"Not Alone Here"

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Title: Not Alone Here
Characters: Clementine, Gabe, AJ
Summary: Where Gabe is at the Boarding School, he comforts Clementine one night after a nightmare.
Author's Note: okay wow this turned out way better than I thought it would omg
Requested By: Anonymous
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user: justajournalist ♡ 
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It had been years since that night in the meat locker, but it still shook Clementine to the bone.

Gabe had always known that, even though she didn't go into details.

It wasn't uncommon for Clementine to appear at Gabe's door in the middle of the night while they were in Richmond. They would sit on their building's roof, looking at the stars. Even in the middle of the summer he could feel Clementine as she'd jitter beside him. He knew it was from nerves, but she never disclosed what happened to prompt them. She would only ever knock on his door to say she had 'a lot on her mind.' She'd never explain that it was a nightmare that kept her awake. She'd only ever said it was her thoughts.

Gabe never questioned her sudden appearances. He never wanted to force her into talking. If she wanted to talk, she knew he was there. Hell, that was why she came to him to begin with on nights like those, even if it was just so she could have company to come down from her panic.

He'd always been curious at what had scared her, especially at what had scared her so often. He'd just never vocalized it.

As time passed, as the two grew, and as Richmond became more and more populated, more issues began to arise. Clementine, Gabe, and AJ had retreated. They'd been separated from Javi and Kate after an uproar, and hadn't heard from them since.

They had been leaning on each other more than ever since they'd stumbled across Ericson. Especially since they'd stumbled across Ericson, because it was the first place after Richmond's crumbling that felt like home.

But since they'd joined the Ericson team, Clementine had been waking up in the middle of the night a lot more. Luckily for her, she was fairly good at keeping her nightmares a secret from Gabe. Him and AJ both.

She wasn't sure what prompted them to appear more frequently. She wanted to pin it on the fact that it was, yet again, a new group of people she'd poured trust into. It was another new place, with new people, and new enemies and threats she hadn't known existed.

It seemed as if everyday they lived, every day that things changed, everything became more grim. Everything got darker and scarier. What got to her the most was that every day was another day closer to the one where she finally died. The day when she could become one of them.

Everyday she came closer to being in Larry's position.

Clementine had been rattled by a nightmare the night before and had been making her way through the day with only an hour of sleep under her belt. After being rattled awake, she didn't want to fall back asleep. Not if that was what she was going to see if she tried.

All day she'd been exhausted. That was the sixth day in a row she'd been rattled by the same dream and abandoned sleep all together, and slowly her lack of self-care was starting to get to her.

She'd been wandering around as if she was already a member of the dead — vaguely, half-there, and with a vacant grey haze cast over her eyes. It hit her the worst after dinner that day when her belly was full, and the sky was growing dark, and all the day's work began catching up to her.

"Clem?"

She'd been staring off absentmindedly in a random direction. She was supposed to be taking inventory of the greenhouse, but with the clipboard dangling meaningless by her side and her gaze blurred and vaguely focused on a nearby tree, they both knew Clementine wasn't getting much done. "Yeah?" She breathed after a beat, letting the lag in her brain catch up with their conversation.

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