thecapitol | Count to a thousand [Closed]

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Count to a thousand [Closed]

Who| Clementine and Luke
What| Clem teaches Luke some origami, there is talking
Where| D6 suite
When| After the binding plot
Warnings/Notes| possible discussion of violence? idk

When Luke shows up Clementine has taken over the coffee table in District 6 with sheets of brightly coloured craft paper. In the wake of everything that's happened she felt like she needed a calming activity to do, one that took up all her attention and focus so she wasn't thinking about how terrible things were for the Tributes right now.

If she'd known... she wishes she could have helped. She should have helped in some other way than playing up a distraction in Clara's scavenger hunt. Now Initiate is caught and accused of treason by brainwashing other Tribute's to do his bidding and other are imprisoned in their rooms. Steve has vanished and no one knows where he is or if they do they're keeping quiet about it which puts a singular feeling of dread in her chest. It must be even worse for the friends who knew him better.

"Hey Luke." she says, looking up when her friend comes into the suite. On the table Clementine finishes folding a blue crane and sets it next to three others of varying colours.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The smile Luke wills as he steps out of the elevators falters.

It’s hard looking into Clem’s face now and remembering the glassy hollowness of her eyes in the footage, her body a ragdoll in the arms of a woman who had tried to justify robbing her of her choices - her life - by pretending she had been doing Clem a favour. There’s only so much he could accomplish trying to sweat his frothing anger out of him for hours at a time in the training centre. But it’s never easy to drain away what’s compounded by so much guilt. Splitting his knuckles against the wall of his bathroom had helped, if only by giving him something else to think about for a brief moment. A new pain too easily soothed and healed and forgotten.

He should have been there to put a stop to it, to try. He should of, but he never is.

Luke pulls up a seat beside her, deep apology in his eyes. Feels a cold clenching low in his gut. “Hey, Clem. Sorry I’m a li’l late." He rests his hands over the table, the knuckles of his right a raw, fading red as if only winter-chapped. "I needed to get a couple things squared away first.”

He reattempts a smile for her benefit and nudges her arm lightly with an elbow. "Hope you ain't been havin' too much fun without me."

Edited 2015-04-27 16:51 (UTC)

Clementine's not had it easy since she woke back up. The fact that Molotov lived in the same District as her made things pretty awkward, even with an attempt at an apology being made. By and large they did as they had before and ignored each others presence, which made things a little more bearable, just a little.

It's not going to stop being a wound inside her, not so quick at least, no matter how many pretty things she's given.

"It's okay. I don't have anywhere else to be." she shakes her head, offering Luke a reassuring smile. "Like what kind of things?"

Her eyes track to his hand and a frown starts to make its way over her face.

And here he had thought she would sass him for being late. Waiting for it, even, with a rueful, lopsided grin that had endeared him to so many college girls. Even a guy every now and again. "Yeah, well, you might not mind right now, but give it a few years an’ I'm pretty sure you gon' change your mind. If I learned anythin' since highschool it's that there’s nothin’ ‘okay’ about leavin’ a girl hangin’. An’ you’d better believe she’s gonna tell you all about it.”

It’s all fun and games with Clem and he does all he can to maintain levity when she wonders what held him up. She isn’t stupid, he knows that. They just could all use relief from the brutal pressures of the stress and supervision they live under.

"Oh, y'know. Stuff.” He huffs softly. Really, the story of how he lost track of time looking over the communicator for more information on Kieren and speeding through showering and shaving his neck is not an especially exciting one. He doesn’t even have a nick to show for it. “An' things."

He follows her gaze as it lowers, noticing the concerned knit to her brow. "…I went a little overboard trainin' the last time, I guess." A hand goes for the back of his neck on a self-conscious reflex. "I'm fine. Doesn't hurt, or anythin'."

A little white lie wouldn't hurt either. She didn't need to fret about him any more than she would, or worse, feel responsible for a stupid impulse that had gripped him at the blinding peak of his frustration. He can only imagine how she already feels, arena upon arena stacked up and the stakes higher than ever with more of them to lose each and every time they’re anxious on their pedestals, poised to run. Hearts caught in their throats.

He can’t keep her alive, not forever. Can’t keep feed her the empty promise that he would, either – God knows that plan has fallen through twice over. The best he can do now is to ease the hurt and help her cope with this shared nightmare however he could.

“You know you can talk to me, about anythin’.” The bleak, ugly stuff, in particular. The stuff that kept one up at night, mind turning restless circles. “I don’ mean you have to right now… ‘less you want to.”

Edited 2015-05-01 12:48 (UTC)

"Is that about kissing stuff? Because Dave says things like that to me too." she raises her eyebrow up at that talk. "It's not like you got lost... is it?" Clementine's expression breaks into a grin at the end, there's the teasing alright.

Stuff and things doesn't exactly amount to an explanation.

"You shouldn't do that." Clem tells him pragmatically, "You're not supposed to hurt yourself training. And what if they sprung another arena on us and you were hurt?" she purses her lips, "You should take care of yourself, Luke."

She looks back down at the paper as Luke offers her an ear if she needs to talk, her fingers starting to fold again. "I know." she does, she really does, just sometimes it's hard to make the words come out. Sometimes... she'd talked to Dave about it not so long ago. "You can talk to me too."

He lets out a breathless stutter of a laugh before he looks at her in wonder, a slow, cautious grin pulling at the corners of his mouth. “Yeah… somethin’ like that.” A faint redness creeps up his neck. Leave it to Clem to make a grown man blush. Always full of surprises, this kid. “…You remembered.” He says at last. His smile falls. “I didn’t think you did… seein’ how you were lookin’ at me like I grew another head when I was askin' about the others in the diner way back when.”

After putting two soul-sucking arenas behind him, it feels like ages since he first arrived, starved and dazed and scrabbling for sense.

He lets her chide him, lets her raise what is undeniable a good point that the logic-driven half of his brain has been beating him over the head with from the moment he had stared at his skinned, bloodied hand and caught his breath.

“I wasn't tryin' to, Clem. It jus'..." A shake of his head. "...happened.” It’s a piss-poor explanation but impulses can’t always be put into words. He wants – needs – someone he can feel at ease opening up to. He knows she’s there, knows she’d be a patient, sympathetic listener to any confession he could squeeze out of himself. But she’s just a kid and he won’t put her in the position of playing his therapist time and time again. Won’t tell her about the strain of leadership or his near-drowning episodes or the ache of wanting someone so badly he thinks he’d sleep with the first adult to favour him with a gentle smile and put their hand on his arm just to feel human again. Pretending he had something meaningful to hold onto in the morning.

Luke's mouth skews. “…yeah.” He glances to the coloured paper spread across the table too, sliding a square sheet towards him and looking blankly at it before glancing her way for guidance. "So, what’re we makin’ today?”

Edited 2015-05-04 04:22 (UTC)

"... remembered what?" she asks then, suddenly cautious. She doesn't remember saying anything like that back in their own world to Luke. It's not like there'd been a whole lot of chances to talk about anything that didn't have to do with trying to stay alive in those few days. "Did I say that before?"

It hits her again that she still hasn't told Luke she remembers more than she did the first time they met in this world, but 'kissing stuff' didn't factor into it. She should tell him, she should really tell him...

Clementine's bites her lip a little as he explains. "You should put a bandaid on your hand, at least, okay?" maybe she couldn't stop him doing it, or maybe he couldn't control himself from doing it. Taking care of any damage after was in both their control though.

She looks back down, "Well... we can make cranes. I know how to make dogs now too, butterflies... a mouse. Flowers?"

Luke blinks when she doesn't curl her lip at the thought of the weird, sappy, cootie-contagious things adults do and the memory of intruding on what had no doubt been an uncomfortably close call for everyone involved up on the deck. It's an unexpected coincidence, this -- but that's all it is, his expression settling somewhere between apology and disappointment as the realization sinks in.

"Oh. Yeah." He scratches his jaw, his brow furrowed. "You did. Jus' a coincidence, I guess."

For better or worse, their attention shifts back to his hand and saves him the trouble of having to gut-clenchingly tiptoe around the bleakness of her future. "I drenched it in disinfectant back when it was pretty gross-lookin'." He musters a smile again, hoping to take the edge off her worry with a touch of humour. "'sides, I figure lookin' at it'll remind me not to do somethin' stupid like that again."

He turns his palm up and then the back of his hand, inspecting it. Back home, underfed and aching for a restful sleep, he knows he wouldn't have healed half as well in the same span of time. "I don' mind lettin' it get some air the way it is now, but if you know where I could get a couple bandaids 'round here, then I guess I should. Dr. Clem's orders, right?"

If not, he could always head four floors down and fish something out of his medicine cabinet.

"Anyway, sounds like you been keepin' pretty busy. How 'bout we start with dogs?" He'd like a memento of Dixie sitting on his nightstand among the few valuable possessions he owned. "Then maybe cranes after, 'cause the one you made me's fallin' apart."

"Sorry, I wish I remembered more but..." she must have said something like that in the future back home. Clementine finished the crane she was making while they talked and realised, suddenly, that if she was going to tell Luke the truth there was an opening to do it. She could stop holding back, she could let him know what she knew and...

Clementine doesn't know what he'll think of it, but she knows she can't keep hiding it forever.

"Luke," she says, dropping the talk of bandaids and origami for the moment. "I... I actually do remember some more of what happened. I don't remember what you're talking about but, I remember other things now."

Luke folds his arms across the table, leaning in and watching her under raised brows. The paper, his bruised knuckles, everything else fades into the backdrop, forgotten. “Hey… don’ worry about it.” He shakes his head, his thoughtful frown softening in sympathy. “It ain’t your fault.” A dull, anxious throb starts in his gut, slow and steady, and he goes quiet for a while after she does, trying to piece together how he feels about her revelation while his mind buzzes in the aftershock.

“Oh.” He says, lamely.

Maybe she expects him to be angry for letting him hide more from her than he needed to. But he made that choice, he reminds himself. He won't chew her out for not finding a way to bring it to his attention any earlier, even though he wishes she had. It wouldn’t have accomplished much, though; he’d still have felt heartsick for the shitty hand she’s been dealt, and the crushing weight of the burdens he shoulders in silence.

He lets out a quiet, tense sigh.

“Like… what?” He tries cautiously, coaxingly, sensing there's a can of worms about to be cracked open. But this day was bound to come and there's no derailing the conversation now.

Clementine keeps her gaze turned downwards at her already folded origami figures. This isn't going to be easy and it isn't going to be painless, she's sure of it.

"It's... I came back from the arena and I had more memories." she starts, forcing out every word. "What happened after the river, with Carver. And we all had to run, then the ski lodge, Kenny... I remember being taken to Carver's camp and what happened there."

The nightmare of those three days... all the people who'd died in such a short space of time. Seeing Kenny and Luke hurt in the course of it all, then Kenny's brutal execution of Carver before they finally fled out into the herd of Walkers.

He listens to her struggle her way through an explanation, as patient as he had been when they sat in the kitchen of the cabin they could never go back to now and quietly watched each other through the dim haze of candelight, shadows dancing across their tired faces. So much grief and loss compressed into just three days, so much he has done his best to shove down and box up and stow away, telling himself he'd touch them when he was ready. Memories now being dumped out onto the floor all around him, scattered and broken, and his throat hurts so bad for a second that he can't make a sound. Pete and Alvin and Carlos, gone forever. All that's left of them is an emptiness the echoes of their laughter and memories can't fill.

"Clem... look at me." A beat. He probes her downturned face for a flicker of acknowledgement. For something. "None of what happened back there is on you, okay? It ain't. Men like Carver, they stop at nothin' to have their way. They pretend it ain't all about what they want... they tell you everythin' they do is for the good a' everyone, but they don' listen to anybody else."

A big reason as to why Kenny grated on him as badly as he did. No compromises. Just mulish stubbornness. "The first chance Carver got to hurt somebody an' make an example outta them, he took it."

And Clem had stood there watching Kenny cave in his face with the same viciousness Carver had beat him down with, one wet-crunch and squelching thud at a time. It's hard to think about. But that she's troubled - that he can see it on her face - tells him she's not numbed to the horrors of the world. It tells him there's hope for her yet.

"An' that herd we pushed through while Tavia an' the others were shootin' from up on the roof" - people he used to work with, laugh with, go on supply runs with when the future had glimmered faintly with promise - "... we were in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Murphy's Law. His lips pinch, eyes dully shiny, angry. In a perfect world, it's nobody's fault. Everyone's absolved of guilt and they move on, accepting and unbothered, happily ever after. Kenny had urged them on in the shape they were in, backed by Mike and Rebecca fearing Carver's wrath -- but he had done no better, relenting and sitting there and letting his people march right into a death-trap. They should never have left. He could've --

"I shoulda said somethin' more." He says stiffly with a shake of his head, swallowing past the burning knot pushing against his Adam's apple. "I told y'all it was dangerous, I knew it'd go to shit... but all I did was jus'... let y'all walk right into that goddamn mess."

"Last thing I remember from there, I saw Sarita get bit on the arm..." Another name probably to add to the list of fatalities. She'd had the hatchet in her hand, remembering poor dead Reggie's words about if you cut the limb off in time...

Then she'd woken up again, back in the Capitol, back in the games.

"Carver deserved what happened to him." she says it like she means it, but also like someone trying to convince herself that she was right. "I chose to stay and watch though, no one made me." the opposite in fact. Sarita had tried to convince her to leave and Clementine had refused, all the anger inside her about everything Carver had done had needed to be sated. Except, in the end, she didn't think she felt much better for it.

"It's not your fault, either."

“No,” The answer's low and raw around the edges. “Not entirely.”

He looks to the wall ahead, staring dully for a long time. A muscle in his jaw works in silence, a slow clenching and unclenching as her voice pulls at him, teasing a loose thread of his composure and threatening to unravel him. A tic pulls at the corner of his mouth and he twists his lips into a stiff, stubborn line.

“But every person I left that cabin with gave me their trust, their hope...” His gaze darkens. Hardens. He swallows against the threat of a tremor in his voice. “I could a’ done better by them, an’ nothin’s ever gon’ change that.”

There’s a heavy sense of finality to it, one that dares to suck every last bit of joy he feels sitting at the table with Clem. “I know you did,” He says, finally. While he was in favour of her exercising her right to make her own decisions and especially in worlds that already robbed her of so much choice, it doesn’t mean he could support them all, even as a close friend. She could have changed her mind, left halfway through, and not one person who mattered would have ever thought less of her for it. He doesn’t know if it’s stubbornness that willed her to stay or a vengeful anger screaming for blood. But the former’s the least scary of the two.

“An' I know how you felt back there -- trust me, I do." He huffs a humourless laugh, his expression drained and sober. "I’d be lyin’ if I said I never wanted to crack him one across the face after everythin’ he did." Glancing to her. "But if we decide an eye for eye is okay... where do we draw the line? What stops us from becomin’ like him?”

Edited 2015-05-17 03:50 (UTC)

"You did the best you could. You came and you tried to help." she insists. "You did everything you could." and he almost died for it.

Clementine shakes her head. "He killed Walter, Alvin, Reggie... he was going to kill you and Kenny. He didn't care, he'd kill anybody he thought was in his way or too weak." that was what he told her, that only the strong deserved to survive in the new world and that everyone else would only pull them down. It was how he excused everything he did. "If he hadn't been stopped he would have tried to hurt us again. He'd never let any of us go, especially not Rebecca."

She bites her lip, knowing she can't explain her choice to stay and watch with that. It had been anger, stubbornness, a need to prove something to herself maybe. Clementine's feelings were conflicted still.

You did everything you could..

He can’t help the hitch of his chest and the wry little chuckle that comes with it. He’s been hearing that a lot, something that, on the worst of days, seems like it has been bled-dry of meaning and become a platitude as worn as he feels. The funny thing is that he keeps trying and trying but he always seems to fall short. And someone else always pays the price.

“Wish I could believe that.”

She means it, though. She does, and he doesn’t know what to do with it. So it settles, cold and heavy, as a lump in his gut. He’s quiet for the rest, letting her finish.

“It’s a slippery slope is all I’m sayin’.” He offers, a heaviness to his tone. “Don’ take much to start slidin’. We all change, Clem. But we still have some choice over that. We can choose to be better people than those who try to hurt us. I know we’re all scared -- I mean, after everythin' we been through, there’s no way we couldn't be. But we can try not to let that fear take over and bring out the worst in who we are."

He considers her with gentle eyes, a sort of dimly hopeful resignation softening the edge of the pained look they hold. "There's enough a' that out there already.”

Edited 2015-05-20 03:43 (UTC)

"I believe it." she hopes that's a help to him, or some kind of comfort. Clementine believes because she believes in Luke as a good person, who would never hold back from doing everything in his power to try and help his friends.

It's hard to accept your own limitations when you fail, she knows that from experience.

"I don't..." she frowns deeply down at the table, fingers gripping its edge. "I don't want to hurt people without reason, I never would. But if its to protect people you care about and stop someone else from hurting them, is that wrong? He was a horrible person, he needed to be stopped."

His frown softens at her reassurance and he tries to put on a happier face, but just can’t will his expression into one. It grows harder all the time to understand why he survived when the others had been no less deserving. A pain he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to shake, a slow, squeezing ache in his chest. But maybe that’s the way it should be. Maybe he’d lie wide awake in the dark of predawn and always hear the echoes of their voices and feel the imprints they had left in his heart. Maybe the memory of Sarah screaming or the sound of a crying baby would always make his throat tighten.

And maybe it'd be okay. Maybe he’d be okay, someday.

“Thanks, Clem.” He says, dimly, nothing seeming to penetrate. His mind is elsewhere, far from the reach of reassurance.

“The shape Carver was in, he was goin’ nowhere. It could a’ ended there. But your friend didn’t jus’ kill him …” He breaks off, eyes shut against the memory. Silence lengthens, deepens.

In that moment he became him, Clem.

“I heard it from all the way outside, over the PA and the lurkers.”

Morality isn’t black and white, it never was, and knowing what the right thing to do is greyer than its ever been. Carver’s death put their minds at ease, his especially; he won’t deny it. But there’s nowhere far he could have gone with his kneecaps blown and a herd closing in. Less so if they’d taken the time to tie him up. Those options might not have offered them the same sort of closure, but they had been there. They had had a choice. If he had to die by their hand, a shot to head is all that would have been needed.

“…We all seen some a’ the worst, most fucked-up things people do to stay alive… an’ sometimes, jus’ ‘cause they can. I was hopin’… all that shit hadn’t taken so much outta you. You’re jus’ so young… I’d like to think there’s hope for you yet. When I look at you now… I don’ think you stood there ‘cause you felt, deep down, that it had to go that far." His gaze pulls away. "But I… I guess I jus' don’ know.”

"Kenny did what he thought he had to." she says quietly, driven to defend her friend in some way. Kenny was her friend, her oldest friend. He was the only one she had left from the beginning now, after thinking he was dead for two years.

But he wasn't okay, she knew that. Kenny hadn't been okay from the day Katjaa and Duck died.

She could make other arguments, like Kenny hadn't wanted to waste another bullet on Carver when the world was fast running out of them but she's sure that wasn't the reason in Kenny's head. No. Kenny had been so angry.

"I don't know either."

Luke's tone softens.

"I know he's your friend." He leans over the table, shoulders hunched and arms lightly crossed, looking into her face. "An' I also know what it's like when it seems like there ain't nobody on your friend’s side."

Luke’s old man had made no secret of his disdain for Nick's ‘deadbeat lowlife' of a father - and for Nick, by association. And Luke couldn't say how many times he had pulled his dad aside over the years and challenged every careless, backwards insult he’d spit at the ground and how many times those arguments had ended with his dad shutting him down with a dark, squinting look or a cuff to the face (once, at its worst) or a few weeks where dad would take on extra work around the farm despite his aches and pains and pointedly refuse to acknowledge his existence when they stood in the same room together. Never mind his attempts to extend an olive branch.

Nick hadn’t been hurting anyone. He never has in a self-indulgently cruel way - and when he lashes out, it's been with words and not his fists. Even if the Gamemakers were to push him into a corner, he’d never have it in him to shove around and beat a kid and be able to sleep at night. After twenty years of friendship, Luke's damn well sure of it.

“I do still think he started out as a good guy.” They’ve had this conversation before, at the foot of the deck, and he draws on his memory. He had phrased things well enough at the time. “I jus’ think… he’s had more than he can take.”

"He still tries to do right." Clementine says, not denying it. "He went through a lot... a heck of a lot of bad stuff. I don't think he's a bad guy." and maybe sometimes Kenny got it wrong, went too far but that doesn't make it not so. He's tried to protect her and Sarita, even the rest of them.

"He always tries to do the right thing and protect everyone." her lips thin, fingers curled into fists. "Christa told me he died saving her life before we met again." when Lee and everyone had been trying to save her Kenny had been right there with them. "He lost his family and still tries to save people."

Even though Kenny is absent from their lives, the subject is more relevant then ever, every last one of them faced with moral decisions every time they locked eyes with another tribute in a blood-soaked arena. The choice to take a life should be a struggle, always. Not for lack of strength, but in struggling to find it.

Clem’s body language alone tells him he has reached a wall he can’t gently persuade his way around and he hasn’t the spite to drag what he knows of her future – their futures – into it. She’s growing up, isn’t she? He can only try to guide her, but it’s her who walks the path she chooses for herself, her who opens the doors and steps through them.

Maybe there’s little place left in the world for people like him, for mercy and restraint. Less so in Panem. But if he doesn’t strugglingly hold onto those values both when calm and when shaking with fury, he’s not him anymore. He’s someone else, someone he never wants to be. And the world as he knows it becomes a darker place.

“Sometimes, the way to hell is paved with good intentions.” He says evenly, relenting.

Kenny is protective of those he cares about, that Luke won’t deny – but he doesn’t have all their best interests at heart, not all the time. Only a select few while everyone else is expected to march to the beat of his of drum. Luke can’t get behind someone so stubborn. Or so possessed by his own demons that he’d put his pain above others and take every opportunity to vent his frustrations on a scared kid who hadn’t even been part of the firefight. To train a gun on him and Mike and will them to step away from the kid to put a bullet in his skull. To urge them to hit the road when Rebecca had desperately needed rest and pushing them hard through the cold.

Everyone makes mistakes, some more dangerous than others. And recognizing a friend’s uglier choices and the cost of them doesn’t mean giving up on that friendship. Doesn’t mean being disloyal. ‘So many of us have lost our loved ones’, he wants to say. But he just looks to his hands again, rubbing at his knuckles. Guilt over Sarah back at the deck washing over him in waves.

Edited 2015-05-31 23:52 (UTC)

Clementine is stumped for a minute on what to say.

Sometimes good people do bad things. They do bad things for the right reasons, or for the wrong reasons. She can't write off Kenny for that, she won't. "I believe in him."

That's it, that's what it comes down to. For the past three... four years of her life she's watched people do terrible things and sometimes she's done them herself. She's also seen the same people still manage to do good, wonderful things, despite the way the world worked.

"Just like I believe in you."

Clementine looks down and picks up another sheet of paper, starting to fold it into a dog.

It’s his turn to be silenced by her remark while he wonders what about him she’s still believes in. His desire to do what he feels is right without sacrificing what's left of his soul if he could help it? His ability to keep her safe? There’s a funny little thought - though he doesn’t have it in him now to laugh, never mind smile.

“Thank you, Clem.” He looks up, holds her gaze. Weariness fraying the edges of his voice. “…I believe in you too.”

Chooses to believe that she feels the stirrings of a conscience the world hasn’t eroded. That even if she can forgive and make allowances for family – his own fuck-ups included -, she wouldn’t follow too closely in Kenny's footsteps. Standing by to watch a brutal murder and being the one to commit it aren't the same.

But he worries that it might be a shorter hop, skip, and a jump from one to the other than he thinks. It’s all he can really do – worry. He can't push things anymore than he has; there’s nowhere else to go on the subject and it leaves him hunting for something to do, to distract himself with. He looks back to his own paper as she begins folding, peeking at her work before long.

"So... what do I do?"

Edited 2015-06-03 05:06 (UTC)

All of it. She believes in Luke as a person. She trusts him to have her back and do the right thing, to listen and talk to her like she's as capable as she is, the way he has today. Clementine may not always agree with him, that's for sure but she knows when he does disagree with her it's because he believes in what he's saying. She's glad for his honesty, Luke never treats her like a dumb kid.

Right, he reminds her this is supposed to be a lesson, as much as it turned into a confession. "Uh, here." she shoves some paper his way, undoing the folds that she's already made in her dog so that she can do it again where Luke can see. "You start like this... then this..."

Clementine takes it one step at a time, watching Luke as he copies her before she moves onto the next. There's a number of steps, too many to remember without going through the process a few times but by the end of it they're both left with a couple paper dogs stood in front of them. "Not so hard, right?"

It’s a slow process, longer than it is complicated with the number of precise folds involved. But he finds an unexpectedly engaging distraction in following her instructions, sharpening creases with his thumbnail, until he has a dog to pose alongside her example. A very angular dog, but a dog nonetheless.

“Not half bad for my first go.” He appraises his handiwork with a nod before turning his dog to face hers. He gives her a conspiratorial elbow-nudge and a smile with it that takes less effort than he expects. “But I did have a pretty good teacher.”

"You'll get better with practice." Clementine looks down at the pair of dogs, nudging hers closer to his as well. "I did."

The compliment makes her duck her head a little further down, the brim of her cap hiding the pleased expression on her face. Things were still good between them, despite everything. "Thanks."

“Jus’ tellin’ it like it is,” He playfully swipes at the visor of her cap with a finger. Keeping things light. Something he has an easier time of once he hangs up the leader-mantle for a little while and focuses on being a friend, a brother.

“So,” He slides over a new sheet of paper for himself, folding the top corners towards an imagined centre-line in the beginnings of a paper plane. “Dave a friend a’ yours?”

It’d be good to know who she has met and can confide in; who else she might trust to protect her when she’s backed into a corner. So many aspects of her life in Panem he realizes he’s hopelessly out of touch with: her social circle, her studies with Bruce, and all the things not pertaining to survival that are just as crucial in their own way. Despite the ugly situations she’s been forced into, every day back home a struggle, she’s still a kid under the scar tissue and there’s some growing up left to do. Some gaps to fill that some semblance of a normal life between arenas and the presence of tributes closer to her own age can help with.

"Don't mess with the hat." she sticks her tongue out at him for that, before picking up another pieces of paper to start again. Clementine still folds slowly in case Luke wants to follow her again.

At this rate they'll have a whole pack of dogs.

Luke's question catches her by surprise, "Um, yeah. Dave's cool. He got here the same time I did." and they shared a bowl of Dorito's while a mini-arena played out on screen. She'd been nervous as heck back then and still trying to gain an understanding of where she was and what she was going to have to do. Dave had probably been the first real friend she'd made outside of adults looking to protect her.

“Well ain’t you a cheeky li'l sonofagun.” His eyes gleam with mirth, with fondness. “Wouldn't have you any other way.”

Here’s to hoping nothing beats that spirit out of her.

“So how cool are we talkin’ here?” He asks before long, roguishly cocking a brow at her. For all he knows, maybe she liked this guy and felt shy being put on the spot. She'd have to get used to it, though, because the brothering won't ever stop at him keeping an eye on her in and outside arenas.

“...Cooler than me?”

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