thecapitol | (Closed) School's in

Entry tags:

(Closed) School's in

Who| Clementine

smarterthanthem and Roland Deschain

ka_sera_sera
What| Chance meeting leads to Roland getting English reading lessons from Clementine
Where| The library
When| Today-ish
Warnings/Notes| None anticipated!

Clementine finds the library by pure accident.

She hasn't been able to help cautious wandering and exploring since she arrived, finding where and where not she can go. They told Clem she wouldn't be able to get out of the city after all, that she had to participate. As far as she's concerned that remains to be seen.

There's always a way so long as you're willing to work towards finding it. She hopes.

But at least she's clean and not hungry anymore, clad in the least gaudy of the new clothes they provided for her that she can find (and of course still wearing her old battered baseball cap), Clementine feels better than she has for a long time. Even her arm feels better as she comes across the library.

A library. It's not something she's unused to seeing, most of the towns she and Christa had found in their wanderings had one but they were abandoned, uncared for and usually occupied by a few Walkers. At least she doesn't have to worry about them here, meaning that she could read in safety. She could actually read and... and relax. Maybe. The plan for exploration is momentarily put on hold as she begins to walk through the shelves, trailing her fingers over them and wondering if she could find a title she might recognise.

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From somewhere beyond those first few shelves, somewhere near the middle of the room, Roland's making much more noise than she is. He hears her, of course, in that part of his mind that's always noting everything, but there's no reason the rest of his mind has to note those footsteps yet.

There's the rustle of a page being slowly turned, and a moment later a mechanical, computerized voice. After yet another moment there's a loud huff, the sound of someone maybe wishing they were reaching the end of their patience so they could have a tantrum and get it over with. Clearly, this library is a sanctuary of fun and joy.

Well there's no missing that. Clementine automatically tenses at the noise and then she takes a breath, forces herself to relax. Killing people outside of the games isn't allowed, she's sure. It's hard to shake off the instincts that have become ingrained in her however so she approaches cautiously, peering around one bookshelf at the man occupying the room with her.

He's... tall. There's a word she tries to think of that comes to mind watching him, 'weathered'. That's how he looks. She doesn't think he's noticed her yet, occupied as he is by his book.

Roland glances up and around, and anyone not looking very closely would probably miss the pause as his eyes move over her before taking in the rest of the room. Then it's down to the book again, glancing at the next page before giving a quiet sigh and shutting it altogether.

"Pardon if the noise bothered you," he says mildly, inspecting the machine strapped over his wrist instead of looking up. "I think I'll probably move on soon, anyway." What's the point of staying here, after all, if none of the books are going to do him any good?

Clementine starts, she'd though she'd been quiet. Apparently not, not good enough anyway. Now she takes a breath and steps out of her poor hiding spot and looks up (and up) at Roland. "It didn't bother me." A pause and then she hazards a guess, based on observation, "It sounds like something bothering you though."

"Mm." He studies her a moment, now that she's given permission by showing herself. "All these books," he says, deciding to share. Frustration wants a voice, and if he can keep his head by venting this one small part of everything pressing at him, he'll do it. Even if only to a child. "All this paper. And not a bit of it useful." The book gets slid back into its place on the shelf, not hard enough to damage it but not as gently as he might. Then he sighs. That's not quite fair. "Useful to one who could read it, maybe."

"You can't read?" Clementine focuses on that last tidbit of information. She'd feel bad about pointing this out except the man volunteered the knowledge himself. "Didn't you ever go to school?"

Said with all the bluntness of youth.

He looks down at her, eyebrows raised. "For a good many years." Then Roland hunkers, setting an elbow on one knee and calling up one of the recent messages from the device on his wrist. "I know the Great Letters. This," he points to a capital letter, then another. "And this. A few others. But as to the rest... I suppose I might as well have abandoned lessons for something more fun." With that he looks back over at her, watching for what he assumes will be enthusiastic agreement.

Clementine looks fascinated at the device. "The capital letters." the girl nods in acknowledgement, she'd never heard them called 'great' before. His last remark sparks a flicker of amusement, "Probably." she agrees. "It doesn't sounds like it was a good school anyway."

It's the first conclusion she reaches since he seems to talk English perfectly well. "What is it you're trying to find out?"

"My teacher taught us all he knew." He has to at least try to defend Vannay's honor, even if only vaguely. Not the man's fault that three of the five languages they'd been most likely to need had turned out, eventually, useless. "But no one can teach everything."

"I'm trying to find out anything," he continues. "Anything I can. This machine," here he lifts the wrist with the device on it, "can read the words of most messages out to me, but I wouldn't depend on that if I don't have to." Roland wonders if that's a concept she'll understand. The need of self-sufficiency. In his world it'd be likely, but with children it's never quite certain.

Edited 2014-04-05 01:12 (UTC)

"I guess not." Clementine thought on his latter statement and nodded, taking only a moment to understand his meaning. "If it breaks then you'll be stuck."

It was far better to learn to do soemthing for yourself, you couldn't always rely on someone or something else to be there to help you. It was a lesson Clementine had learned the hard way before. "I could help... if you like. My reading's pretty good."

"That's it exactly. And I'd rather be able to know what's been written without it being shouted out to anyone around me." He nods. "That'd be kind of you. If you're sure. I'll likely go very slowly."

He leans back to sit on the floor, back to a shelf and knees bent in front of him. "Letters first, probably." He may not sound too enthusiastic, but it doesn't mean he's not grateful. If she has enough patience to teach him even a little, enough to start with, then it'll be more than worth it. "Or, would you start elsewhere?"

Edited 2014-04-06 00:34 (UTC)

"I can see how that could be bad."

Clem hesitates and then sits down beside him, cross legged. "Seems as good a place as any, I've never taught anyone before. My name's Clementine."

It seems only proper to introduce herself now and since it might be easier than both of them leaning over his little device she reaches out and grasps the first book she can reach, some Capitol citizen's biography it looks like.

"Roland." He nods at her. One first name for another. "Well met, Clementine." He tilts his head, peering at the cover. There are a couple rows all in the Great Letters, though not all ones he knows. "I don't recognize all of those. But I think those two are names."

Clementine nods, head cocking a little at his odd turn of phrase but responding with one she more commonly knows. "Nice to meet you, too." so far it's holding true, he doesn't seem bad and not as strange as the people running this place.

"Yeah it is." she nods at his deduction, "Not one I ever heard though." Clementine thinks all the people native to this city have weird names. "Claudio Silverwell." her finger traces under it on the page.

Roland nods. "The Great Letters were taught to us as an ancient language all their own. And sometimes they seem to be. Like here." He points to the name, which doesn't seem as strange to him as it does to her. "But then, here," he points to the title, "They're mixed. Either there's another half to the language we were never taught or it's a second, related tongue that's only used for certain topics. But I can't figure out any more than that." A little of his earlier frustration is back, but only a little.

"Well... how about I tell you the alphabet as I know it, and I can point to the letters in this book so you know what they look and sound like." Clementine suggests, dimly remembering the lessons of repetition and association from when she was younger. "Maybe some of it will ring a bell."

"That sounds wise." He opens the book, looking the first blank page over with some confusion and flipping past the next few, stopping when he reaches one that's got something on it. "Is this book unfinished?"

Roland's now even more aware of the books at his back than he was before. All that paper. Just sitting there, unused and forgotten. "It'd be too like the people of this city to waste it so." In his short time here he's been determined to be unimpressed by the abundance around every corner - wealth so deliberately flaunted is an insult, a deliberate power play, and so is more disgusting than impressive. But this... Roland looks up at the stacks above them, resisting the urge to twist where he sits and gape at the rest of it.

"I don't think so. Sometimes books just have blank pages in them, I'm not sure why... I guess maybe if people want to write in them themselves? But then our teacher always used to tell us off if someone did that." Clementine frowned, not understanding either. "Don't you have many books where you come from?"

"No. Only those recovered from long ago. They were almost never made by my time; a single page took maybe a week to make. A week of steady attention. It must be very different here. At least, I hope it is. I've seen other worlds, too, where it must be so." Roland studies the vaguely familiar letters on it again, then raises his eyebrows at her. "I don't suppose this one is about anything that particularly matters?"

"Machines used to make them where I came from, big factories." She and Christa had passed by one once though they hadn't gone inside. Clementine looks at the cover, "It's about that Claudio Silverwell guy, someone from this place, I think they call these biographies."

A smile comes onto her face for the first time, "So probably not."

He smiles a little in response, faint and amused. "Then I guess it's time to find out more about a life of Capitol frippery." Roland's fingers move over an m before he looks at her again, smile faded. He's waiting for her to read it out, and were these like the lessons of his childhood that's all he'd be focusing on. But these aren't those lessons, and if he's got to learn them he'd rather have at least some distraction, if he can. "Your world must have plenty of libraries, then. Like this one."

"That's a 'm', muh, like for mouse." Clementine looks down at where his finger is. M for mouse, A for apple; she wonders if there are any children's books like that in here. "It does. No one really uses them anymore though."

He makes the noise quietly to himself, trying to bind the noise with the pattern in his head. If he focuses on it fiercely enough, it'll stay there. After a moment of staring down at the letter with narrowed eyes, he moves his attention to the one after it. "Do they not? Is your world much like this place, where everyone uses these instead?" He lifts the wrist with the machine on it, demonstrating the 'these' he's talking about, then points to the letter to the right of the m and raises his eyebrows at her.

"That's an 'o'." Clementine says as she senses he's on to the next letter. "It's a vowel."

She shakes her head, "No. It's..." a moment of hesitance before she continues, "A few years ago something really bad happened, now there's not many people left. Those that are aren't very interested in libraries anymore."

"o," he murmurs, looking it over. A simple circle, no flourishes. Seems easy enough. "o."

Roland takes a moment more to look down at it before going back over her words. "So it always is when a world moves on. Knowledge like this - well, like the libraries I used to know, not this," here he waves a hand at the book in front of them, "is always one of the first things to go." He studies her then, instead of the book, seeing the girl in a slightly different light. "It takes strength to survive such an event. Survive it, and then to live past it."

"And the next one's an 's', suh, like a snake." It even looks like a snake and there's some memory of drawing pictures of them by starting with an oversized 's' on paper.

"So much of it stops being important." Clementine has never heard it put like that before but when she applies the phrase to what happened she finds it apt. Before maybe she wouldn't have but now, when it's accepted that things will never return to how they were, she can agree that her world had moved on. For a moment Clem ducks her head, face hidden beneath the brim of her battered old baseball cap, when she raises it there's a slight smile (bittersweet) at what is some form of compliment. "I had a lot of help."

Roland's mind makes the same connection, that the letter looks like the creature it helps name, and this letter too gets a moment of quiet study before the rest of her words are addressed.

"Some would say that makes it more important." He runs a hand absently over the paper in front of them, thinking back over his world. Not touching it - habit, not to touch real paper any more than necessary - but just above it, his fingers tracing over the trappings of civilization and knowledge. "Not everyone can afford to look back, but-" He pauses, then shrugs. "I'll never forget Gilead. Someone ought to tell its stories."

But there's another story in front of them now, one with a more immediate purpose. Roland focuses on it, the life's story of a man whose name he's already deliberately forgotten. He points to the letter next to the s. "And this?"

"Gilead was your home?" she looks up at him, studying his face. "What was it like?"

Clem looks down. "That's a 't', tuh. The word is 'most'." it seems prudent to say it since they reached the end of the word, then she wonders if maybe she should have let Roland try to work it out himself with the letters she'd just taught him.

His old tutor would have made him work it out - probably wouldn't have let the rest of the class move on until he had. He probably could use the practice. But Roland doesn't expect it out of his present company. He only nods, studying the whole word as closely as he had its separate parts, then keeps staring down as his mind casts itself backward.

"It's difficult," he begins slowly, "to describe such a place in only a few words. Once I might only have said that it was beautiful. But mostly, it was..." Roland pauses a moment as he thinks of the right word. "Mine. The home of my family, and dearest friends, of the festivals and knowledge and people. The place I learned almost everything I know. The heart of everything for which I used--" he frowns, looking confused, then resets. "-- everything for which I fight. Surely yours was much the same." That's what a home is, after all. Roland thinks on that, watching her. At least he'd had longer before his own world fell. A few years more at least, by the look of her.

"It sounds like it was pretty great. I'm sorry for... for whatever happened to it. It's the worst to lose your home." She wonders how long ago it was, why it was. But she won't ask, she knows people don't like to talk about the past that way, it's like ripping the scab off an old wound.

"It is. But the world moves on. Every world. As to whatever it was that happened - war. Only war, and my world slowly running down." It is a wound, still painful after all these years, but all the same he knows enough of his own world's history to recognize that war is nothing unique. "Life and light will grow there again someday. In your world, too." Roland's smile is small but warm, meant to reassure. It may or may not happen in either of their lifetimes, but he does genuinely believe that it will.

"I really hope so." Though how she really has no idea, nothing so far seems to cure the plague of undead. No one even has a clue how it started still, no one she's met anyway. Clementine smiles back gratefully though for his words, "Do you want to try the next word? I'll let you sound this one out once you know all the letters."

Roland nods, moving back to the topic at hand and studying the word a moment. If she wants to talk more on her world - or on his - he will, but for now Roland considers that other subject closed. "That one almost looks like the..." He moves his finger over one of the letters of the previous word. "The o. Except there's that tail there."

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