of deathly miasma. The cat's skeleton was arranged before her in neat, abstract formation, and told her no lies.
Two. The hospital believed her when she said it was a shop class injury. As they stitched her up, all Claire could think about was the knobby ends of the ulna, connected to the triquetrum and hamate. The willpower to block out the pain as she bent her wrist to and fro, watching the muscle and tendon work, trying to see the bones at their most vital, but it's hard to see through all that blood flowing out.
Three. The dreams. Call-me-Molly is big on dreams, so Claire tells her about the ones where she's flying over the ocean with her dad, and the ones where she runs and never gets anywhere, the ones where she needs to ask a question but has lost her voice. She doesn't tell call-me-Molly about the click-clack of osseous tissue on the tiles, the clatter of skeletal handclaps. The skeleton emerges from shadows grin-first like a Cheshire cat, and it already knows her name. Claire asks, What is your name? The skeleton doesn't reply. Come play my bones, it says instead, so Claire plays its ribcage like a xylophone, and the skeleton sings to her as bony phalanges scrape across her cheek. Dem bones, dem bones gonna walk around.
And Claire answers, Oh, hear the word of the Lord.
+
It's late November, and the trees in Pontiac are ink stripes leaking up to the sky. The world is monochromatic as the changing seasons leech the world of heat.
It's post-Thanksgiving clean-up time, and Claire is bringing the good silverware back up to the attic. This is where she discovers the photo albums. Next thing she knows, she's cross-legged in the dust looking at all the people her parents used to be. Long-haired and loose-limbed and desaturated color, skinny and soft in the wrong places. Mom used to wear more dresses. Dad used to have ridiculous sideburns. The body changes and will change, and you'll only have pictures to remind you of what you were. Photographs expose the mutability of flesh. This younger Jimmy Novak with his thinner face and skinny legs – who was he?
She recognizes a picture from a Christmas years ago: her father seated at the kitchen table, Claire standing beside him, his arm around her waist. She remembers that sweater, itchy blue thing from her grandmother and hot-air balloons all over it. Her father wore a gray cotton shirt that always smelled of coffee and woodsmoke, and looked younger than she remembers.
"Hold on, lemme take one more," her mother had said, and Claire remembers her dad raising his head, and she bending to hear him say, "Smile a little bigger, bub."
She said, "I am."
In the next picture, Claire is a blur of open-mouthed laughter because her father was tickling her.
Her father was a mountain and the sky, and Claire has bright but brittle memories of riding on his shoulders as a child, as a sunrise. She clutched his head, covering his eyes and endangering them both. "Turn left, turn left," she'd shriek, or, "Turn right, go straight," and he would obey, trusting her utterly.
After she puts away the silverware, she trots down the stairs and into the dim light of the second floor. The master bedroom is ajar; light pools.
Her father is sitting at her mother's vanity, elbows resting on the polished wood. Fingers laced together and resting against his mouth as if he is in prayer, which would be characteristic of him, but Claire is distracted by his eyes, those heavy eyes, sadder these days, and tired. Her father is studying his reflection, or perhaps something beyond that, Claire cannot say. She steps into the bedroom without an invitation and meets her father's reflected gaze. He smiles.
"Hey," he says, and she says hi back.
She goes to stand behind him, and puts her hands on his shoulders. He covers her left hand with his right. Look here: look at the knobs of Jimmy Novak's knuckles. Look at the veins like highways through the body. Her father's skin is a map whose directions shift every year. He is staying late at work these days. He has long and quiet conversations with her mother in the kitchen that sometimes end in tears. Claire isn't an idiot. She isn't a child. She knows the signs, the mutability of love.
The mirror tells her how she is her father's daughter: the same curved cheekbones, the same thin lips. Not the same eyes. Claire's eyes have more gray, like her mother.
"Why so serious, pumpkin?" he asks, and grins the toothy grin that follows her into her dreams because she thinks it's maybe the one thing about her father that hasn't changed.
"Nothing," Claire replies. "Everything's okay."
As much a reassurance as it is a reply.
+
Here, she says to the skeleton, her hand in its ribcage. Here is where your heart would be.
It tells her that the heart is not the point. Her heart, the meat, soft organs, the skin. Her skin makes itself anew twice in a single month; it is never meant to hold.
Its phalanges are on her face, fingertips tracing her hairline. The voice sounds like slow petrification. It's not this I love.
Claire asks it, What's your name?
Its eye sockets are endless and dark, inexorable, Charybdis. The skeleton replies, Call me Castiel. Call us chosen.
+
When Claire is sixteen, she has sex with a boy in his bedroom after they finish their lab report. His name is Ben, and he keeps his eyes closed as he fucks her in staggered rhythm. It's her first time and it hurts, but she just grits her teeth. She doesn't come.
What she enjoyed more, perhaps, was the foreplay. Pushing Ben down on his back and tracing his clavicles with her fingers, then her tongue. She had pressed a kiss to the hollow at the base of his throat. (Manubrium, a magical incantation.) Claire's fingers fluttered over his ribs and she bit; he gasped. She had imagined her lips pressing against hard bone, her tongue curling around the bars of his ribcage. She imagined Castiel as he appears to her in dreams, where she is the moon that has snagged on the tree branches of his limbs.
"What?" Ben asks breathlessly, distracted, and Claire catches herself, didn't realize she had spoken out loud.
"Nothing," she whispers. "Nothing," and she closes her eyes and keeps the mantra going in her head, steadier than rhythm of the boy between her legs: the thigh bone connected to the back bone, the back bone connected to the neck bone, the neck bone connected to the head bone, (rising in tonal increments as he presses his forehead to her shoulder and moans,) and hear the word of the Lord.
+
You can do so much more with so much less, Castiel tells her, and the truth of the words aches somewhere deep inside her. Her mother is so quiet these days, and there is a distance gathering in her eyes, something akin to storm clouds brewing. As for her father, well. He is often away. Claire thinks there are so many details that need to be cut away.
Don't you want to know yourself? Castiel asks. Know yourself completely?
And yes, yes, she does. Not the shadow that sits at the back of her classes and ghosts through the hallways. Not the stories that the kids whisper to each other, and not the murmured concerns her parents exchange when they think Claire isn't listening. Even the reassurance is wary. Claire takes to wearing only long sleeves and jeans, and lots of bracelets; they cover up her scars. (Castiel, tracing the outline of her patella and saying, Here. Cut here.)
Jimmy comes back from his business trips with gifts for them – a nice watch for Amelia, an iPod for Claire, a box of candy, a sweater that turns out to be too small, a pair of ostentatious earrings, a zirconium pendant. Claire watches her mother lift her hair as her father puts on the necklace for her and kisses her neck. Her mother concedes a smile. Her father looks relieved.
"Sorry, kiddo, I can't," Jimmy says when Claire asks if they can go to the old coffeehouse the next day. "I'm working tomorrow."
"You're always working," Claire blurts out, and she didn't mean to shout. She doesn't mean for the tears to well up or her cheeks to blush, and she is mortified. This is exactly what Castiel warned her about. To have control, you must be aware of what you keep with you and what must be cut away.
Her father has the nerve to look surprised. He steps toward her and she steps back, but he is undeterred. He cups her face in both hands, and wipes away her tears with his thumbs. "Claire."
She closes her eyes.
"Claire, baby, what's wrong?"
Her father has soft hands, smooth to the touch with long tapered fingers. In her mind, Claire cuts away the warmth of them, and cuts away the light behind her eyes that tint the darkness red. She cuts away the heart that pounds inside of her, which clangs like a bell. Her deep shaky breaths, her father's fingers combing through her hair and calling her endearments she hasn't been called in a long time. He hasn't seen her cry in years.
"Come here," Jimmy says softly, and he tries to pull her into his arms, but she wrenches away.
You must remember, Claire.
The hurt in her father's eyes is stark but does not overwhelm her own.
You must remember what it is you need to forget.
+
I can make you free, Castiel tells her, but first you must free me.
+
Four o'clock on a Saturday afternoon and everything is full of peace. Her mother is still at Aunt Helen's. (She kisses Claire's forehead and tells her there is casserole in the fridge. She lets Jimmy kiss her and tells them she'll be back on Sunday.) Her father is in the bedroom, taking a nap, and Claire doesn't know how long she stands in the doorway, watching the rise and fall of his chest, the muss of his hair catching the sunlight through the windows.
There are promises to keep: hers, to Castiel; her father's, to her. She pads slowly into the room and kneels by the bed, as if preparing for a vigil. Her eyes seek out the curves of his face, the temporal bone arching into the zygomatic, the sharp cheekbone that she has kissed countless times before.
He stirs and Claire tenses, tightens her grip on the hilt.
"Claire?" Jimmy rubs his eyes and blearily pushes himself up to a sitting position. Crow's feet and dark circles. There must be something about the superciliary arch of his eye sockets that make him look so tired; she would like to know. "What are you doing, sweetheart?"
"Hi, Dad," she says quietly, and her voice is steady even as her heartbeat quickens. Jimmy smiles sleepily and reaches out a hand to touch her cheek, and Claire rises to her feet.
She raises the knife.
+
In a way, her father stripped of all his meat will be a sturdier identity than her father alive had ever been. It's not Jimmy Novak anymore, but something more basic and true, a reliable entity who does not bend to the tyranny of time, who will not run from her. Claire imagines that in a thousand years when anthropologists find him under strata of dust and rock, they will see what she sees now.
Claire starts with the face, telling herself it's the proper thing to do, but the truth is that she is just impatient. A voice curls at the back of her head, I'm waiting for you, and it steadies her hand, tamps down on her desire to be quick and careless. This process requires precision and at least a modicum of gentleness. After removing the eyes, Claire makes an incision from the hairline down to the glabella, the nasion, careful not to mark the skull beneath. She slides the blade under the skin and separates it from the bone.
The bed is soaked scarlet, which darkens with every minute that passes. The air smells of death, but Claire is pursuing its opposite. She licks her lips and tastes iron, and doesn't know how the blood got there. Blood gets everywhere; she knows this by now. Blood is messy, imprecise.
When Michelangelo unveiled his famous statue, his contemporaries oohed and ahhed and asked him, How do you do it?
My friends, it is simple, the artist replied. I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
It takes a long time, but her patience is rewarded as always. With her blade, she lifts the flap of flesh at one corner of the forehead and pulls. It comes away easily.
"Little one," Castiel says with a grin. "It is good to see you."
Claire sobs with relief.
+
She stays in the room all day and all through the night. It takes hours to liberate the skeleton, and after getting rid of the viscera, she takes a bucket and a washcloth and she washes down the bones. Castiel had always appeared to her as a pristine white thing, but she knows there is a difference between her mind and the real world. Of course there is.
"This is what you are too, underneath your skin," Castiel says to her as she wipes down his skull. "You and I are not so different."
Castiel stays very still under her hands, as careful with her as she is with him, and as patient. He watches her with a gaze that knows her from the inside out. He knows the songs she likes to sing and the ones she has played on his body, the ones whose notes she only taps out very quietly when she fears the loneliness too much to hear her own voice echo back. Castiel knows the sorrows of her heart, but as he has told her, the heart is a temporary thing.
And words, too. Words are temporary things, and she can't find the right ones to tell Castiel what fills her now. Instead, she leans over and presses her lips to the smooth curve of his skull. She closes her eyes, presses her forehead against his, relishing the smoothness of the touch. Claire opens her eyes and looks into his absence of his, and sees only shadows.
"You are," Castiel says, "the most special girl in all the world."
"You said I was chosen," she says, her voice cracking.
"You are chosen," he says, "and I will never leave you."
Claire kisses his mouth, pressing her lips against his teeth. Her tongue darts out and she can still taste the iron of blood, the bitterness of the soap she had used. It doesn't matter. She holds the skull steady with one hand and parts her mouth, running her tongue over incisors and bicuspids, pushing it into his mouth to feel him bite down. She shivers.
"You're perfect." She doesn't know who says the words. It doesn't matter.
+
She sleeps next to him that night, the deepest and most peaceful sleep she's had in years.
She doesn't dream.
+
"We can't stay," Castiel says, and Claire already knows this. She prepared for the inevitable yesterday before she even picked up the knife. She has a bag packed with clothes and food. She has a roll of bills stuffed into her left sneaker in her closet and the Greyhound schedule memorized. She's ready.
"Where will you take us?" Castiel asks.
"Everywhere," Claire says.
Castiel sits up in bed of his own volition. It is a more liquid movement than she would expect from a skeleton, and more sinuous still than when he had only visited her in dreams. He curls off the bed like the swell of a wave, spreading his arms wide as he spins a circle on his heels, testing out this new reality. Claire laughs. She laughs and laughs and cannot stop laughing, and she sounds obscene and monstrous to her own ears, but she cannot stop herself. She doesn't care to. Claire goes to him, reaches for him, but he weaves out of her reach. They dance. His feet go click-clack on the floor and his fingers tap together to keep up a jaunty unpredictable rhythm, and she is happy to be dancing this dance again, a reality that crawled out of her dreams.
"Dem bones, dem bones gonna walk around," Castiel says in a voice like the susurrus of falling leaves.
Claire sings back, "And hear the word of the Lord."
And neither of them can stop grinning.
gabbysilang posted these pictures and skeleton!Castiel burrowed its way into my brain and refused to leave. I return him to you now, Gabby, in fic form (ONE YEAR LATE, LOL X| sorry) on the grand occasion of your birth. Happy birthday, you amazing mind, you relentless inspiration! Thanks for being in my life. <333 Have an amazing, amazing everything ever.Title: Dry Bones
Characters: Claire/Castiel, Jimmy, Amelia
Rating: R for gore and creepiness
Warnings: Highlight to read. Violent imagery, self-harm, animal cruelty, character death, incestuous-by-proxy necrophilia.
Notes: The title is from the song of the same name, performed here by the Delta Rhythm Boys. Thank you very much to Cally, Meto, and Amy for fielding my freak-outs and reading over the draft. You guys rock.
Summary: Skeleton!Castiel AU. Claire has an imaginary friend and violent tendencies, not necessarily in that order. ~4100 words
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weatheredlawHer father takes her to the park, her little hand in his. "Push me on the swings!" she says. "Ride the see-saw with me!" Claire at the summit of the slide with her face turned to the sun, looking like the pride and joy of every father and the reason Jimmy's heart swells in time with her raised voice.
"Are you looking? Dad, are you looking? Look!"
She waves at him. He waves back.
+
One day she falls from the monkey bars, as children do.
A blur, some shouting, and Claire becomes aware of empty space opening up around her as people back away. Emptiness pools around her like she is bleeding it, and on the edge of it, commotion. “Call an ambulance!” “Where's her mother?” “Billy, get away from there!”
The cut goes all the way down to the bone and Claire can't look away. She feels sick to her stomach, but there is a glimpse of—
Trickling and streaming, steady. That's how the blood flows, and somewhere far away, her father yells her name. There is the bone, her skeleton, the stick figure of her. Claire puts her fingers in the wound and it hurts, it hurts so much, and she hears herself make an animal sound.
“Claire!”
But she is full of wonder, too. The pain pushes up bile, and her fingernail tap-tap-taps the bone.
“Claire! 'Scuse me, 'scuse – Claire, oh god.”
+
She knows what she looks like now, under all this.
There's a book in the school library that teaches children how the body works by taking it apart. The respiratory system, the nervous system, the digestive system – such false compartmentalization, as if one is actually separate from the other. Claire devises categories where the kidneys and the lungs are part of one system, the esophagus and the ribcage are partners. The brain and the liver are cool-eyed collaborators, confidantes.
She gets to the page about the skeletal system, and looks at the scar the stitches left behind, pink and gnarled on her skin. The scar is a locked door, and behind it lies something precious, or at the very least something dangerous. Maybe the whole body is a locked door. What lies beneath?
At home she's in the bathroom and frowning at the mirror, the body book in hand. Claire palms her hair back from her face, glances at the page, and imitates the grin.
+
“Daddy!” Claire yells, and Jimmy wonders how she can still do that. He let her fall and get six stitches, and here she still is, running to him with a smile that wide and everything forgiven. She's perfect.
He starts picking Claire up from school as a form of atonement. Jimmy would take her to Friendly's for ice cream, or that coffeehouse downtown where they have the cranberry muffins she likes. Today, she tells him, is a cranberry muffin kind of day, so here they are, Claire talking around mouthfuls of sugar as he sips on his coffee and asks leading questions.
“Look,” Claire says, spreading the book on the table between them. She pokes Jimmy's arm with an instructive finger. “Humerus, radius, ulna,” she says, then holds his hand in hers and continues, “carpal, metacarpal, phalanges.”
Claire says 'phalanges' with a hard G. Jimmy wiggles his fingers in her face and corrects her pronunciation.
“I think I saw my tibia," she says.
“Yeah?”
“When I fell.” Claire lifts a pant leg and they look at the scar on her shin. Jimmy frowns; his jaw clenches.
On the drive home, Claire is still looking through the book and you really shouldn't read in a car, it's bad for your eyes, so Jimmy distracts her by teaching her that song his mother liked. She used to put it on the record player, and Jimmy always feels like he's singing it wrong because his voice isn't scratchy and fuzzed from years of wear. His tenor is embarrassingly clear, but he is singing for his daughter now, so neither of them care.
“Ezekiel cried dem,” Jimmy warbles, and Claire answers, “Dry bones!”
By the time he pulls into the driveway, Claire is making up her own lyrics, holding the book in front of her like a hymnal. The manubrium connected to the clavicle, the clavicle connected to the acromion, the acromion connected to the scapula, and hear the word of the Lord.
+
If the body is a locked door, there are a number of things you can use as the key. Claire tries a knife.
At first the cat makes horrible sounds. It's her first time killing anything this big, and it's messy and prolonged. She gets scratches on her hands that will itch later. Maybe next time she should wear gloves.
She's in the woods where her parents don't like her playing alone, and she thinks about how things rarely go well the first time. Not only does it take her longer than she anticipated, but the knife she brought is too big, too awkward for the task she puts it too. Claire has barely begun to remove the meat from the bones when she hears voices— “Noise was coming from over here, swear to god”— so she pushes herself to her feet and runs.
Where is she going to wash her hands?
+
Amelia walks into her bedroom and stops, eyes wide and horrified.
Claire is sitting on her bedroom floor, knife poised over her leg, the scar inviting. There is apprehension on her face.
“Claire!” Amelia shouts, and drops the folded clothes.
Claire tries to think of an excuse. Her mother tells her to hand over the knife. Claire has no choice in the matter, and suddenly Amelia is on her knees and touching her face, her shoulders, her face again.
“Are you okay, baby?” Amelia asks, tears in her eyes. “Tell me what's wrong.”
Claire can't think of a lie. “I'm fine.”
+
A few years in and Dr. call-me-Molly Burnham knows which of her teachers Claire doesn't like, how she feels when her mother yells, and how little Claire sleeps when her father is away. She knows Claire's favorite food (baked ziti) and least favorite food (carrots), favorite color (purple), and least favorite holiday (Easter). Here are a few things that Claire keeps to herself:
One. The eighth time, it was another cat, and she did a good job. Not the best job, but it was the first time she reached satisfactory. She was proud of herself because she knew no one else would be. A swift and quiet death. Clean incisions. The removal of the meat from the bones without marring it overly. It had taken hours, all afternoon, but by the time the sky began to darken, she was done. Claire sat cross-legged on the forest floor, her hands red, her clothes ruined, her knife by her side, serene in the midst of deathly miasma. The cat's skeleton was arranged before her in neat, abstract formation, and told her no lies.
Two. The hospital believed her when she said it was a shop class injury. As they stitched her up, all Claire could think about was the knobby ends of the ulna, connected to the triquetrum and hamate. The willpower to block out the pain as she bent her wrist to and fro, watching the muscle and tendon work, trying to see the bones at their most vital, but it's hard to see through all that blood flowing out.
Three. The dreams. Call-me-Molly is big on dreams, so Claire tells her about the ones where she's flying over the ocean with her dad, and the ones where she runs and never gets anywhere, the ones where she needs to ask a question but has lost her voice. She doesn't tell call-me-Molly about the click-clack of osseous tissue on the tiles, the clatter of skeletal handclaps. The skeleton emerges from shadows grin-first like a Cheshire cat, and it already knows her name. Claire asks, What is your name? The skeleton doesn't reply. Come play my bones, it says instead, so Claire plays its ribcage like a xylophone, and the skeleton sings to her as bony phalanges scrape across her cheek. Dem bones, dem bones gonna walk around.
And Claire answers, Oh, hear the word of the Lord.
+
It's late November, and the trees in Pontiac are ink stripes leaking up to the sky. The world is monochromatic as the changing seasons leech the world of heat.
It's post-Thanksgiving clean-up time, and Claire is bringing the good silverware back up to the attic. This is where she discovers the photo albums. Next thing she knows, she's cross-legged in the dust looking at all the people her parents used to be. Long-haired and loose-limbed and desaturated color, skinny and soft in the wrong places. Mom used to wear more dresses. Dad used to have ridiculous sideburns. The body changes and will change, and you'll only have pictures to remind you of what you were. Photographs expose the mutability of flesh. This younger Jimmy Novak with his thinner face and skinny legs – who was he?
She recognizes a picture from a Christmas years ago: her father seated at the kitchen table, Claire standing beside him, his arm around her waist. She remembers that sweater, itchy blue thing from her grandmother and hot-air balloons all over it. Her father wore a gray cotton shirt that always smelled of coffee and woodsmoke, and looked younger than she remembers.
"Hold on, lemme take one more," her mother had said, and Claire remembers her dad raising his head, and she bending to hear him say, "Smile a little bigger, bub."
She said, "I am."
In the next picture, Claire is a blur of open-mouthed laughter because her father was tickling her.
Her father was a mountain and the sky, and Claire has bright but brittle memories of riding on his shoulders as a child, as a sunrise. She clutched his head, covering his eyes and endangering them both. "Turn left, turn left," she'd shriek, or, "Turn right, go straight," and he would obey, trusting her utterly.
After she puts away the silverware, she trots down the stairs and into the dim light of the second floor. The master bedroom is ajar; light pools.
Her father is sitting at her mother's vanity, elbows resting on the polished wood. Fingers laced together and resting against his mouth as if he is in prayer, which would be characteristic of him, but Claire is distracted by his eyes, those heavy eyes, sadder these days, and tired. Her father is studying his reflection, or perhaps something beyond that, Claire cannot say. She steps into the bedroom without an invitation and meets her father's reflected gaze. He smiles.
"Hey," he says, and she says hi back.
She goes to stand behind him, and puts her hands on his shoulders. He covers her left hand with his right. Look here: look at the knobs of Jimmy Novak's knuckles. Look at the veins like highways through the body. Her father's skin is a map whose directions shift every year. He is staying late at work these days. He has long and quiet conversations with her mother in the kitchen that sometimes end in tears. Claire isn't an idiot. She isn't a child. She knows the signs, the mutability of love.
The mirror tells her how she is her father's daughter: the same curved cheekbones, the same thin lips. Not the same eyes. Claire's eyes have more gray, like her mother.
"Why so serious, pumpkin?" he asks, and grins the toothy grin that follows her into her dreams because she thinks it's maybe the one thing about her father that hasn't changed.
"Nothing," Claire replies. "Everything's okay."
As much a reassurance as it is a reply.
+
Here, she says to the skeleton, her hand in its ribcage. Here is where your heart would be.
It tells her that the heart is not the point. Her heart, the meat, soft organs, the skin. Her skin makes itself anew twice in a single month; it is never meant to hold.
Its phalanges are on her face, fingertips tracing her hairline. The voice sounds like slow petrification. It's not this I love.
Claire asks it, What's your name?
Its eye sockets are endless and dark, inexorable, Charybdis. The skeleton replies, Call me Castiel. Call us chosen.
+
When Claire is sixteen, she has sex with a boy in his bedroom after they finish their lab report. His name is Ben, and he keeps his eyes closed as he fucks her in staggered rhythm. It's her first time and it hurts, but she just grits her teeth. She doesn't come.
What she enjoyed more, perhaps, was the foreplay. Pushing Ben down on his back and tracing his clavicles with her fingers, then her tongue. She had pressed a kiss to the hollow at the base of his throat. (Manubrium, a magical incantation.) Claire's fingers fluttered over his ribs and she bit; he gasped. She had imagined her lips pressing against hard bone, her tongue curling around the bars of his ribcage. She imagined Castiel as he appears to her in dreams, where she is the moon that has snagged on the tree branches of his limbs.
"What?" Ben asks breathlessly, distracted, and Claire catches herself, didn't realize she had spoken out loud.
"Nothing," she whispers. "Nothing," and she closes her eyes and keeps the mantra going in her head, steadier than rhythm of the boy between her legs: the thigh bone connected to the back bone, the back bone connected to the neck bone, the neck bone connected to the head bone, (rising in tonal increments as he presses his forehead to her shoulder and moans,) and hear the word of the Lord.
+
You can do so much more with so much less, Castiel tells her, and the truth of the words aches somewhere deep inside her. Her mother is so quiet these days, and there is a distance gathering in her eyes, something akin to storm clouds brewing. As for her father, well. He is often away. Claire thinks there are so many details that need to be cut away.
Don't you want to know yourself? Castiel asks. Know yourself completely?
And yes, yes, she does. Not the shadow that sits at the back of her classes and ghosts through the hallways. Not the stories that the kids whisper to each other, and not the murmured concerns her parents exchange when they think Claire isn't listening. Even the reassurance is wary. Claire takes to wearing only long sleeves and jeans, and lots of bracelets; they cover up her scars. (Castiel, tracing the outline of her patella and saying, Here. Cut here.)
Jimmy comes back from his business trips with gifts for them – a nice watch for Amelia, an iPod for Claire, a box of candy, a sweater that turns out to be too small, a pair of ostentatious earrings, a zirconium pendant. Claire watches her mother lift her hair as her father puts on the necklace for her and kisses her neck. Her mother concedes a smile. Her father looks relieved.
"Sorry, kiddo, I can't," Jimmy says when Claire asks if they can go to the old coffeehouse the next day. "I'm working tomorrow."
"You're always working," Claire blurts out, and she didn't mean to shout. She doesn't mean for the tears to well up or her cheeks to blush, and she is mortified. This is exactly what Castiel warned her about. To have control, you must be aware of what you keep with you and what must be cut away.
Her father has the nerve to look surprised. He steps toward her and she steps back, but he is undeterred. He cups her face in both hands, and wipes away her tears with his thumbs. "Claire."
She closes her eyes.
"Claire, baby, what's wrong?"
Her father has soft hands, smooth to the touch with long tapered fingers. In her mind, Claire cuts away the warmth of them, and cuts away the light behind her eyes that tint the darkness red. She cuts away the heart that pounds inside of her, which clangs like a bell. Her deep shaky breaths, her father's fingers combing through her hair and calling her endearments she hasn't been called in a long time. He hasn't seen her cry in years.
"Come here," Jimmy says softly, and he tries to pull her into his arms, but she wrenches away.
You must remember, Claire.
The hurt in her father's eyes is stark but does not overwhelm her own.
You must remember what it is you need to forget.
+
I can make you free, Castiel tells her, but first you must free me.
+
Four o'clock on a Saturday afternoon and everything is full of peace. Her mother is still at Aunt Helen's. (She kisses Claire's forehead and tells her there is casserole in the fridge. She lets Jimmy kiss her and tells them she'll be back on Sunday.) Her father is in the bedroom, taking a nap, and Claire doesn't know how long she stands in the doorway, watching the rise and fall of his chest, the muss of his hair catching the sunlight through the windows.
There are promises to keep: hers, to Castiel; her father's, to her. She pads slowly into the room and kneels by the bed, as if preparing for a vigil. Her eyes seek out the curves of his face, the temporal bone arching into the zygomatic, the sharp cheekbone that she has kissed countless times before.
He stirs and Claire tenses, tightens her grip on the hilt.
"Claire?" Jimmy rubs his eyes and blearily pushes himself up to a sitting position. Crow's feet and dark circles. There must be something about the superciliary arch of his eye sockets that make him look so tired; she would like to know. "What are you doing, sweetheart?"
"Hi, Dad," she says quietly, and her voice is steady even as her heartbeat quickens. Jimmy smiles sleepily and reaches out a hand to touch her cheek, and Claire rises to her feet.
She raises the knife.
+
In a way, her father stripped of all his meat will be a sturdier identity than her father alive had ever been. It's not Jimmy Novak anymore, but something more basic and true, a reliable entity who does not bend to the tyranny of time, who will not run from her. Claire imagines that in a thousand years when anthropologists find him under strata of dust and rock, they will see what she sees now.
Claire starts with the face, telling herself it's the proper thing to do, but the truth is that she is just impatient. A voice curls at the back of her head, I'm waiting for you, and it steadies her hand, tamps down on her desire to be quick and careless. This process requires precision and at least a modicum of gentleness. After removing the eyes, Claire makes an incision from the hairline down to the glabella, the nasion, careful not to mark the skull beneath. She slides the blade under the skin and separates it from the bone.
The bed is soaked scarlet, which darkens with every minute that passes. The air smells of death, but Claire is pursuing its opposite. She licks her lips and tastes iron, and doesn't know how the blood got there. Blood gets everywhere; she knows this by now. Blood is messy, imprecise.
When Michelangelo unveiled his famous statue, his contemporaries oohed and ahhed and asked him, How do you do it?
My friends, it is simple, the artist replied. I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
It takes a long time, but her patience is rewarded as always. With her blade, she lifts the flap of flesh at one corner of the forehead and pulls. It comes away easily.
"Little one," Castiel says with a grin. "It is good to see you."
Claire sobs with relief.
+
She stays in the room all day and all through the night. It takes hours to liberate the skeleton, and after getting rid of the viscera, she takes a bucket and a washcloth and she washes down the bones. Castiel had always appeared to her as a pristine white thing, but she knows there is a difference between her mind and the real world. Of course there is.
"This is what you are too, underneath your skin," Castiel says to her as she wipes down his skull. "You and I are not so different."
Castiel stays very still under her hands, as careful with her as she is with him, and as patient. He watches her with a gaze that knows her from the inside out. He knows the songs she likes to sing and the ones she has played on his body, the ones whose notes she only taps out very quietly when she fears the loneliness too much to hear her own voice echo back. Castiel knows the sorrows of her heart, but as he has told her, the heart is a temporary thing.
And words, too. Words are temporary things, and she can't find the right ones to tell Castiel what fills her now. Instead, she leans over and presses her lips to the smooth curve of his skull. She closes her eyes, presses her forehead against his, relishing the smoothness of the touch. Claire opens her eyes and looks into his absence of his, and sees only shadows.
"You are," Castiel says, "the most special girl in all the world."
"You said I was chosen," she says, her voice cracking.
"You are chosen," he says, "and I will never leave you."
Claire kisses his mouth, pressing her lips against his teeth. Her tongue darts out and she can still taste the iron of blood, the bitterness of the soap she had used. It doesn't matter. She holds the skull steady with one hand and parts her mouth, running her tongue over incisors and bicuspids, pushing it into his mouth to feel him bite down. She shivers.
"You're perfect." She doesn't know who says the words. It doesn't matter.
+
She sleeps next to him that night, the deepest and most peaceful sleep she's had in years.
She doesn't dream.
+
"We can't stay," Castiel says, and Claire already knows this. She prepared for the inevitable yesterday before she even picked up the knife. She has a bag packed with clothes and food. She has a roll of bills stuffed into her left sneaker in her closet and the Greyhound schedule memorized. She's ready.
"Where will you take us?" Castiel asks.
"Everywhere," Claire says.
Castiel sits up in bed of his own volition. It is a more liquid movement than she would expect from a skeleton, and more sinuous still than when he had only visited her in dreams. He curls off the bed like the swell of a wave, spreading his arms wide as he spins a circle on his heels, testing out this new reality. Claire laughs. She laughs and laughs and cannot stop laughing, and she sounds obscene and monstrous to her own ears, but she cannot stop herself. She doesn't care to. Claire goes to him, reaches for him, but he weaves out of her reach. They dance. His feet go click-clack on the floor and his fingers tap together to keep up a jaunty unpredictable rhythm, and she is happy to be dancing this dance again, a reality that crawled out of her dreams.
"Dem bones, dem bones gonna walk around," Castiel says in a voice like the susurrus of falling leaves.
Claire sings back, "And hear the word of the Lord."
And neither of them can stop grinning.
no subject
I found myself thinking how whole it is, and what a wonderful story about Claire and Jimmy but also what a wonderful story about that search to go deeper within - basically as wonderful as knowing the urtext of canon is, the parts I like best are the things that make it so strong that it stands alone. Claire and how she is not a sociopath who skins things, but a little girl obsessed with the journey inward, and skelecas in her dreams who shows her how to make that journey, and how her dad and skelecas which she both wants become the saaame thiiing asljsfdkds
Also this is so damn beautiful. aaahhhh bookmarkiiiing
no subject
the parts I like best are the things that make it so strong that it stands alone.
Phew, I'm glad! I realized through the writing of it that this thing is pretty much borderline original fiction. If one changes the name Castiel into something else (BOB THE SKELETON) then it might as well be, no?
Thank you so much, Z! <3