Chapter Text
They make a mistake, choosing Becca. Even Sarah knows this.
Sarah, who involuntarily kept her distance from Becca after several failed attempts at a play-date back in Carver's camp (Becca had hated that word—play-date). Sarah, who hasn't seen Becca in seven years. Still, she knows that Becca is the last person the bandits should have chosen to drag from the camp in the wee morning hours.
But they do choose Becca, not the three people Sarah has never seen before, not... the girl with the hat.
In the half-light, Sarah watches the scuffle from her vantage point in a tree, where she has been watching all night.
She didn't expect this. Her body seizes up and her fingers feel cold against the branch beneath her. She can't get involved. If she has to... she can handle herself. She has handled herself before. Her friends... her family have made sure of that. But she doesn't have to engage with the scene unfolding before her, with the camp of people that are only strangers and memories. She doesn't have to, so she doesn't.
Becca is grabbed from behind, a hand clamping tight over her mouth. The mousey boy on watch with Becca is fast asleep, and stays that way as his companion is pulled away from the camp, disappearing into the trees. The bandits are male in stature, their faces covered in ski masks reminiscent of criminals in the time before the dead walked.
It isn't too odd these days, for bandits to make efforts to protect their identity. Those who can survive nine years in a living nightmare are good at what they do—crossing the wrong people is a death sentence, or at the very least a ban from joining safe encampments. Especially since most people don't travel much anymore—nowhere is safe enough to justify the risk of long-term travel.
Those who cross the living are always recognized eventually. Sarah knows this too well.
It is impossible to avoid the wrath of the living. For some, it's hard not to indulge in that wrath. For Sarah, it's hard to shake the fear of what others have done before, what they might do again.
Forgiveness is a difficult thing to give, and an even harder thing to conjure.
Faces that aren't rotting are rare, and Sarah never forgets a face. (Her salvaged, recycled prescription glasses help her in this task. They were procured from a living dead person who, out of the dozens they'd checked, happened to be just as visually challenged as Sarah. She missed the days of eye doctors and better one or better two.)
Sarah especially did not forget the face of the sleeping girl in the camp far below her, who hasn't woken despite the kidnapping of her companion by two bandits who look more like comic book bank robbers than the cannibals they probably are. The girl is obscured by a thin layer of tent now, but Sarah saw her enter last night. Saw her face by the firelight when it was her turn to keep watch. Sarah had spent the whole night in the tree just to watch the girl for a little longer.
That's what she keeps telling herself: just a little longer.
The girl still wears that baseball cap, even though it is much more war-torn than Sarah remembers it. Seven years. The girl has kept that thing safe for seven years. Sarah wants nothing more than to smack it off of her kinky hair.
The chirping birds remind her that she has been away for too long, spying on her, and Becca, and their companions.
Sarah's group has been waiting for her to return since before dark last night, and though at least one of them is probably worried sick, Sarah knows that he'll be happy to know Becca is safe.
Well, sort of safe.
Will be safe, eventually.
Sarah believes in Becca.
She wants her to be safe, despite recognizing in hindsight that Becca had bullied her back in Carver's camp.
Becca had seemed so much older back then...
And even though the right thing to do is shimmy down from her hiding spot in the tree and wake the camp of mostly strangers to inform them of Becca's kidnapping, Sarah can't bring herself to move.
She can't because it's... It's okay to watch Clementine. Sarah can handle that. But the thought of speaking to her makes Sarah's chest clench and her heart race. The girl with the hat had saved Sarah, cared for Sarah like her father had cared. But Clementine had also stood safe on a deck and did nothing but order someone else to help when Sarah was in danger. Why? Why had she done that when she had taken the job on herself the first time in the mobile home? She had talked Sarah out of suicide only to abandon her when she was begging for help. Even though Sarah pleaded for her life, the other girl could not be bothered to help her again. She sent someone else to help. Someone who didn't want to. Someone who hadn't even helped their own sister.
Sarah had overstayed her welcome back then, and Clementine had stood safely on the deck and watched her die.
But Sarah is not dead.
She had struggled her way under the rubble, curled into a tiny ball, and stayed as quiet as her dad had told her to be so many times before, until more of the deck crashed down on top of her, protecting her further in her little cubby-hole. She pushed her way out when the screams of Rebecca's labor were sure to draw the dead people elsewhere.
She is alive.
But it is better if the people that left her to die still believed her to be dead. It was her reason for leaving them back then, for wandering off in the woods, clutching her sore arms, to find her dad, who never would have abandoned her like the girl with the hat or the people they had called friends.
Her dad would not have stood in safety and entrusted her life to a stranger. He would have done everything in his power to keep her alive.
She did not die.
And she did not forget.
* * *
The scream that bounces through the trees is more a battle cry than a call for help. They go to help anyway, possessions not meant for violence left forgotten in the camp.
Michelle takes to the trees like something from a nature program that Clementine's father used to watch. Danielle is right at Michelle's heels, but Fivel, Fivel looks torn. He seldom leaves Danielle's side, but he also knows that Clementine will be hindered slightly by the overgrown forest floor. He opts for staying behind with her, though the level of anxiety on his face makes Clementine wish he would just go on ahead.
"Just go, the others might need you," she says.
Fivel tosses her a skeptical look. "Doubtful."
The statement is a mix of confidence in his friends and a bit of self-depreciation, but it is true, as most things Fivel says are. He can be a bit cynical at times, but he is usually right.
They move in silence, because there is nothing to say. Becca wouldn't hesitate to chastise anyone who broke the rules and left camp without notice, no matter what their reason might be. It is unlikely that she ended up out in the woods voluntarily. Which pointed to bandits. Bandits only have so many reasons to steal live humans instead of food or supplies. None of those reasons are good news.
Clementine is much taller than she was half a year ago, which is a godsend for climbing fences or reaching things she couldn't before, and for giving better piggy back rides to Alvin, but is bad for her balance. Her left leg—the one in need of an upgrade—keeps catching on the underbrush. Finding a prosthetic that accommodated her new height would require an extensive trip into the city that Kenny has forbid her from taking.
Still, she moves quickly enough that they find the others before Michelle is finished tying the bandits up.
Becca's lip is split, but she looks no worse for wear. Just to be sure, Clementine attempts to inconspicuously circle the other girl, checking for wounds.
She fails, because Becca spots her, rolls her eyes, throws her hands up in exasperation and spins around once to show she is unharmed.
"Happy, mom?" Becca spits in Clementine's direction. She doesn't like being babied, not even by Michelle, but especially not by Clementine.
Clementine shrugs. She hasn't felt relief in a companion's survival in a long time. Feelings like surprise, or worry, are things that died with her childhood. She doesn't mourn the loss of such emotions, not really. There is no room for emotions most days; everything has to be treated as a series of something Mike liked to call If, Then, protocols. If Becca is wounded, then Clementine should administer first aid. If Becca is fine, then move on to dealing with the bandits.
Michelle finishes tying the last knots around the men's wrists (she was in girl-scouts back in the day, something Becca constantly teases her for), and Fivel gathers the weapons that were disarmed from the bandits.
"Please! I'm sure they had their reasons!" Danielle says to Michelle, who ignores her.
"Yeah, what the girl said," the barely conscious Bandit #1 agrees. Becca shuts him up by pointing a gun in his direction.
"We're all desperate out here, right?" Danielle says, addressing everyone but the bandits, who can't hide their surprise behind their ski masks.
Clementine hates this part.
The others do too. No one responds to Danielle's pleading, her justifying. But no one stops her either.
Danielle casts a frantic look around the group. "Hey," she says, voice more pleading, giving an unspoken promise to the bandits with the pointed way she spoke. "You had a good reason, right? Tell my friends you had a good reason."
Her voice promises: if you talk, we might spare you.
Tears collect in Danielle's eyelashes. Every time. She cries every single time she does this, pleads for a monster's safety.
"We weren't gonna hurt nobody," Bandit #2 says, much to #1's apprehension. "We're simply the middle men."
Clementine has heard this phrase before, but she doesn't remember what it means.
Danielle doesn't either, apparently, because she shoots a pointed look at Fivel, who usually knows these kinds of things.
"And why exactly are you acting as a middle men dealing in human cargo?" Fivel asks, sounding sure of himself, though Clementine knows he is reluctant to participate. Anything for Danielle.
"Come on man," says Bandit #2. They say man, not kid. Fivel, with his lanky body and soft, pointed features, would never be called man by someone who wasn't close to his own age. These bandits are just teenagers. "We don't see the girl as cargo, but you gotta understand, we weren't gonna hurt her or nothin'. We just need her is all."
Clementine bristles at the word choice. Needs. Men have needs. It's a consensus that had apparently existed before society's ruin. A false conclusion that is drawn out of selfishness and the inability of men to accept responsibility for their actions.
She first came across this notion when she was eleven and Luke risked the group to indulge in a woman who he barely knew, rather than making sure his pregnant friend was safe, a dead man's daughter, an eleven year old girl, his friends.
The thought brings her back to a memory of Molly slapping Luke across the face when he tries to justify the same sort of behavior years later.
Clementine shakes the memory away, and rejoins reality in time to realize that the bandits aren't talking about that kind of need.
"There's this encampment a ways over, out in the middle of the boonies. They're real safe, they boast a stockpile of medicine and food the likes of which I believed unheard of." The bandit's voice wavers under Michelle's cold scrutiny. His gaze keeps flitting over to Danielle, who nods in understanding. "Thing is, they've got too many men. They don't accept new groups unless you've got a woman with you."
"I see, I see," Danielle coos, fingers immediately going for the ropes around the bandit's wrists.
Clementine hates this. Her heart bangs against her ribs like the bars of a cage. No emotion, she reminds herself, there is no place for emotion in this world. Not even fear.
Fivel gravitates towards Clementine, he's good like that. She knows it must be his time surviving alone with Danielle as a child that makes him this way. People call Clementine the Matriarch more than they call her Clementine, and while she understands the reasons behind the title, the notoriety, it feels wrong applied to her when Fivel and Bonnie care so much more deeply than she is capable of. They are so much more attuned to the emotions of others, and it makes them twice the survivor, twice the nurturer she could ever be.
Clementine doesn't realize her fingers are trembling until Fivel grabs her hand and squeezes. She allows this, because she knows it's hard for him to watch this too.
Becca and Michelle give Danielle space, they just want this over with.
Danielle draws a knife from her belt and cuts the ropes from the wrists of Bandit #2. "My friends and I are going to release you. But you have to promise you'll make friends with a girl next time instead of forcing her to do anything."
"Y-Yes ma'am!" He practically grovels. "Thank you kindly, miss, thank you--your kindness will not go unappreciated!" He rubs his raw, but free, wrists, as though he's just discovering for the first time that the creatures known as humans have the capacity for mercy.
Danielle smiles, studying the look of relief on both bandit's faces before driving her knife into the man's head in one swift motion.
Bandit #1 screams as Bandit #2's body slumps over onto him, he squirms away from the warmth, the blood of his companion seeping through his shirt. "JEFFERY! My, my brother! You killed my brother!"
Clementine almost feels pity, until the words that come next.
"You fucking bitch!" The only remaining bandit yells. "You—we should have taken you—we should have—"
The bandit is dead before anyone can hear what he should have done.
And that's okay, because they don't need to know.