Work Text:
Claudia watches as Louis lovingly places her blood stained dress onto its hook, pinning the memory of her firmly against the wall, and she doesn't do anything about it.
Watching the weight of fabric snag, her neck aches, a phantom reminder of what once was, but she doesn't do anything at all. She can't. Because the dress on the wall— the canary yellow dress; the made by loving hands that are long since gone dress; the dirtied from being dragged through mud and blood dress; the torn up and chewed on by rats dress— is the same fucking dress that she wears now, and it can't do anything for her, other than hurt. Now, dead as she is, it hurts to even swallow down the taste of her own sorrow. Now, remembering the feeling of bruises pressed so firmly into her neck is a dreadful and unbecoming ache, yet she is unable to even feel the clothes resting atop her unrestful and forever burnt skin. She can not interact with the world in any meaningful way, and she has learnt, over the last many decades of complete and utter death, that she can't do a goddamned thing to change that.
The dress is the same dress that Claudia will now always wear, and the only difference between the two wads of fabric is that it, unlike her, has been allowed to last.
It is a tangible thing to be held onto in sadness, this dress. Even if it has been made into a dusty thing, meant to be shoved away in a box and better left not thought about, the dress still remains, more alive than her even when inanimate. The rest of her does not remain, being ashes spread in the wind for decades now, but the dress does. It should make her feel sympathetic for her sisterless brother, her daughterless father, but mostly, it just hurts, watching him look towards the artificial memory of her as if it could ever be a guiding light.
Claudia watches Louis stand back to admire his work now, and she feels a dreadful throbbing sensation in her ankles. They bleed still, silently and even if they can not drip onto the floor, leaving a mark more so than her gone with the wind body ever could, and she has not even found herself with the choice to allow the wounds to close over grime. What sympathy should she have leftover for the living dead? As painful as that would still be, feeling stone beneath flesh with every shift of the limb, she has been rendered choiceless and bodiless, a far worse fate. She no longer feels such an urge to be sympathetic to anyone at all, she thinks, and the dress, bloodied as it is, only makes her see red. A not so small part of Claudia wants to yell at the always loving Louis, screaming that the dress has not ever mattered and will never again matter, but of course, she can not. She loves Louis, she does, but she can not ever again be with him, chiding him for his conditional unconditional love. Like the goddamned dress on his lonely fucking apartment's wall, she has been made into only a memory, no longer able to participate in the world that pretends to mourn for her so completely yet still moves on anyway. She can only stare at the canary yellow quietly, fuming as it halfheartedly attempts to cover old cracks in the wall.