Clementine read a book once, she doesn't remember the name but she remembers what it was about. It was about this adult that was trapped in a kids body, and she had to go through life being treated as a child again as she tried to get back in her adult body.
Clementine remembered when she was done with the book too, she had read it by the light of a fire as she had done many times before on her sleepless nights. She finished it in one nights sitting too.
She had looked up at the baby she was taking care of. Winter was over, and he had survived; with a eleven year old girl taking care of him alone. He was a fighter for sure.
And when she looked at the book she read, and then at all the baby books that taken up room in her backpack she realized she could relate to the main character.
Because she wasn't a child anymore, no one gets to be a child anymore; at least with her background she didn't.
And that night she buried the book under a tree with a note taped.
For the childhood I lost.
Clementine didn't know what else to say. She didn't know when to say it died. She could think of many ideas but none stood out.
Maybe it was when this whole hailstorm started; or maybe when Duck died.
Clementine could remember the day her friend died, how she prayed that maybe Duck would come running out of the woods yelling about how he was just messing with her, and she would pout and then put a bug down his shirt.
Maybe it was when I decide to look for my parents and then I didn't like what I saw.
That haunted her thoughts most of the nights, how they could still be walkers roaming. The man she called "daddy" and would run to when she tripped and got a injury; or when kids at school would pull her hair; could be eating someone alive right now.
She's had worse then a scraped up knee now and nothing could pull her hair now.
Or her kind mother, the way she would look up at her a say "I hope I'm as pretty as you are one day."
She couldn't remember that pretty face though, because all she saw were walkers.
Maybe it was when I watched Lee kill the stranger, and then I had to shot him.
That blood spatter was something she hated, a reminder for what she had caused.
Or maybe it was the day I overheard Christa talking to herself about leaving me.
Clementine hated that memory. She had trouble sleeping and wanted to talk to Christa about her nightmares, about how every time she closed her eyes she could see Lee and her parents. But when she heard the woman she thought of as a mother talking to herself about leaving Clem in the dust she stopped.
Maybe it was the day I thought of myself first and fixed my arm or maybe it was the day I became responsible for a newborn baby.
She pushed her thoughts aside when the sunlight cracked through the clouds at dawn, and she leaned down and picked up little AJ and her things before walking deeper in the forest.
It's a shame she didn't stay for spring though; because as the flowers bloomed, and the tree started to bloom with fruit she would have realized what type of tree she had planted under.
A clementine tree.
I'm thinking of making a TWDG fan fiction about what I would have liked Season Three to have been about. Based on this would anyone read it?
P.S. if I do make it this will be a book full of one shot about what would have happen during the two year gap.