entrancelogs | + Somewhere a Grandiose Carnival Was Going on in the Sky +

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+ Somewhere a Grandiose Carnival Was Going on in the Sky +

Who: Everyone!
Where: The grounds of the Mansion
When: March 9-16
Rating: PG-13 (warn if you go higher)
Summary: The Red Queen has thrown a carnival for everyone!
The Story:

From Friday, March 9, through Friday, March 16, the gardens and grounds of the Mansion will be a sprawling a carnival. The masked, unspeaking vendors will be selling trinkets and running free game booths. Carnival rides, exhibits, and foods represent all of the various cultures of those currently residing in the Mansion.

Of particular note, and perhaps incongruously, everything is decorated with red hearts.

Use this log for any and all of your carnival needs!

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At least someone's enjoying it.

His eyes screw shut. It feels like he might've left his guts behind him at the top of the hill as they rush downward, the wind tearing at hair and clothes and all but sucking the breath clean from his throat.

He doesn't gasp. He doesn't cheer. The most he manages is slitting his eyes open, just a hair, as the coaster jolts from side to side. Oh, god. Is he gonna be sick?

"There's - another one?" he works out between gritted teeth, caught somewhere between awe and horror.

Clementine looks over at him with a frown like she's trying to remember how to-

"Yeah. Looks like it. Might be... the last?"

That was comforting, right? She's not sure, and it's not like- This roller coaster is careening forward further as they start to head up, up, up again, and then much faster this time they're down already. She lets out another cheer helplessly.

It's fast. It's fun. It's impossible to think about- about everything fucking else when the wind is blowing like this and the world's blurring by fast. It's impossible to think about how she has no control over her life, about how no matter what she does she's screwed, about how she wanted to believe in a revolution but can't anymore. No thoughts at all. Just the rush.

Thankfully, for Tim, they're heading toward the end.

He can't tell if it's exhausted relief that sends the blood churning through his veins or if it's some kind of adrenalized high, but either way, it leaves him short of breath when the ride finally slows to a halt. He has to fumble with the strap for several long seconds before he can unhook it and extricate himself from the seat.

He's maybe slightly struck with a minor case of serious vertigo.

"...jesus," is about all he can get out to begin with.

Clementine unstraps herself a moment or two later before she steps out after him, and she folds her arms loosely across her chest as she eyes him carefully. Her voice is quiet, but she doesn't really speak expecting a response at the moment.

Not with how he's reacting, and she... kinda feels bad about it. which is weird for her.

"...guess you don't like roller coasters."

"I guess I...don't, really." He releases a shaky breath, trying to jar himself back into feeling like he's one whole person, and not existing a couple inches to the left of himself. The sudden movement does not help. At least he isn't nauseous - he hasn't eaten enough to merit that kind of thing.

Thank god.

"But, uh, I tried," he offers weakly. "Made sure of it first and everything."

Clementine stands beside him, staring down at him after a moment. She nods, because that's true- that's good, she guesses. Better to know for sure. Not everyone is willing to try new things. ...maybe he wouldn't have if she hadn't shown up.

Probably time to come clean.

She gives him a few more moments to... breathe, cause that's important.

"I have some water but that might make it worse." Still she pulls it out of the bag around her shoulder and holds it out in front of her. Another pause. "It's probably obvious, but... I'm the mirror."

He shakes his head, a breathless but polite refusal. His stomach just needs to settle. He needs to settle. That's all he has left, right up until the moment when she puts that out there, and everything else abruptly falls away.

That's roughly the point where he stops focusing on sucking down lungfuls of air and stares at her instead.

"It..."

He should've been able to tell. God, he should, shouldn't he? He should've been able to tell. He just - didn't. But she said it, told him directly instead of waiting it away, so...so that's gotta be a good sign, right? That she trusts him to tell him?

"...I didn't know," he admits at last. "I'm sorry, I - should've been able to tell, huh?"

Clementine watches his genuine surprise, and her own mouth parts, because she assumed, but- It's not like she pays much attention to her real. It's better that way. She doesn't have to want something she can't have. Shit on the other side of the mirror seems a lot better, and people... care. There's just nothing safe about being a mirror, and she gets tired of it.

She shrugs.

"I don't know. I don't know much about my Real. I just thought you wouldn't want to ride with me if I told you the truth before, and I didn't want to go alone."

Even if it meant subjecting someone else to something they clearly didn't really like at all. She thinks her Real wouldn't do that, but maybe she would.

"Guess I've had a lot on my mind." Overstimulated, maybe, with the number of unfamiliar sights and smells and experiences he's never lived before. And Clem - she came outta her two year sojourn back home changed. What she's been through, that'd change anybody.

Maybe it's the difference between who she was and who she is that obscured the line between the Real and the Mirror just enough. Especially for someone who's never met the latter.

"Why would I not wanna ride with you?" he says with a faint lift of his eyebrows. "You've been pretty all right this whole time."

Clementine's gaze narrows as he asks the question, and she has to bite back her initial reaction, You're like Georgia, aren't you? It doesn't feel safe to even admit she's talked to Georgia in any capacity so she doesn't say it. Yet.

Her voice finally grows sharp as if she can convince him by this alone when she already knows how well this conversation went the last time she tried to have it.

"Because most mirrors are fucking dangerous to Reals, to other Mirrors, to everybody for no good reason. That's why. I would have understood you saying no after finding out what I was."

"Sounds to me like you've already caught on that there's not a whole lotta point to going at each other's throats," he says, and thank god, he must be getting a fraction of his equilibrium back, because he sounds appreciably wry and thus a bit more like himself.

"Far as I can tell, you haven't done anything that'd warrant that." A pause, and then he shrugs. "Mirror or not, you're just a kid."

"But I'm not just a kid." Her voice is steady. It's not spoken like a child might, reactionary, lashing out against the reality. It's spoken as someone who is aware of her age, aware of how to use that to her advantage too. "You start thinking like that about all the Mirrors in there, and you'll really be in trouble. I'm someone who signed up with the biggest asshole in my world and screwed over a bunch of people I cared about to do it. By screwed over, I mean that most of them were killed after that, and I went on to thrive and help the asshole by doing a lot of fucked up shit without caring."

There's a pause since she gets her talking about it means-

Well, it means what it does. She's not so heartless anymore or maybe she let her heart out of wherever the hell she stuffed it. She huffs out a breath.

"I'm trying to be different now. Don't really know why."

So that'd be the difference between this version and the Real one. One distinct choice marking the separation between them. Only there's a hole in this story, just like there was with the Real Clem's.

He folds his arms, regarding her evenly for a long moment.

"If you don't care, why're you trying?"

"I don't know. Got tired of it. Didn't ever do anything for me but keep me alive and secure, keep me from going hungry back in my own world. It's not the same anymore. There's nothing but this."

The Mirror side has nowhere to go, nothing to do. There's just being on edge always. It's not like there's a worst place she could be instead. It's not like she can justify being paranoid and on edge all the time by telling herself that it's better to be somewhere secure and with food, because the mirror side is anything but secure. The Queen would throw her away without blinking at least she was important to Carver even if it meant becoming someone she never wanted to be (becoming like him).

"I just want you to be careful with mirrors. I get giving some a chance cause otherwise you'd have been pissed after that roller coaster ride, but a lot of them really will hurt someone if they get the chance."

"Maybe 'cause people keep expecting them to take that chance." Hasn't she just proven that entire mindset wrong? Did she set out to do exactly that, or did it more or less happen by mistake?

If she doesn't care, allegedly, then why is she seeing fit to warn him? Why not keep leading him to believe she was Real? Why admit to it, and then impart cautionary advice?

She's telling him one thing. Her actions say something else entirely.

"You're giving me a lotta advice for someone who doesn't care."

Clementine realizes that once again, she's not getting anywhere with this line of conversation. It's frustrating, because it makes it so hard for her to trust Reals when they do this, which is probably ironic. It's because they're willing to give mirrors a chance at all that they give her the time of day.

She's just seen the kind of shit that goes on over there. Her shoulders tighten, and she shrugs.

"Like I said, I'm tired of living that way- tired of not caring. I'm trying to care more than I care about surviving for once."

It's just not easy.

"But you can do what you want with what I've said. I haven't been able to convince anyone of this shit anyway."

"You know you didn't have to say anything to get us to give a damn, right?" Or maybe she didn't know. Maybe that was the point - that this was meant to establish something, a litmus test for her own sake rather than for his. Her way of testing the waters, to see if he could be trusted in the first place.

Given the general mistrust of Mirrors on principle, he can't blame her for that. For being wary.

But she shouldn't have to be.

"Yeah. At least two of you give a damn out of the goodness of your hearts or some shit," Clementine says, because she can't think of a reason why- another reason why. She's not used to people with goodness. Everyone has their reasons.

It's harder to trust that they actually give a damn, because she hasn't figured out the reason why yet.

Goodness doesn't count. Goodness is harder to rely on. Everyone has a breaking point.

"Maybe 'cause we know how it feels to have never had control over a damn thing in our lives." George would know, having been manufactured, pieced together in a lab, fabricated for the express purpose of being set upon her brother. Tim would know, having been always been the subject of someone else's whims - nameless doctors, Alex's puppet-stringing, Jay's investigations, Brian's static-laced warnings, the machinations of something utterly beyond his conception.

"Maybe we don't anyone else to have to live with that."

They had to deal with it alone.

No one else should have to.

"Still pretty compassionate of you both. Plenty of people have been fucked over before, and they don't try to help other people fucked over like that," Clementine says in a practiced, tired sort of way. She doesn't know what to do with this caring. She doesn't know what to do with people giving a shit that- that. Her chest aches deeply with it, and she shifts, taking in a breath and turning so she doesn't look directly at him.

She slides a hand behind her neck.

"I don't know that there's any other choice." But to live with it. "But it means something if you're trying to stop it like Georgia is."

It means something even if she doesn't believe it will change a thing.

"Plenty of people have been through shit," says Tim. "It's just a question of what they choose to do with it."

He's tired of pressing it out in the form of bitterness, of loathing, of defensiveness and prickly barriers and walls thrown up time and time again. He's tired of it, and if that's what gets him and the rest of Wonderland doomed to some faceless entity eviscerating their minds - well, fine.

At least then they'll know what's doing it to them, right?

"She and I think you've been through enough."

"What do you choose to do with it?"

Clementine lifts her gaze to him, narrowing her eyes as if she can read him more clearly if she looks closer at him. She's thirteen, but her body language is almost aggressive as she does so.

She doesn't say anything to the rest. She went through shit, and she made poor choices- she chose to fuck people over because of it- because she wanted to survive more than she wanted to help other people survive. She made her choices, and maybe that is why she ends up as a mirror on the other side instead of as a real- instead of as something more.

She doesn't know, but she knows she is tired of this shit.

It's a challenge - a thrown gauntlet. Like she expects the answer to be something self-serving, or maybe for him not to have an answer at all.

Tim jams his hands into the pockets of his jeans and tips his head to one side, considering how best to phrase it.

"I...look. I dealt with this - alone. For most of my life. Didn't really have anyone else who got it." And when eventually the people who did get it happened along, they were either in complete denial over that fact, or they didn't care that there was a wealth of similarity there, and simply wanted to excise it like a tumor. "And it sucked, okay? It sucked, not having anyone around who could tell me what the hell was happening. So even if I can't do - I dunno, much, at least I can do...this.

"Make sure that no one else was as alone as I was when it happened."

Clementine listens even as her gaze moves away from him, and her arms fold tighter across the front of her chest. Her hands are fists there as if she's always expecting a fight, and isn't she? Didn't she watch everyone she cared about die because- because-

Because she cared more about herself living than anything else.

She listens in the quiet.

"Yeah." Her voice is soft, quiet, torn almost. It's still so hard to trust but everything is hard to trust. She wipes at her face, breathes in, and then turns to him. "That's a- a goodhearted reason to want to help. I'm sorry you were alone with that shit for so long. The world's a fucking asshole."

"I'm sorry you were, too." He can't get it, he knows. Not completely. Not totally. He's never lived in a zombie apocalypse, and he's guessing she's never grown up in a hospital, in complete isolation. "But it's...like I said. Mirror, Real - I don't care. You shouldn't be alone in this."

She deserves, like so many others, to have someone in her corner. Especially seeing as she's not had many people who would, considering her paranoia, her distrust that someone would do so without there being some kind of gambit at work behind the scenes.

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+ Somewhere a Grandiose Carnival Was Going on in the Sky +

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