Work Text:
Excerpts from A Study of the Wittebane Brothers by Lilith Clawthorne, Luz Noceda and Hunter Clawthorne:
Caleb Wittebane was the long-erased older brother of notorious human Phillip Wittebane, and although new sources on his life are constantly being unearthed; it currently seems that he was at least, if not more, extraordinary, than his brother. Unlike Phillip, Caleb actively attempted to accommodate to the Boiling Isles and Demon Realm, which included forming a romantic relationship with pirate, disgraced palisman carver and former wild magic scholar, Arianna Clawthorne.
Caleb was a renowned inventor, who worked on improving quality of life across the Isles, both with and without his wife. Before the campaign to repress his memory, he was fondly remembered and deeply missed by the Bonesborough community.
Caleb died at twenty-eight, according to most modern theories, by his brother’s hand. There is evidence to show that in the later years of his life, Caleb dropped his surname and went by his wife’s, simply being known as Caleb Clawthorne. There are seventeen reported artifacts signed with the initials C.C purported to belong to Caleb Wittebane, dated to his final years.
Twenty.
Dear Arianna,
It’s been a year since I kissed you goodbye and you’re still the love of my life.
I’ve never been in love before you; I thought I was—but I thought a lot of things, things that turned out to be untrue. But it’s been a year since I kissed you, and I still wake up praying that you’ll be next to me—even if I know that I dug my own grave. I’m the reason you left.
And I’m sorry. But sorry doesn’t change anything.
Do you remember when you told me that I always try to fix things, even if they’re hopeless? You were grinning, and swirling a glass of alcohol I couldn’t hold very well in your hand, amber and reflecting your glimmering eyes and cooling down my heart and simultaneously setting it ablaze as soon as I laid eyes on you again—
And fuck, you told me that you liked it. You told me that you liked how I dashed in to save everyone from the burning building, and I felt myself rise to the sky at the sound of your voice, and the praise brimming from it, but you didn’t stop there.
You kept going. You said that I would get myself killed, and you frowned, and you continued by saying that not everyone could be saved. That not everyone wanted to be saved.
I remembered telling you that you were wrong.
I know better.
You’re not wrong.
There’s no churches in the Boiling Isles, and that’s good.
I’m going nowhere in particular, and I think I made the wrong choice, because I still love you and I don’t pray anymore but I pray that you will never read this.
Here’s my promise to you, Arianna: someday, we’ll be in the same city again. And I’ll be able to articulate everything you make me feel.
[illegible]
[illegible]
How do you make a home in someplace that doesn’t want you? I never stayed long enough to learn, until I met you.
I’ve come to the startling conclusion that home is wherever you are tonight.
Twenty-four.
Dear Arianna,
If I bleed, you’ll be the last to know.
I’m sorry for everything I’ve done to you. I don’t know how to do this other than telling you. I don’t know how to tell you. I don’t know how to begin. I don’t know how to end. All I know is that, for whatever it’s worth, I love you with all of me.
The last time you got drunk, you told me that I was a new beginning for you. You said that I’d saved your life. I don’t think that’s true. I wasn’t… I don’t consider the man I used to be worthy of drawing breath. It was only when I fell in love with you, Arianna, that I managed to see beyond my own nose.
I know I shouldn’t put all of that on you. It’s not fair to you to make you responsible for my enlightenment, but it’s the truth and I don’t see a reason to lie. I was and, in some ways, still am an incredibly selfish man, Arianna, selfish enough that I was willing to betray my beliefs if it meant I could spend another night in your bed.
I know that Phillip is more… convicted than me. I don’t know if you still speak, I haven’t had the balls to ask you. But I don’t know how to forsake him, even though I think I did from the first time I laid eyes on you. I don’t want it to be a choice between you and him and that’s terribly selfish for both of you, isn’t it? I’m prolonging the inevitable in hope of the impossible.
I’ve never learned what to do in case of fire. Do you run… or do you watch it burn?
Twenty-six.
Dear Arianna,
Happy birthday. I’m sorry you’re spending it like this.
I’ll rewrite this life, and this time, there’ll be so much love that you won’t be able to see anything else.
If we meet each other in Hell, it’s not Hell anymore.
Twenty-seven.
Dear Arianna,
You told me that I should regret loving you, because of the strife our loving’s caused me. Well, I think we can call it even now, huh? Arianna, I don’t know where to begin. So, I’m going to begin by saying that I’m sorry.
Sorry doesn’t change anything that’s already happened, and it only changes the future if you’re ready to let it—and well, I don’t know if I am. I have a terrifying urge to reach out and grab Phillip’s wrist, even if I know how it’s going to end.
I remember telling you that everything leads to you. That’s true. But everything leads to Phillip, too. I love both of you and you both have keys to different parts of my heart. And it’s terrifying to think of losing any of you. I can’t.
I just can’t.
I know I can’t have everything I want—I know the world doesn’t grant the wishes of foolish men. But I don’t know how to make that choice. I always go on about working on yourself and trying to be better, trying to actively be better. But I can’t shut him out.
And I can’t leave you, either, even if I know that I’m going to hurt you.
And fuck, I don’t know if Phillip fucking did it on purpose. I lied to you. And you looked at me like you knew. You were doing that frown, the one where you don’t know whether to be angry or cry for me. And I hate it. I hate everything about it.
Please, tell me that it’s all in my head. Tell me that I’ve somehow gotten everything wrong. You can drop the act now, Philly and Ari, you got me good—you’ve won the prank war forever. Just please, let us go back to how it was.
You tell me that I’m the strong one. I’m not. I’m crumbling under your gaze, withering under your stable hands. I’m not strong enough to take this fight. And it’s terrifying to admit—this reliance on others.
You were right when you yelled at me. You were right. I could have fought Phillip. I know I should have. I didn’t. I didn’t fight him because I couldn’t stomach the thought of hurting him. I knew I could have died. I didn’t think that he would snap out of it. And I knew, when he had me pinned, that I was going to die here if someone else didn’t make the choice for me. Because I just couldn’t.
I had a thousand and one chances to attack him, and every time, I couldn’t.
I’m sorry, Arianna.
You deserve a man who isn’t lingering in the folds of the past, yearning for a home he cannot return to. I keep remembering and my heart never has pity on me, and I know, when I feel it tugging on me, that it’s breaking, fraying on the edges.
I know that I’m not strong enough to resist. I know I would rather leave you behind than…
God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I love you. I love you. Please stay. I don’t know what I would do if you left me too. I love you. Please. I promise that I’ll try to be a better man for you.
All I want is to be under the stars, laughing together.
Excerpts from Diary of a Young Woman Alight: Collected Poems and Writing of Arianna Clawthorne-Wittebane, compiled posthumously by Lilith Clawthorne:
Twenty-seven.
I write to you on the side of the bed, crumpled over paper, my hands frantically scribbling words that I won’t be able to translate when the morning comes, to the rhythm of your halting breaths. These are letters to you, who is my husband, you, who is my grief, you, who is my rage; in my mind, everyone I’ve ever loved is crystal-clear until I reach to touch them, to pull them into my embrace, and they swirl into nothing but thick black smoke.
You are everything to me. You are nothing to me. One of those is me lying to myself, and it switches depending on the day. When I reach out for you, you vanish from my desperate grasp and I don’t know how to reel you back in to me—I don’t know if it’s something I even want to do.
I feel as if I’ve tethered you to a sinking ship, but you’re smiling as you go down and fuck, now I’m staining the paper with my tears again. My handwriting’s already sloppy and shit in a way we both know would make my mother weep to make me feel like crap, then toss her shoe at me and somehow hit me, even if I’m hiding behind the kitchen counter. I can’t ruin another sheet of expensive paper.
I don’t like confessions because they always feel performative. But here’s a few, because I’m trying to open myself up more. And I’m going to lock this letter away in a drawer anyways.
I was afraid to fall in love with you because you made me feel like I was on top of the world and that’s a very long way to fall when you realise what you’ve chained yourself to. When you finally cut yourself free of me. I won’t blame you, you know.
You tuck the hair behind my ears, and you tell me that you’ll never leave, and you say it like a promise that I can almost believe, but it makes me feel better to know that even if you won’t listen to me: that I’ve said it. I know you want to be the one who stays, because everyone else has left. I know it’s partly because of him.
And how he treated you. It doesn’t hurt. What hurts is watching you fall prey to his whims and desires in a desperate bid to regain a relationship that’s burnt into nothing. That’s what I tell myself. We both know that I give you shit for speaking to Phillip. We both know that I got drinks with him and send him a card every year. I’m sorry.
I really am, if it means anything. Not just for that.
Phillip hurt you and I don’t want to think about it.
I want to think about us doing things that regular married couples do.
We argue in the kitchen over whether to have children and the world ending under the scale of my ambitions and I try to pretend that I don’t desperately want to be a mother—that the thought of rectifying my own’s mistakes and burning the line of hurt into ashes where I stand doesn’t excite me.
The first day I was a girl was in my backyard with my brother picking up brush to burn in a pile. My father said I had to put a shirt on that summer, even though it was hot, and my brother was shirtless. I was six or seven and helping cleaning up the backyard. It was a wooded lot down a long gravel road and there was nobody to see me, but I was a girl in that heat and always would be.
Phillip hurt you.
Your breaths are shallow and stuttering and outside, the leaves fall, the tide waxes and wanes, bringing with it wares from your past and I try to think whether you’d stay. I don’t know if Phillip intended to hurt you because I don’t know if I can believe his words.
The healer told me that you were lucky to survive. That you probably only survived because of me. It rendered me speechless.
I was always ashamed to take, and you always knew that, and I always gave and gave and gave and you knew it wasn’t a virtue: it was a disguise.
I don’t really know if I’ve survived, or if my inner self hasn’t just shut herself up by holding a fist to her throat and forgetting how to put it down, forgetting how to be a person outside of a function. I remember meeting you, I remember you unwinding me, and I remember thinking that you would teach me how. Today, I remember trying not to resent you for being unable.
You love me even when I don’t love myself and that’s a higher virtue than holding lives in your hands. I don’t want to be the one who mourns when everyone else has clearly forgotten. It’s mortifying. It’s mortifying to be the one who remembers, because you’re made to feel that your love—grief being the echo of your deepest love—is wrong.
I don’t want to feel wrong about missing him, and I know you don’t either. I fear that you’re going to do something wonderfully reckless, and I am going to remember why I fell in love with you right as the blade comes down over your throat.
And it’s going to shatter me in ways I can never recover. That’s always terrified me: the part where you admit that you need someone. That you couldn’t or simply wouldn’t want to live without them. I’m not someone who trusts easily. You know that. But… you make me want to try.
I don’t want to feel wrong about loving you, but I do. And I think I always will. You tell me that I didn’t cause the rift between you, but I know you’re lying. You’re doing it from a place of love, but you’re still full of shit. I want to love you wholly, without guilt.
I’ve spent too many years dancing around my desires out of fear. I’ve spent too long trying to be someone who I’m not, pushing people away before they could leave me. I’ve spent too many years of my life living in the echoes of my past—of what happened to me.
You insist that I can be everything to you, that you can be mine—and you promise me, in the curve of your lips, how you rest your hand on the small of my waist and how your eyes are the most inviting ocean and even if I know the waves will swallow me whole, I still jump in without question.
I didn’t stumble into love, but I didn’t fall either. I wasn’t pushed or encouraged and even though I think it’s romantic, I didn’t saunter vaguely downwards either. I swan-dived into you from the moment I laid eyes on you, and I’ve just been lying to myself.
That makes two of us, huh?
You’re lying with your head against my hip, you’re snoring softly against my skin and it’s fucking terrifying to open myself up to you because I’m scared and I’ve been hurt before, but you’re the kindest touch I’ve ever known. And if anyone can make me want to be good, it’s you. So, it’s you.
It’s always been you. It’ll always be you.
I was never as good as I wished I was, and never near enough to your shining sun, but I know how to dress myself up.
You’re my renegade lover dragging me back by my hair, forcing me into being better than I ever thought myself to be, and I will love you with everything I’ve got until I breathe my last breath. Save your dirtiest jokes for me, and I’ll always swing my thighs around your waist and bite at your lower lip.
Motherfucking Amen, Caleb. I love you, and I want you in my life for the rest of it, dammit.
Fifty-seven.
I hope there’s a liquor store waiting in the afterlife. I hope you’ll wait for me, twirling a cigarette between your fingers, waiting to light it with the stars. I hope you’ll make conversation, give all the hugs I couldn’t, hold onto all the people I couldn’t.
I don’t know if I am grieving or angry.
I don’t know if I could forgive any of it.
I am ashamed to say that I still think of it.
I am ashamed to say that yesterday, I cried so much that I woke up with swollen eyes. I am ashamed to say that I screamed in the kitchen, in the spring of the morning when no one else was up, I stuck my head into the filled sink and as I pulled out the plug, I screamed, then kept quietly cutting onions.
It's always surprising how still things can be, even when you're falling apart. Even when everything feels out of place, and you know it'll never come back to you again.
When you know that it's your fault, there's a strange resignation in that, I think.
Forgiveness is another way of saying that something didn't happen, and I refuse to give that to him, I refuse to deny the enormity of my pain, of my terror, of my grief and rage bundling together at the bottom of the simmering pot.
If I have to (and I do, I so desperately do) drag the weight of all the things that they ever did behind me, everywhere I go, so do they.
I do not know myself and it frightens me.
My little sister’s asking me what I want for breakfast and I’m telling her about how when the worst thing happened, I didn’t even cry. I screamed and I shook, and I sobbed but I didn’t cry for him. I stormed through Phillip’s shitty little cult, and I yelled at him, and I circled him as if I could avenge my husband and then I didn’t do it.
And I didn’t cry for him.
And I don’t even remember his death. When I try to recall it, it’s everything and nothing all at once. I can smell his flesh burning, I can hear his scream and I can feel how it ran through my body as I tried to fight against my own flaming restraints, but I can’t remember how he looked when he died. And I can’t remember what I did.
I blink, and I’m standing in the ashes, hugging his body to my chest. I blink, and it’s night and I’m soaked to the bone without him and sitting on my sister’s porch. I blink, and Phillip’s coming for me. I blink and I’m turning thirty without you him. I blink—
I’ve willed myself to forget a lot of things. There’s a lot of things that I’m too afraid to write down. I’m sorry. I know that you’re never going to read these, and I loathe to think about Ellie or Dell reading them, but they’re the only family I have left.
Other than Phillip. I’d rather have my memory burnt than Phillip becoming the keeper of it.
Ellie’s asking me what I want for breakfast because I broke my hand punching a jerk square in the jaw and I don’t want to go to a healer because the price on my head is too high, so she’s cooking again and I don’t know how to not feel shitty about that and so, I’m baring myself because I should at least be able to give her this much.
I should at least try to tell her why I broke my hand in the first place. I think you would like that initiative. I tell her about that when the worst thing happened twice, I’d run out of tears and how I know I’m not going to cry at our mother’s funeral, either. Her hands wander down my sharp shoulders and she nods like you wouldn’t fault me for it.
She’s handing me a shopping list and a satchel, and she even trusts me with her money even though I’ve spent it on alcohol and drugs and knives more times than I can count, and I think about what would happen if I passed her the bundle of letters I wrote when I was fifteen and asking the sky if it would be alright.
She’s passing me the spices for my apple blood and apologising for how it tastes like dirt because she hasn’t made it (spiced apple blood) for years. I know why. It’s because I haven’t been in her life for years and now, I’ve staggered back, bloody, beaten and with nowhere else to go, except it’s not the first time and yet, the back window’s still unlocked.
She’s constantly trying to do normal things and I’m just throwing dull pieces of truth onto our mother’s kitchen table that she’s inherited even though she never fucking liked it and now they’re everywhere and they’re on the floor and she’s leaning down to pick them up, uncaring of the risk of being cut.
I want to say: these are the things I’ve done and they’re mostly sad, the ones that aren’t always include you, I promise, and these are the places I’ve been and they’re mostly awful and I’m only alive because of a man I can’t look at; mementos and trinkets from a life I never got to lead.
I want to say: I can’t lie anymore, even if I love you.
Instead, I keep throwing the sharps to the ground and stumbling over the words when I try to clear it, trained harshness clattering to the ground with pinpricks of golden blood.
This life has woven itself into the notches and grooves of my curving spine and I hear it creak every time I stand up. I know I couldn’t run if I tried, I know I should stop being sorry because you chose this more than me, but it doesn’t feel like that.
It feels like I was falling and when you reached your hand out to save me, I gripped your wrist and pulled with me, calling it love and playing wedding bells to trick you into smiling as you plummeted.
Excerpts from Love Is The Mission: Studies of Love Letters in the Deadwardian Era by Hunter Clawthorne:
Twenty-eight.
Ari, I’m sorry.
I knew he [illegible]. I ignored it because [illegible] and he was [illegible] but I should have listened to you.
I will always love you and please don’t—[illegible].
I don’t want you to throw yourself away for me.
[illegible]
[illegible]
[illegible]
Keep him safe. *
[Curator’s note: the rest of the letter is deemed illegible due to fire damage making further transcription both unreliable and unfeasible.]
[* signifies the presumed writing, unconfirmed due to smudging and fire damage.]