A/N-This is a one-shot in response to a prompt at bitesize_bones on LJ. Enjoy.
Prompt: ( Amilyn ) Brennan has said, at least twice, as if she believes it's simply true, "I was a very clumsy child." Was this true of the probably fast-growing and gangly, tall and skinny young Brennan? Or was it what she was told until it "became true" for her?
Effigy: a roughly made model of a particular person, made in order to be damaged or destroyed as a protest or expression of anger.
-
They tell her she's a clumsy girl, the first week, when she nearly falls over the cat that's weaving around her ankles. She has a hard time believing them, it was hardly her own fault. She does not remember ever spraining her wrist, or breaking an ankle in her young life, so she wonders how they can say it.
Temperance is barely 16, all long limbs and miserable eyes, and she holds herself with an uncanny grace that she doesn't yet realize. She doesn't let anyone in anymore, for a reason, and growing into her beauty does not endear her to her peers, nor her new 'family'. Her foster mother watches her with jealous eyes, while her husband contemplates. Two days later she slips down the last four stairs and bruises her tailbone.
-
Her counselor has a check-in with her two weeks after she's been at the new school. She tells her in a saccharine voice, that she doesn't connect with people, she's unable to relate. Temperance thinks about the emptiness in her life.
There is a reason why her family left, there is no action without cause. She tries to understand the why, and can only see herself. It makes her a little sick, but Temperance swallows it down. She breathes through the pain as her foster father picks her up 30 minutes later, see's him with lost eyes, but doesn't see the hunger staring back.
-
He tells her she's beautiful, and catches strands of silken hair between thumb and fingers to feel the texture. Temperance freezes, watching him back warily before sliding out to the car and hurrying into school. She feels dirty somehow, hunches her shoulders, and skips last period to cut her hair behind the dumpsters.
She remembers her father telling her that same thing, though the memory is hazy now, they all are. She pretends that they are just scenes from a movie she saw a long time ago, and when she does so the pain is a distant, frozen thing that can no longer touch her.
As she walks to the car, the star track player passes by her and winks at her. She smiles back blankly, contemplative.
-
Temperance tries to focus on the words in front of her, but their voices pull her again and again from her reading. They say in staged whispers, that it's the only thing she's after, the only way she'll ever get a boy. Who would commit to her when she would run after the next thing that caught her eye.
They bring up his name. She buries the hurt with knowledge even if she can't shut out the words. When he arrives for their study date she rebuffs him harshly, she says he's using her for a test score and not to get to know her. She doesn't see the shocked hurt in his eyes as she leaves, the cheerleaders two tables over following her every movement jealously. She cannot see how truly stunning she is becoming, physically and intellectually. She blinds herself to the truth, and makes herself brittle.
-
She tells her that it is a burden to have her there, in not so many veiled words, as they shop for groceries. The disdain is clear through her foster mothers smile and Temperance wishes for Christine Brennan in that moment, more strongly than she's wanted anything in a long while. She feels fragmented and too much like glass. Transparent. Her body aches and her throat is raw from screaming, and all she wants is to curl up on her mother's lap and forget last night, and the last year too.
They stand in line behind a young girl who stares at Temperance with innocent eyes, and she wonders if people can see what happened to her, if they notice. She knows its not possible, and quite illogical to even contemplate. The girl turns, leaving with her hand clasped in her fathers. Temperance thinks of the 27 bones that make up a hand, how delicate the phalanges and carpals and metacarpals truly are. How much pain they can inflict.
-
It is the true breaking point. They tell her the water is hot, and because she is a fragile, clumsy thing she does not listen. She scalds her hand and drops a china plate. It shatters. The silence is deafening and then the rush of blood in her ears drowns out any sound that he makes as he comes after her.
-
She was born with pleasing, symmetrical features. Her mother and father were both handsome people, but they did not want her. She does not know what it means that they are gone without her, but she knows that there is a reason. Love is nothing but a chemical delusion, beauty is a curse that men use to objectify you, there are 26 bones in the foot, 27 in a hand, 206 in the human body.
She can tell you that tinnitus is often a side effect of a heavy blow to the cranium, and that when enclosed in a small, dark space for more than a day, it is best to not panic, it uses up the oxygen available much more quickly.
What Temperance will never say, is how being trapped for those two days broke her, and then subsequently reshaped her into something new. She won't explain how she was born again, into something fierce and remorseless and distorted.
She was a very clumsy child, but she will never be a clumsy adult, even if it makes her brittle enough to break all over again.