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It was his own skin, but he forgot how fragile human flesh was.
Claire was Claire: never in danger of breaking, but soft, and gentle, and she touched him like he was a flower. Maybe he wasn’t the fairest, it was true he was somewhat brittle around the edges and bent up at the very least, but he was hers, her creature of life capable of drawing breath and providing oxygen for all who drew near. And she loved him for it, so much that her lungs didn’t know how to cope with all this air, and it thundered through her chest with every rise and fall of her ribcage. Jim felt it, too, every time their eyes found each other, every time he exhaled oxygen.
He forgot what it was like to be physically vulnerable. To have stone for skin is to have a wall of stone around one’s heart. Or, maybe just his heart.
He never knew it was possible to miss the softness of his own touch until he lost it. And he’d never have known how different he could feel as a whole without his own body, without that simple connection to his closest few: Mom. Claire. Toby. Nothing felt exactly the same, be it physical, or emotional. The closest he ever came to figuring out why, was when the anger and frustration had already coiled up into an indiscernible ball of grief in his chest, and he was desperate for anything to remind him what it felt like to hurt, or feel anything at all rather than this partial-numbness. He felt that well-enough in his own head. And then something would jolt through his body from his head to his toes and for a split second, Jim could feel, only for it to be gone again. After some careful reflection with Claire during many late night conversations, the idea lodged into his head that it was the closest he ever came to feeling human again. In the several months he spent as a half-troll, he shed not a single tear, and it disturbed him. As a human he never forced away his inherent sensitivity. In fact, it was part of what made him successful thus far as Trollhunter. But as a half Troll, nothing seemed to take advantage of that chink in his armor.
Jim had gotten somewhat used to being something else, but to be in his old body again was jarring, disorienting, and absolutely unreal.
Claire had met him halfway in a tight embrace after he stumbled from the literal pile of rubble of his former self. (His monstrous self.) He was so much smaller, only a few inches taller than her, and their bodies fit together like they were lost magnets found once again. It was an unconscious effort to withhold his strength, something he once had to do, but then she hugged him. Hard. A pain, small and bearable and more along the lines of discomfort, lanced through his back. Then, he thinks, is when the full force started to hit him. He squeezed her back. His muscles trembled, but he didn’t let go, nor did he relinquish his strength. Her skin was warm against his.
His skin was warm again. His heartbeat pulsed under his chest in rapid beats. He exhaled slowly.
On the front porch of his home, he hesitated.
Why should he? He didn’t know. The door was all that stood between him and his family. His heart still pounded furiously between his lungs. Was he prepared to come face to face with the life he thought he could never have again? Could he really stay?
“You’ve got this, Jim,” said Claire beside him. She still wore her armor, as this was the first and foremost step they took after Douxie left with Nari. Her hair was somewhat haphazard. The white had spread since it turned several months ago—when she opened the massive portal to escape from the overrun Trollmarket—no doubt due to the new and pressing responsibilities the disarrayed tribe required in those trying times.
She was a stark contrast to the Claire Nunez he started crushing on the beginning of last school year. It had been maybe a year since; and in that time, she suffered loss after loss in a world not quite her own, bound by integrity (and the lives of hundreds if not thousands entrusted in her) to keep this secret, overpowered a centuries-old sorceress and mastered said sorceress’ powers in the span of several months. As he looked at her now, he didn’t see Claire so much, rather than her soul looking back at him through her big, brown eyes. They were shoulder to shoulder but it would have been stranger to be farther apart. It seemed only natural to be close—he wanted to be close, to be touching somehow, every second he was with her. If nothing else, he wanted this.
“I’ll go back to my house for the time being,” she said. “You two could use some time alone together, and I’m sure my parents will want to see me now that I’m back.”
Jim nodded wordlessly, took her hand in his and brought it to his mouth. She was warm. He was warm. When he kissed the back of her hand, he took a deep breath, something like a sigh and a hum. She smelled of sweat and citrus. He looked back at her and forced a smile, albeit not disingenuously. He was happy. But he was tired.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” said Jim.
They held gazes, then came together in one final embrace. Both gripped the other like a lifeline, arms locked together, eyes squeezed shut, something else lingering in their touch. They never wanted to let go—that was spoken plainly despite its subtlety, but in some way, this embrace extended beyond its physical parameters, and he felt it even when she finally let go and long after she disappeared through a portal, nothing but her scent and the residual lightness of his chest to suggest she was even there to begin with.
Jim looked at the front door. There were vague smudges and scratches left on the aged paint, and he wondered if they were the same ones that were there the day he left. His hand came up to ring the doorbell and stopped. Still, he wasn’t sure what he was waiting for, but he pressed it anyways. He could hear the tune ring through the walls... So often, he tackled things headfirst on his own. The Darklands. The Eternal Night. Trollhunting itself, when he elected to let his mother forget everything he had confided in her. It was how he functioned as a regular human being to begin with, but once given the proper means to really make something of a difference, he took it and ran. And frankly, it was always terrifying… But this train of thought made him somewhat uncomfortable. What was he comparing seeing his mother to?
You question your strength, something whispered. Your worth.
The musing left him no less uncomfortable. Then he realized some sort of flickering in his chest, only a phantom of what was but a firm reminder all the same: that Feeling. Some part of him was not yet fully human. It remained something stone-like, brittle, cold and lifeless. These sensations coursing through him—both physical and emotional—weren’t exactly settling with the part of him unreceptive to these luxuries. The stone in him didn’t feel the same warmth of Claire’s presence that the newly restored human in him had.
He could hear his mother talking and laughing from behind the door as she approached. Strickler, maybe? When the door opened, her eyes landed above him first. She wasn’t expecting him. Then she looked down and took all of a single second to gather the obvious: he was home, and he was human.
Jim’s heart melted at the sight of her. She was wide-eyed, in lounging clothes and carried the scent of something savory from the kitchen (so someone else was here), and she was everything he had ever loved and fought for. “Hi, mom,” he said, voice breaking, eyes burning.
She closed the distance between them in a split second, and his face was in her chest, her arms squeezing the life out of but breathing into him all the same, and her body shook.
“My baby,” she sobbed, “my baby, thank you, God.”
And then he was crying with her. “I’m so sorry.” His voice was muffled. Her shirt smelled like her favorite lotion, something with honeysuckle and lavender, and he balled it up in his fists against her back. They rocked unsteadily on the porch; balance was not a priority of either of theirs. “I’m so sorry. For everything.”
She wept, but shook her head fervently. Since she needed a moment to find her voice, she tucked her chin and pressed kisses to his head one after the other, only stopping to hold his forehead against her cheek, to feel his skin on hers again. “Don’t apologize. We— we have to move on from right here, right now. You're here and I couldn’t pick a better place to start.”
She pulled away just enough to get a good look at his face. Hers crumpled when her eyes flickered up to his cheek, then his brow. Her thumbs caressed the scars.
“Oh,” she sighed, halfway between a cry and a groan. “How— how did you get these?”
Jim closed his eyes, took her hands in his. “It’s not important right now. I’ll tell you everything, but…” There was so much he never wanted her to know. Things no mother wanted to hear. But he made that mistake once, and it wasn’t one he was going to make again on his own accord. “...But later.”
Jim shook with her. This was the first time they lamented together what they lost. And it took so much of it to make this happen. For months Jim grieved the toll the amulet took on their relationship. It was the one thing he loathed most of all. Of anything to sow a seed of bitterness to fester over, this was it. Through every day of their lives, they took care of each other, adapted together, and looked after one another. They continued to after James left. More than the amulet, more than Trollhunting, his mother was his rock, his constant. Never again would he risk losing her.
Moments later, their cries subsided long enough for his mother to coherently ask him inside. Dinner had a few minutes left to go on the stove. Strickler waited patiently, aware of the meeting and respectful of their privacy, if not intimidated and a little embarrassed. He was still a newcomer in their home, especially to Jim, but it made no discernible difference once the two came in. In fact it was with great surprise he was met with an obliging but genuine hug from Jim.
“Thank you,” he said, “for keeping her safe. And happy.”
Despite his Troll-ish appearance, Strickler retained a gentle dignity from his life spent as a man, and it is with this manner he answered, “It is with my greatest honor and pleasure I do, Young Atlas.”
His mother approached from behind and pulled them all together into a collective embrace, Jim stuck in the middle. At first it was awkward, but then it wasn’t. Something shifted in his chest and dissipated just as smoothly as the steam off the stove-top.