WHO: Mine and yours WHAT: Catch-all WHEN: ~Harvestmere WHERE: Various NOTES: Closed starters (for now); if you're after something or someone, hit me up and I'll craft you something bespoke!
"Because this is what I do." Maybe it's reckless to mention this but she's past of the point of caring about that considering what they've done. Clarisse has seen her with her trousers unbuttoned and hair in disarray so whatever. "And I fucked up a friendship the last time, so I... just assumed I'd done it again, with you, and I was mad at myself for not learning a lesson."
This is probably the most honest she's been about her inner dialogue with anybody. It feels stupid saying it out loud, private-journaling into Clarisse's ear.
Clarisse squints, not understanding. Well, she gets what Abby's saying in the general sense, but the specifics are what's confusing. She's not sure what "this is what I do" is supposed to mean, or what exactly Abby is admitting to doing "last time." Fucking a friend? Fucking a friend who's already in a relationship?
Is Clarisse already in a relationship?
She presses her lips together. It's not Abby she's angry with. Increasingly she's finding herself annoyed with Ellie. Or... not Ellie, the real person, but whatever is left of her presence here. That's what has her so fucked up about this. It's like there's a third person on the boat with them right now, a silent ghost whose only purpose is to make Clarisse feel guilty. And maybe she's got Abby feeling that way too.
"I made my own choices," she says. "This isn't on you. Or—I guess it's on both of us, but—it's not like we did anything wrong." Her voice comes out flat until the last word, which rises in a way that's telling. It's defensive, like she's trying to convince herself.
Yeah it's not hard to hear that note in Clarisse's voice, the need for Abby to agree with her and cement this as a shared fact. "No," she says quickly, because she does agree with that. "We didn't." No matter what she thinks of Ellie's noticeable absence from this conversation, nobody has been wronged by this. The timing was bad. Or — she doesn't completely understand what Clarisse thinks of her and Ellie's relationship (what's left of it, anyway). She's never asked and doesn't know if she's even allowed to.
"Shit happens. I don't... regret it."
She regrets Owen. She won't regret Clarisse. Like she said, she didn't learn her lesson.
They didn't. Doesn't matter if she still feels guilty sometimes, it wasn't wrong.
And Abby doesn't regret it, apparently, whatever that's supposed to mean. Clarisse feels the tips of her ears start to burn and utters a short, awkward laugh.
"It was stupid, but we've done dumber shit." Remember that time they stood their ground against a fucking dragon?
A bubble of pressure bursts when Clarisse laughs and Abby does too, a nervous sound. She still feels strange, she still has questions, but she can deal with that for now. Knowing Clarisse isn't mad at her helps with all of that.
And seeing her reddening ears makes her feel weirdly squirmy.
"You mean you've done dumber shit." Who faced the dragon, exactly?
"But when you're with me, you do the dumb shit too."
This is okay, right? It's like when Abby teased her earlier about losing her crew. Still not completely back to normal, but way better than how things have been.
After a moment of internal debate, Clarisse crosses most of the rest of the distance between them, so they don't have to talk across all that empty deck space. There. She's done being weird about this.
Oh um okay. She holds still for a moment while Clarisse cross the deck but exhales once she's there, attempting to relax. "Do you know what dumb shit I actually did do recently? Said I'd conduct interviews with everybody in Riftwatch, for Cedric. So get ready for one of those, I guess."
"When you say it like that you make me sound like a zombie." Y'know, the mushroom kind.
Clarisse is raising her eyebrows at the interview thing, though, brushing past the quip (and the way Abby let out that breath when she walked over, too. Not subtle). "Interviews about what?"
If she stays right where she is, a couple feet distant, this feels okay. Faking normal until they make it.
"Oh man," she sighs, still sloughing off the last of the awkwardness. At least Clarisse is doing her the courtesy of pretending she can't tell she's acting like a weirdo. "You'd be the worst zombie. So hard to kill, I mean.
"And about anything. He wants more in depth profiles on the rifters for the library so we can be remembered." She glances at her, noting where she stopped. Hesitating, before she asks, "Want to write something about Ellie with me?"
That's the last thing Clarisse expected Abby to say, and not for the first time she wonders what Abby's thoughts are on the whole Ellie thing. She's always been quieter about it, whereas Ellie was apt to bring Abby up at random. She wonders if talking about Ellie puts a bad taste in her mouth, or makes her angry, but the look on Abby's face is... unreadable.
It still means more than Clarisse can put into words, that Abby is willing to talk about her for Clarisse's sake even if she doesn't want to.
She realizes she hasn't said anything and manages, "Okay. Sure."
Looking at Clarisse gets too intense all of a sudden so she looks away, rubs her shoulder with one arm and pressing her fingers into muscle, squeezing like it's sore. They've hardly spoken about Ellie, really only where necessary, and she knows that she's got to be confusing Clarisse. She should know that Abby's been confused about all of this too.
"Thanks." She keeps going after a moment, choosing her words. "I... feel like I knew some really important stuff about her, and like I have no idea who she really was at the same time. If that makes sense."
It's okay if it doesn't because it barely makes sense to her.
It makes sense. Like, she gets why Abby doesn't talk about Ellie much, as weird as it can be for Clarisse at times. She wouldn't want to hang around someone she had that kind of history with either, or... get to know them, or listen to their girlfriend talk about them like they're some nice person, or whatever the fuck.
"Yeah," she says, "it does. Sometimes I felt that way too."
That sounds way nastier than she meant it to, so Clarisse amends, "Just, I mean, she used to try to tell me bad things about herself and I would stop her. I guess I didn't really want to know." She kept all the good things and ditched the rest, until she couldn't anymore.
She lifts a hand and scratches softly at the side of her neck, feeling awkward. "I'll tell you whatever you want to know, though."
Abby looks surprised at that, even hums a sort of huh sound without realising. It doesn't sound nasty to her at all, it sounds... a little sad, a little indicative of what Ellie is like as a person. Complicated. Strange. Hard to understand. Why would she want to tell Clarisse all of the bad things about her?
She feels a little unsteady. She asks suddenly, "She loved him, didn't she. Joel."
His name felt strange coming out of her mouth and she wonders for a wild moment if she even said it right. She hasn't said it out loud for years. And this is something she never would have asked Ellie, something Ellie never would have told her. And Abby knows the answer, but it's still the last piece of the puzzle and somebody has to say it out loud.
"Yeah. Of course. He saved her life, he was like her dad."
Clarisse sucks her teeth, not sure whether to leave it at that or not, but it's like she can't stop herself. "She kind of idolized him, I think, because he took her away from Boston. Even the stuff that was bad, I don't think she knew it was bad. Or she knew it but she didn't really let herself believe it."
It sounds dumb as hell for Clarisse, of all people, to be judging somebody for overlooking their father's faults, for idolizing them to a point of self-damage. But it's always easier to see it when it's somebody else doing it, not yourself.
"It's not just that. They had this huge fight and didn't talk for a long time, but finally she said she wanted to try and forgive him. But that was the night before—" A pause. She doesn't need to say the rest, right? "So they didn't have the chance to fix anything. I think she kind of hated herself for that."
All of a sudden Clarisse becomes aware of exactly how much she's just word vomited about Ellie and Joel to Abby, of all people. She shuts the fuck up very abruptly and crosses her arms, looking away.
Abby doesn't say anything, too busy turning over these new pieces of information in her brain. There might be something else hidden underneath them, but there really isn't — it's exactly as she thought. Yeah, of course she loved him. He was like her dad.
There was so much more to Joel than what he did to the Fireflies, to Abby — she's known for years that he shot Marlene to save Ellie, stormed their base to get back something they took from him, but she had trouble looking at it head on, like bright light. When he died she expected the monster to be slain and all she saw was a man crumpled dead at her feet.
She barely notices when Clarisse stops talking because her own thoughts are so loud in her head.
Eventually she says, "I hated myself for it too." Quiet, steady. "But I wasn't supposed to. I wasted all that time looking for him. You know? I dragged everybody else into it. And then it was supposed to be over, but it wasn't." It was easy to tell; the nightmares didn't stop. "Because I did the same thing to her that he did to me."
Clarisse doesn't know what else to say. She can't bullshit Abby and say what she did wasn't that bad, because Abby would just see through it. She's too smart to fall for Clarisse's bullshit. And saying that Ellie wasn't innocent in everything that happened would be pointless, too, because they both already know that. It doesn't change anything.
"Sometimes we don't realize things until it's too late. It's just how it is. But—" She swallows and feels her teeth press together, her jaw going tight. She tips her head back a little so it's easier not to blink. "I think she was happy. Here. A lot of the time."
She nods. It doesn't make the cold, heavy feeling in her stomach go away but it doesn't make anything worse, either. Clarisse is totally right. Abby didn't know. It's just how it is. If she could go back and do it all over again —
But she can't.
"I think she was too." Obviously Abby didn't have a good reference for Ellie being happy in her mind but she's seen her at the opposite end of the scale, heard her broken-up screams on a blood-slick floor. That feels like it happened a lifetime ago.
She shakes her head. It's like she's not all here. Half of her is still on that rooftop, sharing a blunt and being told about stars. "She asked me if we were friends before she left. I said we could try."
That finally gets Clarisse to smile, even if it's still a little sad. A question like that is just... so like Ellie. It's like she couldn't help herself sometimes.
"I think you could've done it." Hell, they were already all sharing a tent, how much closer can you get to another person? It reminds her of something, though, and she snorts, stepping closer.
"One time we were up in the mountains and she told me she thought you were cool. Out of nowhere, almost."
"Same." It's not embarrassing or sad to tell Clarisse that either like she thought it would be, it actually helps to say it out loud. Helps even more to see Clarisse smile at it, affirming. Abby isn't naive, she knows it wouldn't have happened overnight but if they'd had more time, another couple of years — it had felt like it was possible.
She snorts, feeling herself grin a little. "Oh. Really?"
Dork.
"She's kinda cool too, I guess. I always thought her paintings were really good."
Clarisse nods, still smiling. "Yeah, we were on a date, and it was... I didn't know what to say so I just changed the subject."
In the moment it had been awkward for her, and she hadn't known how much she could bring up either one of them around the other, but it's something funny she can look back on now, at least.
"You should see some of the stuff she sketched sometime. I bet there's drawings of Wags in there." She's sure there is, actually. And the griffons, the horses... probably a lot of the people in Riftwatch, too. Maybe she should go through the sketchbook and hand out whatever's in there, sometime.
Clarisse doesn't know she's not only seen the drawings but ripped some of the pages of the book out for herself and Abby decides she's not going to, not if she can help it. She just relinquished something, the fact that Ellie asked if they were friends right before she up and disappeared; that's enough. It's not like she's keeping everything from her, just this. Sketches, desperate lines of poetry. Her eyes scribbled over in black. Does she think she's protecting Ellie from judgement?
This version of Ellie is still new to her, the one that went on dates with Clarisse and sketched in her free time, filling in page after page of her book with pencil lines. Just a girl, not a threat.
Abby finds herself saying, "What was she like when it was just the two of you?"
Clarisse doesn't answer immediately. She's thinking—it's hard to sum a person up in just a few sentences and she wants to do a good job of it. Of course now that she's been asked the question, it feels impossible to cover everything.
What the hell. She'll do her best anyway.
"Funny," she says after a minute, "but in a dorky way. And thoughtful. She used to buy me chocolates sometimes just because, or plan something we could do for fun and surprise me. And she was smart, you know? She liked to read about history and art and space. She liked to know things about people and when she talked about them you could tell she really saw them and paid attention to them. She used to tell me stories about living in Jackson or being on the road with Joel, and she'd ask me things about my mom or what it was like at camp. And we'd just talk for ages."
She scuffs the wood boards under them with the heel of one boot. "She was... softer when no one else was around. Is that what you thought I'd say?" She really has no idea what Abby used to assume they talked about or did back when Clarisse would spend half the time with Ellie. Or if she spent time thinking about it at all.
Abby nods, feeling oddly soothed by this explanation — she already knew this about Ellie, all of it. Had to hear her puns come through over the crystal, listened to her explain the ways the night skies in Thedas were completely different to the ones on Earth. And Ellie was the one who looked after Wags while she was dead in another time, the one they left behind. She would have done it again if it had happened again.
Maybe Ellie wasn't so unknowable to her after all.
This all feels weird and complicated. That same sadness she talked to Gwen about still sits in her, tangled up tight with anger and regret. It's unfair that this happened when it did and it's childish to want to call it unfair so she can't. The whole thing is out of her control; maybe that's why Abby hates it so much.
"Yeah," she says. "I guess." She has no idea what kind of face she's making right now but she understands that this moment is finite and tender, that anything could break it open. She presses her fingers into her jaw and finds the point where everything draws tight. Talking helps. It always has.
Maybe to somebody else those words would sound weird coming from Abby, but to Clarisse it makes sense, and she nods.
Even with their fucked up history, it must have been comforting to have somebody else who came from the same place, who understood what life was like there and who didn't need to have anything explained to them about it. And though the reason for it might be awful, the two of them were connected. Irrevocably. The strings of their destinies overlapping and tied up together.
For that to just... end, with no closure, with no warning, has got to be impossibly hard. Ellie disappearing was devastating for Clarisse, but in some ways she thinks Abby must be even more fucked up by it. It's not just loss of the future for her, it's loss of the past, too.
"I know you do." She swallows. "I wish I'd gotten to see you guys be friends."
"Yeah," Abby says, and laughs because it hurts and she doesn't know how to deal with that. "I bet." Clarisse was stuck in the middle of them the entire time, it must suck to have so nearly made it to them being friends, only to have it taken away. Her eyes feel sort of hot and prickly. Abby pauses, pressing her tongue against the inside of her cheek until the heat recedes somewhat.
She says carefully, "It would have been so weird."
Right? For them to be friends? How couldn't it have been weird?
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This is probably the most honest she's been about her inner dialogue with anybody. It feels stupid saying it out loud, private-journaling into Clarisse's ear.
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Is Clarisse already in a relationship?
She presses her lips together. It's not Abby she's angry with. Increasingly she's finding herself annoyed with Ellie. Or... not Ellie, the real person, but whatever is left of her presence here. That's what has her so fucked up about this. It's like there's a third person on the boat with them right now, a silent ghost whose only purpose is to make Clarisse feel guilty. And maybe she's got Abby feeling that way too.
"I made my own choices," she says. "This isn't on you. Or—I guess it's on both of us, but—it's not like we did anything wrong." Her voice comes out flat until the last word, which rises in a way that's telling. It's defensive, like she's trying to convince herself.
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"Shit happens. I don't... regret it."
She regrets Owen. She won't regret Clarisse. Like she said, she didn't learn her lesson.
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And Abby doesn't regret it, apparently, whatever that's supposed to mean. Clarisse feels the tips of her ears start to burn and utters a short, awkward laugh.
"It was stupid, but we've done dumber shit." Remember that time they stood their ground against a fucking dragon?
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And seeing her reddening ears makes her feel weirdly squirmy.
"You mean you've done dumber shit." Who faced the dragon, exactly?
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This is okay, right? It's like when Abby teased her earlier about losing her crew. Still not completely back to normal, but way better than how things have been.
After a moment of internal debate, Clarisse crosses most of the rest of the distance between them, so they don't have to talk across all that empty deck space. There. She's done being weird about this.
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Oh um okay. She holds still for a moment while Clarisse cross the deck but exhales once she's there, attempting to relax. "Do you know what dumb shit I actually did do recently? Said I'd conduct interviews with everybody in Riftwatch, for Cedric. So get ready for one of those, I guess."
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Clarisse is raising her eyebrows at the interview thing, though, brushing past the quip (and the way Abby let out that breath when she walked over, too. Not subtle). "Interviews about what?"
If she stays right where she is, a couple feet distant, this feels okay. Faking normal until they make it.
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"And about anything. He wants more in depth profiles on the rifters for the library so we can be remembered." She glances at her, noting where she stopped. Hesitating, before she asks, "Want to write something about Ellie with me?"
She should have a record too.
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That's the last thing Clarisse expected Abby to say, and not for the first time she wonders what Abby's thoughts are on the whole Ellie thing. She's always been quieter about it, whereas Ellie was apt to bring Abby up at random. She wonders if talking about Ellie puts a bad taste in her mouth, or makes her angry, but the look on Abby's face is... unreadable.
It still means more than Clarisse can put into words, that Abby is willing to talk about her for Clarisse's sake even if she doesn't want to.
She realizes she hasn't said anything and manages, "Okay. Sure."
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"Thanks." She keeps going after a moment, choosing her words. "I... feel like I knew some really important stuff about her, and like I have no idea who she really was at the same time. If that makes sense."
It's okay if it doesn't because it barely makes sense to her.
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"Yeah," she says, "it does. Sometimes I felt that way too."
That sounds way nastier than she meant it to, so Clarisse amends, "Just, I mean, she used to try to tell me bad things about herself and I would stop her. I guess I didn't really want to know." She kept all the good things and ditched the rest, until she couldn't anymore.
She lifts a hand and scratches softly at the side of her neck, feeling awkward. "I'll tell you whatever you want to know, though."
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She feels a little unsteady. She asks suddenly, "She loved him, didn't she. Joel."
His name felt strange coming out of her mouth and she wonders for a wild moment if she even said it right. She hasn't said it out loud for years. And this is something she never would have asked Ellie, something Ellie never would have told her. And Abby knows the answer, but it's still the last piece of the puzzle and somebody has to say it out loud.
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Clarisse sucks her teeth, not sure whether to leave it at that or not, but it's like she can't stop herself. "She kind of idolized him, I think, because he took her away from Boston. Even the stuff that was bad, I don't think she knew it was bad. Or she knew it but she didn't really let herself believe it."
It sounds dumb as hell for Clarisse, of all people, to be judging somebody for overlooking their father's faults, for idolizing them to a point of self-damage. But it's always easier to see it when it's somebody else doing it, not yourself.
"It's not just that. They had this huge fight and didn't talk for a long time, but finally she said she wanted to try and forgive him. But that was the night before—" A pause. She doesn't need to say the rest, right? "So they didn't have the chance to fix anything. I think she kind of hated herself for that."
All of a sudden Clarisse becomes aware of exactly how much she's just word vomited about Ellie and Joel to Abby, of all people. She shuts the fuck up very abruptly and crosses her arms, looking away.
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There was so much more to Joel than what he did to the Fireflies, to Abby — she's known for years that he shot Marlene to save Ellie, stormed their base to get back something they took from him, but she had trouble looking at it head on, like bright light. When he died she expected the monster to be slain and all she saw was a man crumpled dead at her feet.
She barely notices when Clarisse stops talking because her own thoughts are so loud in her head.
Eventually she says, "I hated myself for it too." Quiet, steady. "But I wasn't supposed to. I wasted all that time looking for him. You know? I dragged everybody else into it. And then it was supposed to be over, but it wasn't." It was easy to tell; the nightmares didn't stop. "Because I did the same thing to her that he did to me."
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Clarisse doesn't know what else to say. She can't bullshit Abby and say what she did wasn't that bad, because Abby would just see through it. She's too smart to fall for Clarisse's bullshit. And saying that Ellie wasn't innocent in everything that happened would be pointless, too, because they both already know that. It doesn't change anything.
"Sometimes we don't realize things until it's too late. It's just how it is. But—" She swallows and feels her teeth press together, her jaw going tight. She tips her head back a little so it's easier not to blink. "I think she was happy. Here. A lot of the time."
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But she can't.
"I think she was too." Obviously Abby didn't have a good reference for Ellie being happy in her mind but she's seen her at the opposite end of the scale, heard her broken-up screams on a blood-slick floor. That feels like it happened a lifetime ago.
She shakes her head. It's like she's not all here. Half of her is still on that rooftop, sharing a blunt and being told about stars. "She asked me if we were friends before she left. I said we could try."
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"I think you could've done it." Hell, they were already all sharing a tent, how much closer can you get to another person? It reminds her of something, though, and she snorts, stepping closer.
"One time we were up in the mountains and she told me she thought you were cool. Out of nowhere, almost."
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She snorts, feeling herself grin a little. "Oh. Really?"
Dork.
"She's kinda cool too, I guess. I always thought her paintings were really good."
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In the moment it had been awkward for her, and she hadn't known how much she could bring up either one of them around the other, but it's something funny she can look back on now, at least.
"You should see some of the stuff she sketched sometime. I bet there's drawings of Wags in there." She's sure there is, actually. And the griffons, the horses... probably a lot of the people in Riftwatch, too. Maybe she should go through the sketchbook and hand out whatever's in there, sometime.
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Clarisse doesn't know she's not only seen the drawings but ripped some of the pages of the book out for herself and Abby decides she's not going to, not if she can help it. She just relinquished something, the fact that Ellie asked if they were friends right before she up and disappeared; that's enough. It's not like she's keeping everything from her, just this. Sketches, desperate lines of poetry. Her eyes scribbled over in black. Does she think she's protecting Ellie from judgement?
This version of Ellie is still new to her, the one that went on dates with Clarisse and sketched in her free time, filling in page after page of her book with pencil lines. Just a girl, not a threat.
Abby finds herself saying, "What was she like when it was just the two of you?"
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What the hell. She'll do her best anyway.
"Funny," she says after a minute, "but in a dorky way. And thoughtful. She used to buy me chocolates sometimes just because, or plan something we could do for fun and surprise me. And she was smart, you know? She liked to read about history and art and space. She liked to know things about people and when she talked about them you could tell she really saw them and paid attention to them. She used to tell me stories about living in Jackson or being on the road with Joel, and she'd ask me things about my mom or what it was like at camp. And we'd just talk for ages."
She scuffs the wood boards under them with the heel of one boot. "She was... softer when no one else was around. Is that what you thought I'd say?" She really has no idea what Abby used to assume they talked about or did back when Clarisse would spend half the time with Ellie. Or if she spent time thinking about it at all.
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Maybe Ellie wasn't so unknowable to her after all.
This all feels weird and complicated. That same sadness she talked to Gwen about still sits in her, tangled up tight with anger and regret. It's unfair that this happened when it did and it's childish to want to call it unfair so she can't. The whole thing is out of her control; maybe that's why Abby hates it so much.
"Yeah," she says. "I guess." She has no idea what kind of face she's making right now but she understands that this moment is finite and tender, that anything could break it open. She presses her fingers into her jaw and finds the point where everything draws tight. Talking helps. It always has.
"I miss her."
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Even with their fucked up history, it must have been comforting to have somebody else who came from the same place, who understood what life was like there and who didn't need to have anything explained to them about it. And though the reason for it might be awful, the two of them were connected. Irrevocably. The strings of their destinies overlapping and tied up together.
For that to just... end, with no closure, with no warning, has got to be impossibly hard. Ellie disappearing was devastating for Clarisse, but in some ways she thinks Abby must be even more fucked up by it. It's not just loss of the future for her, it's loss of the past, too.
"I know you do." She swallows. "I wish I'd gotten to see you guys be friends."
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She says carefully, "It would have been so weird."
Right? For them to be friends? How couldn't it have been weird?
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