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

"He wanted- well, I can't really say what he wanted since you're a bit young, but he wanted my attention, basically. Like I'm going to give anything more than polite gratitude for a muffin, right?" She rubs her palms together, trying to warm them.

"Yeah? I don't think I ever got to see anything cool in the city when I was a kid. Like, I loved all the activity, but it seems like an adult's city." She pauses, realizing with heaviness that she needs to amend that. "Seemed like an adult's city. An East Coast Vegas."

"I don't see why he couldn't just come up and talk to you." she says, but she guesses it worked out in Venus' (Clem's) favour because, hey, free muffin. That really seems like it shouldn't be a big deal in a world where they could buy anything they wanted at any time but it still did, maybe because Clementine had three years of living with nothing to compare to nine months of opulence in the Capitol.

"Vegas is where people went to gamble, right? It's out in the desert, I think." Gambling definitely was not an activity for children, as she'd once been sternly told, and wasn't an activity for anyone but fools as her mother put it. "I didn't like going shopping there, which was most of the reason we went."

"Because that would take effort, being charming, you know. He'd have to put thought into thinking about what I might find cute or funny, instead of just smacking down three bucks on his credit card."

Venus has been macked on enough times in her life that, shy as she is with actual romance, she's jaded to flirting. For a moment she feels like a big sister giving Clementine advice for when she goes through puberty, but again, she realized that when she imagines Clementine's future she sees only a dark smear.

"Yeah, Vegas is out in the desert. You gamble, you drink, you do all kinds of things no kid should be doing."

"Makes him sound like a real loser."

Clementine hasn't really yet started to think about that sort of thing and, if she doesn't get out of the cycle of arena's, she probably won't for a while yet, stuck in a sort of pre-pubescent limbo. She thinks of romance and what it involves (kissing stuff) the same way she'd think of another country, existing but not in her bubble of experience. It was just something that adults and ~~Dave~~ teenagers got weird about.

She's about to answer that she's done plenty of stuff that no kid should do before, then remembers the way adults look when she does. That sort of pinched discomfort in their expressions with sadness in their eyes, pity or in some cases anger. Clementine doesn't say it, she just nods. "Drinking is gross."

So far she's tried wine and the moonshine she found in the shed with Nick, neither impressed her.

"Yeah, I wasn't impressed."

Venus laughs, watching the ducks milling around and warily eying their human food-dispensers. "Longer you think that, the better. Last time I drank I ended up sick for a whole weekend."

It's like best Clementine hasn't said that, because the incident Venus is talking about was during the children's Arena, as she tried to block out images of her own impotence. She has to hold on to the memory of the night by the hooks of alcohol-related missteps rather than by the real core of what it came to all mean.

"You come from a world with zombies, right?"

"Why do people do it if it makes them sick, then? I'd rather not get sick after doing something fun, it feels like it would ruin the fun part."

Reminded of the ducks Clementine bites into her muffin, holding it in her mouth so she can throw another handful of bread at the, which they immediately descend upon. Then she takes the muffin back out of her mouth, swallowing the mouthful.

"Yeah, we call them Walkers though. Or lurkers."

"If you do it right you don't get sick. But I ain't going to be the one to tell you how." She smiles, more to herself than to Clementine. "Your posse of fellow zombie-survivors would make me suffer, for sure. I just know it."

Something about that shared type of lifestyle has brought them together, while Venus feels set so far apart from the rest of the superheroes. She knows logically that they probably have pasts are tortured as hers, and yet she knows, somehow, deep inside her that she doesn't deserve to include herself in their company. She pales in their shadows.

"I tried it once, urm, twice." Right, twice. The wine and the moonshine she and Nick had found. "It tasted really bad, so I don't think I'll try it again." the moonshine in particular had her coughing and wheezing. So Venus is only half-right, at least one of Clem's posse couldn't exactly say anything about someone teaching her about alcohol.

"Maybe some of them would." she smiles, shrugging her shoulders. "They're good guys, though, have you met any of them?"

"Ha!" Venus laughs, her smile deepening and rounding her cheeks, making her face heartshaped. "Yeah, you don't sound eager to try it again. Bad experiences?"

She shrugs. "A few of them. Can't say any of them made the world's biggest impression on me, but none of them came off as someone who'd hurt you."

"The first" second? "stuff I tried made my throat burn, it was gross. Then the wine just tasted bad. Kind of sour. That was at Kevin's Crowning." she'd heard enough from a variety of people who had agreed about her never trying it again, though little explanation satisfying her curiosity as to why adults continued to drink it.

Clem's not even surprised as Venus judges her friends on their likeliness to hurt her. That's another thing adults do but one she generally understands after so long. In her world strangers couldn't ever be trusted off the bat. "They're good." she assures, "They've saved my life before."

"Yeah, alcohol isn't so much for taste as other things. But it's probably best not to try getting those other things at this stage of your life. You know, running from zombies and all." That's a good enough reason, isn't it?

She takes another sip of her drink, then checks her watch and realizes she has somewhere to be.

"It's been nice meeting you, Clementine." She holds her hand out to shake.

"Getting drunk would be really stupid if there were zombies around." Or in the arena, which she's actually seen happen before at the sponsors sent all that gin to Thor. She couldn't believe they'd all actually drank it! "They're not that slow."

Clementine blinks as she see's Venus check her watch, then nods as the woman is clearly making to leave. She takes her hand and shakes it, smiling at the grown up gesture, "You too."

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

Re: It's okay! c:

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