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She comes to say goodbye to him, for what it’s worth.
The hospital in Richmond isn’t anything special, despite how much Eleanor likes to sing its praises. Granted, Clementine figures any hospital is special nowadays, but without electricity most of the equipment was useless and there were barely any supplies left after the events of just days prior. Lingard would have a heart attack if he saw this place now, she thinks as she walks down the hall to Gabe’s room. She’s pretty sure the hospital is at capacity following the past few days, and she can see families in some of the rooms. She passes by an open door with a woman crying next to the hospital bed inside and quickens her pace ever so slightly, averting her eyes to the floor as she does. It’s no secret that there were a lot of lives lost in the chaos of David’s attempted execution and Kate putting a hole in the wall surrounding Richmond, and that the community would be reeling from the loss for a while still. She shakes the thought from her mind with a frown, because she had already decided she wasn’t going to be here to watch it happen. Whether Richmond could rebuild or if it would fall apart without David wasn’t something she was going to keep herself up at night about.
She stops in front of Gabe’s door and reaches to knock, freezing when she hears voices inside. They’re angry, loud enough that she can hear them through the door yet quiet enough that she can’t make out what they’re saying without putting her ear up against it. “Why does everyone keep treating me like a kid after all of this?” Gabe snaps, followed by the sound of pacing footsteps on creaking floors. If she tries hard enough, she can imagine what he looks like - furrowed eyebrows and a scowl on his face, his hands clenched into fists to hide trembling fingers, shoulders squared as though he’s going to take a swing at someone. She’d mocked him for it before, the false bravado and the way his face always betrayed how scared he actually was, but she remembers being the exact same kind of angry at the world. If she’s honest with herself, she thinks she still is, just in a different way, for different reasons. Maybe it meant she had grown up, she couldn’t tell quite yet. “I can take care of myself, just let me prove it!”
“Because you are a kid, Gabe.” Javier’s voice sounds tired. Or maybe stressed. Probably both. It wasn’t hard to believe that the remaining residents were reluctant to listen to the man who, in their eyes, had allowed their community to be destroyed and their friends killed, but Javier’s charisma was proving enough to slowly win people over. If only that charisma was enough to pacify his nephew. “I’m not going to let you get yourself killed to prove some point.” She hears him sigh, can imagine him dragging a hand across his face and groaning in frustration because arguing with Gabe never went anywhere, before footsteps begin approaching the door. She steps back in time for the door to swing open and does her best to look like she hadn’t heard anything. Javier stares at her for a minute in silence before clearing his throat, greeting her with a nod before slipping past her and continuing down the hall. He disappears around the corner leading to the entrance and she’s left standing in the hallway, debating whether or not to go through with what she set out to do. She needs to say goodbye to him, needs to satisfy whatever inkling in her mind has her convinced that he could change her mind somehow.
She takes a deep breath, steeling her resolve, and peeks her head through the doorway. Gabe is standing in front of the window next to his bed, seemingly unaware of her presence as he stares out at the street down below. She raises a hand and lightly raps her knuckles on the doorframe. She’s not sure if it’s the motion of turning to the side or the flinch of being startled, but Gabe cries out in pain and wraps an arm around his torso, doubling over and leaning on his other hand planted on the windowsill. She rushes to his side, apologies spilling over and worry etched into every part of her face. “Sorry, sorry, I’m sorry,” she’s babbling like a child, her heart is racing and fuck, she should go get Eleanor to handle this. She turns to find one of the nurses when Gabe’s hand closes around her wrist to keep her from moving, his breath coming slower. He lets out a long stream of air through his nose, slowly straightening his back until he’s standing as straight as she thinks he can be. “You shouldn’t be standing.” She glances over her shoulder to the door, then back to his face - his eyes squeezed shut and his jaw tense - and she wishes Javier would come back to help her force him to lay back down. You shouldn’t be here, the thought crosses her mind as quickly as it passes, just long enough to burn a frown into the corners of her mouth. She feels guilty for thinking badly of his father even after he’s dead, but she doesn’t know if she’ll ever stop blaming David for this.
“I know.” He eases himself into a sitting position on the bed, breathing out slowly as the mattress dips underneath him. “Javi’s already gotten mad at me for it.” He smiles sheepishly up at her and for a moment, Clementine remembers that they’re kids. She wonders what he would be doing if none of this had happened, if he had never met her and she never knew he existed. It’s such a faraway thought, imagining any sort of reality where they’re normal, safe, maybe even happy for a fleeting moment. She’d be in the seventh grade now, she figures, and he’d be in the eighth. Maybe David would go to his baseball games (would Javier teach him how to play?), maybe her father would watch her play volleyball. Maybe they would lead completely ordinary lives and never meet each other, or maybe they were the kind of people that needed each other in every instance of life. She’d have to ask Kate before she left. She’d never really understood the whole fate thing, no matter how many times Luke had explained it to her in the past.
She’s pulled from her thoughts when he says her name and realizes she’s been staring at the wall in front of her for who knows how long, that he’d been talking to her about something or the other while she did. “You’re thinking too much again,” Gabe says, smiling at her again and her heart drops into her stomach because this was it. She wonders what Lee would do if he was here, what Kenny would say if he was around to give her advice. She knows Kenny would tell her that of course she has to leave, has to find AJ before it’s too late and she loses him forever, that Lee would tell her to do what felt right and would keep her people safe, even if it meant some people were upset.
Leaving feels right. Leaving would keep AJ safe. Leaving would keep her safe, would keep her from growing attached to a boy who was going to die someday and her stomach is twisting and her chest hurts and- “I’m leaving,” she blurts, her eyes still focused on the faded stain on the wall behind his head. The air in her lungs leaves in a rush as she lets go of a breath she didn’t know she was holding and she feels her fingertips trembling as her hands close into fists at her sides. She doesn’t look at him, doesn’t look him in the eyes because she knows the hurt in them would make her take it back, shovel the words back into her mouth and bury them deep. But now the air is heavy and she can hear her heart beating in her ears, and she knows that there’s no going back now. “I have to find AJ.”
Gabe doesn’t say anything, just stares at her like she’s told him that walkers have gone extinct. Clementine wishes he would get angry, yell at her, call her every traitorous name in existence, something other than just letting her talk. She’s babbling off justifications for leaving, as though she needs to provide any explanation at all, when his hand slowly reaches out to her. His finger bends through one of her belt loops and he tugs her towards him. It’s a bit awkward with him sitting down, and she’s terrified of bumping him in the ribs, but his arms wrap around her waist and pull her forward until her head comes to rest on his shoulder. She breathes him in and smells the rosemary that Richmond puts in their soap, his fingers curling into the fabric of her shirt like she’s going to disappear if he lets go. She can feel the outline of the bandages wrapped around his torso under his shirt, traces over it with her fingers like it’s the only thing she’ll remember about him. “I’m going with you.” His voice sounds so sure, as though it’s a decision he’d already made long before, or a decision that was his to make in the first place.
“Your family needs you here,” she whispers into his shoulder, swallowing the lump forming in her throat. In any other universe, under any other circumstances, she would consider it. In this universe, he was in no condition to travel and likely wouldn’t be for a few weeks if Eleanor was right about a busted rib. It was too long to wait, too long to stay in one place when it had gone to shit once already. Too long to spend looking over both of their shoulders and waiting for the inevitable. She doesn’t know how many losses she has left in her, how many graves she can dig while tears soaked into her shoes and her chest ached from screaming.
There’s a beat of silence where she swears she can hear the blood in her ears before he lets out a long sigh. His left hand grips the back of her shirt and he gently tugs her backwards, grimacing as his arm extends too far when she stumbles a step. “Come back,” he breathes it out in one word, like saying it fast enough will keep her from refusing. “Next week, month, year - I don’t care, just come back.” He stares her in the eye as he says it, boring through her and sending blood rushing to her cheeks. “I can’t lose you, too.”
She takes a deep breath and, before her mind can talk her out of it, takes a step forward. Her hands find his face and she presses her lips to his, her heart in her ears and her stomach in her feet. She feels his hands on her waist and he leans into her, his breath tickling her cheek as he exhales through his nose. She’s relieved to see his cheeks tinged the same shade of pink when they separate, his eyes combing over her face like he’s trying to memorize her before she’s gone. She draws in a breath and feels her resolve cracking with it. Some part of her knows that this just made it worse, because now everything was out in the open and fuck, he was looking at her like she just made a promise.
“Be alive for me to come back to.” Her thumb traces the scar forming along his jaw, frowning at the way the white line stands out against his skin. He doesn’t fight her when she steps away for what she knows is the last time, glancing over her shoulder at the door behind her. He watches her for a moment before slowly nodding his head, resigning himself to the fact that that was the best he would get from her. It wasn’t a solid agreement or refusal, because Clementine knew better than that, but it left him enough hope to hold on to. She doesn’t know if it’s a good thing, hopes it doesn’t ruin him the way she thinks it’ll ruin her.
“I owe you a rematch in euchre when you come back.” he says to her back as she’s walking out. She stops for a moment in the doorway, breath caught in her throat and brows furrowed. She clears her throat before looking at him with a smile and nodding. She doesn’t give him time to say anything else before she’s gone, heading down the hallway towards the entrance of the hospital.
He’s just a boy, her brain chides itself, repeating the phrase over and over even when her sleeve comes away wet from her face. He’s just a boy and you don’t need him to survive but I wanted to love him so bad this isn’t fair.
She shakes her head, wiping her sleeve across her eyes one more time before she steps through the front doors of the hospital. Find Javier, her mind says this time, gentler. Her eyes scan the street in front of her before she turns left, making her way towards what had become the Garcia residence, the house they’d been holed up in when they learned David was going to be executed. It all seems so long ago, even though she knows it’s only been a few days. Everything seems so long ago as she makes her way through the streets of Richmond, and part of her worries that she’s going to forget this place eventually. But maybe that was for another time, when she had less on her mind and in her heart.
Maybe the hurt meant she was growing up, she couldn’t tell quite yet.