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The sun is just barely setting, but it’s cold enough that they’ve already got the fire going. Clementine sits with AJ in her lap, rubbing circles into his chubby cheeks with her thumb, while Kenny hums to himself and keeps their fire alive by poking it with the end of his stick.
The sky is slowly turning pink. They haven’t encountered any walkers for about three days now- which doesn’t seem like much, but, well. Small blessings.
She wouldn’t say things have been easy. The two of them are taking care of a fussy toddler, Clementine is just starting to move through the beginnings of puberty and Kenny’s always nervous to explain everything to her, and then the undead, on top of all of that. Things haven’t been easy, but they’ve been easier .
She wishes things could stay like this, just a bit longer.
Kenny’s beard has grown out a lot, recently. He’d kind of given up on trimming his beard and his hair, and as Clementine observes him she begins to frown smally.
“You should really cut that,” she says, breaking the silence between the three of them. Kenny blinks at the fire, then up at her, and smiles sheepishly.
“Sorry, I didn’t catch that, Clem,” He responds, and Clementine’s frown turns concerned. He’s been doing that a lot these past couple weeks, getting lost inside his own thoughts. “Mind repeating?”
“You should cut your beard,” she says. “And your hair. They’re getting long.”
Kenny tilts his head, considering. “You don’t like it?” he asks with a grin. “Don't it make me look like a bit of a badass?”
“Even if it did,” Clementine rolls her eyes. “Long is dangerous.”
Kenny purses his lips, then nods after a second. “Guess you’re right,” he says. “Lee taught you that, didn’t he?”
An ache crawls up her chest at the mention of his name, but she pushes it down. They don’t talk about Lee often, but they talk about him more than her and Christa did. She’s not sure if she appreciates it or not.
She nods.
Kenny stands, sets his stick aside. He moves towards the car, rifles around in the trunk a bit, then reappears with a pair of old rusty scissors and a broken mirror. He sits back down by the fire and gets to work, chopping his hair off unevenly. AJ squirms in her lap, apparently interested, so she lifts him up and moves over next to Kenny to watch.
“Want me to do you guys, too?” He asks. Clementine looks at the uneven mess of hair he’s left on himself and raises an eyebrow. The man laughs.
“I’ll go easier,” he says. “I know you care about how your hair looks- me, not so much.”
Clementine nods, slowly. She sits AJ down next to her and slides in front of Kenny, waiting.
Apparently she looks tense, because Kenny pats her on the shoulder with a quiet laugh. “I’m not gonna cut you, sweetheart. I know how to do hair. I used to always….” he trails off.
“... yeah?”
“I used to cut Duck’s,” he says quietly. “And me and Sarita would cut each other’s, too.”
“Oh…” Kenny doesn’t talk about them, often. Less often than he does Lee, at least. Clementine knows that it hurts him, not in exactly the same way these things hurt Clementine, but still. “Kenny, um...”
“I’m okay, kid,” he assures her, takes her hat off the top of her head and undoes her ponytails. “It’s good to talk about this stuff, sometimes.”
Clementine watches the fire sway back and forth, listens to it crackle and hiss. The sky’s gone from pink to purple now, and Kenny quickly gets to work, brushing her tangled hair out with his fingers and beginning to snip.
“Kenny?” She asks, and the man hums in response. “Can I ask you something?”
“Go ahead, sweetheart.”
Clementine closes her eyes, sighs. She never got to know Sarita very well, but she cared for her, and Sarita cared back. She knew Duck and Katjaa better, but her memories from then aren’t all there. Despite that, she misses them, all three of them, but she knows Kenny misses them different.
“What’s it like to love someone?”
The scissors stop, and after a moment Clementine feels Kenny shift from behind her. He sighs, muffled by his palm.
“Y-you don’t have to answer,” she says, suddenly self conscious. “If you-”
“It’s okay, darlin’,” he says, slowly gets back to work. “Love is… how you feel about AJ, right? Or… Lee, back then.”
“Not like that,” Clementine frowns. “I understand that- like the way you love your parents. That’s how I love you, too. I mean like… Katjaa, and Sarita…”
When Kenny doesn’t say anything again, she turns around to look at him. She knows it’s a tough subject for him, even if he’s gotten better about his anger and his sadness. There are tears in his eyes, but-
He’s smiling.
“Thanks for saying that, Clementine,” he says quietly, and Clementine’s chest aches when she realizes what he means. Does he not think she loves him?
“AJ loves you too,” she presses. “We both do, Kenny.”
He wipes at his eyes, scissors forgotten at his side, and nods. “I love you too, Clem. Both of you, more than you know.”
He fiddles with the knees of his pants a bit, a nervous habit Clementine had noticed he’d picked up after they’d all left Wellington. He looks up at the darkening sky and his smile turns small, soft.
“I don’t know how to explain it, Clem…” he whispers. “When you love somebody, you just know.”
Clementine nods, assuming that’s all she’s gonna get out of him, but he keeps going.
“When I met Katjaa, it wasn’t love-at-first-sight or any of that business. I took my dog in to the vet and she was on staff that day. She brought him back to me, and I thought how cute her accent was. Accidentally said it out loud, too, ‘cuz she blushed and laughed and called me a charmer.”
“Things… went from there. I’d been on dates with plenty of women but this was different. She was kind, and she was gentle, and my heart swelled when I was around her. She made everything easy. And then when we had little Duck, well…”
His eyes shine. “Being a father is something different. You look at that kid and it’s like… he’s yours, he's your baby, but he’s also his own person and you know no matter what he does, he’s going to make you proud.”
Clementine glances at AJ, then back at Kenny. There are tears streaming down his face now, and his lips are pulled into a strange smile- like he’s happy but trying not to sob at the same time.
“When they left… you and Lee were all I had. There was Ben and Christa and Omid, but I wasn’t close with them. Not in the same way. Lee had made himself my family, had done so much for the three of us. And then he was gone, and you were gone and I couldn’t find you, and…”
“I met Sarita when I was at my worst. Loving her was different than loving Katjaa- Katjaa made my life, but Sarita saved it. She made everything seem like it was going to be okay, made things feel normal even with all of the shit going on around us. We needed each other.”
“...Kenny?”
“Yeah?”
“Did you love Lee?”
Kenny looks down at her, shocked. The fire illuminates his face in orange, highlights the tears on his cheeks and his warbling expression. Then, he laughs. Once, twice, until he’s laughing so hard AJ starts to giggle along, and then his laughs turn into quiet sobs.
“You know, Clem,” he mutters snottily. “If anyone would have said something like that to me at the start of all this- hell, if anyone would have asked me anything like that anytime before we went for Wellington, I probably would’a screamed at them or insulted them.”
His smile fades. “... I wasn’t ever a very good person, I guess.”
“Kenny-”
“I think that, after everything happened, I felt like Lee was going to be the only thing I’d ever have left. I had worried so much for Katjaa and Duck even before they'd... well, but Lee was different. I was so sure he was going to be the one to always be there, that he was going to be there for me no matter what happened. He was strong for everyone, not just for you, y'know? And then, when he got bit…”
He looks at Clementine, eyes sad. She nods, understanding.
“It was different from how I loved Katjaa and Sarita. Different from how I loved Duck and you and AJ, too. But… I think I did love Lee. He was my best friend. Even when he was gone, and I…”
He stops after that, puts his head in his hands with a quiet ‘I’m sorry, darlin’’ and Clementine moves closer to him, wraps her arms around him. She finds that she’s sniffling herself, shaking with the force of trying to hold back her tears. She misses them- all of them- so, so much. She can imagine Lee across the fire, shaking his head at them with a laugh, hair graying and AJ in his lap.
Kenny turns, envelops her into a real hug, and AJ crawls over to get in it too, the both of them laughing tearily.
“We’ll get to Florida soon,” he whispers into her hair. “We’ll get to Florida, get a boat, and we won’t have to worry about any of this shit anymore, Clem. No more dying, no more losing anyone we love. I promise.”
Drifting asleep with her boy in her lap, Clementine holds on to that hope.
(In the morning Kenny will wake her so he can sleep, and she’ll dig the scissors out from under him and finish cutting her hair, put her hat back on firmly. She knows love in the way she loved her parents, and Lee, and Kenny, and Duck, and Sarah, and AJ, and… so many people. She wonders though, if she’ll ever feel love like Kenny has. She hopes she gets that far.)