The Walking Dead Final Season- 'Safe and Sound'

Safe and Sound III

The water gently lapped across Clementine's foot; still and calm, even as the occasional fish darted past, escaping  Violet and A.J's spears.
She was sat on the edge of the stream, her back to the sun and the wooden fishing shed. 
Rosie was on the opposite bank, lying in a brief circle of light that remained, trying to get as much sun as possible before the evening arrived.
Clementine couldn't remember the last time she had just relaxed outside without a wall or a barricade surrounding her.
Sleeping inside a car certainly didn't count.

The group had kept themselves busy the past few days making some makeshift walker deterrents in the area.
Sharpened sticks had been dotted along the path like something from a crude wooden fort and Willy and Louis had dug a few moderately sized holes nearby. Not enough to trap anything, but dangerous enough to take a walker's ankle out of commission and leave them crawling along the dirt and dust.
Some barbed wire from the greenhouse was draped between trees near the fishing shed, looking like metallic spider webs crossing gaps in the forest.
Even still, they'd only seen about four walkers the past week, all individually and alone around the forest.
Both of these things had made Clementine comfortable enough to test Ruby's 'Prosthetic' outside of the school grounds.
It was a boot with some wood, metal and cloth around it based on a design found in one of the school's older history books. Some welding, an old belt, and dismantled bicycle parts later and Clementine had found herself standing without crutches, although supported by Violet.
She wouldn't be running any time soon, but she'd been ambling around the school ground for the past couple of days without too many problems.
A.J had taken to calling it her 'Robot leg' and hadn't stopped referring to it as 'super cool'.
Whenever she saw the bare stump, Clementine couldn't help but think of Lee, his arm missing as he fought across a dead city to find her all those years ago. 
If he could do that, then the least she could do was try and walk without crutches for a day.

"How about we call it for today?" Violet spoke up nearby.
"Just one more, then my bucket's full" said A.J, peering into the stream with both hands on his spear.
"You got it. Make sure it's a fat one then" said Violet as she headed to the shed to return her spear, squeezing Clementine's shoulder as she walked past.
"How's the Water?"
"It's not freezing my toes like earlier, so that's always a win" Clementine said, taking her foot out and picking up her jacket from the grass to use as a towel.
"Maybe we should fill the swimming pool in the gym up." Violet joked from inside the shed.
"The size of these buckets, I think we'd need quite a few trips."

Clementine put her foot back in her boot and then grabbed the prosthetic next to her, calling out to A.J.
"Hey, wanna help me with my robot leg?"
He was putting a final fish in his bucket and turned to her with a smile wrapped around his face.
"You bet!"
He dropped his spear and ran over, grabbing the end of the boot and holding it steady as Clementine placed her leg into the metal frame before  tightening the belt on the end at the end of the prosthetic.
"Alright, one Robot Leg assembled, nice job" she raised her palm and high fived A.J "Now make sure you put your spear back, before we go."
"Ok Clem" he said, running back to his spear and bucket.
She was always aware of how she sounded whenever she asked or told A.J to do something, that maternal tone she'd never gotten quite used to.
Sometimes she heard her Mother telling her to come in for dinner or be good for the babysitter. 
She wasn't even sure if it was definitely how her Mother sounded or if it was her mind just doing the best with what memories she had. It'd been nearly a decade since Clementine had heard her voice, and her Mother had been dead longer than she'd known her.
Clementine couldn't help compare that 8 year old girl to A.J whenever she saw him, often wondering if was harder to adapt to this world or be born into it. 
More than likely they were simply their own forms of tragedy, each as strong and wicked as the other.

A tap on her shoulder bought her out of this realm of thought.
"Need some help getting up?" Violet asked.
"Well, since you're offering." She looked up and smiled, grabbing onto Violet's arm before being pulled to her feet, wobbling slightly as the prosthetic shifted.
She grabbed onto Violet for balance before standing on her own.
"I'm sure it'll get easier" Violet said softly "And it's good you're wanting to go out and walk more. Also if you just sit around and get fat I probably won't be able to pick you up anymore."
Clementine laughed and wrapped her jacket around her waist.
"I'm going to spend the next week in my room, just eating nothing but rabbit and canned peaches, you'll see."
A.J spoke from inside the shack.
"Ruby says if you just eat rabbit you'll die." His hopped out of the doorway and went to grab his bucket.
"Is that so?" Clementine asked.
"Yeah. She says you'd get...um, proton poisoning?"
"Protein" Violet corrected. "Although I guess proton is also technically correct right?"
"Don't look at me" Clementine said smiling, "I dropped out of school at the 3rd grade"
"You dirty flunker" Violet said, going to grab her bucket.
"Hey, this little renegade hasn't even been to a school" Clementine pointed at A.J, winking as she turned her finger into a gun and pretended to fire.
"What's a proton?" A.J asked, hopping over the stream with his bucket.
"I don't think I'm the best person for that.Ask Ruby when we get back, or find a book in the library." Clementine said, walking slowly across the stream and onto the path.
"Even better, ask Louis to draw you one." Violet said, walking next to Clementine, just within grabbing distance if need be.
Rosie stirred and lifted her head as the three of them walked past her.
"Here Girl, let's go have some fish." A.J said and whistled for her.
She stretched in the sun before trotting to his side and sniffing the bucket.

They were nearing the school gates when Clementine suddenly stopped and grabbed Violet.
"Ok, I think I might need a bit more help, I'm starting to ache."
The walk had been twice as long as usual, and Clementine's leg was aching from the stress of lifting, and then slightly dragging, the prosthetic but she'd done far more than she expected.
Clementine was sure Lee wouldn't have minded her getting a bit of help the final few steps.
Violet interlinked her arm with Clementine's and started to help her walk at a faster pace.
"Well, you lasted longer on the way back then you did going there, so that's awesome." Violet said.
 A.J, a few steps ahead, turned back to face them.
""What's wrong?" he asked
"I guess I'm not one hundred percent robot yet." Clementine said smiling. "Maybe in a few days"
"I'm hoping for a Clembot pretty soon." A.J said, turning back around.
"Roboclem" Violet whispered.
"I think my Dad liked that movie." said Clementine.
"You ever watch it?"
"Nope. I was way too young for stuff like that."
"Well, we're talking about getting the horse and cart and going on a run to the city, maybe we could hit the video store, try and grab a copy. There's a video player in the science room."
"Roboclem date night?" Clementine chuckled.
"Roboclem date night." Violet repeated
Clementine was saying more things like that lately. Silly phrases. Daft, lighthearted jokes that meant nothing, but represented everything that had changed lately and how she had found herself in a place where she was able to say things like that. 
After so many years giving A.J nothing but commands, instructions or warnings, she was now going hours at a time without even talking to him.
He'd greet her good morning and then run off, spending the rest of the day around the school.
He'd go looking for trash with Willy and sketch wild and crazy inventions and ideas. 
He'd spend a day in the music room helping Louis write lyrics and stories for songs, mostly to do with disco broccoli, something Clementine always begrudged herself for, the fact she never found any more books or stories for him. 
Hours at a time travelling, with nothing but her trying to salvage half remembered tales and stories she'd been told as a child.
But then at night she'd see him lying in bed with a book he'd grabbed from the library, trying to make the most of the candlelight.
She'd consider telling him not to strain his eyes, but she'd just close hers and leave him be, smiling with every faint scrape of him turning a page.
They had no books in his age range, but plenty of encyclopedias and history books with illustrations and drawings.
They could almost be fiction now, events that transpired so long ago anyway were now rendered even more distant by the state of the world A.J had been born into. No trains or bustling restaurants and shopping malls to show the progress of historical drawings and illustrations that A.J would pore over.
Maybe Clementine was just overthinking things, the way one would do with a sudden excess of free time and peace. 
He was reading books and going to sleep in a bed every night; that was more than enough.

As they reached the school gates Violet stopped and shook her head.
"I knew they wouldn't move him. That fucked up scarecrow."
She was referring to the wretched remains of a man slumped against a tree. 
He used to be a man named Abel, but in death he was a crude warning, the unceremonious display of his corpse a decaying 'keep out sign'.
A dirty shirt was sliding over exposed ribs like a collapsed tent, and a frantic shadow of flies was blinking rapidly around any exposed flesh.
"I like it." A.J said "It tells people not to mess with us."
"We don't have anybody who wants to mess with us though." Clementine said.
"I just want it gone. It's gross and smells like shit." Violet said as she turned away, pulling Clem and walking to the School gates.
"Well, if they don't get rid of it tomorrow, we can do it." Clementine said.
"Yeah, we'll get Ruby and show the boys how it's done." Violet squeezed Clementine's arm and smiled. 

Inside the school grounds, Violet walked to Clementine over to a bench and helped her sit down.
"I'm gonna drop my bucket off with Omar and check in on Ruby. She wanted me to help move some stuff out here before we all ate. Don't go anywhere." She said.
"Ha." Clementine mock laughed as Violet kissed her cheek and walked off.
Alone by herself, the cramping and strain on her leg became much more evident and pronounced; Clementine leaned over and tangled with the belt attached the prosthetic, unhooking it and letting it drop to the floor.
"Well, looks like I'm stuck here till after Dinner." She said quietly, before swinging her leg onto the bench and then lying down along the length of it. She then placed her remaining foot onto the middle of the bench, resting it and propping her knee in the air. 
"Wake me up for dinner" she joked to nobody in particular, as she draped an arm over her face and closed her eyes.