paradisalogs | closed | girls just wanna have fun

Entry tags:

clementine,
tess

closed | girls just wanna have fun

Who: Clementine and Tess
What: ~~toddlers and tiaras???~~ GIRL TIME
When: Todaaaay.
Where: Tess/Joel/Ellie's place.
Rating: R because Tess is Rude

Clementine is the perfect picture of apprehension. She's sitting on the edge of the sofa, feet flat on the floor, hands neatly in her lap. She can't stop glancing around. Her brows are furrowed together, even though she's not very aware of it. What she is aware of, painfully aware of, is Tess' presence.

It makes sense, seeing as she lives here, but Clementine never expected her to invite her over. Or to want to do something like this with her.

She would have been excited about this years ago, but right now Clementine just feels like she's walking into a trap. A trap filled with walkers, alligators, and that bloater thing from earlier. Her encounters with Tess never go well.

But she'll give this a shot.

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It isn't really that Tess wants to spend time with Clem, but it also isn't like she's being forced. After all, nothing is forcing her to do this, and in reality, nothing ever could. Tess never lets herself get forced into anything; everything is always her idea, and it's always her game plan that gets put into play.

But if she's being honest, this whole thing with Joel and his little girls has been weighing on her a lot lately.

Not that she'll ever admit to feeling threatened by a couple of children, but she's never had competition for Joel's attention. Not by any adult and certainly not by children, and children are Joel's worst soft spot. And unlike drug dealers and smugglers and other black-market dogs, Tess can't blow 'em away, even if she wanted to.

Even worse, the only way to really deal with the problem is to make nice, which is something Tess has never been good at. And it's easier with Ellie, because Ellie is older and more experienced and she knows how to live alongside Joel. Tess can argue with Ellie. But Clem, well, Clem is practically a baby.

But now, sitting across from Clem and wearing a terse smile, Tess wants a smoke.

"I was just thinking we could get to know each other better."

This is scarier than Tess yelling at her. Clementine's eyebrows lift up, slightly, listening. Tess wrote Clementine off long ago. She knows that. And really, Clem was fine with that now. She got along with Ellie, adored Joel, stayed out of Tess' way. She did the same with Lilly's dad and his temper, and Kenny after what happened to his family.

"Get to know each other better?" She echoes. She almost wants to ask if Joel put her up to this. "Like... how?"

He must have, which is a little annoying because that makes Clementine feel obligated to go along with this. Tess isn't interested in her life.

Tess pauses, leaning her elbows on her knees and looking at Clem like she's asked a confusing question.

"How? Like how anyone does. Let's just hang out and do normal things."

It is a confusing question. Clementine knows what hanging out with adults is like, and Tess really doesn't seem the type to want to do the things Clem would be interested in.

Now would be a good time for Joel to come in. Her eyes flick to the door, but no one enters.

Damn.

"Alright. Um. Did you have anything in mind?"

"I don't know," Tess replies. "Watch a movie, bake, play with make-up. Something. Jesus, you don't have to act like I'm holding a gun to your head."

(She isn't, for the record.)

Tess already feels like she's making a mistake.

She sighs. Here we go.

"Pick something you want to do with me." That way, if it goes terribly, she can't blame it on one of Clem's ideas.

"You're a little girl," Tess replies. "So you like make-up and dress-up, right?"

She's trying. She's fucking trying.

"I guess."

She used to love those things. Clem looks at Tess expectantly. Is that really her plan?

"You guess?"

Tess looks exasperated. It's easier to be blatantly exasperated than it is to mask frustration with a more blank look.

"Look. You get along well with Joel. He's my partner. I'm just trying to make amends here, alright? I thought this is what you wanted, for us to get along well."

Get along well is sort of pushing it.

"I just don't want you to lose your patience with me five minutes into every conversation. If Joel made you do this, you can tell him we hung out for a while. Don't force yourself into doing stuff you don't want to do."

Life's too short for that.

"Do you seriously think that Joel can make me do anything?" Tess asks, pointedly. "I'm not losing my patience."

"If you care about him, then yeah, probably," Clementine replies with a small shrug of a shoulder. She's sure if Joel asked Tess to make nice with Clementine, she'd try. That's what this was.

Tess sighs.

"That's not how it works, Clem. Joel doesn't make me do anything, and I don't make him do anything. There are things we ask of each other sometimes, yes, but we do it because we agree with it, not out of obligation."

Except that one time she insisted he take Ellie on a cross-country journey while she hung back to die, but that was an exceptional circumstance. It's different when it's a deathbed wish.

She considers this. Just do be sure...

"So you invited me over because...?"

To listen to you be a total cunt, Clementine. That's why.

Tess thinks it's perhaps unwise to sarcastically call an eleven year old a "cunt" and aggravate the tension further, so she opts for the more diplomatic response.

"Because I want us to get along."

Clementine still isn't entirely sure she buys that, but once more, she'll give Tess the benefit of the doubt. If Joel and Ellie liked her, there had to be something there for Clementine to find. She sighs, looking down at her shoes, then gives Tess a nod.

"My mom didn't really like me playing with make up."

So let's do that.

That's better. Tess can work a forbidden fruit angle –– that's always been her motivation, anyway. If someone says she can't have something, then she's that much more motivated to get it.

"So we take advantage while she's not looking, then."

The smile Clementine gives is thin, but it's a smile all the same. Dead and not looking, sure. She's not very interested in sharing any more of her life before with Tess, so she keeps her mouth shut.

"Yeah. I put her lipstick on a few times, but that was it."

Everyone's parents are dead, Clem. Everyone's. Lighten up.

Tess gets up to get her make-up case from the bathroom. Why she wished it all up when she wears scarcely more than a bit of mascara and lip balm every day, she has no real justification for, but at least it's coming in handy somewhere. She sets it on the coffee table in front of Clem.

"Do you want anything to drink?"

"Soda?" Lee's never been much of a stickler when it came to what Clementine ate, but for the past month she's been eating anything and everything she's wanted. Cookies and fruit punch for lunch? Yep. Sugary drinks forever? Yes. Sometimes her stomach didn't really agree with her choice of food anymore, but it was worth it for the taste of things that she hadn't had in forever.

And as much as she wants to look at what's in Tess' case, she'll wait.

"Sure," Tess says, moving to the kitchen. She rummages in the fridge for a moment, and she comes back with a small bottle of soda pop and a wine cooler for herself. (She figures Clem will be less judgmental of what looks like a fancy soda or juice than she would of what is obviously a beer. Like fuck an eleven year old in an apocalyptic world will even know what a Breezer is.)

Tess sets the soda down in front of Clem and sits. She opens the make-up case.

"I bet we could give Joel and Lee a laugh, getting you all dolled up."

Joel's already seen Tess dolled up, though he pulled a gun on her at first. Typical.

"Thank you."

She opens her drink without any mind to whatever Tess has gotten for herself. The make up is much more interesting.

"Do you do this with Ellie?"

"Nope," Tess replies, pulling various things out for Clem to look at. Eyebrow pencils and lip glosses and eyeshadow palettes and little pots of this and that. "I don't think she's particularly interested in this kind of stuff."

Clem opens a small eyeshadow palette, resisting the urge to stick her fingertips into the colors. They're pretty. They remind her of the watercolors she shoved into a drawer of her room soon after getting back.

"Yeah, I guess she wouldn't be. I bet there's not a lot of this stuff around to play with." Omid and Christa were determined to stay away from cities, but the occasional gas station or out of the way drug store that had cosmetics had been sacked. Bandits took everything, even if it didn't really have much use when it came to surviving.

"It's pretty uncommon these days," Tess replies. "Luxury items are pretty drained out, now, but they used to be really popular. I kept wearing make-up for years after the outbreak, probably more than I even did before. Kept dyeing my hair, too."

She still wore make-up these days, even, when she could get her hands on it, but after twenty years, most of it had dried up, crumbled or expired beyond all hopes of revival. Pencil crayon and hot water could make a halfway decent eyeliner, and she'd kept a packet of powdered Jell-O mix for years to use as lip stain, but all things come to an end eventually. At least tweezers could always be resharpened and she could always braid her wet hair so it'd dry wavy.

Tess pulls out an eyeshadow brush from the case and gestures for Clem to give her the palette. C'mere, kid. She'll do your eyes.

"For a lot of women, being able to look nice is a little bit of normalcy even when nothing else is normal. Nobody likes looking like shit if they can avoid it, and all."

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