It sounds pretty bad saying it outright like that but it's not like she can take it back.
What she's trying to say is, "I wanna know more about you. It doesn't have to be something really fucked up, for the record." She tugs her braid through her hand, tosses it over her shoulder. "It's just that you know all this shit about me now, but I don't feel like I know that much about you."
The basics of Clarisse's life, yeah. They talk all the time, it's not that, but as far as deeper conversations go...
Maybe they aren't there yet? And for some, insane reason, she's envious of Ellie for knowing her better. But they're literally dating, so of course she does?? Abby frowns. She rubs her neck. She's probably making this uncomfortable.
"I don't know shit about you," Clarisse says honestly. She's felt this way for a while, and she's past being mad about it. "I know... basically nothing."
She's loathe to defend Ellie's honor right now, but she kind of has to. At least when it comes to this.
"You don't get it. Ellie is always so careful when she talks about you. She never says anything that has any emotion attached to it, because she doesn't want what she says to change how I feel about you. And she won't say anything she doesn't absolutely have to, because she says it's not her story to tell. So get it out of your head that I know all about you, because I don't."
Abby opens her mouth instantly and then shuts it, because she can't think of anything to say. In wake of her silence, Clarisse keeps talking. She's right, and Abby did not get that, she assumed—
Her face feels very hot.
She's always talked about Ellie like that to other people. Seldom complaining, even coming to her defense once or twice because nobody else could possibly get it, not like they do. But is that even true? Or has she just been stopping Clarisse from trying to understand her, and know who she is? She did this with Derrica, too. And Glimmer.
The problem with Thedas is that the friends she's made don't know what she's been through. She's used to them already knowing. It isn't a bad thing, it's just different and she obviously isn't handling that well.
"Right." What she wouldn't give for something to happen that would force her out of the room and from this conversation... Abby gives it a couple seconds just in case before she grunts, "Sorry."
Seems like they sit there for ages, facing each other without speaking, but in reality it's not that long. Fifteen, twenty seconds, maybe.
Somewhere around second nine, Clarisse realizes that this is also kind of her fault. She hasn't pushed Abby to talk about anything deeper than surface-level shit, and she hasn't exactly jumped at the chance to talk about anything on her end, either.
She's still doing it now, having flipped the conversation away from her own fucked up trauma—less awful than Ellie's revenge trip to Seattle, but not exactly forgivable, either—to point fingers at Abby instead.
Can't really be that mad at someone for not wanting to talk about themselves when you're pulling the exact same shit.
"Why'd you do it?" she asks finally. She doesn't need to say what it is. They both know.
Clarisse just told her that Ellie was holding her side of the story at arm's length and it still surprises her that she doesn't know. She snorts air and says, "Because he killed my dad."
Says it matter of fact. Like it happened so long ago now that it doesn't bother her any more. To be fair, most days it doesn't. Abby thinks she might be actually processing what happened instead of letting it sit, jammed up in her chest like a spike, poking at her insides every single day. It's definitely better this way, even though she fumbles from time to time, and slices herself open on it all over again.
Slowly, she takes a breath. Then, she adds, "Not just 'cuz of him." Mostly because of him. But, "He stormed a hospital we were living in. The Fireflies, I mean. We were looking for a cure, and he killed half our base."
The last piece slots into place, and suddenly, she gets it.
"Oh," Clarisse says, almost breathing the word rather than speaking it. It all makes sense now. Ellie's story lining up with Abby's, and Clarisse can see them side by side for the first time. Joel killed Abby's dad, so Abby went after Joel.
"I knew about the hospital. She told me that part, about the cure and all, but not anything about you. That was the thing I couldn't figure out, why you'd do that, but—" A pause, but not a very long one. "I don't think he was a great person. So I figured you must have had a good reason."
Abby doesn't move. Ellie may have taken great care to cut her out of their shared story, but she'll have heard about Joel by now. She understands the magnitude of Ellie's grief and loss. She's kind of waiting for Clarisse to have a go at her over it, feels herself bristling preemptively. She doesn't think she'd yell, but she might go ahead and say something blunt that will make Abby feel like dirt—
She lifts her head in surprise to look at her.
"Oh," she says, echoing the way Clarisse said it.
Well. Okay then. "Yeah." Felt like a pretty good reason to her.
It's complicated. Clarisse can't pretend it isn't. And the thing is, the kind of agrees with... all of them. She can't say she wouldn't have done what Joel did in that hospital, or that she wouldn't have tracked him down like Abby did, or that she wouldn't have gone to Seattle if she'd seen what Ellie saw. All of them had their reasons, and their reasons weren't bad ones.
"Well, I mean." She rubs the back of her neck, awkward. "If someone killed my mom, I would do the same thing."
This is... weirdly reassuring to hear, but it doesn't stop Abby from snorting. "I hope nobody kills your mom."
And she thinks that her dad would probably really like Clarisse if he could meet her, it's just something that she likes to think about.
"I had so much of Dad's stuff back home," she laments, staring dismally at her comforter and where she's pinching it ruthlessly between two fingers. "I left it in my room at the stadium... they've probably thrown most of it out." She hates that thought, but it's a better one than picturing the WLF giving it all away to other people to use.
Well, it's post-apocalyptic times, so they probably did give some of Abby's dad's stuff away rather than throw it out. But it's a good thing Abby hadn't said anything about it out loud, because it means Clarisse doesn't stick her foot in her mouth by announcing that.
"What kind of stuff?"
Clarisse is genuinely curious. The only items she's ever gotten from her father have been the spear, the replacement spear, and the replacement's replacement. Gifts for becoming head counselor and then capturing the Fleece and then slaying the drakon. Not, like, stuff.
She is always, perhaps weirdly, interested in what normal dads are like.
Oh, but maybe Clarisse doesn't know. Abby remembers her saying at one point that she was glad her dad wasn't in Thedas. She rubs the back of her neck.
"I had the mug from his alma mater, his coin collection, a bunch of funny photos he took of me when I was a kid, a poster from his office, some of his medical texts... The Fireflies took all his notes and stuff, I didn't get any of that. But I got pretty much everything else." Whatever she could carry. "We only had a couple days to pack up. Nobody exactly wanted to stick around after what happened."
Yeah, that all sounds like Dad Stuff to Clarisse. Not that she'd know, personally, but she's seen enough movies to have a general idea of what fathers are supposed to be like. A mug, a coin collection, dorky family pictures. The kinds of things you could run your fingers over if you wanted to.
"Sucks none of it came through with you. I mean. Some medical books could be pretty fucking handy."
It's a lot more comfortable for her to get off the topic of her dad's lost stuff and onto something else. "They believe in the four humours here. Whatever you do, don't bring up germ theory."
Clarisse snorts. "Guess you don't need germ theory if you have magic." Still fucked up to think about, though. At least in her universe there's, like, both.
She rubs her hands on her thighs. She could decide the conversation's over and she doesn't think Abby would argue with her about it, but that doesn't seem exactly fair, after all this.
Finally: "I did something fucked up and I got people killed. My best friend died. It was bad. And... it isn't the kind of thing that you can spin and make it sound like it wasn't my fault. It was definitely my fault." She clears her throat. "That's the thing I had to tell Ellie about."
She can't help it. For a moment she actually wonders if Clarisse is like... telling Abby her own story to show her just how fucked up she is. And then she realises that Clarisse doesn't know these things about her, because Ellie doesn't either. There's no way that she could know. They genuinely have these things in common. She sucks in a breath.
"Oh."
Where to begin. Another breath and she says tightly, "Same, actually. To all of that."
The look on Abby's face, a narrowing of her eyebrows and a twisting of her lips that make her look both disgusted and pissed off, has Clarisse regretting her decision to say anything almost immediately. Fffffuck.
She feels her cheeks heat up. It's shame, not anger. She can't be angry about it because she can't defend herself. She already just said there's no way to spin the story to make her look good.
She just really, really doesn't want Abby to think she sucks. Or to stop being her friend.
When Abby speaks, then, it catches her completely by surprise. Clarisse isn't sure what to say.
"Oh," she says, echoing Abby in a way that sounds almost dazed. "That's... a really shitty thing to have in common."
Maybe it's better this way, actually. Telling Clarisse what she did instead of letting her learn it all off Ellie. She says, "I dragged my friends into my shit. I didn't make them come with me to kill him, but I made it hard for them to say no. And then I made them watch, because I couldn't stop.
They got killed, and it was my fault. Because they were there in that room when they didn't have to be."
She thinks about it all the time.
Clarisse had to tell her story to Ellie, but Abby is choosing to say this. It hurts, and is oddly satisfying.
Abby talks, and Clarisse nods. She isn't agreeing with her, just listening, taking it in.
She can't say their situations are the same, but she understands the feelings Abby must have in the aftermath. She gets what it's like to walk around knowing that you got people killed, people you love, and there's nothing you'll ever be able to do to take it back or even make it okay.
That some mistakes are so big and so awful that they alter the entire course of your life.
"I'm sorry about your friends," she says. "And... about your dad." For the record.
Obviously people used to tell Abby that all the time. Sorry about your dad. Sorry, Abs. Sorry. Hope you're okay. Over time it started feeling insincere, when the truth was nobody knew what else to say to her. What else can you say?
Hearing it from Clarisse now doesn't feel that way at all. It actually helps.
People might've said it all the time to Abby, but that hasn't been Clarisse's experience, and it hits surprisingly hard. People basically stopped talking about Silena in front of her after what happened. Mostly because they blamed her. Which is fair. She wouldn't have said "sorry about your friend" either, if the same thing had happened to someone else.
"Yeah. Thanks." She presses her lips together, not sure what to say next. Then, with a sigh: "It's been a few years now. But sometimes it still feels like it just happened. You know?"
It's weird, thinking about herself growing older while Silena stays seventeen forever. It doesn't seem right.
In a way, she hasn't been thinking of her friends as dead? More that they're... not here. It's not like she's in denial, or thinks they could fall out of a rift one day, it's just easier to think of it like that rather than what actually happened. When she remembers exactly what Ellie said to her about Nora, she feels sick to her stomach.
Is that something that gets easier over time? Abby has no fucking idea.
She clears her throat. "Yeah. I do."
She thought she was gonna leave it at that but finds herself adding, "Talking about it helps. Otherwise it's like you're the only person here who ever knows they existed and it's... weird, and fucked up. If you ever want to talk about them with me, you can."
Thinking about Silena for too long makes her feel like she's hungover and just crawled out from in between the clashing rocks at the climbing wall back at camp, and Clarisse isn't sure how much she believes that talking about her would be any better, but she doesn't argue. Because even though it hurts, sometimes she does want to talk about it. To bring up things that remind her of her friend, so it isn't like Silena never existed.
Maybe it would hurt less if she did it more often.
It's not until Abby asks that Clarisse realizes what her face must look like. For better or worse, she's never really been able to hide how she's feeling, because everything shows up right on her stupid face no matter how hard she tries, and this whole conversation must have been no exception.
"Yes, Abs." She even smiles, a little. Not fake, just a little too fragile to be considered enthusiastic. "We're cool."
She cracks a tiny grin at the nickname, stretches her arms up over her head.
"Hey," suddenly, "Let's go somewhere." Fun, that is. Something that isn't sitting around here, thinking about Ellie's secret baby, cuz Abby can already tell she's going to dedicate way too much time and energy to that and she doesn't wanna, ugh. "We could... grab food out of the kitchens and go out to Sundermount, or something."
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It sounds pretty bad saying it outright like that but it's not like she can take it back.
What she's trying to say is, "I wanna know more about you. It doesn't have to be something really fucked up, for the record." She tugs her braid through her hand, tosses it over her shoulder. "It's just that you know all this shit about me now, but I don't feel like I know that much about you."
The basics of Clarisse's life, yeah. They talk all the time, it's not that, but as far as deeper conversations go...
Maybe they aren't there yet? And for some, insane reason, she's envious of Ellie for knowing her better. But they're literally dating, so of course she does?? Abby frowns. She rubs her neck. She's probably making this uncomfortable.
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She's loathe to defend Ellie's honor right now, but she kind of has to. At least when it comes to this.
"You don't get it. Ellie is always so careful when she talks about you. She never says anything that has any emotion attached to it, because she doesn't want what she says to change how I feel about you. And she won't say anything she doesn't absolutely have to, because she says it's not her story to tell. So get it out of your head that I know all about you, because I don't."
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Her face feels very hot.
She's always talked about Ellie like that to other people. Seldom complaining, even coming to her defense once or twice because nobody else could possibly get it, not like they do. But is that even true? Or has she just been stopping Clarisse from trying to understand her, and know who she is? She did this with Derrica, too. And Glimmer.
The problem with Thedas is that the friends she's made don't know what she's been through. She's used to them already knowing. It isn't a bad thing, it's just different and she obviously isn't handling that well.
"Right." What she wouldn't give for something to happen that would force her out of the room and from this conversation... Abby gives it a couple seconds just in case before she grunts, "Sorry."
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Somewhere around second nine, Clarisse realizes that this is also kind of her fault. She hasn't pushed Abby to talk about anything deeper than surface-level shit, and she hasn't exactly jumped at the chance to talk about anything on her end, either.
She's still doing it now, having flipped the conversation away from her own fucked up trauma—less awful than Ellie's revenge trip to Seattle, but not exactly forgivable, either—to point fingers at Abby instead.
Can't really be that mad at someone for not wanting to talk about themselves when you're pulling the exact same shit.
"Why'd you do it?" she asks finally. She doesn't need to say what it is. They both know.
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Says it matter of fact. Like it happened so long ago now that it doesn't bother her any more. To be fair, most days it doesn't. Abby thinks she might be actually processing what happened instead of letting it sit, jammed up in her chest like a spike, poking at her insides every single day. It's definitely better this way, even though she fumbles from time to time, and slices herself open on it all over again.
Slowly, she takes a breath. Then, she adds, "Not just 'cuz of him." Mostly because of him. But, "He stormed a hospital we were living in. The Fireflies, I mean. We were looking for a cure, and he killed half our base."
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"Oh," Clarisse says, almost breathing the word rather than speaking it. It all makes sense now. Ellie's story lining up with Abby's, and Clarisse can see them side by side for the first time. Joel killed Abby's dad, so Abby went after Joel.
"I knew about the hospital. She told me that part, about the cure and all, but not anything about you. That was the thing I couldn't figure out, why you'd do that, but—" A pause, but not a very long one. "I don't think he was a great person. So I figured you must have had a good reason."
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She lifts her head in surprise to look at her.
"Oh," she says, echoing the way Clarisse said it.
Well. Okay then. "Yeah." Felt like a pretty good reason to her.
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"Well, I mean." She rubs the back of her neck, awkward. "If someone killed my mom, I would do the same thing."
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And she thinks that her dad would probably really like Clarisse if he could meet her, it's just something that she likes to think about.
"I had so much of Dad's stuff back home," she laments, staring dismally at her comforter and where she's pinching it ruthlessly between two fingers. "I left it in my room at the stadium... they've probably thrown most of it out." She hates that thought, but it's a better one than picturing the WLF giving it all away to other people to use.
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"What kind of stuff?"
Clarisse is genuinely curious. The only items she's ever gotten from her father have been the spear, the replacement spear, and the replacement's replacement. Gifts for becoming head counselor and then capturing the Fleece and then slaying the drakon. Not, like, stuff.
She is always, perhaps weirdly, interested in what normal dads are like.
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Oh, but maybe Clarisse doesn't know. Abby remembers her saying at one point that she was glad her dad wasn't in Thedas. She rubs the back of her neck.
"I had the mug from his alma mater, his coin collection, a bunch of funny photos he took of me when I was a kid, a poster from his office, some of his medical texts... The Fireflies took all his notes and stuff, I didn't get any of that. But I got pretty much everything else." Whatever she could carry. "We only had a couple days to pack up. Nobody exactly wanted to stick around after what happened."
There were a couple fears that he'd come back.
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"Sucks none of it came through with you. I mean. Some medical books could be pretty fucking handy."
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It's a lot more comfortable for her to get off the topic of her dad's lost stuff and onto something else. "They believe in the four humours here. Whatever you do, don't bring up germ theory."
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She rubs her hands on her thighs. She could decide the conversation's over and she doesn't think Abby would argue with her about it, but that doesn't seem exactly fair, after all this.
Finally: "I did something fucked up and I got people killed. My best friend died. It was bad. And... it isn't the kind of thing that you can spin and make it sound like it wasn't my fault. It was definitely my fault." She clears her throat. "That's the thing I had to tell Ellie about."
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She can't help it. For a moment she actually wonders if Clarisse is like... telling Abby her own story to show her just how fucked up she is. And then she realises that Clarisse doesn't know these things about her, because Ellie doesn't either. There's no way that she could know. They genuinely have these things in common. She sucks in a breath.
"Oh."
Where to begin. Another breath and she says tightly, "Same, actually. To all of that."
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She feels her cheeks heat up. It's shame, not anger. She can't be angry about it because she can't defend herself. She already just said there's no way to spin the story to make her look good.
She just really, really doesn't want Abby to think she sucks. Or to stop being her friend.
When Abby speaks, then, it catches her completely by surprise. Clarisse isn't sure what to say.
"Oh," she says, echoing Abby in a way that sounds almost dazed. "That's... a really shitty thing to have in common."
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Maybe it's better this way, actually. Telling Clarisse what she did instead of letting her learn it all off Ellie. She says, "I dragged my friends into my shit. I didn't make them come with me to kill him, but I made it hard for them to say no. And then I made them watch, because I couldn't stop.
They got killed, and it was my fault. Because they were there in that room when they didn't have to be."
She thinks about it all the time.
Clarisse had to tell her story to Ellie, but Abby is choosing to say this. It hurts, and is oddly satisfying.
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She can't say their situations are the same, but she understands the feelings Abby must have in the aftermath. She gets what it's like to walk around knowing that you got people killed, people you love, and there's nothing you'll ever be able to do to take it back or even make it okay.
That some mistakes are so big and so awful that they alter the entire course of your life.
"I'm sorry about your friends," she says. "And... about your dad." For the record.
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Hearing it from Clarisse now doesn't feel that way at all. It actually helps.
Abby releases a breath and nods, looking at her.
"Sorry about your best friend."
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"Yeah. Thanks." She presses her lips together, not sure what to say next. Then, with a sigh: "It's been a few years now. But sometimes it still feels like it just happened. You know?"
It's weird, thinking about herself growing older while Silena stays seventeen forever. It doesn't seem right.
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In a way, she hasn't been thinking of her friends as dead? More that they're... not here. It's not like she's in denial, or thinks they could fall out of a rift one day, it's just easier to think of it like that rather than what actually happened. When she remembers exactly what Ellie said to her about Nora, she feels sick to her stomach.
Is that something that gets easier over time? Abby has no fucking idea.
She clears her throat. "Yeah. I do."
She thought she was gonna leave it at that but finds herself adding, "Talking about it helps. Otherwise it's like you're the only person here who ever knows they existed and it's... weird, and fucked up. If you ever want to talk about them with me, you can."
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Maybe it would hurt less if she did it more often.
"Okay," she says finally. "You too, if you want."
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... Easy. She lets out a big breath.
Because Clarisse's expression is a little hard to read right now, she adds, "We cool?"
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"Yes, Abs." She even smiles, a little. Not fake, just a little too fragile to be considered enthusiastic. "We're cool."
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"Hey," suddenly, "Let's go somewhere." Fun, that is. Something that isn't sitting around here, thinking about Ellie's secret baby, cuz Abby can already tell she's going to dedicate way too much time and energy to that and she doesn't wanna, ugh. "We could... grab food out of the kitchens and go out to Sundermount, or something."
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