It had to be done. Clarice wasn’t sure whether John really was super busy with the kids he had “adopted”, or whether he was avoiding the conversation he was too smart not to know the subject of, but she wasn’t willing to wait anymore.
As she marched down the stairs of her house, Clarice ground her teeth with nerves, something she had been doing all day, even before she had decided with finality to get this over with. Which reminded her, she might as well open a portal right to the bottom of ‘Body 25’, John, Dash and Violet’s new home. She had been here before, there had been cake, and it had been delicious and awkward. She liked the kid though. And the cake.
As she knocked on the door, she rotated her jaw and tried to relax which was stupid and impossible and a waste of time. By the time it was opened her hair was a bit of a mess from all the nervous twirling. Clarice quickly smoothed it down, giving John a steelier look than she should be able to by rights.
“Hey. You know why I’m here.” He probably wouldn’t close the door in her face. He was too nice. Right?
“Hey.” John’s gaze may have been a little shifty as he opened the door enough to see Clarice standing on the other side, but also little enough that his body mostly blocked any view of the inside of the house.
“This, uh, isn’t really the best time,” he said, thinking of the pile of loot he’d been acquiring all day and the fact that he still couldn’t stop thinking about stealing everything in sight. Logically, he knew it was all Atlantis, but that didn’t mean he wanted to be obvious about it.
Although Clarice couldn’t see herself she was pretty sure her nostrils had flared at the greeting she had received. The gall. Eyes narrowing, Clarice took a small step forward, thankful that she wasn’t that much shorter than John and so could almost easily stare him down. “The hell it isn’t. What happened to ‘ooh Clarice I always have time for yoou’?”
He was blocking the door like someone with something to hide, and Clarice’s heart fell when the thought that he might have someone else in there in some stage of undress crossed her mind. She tried to look over his shoulder, then looked back at him defiantly. “You can let me in or I can be a bitch about it and portal into the middle of the room. At this point, I kind of don’t give a damn.”
“Can’t we do this tom-” John trailed off at her look. He knew Clarice well enough to know when she was pissed and she was definitely pissed right now. She was also right about being able to just portal her way inside. She’d been in the house before, she could get in whether he decided to let her in or not and the look on her face told him she wouldn’t hesitate to do it.
“Okay,” he agreed reluctantly, stepping aside to let her in. If her getting inside was inevitable, he figured he might as well cooperate.
Hotheaded though she was every once in a while, screaming wasn’t exactly Clarice’s thing, but when John started to push back again she almost went there. Luckily he stopped himself before he finished the sentence and so the puff of hair Clarice had filled her lungs with was let go and she relaxed a little.
The second he stepped aside Clarice barged in. If anything, she wanted him to know how serious about this she was. Even if she felt a little sick and kind of wanted to open up a portal and run right through it using the same momentum that she walked past him with. The thought was, for better or worse, interrupted by something she fully kicked on her way in, causing a pile of other things to topple.
“What the hell?” Clarice looked down as an old bicycle bell stopped ringing. “Are you… John I understand we’re not used to having stuff back home so when we do get to have stuff we tend to overdo it but that’s no reason to become a hoarder!”
John had the grace to look embarrassed with flushed cheeks and a glance away when she teased him about the pile of crap in the middle of the living room. “Uh, it’s not technically mine,” he admitted. That wasn’t better and he was pretty sure Clarice was never going to let him hear the end of it, but what was he supposed to say? He knew this was just Atlantis, but it was still kind of embarrassing.
Clarice barely looked around to see John blushing with embarrassment before she was perusing the pile with her eyes again. It was amazingly diverse. Clarice saw, at first glance, a tire with rope tied around it, - so a tire swing - a roll of bubble wrap and a pair of bicycle training wheels.
She wanted desperately to talk about the elephant in the room, but she also wanted to bask in whatever the hell this was. Especially once John admitted these things weren’t his. Technically. Clarice’s breath caught in her throat and she whipped her head around to stare at him in bewilderment. Then, she knelt down and sorted through the pile.
“John. Where the hell did you get a full golden candelabra? Why a pair of bright red leg warmers? What the hell are you gonna do with all these air fresheners?!” She wasn’t laughing. But she wasn’t… not. Standing back up, Clarice put a pair of ski goggles around her head. “Only in Atlantis: Thunderbird goes full on Thieving Magpie. What the hell, man?”
Then suddenly, something wiggled at the corner of her field of vision, and Clarice almost took a dive back onto the pile. She pushed a few things out of the way to pick up, in its full glory, a Hello Kitty bike helmet with a hot pink dildo glued to the middle of it. Speechless, she could only look back at John. “Why?!”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. His face had gotten progressively more and more red with every embarrassing item she pointed out, but the bike helmet was definitely the worst. Truthfully, he couldn’t answer the question of why the hell he had all this stuff. He only knew that all day he’d been unable to stop himself from stealing basically everything in sight.
Now he had a giant pile of random and worthless crap that didn’t belong to him and no real explanation for why he had any of it. Despite his embarrassment, he couldn’t help laughing along with her. This was obviously one of those weird Atlantis things that he hopes would go away soon.
John was blushing even harder now and it was both hilarious and kind of cute, which Clarice resented. She dropped the helmet right away, holding her hands in front of her. She booked it for the bathroom to wash her hands, leaving the door open. "God. Atlantis turned you into a weirdo hoarder! I am never protesting flowers again."
Once back out of the bathroom, still with the ski goggles on her head, Clarice took a few awkward steps towards John and shoved her hands in her pockets. "So, uh, anyway... Um, about that... the talk that I wanted to have before I stumbled upon your dragon hoard..." She worried her bottom lip between her teeth. "Look I'll just come out with it 'cause this is ridiculous at this point."
There was a pause, and Clarice swallowed her nerves and looked up at John. She felt terrified but forced herself to keep going. "After everything that's gone on, on that other place, and back in Atlanta, is there anything here? Like, between us...?"
“I think the word you’re looking for if klepto,” John corrected her. As embarrassed as he was, he would 100% rather talk about his weird pile of stolen items than his feelings about Breckentale or Atlantis or any of the rest of it.
“I don’t know,” he said, mostly because he was a big chicken. He did have feelings for Clarice, but he didn’t know if it was mostly Aiden or mostly him and he also didn’t know how much of what Clarice might feel for him was because of that other place where she’d been Cerise or what Dreamer had done to her.
And maybe there was also just a part of him that was afraid to let himself feel that way about anyone again.
“Kleptomaniacs can be hoarders. What else do they do with all their stuff after they steal it?” Clarice pointed out, pulling the ski goggles off her head and tossing them onto the pile with one hand while smoothing down her hair with the other.
After John’s answer to her question she stood in silence, waiting for him to elaborate. When he didn’t, Clarice looked off to one side, trying to come up with something to say. There was nothing right that second and the silence was kind of strangling her. Moreover she was feeling a sort of heat rising from her belly up onto her throat and face. Pretty soon she needed to pick and choose from the plethora of things she wanted to say.
“You don’t know? You… don’t know. After all this time, and all this bullshit, you expect me to believe you still don’t know?” She scoffed. “You know, I know you probably wanted to like, spare my feelings? But this is worse. Just say ‘no’ and move on, for fuck’s sake. I’m a big girl, I can take it. Been getting my feelings all sad for ages before your ass came along, it’s not you who’s gonna break me.”
She shook her head and stepped towards the door. “I’m done here so I’m gonna go. Thanks for your honesty, buddy.”
“That was me being honest,” he argued. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to sort through all these fake memories and figure out what’s real and what’s not. I don’t-” Frustrated, he dragged a hand through his hair. He couldn’t tell her he didn’t feel anything for her, because that wasn’t the truth. He knew that much, but he didn’t think it was that simple. He still remembered what it was like to be Aiden and some of it felt like him, but how was he supposed to know the difference? They’d both had their memories and feelings manipulated here and for her it hadn’t even been the first time. It was easy to second guess what was or wasn’t real.
“I know that you’re really important to me, Clarice,” he said, knowing full well how lame that probably sounded, but it was the best he was prepared to give right now.
“Are you kidding? There was a before, John, that stupid alternate reality wasn’t the first time we-” Clarice paused, snickering. As far as she was concerned, John’s bullshit answer was the same as a negative one, but somewhat more humiliating. He should know better by now, and it pissed her off that it looked like he didn’t. In case he needed help, she thought she might as well clear some things up. “You learn, you know? Things become pretty clear eventually. What isn’t for real feels wrong. If Breckentale is the only thing keeping you on the fence then nothing meant anything, there’s nothing.”
As he made things worse with platitudes that meant absolutely nothing to her right now, Clarice stopped at the already open door and turned around.
“Seriously? Yeah you’re super important to me too, which is why I’d respect you too much to spew this wishy-washy crap after avoiding you, which you did again just like you and Dreamer did that other time.” Clarice’s anger subsided into sheer sadness for a moment as she shook her head. “I thought you knew better by now.”
She slammed the door behind her and immediately opened a portal back to her own bedroom.