Chapter 14:
AN: For the tickets, since I wasn't getting many answers, and the ones I did were conflicting with each other. I decided to flip for it. Heads, we fuse. Tails, we do not fuse.
Result, I got tails.
==================================
Entering the dark room, he closed the door behind him; the soft click of the door being locked was too loud for him, but it didn't make his skin crawl in caution. Instead, he stood in the dark for a moment with his back to the room, his hand still on the handle, and let himself exist. Not survive- which consisted of worry, plans, schedules, and much more.
For the first time in three months and a week, Clark stayed still and existed. He didn't run.
He crossed to the bed.
Sat on the edge of it.
Looked at the ceiling, which was low and textured, the same popcorn plaster as everywhere, the same water stain in the corner that he'd catalogued his first night here and hadn't looked at since.
He lay back.
The mattress took his weight with a sound that he'd memorized by now- a woody growl that was ignored. He stared at the ceiling, and his chest felt like something had been removed from it, and he wasn't sure yet if that was good.
Lighter. That was the word he'd thought, coming out of Carley's room.
Like a bruise that had been pressed on for so long, it had stopped being painful and only made itself known when the pressure was finally released and he could breathe again.
He pressed the back of his wrist against his eyes.
The ceiling was still there when he moved it.
He thought about his mother's hands, because they were the softest thing he could remember or fantasy by this point. He wasn't sure if he was even remembering her correctly. If it truly was her memory that he was thinking about, or a fantasy that he had cooked up to push himself to survive one more day.
And as if to answer, his mind replayed one of them- memory or fantasy, her hands flour-dusted, the way they always were on Sunday mornings, pressing dough flat on the counter and then scolding him for wanting to mess with her baking.
The sound she made when she laughed at something genuinely funny- a dolphin's cry, not the polite laugh she gave to people she didn't know well, but the real one, the one that came out high-pitched and that she always covered with her hand like she was embarrassed by it, but his father loved it. Because it made her unique to him.
His mind shifted, the thoughts of his mother changing to his father. Teaching him how to bike. Holding him with his solid hands as he pushed him around the street, guiding him to look forward, always forward instead of at his feet. And how he'd turned it into one that was about life in general, a lesson that sprouted from how to bike.
Clark would always roll his eyes whenever he started a lecture, unlike his mom, who would listen for hours and hours until she fell asleep. That's what she used them for: to sleep.
Clark's jaw tightened.
As they shifted, they were staring at him with teary eyes filled with love and worry, and the other filled with pride and certainty that he would succeed, as each of them had a bullet hole in their forehead. A bullet that he fired-
He pressed his wrist against his eyes again, harder this time.
He wanted to blind himself from seeing it each time he thought of them in any way.
His breath exploded from inside him as if he were drowning, and he had finally breathed air.
He turned onto his side.
He didn't mean to. His body made the decision before he'd finished making it, curling inward, knees to his chest, both hands pressed against his mouth and nose to keep the sound from carrying through the walls.
If he suffocated from it, Clark counted it as a win. That way, all of his pain would stop, and he would sleep- he was still trying to run, he realized, relaxing his hold on his own face.
Again, he breathed, as fresh tears painted his face.
He stayed curled like that for a long time.
The fire outside had gone fully to coals. Somewhere down the walkway, a door opened and closed.
The night was as close to peaceful as nights got anymore, and Clark Rogers lay on his side in the dark with his knees to his chest and his hands against his mouth, and cried for his parents in grief for the first time since he'd left their bodies on the highway to rot.
He cried until his chest stopped heaving. Then he kept going a little longer because apparently there was more.
Then that too ran out.
He stayed curled. Didn't move to stretch, didn't shift to cat form, didn't do anything practical with the post-cry exhaustion. He just lay there, and the room was dark and quiet, and his face was wet, and his hands had moved from his mouth to be tucked under the pillow beneath his cheek.
The thought that came, somewhere at the edge of sleep, wasn't about Clementine or Carley or Lee or the list or the power or any of it.
It was his father's voice. The bike lesson. Look forward, always forward.
Not away. Not at your feet. Not behind you.
Forward. Even when staying still.
He was asleep before he'd finished holding onto it.
…
…
…
Unaware of the tickets that he had accumulated for some time due to his mental state, the tickets rolled themselves-
[Bronze Ticket Acquired.]
|Immovable Object — You held your ground against someone who had every reason to make you fold.|
Spoiler: Stone Skin
[Clark Roger has acquired 10 abilities. Another slot is now available to him]
[Bronze Ticket Acquired.]
|Receipt — You made someone acknowledge what you gave before you gave more.|
Spoiler: Leaf Blade
[Silver Ticket Acquired.]
|Olive Branch — You extended grace to someone who hadn't fully earned it.|
Spoiler: Dream Mirror
[Bronze Ticket Acquired.]
|3 AM Honesty — You told the truth to someone who wasn't asking for it, because the moment was right.|
Spoiler: Novice Polearm Mastery
[Bronze Ticket Acquired.]
|Found The One — You made someone want to come back.|
Spoiler: Dry
[Silver Ticket Acquired.]
| Dust is in the air — You've crushed so hard, The Rock trembles in front of you.|
Spoiler: Mentats
[Gold Ticket Acquired.]
|Voluntary — You asked for help without being cornered into it. First time.|
Spoiler: Intermediate Blade Weapon Mastery
[Silver Ticket Acquired.]
|First Step — You chose to stay. Not forever. Just tonight. That's enough.|
Spoiler: Gambler
[Gambler has been toggled. D20 = 18]
[Gold Ticket Acquired.]
|Named at Last — You said the thing you have never said. Out loud. To people who mattered.|
Spoiler: TITTLE
…
…
…
The door had barely clicked shut before Lee exhaled.
It wasn't a loud sound. Just air, released slowly through the nose, the exhale of a man who had been holding something carefully for a long time and had just been given permission to set it down.
Carley understood. She felt it herself as she wiped her tears from her face, the weight of having witnessed something heavy. Just real and enormous, that detailed the work they'd need to do, and left in the room with them now that the person carrying it had gone.
"That was…" Lee started, and stopped.
"Yeah," Carley said.
They sat with that for a moment.
Lee had moved, taking Clark's place. Carley was still on the bed with one less pillow, legs crossed, hands in her lap, and her head found Lee's shoulder as his hand found her back, comforting her. The room felt different now that it was just the two of them. Quieter. Like a storm had passed through it.
"Three months," Lee said. "Alone. Doing all of that alone." He shook his head slightly, "and still standing."
"Still feeding us," Carley added, which made Lee's mouth do a thing that was somewhere between a laugh and a wince.
"Yeah." He looked at the door. "Still feeding us."
She thought about the first time she'd seen him, folded into the corner of that stripped apartment with his weapons in his reach and his face all angles and hollows, and the way he'd opened his eyes at her the second he'd woken up… The boy had accepted death because the weight he'd be carrying was too much.
But now, though it wasn't official, everyone was looking at him the way they'd used to look at Lilly or Lee. Every time he went to hunt, he told everyone to be careful, his back turned. Due to it, he didn't see the adults, the ones who should be leading, nod to him with a sense of… trust and awe.
It was wrong.
But it didn't mean they wouldn't take some burdens.
"He's going to be good for this group," she admitted. Because ever since he joined, there have been fewer and fewer arguments. Even Larry, who would raise his voice at people, had stopped and was simply working on the fence.
"He already is." Lee leaned back in the chair. "Lilly nearly apologized." She rolled her eyes, turning and tucking her face deeper into his neck, inhaling his scent, which reminded her that he needed a shower. They all needed a shower.
"Lilly did apologize."
"Nearly voluntarily apologized." Lee corrected, and this time the thing his mouth did resolved fully into a smile, and Carley felt the butterflies, and her own smile widened just a little.
Before they knew it, they were back to where Clark had interrupted them, their bodies glued to each other, and their lips sucking on each other's.
A pause-
"What's wrong?" She asked him, her voice muffled and heavy and wanting more-
"Do you think they've got the 'talk'?"
Dread killed all her butterflies, and her heart almost stopped. "Oh no…"
…
…
…
Lilly had been awake since six and was simply having a small talk with the man on the lookout, Mark.
This has not been unusual for a week now. Lilly had been awake since six every morning, if she didn't have the night watch, since the outbreak, which she attributed partly to military habit.
For Mark, it was the same reason. He'd usually wake up around the same time as her and partly to the particular anxiety of a man who had survived alone in a commissary for weeks and had developed a relationship with early morning that could charitably be described as compulsive.
What was unusual was that by seven, after Lilly took over, the fire wasn't going.
Mark stood by the cold pit, hands in his pockets, and looked at it the way a man looks at something that has always been one way and has suddenly stopped being that way. The ash was yesterday's. No fresh wood. No coals banked from the night before.
He looked at Clark's door.
Closed. Curtains drawn.
Mark checked his watch- the spare one he'd dug out of the motel office after giving the good one away, which kept slightly worse time but still worked. 7:04.
He looked at the door again.
Then he built the fire himself, because the fire needed building regardless. No, what he was feeling uneasy about was the boy. For a week, he'd been in a routine, and suddenly, he had broken his routine?
'Is he okay?'
By eight, the parking lot had filled in the way it did every morning- Kenny emerging rumpled from his RV, Duck immediately vocal, Katjaa with a quiet and peaceful smile on her face, following her family.
Clementine came out at ten past, which was later than usual.
She crossed to the fire, accepted the tin of something warm that Mark held out, and looked at Clark's door.
Then she looked at the fire.
Then at the door again.
"He's usually up before anyone," she said, to no one in particular.
"He is," Mark agreed.
Lee had emerged from Carley's room at some point- both of them wearing the expression of people who had decided not to acknowledge Kenny's smug look at their tired faces.
He looked at Clementine's face. The face that she was making- uncertainty and a little worry in there- his brain identified. The way her eyes kept returning to Clark's door was the same way they returned to a page she was trying to read in bad light.
"He's sleeping," Lee said.
She looked at him. "It's eight." As if that explained everything. Which, funnily enough, if it regarded Clark Rogers, it did.
"I know."
"He's never sleeping at eight."
"He was tired," Lee said simply. "He's been tired for a long time. He just didn't have anywhere safe enough to actually feel it." He reached for the tin Mark, it tasted incredibly bad, but it was their breakfast for a while now- a week now, offered and wrapped his hands around it. "Let him sleep."
Clementine looked at the door one more time. Something moved through her expression that settled into something she didn't examine too closely, and she nodded once and turned back to the fire.
Ben appeared from his room at roughly this point, with the timing of someone who had been watching through the curtain gap and had identified what he thought was a favorable moment. He crossed to where Clementine was sitting and lowered himself onto the overturned crate beside her with the energy of someone who had been rehearsing something.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey," Clementine said, watching the fire.
"So, I was thinking-"
"Duck!" Katjaa's voice, carrying from the RV.
Duck materialized from somewhere, immediately loud, and crashed into the space between Ben and Clementine with the unerring accuracy of a nine-year-old who had no concept of personal space.
"Clem! Clem, I found a thing, you have to see the thing-"
"What thing?"
"A bug thing. A really big one. Come see-"
Clementine stood. "I'll be back," she said to Ben, and followed Duck toward the RV with the air of someone who had genuinely forgotten he was mid-sentence.
Ben sat on his crate.
The fire crackled.
Mark, who had watched the entire sequence with the controlled expression of a man determined not to react, looked very intently at the middle distance.
Across the fire, Kenny's mouth was doing something he was also clearly suppressing. He caught Lee's eye. Lee looked away first, which helped neither of them.
Carley had her hand pressed flat over her mouth, and Lilly, as the watch, let out a mixture of scoff and cough.
Larry, from his position by the fence, had watched the whole thing with an expression that, on a face less naturally hostile, might have been described as almost sympathetic.
By noon, the parking lot had settled into its midday rhythm- Lilly stretching and hoping her shift would soon be over, Kenny working on the RV with the focused irritation of a man and a machine in a long-term disagreement, Mark doing fence work with Lilly's father after a long nap. Duck had migrated back to his mother.
Clark's door was still closed.
Clementine had looked at it six times. She had not been counting. She was aware of the number anyway.
"I'll check on him," she said.
Lee looked up from the map he and Carley had been studying, his expression doing the thing it did when he was trying not to smile and succeeding partially. Carley's face arranged itself into something neutral with visible effort.
"I'm sure he's fine," Lee said.
"It's noon."
"Clementine-"
"It's noon," she repeated, the tone of someone who has made a decision and is now informing people of it rather than requesting permission. She was already moving toward the stairs.
Lee watched her go.
Carley looked at him.
"Don't," he said.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were going to."
She smiled and looked back at the map, planning their route to Savannah.
The door didn't answer.
Clementine knocked twice, said his name once in a normal voice and once slightly louder, and received nothing.
She tried the handle. Locked.
She stood in front of the door for a moment, thinking about it, then moved to the window. The curtains were drawn, but there was a gap along the left edge where the frame had warped, and through it, in the dim interior, she could see enough of the room to confirm that the shape on the bed was there and wasn't moving.
The window was latched, but the warp in the frame had left just enough give. She worked it with her fingers and felt the latch shift.
The window swung in. She climbed through, thanking Carley for teaching her these skills. The room was dim, the curtains doing most of their job if not all of it.
He was curled on his side, knees pulled up, both hands tucked under the pillow beneath his cheek. His face, in the low light, looked younger than it did outside. Less guarded. The openness of a person who has stopped managing their expression for a few hours.
She said his name.
Nothing.
She said it again and reached out to touch his shoulder, shaking it gently.
He didn't stir.
She frowned.
Her hand moved to his arm, which was the closest thing to her, and she registered the warmth of it before she'd processed what that meant. Not the normal warmth of sleep. The wrong kind.
She touched his forehead.
Pulled her hand back.
Touched it again to be sure.
The heat coming off him was significant. Not imagination, not the warmth of a room with poor ventilation.
A fever.
A real one.
Before she knew it, she had unlocked the door and run to the only person she could think of, while her breathing had turned frantic and her chest hurt in worry.
Lee.
Clementine hit the bottom of the stairs at a run, which was the kind of running that made everyone in the parking lot look up at once.
Lee was already on his feet before she'd reached him.
"He won't wake up," she said, and her voice was doing something it didn't usually do, a thinness at the edges that she was controlling and not quite managing. "He's hot. Really hot. Like-" She pressed her own hand to her forehead in demonstration. "He's burning."
Lee was moving before she'd finished the sentence. Carley was half a step behind him the map forgotten, already moving with the worry of someone whose brain had shifted into emergency mode.
Lee pushed Clark's door open, which Clementine had left open after rushing out to him, and crossed to the bed in three steps. He did what Clementine had done: touched Clark's forehead, registered what was there, and didn't pull back.
The fever was real, and it was significant.
Clark's face, which in sleep had looked younger and unguarded, now was loose and pale and sweaty. His breathing was shallow. Not alarmingly so, but enough that it signaled that it was taking him effort.
"Clark." Lee's voice. Firm, not loud. "Buddy, I need you to wake up for me."
Nothing.
Carley moved to the window and pulled the curtains back, letting the afternoon light in properly. The room changed, gray to pale gold, and she turned back to the bed.
Lee tried again, a hand on Clark's shoulder, a real shake this time. "Clark."
A sound. Not a word.
Carley sat on the edge of the bed.
She looked at his face in the light, properly, for the first time since last night. And there they were- the tear tracks she'd half-expected and hoped not to find, dried now, faint pale lines from the outer corners of his eyes toward the pillow.
She didn't say anything. Lee had seen them too; she could tell from the way his jaw moved once and then settled. Neither of them said anything.
"Hey." She kept her voice quiet, the same quiet as last night, but different and urgent. "Clark. Can you wake up for me, please?"
Another sound. Slightly more structured. His face moved, the smallest contraction around his eyes, like someone trying to surface from something deep and encountering resistance on the way up.
"There you go," she said. "Come on."
His eyes opened.
His beautiful emerald eyes that almost made her lose herself in them, as if she were in a forest. The sunlight made it more tempting to just stare at the marvel, but now wasn't the time.
Not recognition. Not awareness. Just open, the reflexive surface of someone whose body had responded to sound before the mind had caught up with where it was or what was happening.
Then a blink. Then another.
"Hey." Carley again, same quiet. "There you are."
His mouth moved, and then his shoulder. What came out wasn't a word, but a sound.
"Don't." Lee's hand on his shoulder, steady. "Don't try to sit up yet."
Clark's eyes moved- ceiling, curtains, Lee's face, Carley's face- his brain ran automatically even when the rest of him was offline, and she watched him try to place himself. The confusion on his face was different from sleep-confusion.
Slower to clear. His eyes weren't sharp the way they usually were, that alertness he carried like a second skin, stripped back to something younger and undefended. Carley and Lee could finally see the unguarded kid who had to grow up in minutes.
"You have a fever," Carley said, because he was going to ask, and getting there first was kinder. "A real one. You've been out since last night."
His face moved. Something that was trying to be his normal expression and wasn't quite making it. "I'm fine," he said, or started to say- before he coughed, his throat dry.
"Sure," Lee said.
"I am-" He tried to push himself upright. His arms shook with the effort, and Carley's hand was on his chest before he'd made it three inches off the pillow.
"No," she said.
He looked at her hand. Then at her face. Then, with the expression of a man who had given up, he sank back on the bed.
Good. Because his face had gone a shade paler with the effort, and the sheen of sweat on his forehead hadn't been there a moment ago.
"Everything hurts," he said to the ceiling. Like a confession he hadn't meant to make.
"I know," Carley said.
"My chest." A pause. "My bones." But underneath his flat tone, she could hear the edge of it. The real edge. It genuinely hurt, and he was genuinely surprised by how much, and he was scared. Genuinely scared.
A knock at the open door.
All three of them looked- Clark winced, the light being too bright.
Lilly stood in the doorway. She had her arms crossed, which was her default posture, and her expression was back to being tight and controlled, the effort of someone whose face wanted to do something else.
In her hands were things, a small collection of things, held with the careful deliberateness of someone who had assembled them in a hurry and was now uncertain how to present them.
She crossed the room without being invited, set everything on the nightstand with a quiet efficiency that suggested she had decided not to make this a moment, and stepped back.
Three water bottles. A clean towel, folded. Two white tablets. A strip of something wrapped in a cloth that smelled, even from where Carley was sitting, like smoked meat. And, sitting slightly apart from the rest, like it had been placed last and with the most deliberation, a whole apple.
Green. Slightly overripe, but whole.
Clark's eyes had tracked to the nightstand. He was looking at the apple with the expression of someone whose brain was still catching up, but whose body had registered it on a more fundamental level.
Lilly looked at Clark. Clark looked at Lilly.
"Ibuprofen," she said, nodding at the tablets. "Two, with water. All three bottles before tonight." She paused. "The meat's smoked. It'll keep." Another pause, shorter. "The apple's from Clementine, she insisted."
Then she turned and walked back to the door.
She stopped in the frame. Didn't turn around.
"You did well," she said. "Now, rest and recover. Kenny and Mark said they'll take over hunting until you do. We also have a surplus of food from your hunts. So, rest and recover."
She left.
The room was quiet.
Clark was still looking at the doorway she'd gone through. His face had done something complicated and hadn't fully resolved yet.
From the hall, they heard one more thing before Lilly's footsteps reached the stairs- a small sound, from a spot just outside the door, the sound of someone who had been standing very still and had just stopped holding their breath in resignation due to Lilly blowing up her cover.
Clementine appeared in the doorway a moment later, in the way of someone who absolutely had not been standing there for the last several minutes.
"I was just passing," she said.
"Of course," Lee said.
Clark's mouth did something that wasn't quite a smile but was trying. "Thanks," he said to the ceiling.
She stayed in the doorway.
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AN: YOYOYO, I had very different plans for this chapter. I planned to have the St-Jon farm arc alongside the Save-Lots Bandits, but then, when I was writing, it turned into this "recovery" chapter.
PS: please don't use me on me. I know who'se gonna weaponise it. Don't. I'm warning you.
I hope you guys enjoyed this chapter.
Regarding the tickets, as you may have noticed, I changed some ranks of them and since we got gambler, let's hope we stop getting trash things. Also, I'm looking at the character sheet and I believe it's time to donate some abilities and items to others. Cause man it's starting to being a lot of things that I can't track all of it. Another option is to start fusing them instead of giving them away for right now.
Here's my suggestion for which people would get which things. All of you can counter or make up your own sheet and share it with me:
Carley:
Spoiler: Carley Character Sheet
LEE
Spoiler: Lee's Character sheet
Clementine:
Spoiler: Clementine Character Sheet
And speaking of rolls, as you have noticed, we haven't picked the choice from our gold tickets, the choices being a good teacher or having a sword. Let me know your ideas and maybe you'll change mine. I need a discussion on that topic.