Chapter Text
"I’m scared, Lee.”
“What can I tell you to make it better?”
“That you won’t leave me.”
SHE REMEMBERS THINGS that shouldn't be remembered.
Glazed eyes. Damp skin. Radio static. Ragged breaths, frantic pleas. The thump of a body as it plummets to the ground. The weight of a gun in her hands. Iron, sharp and bitter on her tongue, and red smeared across her palms. These memories dig their way into the crevices of her mind so that she remembers the strangled cry of the first walker she ever killed, yet she can’t imagine the murmur of her mother’s voice if she tries. The bad replace the good; the more her mind represses. She forgets in droves. Each lost memory sprouts through her with a sting so potent, she can’t stop her fingers from clawing at her skin to banish the horrible sensations boiling beneath. Her nails don't leave lasting marks, but the places they touch burn red hot.
The night AJ is taken from her, she thinks: Will I forget him, too?
What she does remember is this:
She is alone. The Frontier won't help her anymore, and she found nowhere else to stay but in a comfortless shack. Frost sticks to the fabric of the coat wrapped around her shivering form, its crystals like millions of stagnant little parasites, and her breath puffs out from her mouth in big white clouds. The moisture blurring her vision clings to her eyelashes.
When morning comes and pale light seeps through the cracks in the walls, she doesn't move. The cold numbs her body, seeps into every muscle. It numbs her mind, too, and only leaves room for the thought that the only person left for her is gone.
The world left a fragile threshold between sanity and senselessness ever since it went to hell. The specifics of its demarcation come in different forms for different people. For Lilly, it was her father's death. Kenny, his wife and son. One thing stays constant: once the barriers of the threshold crumble, the burden of your own grief rips you apart.
At that moment, she's standing at the great barrier, its foundation swaying, threatening to give out. She wants to fall with it. She's so tired of running, of wondering when she'll finally stop forgetting and wondering how many more people will have to die for her to live. But if she falls, what would that mean for people like Christa or Omid, Lee or Kenny? Every mark of their existence would vanish the moment she closed her eyes. They would’ve died for nothing. Who would she be to let that happen? She has to keep moving.
And maybe- the possibility is absurd, and she knows, God, she knows it's not true- but maybe, one day, she'll see AJ again.
°°°°° °°°°°
“Clem?”
The last time she got a full night's rest was three months ago, holed up in a cave with AJ leaning against her, his chest softly rising up and falling down with each shallow breath. She bears the nightmares, most of the time, and drifts into an uneasy, dreamless sleep. But then there are times where she can't. Times where she jolts up with a chasm bursting open in her stomach and her heart slamming against her ribcage the way walkers pound at a closed door, mouth so dry it hurts to breathe, panic still rising up her throat, or maybe bile, because she can't see, and she can't calm down; not until it's light enough for her to understand where she is, and that she's safe.
And when she's okay, AJ isn't. Neither of them knows how to rest untroubled. It's an unfortunate consequence of their chaotic life. That night, she raises her head from her pillow and finds him kneeling beside her bunk with his eyes blown wide and his fingers running over the ends of his sweater sleeves, waiting for her gaze to fall over him.
“Bad night?” She asks. “Do you want to sleep with me?”
He squints and looks down.
“I can't sleep,” he says. “I'm not tired anymore.”
“Well, you can still come up here, can't you?”
An indignant frown pulls on his cheeks (and she half expects him to object: “I'm too big for that,” he'd say, even though his tiny hands could barely close around a pistol), but within seconds he's crawling up beside her, flopping onto her pillow.
Clementine shifts so she's facing him, the flimsy bed frame screeching complaints under her weight, and pulls him into her arms. She doesn't even finish enveloping him before he leans in and buries his face in her shoulder. It’s then she realizes he’s shaking, and as he leans closer, her hands rub small circles on his back, calming him until he’s motionless, except for the occasional hiccups and sniffs that wrack his body, and as the minutes slowly tick by, her exhausted eyes stinging, the jacket hung over her wettens with his tears. He’s a quiet crier, but that’s a given. There’s no room for volume in a world where death lurks around every corner.
The pressure of AJ's head on her shoulder eventually eases, and he stares up at her, eyes still puffy.
“You feeling better?”
“Not really,” he says.
“That's okay.” She shuffles to the side of her bed and leans back so AJ has room to lay next to her. “We can stay awake.”
As AJ's hitched breathing begins to even out, he says: “It wasn't about the ranch, this time.”
Clementine squeezes his hand. “Was it the Raiders?”
“Lilly.”
“Oh.”
Lilly. Her name tastes like copper and falls bitterly off her tongue. Abel, she can openly detest; Lilly is much more complicated. Clementine still connects with her—through a mutual past, through mutual suffering, even through the fading remnants of mutual affection—despite everything she's done.
It's a cluster of emotions difficult to express, which is why when she opens her mouth, she chokes.
“We need to get them back. Aasim and Omar. And Violet.”
AJ sits up and swings his short legs over the side of the bed, his face tight with determination but his eyes still laced with fright as he stares at the doorknob. She rises with him and presses a hand to his shoulder.
“Where are you going?”
“To get ready.”
A pang of amusement surfaces amidst her worry. “How do you plan to do that?”
“I can find more stuff to fight with. Like rocks, or… or something. I can practice with my knife.”
“We'll have time to get ready in the morning.” When he doesn't respond, Clem bends down to meet his eyes, which avert as soon as she catches them. “Hey, I promise,” she says, softer. “We're going to try our hardest to get them back, okay? The Raiders won't know what hit them.”
The two of them sit in silence until AJ sighs and pulls away from the edge of the bed, hugging his knees to his chest. “Okay,” he says. “But…”
He bites his tongue and his face scrunches up. The words he wants to say stay inside him, caged by an invisible hand. “What if we can't get them back, Clem?”
Lee made it look so easy. He always knew what to say. She tries to do the same for AJ, tries to find a balance between what he wants and what he needs to hear, but, as always, she flounders for an answer.
“You talk a lot about other groups. Like the ones you were in before, the ones that fell apart. I like it here. I don't want that to happen.”
“I don't think it will.”
AJ stares at her with a skeptical expression, head tilted down, identical to the one Violet gets after she's heard too many bad jokes.
“Everyone here— they get along well. They’re not broken like a lot of the other people I’ve been with. They don’t want to fight or kill. They care about each other too much.”
“What about Marlon?”
She shakes her head. “He did horrible things. But they were never in cold blood.”
“Cold blood.”
“It’s like hurting someone without feeling guilty.”
“Like Lilly,” AJ says, more to himself than to her.
“Right.”
“Was she always like this?” He asks. Clementine bites her tongue, drags it between her teeth. “You used to know her.”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember much about her, but I remember her being nice to me when I was little. You know this hairband?”
AJ squints at her bun. “Yea. It kind of smells bad.”
She elects to ignore his comment. “She gave it to me, a long time ago.”
“How old is it?”
“Eight years old, at least. I got it way before you were born.”
“Oh,” he says. “That's nice of her, I guess. But it's kind of gross. It's all dirty. That's probably why it smells so bad.”
AJ yawns, his body slumping against her. She wraps an arm around him and rests her head on top of his.
“Do you think she could be good?”
Her chest tightens. “What?”
“I don't,” AJ says. “But Tenn said there's always good in people, even if they do bad things.”
She thinks of Kenny, of the warmth in his eyes , then of him pinning a knife to Jane's chest, his face twisted into a grimace of ghoulish rage as the blade cut her heart, and of the regret falling over his tired features as he realized what he'd done, how dangerous he'd become; yet nothing of what he realized about himself paralleled the strength of his horror that Clementine would leave him. “He's right.”
“Then could Lilly ever be good?”
( “We were family once,” she said.
Lilly's eyes grew terribly sad and the gun shook in her grasp, falling from Clementine's forehead to her chin. This was the woman who used to come to her while she was alone, smiling gently as she asked her what she was coloring, who remained mindful of her while so many of the people Clementine met never did.
Yet she was also the woman who shot Carley through the skull and tossed the gun aside with no remorse. Who kicked Clementine to the ground and threatened to kill her friends without a second thought, who captured and hurt so many others. That night, the night she broke into the school, if Louis never tackled her to the ground, Clementine is certain she’d have pulled the trigger. )
She swallows. “If things went differently,” she says, “I do. I think she could’ve been good.” Her confession hangs somewhere between a truth and a lie. She can’t tell which.
At one point, AJ falls asleep. Clementine doesn't.
°°°°° °°°°°
Any lingering affection Clementine feels for Lilly bursts into pieces the same time the ship does.
On the way back to the school, she thinks of the night before. She still doesn’t know if Lilly could have been good. She just knows that now, she is utterly irredeemable.
Louis and Aasim haul her with them, her arms slung over their shoulders. She aches like she's been quartered, and she can’t see the red marks on her neck, but the buzzing and stinging of her skin lets her know they’re there, right where Lilly’s hands once were. She cranes her pounding head towards James, passed out in Violet’s arms- Violet, who hasn't looked at her since they got off the ship- with the knife removed from his back. He narrowly avoided death. A centimeter to the left and it'd be over.
Impossibly, everyone survived. But not unscathed, not without stains of blood and trauma.
It’s hard for Clementine to hate anyone: even with all the horrible things she’s seen, all the wicked people she's met, she’s never hated. But when she gets off that ship, there's no soft nostalgia, no gray area left. The adrenaline wears off later that night while everyone in the school huddles together in the music room and tries to find comfort in numbers as they sleep, and as the fog clears, she feels Lilly's shadow looming over her, and it sends, all at once, searing, blistering rage through her. Her vision goes white. Her hands shake. Her fury, its morbid invigoration, howls at her to march back to the ship's smoldering debris and search for Lilly, if only to stand above her as the flames reduced her to ash and bones. Ash and bones can’t kill.
She knows what hatred is, now. It's a terrible feeling, appeased only by the thought that Lilly died for what she's done. Maybe, in the last few seconds or minutes or hours of consciousness, before the night snuffed her and the fire out, she burned in a fit of rage similar to Clementine’s own as she pathetically thought of how she could have won, what life would be like if she hadn't fucked up. Maybe the magnitude of her actions pinned her to the ground like the pressure of the deepest ocean, and she gazed into its abyss as her life slipped between her fingertips.
Clementine hopes so.
Her friends fall asleep, and the longer she stays awake, the more her fury fades. It turns to anger, then to resentment, then frustration. In the early morning, one, two, or three, all that’s left is hurt and exhaustion, exhaustion so deep tears wouldn’t come. She doesn’t think she was ever as scared as she was aboard the ship. Not even when she realized she would lose Lee. When she gets sick to her stomach, her subconscious screaming that something else will go terribly wrong, as they always do, she reassures herself: Everything is okay. Your friends are alive, you are alive. You don’t have to run anymore.
Except running was her only distraction: now that it’s gone, she feels the full weight of her grief. She spends the night staring at the ceiling and seeing Sarita, Sarah, Kenny, Lee’s faces in the cracks, each new face driving her sorrow deeper, feeding her guilt until she only breathes in strangled whistles and wheezes around the boulder in her throat. When did she last associate their features with good memories? When she thinks Luke, the first thing she remembers is him inhaling gallons of water as he sunk to his death; Carley, the blur of her body plummeting down and staining the grass red.
Her first conversation with Luke—her first real conversation—wasn't pleasant, but remains incorrupt. She keeps it close to her and guards it as best as she can. It doesn't work the way she hopes it will. Chunks of it erode as the passage of time advances, but one part always stands out:
The two of them are sitting at a longtable. Luke asks, “What brought you here? What happened to your parents?”
She tells him what she can. Her parents died on a business trip and left her with her babysitter. Lee found her and saved her, but she couldn't return the deed.
“It was my fault,” she says. “Sometimes, people die because of me.”
When she dreams, she imagines Lee telling her it wasn’t her fault, not when he was bitten, or when she shot Kenny, or when Sarah was torn apart. Except it was. Death, the endless cycle, repeats over, and over, and over, each bleak reprise asserting the same undeniable truth that she is at fault.
The cycle began with Lee and kept unraveling. The day Omid was killed, it revealed itself to her. She memorized the way he fell, shock etched in his face as Christa rushed in to cradle his limp body: she memorized the hitch in her sobs as her eyes fell upon Clementine's gun discarded from their attacker's hand. Christa never acted the same, after that.
She never said it. Clementine knew she wouldn't, because even though she lost her world in an instant, she still cared about her. She taught her everything she could in the time they spent together: how to patch herself up, build a trap, use a knife.
More than anything, Christa blamed herself. But on the nights they spent around faltering firebeds, they sat three feet—three thousand, three million feet—apart. Neither of them talked. Clementine trapped her hands underneath her thighs to fend off the overpowering urge to scrub them 'till they bled. She always kept her pistol beside her since her last day with Omid, the smooth curve of the trigger a constant reminder of the damage she could never mollify. Sometimes, she'd catch Christa staring at it in the dead of night, and she turned away and pretended not to notice. She never said it: “You're the reason he's dead.” But her silence was the only confirmation Clementine needed.
People die because of her; Lilly died because of her. Instead of guilt, though, all that overcomes her is betrayal, crushing and absolute. She was the one person who lived, the only remaining relic from the turmoil of the past, yet she tainted what Clementine had left of her. There was no joyful reunion, no “I missed you”s or “I'm sorry”s. She wove her way back into Clementine's life so she could leave her with nothing and nobody. Why? Because she didn’t know how to do anything else?
Did she abandon her conscience with Carley’s body? Or did she leave it earlier? Was it inevitable? Was she destined to become one more corrupted memory? One more ghost of a person Clementine lost?
She doesn't understand.
°°°°° °°°°°
When she sees Violet that next morning, she expects outrage. She dreads it. Yet... Nothing happens. She gets nothing she expected. In fact, she gets nothing at all. No insults, no apologies, no backlash, no heed. On the boat, her anger was as palpable as the wall Violet slammed her against, her teeth gnashing with every word she spat: now she’s nothing but silent resentment and despondency, disregarding Clementine’s presence until she’s close enough that she can’t ignore her.
Then she stares, her gaze a challenge Clementine fails to surmount. Pale green eyes sit like glaciers in her skull, and their frigid edges send her years back, alone in the far corner of a shed, the last person of her rudimentary family wrenched from her arms. With her statue-still body angled away from the other girl, Clementine thinks she hears her hiss: “You failed me,” but her mouth never opens. Clementine clamps her twitching hands to her wrists hard enough to feel her own pulse hammering her veins because if she lets go, she thinks she’ll snap in two.
The day crawls by with its legs dragging through the dirt. In the morning, the kids step outside, groaning and muttering as they sweep up debris still littering the camp after their first cleanup. She and Omar hunt that afternoon, and neither of them catch anything, save for a starving rabbit that looks like it’ll start decomposing as soon as the spear impales it. They talk. Clementine doesn't recall their conversation; she was busy channeling the little energy she had into stifling the ringing in her ears. Her brain, fuzzy with exhaustion, guides her through each chore like a plane suspended in endless mist until the first ruby orange and sapphire purple streaks of dusk creep over the horizon, the fluttering leaves of the trees scattering the light across the ground like stain glass windows, patchy and vibrant. While everyone finishes dinner, she sits and basks in the peace as long as she can. The full echo of Louis’s voice fills the vacant spaces in her head.
Her senses start to meld together as she drifts into a half-sleep when Willy shouts from his lookout perch.
Clementine turns in time to observe him descending the ladder. He hurries to the other kids on his tiptoes like a rabid beast is tracking him and says between pants: "There's Raiders outside. Two of them.”
AJ, Tenn, and Willy stay behind the gates, James lurking by the benches, barely strong enough to stand, but determined to defend them if the situation calls for it. The rest of the school watches for danger behind shrubbery. Willy said they were, at most, a hundred yards away, and approaching rapidly. She shifts her grip on her knife's handle.
She sees the first one: a man barely taller than her, blonde hair bloodied and stringy, falling over the ridge of his nose. The holds his rifle with a tightness mightier than a mother's grasp on her firstborn.
A lanky woman trails close behind, armed with nothing but a knife. Clementine nods to Omar, who's hiding behind a bush a few feet away. She's all yours. He grimaces.
The Raider doesn't see her coming. When his footsteps halt, she lunges forward, plunging the knife into his kneecap. He howls in agony and crumbles to the forest floor, his unharmed leg baring his weight.
Then he rears the gun towards her. She tries to wrestle it away, but her muscles protest, and—
Bang.
Her heart sinks.
The concussive blast echoes past every tree, into the open sky. The bullet misses her by a considerable distance, misses everyone by a considerable distance, except she knows that's not the end of it. The bushes rustle as everyone steps into the open.
“Look what’s happened now, shithead,” the man spits. “You’re really gonna regret not dying in that explos-”
She slams the butt of the rifle over his skull.
“We need to get out of here,” she says. Ruby and Omar have the woman pinned, unconscious. “There’s-”
“Stay where you are.”
A click. The reloading of a gun locks her limbs in place as cold metal prods the back of her head, the cloud of imminent danger hanging over her thickening. Louis stares at her with parted lips and a body motionless with shock.
“Turn around.”
Willy said two, she thinks uselessly. The voice is coarse and dips low into a growl, the way the engine of an old car rumbles to life, spitting out black smoke. She looks over her shoulder, where a tall, brazen woman with scars bathing the hardened flesh of her face holds the barrel of a gun close enough to brush her forehead.
“Unless the lot of you want to get shot,” she says, “I suggest you drop your weapons.”
Her fingers tighten around the rifle, but her stone arms slowly budge as she bends down and places it onto a bed of grass. No one else obliges. “Drop them,” says Clementine.
“You don’t have to do this,” Louis pleads. “If you let us go, nobody will get hurt.”
“You think we’re going back to the Delta empty handed?” The woman says. “No way in hell. If the leaders back there are merciful, they’ll shoot us to death. You either come with us or you're lurker bait.”
As if on cue, a groan drifts to their ears, followed by another- a string of half-formed babbles and growls. Sweat drips down Clementine’s palms.
“Better decide soon, huh?”
“Your people are evil,” says Omar. He’s never looked at someone with such abhorrence.
“We all need a way to survive out here. People have different methods.”
“Well, there’s a difference between different methods and terrible ones.”
“It doesn’t matter, nowadays.”
The groans grow in volume. As panic starts to set in, something behind the Raider woman catches her eye: a crouching form, black hair slicked back, determined—
Aasim.
She pretends not to notice.
“You want more time?” She tips her gun to the man at Clementine's feet. “Give Remmy a moment wake up and you've got one more day on your hands. That's one more day to make up your mind.”
“How do you plan to outrun a herd? We don't have the time for a second option.”
“I never said anything about outrunning a herd. You've got your cozy little school around here, don't you?”
“Sure,” Clementine says. Aasim is right behind her now, knife in hand. “But you can't have it.”
The knife twists into her spine, and, screaming, she falls to the ground. Her squirms disrupt the soil, her limbs thrashing in wide arcs and gasps rolling from her mouth in short, agonized bursts of air. Aasim squints and watches. His head turns to and from the scene as though he can't bear to look at her.
She’s reminded that these kids haven’t killed anyone before.
“I can't.” He sways where he stands. “Clementine—”
She finishes the job. Blood splatters across her jacket, lukewarm and pungent, and pushes the guilt from her mind. There's no time. She hands Aasim his knife back.
“You'll need it,” she says.
There is, indeed, no time. When she blinks, her eyelids shrouding her line of sight in darkness for a fraction of a second, something else happens.
“Clem!” Louis screams.
A walker has him shoved into the dirt. Gravel lodged in his palms, he desperately tries to keep distance between them, the corpse’s jaw sagging and snapping as it leans towards his face. His knife lays two feet away.
“Louis!” She bursts into a sprint, the walker closing in on his neck—
—And a cleaver slices through the its skull, fluid spurting from the wound and staining the sharpened steel. It goes limp on top of Louis, who’s wheezing with fright, and Violet throws it off, frantically searching her friend for bite marks, muttering until her eyes meet Clementine’s, and she halts for the briefest moment, rage flashing across her features.
She doesn’t get the luxury of discovering the depth of her anger. Behind her, another walker gurgles through the blood and saliva trapped in its gullet. She whips around in time to push it away with her hand and kick its knee out. Her knife finds a lovely home lodged in its esophagus.
They keep coming: not in compact waves, like the walkers in the city, but stragglers congregating into one moving heap of death. Her knife becomes an extension of her arm as she mows down targets and tosses them aside like torn-up weeds.
She's not immortal, though, and she's not stupid enough to keep rushing in while everyone else spends alarmingly long intervals of time wrestling with walkers. They haven't spent their childhoods honing their abilities to fight like she has.
“Let's go before this gets any worse,” she says.
The sound doesn't carry over the chaos. At first, she isn't sure if anyone else heard; but soon they hurry to her side, panting from exertion.
“Do you think they got away?” Omar asks.
“Honestly? No. They have nowhere to go. It'd be a miracle if those two Raiders even woke up in time to see the inside of a walker jaw.”
The short trek back is tense, to say the least. They look over their shoulders obsessively, every exchange involving some sort of repetitive affirmation that, yes, everyone is still alive.
The most electric exchange, though, fizzles between Clementine and Violet, both avoiding contact with one another like two explosive magnets turned the wrong way, despite being right next to one another.
Clementine expects her to detonate as soon as the school's metal gates sweep open.
“What a way to end the night,” Aasim grumbles. He wipes his blood-lathered hands on his jacket.
“Yea. What a delight,” Violet says, staring straight ahead. “Especially since that gunshot could’ve fucking killed us.”
There it is.
“Don’t try to pin this all on me,” she snaps.
“I don't have to.”
“Excuse me?” Clementine says. “I didn’t know this would happen as much as anyone else did.”
For the first time since they were in that cell together, Violet reacts. Clementine isn't sure how to feel when she whips around with her jaw clenched, pointed words hissed between her teeth. “I don’t give a shit if you didn’t know. You “didn’t know” Minnie or Mitch would be killed. You “didn’t know” the Raiders were dead until now. You “didn’t know” trying to grab somebody’s gun was going to bring a bunch of walkers to us. Of fucking course he’d fire. Do you not think things through? Do you want us to die?”
“No, I don’t !” A rope wrings her gut, tightening, tightening. “You- He would’ve shot us. You need to act quickly. The longer you let someone keep you under their control, the more opportunities there are for someone to die.”
“And if more of them come back?” Violet says. “We blew up their ship and they still came back. How much time before they track us down again? Before something else like this happens?”
She shakes.
Louis grabs Violet’s arm. “Vi-”
“Tell me.”
She tries-
“Tell me.”
“Violet-”
“I-I don’t know. We-”
“-Will die if we keep fighting them like this. I’m not letting more of us get killed.” Her face twists with betrayal and hurt, and Clementine can’t look away. “Why should you keep dictating what needs to be done?”
“I didn’t want anyone to get hurt.” It comes out feeble and so, so small. She hates it.
“I didn’t either.”
No one talks the rest of the way. Even Louis’s solicitous presence next to her can’t ease the roaring in her ears and nauseating thrum of her pulse. The minute they reach the staircase leading to the commons, Clementine branches off, barely catching Violet’s expression twitch with guilt as she escapes to her room, her steps not registering as her body glides up the stairs and through the hall.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
The door shuts behind her. Her pulse finally calms, but she still feels it expand against her flesh like it doesn’t belong to her. She finds the first thing she sees—the shelf, pressed against the wall— and takes in its every detail: its shallow lines and bruises, the splintering, unoiled wood, the boar’s skull, a mushroom, a glass jar. And her skin boils. And her skin boils and boils. It’s seething—she reaches to scratch, fingers throbbing—
“Fuck!” She shrieks. Her voice reaches such a shrill note it cracks and falls back, hitting a vault and knocking the breath out of her. So shrill, it buries the shatter of glass hitting the floor as she drops the jar she didn’t even realize she picked up.
She stares, bewildered, and says to herself: “Oh, Jesus.” The embarrassment is overwhelming, but at least she’s grounded. The energy seeps out of her, pooling at her feet, and she drags herself over to the bed, letting gravity steer her body into the mattress.
Shame. It’s the only thing grasping her, now. There’s no thoughts connected to it. If she were less exhausted by her thoughts of the day prior (and the few minutes prior) she could have listed them off for hours on end. Or maybe she’s willfully blocking them. She doesn’t want to investigate further, so she lays there, eyes closed, unable to embrace sleep.
The door creaks.
She tilts her head to the side, not quite lifting it, to see Louis’s face through the slim opening. He points to the lock on the door and raises his eyebrows, an unspoken request to enter. Clementine sighs out her nose and discovers the task of sitting up surprisingly challenging.
The door swings open and Louis greets her with a tiny wave.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey.”
He steps over the pile of broken glass on the floor, careful not to make much noise. The quiet is vulnerable, not so much as a draft of air interrupting it. The creases of the blanket suddenly look very interesting. Her fingers pleat the fabric, and she shuts out the thumping of Louis’s footsteps. The bed creaks as he sits beside her.
“So I found this in my closet.” Louis unfolds his hands. They’re still dirty from his fall, speckled with dry blood. Shallow cuts and scrapes stretch across his palm from needles and gravel, and an apology pulls at her lips, but before it emerges, he holds up a little figurine of a nurse, smeared in grime but mostly intact, and drops it in her hands.
Clementine wipes her face and twirls the toy around. It’s old: chipped in several places, blue and white paint fading. “It looks kind of funny,” she says, nudging him. “Like you.”
“I’ll have you know that I’m funny, not funny looking. My charm is irresistible.”
“Oh, I’m aware.”
Blood rushes to his face, tinting it red-brown. He clears his throat before speaking again. "When I first got sent here, my parents were so angry with me. They wouldn’t let me bring any toys, but, uh, I snuck a couple in. Tiny ones. It’s been a long time and I’ve lost most of them, but I still have this guy.”
She sets it on the dresser, admiring it from her seat on the bed.
“I wanted AJ to have him,” he says. “He can be a part of Disco Broccoli and Co. Hopefully he knows a lot about vegetable anatomy from his courses at Fantasy Yale.”
“Fantasy Yale?”
“It’s like Yale, but cooler.”
“Dork.”
Silence falls over them. It’s difficult to talk: if she had any motivation for a conversation before, it was gone. The longer she sits, the more the room feels off, somehow, and empty, missing something of importance. The bunk at the opposite wall, sheets ruffled and thrown about, delivers a shred of remembrance.
“AJ,” she says. “Where is he?”
“He’s still outside,” Louis says. “I told him to stay with Tenn for a while. Unwind, all that good stuff.”
She nods. Her foot traces the scratches and stains on the floor, blooming in different directions, diverse shapes and sizes. But it’s not enough to distract her from Louis’s questioning gaze.
She swallows. “I’m okay,” she says. “I just have a lot on my mind.”
“Violet can be an asshole sometimes,” Louis says, “and she says things that she doesn’t really mean. Or that aren’t true. Obviously, that doesn’t make it right, but… She’ll come around eventually.”
“That’s not the problem, it’s that she’s-” Her words fail. “You could’ve died out there.”
He shakes his head. “I didn’t.”
“I know you didn't–”
“I know that you know I didn't, because I'm still here.”
“But for how long?” Clementine presses. “How long, Louis?”
He cringes, unsure of what to say.
“She was right,” Clementine says. “Not about giving up, but about the Raiders. They could come back. I don't think it's likely, but there's a possibility. And safety doesn't last forever. Something else will happen. Maybe something worse than what we've been through.”
“I'll be a while.”
“You don't know that.”
“Okay, yea, I don't,” says Louis. “But we have time to prepare. Once these Raiders are gone, it'll just be us. Nobody found this school for eight years. We’re safer here than we are anywhere else.”
He smiles: not a pity smile, which she's infinitely thankful for, but one slight and reassuring, alighting a spark in his eyes, brightest in the dimmest moments.
“You remind me of someone I knew a long time ago,” she says.
“I do?”
“His name was Omid. Short, really goofy- but he always knew what to do and where to go when we were on the road, and he was really good at making people laugh—”
“My kind of guy.”
“—when he told jokes that were actually funny.”
“Ouch.” Louis puts a hand over his chest like she ripped it open. “Ice cold, Clem.”
“Yea.” She forces a smile. “I really miss him.”
“If you don’t mind me asking,” Louis says hesitantly, “what happened to him?”
She considers keeping it to herself. The past weighs leaden on her chest, and she wants no more than to curl up and hide. But the guilt would rot her from the inside out and leave nothing left.
“You know what?” He says. “It’s okay. Forget I asked-”
“We split up at a pitstop,” she says. “I was inside one of the bathroom stalls looking for something I dropped. I left my bag by the counter.”
Louis’s face droops. She focuses, again, on the floor.
“Then this woman walks in. I was completely defenseless, no weapons on me, nothing. She takes my gun out of my bag and makes me come out, asking “What do you have?” Apparently, we made enough noise for Omid to hear us. Her back was turned to the door when he came in, and he only needed one more second to disarm her. But the door clicks shut, and…”
Fingers twine together with hers. Louis squeezes her hand and lifts it so it’s resting on his lap, his thumb circling over her knuckles.
“He slid to the ground, slowly, he… He looked horrified, like he knew he was going to die. I don't think the woman who shot him meant to do it. She wasn't a killer. But he slumped over and that was it. His girlfriend, Christa, she runs in and shoots the woman next to me and the gun falls out of her hand.”
“I’m sorry,” Louis whispers.
“Things weren’t the same after that. Omid was all she had left, and she loved me, but-” She stops. “She couldn’t forget that the woman who killed Omid killed him with my gun. I don’t blame her. I wouldn’t be able to, either.”
“It’s not your fault.”
She shakes her head. “I’m tired,” she says, “of being alone. Being here with everyone— this is the first real home I've had, and I keep thinking it'll fall apart the second I turn my back. Too many people have died because of me.”
“Clem,” he says. “It’s not your fault.”
“You say that, but you don’t know. People keep dying because of my mistakes or sacrificing themselves to protect me and I can’t even think why they’d- why they’d do that. What’s one life compared to nine? Ten? It’s so fucking-” She chokes. “It’s unfair. I don’t want to see anyone else die.”
“Unless you’re trying to kill someone, going out of your way to do it like Lilly did, it’s never your fault. Please don’t blame yourself.”
He's wrong. She tries to tell him, but she can't squeeze it out through the pressure of her bated breath.
“Clem?”
She tries again to respond, but when she does, her entire body shudders, and the whine she releases morphs into a heaving sob. Once the first one leaves, they keep coming, quaking through her, cramping her stomach, and soon she's hunched over her knees with an onslaught of tears blurring her vision. Her fists dig into her abdomen in an attempt to restrain her muted, yet enormous cries, but she gives up, finally allowing them to pour out.
He calls her name again. She must not have heard him the first time; he looks sort of panicked. “Are you okay?”
“I'm-” She can't lie to him. “I'm not okay.” Her voice sounds uncoordinated, shaky. It hurts to talk. “That's fine. I don't know. I'm not okay. I-”
“Here.” Louis wraps her in his arms. She does the same, burying her head in the crook of his neck, the old fur lining of his tailcoat mopping up her tears. “See? It's okay to not be okay. We're at a school for troubled youth. We're all flavors of fucked up.”
“I'm getting your coat wet,” she croaks.
“It’s already crusty. Also, it, uh-”
“It smells terrible.”
“It smells terrible,” he says sheepishly. “That would be the walker intestines.”
A wet laugh. She pulls her face away, still keeping close to him, leaning into his touch. “I look like a mess. No sleep-” she wipes her nose. “Is that snot?”
“Again, you’ve come to the right place.”
She coughs, fresh moisture flooding her eyes. Louis draws her in again.
“Did I say something wrong?”
“No,” she says. “It just... No one’s told me that before. It doesn’t feel right.”
“It is. Do you know how amazing you are?” His tone shifts to something more somber. “If you ever want to talk, just tell me, okay?”
“I have no idea how someone like you still exists,” says Clementine, chest swelling.
“Is that a good or a bad thing?”
“Good. Very good. And the offer is mutual, just so you know. Don’t keep everything bottled up.”
“Alright.”
“Louis.”
“I got it! I got it.” He bumps her shoulder, eyes crinkled in appreciation.
They spend another moment in silence: this one full, soothing. Louis continues rubbing circles on her knuckles and he melts onto her shoulder, head tilted, dreads tickling the back of her neck. How fate lead her here, after so many years of disaster, to someone who has the best of humanity left in him, someone genuine and honest and boisterous— to a place where she can feel safe, even if the safety's fleeting— she'll probably never know.
“I do want to talk,” she says. “I’m just… tired. And I don’t know where to start.”
“You don’t have to know,” Louis says. “Say the first thing that comes to mind. It probably won't make sense, but that doesn't matter. At least you’re letting it out.”
She shrugs.
Louis purses his lips thoughtfully. Then, in a luminous epiphany, he grins to himself and begins bunching up the blanket in his arms, sliding himself from the mattress to the floor. He pulls Clementine with him, and in a swift movement, fans the blanket around the two of them and cocoons them inside. She feels like a child again, taking refuge in a pillow fort, warm and protected. She takes his hand.
“How about we start from the beginning?” He says.