ooc: sure! that works for me :3 i'm good with slowtagging it until then. i love this thread so much :')
These abuses don't just happen; they don't start and end with the terror of one decisive moment. He can piece together the tapestry from her small confessions, her guilt, her anguish. This man was not a good one (nor, he suspects, was this woman in association) and that cruelty and selfishness reverberated among them all, building to this: this moment Clementine details as if the memory itself is shaking inside of her.
She did not deserve this. She did not deserve the maltreatment, the lack of tenderness; she did not deserve the responsibility of being the adult surrounded by those too wrapped up in their own fear to spar a thought for her or their child.
(Klaus considers he would have liked to slaughter them both in lieu and in deference to her suffering. The world might be better off.)
He reaches to cup her cheek then, the hardness of his rage muted and softened by his desire to comfort her. "No one should have to do what you did," he tells her, because people should not have to die, to be killed or to kill. Because it should not have been on her shoulders at all. But it was. It was, because life does not deal in shoulds.
She did what it took to survive. That is not wrong in his eyes. That is strength. "But you were brave in doing it."
SOBS!!!!
These abuses don't just happen; they don't start and end with the terror of one decisive moment. He can piece together the tapestry from her small confessions, her guilt, her anguish. This man was not a good one (nor, he suspects, was this woman in association) and that cruelty and selfishness reverberated among them all, building to this: this moment Clementine details as if the memory itself is shaking inside of her.
She did not deserve this. She did not deserve the maltreatment, the lack of tenderness; she did not deserve the responsibility of being the adult surrounded by those too wrapped up in their own fear to spar a thought for her or their child.
(Klaus considers he would have liked to slaughter them both in lieu and in deference to her suffering. The world might be better off.)
He reaches to cup her cheek then, the hardness of his rage muted and softened by his desire to comfort her. "No one should have to do what you did," he tells her, because people should not have to die, to be killed or to kill. Because it should not have been on her shoulders at all. But it was. It was, because life does not deal in shoulds.
She did what it took to survive. That is not wrong in his eyes. That is strength. "But you were brave in doing it."