thecapitol | (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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"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."

(Closed) School's in

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