For a few seconds it seems like Clarisse might not answer. She chews on her bottom lip, staring off at some point over Abby's shoulder, knowing that she shouldn't do this but needing to do it at the same time. She doesn't have anyone else to talk to about this.
"I saw a couple things. In the temple. They upset me." And that's an understatement. "When we got back I avoided her because I was pissed off, embarrassed, but last night we talked. She talked, mostly. I sat there and listened to it." She puts her face in her hands, breathing through her fingers. "The fucked up thing is that a lot of it I wouldn't have been angry about, you know? If it'd just been Seattle? It's not great but it's not like I can judge, with my family. But ditching her family so she could go on some fucking unhinged revenge quest and 'finish what she started' and threaten a little kid at knifepoint? I'm fucking sick about it. I feel like I don't even know her. Like... who does that?"
It's not like she thinks Abby's going to have an answer for her. If there even is an answer. But it's something she's going to be asking herself for a long time after this.
Fuck, she really did tell her everything. Clarisse probably knows more about what happened than Abby does. While she's listening she pulls the tie out of the end of her braid, grabs the dark brown, wooden comb she keeps on her bedside table, starts to drag it slowly through her hair. It's a comforting thing.
There isn't an answer for her question, not really, but it feels disingenuous not to reply to it. Abby doesn't stop combing. "Me."
If she heard about everything, she knows about Joel. She doesn't know the extent to which Abby went to find him, because Ellie doesn't know that either, but she was out of her mind over it, for years. If she had to hold a kid at knifepoint to get information on his whereabouts? She probably would have done it. She would have done anything. She isn't a good person either.
"I'm not defending it," she adds, "It wasn't right. It was fucked up, but it happened."
Clarisse decides she's just going to flop onto her back on the bed, so she can stare up at the ceiling instead of having to avoid looking at Abby the whole time.
"Guess you two are just made for each other," she mutters, and yeah, it's a bitchy thing to say, but she's over it.
She shuffles her legs, kicking first one boot onto the floor, then the other. She's not leaving this room today. (Unless this conversation goes so badly that she feels like she can't be around Abby anymore. Then all bets are off.)
Abby snorts. "... You're actually not the first person to say that to me."
Or the first person to get caught in the middle of them. Abby knows it fucking sucks. Clarisse isn't alone in wishing it wasn't like this.
Setting the comb aside she drags her fingers slowly through the waves of her hair, sectioning it out before she starts to slowly braid. "That why you've been avoiding our room too?"
"No," Clarisse says, "I was avoiding our room because you stink it up so bad."
Look, she's never going to pass up an opportunity to roast Abby (lovingly). Her heart's not really in it, though, and after a few seconds she admits, "Yeah."
She isn't mad at Abby the way she's mad at Ellie. But it's a lot to deal with.
"Shut up," she replies automatically, and falls silent. She's braiding slowly, but she still finishes before she can formulate anything to say in response. What do you say to that? Even apologising feels lame and stupid and not enough.
Tying off the braid, she tosses it back over her shoulder, and looks at Clarisse.
"Well, yeah," Clarisse says flatly, "I'm pissed at both of you for talking about me and deciding what I'd be allowed to know about you, like, three months ago, and then not actually telling me anything."
But even in that instance, her anger falls more toward Ellie. And she knows it isn't entirely fair, but Ellie's the one she's been lying in bed with night after night, and she can't just turn her feelings off.
Abby can't help wincing. Without realising it, she's scooped her braid back over her shoulder again to tug at it, fucking with the loose ends as she mulls a couple words over.
"She really cares about what you think. I accused her of hiding some shit from me because she was trying to trick me into trusting her." Saying it out loud is embarrassing, especially when it's so obvious Ellie wasn't trying to do that, but at the time that's what it felt like. "She didn't want that to happen with you. And it's kind of a hard thing to bring up when you know what it sounds like."
Eugh... is she really going to sit here and stick up for Ellie? This sucks. She sighs heavily. "We fucked that up, obviously, but I don't know how we couldn't have."
"It would've helped if she hadn't namedropped the baby over a month ago and skipped over the part where she was raising him," Clarisse mutters darkly.
Because that's a big part of it. The revenge and the murder weren't amazing to hear about, obviously, but Clarisse can at least relate to those concepts. Finding out her girlfriend has a kid, even if that kid is in some other universe, is fucking her up way worse.
Again, though, not Abby's fault. Unless Abby knew about that, too, and didn't say anything. Then it's... partly her fault.
Abby looks up instantly, frowning. Clarisse is still lying flat on her back, staring up at the ceiling, her jaw set. She looks pretty pissed off, but it's not like anybody would expect her to be anything else, considering. "The what?"
Clarisse knows immediately that she fucked up, and Abby doesn't know anything about JJ, but the problem is that she's too hurt to care enough to stop herself from fucking up worse.
"Her girlfriend's kid. She had him after Seattle and they moved onto a farm and were raising him together." Until Ellie decided to leave, but Clarisse doesn't want to get into all that.
"I'm allowed to be mad. Right?" She isn't just being a dick, right? It's kind of fucked up not to tell someone you're dating that you technically have a kid somewhere, even if you have your reasons for keeping it to yourself, right? Right??
She realises what Clarisse is talking about in stages, the first round hitting her when she realises Clarisse isn't saying Ellie had a baby, second as she remembers that pregnant woman in the theater, the one she held a knife to the throat of. That one makes her feel sick, stomach churning. Relief pokes a few fingers through. Obviously she was fine, she... had her baby. They moved onto a farm and raised him together, but Ellie left, she must have, because she was there. At the end.
For a moment she doesn't even process Clarisse's question, too busy tripping through all of the implications. Then she says, "Yeah," haltingly. "I think so."
She feels mad. She feels disgusted, and she doesn't know what to say.
It seems to occur to Clarisse, all of a sudden, that they shouldn't be talking about this, and that bringing it up at all was a shitty thing for her to do. She just took very private, personal information of Ellie's and handed it over to Abby without hesitating.
She hadn't known at first that Abby hadn't known about the kid, but... still.
She falls into a brooding, guilty silence, still staring up at the ceiling. Wrings her hands together and uses one thumbnail to pick at the other one. Click. Click. Clickclickclick.
It's a fairly awkward silence. Abby, upon noticing Clarisse is maybe wishing she hadn't just said all of that, releases a held breath. She unclenches her jaw.
"That – must have been a lot. To hear all at once."
The baby thing in and of itself is wild, and it was only one slice of the insane pie. "You okay?"
"Oh. Is this some... new thing that couples are doing together that I don't know about?"
It's a bad joke, but she's trying to make Clarisse laugh, even if only a little bit. She looks stressed out over there, stretched out prone, pinging her nails off of each other as she picks at her fingers.
Clarisse snorts. It's not a genuine laugh, but it's the closest thing she can manage.
"Yeah. You wouldn't know about it because you're always single." Boom, roasted.
She stops messing with her thumbnails and rolls onto her side so she can look at Abby. She knows that Abby is going to Hate This, but she has to be honest and she doesn't have anyone else to say it to.
"I think... I love her," she says quietly. It's why this all hurts so much. If she didn't love Ellie, she wouldn't care, right? "Don't—tell anybody I said that."
"You're so funny," Abby tells her witheringly, and her eyes go right to Clarisse's face the moment she rolls over, baring herself. This means Clarisse gets treated to an expression of distaste that forms before Abby can catch it: a scrunch in her mouth, brow furrowing, a tightness in her jaw.
"Oh." She doesn't hate it, but it's weird. Clearly, this thing with the two of them is not just a thing, it has staying power. Abby wonders how it got this big when she wasn't looking. While she was being 'always single' or whatever.
Big feelings all around. Realising she should at least try to be a better friend than this, she gives Clarisse a thumbs up. "I won't tell."
But, "Are you gonna tell her? Honestly, it doesn't really do anything for me."
The look on Abby's face isn't any kind of surprise, but at least she doesn't audibly gag or anything. Clarisse knows that she's trying. This is most definitely not the conversation either of them thought they'd be having right now, but here it is.
"Yeeeeah," she says, and her face is a little red, "I mean... eventually, sure."
It feels like she and Ellie have been dating for months and months, but that isn't really true. It's complicated. And saying it right after all this would feel weird, almost performative.
Abby considers this, and the look on Clarisse's face, her reddening ears. It's weirdly sweet. She tries not to think about how she'd actually be really happy for her if they weren't talking about Ellie right now, because it makes her feel like an asshole.
"Well," and this feels fair, "if you haven't told her in... three months, I'm doing it."
That'll light a fire under her. It's probably better to get in now, establish this hard rule before all the pining starts. If she has to lie here for more than three months listening to Clarisse agonise over how to tell somebody she loves them, she really will audibly gag.
"No you're not," Clarisse fires back, but the only reason she's so confident is because she doesn't think Abby would go out of her way to tell Ellie the tower was on fire, much less that Clarisse loves her.
After a moment, though: "Fine. Within three months." That's plenty of time.
She won't. She can't imagine anything more cloyingly awkward, and it's not even worth pretending she would even to jokingly threaten Clarisse with it. But she has to say something, and she doesn't know what else to say.
Changing the subject, "What do you mean you had to tell her something fucked up you did?"
Also, what thing was that? She wants to know but doesn't want to ask outright.
For a second Clarisse only blinks at her. The sudden circling back to this is almost disorienting, but... she gets why Abby would want to move on from the subject of her being in love with Ellie Williams, so she lets it slide.
"She saw my memories, too," she says finally. It's not an explanation in the way Abby wants, but it's not nothing, either.
Feels more like getting a door deliberately shut in her face. She says, "Right," and falls silent, feeling awkward, like she shouldn't have asked at all. But she still wants to know, it's like they've had something in common this entire time and she's only just finding out about it.
"How come I didn't see any of your memories?" Like it was something that Ellie got and she didn't.
It's weird, that's all. Presumably Clarisse knows a fair amount of fucked up things about Abby at this point.
Clarisse is glad for that, if nothing else. She's not sure she could have dealt with the fallout of something so invasive happening to her and Abby at the same time as all this shit with Ellie.
She's surprised by the look on Abby's face more than her question, though. Sort of hurt, and closed off. It takes her a few seconds to realize why.
"Oh," she says, not sure whether she should be offended or not. "You want to know what I did?"
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"I saw a couple things. In the temple. They upset me." And that's an understatement. "When we got back I avoided her because I was pissed off, embarrassed, but last night we talked. She talked, mostly. I sat there and listened to it." She puts her face in her hands, breathing through her fingers. "The fucked up thing is that a lot of it I wouldn't have been angry about, you know? If it'd just been Seattle? It's not great but it's not like I can judge, with my family. But ditching her family so she could go on some fucking unhinged revenge quest and 'finish what she started' and threaten a little kid at knifepoint? I'm fucking sick about it. I feel like I don't even know her. Like... who does that?"
It's not like she thinks Abby's going to have an answer for her. If there even is an answer. But it's something she's going to be asking herself for a long time after this.
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There isn't an answer for her question, not really, but it feels disingenuous not to reply to it. Abby doesn't stop combing. "Me."
If she heard about everything, she knows about Joel. She doesn't know the extent to which Abby went to find him, because Ellie doesn't know that either, but she was out of her mind over it, for years. If she had to hold a kid at knifepoint to get information on his whereabouts? She probably would have done it. She would have done anything. She isn't a good person either.
"I'm not defending it," she adds, "It wasn't right. It was fucked up, but it happened."
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"Guess you two are just made for each other," she mutters, and yeah, it's a bitchy thing to say, but she's over it.
She shuffles her legs, kicking first one boot onto the floor, then the other. She's not leaving this room today. (Unless this conversation goes so badly that she feels like she can't be around Abby anymore. Then all bets are off.)
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Or the first person to get caught in the middle of them. Abby knows it fucking sucks. Clarisse isn't alone in wishing it wasn't like this.
Setting the comb aside she drags her fingers slowly through the waves of her hair, sectioning it out before she starts to slowly braid. "That why you've been avoiding our room too?"
She noticed.
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Look, she's never going to pass up an opportunity to roast Abby (lovingly). Her heart's not really in it, though, and after a few seconds she admits, "Yeah."
She isn't mad at Abby the way she's mad at Ellie. But it's a lot to deal with.
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Tying off the braid, she tosses it back over her shoulder, and looks at Clarisse.
"Are you mad at me?"
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But even in that instance, her anger falls more toward Ellie. And she knows it isn't entirely fair, but Ellie's the one she's been lying in bed with night after night, and she can't just turn her feelings off.
"As far as everything else goes, I don't know."
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"She really cares about what you think. I accused her of hiding some shit from me because she was trying to trick me into trusting her." Saying it out loud is embarrassing, especially when it's so obvious Ellie wasn't trying to do that, but at the time that's what it felt like. "She didn't want that to happen with you. And it's kind of a hard thing to bring up when you know what it sounds like."
Eugh... is she really going to sit here and stick up for Ellie? This sucks. She sighs heavily. "We fucked that up, obviously, but I don't know how we couldn't have."
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Because that's a big part of it. The revenge and the murder weren't amazing to hear about, obviously, but Clarisse can at least relate to those concepts. Finding out her girlfriend has a kid, even if that kid is in some other universe, is fucking her up way worse.
Again, though, not Abby's fault. Unless Abby knew about that, too, and didn't say anything. Then it's... partly her fault.
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The... baby?? She adds, stupidly, "What baby?"
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"Her girlfriend's kid. She had him after Seattle and they moved onto a farm and were raising him together." Until Ellie decided to leave, but Clarisse doesn't want to get into all that.
"I'm allowed to be mad. Right?" She isn't just being a dick, right? It's kind of fucked up not to tell someone you're dating that you technically have a kid somewhere, even if you have your reasons for keeping it to yourself, right? Right??
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For a moment she doesn't even process Clarisse's question, too busy tripping through all of the implications. Then she says, "Yeah," haltingly. "I think so."
She feels mad. She feels disgusted, and she doesn't know what to say.
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She hadn't known at first that Abby hadn't known about the kid, but... still.
She falls into a brooding, guilty silence, still staring up at the ceiling. Wrings her hands together and uses one thumbnail to pick at the other one. Click. Click. Clickclickclick.
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"That – must have been a lot. To hear all at once."
The baby thing in and of itself is wild, and it was only one slice of the insane pie. "You okay?"
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Just not today.
"I had to tell her about something fucked up I did, too." Like, not as fucked up as all that, but still. "It was just... a really long night."
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It's a bad joke, but she's trying to make Clarisse laugh, even if only a little bit. She looks stressed out over there, stretched out prone, pinging her nails off of each other as she picks at her fingers.
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"Yeah. You wouldn't know about it because you're always single." Boom, roasted.
She stops messing with her thumbnails and rolls onto her side so she can look at Abby. She knows that Abby is going to Hate This, but she has to be honest and she doesn't have anyone else to say it to.
"I think... I love her," she says quietly. It's why this all hurts so much. If she didn't love Ellie, she wouldn't care, right? "Don't—tell anybody I said that."
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"Oh." She doesn't hate it, but it's weird. Clearly, this thing with the two of them is not just a thing, it has staying power. Abby wonders how it got this big when she wasn't looking. While she was being 'always single' or whatever.
Big feelings all around. Realising she should at least try to be a better friend than this, she gives Clarisse a thumbs up. "I won't tell."
But, "Are you gonna tell her? Honestly, it doesn't really do anything for me."
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"Yeeeeah," she says, and her face is a little red, "I mean... eventually, sure."
It feels like she and Ellie have been dating for months and months, but that isn't really true. It's complicated. And saying it right after all this would feel weird, almost performative.
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"Well," and this feels fair, "if you haven't told her in... three months, I'm doing it."
That'll light a fire under her. It's probably better to get in now, establish this hard rule before all the pining starts. If she has to lie here for more than three months listening to Clarisse agonise over how to tell somebody she loves them, she really will audibly gag.
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After a moment, though: "Fine. Within three months." That's plenty of time.
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She won't. She can't imagine anything more cloyingly awkward, and it's not even worth pretending she would even to jokingly threaten Clarisse with it. But she has to say something, and she doesn't know what else to say.
Changing the subject, "What do you mean you had to tell her something fucked up you did?"
Also, what thing was that? She wants to know but doesn't want to ask outright.
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"She saw my memories, too," she says finally. It's not an explanation in the way Abby wants, but it's not nothing, either.
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"How come I didn't see any of your memories?" Like it was something that Ellie got and she didn't.
It's weird, that's all. Presumably Clarisse knows a fair amount of fucked up things about Abby at this point.
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Clarisse is glad for that, if nothing else. She's not sure she could have dealt with the fallout of something so invasive happening to her and Abby at the same time as all this shit with Ellie.
She's surprised by the look on Abby's face more than her question, though. Sort of hurt, and closed off. It takes her a few seconds to realize why.
"Oh," she says, not sure whether she should be offended or not. "You want to know what I did?"
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