FIC: The Feast of All Saints (Jurassic World, Claire/Owen, PG-13)
TITLE: The Feast of All Saints
RATING: PG-13
FANDOM: Jurassic World
PAIRING: Claire Dearing/Owen Grady
SUMMARY: They go east, and they go together.
AUTHOR’S NOTES: Written for the second @clawenficathon for @cricket-scribbles, who wanted “calmed by touch” with a kiss, a cuddle, a happy ending, and no non-con or rough sex.
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
- Juliet, Romeo and Juliet Act I, Scene V
Claire runs her fingers through Owen's hair, rests her palm at the back of his head so that she is cradling the place where his spine meets his skull in her hand. She feels him exhale, feels tension bleed from his muscles.
“So,” he says, voice raspy and low, a private voice just for Claire, “what now?”
***
They drive east, because west is straight into the ocean. The mosasaur ate 20 people before the beaches were closed. She's probably gone now, though. They can swim so far, so fast. She'll go where the food is.
Claire flinches at the thought, rubs at the knot of pinched muscles between her eyes like she can work the thoughts free. She's not sorry. She's sorry about the 20 people who won't be coming home, but she isn't sorry for the triceratops herd in San Diego, and she isn't sorry for Blue running the back roads of the Arizona desert hunting deer. She's not sorry they're not dead, and that isn't likely to change.
She has experienced, the past three years, a complete loss of control. It doesn't scare her anymore, hasn't for a long time. Sometimes these past few weeks she will wake up from dreams of being stuck beneath the water, nothing between her and death but the thick plastic shell of the gyrosphere and Owen’s hand pressing against hers from the other side. At first she cannot breathe, like the water is still in her lungs. But then Owen wraps his arms around her, and she feels his pulse thrumming into her skin, the heat of his body, the rhythm of his breathing-how easy it is for him to breathe, and it helps her remember how.
***
They go to Best Buy and Home Depot. Owen walks purposefully through the aisles, filling their cart, and Claire and Maisie trail behind, sucking cherry Tootsie Pops. They’re on the move for now from necessity, but Claire worries about how it affects Maisie. She’s been through enough. It can’t be helped, though, so they tell her that, and that it’s not forever, and they buy her clothes and dinner and take turns brushing her hair in the evening and plaiting it in the morning. Kids, Claire thinks. She never counted on kids. But, to be honest, her life’s trajectory has gone way off course. She had a plan, and that plan died on Isla Nublar when that asset broke out of containment, and frankly good riddance. It had been a failure of imagination, maybe, since back then-that Claire-could never have imagined anything as wonderful as late nights in the Sonoran Desert, finding constellations with Maisie while Owen assembled a tracker with spare parts and overpriced solder.
They put Maisie to bed, and then sit outside the camper. A trailer again-maybe she’ll never get that house. Maybe that’s okay. The sky here is bright with stars, more than Claire’s ever seen in her whole life.
Owen twists a knob on the tracker, then curses, then pulls at a bit of wire. The machine hums, and he seems satisfied. He nods at the screen, and Claire rests her head on his shoulder, looks at the little screen with its green grid lines and pulsing white dots-like stars.
“Which one is Blue?” she asks.
He frowns, shakes his head. He’s about to speak, but it’s going to be frustrated words, words about missing her and never knowing if he’ll find her, words about causing all this-but Claire rubs her palm between his shoulders, and he sighs quietly, a pleased noise, and doesn’t speak.
“We’ll find her,” she says.
Owen looks down at her, their faces lit by the big harvest moon and the thousands of twinkling stars. She meets his eyes, and she smiles.
***
Owen sneaks into the camper for sleeping bags. Maisie is asleep in the little bed beneath the window, and she doesn’t stir when he grabs the packs and goes back to Claire. She is sitting beneath the stars and waiting for him. He knows now that she’ll wait a very long time.
Claire watches Owen spread out the sleeping bags on the desert sand. He comes for her, extends a hand, helps her to her feet. And then off them, lifting her up into his arms and down onto the bed he’s made out of the sleeping bags. She laughs, her red hair spreading out beneath her, her hands curling around his waist. He leans down and kisses her, tasting fresh and green and aggressively alive, like the dew sipped from a blade of grass. Claire closes her eyes as he kisses her deep, and concentrates on the warmth from his body covering hers, on the beat of his heart against her own breastbone, the way their breathing synchs up like when she’s shipwrecked from nightmares.
Owen’s hands aren’t as rough as it’s easy to imagine just looking at him, and he’s careful, so careful, when he puts them on her body, when he undresses her beneath him. They butt heads, most of the time, they race and fight and struggle for dominance, but just now Claire lays still and waits, is patient and accepting as he bares her. She doesn’t have anything to prove; there’s nothing he doesn’t already know.
Owen tangles his hands through Claire’s hair, and he kisses her face, and he cradles her in his arms as he pushes into her, gently. Claire gasps, and she surges, and she watches his face as the expression changes to pure bliss, ecstatic bliss like saints and the laying on of hands, a touch so significant that you are healed, made new, blessed.
She understands what that feels like.
Outside the camper in the Sonoran Desert, the sand shifts quietly beneath the sleeping bags. The sky is huge and filled with more stars than Claire has ever seen, but she is not looking at the stars. She is looking at Owen, and she is holding him in her hands.