PTSD, a claymore fanfic

PTSD

Disclaimer: Claymore & its characters belong to Norihiro Yagi & his affiliates. You know the drill.

Rating: T (for disturbing images)

I wrote parts of this a long time ago, lost the manuscript and found it again. Shiek and MisterJB from Animesuki (now at Mangahelpers) gave comments and helped with edits. My thanks go out to them.

The summary trial is conducted almost in absolute silence: only some trumped-up charges and a lot of truth that can't be uttered by a man with a cloak with white trimmings. White, like something more solemn, truthful against the rabid black of everyone's robes and the unpolished silver of the Claymores.

A warrior gives a short witness and Rubel notes, with some satisfaction, that the verdict is swift, steady and immediate:

I) She will not be able to touch a sword. She will not be seen near one. She will not pick up any other things: the twenty-seven other implements deemed by the Organization as potential instruments of war. She will not wear any armour. She will not carry on her person anything that could be used a weapon. Violation of this injunction will result in the loss of more of her fingers. Maybe even a hand. Or a foot.

II) She will not be allowed to leave the boundary of Staff, or its immediate villages. She will only be permitted two hours, per day, to be outside. The remainder of these hours she must serve within the fortress of Staff, completing her assigned duties as instructed by her handlers or other warriors. (She must not refuse these duties because her life is spared because she is still deemed "useful" in this respect). She will be restricted to the East Court after nightfall. Violation of these parameters will constitute further punishment.

III) She will report to her handler every morning, noon and night on her movements and duties. At these hours, in the presence of her handler, she will consume two Yoma suppressant pills each time. She will be reminded that her life, is a product of the mercy of the Organization, and should this mercy be abused, her life will be forfeited.

Tabitha accepts this, without a word. The only sound she makes is the clapping of the chains that twirl her arms around her neck. Her face, Rubel thinks, is scenic: plain as mountains on a cold day from the watchtower in the East Court, blank as the fog leaping through the ramparts on a winter's morning. Almost like a previous warrior he's known before, he thinks.

The only difference: those eyes. That previous warrior had no eyes. And she died without even knowing what hit her, Rubel chuckles. But this one's are like ravines, taking everything in without giving anything out. He should be careful because he might lose himself in them, those eyes. Those eyes that have seen so much carnage, from Pieta to Rabona to failed attack on the Organization – so much loss of life, that they really seem as empty, as impeccably dreary as the ravine where the others were executed for treason.

The trial is the last time Rubel sees Tabitha with braided hair. Her first few handlers enforce the punishments so literally, she does not carry anything but the cloak on her shoulders. Her hair falls: she wears it as if it had been hacked by a machete. Without the hair to cover it, a healing scar sprinting diagonally upwards at her temple looks artistically swollen, out of proportion.

When he passes her in the corridor, he finds himself drawn to the arms (exposed up to the pits), and her legs (exposed far up her thighs). The scars that mark the inside of her arms are recent additions: her handlers believe her to be slow, and a slave can be given lashes for any good reason. But those on her legs – like a geography of wars and fights – form concentric circles around her knees and thighs.

One circles up her torso and reappears at her right shoulder. Rubel wonders how many times she has fallen in battle, how many times mutilated and diced and twisted by her enemies under that dirty rag which she uses for modesty. Use and abuse and let them live out that trauma as immortals – is a philosophy of why she was spared, maybe.

He looks into the dark, battered beauty of her face – the silence hanging over her like a halo that threatens to make him stumble into sympathy. Deeper into those eyes Rubel knows the ravine is so deep it would take eternity to climb out of its blood-soaked underbelly.

When she gets passed onto him as her next handler, she has a crushed lower lip, a fist of bruised muscle on her right eye and one or two rivulets of dried blood coiling down from her thighs. He watches her down her three-times a daily dose of suppressant pills. As she lifts a hand to swallow them, her rags part to reveal a body, a shriveled breast, all carved into the pattern of stick-like ribs. She almost chokes on the pills. She coughs out blood: watery, salivary, more translucent than crimson.

She cleans, serves and sleeps curled (but chained) outside his quarters. In the mornings, he talks to her to reduce the silence of her presence. He wedges his words into her rummaging – talks about the Ghosts, and constructs insults on their fate. When he fails to get a response, he even goes on to Miria:

Which he remembers even more because she came so close to succeeding. He remembers when her sword had already burned off his shoulder – can still feel the wound there too – where she finally fell to the combined efforts of warriors and Abyssal-Eaters.

He wants a response. So he repeats it again – this time he talks about how Miria looked just before the fatal strike – and then she turns to face him. But on her face he only sees the landscapes of dead grass in autumn, spanning for thousands of miles across the plains. Blood crawls from an inflamed lip.

And Rubel says: "Think of it as grateful. Think of yourself as lucky you're on the road to reformation."

Sometimes, he gets pleasure seeing the other Claymores as they address the traitor. You there! Yes you! Sometimes that's the only pleasure he obtains: that he has seen with his own eyes Miria's miserable attempt at rebellion disintegrate into a massacre and the fact that it's a close shave that he's alive, and all the traitors except one, executed.

He receives the Claymores' sharp, dog-obedient salutes as he moves past, nods his head to her. But she does not acknowledge him: merely she stabs her rags onto the Claymore's armoured shoes and huddles over them. The Claymores laugh. Who are they really laughing at, he wonders.

He does try to get information out of her. When they are alone, for example, he notices her undo the matted knobs and ends in her hair. She designs her hair till they imitate a braid, but when she seems ready to adjust the first twirl, she lets everything drop. And it all collapses, crashing to her waist, like an animal even bigger than the figure that by day grows smaller. Rubel thinks: how pathetic.

He does try. He needs his reputation as the Organization's premier handler to be intact. But he watches and watches. He imagines his hand on her shoulders and around those cheeks and stuffing themselves into that mouth and with a handful of those drab breasts and, he looks out of the window to see nothing but the thin white clouds like froth on saliva. He waits.

He does. And when he asks about Clare, she turns to the window too.

"You're useless –"

She slowly fades into her rags: bones and skin and no yoki at all. Nothing but a face: multiple hills and ridges on an undulating plain, an outcrop like dried lips, a nose like an overturned rock. And she swallows the yoki pills, the bulge in her throat mesmerizing.

"You should've died. Should've taken your own life."

She walks and moves carefully, her breathing as loud and ghastly as the crackling of dried leaves. Rubel waits till her back is turned, and finally moves his hand to her shoulder. He clasps the wiry flesh there with his fingers, waiting. He needs an excuse, or a reason, or something. Is this it? He thinks.

He thinks he gets it: there, hand splayed onto that chunk of thinned meat and blade, he feels the pulse of her breathing, her entire body moving into motion, the panting more like choking. He could relocate his hands further, to that thread-like neck, just sweep the already dying life away. No one will bother, or notice, or care.

"There's a reason why I didn't do it."

She's so weak that when he applies force she crumbles under his angular flexing arm, his own muscles gnarling into his hideous blue veins. But as she lowers herself under his weight, she keeps her face pulled up at his.

"There's a reason why I didn't do it when I had the chance," she says.

"Pathetic," he replies. "You sure are talkative today." And he thrashes her once, twice with the back of his wrist.

He knows he has dislodged a tooth or two. But when she gets up, her face is different. No more mountains, no more hills like ground-hugging storm clouds – even the eyes, like birds startled by a body falling, like a forest closing in on itself. Like the turn of Miria's elbow as she stepped over him, like the feeling of a Claymore to the throat.

And Tabitha walks, and walks past him.

END

NOTES: I tried to make this as dark as possible. It was supposed to represent a no-hope future, a glimpse of what life would've been like if Miria's gamble failed and all the Ghosts were hunted down and captured one-by-one. Why I choose Tabitha to survive? Probably because when I wrote this I imagined her being the last of the Ghosts holding out in Rabona.

This story was a departure from my original style. Instead, the style here is more "airy". I was influenced by ., a Harry Potter writer with a very spare, haunting style. He seems to have disappeared from the site though.

I will be slowly putting a cache of Claymore fics I discovered while switching laptop onto the site. In the meantime, I will also be trying to finish "The Language of Frogs" and other short stories. Hopefully...

31.07.2013