Chapter 10:
Dawn came sooner than Clark expected, as he woke up and let out a big stretch. The cat on the bed let out a yawn before making biscuits on the bed. As soon as he saw it, he chastised his feline instincts and morphed back to his human form.
With nothing else to do, for some time now, as he felt the silence in the parking lot, Clark took a Soylent Green from his powers, letting the cooldown start. He put the new can inside his backpack.
Another thing that he did was blow air into the crushed water bottles he kept carrying in his backpack and took out his fruit wine, half-filling the half a dozen empty bottles. Now, he'd needed water to just fill the rest, and Lee's group would, maybe for the first time in forever, taste fruit wine turned to fruit juice.
Hopefully, this would remove some doubts from others regarding his usefulness. Because that's how the world worked now. If you were useful, you were protected and kept safe. If not, then you were kicked out.
By the time others had woken up, Clark already had a fire ready and greeted Kenny, who stayed all night as lookout.
Kenny looked at him the way men looked at things they hadn't expected and weren't sure how to categorize yet.
"You're up early." He said it like an observation, not a greeting.
Clark shrugged, "early riser."
Kenny grunted and accepted that, settling into his picnic chair, the rifle on his knees and ready to shoot anything that moved towards the fence.
Clark fed the fire another strip of wood and said nothing.
"You hunt?" Kenny asked, after a while.
"Some." Clark kept his eyes on the fire, already figuring out the reason behind the questions. "Got better at it recently."
"Bow?"
"No."
Kenny glanced at the pipe on Clark's hip, which he was bringing everywhere, and the Glock next to it, and made a sound that wasn't quite skeptical and wasn't quite impressed. "Trapping?"
"Something like that."
Another grunt. Kenny, apparently, communicated in a dialect that was mostly grunts, with occasional full sentences reserved for things that actually warranted them. Clark could respect that.
"We're low," Kenny said, already putting him to work, after another stretch of quiet. "On everything. Lilly's rationing it down to the bone. Duck's been-" He stopped. Reset. "The kid's been hungry."
He remembered the people that he cared about: Carley, Lee, and Clementine. Their faces and eyes looked no better than his two weeks after the outbreak.
Clark's eyes went to his room and the backpack he left by the bed, and the bottle lineup he'd prepared in the early morning, and he made a decision. It would be beneficial for him and the group.
"I'm going out today." He said. "I'll let Lilly or whoever runs this group know about it."
"Lilly doesn't run this group." Kenny's jaw tightened slightly, the reflex of a man who had opinions about that and had said them and would keep saying them.
Clark let out a sigh, stopping his snap back. "Whatever. I'll go after others wake up." Clark decided.
Kenny nodded once, which Clark was learning to read as approval, and went back to watching the fence.
The next hour passed quietly and Clark went inside to drop another Soylent Green in the room. The fire burned down to coals, and Clark fed it twice more, and somewhere around the time the sky shifted from gray to pale gold, the motel doors started opening.
Katjaa first, with Duck trailing behind her, the boy still half-asleep and dragging his feet. Then Mark, who acknowledged Clark with a nod that Clark returned. Lee came out maybe ten minutes after that, already dressed and alert in the way of someone who hadn't slept as deeply as he'd wanted to.
He spotted Clark by the fire and crossed to him without breaking stride.
"You're up." Man, he missed small talk.
"Yeah." Clark nodded, motioning for one of the picnic chairs and two cartons of milk overturned seats.
Lee crouched by the fire and held his hands out to it. "Sleep okay?"
"Better than I have in a while," Clark said. It was true if his purring was anything to go by.
Lee glanced at him sideways, like he was deciding whether to say something. He settled on, "good."
Carley came out last, which surprised him, because she hadn't struck him as someone who slept in. Then he saw her face, and already, she looked better than yesterday. In her hand was the can that he had given her, filled with his fresh kill from yesterday.
And it seemed like she had peeked inside, because as soon as she saw him, Carley marched up to him and dragged him back to his room to give it back in secret.
She pushed the door open with her shoulder, pulled him inside by the sleeve, and turned to face him before he'd finished processing the momentum.
"Clark." She held out the can.
"Carley."
"This is-" She stopped, looked at the can, then back at him. "This is a lot of meat."
"I know."
"This is two days of rations for the whole group." Which was sad because, Clark remembered, before the outbreak, that amount of meat wouldn't even last one person. It'd be gone in under half an hour.
"I know."
"Where did you even-" She stopped again, and he watched her recalibrate, the way she always did when she was choosing which argument to lead with. "You can't just give this to me. This is yours."
"I gave it to you," Clark said. "That makes it yours."
"Clark-"
"Carley." He kept his voice even. "I can get more." He guided her to sit on the bed. It was time to share his biggest secret with someone, and Carley, he could feel that he could trust her.
"What are you-" She stopped as he pulled his hiking backpack to her and opened it. Her jaw fell at the amount of what looked like food inside it. "I want to give this to others. But I gotta warn you, they taste horrible."
"Soylent Green?" She muttered, taking one can.
"Yeah," Clark said. "The main ingredient is plankton, which suck, the taste is horrible, and it changes. But it keeps off starvation."
"How?"
"It restocks." He said it carefully, watching her face turn to genuine confusion, because this was the part where it either went well or it went very badly. "Every hour. I can pull another one right now."
He did. Reached into nothing, the way he'd been doing for three months, and set the fresh tin on the bed between them.
Carley looked at it.
Then she looked at him.
Then at the tin.
"Okay." She said, with the careful tone of someone putting a pin in approximately hundred questions to deal with them in order. "Okay. So you just-" She waved her hand in the air-
"Yeah."
"And it restocks."
"Every hour for this item."
"And you've been surviving on this for-"
"After I settled in Macon." He paused. "There's also Ancient Fruit Wine. That one's every twelve hours. I watered it down this morning for the bottles I left out," he pointed to a drawer where he hid them all.
Carley sat very still. Her journalist brain, he could see it working, assembling the information into something that made structural sense and not quite getting there.
"Clark." Her voice had shifted into something deliberate and careful, the tone of someone who had decided not to panic yet was very close to and was enforcing that decision in real time. "Are you okay?"
He exhaled.
"I'm going to tell you something, and I need you not to freak out."
"I'm not going to freak out."
"You're already a little freaked out."
"I'm a little freaked out," she conceded, not even arguing that point, and wanting to move on. "Tell me anyway."
So he did.
The tickets. The abilities. The items that appeared from nowhere when he needed them, the ones that were useless, in his opinion, and the ones that had kept him alive when nothing else would have.
The rings. The cat form, which he left for last because he figured she needed to be sitting down for that one, and she was already sitting down.
Carley listened all the way, words getting in one ear and out the next as it couldn't fit into her whole understanding of the world, without interrupting, which he appreciated because he wasn't sure he could restart once he stopped.
When he finished, she was quiet for a long moment.
"Show me something," she said- no, demanded more like.
He picked up the Soylent Green from her lap and held it in his palm, let the warmth travel down his arm, and watched steam rise from the lid.
Carley watched it happen.
"Heat Object, I can heat things, but at the cost of stamina," he said. "I've got a few of them. The abilities."
She reached out and touched the side of the tin, then pulled her hand back fast. "That's hot."
"Yeah."
Another silence.
"The cat thing." She demanded.
"No." Clark said, immediately.
"Clark-"
"Absolutely not."
"You just told me you can turn into a cat and I want to see."
"I know what I told you."
"Then show me." She crossed her arms, the particular posture of someone who had decided and was now simply waiting for the other person to catch up.
"I showed you the Soylent Green. I showed you Heat Object." He pointed at the still-steaming tin on the nightstand. "I even-" He grabbed the hem of his shirt and pulled it up far enough to show his ribs, where two thin gill slits had opened along his sides, faint and slightly iridescent in the pale morning light, before he willed them away. "That's three things. Three is enough."
Carley looked at where the gills had been. Then back at him.
"The cat thing," she repeated as if she didn't see fish gills on his body.
"It's undignified."
"Clark."
"I become very small." He said it like a warning. "And I can't talk. And my tail does things I can't fully control."
"I saved your life."
He opened his mouth.
Closed it. That was a low blow from her, but surprisingly, it didn't hurt him as much as he'd thought. Or, for that matter, it simply made him a bit frustrated with her stubbornness instead of her words.
She was looking at him with that expression that had no cruelty in it whatsoever, just patience and a twinkle in her eyes. Why wasn't she freaking out? Is she wrong in the head?
Clark let out a long, slow breath through his nose.
"Fine." He said. "But you don't tell anyone. I'm not ready to tell anyone other than you."
"I won't."
"I mean it. Not Lee, not-"
"Clark." Her voice was gentle, her voice layering over a familiar one he'd missed. His mother's. Oh, how much he'd like to sleep now and maybe have a chance to hear and see and feel her touch. "I won't tell anyone."
Took a step back to give himself room, pushing past the nervousness, and let out a sigh.
"Okay, here it goes."
The shift was always strange, but after using this form almost as much, if not more than, his human form during the past few weeks, it felt… like a big stretch.
The bed, which had been below him, was suddenly at eye level, then above it, and the floor rushed to meet him as four paws found it automatically, the way they always did, like the cat knew how to land even when the human didn't.
In under three seconds, he sat in his cat form.
Carley hadn't moved. She was still on the bed, which was now enormous, looking down at him with an expression that his cat eyes could read very clearly and that his human dignity was choosing not to acknowledge.
Her jaw had dropped to the floor.
He was, generously, below her knee.
His tail moved. He hadn't told it to. It curled out behind him and swept once, twice, the slow side-to-side that cats do when they're nervous or irritated. He could feel it happening and could not stop it. He wanted to jump on it and bite it to make it stop, but that was… another issue.
Carley's mouth opened.
Closed.
Opened again.
"You're- " She stopped. Tried again. "You're so small."
He knew that. He was aware of that. He did not need it stated.
He sat very still and let his tail betray him. His irritation seemed to be shown by the way his ears moved and flattened against his head as he glared at his tail.
Her hand came down slowly, the way someone reaches for something they're not sure is real, giving him plenty of time to move away, but Clark didn't. Instead, when her hand was about to touch him, he sniffed it, the feline in him registering her smell, before his body moved.
Head butting her fingers and guiding them to scratch behind the ears, the cheeks, and whiskers, and then below the chin.
Then, against every instinct that his human self possessed, a sound came out of his chest that he could not prevent and could not take back.
A purr.
It was quiet. Barely there. The kind of sound that could, theoretically, be mistaken for something else if both parties agreed not to examine it too closely.
Carley's entire face did something that it had not done in a very long time. Her expression cracked open, warm and genuine and slightly undone, and she laughed. That seemed to also displease his feral side of him.
In extreme embarrassment, he slapped her hand away from him, a hiss as a warning to never do it again, before he willed the change back to human form.
He was human again before the embarrassment had fully finished processing, if it'd ever end, which meant he had to sit with all of it in a body that could actually feel shame properly.
Carley still had her hand over her mouth.
"Not a word," Clark said.
Her shoulders were shaking.
"Carley."
"I'm not saying anything." Her voice came out slightly broken. She was very clearly saying nothing as hard as she could.
"I can see you."
"I'm not laughing."
"You are absolutely laughing."
"I'm smiling." She lowered her hand, and her expression was exactly what he'd been afraid it would be. Open. Warm. It seemed like someone who had been handed something they hadn't known they needed and wasn't sure what to do with it yet. "There's a difference."
Clark looked at the wall. Then the floor. Then the nightstand, where the Soylent Green tin was still faintly steaming.
"The purring was involuntary," he said, to the nightstand. He had to explain things.
"I see."
"I can't control it in that form."
"I understand, Clark."
"And the head butting was also-"
"Clark." Her voice was still warm, but it had gentled into something that wasn't teasing anymore. Just present. "I understand."
He looked at her sideways. She looked at him like Lee looked at Clementine, and he decided to push through before running away. He had a favor to at least try to return.
"You're weirdly calm about the abilities, too." He said.
"I'm not calm." She said it plainly. "I have about four hundred questions, and I'm choosing not to ask them all at once because you look like you'd bolt if I did." A pause. "I'm managing my calm."
"That's terrifying." Clark shivered, sitting next to her on the bed.
"Thank you."
He looked at her, her state. She wasn't as bad as him when they found him. Heck, she looked ten times better. But still, his gut told him to do it.
She looked at him, waiting, knowing that he wasn't done yet.
"Give me your hand." And he received it without hesitation, but he noticed her questions rising as he took it and switched Cat Form to Cor Leonis. He wasn't sure if the ability was magic when he used it because when he got it, the ability was said to be magic, and yet, it wasn't that now. Almost like the source was swapped.
He remembered the notification about having no capabilities of magic in this world when he did get a magic-related roll. Then what was the origin of his turning into a cat, or now, taking others' conditions, or giving them conditions?
The only downside was that he could only use this on people his ability and himself considered allies. He couldn't find a bandit scum and just forcibly take their health away from them.
"What are you doing?" She asked, and Clark thought of how to make her accept what he was about to do, before just shrugging.
"I want you to close your eyes, and whatever that's about to happen, don't push it back."
Immediately, she took her hand back, a frown and a disappointed look on her face, "Wha-?" He was confused-
"I'm not… I-" Carley stuttered, as Clark finally understood her expression. Betrayal.
"Clark… I'm not interested-" Her words connected with what he had said and her face and his eyes widened. "What! No, no, no, that's not what I meant." He shook his head and his hands, the most animated he'd ever been in the past three months. Carley, surprised but on guard, kept quiet for him to continue.
"It's another one of my abilities, I can take physical and mental conditions or even give them to my allies, but I need their willingness."
"Oh…"
"Yeah, sorry for-"
Carley giggled, letting tension bleed from her shoulder, "It's fine." She offered her hand, which Clark hesitantly took and closed his eyes. A little concentration, and Cor Leonis was activated as it listed all her conditions, physical and mental. But at the top of them were starved and exhausted.
A second is all it took as he pushed his condition to hers. All the muscles that he had recovered were slowly diminishing as Carley let out a gasp.
"Clark-" She called him, but he ignored her- the link was gone.
"What'd you do?!" She grabbed him by the shoulders, shaking him until he opened his eyes with clear exhaustion and fatigue. His recovered face had returned to being sunken, but not as much as a few weeks ago.
"I gave you my recovered state," he said simply. "And took your starved one."
Carley's hands tightened on his shoulders for one second, then released him. She sat back and looked at herself- her hands, her arms- the wonder immediately turned to disgust and something else that Clark couldn't name.
She looked up at him.
"Clark." Her voice had gone flat, "Give it back."
"No."
"Clark-"
"Carley." He exhaled through his nose. "You've been starving yourself to save food for me for two months when you didn't need to. When you didn't even know if I was alive." He spoke, cutting her words off by raising a hand.
"This is my choice." He continued, "I can't give it back. My ability doesn't work like that." He lied.
She sat with it for a moment. Her body tense and her hands were in her lap, turned into fists with the recovered strength and muscle that she didn't have a few minutes ago.
She exhaled. It came out long and slightly unsteady, the exhale of someone releasing something they'd been holding for a while, but she remained tense around him. "How long until you recover again?"
"A couple of weeks, maybe." He shrugged. "Less, with food and the Soylent Green. The hunting will help."
Her eyes moved over him once more, and when they came back to his face, they had settled into something that wasn't happy but had accepted the situation and filed it.
"You shouldn't have done that," she said.
"I know."
"I'm serious, Clark. You don't-" She stopped, and he watched her choose words carefully. "You don't have to do that. You don't owe me anything. You don't owe any of us anything."
He remained silent because he owed Lee and her his life. He couldn't just shut that part of him down- wait, was he a freaking pushover?!
Her voice was quieter now, the argument having run its course. "But don't do it again. Never again. Delete that ability if you can."
He could, but he wouldn't. It was far more useful than most of the other abilities he had.
She nodded once, seemingly done with scolding him- who did she think she was?- sharp and final, the way she ended conversations, she was done having. Then she stood, tucked the can of meat under her arm, helped with his backpack, and moved toward the door.
"Come on," she said, without looking back. "We'll share it with the others at breakfast. And you'll let me decide how much you eat."
He followed her out with a sigh… The Half Light was getting too loud for his liking, or were the voices and snappy comebacks from his edgy phase?
'Oh please, let me be normal…'
…
…
…
The parking lot had filled while they'd been inside. Kenny was still on top of his RV as the lookout, but his posture had changed, the particular shift of someone who had been joined by people he was comfortable around.
Lee stood near the fire, talking to Mark, who had the look of a man mid-complaint. Duck was talking nonsense to his mom, rumbling on and on and on. Did the kid not shut up for one moment?
What happened to his quiet mornings, where he just stretched in his cat form and scouted the forest for meals? Clementine was sitting on the other side of Lee, listening to the conversation between Mark and Lee. He spotted her rolling her eyes at something Mark said and shook her head, walking up to Carley as soon as she noticed them.
Whatever grudge she seemed to hold against him was forgotten as a greeting passed between them and helped Carley with the heavy load. Now, he looked like an asshole, letting two women carry the heavy loads, even when offered. Carley simply pushed him away and refused.
Clark set the bottles he'd prepared that morning by the fire without announcement. Six water bottles of watered-down fruit wine, glowing a faint reddish-gold in the morning light.
"What's that?" Duck asked, abandoning his rumblings.
"Fruit juice," Clark said. "Roughly. Don't drink it all at once."
Duck looked at the bottles with the expression of someone who had not seen fruit juice in three months and was having trouble processing the concept. Katjaa put a hand on his shoulder before he could reach for one.
"Where'd you get it?" Lee asked, looking up from the fire.
"Had it." Clark kept it simple. Lee looked at him for a moment with that considering expression he had, then nodded and didn't push.
Carley set the can down by the fire, pulled the lid back, and the smell that came off it was something Clark had forgotten other people hadn't had access to in a while.
The group went quiet.
Not uncomfortably. Just the particular quiet of people adjusting to something unexpected.
"That's-" Mark started.
"Rabbit and squirrel," Clark said. "Mostly."
Mark looked from the can to Clark to the can again. Then he unclipped the digital watch from his wrist, the kind with the rubber band worn smooth with use, and held it out.
"Here." He said it simply, like it was obvious.
Clark looked at it.
"For the food," Mark said. "As a thank you. It's been so long since we ate meat."
The watch had a practical, waterproof casing, a backlight, and still worked after three months, which meant the battery was good. He accepted it without making a thing of it, and Mark nodded once, satisfied, and moved toward the fire, while Lilly and her dad didn't say anything. But both of them appeared eager.
Clark strapped the watch to his wrist. The rubber was warm from Mark's skin.
Carley began taking out the pieces of meat and put it on a pan that was close by, cooking it for the group. They might get just one bite of meat since there wasn't a lot. But that's where Soylent Green came into play as he watched the adults take sips from the tins first.
Their faces changed, and Mark even looked ready to vomit, and didn't touch it since. After a bit of convincing, Clark had them give him their empty plastic bottles as he emptied the Soylend Greens inside them, hiding the fact that the tin cans vanished a minute later.
For the first time in a long time, everyone's belly was full, even though not everything tasted good.
…
…
…
The argument about hunting came later, when the bottles had been distributed, and the meat had been portioned, and Lilly had taken the lookout job from Kenny so he could go to sleep after giving his shares to his wife and Duck.
"I said no," lilly said, to Clark specifically.
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AN: After this chapter, i think I'm gonna take a little break. A day or two at least. I've been pumping chapters after chapters that I'm kinda tired of writing.
I dont have much to say except that I hope u enjoyed this chapter.
PS: Im watching FEAR TWD, it's pretty good so far, im on s1, ep4. Season 1 is nice.
I already have a list of people that I dislike:
The step dad: "You know how I feel about guns." He asks his wife WHILE THEY ARE IN A N APPOCALYPSE. BITCH YOUR THE MAN OF THE HOUSE. YOUR IDEALS OF BEING UNARMED IS SHIT. Teach your son and daughter how to use guns!!
The bio-son of Travis: Dude is clueless and dumb. I think he's even a little wrong in the head.
Alicia's mother: Dumb decisions when facing walkers: principal, youre okay, your just a little sick. Bitch, you saw these things tank cars and guns.
Oh, also the ex wife of Travis as well.
So far, Alicia's decisions are, while annoying, are logical and I can see even my loved ones do, so she's forgiven.