Young and Young at Heart (The Rewrite of The Walking Dead Game: S2) [TWDG/TWD]

75. Three Little Words

"Clementine?" whispered Sarah.

"Yeah?" answered Clementine.

"What did you mean, when you said you killed Lee?" Clem tensed up. "I'm sorry. I—"

"He was bitten," answered a teary Clem. "And I didn't want him to turn into a walker, and he told me there was only one way to stop that from happening. So..." Clem bit her lip, trying not to cry. "So I shot him."

"Oh Clem," spoke a saddened Sarah. "I'm so sorry." Clem tried to stifle her tears as she thought back to that horrible day. "It... it was like my dad. Wasn't it? He... he was already dead. Even if he got up, those bites would have killed him." Clem listened to Sarah weeping and felt like crying herself.

"That's why you shot him, isn't it?" asked a sniveling Sarah.

"I'm so sorry Sarah," spoke an emotional Clem. "I didn't want to. But—"

"But we had to go, and you knew I wasn't going to leave him..." Clem felt her eyes tearing up as she listened to Sarah whimper. "So you had to, because I didn't want to believe it, and we were going to die because of me, because I didn't want to leave my dad, even though—" Clementine started crying loudly, startling Sarah.

"I'm sorry, I'll—"

"It was my parents," cried Clementine.

"What?"

"That mistake I made, because I trusted someone who said he had something I needed?" reminded Clem. "It was my parents. He said he found my parents."

"Huh? Who did?"

"The man I talked to on my radio." Clementine felt Sarah's hand moving up and down her back as she tried to stop crying.

"It's okay," assured Sarah in a calm voice. "We don't have to talk about it if you don't want to."

"Do... do you not want me to talk about it?"

"I just want whatever makes you feel better. Do you want to talk?" Thinking about Sarah's question, Clem realized they were both alone, lost in the dark, cold and hungry, without any idea if they'd ever find anyone ever again. It dawned on the young girl she might never get another chance to talk about this again.

"I... I thought my radio was broken, but I kept it anyway, because I liked to pretend I was still talking to my mom and dad on it. But when I put new batteries in it, it started working again. So I thought, maybe I could use it to find my mom and dad. If they found another radio, they'd know to try to call me on it, and one night, someone answered me.

"I told him about how my parents went away to Savannah, and he said he felt bad for me. We kept talking, and I told him about how scared I was, and the bad things I saw, and he kept saying how terrible it was for a little girl like me to have to go through this.

"He said he would be my secret friend. Someone I could tell anything to, and he would never tell anyone else no matter what. One day, he told me he was going to Savannah to find my parents. And not long after that, we found a train that could take us to Savannah too."

"A train?" asked Sarah. "It still worked?"

"Yeah, I know. It took us right to where my parents were, and when I told my friend about it, he said he was already there, and that he was going to start looking for them before we got there, and I told him to start at the hotel they were staying at. It felt like a dream come true." Clementine started sniveling. "But when we got there. Everything went wrong.

"Lee wouldn't give me my radio back, because he knew my friend wasn't actually a friend, but I didn't want to believe them. Christa told me too, and I didn't believe her either. We went to the only place in Savannah that was supposed to still have people left, and everyone there was already dead. But I kept telling myself they had to be somewhere in Savannah, but Lee said there just wasn't enough time to look for them. So I..." Clem drifted off.