Chapter Text
When it comes to fearing for your life, you have two thoughts: I am going to survive. I am going to die.
There is a third thing. One that will not hit you until long after the dust has cleared, and when you can’t keep yourself together any longer, and when nothing matters, but everything weighs heavy.
Claire learned that once, haunted and fractured by the events of a few hours. Learned it in the dark hours of sleepless nights. Learned it in the hours that passed too slowly because every face, every word, every silence, felt like a threat.
She’s learning that again, adjusting to relying on mobility aids and medications.
It’s a lot like growing a new limb. Or, extensions of the old ones. Ones you can forget you need, only once you’re stumbling over with the unfamiliar weakness. She doesn’t do that much anymore. It’s on instinct she reaches for the crutches or cane, as absent as bending a leg to stand is.
She, quite honestly, didn’t expect him to stay once the doctors said her chances of a full recovery were slim. Maybe he’d take Maisie and run, but he surely wouldn’t stick around to deal with what remained of his ex-girlfriend.
All he did was take her hand and flash her that same look of for survival, right?
Claire doesn’t like hospitals. They’re sterile, smell overwhelmingly of cleaning supplies, and are never home to good memories. She leaves at the first chance they give her.
Owen is the one who volunteers to lead her physical therapy. He takes in the information like a thirsty man to an oasis and she wonders when exactly a dinosaur must’ve hit him over the head.
Because he did care, once, but he shouldn’t anymore. Not after she left, and he left, and it doesn’t matter as much as the fact that someone left and neither stopped them.
He’s strict about her routine. “Your health is important, Claire,” he says more than once, while forcing her leg muscles to bend in all the uncomfortable ways that supposedly will fix them. You’re important to me, he does not say, but perfectly conveys with a single sharp glance.
She doesn’t fully get it. No, she doesn’t get it at all. Maybe that means she should sit them down for a conversation about what their relationship is, but she’s so tired, and in pain, and doesn’t want to until she knows the answer is one she’ll want to hear. Cowardly, maybe. But after how much boldness has wrecked her, she deserves a moment of it.
When they start staying in the trailer beside his cabin frame, it’s an unspoken agreement that they’ll share the bed. He won’t fit on the pullout couch, and the doctor strictly advocated against her sleeping anywhere but a bed. It’s awkward as much as it isn’t.
The cabin slowly builds itself around the three of them; two adults and a stowaway little girl. As it builds itself, she notices a few things. Like a more accessible floor plan with the idea of a second floor put almost entirely to the side.
“It’s your home, too,” he says with a shrug. Like it’s the easiest choice in the world, to dictate your plans around an ex-girlfriend who doesn’t quite feel like leaving any time soon.
She also notices, without meaning to, that there are only two bedrooms he’s planning on immediately finishing. One, clearly Maisie’s. The other, tentatively theirs.
It’s easier for him, accepting life as it comes. Changing his life on a whim and taking on changes without a complaint. It baffles her as much as impresses. Where an emotion hits her with the strength of a hurricane, it’s seemingly a drop of water sliding off him. She doesn’t get it. She’s not built to get it.
(“It’s not that I don’t care,” he’ll whisper to her, some time in the far future. “It’s that sometimes things happen, and you either adapt or die. That’s evolution.”
“Spoken like a true behaviorist,” she’ll grouse back, but it hits its mark. That’s all life ever is. Adapt or die. Make something good out of it or suffer. She’s tired of suffering.)
There is more than one day where she wakes up with the assumption that both of her legs remain as they were. After she can wake up without the pain of it burning her every sense, the ability to forget creeps in.
It’s a swiftly disproven monster, easily by a single attempted step. And in that moment, she is always startled by the fact she can’t walk anymore. For a moment, she believes her body has betrayed her. Then, she’s forced to remember, and the pain of those memories - nightmares - are as bad as what she’d gotten over.
There is a phenomenon called phantom limb some amputees feel where the body tries to remember a feeling so hard you feel the remnants of a long gone part. Owen mentioned it, people he’s known from days long over - and how often they got screwed again and again by the land who’d thrown them into a pointless fight.
Claire might have a few phantom limbs for things that aren’t limbs. In the dead of night, when the two people she calls family are fast asleep, there is a muscle in the back of her brain that says she has a park related email to answer. In the light of the morning, she can open her eyes expecting to see barren white walls of the apartment she hated.
(Or homely walls of a bungalow bedroom they both won’t mention she’d seen.)
If the day is grim, and her mood even more so, she can close her eyes and expect to see reporters banging on the windows for their Main Street Murderess and their New York Time’s Most Striking Image of the Year.
“I want you, and I want Maisie. I know you want Maisie, and I think you want me. It’s simple,” he says, a low whisper in the darkness, across from her in a bed that keeps shrinking. As if there’s nothing else to consider. Nothing at all to think about.
“It’s not simple. Nothing about this is simple,” she replies. They’re little more than fugitives with a stolen girl. Dysfunctional fugitives, at that.
“Ok. Maybe simple is the wrong word. But it doesn’t have to be that complicated.”
“I don’t see how it can’t be. Do you really think we can raise a child?” Do you really think we’ll last a year, is what she doesn’t add. By the tense silence that follows, he’s caught what’s left unsaid.
“I like to have faith in us.” Unlike you, who is always catastrophizing how we’ll end. He said something like that in their last fight. Back when things were simpler and more painful. He can let go, but she can’t. He was right in that accusation, she supposes. It’s easier to imagine how something will end than to consider it might not. Safer.
“I think we’ve used any luck we have left.”
He’s silent, again. Considering that for what it is.
The bed shifts under him, and she feels the eyes before she notices he’s turned to face her. “A relationship isn’t luck, Claire. It’s work. Luck is having a chance to do this right. Everything else is just you and me.”
It’s easier when he isn’t looking at her, digging in like he can see each thought forming in her head. It’s akin to being made of glass with him, how much he can tell from the way she crinkles her browline. Maybe he feels the same way with how the slightest frown can tell her as much as any conversation.
“Just you and me?” she asks, and it feels a hell of a lot like a leap of faith.
The short of her issue is that she was impaled in an extremely inconvenient place by a creature designed to injure. Slicing near everything above the knee, it wasn’t a pretty sight. Nor is what remains now as a rough scar.
“There's a good chance you’ll walk again, but it won’t be pretty,” was the summary of everything the doctors had said about it. They were right.
She uses forearm crutches to get around. She never imagined herself being someone who would end up needing a mobility aid, but they’re also not what she expected. As much as there’s lingering discomfort over the thought of being dependent on something, there’s something so liberating about being able to walk easily. In becoming dependent on these objects, she doesn’t have to depend on anyone else. By far the worst part of being unable to put her full weight on one leg for months.
Maisie barely bats an eye. Having been raised by an ailing grandfather, she’s the most knowledgeable among them about mobility aids. It’s fascinating how much knowledge she can fit into that tiny head of hers. She’s a wonder in a thousand different ways.
Owen continues to confuse her with his investment. She understands better now, understands that love still exists between them, but this, unselfish adoration, is an entirely new creature. Taking on mobility aids as something she comes with now rather than a temporary bump he’ll have to trudge through before he’s back to finding gold.
And it’s through how much neither of them care that she feels allowed to not care either. What reason does she have to feel embarrassed, anyways? How is movement an embarrassment? How can her body’s limits be something she feels shy around?
She is Claire fucking Dearing, and absolutely no one, not even herself, should care if she’s using crutches or canes or nothing at all.
When people stare, she’s never sure if they’re staring at her or the crutches. She’s used to stares; confidence in her appearance is something she has had since college. Claire is a beautiful woman and beautiful things are stared at, whether that he respectfully or sleazily.
But then she was stared at in a wholly new way when blood stained her resume such a dark pool of red that it became black. They stared at her like a demon, they stared at her like a resurrection.
Now, when they stare, she can’t be sure it isn’t the crutches that draw their attention first. Most people will have the decency to look away when she notices the eyes. Some do not, and continue to stare at the two objects supporting her.
Owen, who is with her more often than not, has a tendency to glare at them until they’re focused on everything except her. One thing that has never changed is his desire to shield her from things she needs no protection from. A stare won’t kill her, yet he acts like they might.
Brutish idiot, she’s called him more than once.
Wouldn’t have to be if they stopped trying to sniff around for a gossip magazine scoop, he’s replied more than once.
She’s not sure how she feels about her existence being a spectacle. No, it won’t hurt her. But she feels odd empathy with the dinosaurs they put on display. Forced to be a show for a public she didn’t ask for. As if her being was something to watch with bated breath.
There are crutches in her forearm’s grip. She didn’t invent the wheel.
Is she not a normal woman? A person with nothing striking beyond a pretty face? Has she become an alien overnight, one so oddly human that a mirror couldn’t tell her apart from one?
Limited walking mobility was an obvious consequence. It wasn’t until days started passing that she realized that driving would also be an issue. If it were her left leg, maybe she’d be in a better position. But it wasn’t, and maybes are useless.
Had she still lived in her apartment, it wouldn’t have been as big of an issue. There are buses, and you can walk to any small convenience store if you need one.
They don’t live in a city, though. Not anymore. They live in the middle of goddamned nowhere, and she’s trapped at the whims of goddamned Grady because he’s the only one of them that can drive at this point.
Hate is the weakest word to describe the situation. Loathe feels too poetic. There is no niceties or poetry in being completely trapped in one place. The world used to be at her fingertips. She didn’t need a single thing from anyone.
(She wanted things. Wanted things from a particular person, at that. But she didn’t need them. She wanted them badly enough to tell herself she had to live without them.)
Now, she tries to put enough pressure on the gas to move a few feet, and wishes they’d amputate it instead because nothing should hurt this badly. Now, she’s little more than the dog locked inside the house while the family goes off to dinner.
(In time, it won’t hurt so bad. In time, she’ll have a moment to learn about disability driving aids. But now isn’t then. Now, she’s allowed to be mad that life is changing too quickly to keep up with.)
Of all of them, Maisie worries the most. Claire supposes it’s a layover from losing her grandfather, but that, in turn, worries her. Because Maisie is nine, a child, and no child should worry that much about their guardian.
(She did. Which is what makes her fear it the most.)
Where Owen hovers, Maisie frets. She’ll peek her head up, staring at the sleeping adults when she assumes they’re both fast asleep. She’s highly invested in knowing everything about Claire’s recovery. Hell, she even does her best to make Claire chamomile.
It’s not something to chide Maisie over, but it’s worrying. No child should have to devote that much energy to fear.
“How are you,” she’ll say, often enough for it to become routine.
“I’m fine,” Claire will reply with a gentle smile, no matter how much it hurts. No matter if she’s still thinking about what she took for granted and how much it goddamned hurts.
Maisie will give a look at that. One that makes it clear that she’s a child, not a fool. She’s been with them long enough to start picking up her tells. Adaptive and observant to her eventual detriment, Claire thinks.
She’s helpless to do anything other than assure Maisie she’s fine, that she shouldn’t worry, that she’s a child who needs to enjoy time as one. We’re she a better mother, maybe she’d have the magic words to make Maisie see sense. Maybe she’d know the perfect lullaby or soothing gesture.
But she doesn’t, because for most of her life kids were distant enough to never offer thought. She disliked babies in general - except maybe baby Zach. Who she bonded with for a moment, then disappeared without a goodbye because of—
She’d let her connection to family die with a coffin going into the ground. But she’s better now. She’s learning.
She’s something between a pseudo-mother and ethical kidnapper, and there’s no guidebook for either.
So, she asks Maisie, “What would you like to do today, sweetheart.” So, she asks Maisie, “How are you feeling this morning, hon?” So, she asks Maisie, “What movie do we watch tonight?”
And she hopes that’s something good in a minefield of bad.
Because it does hurt. Often, without reason. A dinosaur impaled her. That is something that can never be under addressed. It hurts when she tries to take a step, it hurts when she’s sitting down.
She doesn’t like to say when it does. That only leads to hovering. There’s nothing either of them can do for it, except hand her another painkiller that she can’t take for another hour.
It’s not like she’s the puppy they’re nursing back to health. She doesn’t need their dotting.
But sometimes, sometimes she can’t help herself from wincing. Sometimes she’s sitting on their living room couch, lips pursed in thinly restrained agony. Her hands balled in fist as she focuses on something— anything that is not looping white hot dagger pains or constant aches.
In those times, it never takes them more than a few minutes to notice. In the pain, it will feel like an eternity, because every moment is one.
Maisie will ask her if there’s anything she can do - No, honey. I’m fine. Really. - then curl against her side like it’s the simplest thing in the world. Like they aren’t strangers in a cabin together and are, instead, some semblance of family.
Then Owen, because he’s never far from either of them. He’ll ask her the same thing - Which she won’t respond to. She can’t. He knows she’s lying before she does. Instead, she gives him a look that says later - and find her opposite side. Wrap an arm around the frame back like they’re that same thing; a family of three. Three who became family.
Sometime much later, when she’s relearned her balance and the injury is as healed as it will get, Claire graduates to a cane on a good day. Walking without something is something she can technically do, in short bursts, but it is unpleasant, to say the least. The cane is as awkward as the forearm crutches were at first, but it feels good to move like this. To move at all, and to move freely.
It also makes her feel elderly; like she’s reached her sixties a few decades early. Yet it’s what she needs to support her uneven strengths, so there she is, in town with one.
Maisie makes it something special. Using markers and stickers to make it look like something worth owning. She hasn’t been a mother before, but she thinks this is what motherly pride must feel like. It must be what Karen felt when she stuck Zach’s first drawing on the fridge. And no matter where she is, it’s like Maisie is with her. Smiling by her side with a childish whimsy.
When it comes to living her life, Claire has one thought: This is nice. It’s not the fast life of Nublar nor is it the activist life of the DPG, but it’s good. Her home is loud rather than quiet. Her days are as peaceful or as chaotic as she wants them to be. She’s not held down by the thousands of eyes watching and waiting for that next failure.
And when it’s nice, there’s more than one day where that manor evening slips her mind entirely. Where she forgets to be upset that something shifted that day, and forgets that things weren’t always like this. Instead, she takes a deep breath and enjoys the sway of the hammock.