thecapitol | Come away little loss, come away to the water [open]

Who| Clementine and OTA
What| Catch-all for Clementine things since the end of the arena, Clementine dealing with her canon-updated memories
Where| The Tribute Center and out in the Capitol, choose from the prompts or make your own
When| Anytime between the end of Arena 12 and now
Warnings/Notes| Talk of violence and children in harmful situations probably.

It's been a strange few weeks for Clementine, how do you describe the sensation of waking up with a whole new bunch of memories in your head? It made the usual disorientation in coming back from the arena pale in comparison.

The memories were... good, bad. A lot of bad. The good was Kenny, alive, really alive. The bad was everything that had happened after that discovery, Carver and his camp, the things Clementine had done and witnessed in the span of just a couple of days. Things she now had to reconcile and fit in with her memories of Panem, ending with everyone surrounded by Walkers and Sarita...

So it's not all surprising that Clementine has been a little reclusive since coming back. She hasn't actively avoided people, far from it, but she has taken a little more time to herself and her thoughts.

Prompt A: District 6

There's nine people living in the District 6 suite (not counting their support staff) and only one big television to share between them in the big lounge area. That can lead to some squabbles over what to watch and a general first-come, first-serve attitude to grabbing the remote whenever it was spied outside of someone's hand.

Clementine takes advantage to temporarily being on her own to set up the gaming system she'd asked for after spending hours at the arcade downtown, putting in a rather bright and colourful racing game which has nothing to with violence or horror. She'll settle for racing against the computer controlled characters for now but if anyone else wants to join in she probably won't say no.

Prompt b: The park

It's extra cold out in the Capitol today and despite that Clementine still ventures outside of the Tribute Center.

She's wrapped herself up in a thick coat and scarf, got a cup of hot chocolate from one of the many, many coffee shops dotted around the Capitol and come to the park with a bag of bread in hand. The ducks here are probably pretty spoiled already by visitors, looking well-fed despite the season, but they still come swimming over the moment Clementine crouches by the bank and sets down her drink on the frozen ground.

"Alright, hang on." she mutters at their insistent quacking, opening up the bag of bread to start tearing off small pieces and throwing them into the water where the ducks immediately set in on squabbling for the food.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

There are only a few people Bruce will really try to keep track of. One of those people? Clementine.

So when the arena is over, he checks to see if she's in her district. She is. He catches her playing a video game.

He doesn't immediately try to catch her attention. He crosses his arms and leans against the doorway, watching her play and allowing her a moment to enjoy herself. God knows she deserves it.

"Oh come on!" she grumbles as her kart is knocked spinning by some blue shell thing one of the computer characters fired. "I was winning, that's totally unfair."

Clementine pouts as three of the other racers pass her by before she manages to recover and get back into the race. It's the last lap and she quickly realises she's not going to recover first place before the finish line but at least she manages second. Still, she drops her controller in her lap and flops back against the sofa cushions with a dramatic groan -- which is when she catches sight of her visitor.

"Bruce!" in a second Clementine's scrambled up onto her feet, leaving the sofa to go meet him at the door. "Hi."

"Hey, Clem."

Impulsively, his hand goes to her shoulder, just brushing against it (to make sure she's alive, real, healthy) before pulling away again. He's not one to initiate contact very often. This will be one exception. "Having trouble with competition playing dirty?"

Yeah, he saw that blue shell. He should probably say a typical boring adult thing like 'video games will rot your brain', but he can't help but smile a little at seeing her enjoy something.

She leans into it for the brief moment that it lasts. Clementine's picked up by now how Bruce seems to rarely initiate contact and she's considered that maybe he doesn't like it very much but never known how to ask. She doesn't want to make him uncomfortable.

"Yeah. I totally should have won that race." she grins then, an idea sparking, "Do you want to play with me?"

Bruce is really smart, he'd probably be pretty good at video games.

"They were just being sore losers anyway. It doesn't count if they hit you with the blue shell right before the finish line."

Bruce hasn't had much of a chance to play video games on the run, but Tony got him caught up on them when they were together and not working. He gives a soft huff of a laugh before slowly starting to go to the couch.

"I warn you, I may not be good to start with, but I'm a quick learner."

Her face lights up and she almost runs back to the couch ahead of him, bending down to get a second controller and turning it on for Bruce before using her own to go back to the main menu of the game. There she moves to set it to multiplayer.

"Best out of three?" Clementine challenges him. If she has her way it'll probably turn into best out of five and beyond. "I'll go easy on you to start with." she says playfully.

"How about best out of five?" He sits down next to her, picking up the controller and giving her a wink. "I need time to warm up. And then I'm not going to be going easy on you."

He has no problem going even longer, though. To hell with all the hellish stuff everyone has had to deal with. Video games with a little girl are the way to go.

"You better not, I'll be able to tell if you are." Clementine's not about to let anyone do that for her in any situation, even for something as relaxed as video games.

She picks her favourite character at once, a princess-y type decked out in purple, then sets about assembling the car she likes from the options the game provides. It's one of the few Capitol games that doesn't involve death or destruction, which explains why she likes it so much.

Once while looking she'd found a game (part of a series of games) that was an arena simulator. The player could choose one of a number of Tribute characters with different skills and then an arena and try to win, working their way through their opponents. It had been an older copy so it was still the Districts with only twenty-four Tributes competing but she'd glimpsed the newer editions, the one's that featured the modern version of the Hunger Games. Suffice to say she'd walked away quickly from that one.

"Do you play games a lot at home?"

"Not at all. I travel all over the world, but not in the places that would have many video games."

Bruce just picks the first character he sees, which is a cartoony parody of a person from District 4. Meaning it has a fishing hat and a shirt made of fish netting.

It would probably be best for all involved if they just avoided the arena fighting games.

"But I have a friend who insisted on catching me up on them when I came back to the United States. Have you ever met Tony Stark?"

She remembers Bruce telling her that before now.

"I did once, at Kevin's crowning. I... I don't think you were here then." Clementine says after a moments thought, then she breaks out into a grin. "He didn't like that he got a pink shirt so he swapped it, but the shirt he swapped it for was from somebody way smaller than him." here she starts to snicker.

"It didn't even cover his stomach."

"Yeah, that sounds like Tony." Bruce gives a small smirk. "He's brilliant, really, but he's an idiot too. When we first met, we were supposed to work on a project together. He thought it'd be a good idea to shock me when I was paying attention to something else."

His voice betrays his amusement. He actually liked Tony's company, even when he was romping around poking things that he shouldn't.

"He told me he blows up stuff a lot." she continues grinning, selecting a track on screen at random. Clementine laughs, "What kind of shock? Like saying 'boo!' real loud?"

She'd like Tony when she'd met him but not had much chance to talk to him since then.

"No, a literal shock with electricity. He wanted to see what would happen, he said."

He can't help but smile at the memory. "Steve almost bit his head off for that one."

"Didn't that hurt?" she stares when he tells her it was electricity, mouth hanging open a little. It seemed like it would hurt, in which case she could totally understand why Steve would get made over it. "That doesn't sound very nice."

"Not really. It was just a little thing. It doesn't seem nice at the surface, but it's just how Tony is." Bruce shrugs, still smiling just a little. "He likes to see where people's boundaries are. I didn't mind."

Frankly, it was refreshing just to have someone show absolutely no fear of the other guy, even if it was stupid as hell.

"I'd never do that to someone." she's really not getting the motivation here, beyond her already existing sentiment that Tony Stark was kind of weird. That idea was reinforced by this conversation.

The race is starting on screen so Clementine turns her eyes in that direction. Her thumb pressing down on the acceleration button at the critical moment. "But I guess if you didn't mind... did you win against him?"

Come away little loss, come away to the water [open]

D6

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