Chapter 13:
Carley's hand closed around his wrist before he made it to the door.
Not hard. Not a restraint, exactly. Just present, a hand around his wrist, and the particular quality of someone who had decided that this was the line and had placed themselves on it.
Clark stopped.
His body had already mapped the exit. The door was two steps. The walkway was ten. The gap in the gate was forty meters, and the woods were thirty past that, and in the woods, he was small and black and completely invisible, and nothing that lived in the woods had the capacity to ask him a question.
He could become a legend around these parts in a few years, if he survived that long. People would talk about a beast in the forests around Macon. He could start the werewolves legends, but for cats.
Because that's what he wanted to do. To go into that forest and only come up once a month or a year as a human. He could go. She wasn't strong enough to stop him. He was taller, faster, and his instincts were already pointing at the door like a compass finding north.
He didn't go.
Because he couldn't. Because it was Carley. And he didn't want to hurt Carley, and couldn't start now.
"Stop." Her voice was quiet. Not a command, not quite. More like a request that had decided it wasn't going to be refused. And the worst part, it was oh-so-similar to the way his mother used to say.
Clark stopped struggling. His shoulders dropped a fraction. He stood in the middle of the room with his back to both of them and his wrist in Carley's hand, and stared at the door.
The door stared back.
He heard her move from the bed, slowly turning him away from the bed and guiding him to the bed. Once he sat down, he heard Lee move from the chair. Not toward the door- across the room. He crouched, and when Clark registered it, Lee was kneeling in front of him. Not blocking the exit. Just there, eye level, in the way of someone who had decided the conversation was going to happen at the same height.
"What are you afraid of?" Lee asked, cutting through everything. All the ways and walls and deflection that he had prepared. From the cliche "nothing," to changing the subject or even scoff at the man.
But he did none of that. Because Lee saved him when he didn't have to. Because Lee was a good man, and he liked Lee. Respected him enough to do none of that.
So, he stayed silent. Clark looked at the wall to Lee's left.
Lee waited.
Carley's hand moved from his wrist. He felt the loss of it before he'd registered it was happening, and then her arm was around his shoulders instead, her weight settling against his side, her head finding his shoulder with the careful deliberateness of someone who knew the gesture might make him bolt and was doing it anyway.
He tensed. Every muscle in his upper body went rigid the way they did when something unexpected entered his space.
She didn't move. She just stayed there. Present and warm and slightly shorter than him, which meant her head sat at the place where his shoulder met his neck, and she was looking at the same wall he was, and she said: "What's wrong?"
He didn't answer, silently basking in her presence, her comfort, her care, and her kindness.
"We'll wait." Her voice was very quiet. "All night if we have to." A pause. "I'm never letting you go." She told him, her hug becoming a little tighter. "Not if I have a choice in the matter."
"You don't deserve to be alone," Lee said, from the floor. Still not pushing. Just placing it down in front of him. "Nobody does. But especially not someone who's been doing it since the start."
Clark looked at Lee's face for the first time since he'd turned back. Lee looked back at him the way Lee looked at most things- steadily, without flinching from whatever he found.
Clark looked away first.
Where was he supposed to even start? What should he even tell them? What should he do if not run away from what "loving" someone could mean?
He was self-aware enough that he was broken and couldn't be fixed. Just mended, but if he couldn't even do that himself, what right did he have to push it on someone else? He couldn't. He needed to keep his traumas to himself.
He opened his mouth to say something that would close this down. Something practical. Something that would redirect the conversation into territory he could manage, like food supply or horde patterns, or literally anything that existed outside this room.
"I don't know how to do this," he said instead.
Not what he'd planned. But it came out before the filter caught it, and once it was out, taking it back would have required more energy than he had.
Lee didn't move. Carley didn't move.
"Do what?" Lee asked.
"This." Clark gestured vaguely at the room. At both of them. At the warmth of Carley's arm around him that he hadn't moved away from despite every muscle telling him to head towards the exit again.
"Any of this. And her-" He stopped...
The cat was out of the bag… Clark's shoulder slumped even more, as he wanted to curl in on himself and just sleep all of this off. That it might be just a dream, and none of this happened.
"I used to think about it. Before. What it would look like. What kind of person I'd find? What I'd be like with her." He paused. "I had a whole idea. Very detailed. Embarrassingly detailed."
"What happened to the idea?" Carley asked. Her voice was still quiet. She hadn't lifted her head from his shoulder.
"Same thing that happened to everything else." He looked at the wall. "The outbreak."
The fire outside had gone low. He could hear it through the window- the sound of coals settling, the occasional pop of a knot in the wood. Somewhere on the walkway, he heard Lilly's footsteps making their way to her room a couple of doors down. The world outside continuing its business.
"I don't know how to be in a relationship," Clark said. "Not as a joke. Not as a thing people say. I genuinely-" He pressed his hands flat on his knees. "I watched my parents. I know what it looked like from the outside. I know what it looked like when it was good, which was most of the time, and I know what it looked like when it wasn't, which was some of the time. But watching something and knowing how to do it are not the same thing."
"No," Lee agreed. "They're not."
"I'll hurt her." The words came out flat. Factual. The way he said most things cost him something.
He admitted, because of his feelings for her, for… Clementine was not the source of his avoidance. It just was one of those things that got affected by the root cause. And he didn't want to talk about that cause.
Because it was much more comfortable keeping it together. If he could distract them with his feelings for her, he'd take it.
"Not on purpose. I don't have a category for this. For-" He stopped again. "I'll say the wrong thing. I'll not say anything for too long because I don't know when to say things. I'll disappear into the woods for three hours because I need to think, and I won't realize that she didn't know where I was and was worried." He paused. "I already do that." Carley seemed to finally understand why he remained in his cat form, even in the motel, "To all of you. And I don't know how to stop."
"Clark." Carley's voice.
"I'm stupid about people," he said. "I'm smart about other things, I know that, but I am genuinely, specifically stupid about people, and that was fine when the only person I was being stupid about was myself. But if it's her-"
"We'll help you," Lee said. Simple. No qualification attached.
Clark looked at him.
"That's all," Lee said. "That's the whole answer. You look to us. You're confused, you come to us. You don't know if you said the wrong thing, you come to us. You disappear into the woods for three hours and forget to tell anyone, we'll give you a set time, and you come back by it."
"I already have you," Carley said quietly. "You already have that. You just haven't been using it."
Clark looked at the wall.
Outside, the coals settled again, and Mark had settled on the RV.
"What if I make a mistake?" he said. "A real one. Not a social one." He swallowed. "What if something happens and I can't-"
"We'll figure it out," Carley said immediately.
"You don't know what I'm going to say."
"You're going to say something about not being able to protect her." She lifted her head from his shoulder and looked at him properly, and her eyes, in the low light of the room, were very direct. "Something about a situation going wrong. Something happening that you can't stop."
He held her gaze and said nothing.
"We'll be there," she said. "Lee and I. We're not sending you in alone. We're not sending either of you in alone." A pause. "That mistake won't happen because you won't be the only one watching out for her. You understand me?"
He understood.
He didn't believe it yet because believing was harder than trusting. But he understood.
The room was quiet. Lee was still on the floor, still steady, still not pushing. Carley had put her head back on his shoulder, and he hadn't moved away from it, and he wasn't going to, and he had stopped pretending that was a decision he was still making.
The thing that was sitting in his chest, the thing that had been sitting there since before he'd even knocked on the door, shifted.
Not gone. Just rearranged.
He had been going to leave. He had been going to let this be a door he walked out of and didn't come back through, the way he'd walked out of doors his whole life since the outbreak. He was good at that. He'd gotten very good at that. Forward was the only direction, and looking back cost you things, and he had a list of evidence, a very long and very specific list, for why letting himself want things got them taken away from him.
He opened his mouth to thank them-
"I killed my parents."
The room went completely still.
Not the conversational still of a pause. The other kind. The kind that happened when something was said that couldn't be unsaid, and the air in the room had to adjust to accommodate it.
Clark stared at the wall, biting his lips hard enough that it bleed- until Carley stopped by, tracing her finger through his jaw. He relaxed, and Lee moved to bring a cloth to stop the blood.
He had not said that out loud since it happened.
Lee set the cloth against his lip gently and then settled back onto the floor. Neither of them spoke.
"My mom was first." His voice was even, the way his voice got when he was reporting facts instead of feeling them. He'd gotten good at that. He'd had three months of practice. "My dad- a moment after. I had to-" He stopped. "I had the gun. My dad's gun. He kept it in the glove compartment, and I'd known it was there since I was ten, and I'd never touched it, and then I was touching it."
He looked at his hands.
"I didn't hesitate," he said. "That's the thing that I keep coming back to. I didn't hesitate. I just-" He made a motion with his hand that wasn't quite a gun shape, stopped himself, and put his hand back on his knee. "Two minutes. And then it was over, and I was sitting in a car without a windshield cause the ghoul had smashed it on its way to bite them on a highway in Atlanta with my parents, and they were-"
He stopped.
The fire outside had gone almost entirely to coals. The room was dim and quiet and still, and Lee was on the floor, and Carley's arm was around him, and neither of them had moved or made a sound since he'd started, and that was either the kindest thing anyone had done for him or the most dangerous.
Probably both.
"The system gave me a ticket for it," he said. "My lottery power. Kinslayer. That was the name." He said it flatly. "First human kills. People I loved." A pause. "It named it before I did."
"Clark," Carley said quietly, with Lee showing a confused face, looking up at him and then Carley.
"It's accurate." He cut her off, but without heat. Just tired. "I know why I did it. I know they were already gone. They knew it because we saw a cop shoot down a woman who charged at her. She died and came back when she had no bite. That's how we found that you come back as one of them, no matter how you die. I know there would be nothing left in those bodies that was my parents anymore. And they didn't want to become one of them. I know all of that." He exhaled. "Knowing doesn't change what my hands did."
Lee said nothing. Clark caught his expression in his peripheral vision and didn't say anything.
Clark appreciated that more than he could have said.
"Since then," he continued, "every person I've been near-" He stopped. Started again. "John Walker. Man I found in a house in Atlanta. Dying when I got there. I sat with him and learned his story and put him down before he turned." He paused. Funny how the only reason he remembered his name because it was close to John Smith. A nobody's name. "He's on the list."
"What list?" Lee asked.
"The one I carry." He tapped his chest once. "Everyone I've memorized. Everyone I've sat with and then killed before they could turn."
Lee was quiet for a long time.
Not the managed quiet of a man choosing his words. The other kind- the kind that meant he was sitting with something and wasn't going to pretend he wasn't.
"How many names on the list?" he asked, finally.
Clark thought about it because he didn't know- wasn't sure anymore. Because the names were only in his head, not written down. He'd forgotten most of them- if not, all of them. John Walker was the only one that he could remember clearly, and even then, he'd forgotten the man's face and most of the details. Where did he come from, and why was he in that house except for the bite. What had happened to him?
"I'm not sure anymore," he said.
"But I only remember three now… Including my parents." He let out with a shaky sigh.
Lee nodded once, the slow nod of a man receiving information and treating it with the weight it deserved.
"I've got names too," Lee said. "Not a lot. But names." He looked at his own hands for a moment. "The man I killed. My wife's-" He stopped. Reset. "Him. And others, since. People I couldn't get to in time, or people I had to-" He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.
Clark looked at him.
"The list- or more like the weight of it doesn't go away," Lee said. "I'm not going to tell you it does. But it gets-" He paused. "It gets quieter. When you're not carrying it alone."
Clark sat with that.
Carley hadn't moved from his shoulder. Her breathing was even and slow, the rhythm of someone who had decided to be exactly where she was and was not going anywhere. And then, there was Lee, who had sat down on the floor, back rested against the frame of the bed and beside his legs that he pat the closest to.
He thought about Clementine, cross-legged on the walkway outside his room, talking to a cat she didn't know was him. The slow curl of his tail that he couldn't control. The small smile she didn't know was there.
He thought about running. The woods. The thirty seconds it took for the tree line to swallow him whole, and how simple everything got once it did.
He was so tired of running.
"Okay," he said, wanting to push down that urge for now. See where staying still would get him. "Okay," Clark said again, quieter. "I'll try."
Carley's arm tightened slightly around his shoulders. Just once. Then relaxed. He ignored her teary sniff as she broke the hug. "You can stay here-"
"Yeah, no." Clark immediately shot down as he looked at the figure of Lee in the dark and Carley.
"Clark." Carley warned, reluctant to let him go from her room, but he smiled, shaking his head. "I promise…" He began. "I'll be here in the morning when you wake up."
With great hesitation, she allowed him to stand up, which he noted to feeling lighter, in body and also in the head- enough that he almost shot forward. He pushed it to the side, reassuring Carley should take priority over whatever this was.
After a short good bye, Clark was by her door, hesitated, before turning around as he saw Lee stand up, his hand in Carley's. They noticed him, probably already expecting him to thank them in that graceless tone of his.
"When will you two marr-" He got a pillow thrown at his face before he could finish.
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AN: So, this was prewritten, which is why I didn't add the tickets in this. Instead, I've also taken this chapter into account for the tickets. I had to think hard, but here's the ticket that Clark should get from chapter 10 to chapter 13.
PS: this is the clementine Clark sees:
Spoiler: ClementinePS: I might abuse the button.
This is your last chance. Please, let me know if I should deny, add, or modify any of these tickets before I write chapter 14, where he will open all this. ALSO TELL ME IF I SHOULD FUSE THE BRONZE ONES. WE DONT WANT TRASH FILLING OUR CHARACTER SHEET:
Spoiler: TICKETS TO DISCUSS:
The following ticket is for when Lilly said no to Clark wanting to go hunt:
[Bronze Ticket Acquired.]
|Immovable Object — You held your ground against someone who had every reason to make you fold.|
After returning with the turkey and demanding an apology:
[Bronze Ticket Acquired.]
|Receipt — You made someone acknowledge what you gave before you gave more.|
After Lilly apologizes and Clark apologizes back:
[Bronze Ticket Acquired.]
|Olive Branch — You extended grace to someone who hadn't fully earned it.|
Chapter 11
After the early morning fire conversation with Lee:
[Bronze Ticket Acquired.]
|3 AM Honesty — You told the truth to someone who wasn't asking for it, because the moment was right.|
After the first Monopoly game, specifically when Clementine demands a rematch:
[Bronze Ticket Acquired.]
|Found The One — You made someone want to come back.|
Status Effect: Madness of Love. Target: Touch Starved Fool
[Silver Ticket Acquired.]
| Dust is in the air — You've crushed so hard, The Rock trembles in front of you.|
Chapter 12
After Clark goes to Carley's room and describes his needing of help:
[Bronze Ticket Acquired.]
|Voluntary — You asked for help without being cornered into it. First time.|
Chapter 13:
[Silver Ticket Acquired.]
|First Step — You chose to stay. Not forever. Just tonight. That's enough.|
When he says "I killed my parents" out loud for the first time:
[Gold Ticket Acquired.]
|Named at Last — You said the thing you have never said. Out loud. To people who mattered.|