Abby doesn't know what to do either. Well — she'd love to get out of the fucking tent and maybe go for a hard run, push all thought from her mind, but she can't leave or Clarisse will take a horse out into the oncoming storm. She cracks her knuckles slowly and slumps in place. She feels a bit sweaty, not entirely comfortable. The side of her face aches from clenching her jaw and she's trying to relax it, to stop the oncoming headache it'll give her, but it's impossible right now.
She grunts at what Clarisse says, rubbing the back of her neck. It's equally as impossible to reply to her the way she wants to right now. Seems important to choose her words carefully.
"Yeah." Abby herself doesn't really know if it's not true, though. It'd be easier if it was.
She isn't looking at Clarisse either. "She left her bag here."
Clarisse looks at the spot where Ellie's bag should be, and yeah, there it is. It looks pretty much just the way it looked the previous night when they'd gone to bed. She's pretty sure it does. She'd seen it this morning, too, she realizes that now, but it's like her brain had skipped over that in the moment. She had been so focused on convincing herself that nothing was wrong that she thinks her brain must have skipped over a lot.
She nods. Abby's not looking at her, though, so she says, "Yeah."
Yeah, but what if Ellie hadn't planned on being gone long? What if someone hurt her? Took her? People do weird things all the time. People act in ways you don't expect. Maybe Ellie left her bag behind because it's supposed to mean something and Clarisse is too fucking stupid to figure out what. Maybe she left it and it doesn't mean anything at all.
"It doesn't mean anything," she decides out loud. It can't.
It sounds weird the way she's saying it, like Ellie being gone hinges on the bag being here without her but — it kinda does. Abby wouldn't go anywhere without her stuff and Ellie came here from the exact same apocalypse. They're survivors, Ellie even wrote that out in her sketchbook a couple times, the words carefully printed, endure and survive. "Her shoes are here."
It's like she's lining up dominoes just to knock them all down. She doesn't know if it's right to force Clarisse into putting two and two together like this, but she does know that she's exhausted, upset, freaked out, she's absolutely dreading the thought of having to try and stop Clarisse from leaving again in a couple hours time.
Clarisse is stubborn, not stupid, and there is a limit to how much even she can metaphorically cover her ears and pretend that Abby isn't making any sense. She knows, and has known all day, that the idea of flying off into the mountains and actually finding Ellie there is laughable. As ridiculous as the idea that Ellie would leave the Gallows without her bag, her shoes, or her griffon. And that she'd do it without saying anything.
It's Clarisse who's not making sense. And she knows that but it feels like she can't stop, either, because stopping would be admitting that there is no chance, and no hope.
This—whatever she says or does next—is going to change everything. Clarisse knows that. It feels exactly like it did after she landed the chariot in Manhattan and she knew, she knew that as soon as she stepped down onto the street that her life would be different. Permanently, irreversibly.
So she says nothing, does nothing. She doesn't blink, she can't even breathe. On the canvas above them, she hears the first fat raindrops hitting the tent. She watches Abby, as if there's something Abby can say that will somehow undo this, somehow make it right.
It's weird that this is the first time Abby is doing this for somebody else. Other people have done this for her, approached her grief slow as if it were a wild animal, hands out. She wonders if Owen felt like this when he was trying to coax her to stand up from the slick hospital floor, clumsy and useless.
It's achy in her throat, this harsh sadness, and she hates that she doesn't have anything other than words right now. Nobody wants to hear shit like 'I'm so sorry' but it's really all there is. This isn't like when Yara was killed and she had to keep Lev moving no matter what, pushing him through the loss; her and Clarisse aren't running for their lives, they're just sitting in a tent with Ellie's stuff left in it. They're alone.
"She's gone."
She swallows and tries to say it again in another way, as if Clarisse won't believe her otherwise. "She went back."
She's gone somehow lands more softly than she went back. That one feels like a bone snapping. Clarisse flinches, her mouth opening.
She wants to argue that Abby doesn't know, actually, where Ellie is. That if the leading theory is true, the Ellie who was here doesn't exist anymore. A person can't go back to a place they never left. She might just be nowhere. Nowhere.
She thinks those things, but she can't seem to make any sound. She doesn't think she can breathe. All the muscles in her chest are seizing up. She might be nodding—she thinks she is nodding—but it feels unreal, like she's no longer connected to her body. Like she's the one who disappeared.
She's gone.
She knew it when she reached out for Ellie in her sleep and there was nothing there. She knew it when she sat up and brushed a hand over Ellie's blanket, pulled up all the way to the pillow, and it had still felt slightly warm. Like she'd just gotten up, like she'd be right back. When she had looked outside and seen Ellie's shoes and the grass covered in dew with no footprints leading away from the tent.
All day. Ellie's been gone all day.
Clarisse lifts a hand to her mouth as if she can stop what's going to happen next. She can't. She says it anyway.
"I know." Her voice is stretched taut, a rubber band about to snap. "She's gone."
It doesn't help to hear her say that. Abby thought it'd bring the relief of having broken through a seal; it has, but now everything behind it is pouring out and she has to try and keep her chin above it. She has to look up and see Clarisse sitting frozen still, clenched muscle evident in the blunt line of her neck and jaw, and the grief setting down on her like a weight trying to snap her in half.
Abby's mouth feels tacky, like she needs to drink water. She's dimly aware that her and Clarisse probably haven't eaten much of anything, all day. She saw Clarisse take those few spoonfuls of breakfast but that was hours ago, hours of searching ago. They've been tearing this fucking place apart for somebody they both knew was already gone.
She wants to say she's sorry but she can't. Not because she isn't, but because it won't come out, and because she feels sort of wild right now, more angry than upset. Maybe even the same way Clarisse was feeling before when she nearly hit her.
She's angry at Ellie. It's a nice, safe way to be.
It's starting to really come down outside. It's the only sound there is and Abby reaches out under the cover of it, putting her hand on Clarisse's arm and squeezing. She doesn't do anything else just yet, just — tethers them, silently.
This is a nightmare and all Clarisse needs to do to wake up is move. Twitch a finger, blink her eyes, take a breath, and the spell will break and she'll wake up and her heart will be pounding and she'll feel sick to her stomach but she'll be warm under her blanket and Ellie's back will be rising and falling slowly under her open hand.
It will. They both promised.
She is frozen, and maybe that's a good thing, because if she wasn't, she's not sure what would happen. Whatever is rising up in her chest is something awful and nameless and when it crests like a wave it might drown her, but at least she'll go quietly.
Clarisse looks at Abby and waits for her to say something that will fix this. Abby always knows what to say. She's rolled over in bed and given Clarisse words of comfort too many times to count, but now, when Clarisse needs her the most, she's quiet. Instead of hitting her to make her shut up, Clarisse wants to hit her to make her talk, to make her say something that will make sense of this. This nightmare.
It's Abby who moves first. She just reaches out and puts a hand on Clarisse's arm and squeezes. Clarisse can't feel it. The simplicity of it makes her think of Granitefell, the way they'd bumped knuckles and smiled even though they already knew they were dying, how they hadn't said anything out loud but she'd still felt it, known it.
She wonders if Abby is saying anything to her now, silently, with that hand on her arm, and she just can't hear it because of the screaming inside her own head.
"Abby?" she manages in a shaking voice, and can't say anything else.
Clarisse's voice breaking on her name dislodges Abby instantly.
"Hey." She scoots her body across the tent and opens her arms instantly. This time, she won't keep herself from reaching out to her best friend in the face of the worst happening (of course she's thinking about Granitefell; somehow, it was easier than this. Why is it easier to walk to your death than to lose somebody important?). She lets go of Clarisse's arm but only so she can wrap her in an embrace, pulling her bodily closer. Holding on. Holding them both together, tight as she can.
"I'm here," she says. Her voice is low, a little trembly. The rain is so loud on the roof of the tent. "I'm still here."
Shitty consolation prize, huh? But it's all Abby has right now. God, she hopes it can be enough.
She wouldn't have ever asked for it, but when Abby reaches out and pulls her into a hug Clarisse falls into it. She presses her face against Abby's shoulder and holds onto her like she's terrified of what will happen if she lets go.
When Silena died, nobody touched her. She just held the body and wept and eventually she got up and went into battle. And nobody touched her, even long after the enemy had retreated. Chris hung back. Waiting, he said later, for her to tire herself out.
This time there is no body to cry over. And it doesn't make sense. She can understand death, and tragedy, and loss. But in this way, where the other person just disappears, and there is no closure and no reason? She can't wrap her head around this. It feels like she's drowning in the contradictions of it, and the only thing she can do is cry into Abby's shirt and hold on tighter.
Abby keeps feeling like Ellie's going to walk back in at any moment. She can sort of imagine Ellie coming in and seeing Clarisse in her arms — something out of a sitcom, funny and stupid, a misunderstanding. But she isn't coming back, the thought shattered, rebuilt, shattered again when Clarisse slumps her weight into her and cries into her shirt hard, holds her even harder.
This is so horribly familiar. Losing someone; the little moments where you look instinctively for them and realise all over again that they are never going to be there again; when you forget temporarily while you're distracted with something else, then remember and feel guilty. She's done this before, so many times.
Abby can't tell if she cries because she's upset, or if she's crying because Clarisse is crying and listening to her hurts. Either way she doesn't move. She holds onto her just as tight, wet cheek pressed against her head.
It hurts. Something wrenched out of her chest, replaced, ripped out again. It feels like the kind of pain that should, at some point, reach a peak and then start to recede, but it doesn't. It only seems to get worse, and worse, and worse.
She lifts her head and looks at Abby, trying to find some kind of reason, some kind of relief. There isn't one. Abby's crying, too. And later Clarisse will see that it was wrong to expect something so insurmountable from her. She'll understand that Abby is hurting, too, in a way that must be far more complicated and fragile than her own grief.
Right now she can't stop herself. The hurt is too huge.
"I don't understand," she chokes out, "I don't understand, I don't understand how she could just... leave, and be gone, in the middle of the night, and never come back, I—what should I have done?"
There has to be something she could have done to keep Ellie tethered to this place. She could have been better, done more, not taken it as a matter of course that she'd close her eyes and that Ellie would still be there when she opened them again. Not taken it so much for granted that someone had loved her, chosen her, out of everyone she could have had. She could have been someone worth staying for.
Clarisse puts both hands over her mouth like she's going to be sick, like if she presses hard enough she can keep her grief from spilling out. The sobs just keep coming, so forceful that she can barely breathe.
"Hey." Her voice breaks on the word and a few more tears well up hotly, skipping down her cheeks when she blinks. "Don't do that."
Yeah she's saying it for Clarisse — it's heart-wrenching, that she would assume this is somehow her fault — but she's saying it for herself too, because she doesn't know how to begin talking Clarisse down from the ledge of this idea. It's not like Abby can offer hard proof or reassurance of any kind, not when nobody even knows why rifters disappear when they do or like they do, with no warning, like they'd never been there in the first place.
She takes Clarisse's shoulders, smoothing her thumbs up and down her arms. Is reassurance even going to work when she's got tears in her eyes? Her throat hurts so bad, there's a spike in it. "It's not you. Okay? It would never be you."
Clarisse has her hands over her mouth. Her breath comes through her fingers in quick, ragged gasps. Abby changes track: she takes her wrists, eases her hands from her mouth and holds them tight. They're clammy from Clarisse's rough, wet breathing, filmy with tears, but she links their fingers together, she squeezes her hard. She raises her voice. "Clarisse, listen to me. If there was a way to keep people here for good, we would have figured it out by now. This isn't on you — or her."
But she gets why it hurts, why it feels like somebody should take the blame. The only thing they can point fingers at is a fucking rip in the sky.
Abby squeezes her hands tight and Clarisse takes a gasping shudder of a breath in response. Everything looks blurry and unreal. Her eyelashes are wet, her cheeks feel hot, her chest aches.
She can't speak to acknowledge the things Abby is telling her. She only listens, absorbing the words and tucking them away to go over again later, later when she's not so close to the knife's edge of this and can start to process it. Later. But the thought of the hours and days stretching out in front of her is its own gut punch.
All that time ahead of them, without Ellie in it.
Clarisse makes a little moaning sound, sick. "Don't leave," she begs, like it's something Abby can promise her, like by saying it out loud they can stop the worst thing from happening. Maybe it's even true. She and Ellie never said those words to each other: don't leave, don't go back. They never thought they had to.
"I'm not gonna leave." This is wildly wrong of her to say, it's not something she gets to decide. Abby has already considered that Ellie arrived only months before her, is this... heralding something? Is this the warning shot? She has no idea but she does know that she doesn't want to go and wouldn't choose to either, if she ever got to. Knowing that makes it easier to hold Clarisse so tight. "We're gonna stay here, both of us. You and me."
Together.
It doesn't make losing Ellie so abruptly more bearable, but it will. Eventually it will.
God, she's basically implying that Ellie chose to go or left on purpose. How dare she, Abby would never do that, not to Clarisse. Ugh. It's not like she's any better, just that she doesn't know what else to do other than lash herself to Clarisse as tight as she can right now to ride out the storm. It's just for now.
"It'll be okay."
Not it is, but it will be. And she pries a hand away to pat Clarisse's shoulder, soothing, then her back. She rubs up and down her spine. She has barely-there memories of being a kid, soothed like this after a nightmare or injury. Something that could be healed over time.
It's not like it's anything Abby can control, but it still helps, hearing her promise not to leave. That they'll stay together. It takes what happened and twists it into something different, something that isn't predestined. Into a choice.
I feel like we were fated to meet, she'd said to Ellie over a year ago, sitting on a half-wall and watching the sun go down. But you were also my choice.
At the time it had seemed like a good thing, that strange intersection between destiny and free will. Maybe that's the trick of it. That she is fated to make the choices that will hurt her the most in the end, just like all the other heroes. She's no different from any of them.
Abby rubs her back, the palm of her hand following the curve of Clarisse's spine down and then back up again. She tries to match her breathing to it, inhale, exhale, repeat, focusing on that. And it works, sort of—a heavy exhaustion spreads through the core of her, making her feel weighed down in a way that feels almost good, because it means she's too tired to panic. She's aware of the way her eyes ache and her cheeks feel sticky with half-dried tears, and she wipes them with the hem of her shirt. Abby's still holding her other hand, and Clarisse could extract herself from it but she doesn't want to yet.
"We have to—tell everyone," she manages after a minute, grasping for something that makes sense. "Figure out what to do with all... her stuff."
They sit together like that in silence for a while. Rubbing Clarisse's back helps Abby too because all she has to do is concentrate on that movement, keep it going, slow and even. Up and down. She can feel Clarisse's breathing starting to slow under her palm and if she thinks about that, lets it fill up her mind, she can walk herself back from the edge of needing to scream.
She tunes back in inelegantly, hand stalling but remaining, tethered, to Clarisse. Oh, fuck. "Yeah.
"Tomorrow." There's no way she could figure something like that out right now. She eyes Ellie's bag where she left it, sitting in the tent. Opens her mouth to tell Clarisse that she went through it before and took things out of it to keep, that she can have the rest — and closes it again. She doesn't need to know that. And what if she asks Abby to give it back? She has the better claim to it but Abby feels oddly possessive over the Ellie that existed before she came through the rift, even the Ellie that, in the early days of them being here together, stabbed her in the marketplace.
She has so few things to remind her of it. Scars and old notebook pages.
Clarisse lets the air out of her lungs in a tired sigh. "... Yeah."
In a way, it's a relief being given permission to put those things off until the next day. She would have done them tonight if Abby had wanted to but the thought of having to divvy up Ellie's things makes her feel like throwing up. So does the way she'd brought up the idea almost as soon as she'd finished crying, like some fucking vulture.
It's just that she doesn't know what else to do, and if she's not doing something, Clarisse doesn't know how to handle herself. She opens her mouth a couple times and closes it again, feeling like she should say something to Abby but not sure what.
Slowly, she extracts her hand from Abby's, though she doesn't try to move away from the palm resting on her back. Secretly, she hopes Abby keeps it there. The weight of it is warm and comforting.
"Kind of wish we had some Ambien right now." As an attempt at humor, it mostly falls flat. And she's not even a little bit kidding, anyway. She would absolutely say yes to being unconscious for a while right now.
She keeps it there, not in a firm grip, clinging, but gentle, moving every so often in a slow circle; it's helping her as much. Feels good to move, to feel like she's helping in some way, even if all she's doing is rubbing Clarisse's back, keeping them linked. It's a reminder, a reassurance. I'm still here. I won't go.
She laughs, once. It sounds flat, fake. "God, yeah. Same.
"Want me to punch you in the head until you're out cold? I'd do it."
It wrenches a shaky, morbid laugh out of her, too. "Don't tempt me."
Clarisse sniffs. She's not really crying anymore, but every so often her chest hitches. She pinches the bridge of her nose and blinks, hard. Her eyes feel swollen, scratchy.
It's dark out now, helped along by the rainstorm, but not that late, all things considered. She'd never go to bed this early normally, but what else are they supposed to do? Go get dinner, and have to explain why it looks like they've both been crying? Potentially field some awkward question about where Ellie is? Her stomach flips, and she bites down on her lower lip, hard.
"Did you eat?" she asks Abby, finally. "There's food in..." Well. In Ellie's bag.
Abby's lip twitches but she doesn't say anything more, falling silent to listen to the rain on the tent and Clarisse sniffling, her own heart thumping in her ears. There's so much to think about... where the fuck does she even start, with all of this? She kind of wants to lie down and curl up.
It's a relief when Clarisse says something and she has to focus on that instead.
"No." It makes her realise that she's actually really fucking hungry, and that she hasn't eaten anything all day. Too busy looking, too busy worrying, waiting for everything to turn out in the end. She didn't even pretend to finish off that bowl of whatever she made Clarisse eat in the morning, she left it there at the table missing three big bites.
She looks at the bag for a long moment before she gets to her feet to go retrieve it from the corner of the tent. "She won't mind." She doesn't need it any more. Survivor rules. Abby opens it up like she's never done it before, extracts some fruit and bread, something wrapped in wax paper that smells sweet; she tosses the little package to Clarisse.
Abby says she won't mind, but it still feels like stealing to Clarisse as she watches Abby go and get Ellie's bag from the corner, open it up, and take out the food. She doesn't even hesitate.
Clarisse has been to Seattle. She remembers the way they went out and picked over dead people's stuff, and that it was normal, but she hadn't known those people and hadn't cared about them, which had made it easy. Ellie's not dead. She didn't bequeath them her stuff, or anticipate last night when she went to bed that the following evening Clarisse and Abby would open her bag and dig through it for food. It feels gross and wrong to be doing this. Clarisse catches the package Abby tosses her way, on instinct more than anything, but doesn't unwrap it yet. It smells like something sweet inside.
Ellie wouldn't mind. Ellie shared food with her all the time. Sometimes she brought food along just to give to Clarisse, if they were out for the day, because she knew that Clarisse would get cranky and annoying if she didn't eat something. For all she knows, this little package of wax paper could have been intended for her.
Telling herself this, she slowly unwraps it. There are three cookies inside, hard biscuits with raisins baked into them. She takes one and offers the rest of the package to Abby.
"Trade you for some of the bread." She's not very hungry, though. Her stomach feels like it's all knotted up. Still, she'll eat if Abby does, just to keep herself going.
All Abby takes is the food. She doesn't keep rooting around, once she's got these things and tossed the third one to Clarisse she puts the pack back down where she found it in the corner. If this were reversed — if she left and Ellie had her stuff she'd do the same thing, Abby has no doubt.
She's bringing Ellie's apple to her mouth and thinking about what she would have found in Abby's bag, what she'd be standing here eating now. Bread and nuts. Oh, and that jerky she got from the Kirkwall markets last week.
She's gotta be making a face while she eats but Clarisse hasn't pointed it out.
"Sure."
Abby comes to sit. She takes the package and hands her the bread in return, glancing into the wax paper wrapping, lifting it up to sniff. Then she sighs. "I hate raisin cookies." Like Ellie did this on purpose, to spite her from beyond the rift.
Clarisse is tearing the bread in half and doesn't say anything until she's finished and can set one piece aside for Abby. Then, "Ellie doesn't like those either."
She lifts the cookie to her mouth and takes a bite out of it, but it's clear her heart isn't in it.
They agreed on dealing with it tomorrow, but she's still thinking about what else is in the bag and what they'll end up doing with Ellie's stuff. Most of it will get absorbed back into Riftwatch, she guesses, like any extra supplies. Weapons. The knife she made Ellie she doesn't want going to anyone else, but she doesn't want it for herself, either.
This sucks. Part of her hates how unfair it is that she's going to have to figure this out. The other part of her wouldn't trust anyone else to do it. Except for Abby, but she's not sure how much Abby will want to involve herself in dealing with Ellie's things.
Abby watches her take a bite out of the cookie and then she looks away, down at her hands instead. She takes the bread that Clarisse ripped off for her and puts it absentmindedly into her mouth, ignoring the dull ache when she clenches her teeth down to bite through the crust. Her stomach feels like it's in her shoes.
It's just gonna be like this now, huh. Everything is gonna remind her of Ellie one way or the other until enough time passes that it doesn't. Even shitty cookies aren't safe. It feels a little like she has a gut wound, like she's gonna be working around it for a while, instinctively moving her body in a different way to protect the part that's hurt.
Wags has put his chin on her knee in an attempt to commiserate — or maybe he just wants some of the bread.
"Wanna stay up and just... watch the rain?"
She doesn't know what else to do. There is nothing else to do right now except wait until tomorrow, when they can start doing something about this.
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She grunts at what Clarisse says, rubbing the back of her neck. It's equally as impossible to reply to her the way she wants to right now. Seems important to choose her words carefully.
"Yeah." Abby herself doesn't really know if it's not true, though. It'd be easier if it was.
She isn't looking at Clarisse either. "She left her bag here."
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She nods. Abby's not looking at her, though, so she says, "Yeah."
Yeah, but what if Ellie hadn't planned on being gone long? What if someone hurt her? Took her? People do weird things all the time. People act in ways you don't expect. Maybe Ellie left her bag behind because it's supposed to mean something and Clarisse is too fucking stupid to figure out what. Maybe she left it and it doesn't mean anything at all.
"It doesn't mean anything," she decides out loud. It can't.
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It sounds weird the way she's saying it, like Ellie being gone hinges on the bag being here without her but — it kinda does. Abby wouldn't go anywhere without her stuff and Ellie came here from the exact same apocalypse. They're survivors, Ellie even wrote that out in her sketchbook a couple times, the words carefully printed, endure and survive. "Her shoes are here."
It's like she's lining up dominoes just to knock them all down. She doesn't know if it's right to force Clarisse into putting two and two together like this, but she does know that she's exhausted, upset, freaked out, she's absolutely dreading the thought of having to try and stop Clarisse from leaving again in a couple hours time.
She needs them to be on the same page right now.
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It's Clarisse who's not making sense. And she knows that but it feels like she can't stop, either, because stopping would be admitting that there is no chance, and no hope.
This—whatever she says or does next—is going to change everything. Clarisse knows that. It feels exactly like it did after she landed the chariot in Manhattan and she knew, she knew that as soon as she stepped down onto the street that her life would be different. Permanently, irreversibly.
So she says nothing, does nothing. She doesn't blink, she can't even breathe. On the canvas above them, she hears the first fat raindrops hitting the tent. She watches Abby, as if there's something Abby can say that will somehow undo this, somehow make it right.
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It's achy in her throat, this harsh sadness, and she hates that she doesn't have anything other than words right now. Nobody wants to hear shit like 'I'm so sorry' but it's really all there is. This isn't like when Yara was killed and she had to keep Lev moving no matter what, pushing him through the loss; her and Clarisse aren't running for their lives, they're just sitting in a tent with Ellie's stuff left in it. They're alone.
"She's gone."
She swallows and tries to say it again in another way, as if Clarisse won't believe her otherwise. "She went back."
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She wants to argue that Abby doesn't know, actually, where Ellie is. That if the leading theory is true, the Ellie who was here doesn't exist anymore. A person can't go back to a place they never left. She might just be nowhere. Nowhere.
She thinks those things, but she can't seem to make any sound. She doesn't think she can breathe. All the muscles in her chest are seizing up. She might be nodding—she thinks she is nodding—but it feels unreal, like she's no longer connected to her body. Like she's the one who disappeared.
She's gone.
She knew it when she reached out for Ellie in her sleep and there was nothing there. She knew it when she sat up and brushed a hand over Ellie's blanket, pulled up all the way to the pillow, and it had still felt slightly warm. Like she'd just gotten up, like she'd be right back. When she had looked outside and seen Ellie's shoes and the grass covered in dew with no footprints leading away from the tent.
All day. Ellie's been gone all day.
Clarisse lifts a hand to her mouth as if she can stop what's going to happen next. She can't. She says it anyway.
"I know." Her voice is stretched taut, a rubber band about to snap. "She's gone."
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Abby's mouth feels tacky, like she needs to drink water. She's dimly aware that her and Clarisse probably haven't eaten much of anything, all day. She saw Clarisse take those few spoonfuls of breakfast but that was hours ago, hours of searching ago. They've been tearing this fucking place apart for somebody they both knew was already gone.
She wants to say she's sorry but she can't. Not because she isn't, but because it won't come out, and because she feels sort of wild right now, more angry than upset. Maybe even the same way Clarisse was feeling before when she nearly hit her.
She's angry at Ellie. It's a nice, safe way to be.
It's starting to really come down outside. It's the only sound there is and Abby reaches out under the cover of it, putting her hand on Clarisse's arm and squeezing. She doesn't do anything else just yet, just — tethers them, silently.
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This is a nightmare and all Clarisse needs to do to wake up is move. Twitch a finger, blink her eyes, take a breath, and the spell will break and she'll wake up and her heart will be pounding and she'll feel sick to her stomach but she'll be warm under her blanket and Ellie's back will be rising and falling slowly under her open hand.
It will. They both promised.
She is frozen, and maybe that's a good thing, because if she wasn't, she's not sure what would happen. Whatever is rising up in her chest is something awful and nameless and when it crests like a wave it might drown her, but at least she'll go quietly.
Clarisse looks at Abby and waits for her to say something that will fix this. Abby always knows what to say. She's rolled over in bed and given Clarisse words of comfort too many times to count, but now, when Clarisse needs her the most, she's quiet. Instead of hitting her to make her shut up, Clarisse wants to hit her to make her talk, to make her say something that will make sense of this. This nightmare.
It's Abby who moves first. She just reaches out and puts a hand on Clarisse's arm and squeezes. Clarisse can't feel it. The simplicity of it makes her think of Granitefell, the way they'd bumped knuckles and smiled even though they already knew they were dying, how they hadn't said anything out loud but she'd still felt it, known it.
She wonders if Abby is saying anything to her now, silently, with that hand on her arm, and she just can't hear it because of the screaming inside her own head.
"Abby?" she manages in a shaking voice, and can't say anything else.
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"Hey." She scoots her body across the tent and opens her arms instantly. This time, she won't keep herself from reaching out to her best friend in the face of the worst happening (of course she's thinking about Granitefell; somehow, it was easier than this. Why is it easier to walk to your death than to lose somebody important?). She lets go of Clarisse's arm but only so she can wrap her in an embrace, pulling her bodily closer. Holding on. Holding them both together, tight as she can.
"I'm here," she says. Her voice is low, a little trembly. The rain is so loud on the roof of the tent. "I'm still here."
Shitty consolation prize, huh? But it's all Abby has right now. God, she hopes it can be enough.
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When Silena died, nobody touched her. She just held the body and wept and eventually she got up and went into battle. And nobody touched her, even long after the enemy had retreated. Chris hung back. Waiting, he said later, for her to tire herself out.
This time there is no body to cry over. And it doesn't make sense. She can understand death, and tragedy, and loss. But in this way, where the other person just disappears, and there is no closure and no reason? She can't wrap her head around this. It feels like she's drowning in the contradictions of it, and the only thing she can do is cry into Abby's shirt and hold on tighter.
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This is so horribly familiar. Losing someone; the little moments where you look instinctively for them and realise all over again that they are never going to be there again; when you forget temporarily while you're distracted with something else, then remember and feel guilty. She's done this before, so many times.
Abby can't tell if she cries because she's upset, or if she's crying because Clarisse is crying and listening to her hurts. Either way she doesn't move. She holds onto her just as tight, wet cheek pressed against her head.
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She lifts her head and looks at Abby, trying to find some kind of reason, some kind of relief. There isn't one. Abby's crying, too. And later Clarisse will see that it was wrong to expect something so insurmountable from her. She'll understand that Abby is hurting, too, in a way that must be far more complicated and fragile than her own grief.
Right now she can't stop herself. The hurt is too huge.
"I don't understand," she chokes out, "I don't understand, I don't understand how she could just... leave, and be gone, in the middle of the night, and never come back, I—what should I have done?"
There has to be something she could have done to keep Ellie tethered to this place. She could have been better, done more, not taken it as a matter of course that she'd close her eyes and that Ellie would still be there when she opened them again. Not taken it so much for granted that someone had loved her, chosen her, out of everyone she could have had. She could have been someone worth staying for.
Clarisse puts both hands over her mouth like she's going to be sick, like if she presses hard enough she can keep her grief from spilling out. The sobs just keep coming, so forceful that she can barely breathe.
"Why wasn't I enough to keep her here?"
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Yeah she's saying it for Clarisse — it's heart-wrenching, that she would assume this is somehow her fault — but she's saying it for herself too, because she doesn't know how to begin talking Clarisse down from the ledge of this idea. It's not like Abby can offer hard proof or reassurance of any kind, not when nobody even knows why rifters disappear when they do or like they do, with no warning, like they'd never been there in the first place.
She takes Clarisse's shoulders, smoothing her thumbs up and down her arms. Is reassurance even going to work when she's got tears in her eyes? Her throat hurts so bad, there's a spike in it. "It's not you. Okay? It would never be you."
Clarisse has her hands over her mouth. Her breath comes through her fingers in quick, ragged gasps. Abby changes track: she takes her wrists, eases her hands from her mouth and holds them tight. They're clammy from Clarisse's rough, wet breathing, filmy with tears, but she links their fingers together, she squeezes her hard. She raises her voice. "Clarisse, listen to me. If there was a way to keep people here for good, we would have figured it out by now. This isn't on you — or her."
But she gets why it hurts, why it feels like somebody should take the blame. The only thing they can point fingers at is a fucking rip in the sky.
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She can't speak to acknowledge the things Abby is telling her. She only listens, absorbing the words and tucking them away to go over again later, later when she's not so close to the knife's edge of this and can start to process it. Later. But the thought of the hours and days stretching out in front of her is its own gut punch.
All that time ahead of them, without Ellie in it.
Clarisse makes a little moaning sound, sick. "Don't leave," she begs, like it's something Abby can promise her, like by saying it out loud they can stop the worst thing from happening. Maybe it's even true. She and Ellie never said those words to each other: don't leave, don't go back. They never thought they had to.
"Don't leave. I don't know what I'd do."
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Together.
It doesn't make losing Ellie so abruptly more bearable, but it will. Eventually it will.
God, she's basically implying that Ellie chose to go or left on purpose. How dare she, Abby would never do that, not to Clarisse. Ugh. It's not like she's any better, just that she doesn't know what else to do other than lash herself to Clarisse as tight as she can right now to ride out the storm. It's just for now.
"It'll be okay."
Not it is, but it will be. And she pries a hand away to pat Clarisse's shoulder, soothing, then her back. She rubs up and down her spine. She has barely-there memories of being a kid, soothed like this after a nightmare or injury. Something that could be healed over time.
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I feel like we were fated to meet, she'd said to Ellie over a year ago, sitting on a half-wall and watching the sun go down. But you were also my choice.
At the time it had seemed like a good thing, that strange intersection between destiny and free will. Maybe that's the trick of it. That she is fated to make the choices that will hurt her the most in the end, just like all the other heroes. She's no different from any of them.
Abby rubs her back, the palm of her hand following the curve of Clarisse's spine down and then back up again. She tries to match her breathing to it, inhale, exhale, repeat, focusing on that. And it works, sort of—a heavy exhaustion spreads through the core of her, making her feel weighed down in a way that feels almost good, because it means she's too tired to panic. She's aware of the way her eyes ache and her cheeks feel sticky with half-dried tears, and she wipes them with the hem of her shirt. Abby's still holding her other hand, and Clarisse could extract herself from it but she doesn't want to yet.
"We have to—tell everyone," she manages after a minute, grasping for something that makes sense. "Figure out what to do with all... her stuff."
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She tunes back in inelegantly, hand stalling but remaining, tethered, to Clarisse. Oh, fuck. "Yeah.
"Tomorrow." There's no way she could figure something like that out right now. She eyes Ellie's bag where she left it, sitting in the tent. Opens her mouth to tell Clarisse that she went through it before and took things out of it to keep, that she can have the rest — and closes it again. She doesn't need to know that. And what if she asks Abby to give it back? She has the better claim to it but Abby feels oddly possessive over the Ellie that existed before she came through the rift, even the Ellie that, in the early days of them being here together, stabbed her in the marketplace.
She has so few things to remind her of it. Scars and old notebook pages.
"We'll figure it out tomorrow."
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In a way, it's a relief being given permission to put those things off until the next day. She would have done them tonight if Abby had wanted to but the thought of having to divvy up Ellie's things makes her feel like throwing up. So does the way she'd brought up the idea almost as soon as she'd finished crying, like some fucking vulture.
It's just that she doesn't know what else to do, and if she's not doing something, Clarisse doesn't know how to handle herself. She opens her mouth a couple times and closes it again, feeling like she should say something to Abby but not sure what.
Slowly, she extracts her hand from Abby's, though she doesn't try to move away from the palm resting on her back. Secretly, she hopes Abby keeps it there. The weight of it is warm and comforting.
"Kind of wish we had some Ambien right now." As an attempt at humor, it mostly falls flat. And she's not even a little bit kidding, anyway. She would absolutely say yes to being unconscious for a while right now.
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She laughs, once. It sounds flat, fake. "God, yeah. Same.
"Want me to punch you in the head until you're out cold? I'd do it."
You know, as a friend.
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Clarisse sniffs. She's not really crying anymore, but every so often her chest hitches. She pinches the bridge of her nose and blinks, hard. Her eyes feel swollen, scratchy.
It's dark out now, helped along by the rainstorm, but not that late, all things considered. She'd never go to bed this early normally, but what else are they supposed to do? Go get dinner, and have to explain why it looks like they've both been crying? Potentially field some awkward question about where Ellie is? Her stomach flips, and she bites down on her lower lip, hard.
"Did you eat?" she asks Abby, finally. "There's food in..." Well. In Ellie's bag.
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It's a relief when Clarisse says something and she has to focus on that instead.
"No." It makes her realise that she's actually really fucking hungry, and that she hasn't eaten anything all day. Too busy looking, too busy worrying, waiting for everything to turn out in the end. She didn't even pretend to finish off that bowl of whatever she made Clarisse eat in the morning, she left it there at the table missing three big bites.
She looks at the bag for a long moment before she gets to her feet to go retrieve it from the corner of the tent. "She won't mind." She doesn't need it any more. Survivor rules. Abby opens it up like she's never done it before, extracts some fruit and bread, something wrapped in wax paper that smells sweet; she tosses the little package to Clarisse.
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Clarisse has been to Seattle. She remembers the way they went out and picked over dead people's stuff, and that it was normal, but she hadn't known those people and hadn't cared about them, which had made it easy. Ellie's not dead. She didn't bequeath them her stuff, or anticipate last night when she went to bed that the following evening Clarisse and Abby would open her bag and dig through it for food. It feels gross and wrong to be doing this. Clarisse catches the package Abby tosses her way, on instinct more than anything, but doesn't unwrap it yet. It smells like something sweet inside.
Ellie wouldn't mind. Ellie shared food with her all the time. Sometimes she brought food along just to give to Clarisse, if they were out for the day, because she knew that Clarisse would get cranky and annoying if she didn't eat something. For all she knows, this little package of wax paper could have been intended for her.
Telling herself this, she slowly unwraps it. There are three cookies inside, hard biscuits with raisins baked into them. She takes one and offers the rest of the package to Abby.
"Trade you for some of the bread." She's not very hungry, though. Her stomach feels like it's all knotted up. Still, she'll eat if Abby does, just to keep herself going.
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She's bringing Ellie's apple to her mouth and thinking about what she would have found in Abby's bag, what she'd be standing here eating now. Bread and nuts. Oh, and that jerky she got from the Kirkwall markets last week.
She's gotta be making a face while she eats but Clarisse hasn't pointed it out.
"Sure."
Abby comes to sit. She takes the package and hands her the bread in return, glancing into the wax paper wrapping, lifting it up to sniff. Then she sighs. "I hate raisin cookies." Like Ellie did this on purpose, to spite her from beyond the rift.
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She lifts the cookie to her mouth and takes a bite out of it, but it's clear her heart isn't in it.
They agreed on dealing with it tomorrow, but she's still thinking about what else is in the bag and what they'll end up doing with Ellie's stuff. Most of it will get absorbed back into Riftwatch, she guesses, like any extra supplies. Weapons. The knife she made Ellie she doesn't want going to anyone else, but she doesn't want it for herself, either.
This sucks. Part of her hates how unfair it is that she's going to have to figure this out. The other part of her wouldn't trust anyone else to do it. Except for Abby, but she's not sure how much Abby will want to involve herself in dealing with Ellie's things.
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It's just gonna be like this now, huh. Everything is gonna remind her of Ellie one way or the other until enough time passes that it doesn't. Even shitty cookies aren't safe. It feels a little like she has a gut wound, like she's gonna be working around it for a while, instinctively moving her body in a different way to protect the part that's hurt.
Wags has put his chin on her knee in an attempt to commiserate — or maybe he just wants some of the bread.
"Wanna stay up and just... watch the rain?"
She doesn't know what else to do. There is nothing else to do right now except wait until tomorrow, when they can start doing something about this.
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