Chapter Text
When Clementine dreamed of the future as a young girl, she dreamed of love and flowers, a home with neighbours who liked her, and letters from her father. Maybe a wedding or therapy, whichever got there first, and a dog or four to drive her mad when she tried to cook dinner. She thought about a job as an adventurer, taking bounties and finding missing people, or maybe as a baker— two wildly different careers, but nobody ever told her she had to be consistent with her dreams.
When Clem tried to imagine the future, it was always interesting, full of all kinds of adventures and strange things. Still, she’d never imagined one of those adventures would be one where she might one day kill a man to get to her dreams, or that one of her perilous fights would be the one where she’d stare down her father in an abandoned city square. She’d always wanted her father to join her plans in life, but she never thought she’d have to murder to get there.
For some reason, Clementine had dared to hope that perhaps things would go according to a plan, but much like seagulls and raccoons get into trash no matter how locks you put on a bin to keep them out, trouble and strange developments wormed their way into her life no matter how hard she tried to be good.
No, life clearly had no intention of following a neatly organized map she’d drawn out for it.
Growing up in a region called the Black Hallows, she should’ve learned that life wasn’t going to go her way, but Clem had always been a little thick-headed.
To the world outside, the Hallows were known for being the lunar elven homelands, where the elves wove magic into the sky and earth as skillfully as a spider wove a web. Large spires of crystal floated in the canopy, tethered together by bridges-- it was a beautiful place, the buildings caught the sun in a way few others could, miniature rainbows in the cracks of crystalline towers made for a sight unlike any other. The elves were right to be proud of it. But to Clementine, it was a place where deviance was punished swiftly, and conformity was praised. She learned from a young age that there was something very different about her compared to the other lunar elves around her, and that, in their eyes, made her very, very wrong.
It was only when her mother finally sat her down and told Clem about her father that she understood why she looked different—why the other kids never wanted to play with her while she was growing up, or why elders sneered at her.
Elves were a closed-off race, hidden high in the forest trees, sneering at anyone else. They were known for their beauty and elegance, and Clementine... Well, she was decidedly not known for these things. She had a long face, gaunt and sunken, and a long, thin nose, slightly crooked and upturned at the tip and nostrils, as if whatever god that had created her had decided halfway through that they wanted to give her a different nose but forgot to fix the rest of it. That’s how most of her looked— like someone changed their mind in the middle of sculpting her; made split-second decisions and never smoothed everything together. But it wasn’t just her different appearance that made the other elves reject her, no, it was her heritage; Clementine wasn’t entirely elven, she learned. Her father was human, sort of- a vampire, more specifically. Her mother had fallen in love with him despite a prejudice that elves had against other races, and together, they had Clem.
But he’d left— Clementine had known that, already. Her mother had never given a straight answer on that, but Clem had long given up trying to get anything from her mother; she was a distant woman, focused on her career, and sometimes, Clem suspected, forgetting that she had a half-breed daughter. They didn’t interact much, especially as Clementine got older- that’s why it surprised her to receive a gift on her twenty-second birthday; a backpack, a nice one. The pack held several things, though a new cloak was what caught her eye first. It was a rich, olive green, with delicate gold embroidery around the hood. It was decidedly plain, for something of Elven origin, but Clementine ignored that altogether and pulled the fabric up to her nose, inhaling deeply. It smelled of citrus and juniper; an enchantment that elves often had on many articles of clothing, but one Clem had never used before. Elves preferred stronger scents, and they always made her feel like she was suffocating— this was softer though, she didn’t mind it as much. The cloak was beautiful, she decided; maybe her mother paid more attention to her tastes than Clem had given her credit for.
The rest of the bag held items that didn’t seem to fit together, at first; a dagger, gold and clearly made for ceremonial tasks instead of actual use, was painted to appear more functional. There was a small pouch of money, which Clementine didn’t bother counting, shooting her mother a confused look the more she pulled from the bag— a leatherbound journal and some pencils were also in there as she rooted around, but the only thing that really stopped her was a photograph. It was old, or not well-kept, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the image of her mother and a man standing together, holding a baby. Obviously, it was her father, but she struggled to connect the idea of him to an actual image after so long.
Her father was blond and pale- so pale, it made sense why Clementine didn’t have a tone of skin as deep as everyone else around her. His eyes weren’t visible, as both he and her mother were looking down at the pale blue bundle in her mother’s arms, but it made Clem wonder if maybe her yellow eyes, the ones that had always garnered scorn from her peers, came from him.
Her mother had always claimed to have no trinkets of Clem’s father, no mementoes or physical memories to pass down to her daughter. It shouldn’t have surprised Clementine that her mother had lied, but she couldn’t wholly smother the anger swelling in her throat, colouring her face and tips of her pointy ears lilac purple as she gripped the edges of the picture tightly, wrinkling them further.
Clementine’s mother spoke up after a moment of watching her daughter sift through the gifts, not to address her previous falsehood of not having anything to give Clem, but to tell her that these were for finding her father. There was no exact location, no letters with an address, but Clementine’s mother could give her the last place she knew he was at, and for Clem, that was the most she’d ever gotten from her mother.
She was young, for an elf, to be setting off on her own; elves typically stayed with their parents until they were around one-hundred years of age, but even her mother must have known it would be better for her than staying, living with constant disdain on her peer's faces.
Clementine was given little time to prepare; her mother encouraged her to start as soon as possible, and Clem couldn't admit to wanting to stay longer than she had to.
Dressed in her new cloak, knife strapped to her side and bag slung across her shoulders, Clementine was almost ready to set out; she fidgeted with the clasp on her cloak, jittery hands making it hard to get it to close and stay in one spot without slipping. It was anxiety-inducing, leaving the place you grew up in for the last twenty-odd years, but Clementine wouldn’t exactly miss it; the kids teasing her, or the elders whispering about her behind her back; the vacant stare she got from her mother. No, she wouldn’t shed tears leaving.
Clementine’s mother paused her only to pass jewellery on, a necklace and the rings her mother always wore, a set of new earrings and a nose ring; a way of saying that maybe she did care, or perhaps she’d never known how to say it.
With the silver jewellery throne in her bag, Clementine set out-- never looking back at the city that had made her so miserable, looking forward to new sights and new people.