Chapter Text
i.
Maeve is tired. So fucking tired.
The kind of tired that resists, eludes, completely dissolves the possibility of quantification, of measurement, altogether. It’s the kind of tired that burrows into the bones and makes a home in the marrow, parasitic. She has had plenty of years to develop this exhaustion and plenty of years to accept it as a part of her now—like cordyceps twining with muscle and tissue, like a second skin—and yet, still, somehow, she’s trying to fight it. To pretend it’s temporary.
Today, though, she’s exceptionally tired.
She drags herself through the city, in too much pain to be paying enough attention to her surroundings, surveying the landscape for the infected. She finds an empty parking garage. It’ll do for now.
What happened out there?
He did.
Her hand goes to her throat. She’s still bleeding. How she’s not dead yet is beyond her. Even with her medical training, with all that preserved knowledge of bodies and death, she can’t explain it to herself, can’t make it make sense. She almost wishes she were dead. The pain is unrelenting. It hammers into her flesh, and she looks at her hands, vision blurring. All she can see is that endless awful red.
ii.
“We should find shelter,” Joel calls, and Ellie flips him off, continuing to dig through the back of an abandoned Toyota, looking for goodies, as she calls them. He huffs, annoyed, and glances around them furtively. “Ellie.” He says, louder this time. Finally, thankfully, she climbs out of the backseat with a handful of… “What is that?”
“I think they’re like…crystals?” She looks baffled, too, holding them up for him to see. He takes one—store-bought rose quartz, maybe?—and lets out a scoff-laugh.
“They are,” He snorts. “Oh, man. I forgot how weird people used to be.”
“Used to be?” Ellie rolls her eyes. “You’re living proof that they still are. Inspirational, really.”
He rolls his eyes right back. "What did people use them for?" She seems genuinely curious.
"I don't really know the specifics, just...you know. Woo woo stuff," He shrugs. "Like..."
"Talismans?" Ellie cuts in, and he nods.
"Sure, yeah," He says. "Just take one or two, okay? We don't have room for a whole bag of rocks."
She snorts, glares at him. "But we have room for a fuck ton of shampoo?"
He sighs. "Maria requested it for the town supply, Ellie, you know that."
She ignores him, slides some of the crystals into her jean pockets.
Ellie is sixteen now. She has only just begun to truly forgive him for…everything. The hospital.
This is their first trip outside of Jackson together since all of that. She’s grown increasingly distant, spending most of her time outside of their house, avoiding Joel, fucking around with her Dina or the rest of their friends. She’s a good student, he knows, smarter than the two teachers at the fledgling school know what to do with, too clever and uninterested in such blasé concepts as respecting authority. He doesn’t blame her; he was never a big fan of traditional school himself. She’s training, too, to be on patrol, which he hates but doesn’t say anything about.
His dumb, useless fantasy is that she would get to be an astronaut. It makes no sense. There are no astronauts now, of course. Still. He wanted it for her. Wanted NASA to somehow magically re-emerge, uninfected, and recruit her. A fever dream.
“Let’s find shelter, alright?” He says, and she nods.
They walk for a while, guns at their hips, until Ellie suddenly darts off ahead beneath some sort of half-fallen structure. Joel calls her name, hissing it, really, and runs after her.
“Come on!” She whisper-yells, and he curses to himself. Even now Ellie is Ellie, all impulse, the thinking coming later. Reluctantly, he follows her into what seems to be a semi-collapse parking structure. And it’s at that moment, as he stands up, dusting off his pants, that they hear the unmistakable sound of the infected outside, much too close for comfort. He grabs Ellie by her backpack strap, shushes her and she glares at him, like, I know, asshole.
He scans the structure. It’s increasingly dark and yet, when he looks, he swears he can see a figure, tucked behind one of the moss-swallowed cars. He points, and Ellie follows his finger.
He hears it then, too. The breathing. Faint, ragged, belabored. It’s not an infected, he doesn’t think, though he can’t be sure. It sounds like whoever it is is in far too much pain to be a threat to them at all.
“I think someone’s hurt over there,” Ellie whispers. “Should we—”
“Ellie, no,” He grunts. “We don’t know who they are or what they want—”
Ellie looks at him and he knows he’s made the dumbest of mistakes. Him telling Ellie no is a surefire way to have her do exactly what he’s asking her not to. She sprints over towards the breathing, and he follows her, frustrated.
“Oh, shit,” Ellie gasps. She bends down, stares at something—someone. “Joel. Joel, come here, now, please,”
He does. It’s a woman. Probably in her late twenties or so. Older than Ellie, younger than him. Her olive skin is dirt-smeared and her dark hair is tangled and askew, but what he notices more than anything is all the fucking blood. So much of it. Joel is no stranger to blood, obviously, but he almost wants to gag. The woman is breathing, just barely, her eyes fluttering, and he’s not sure if she’s conscious or not.
Ellie points to her throat. “Look,” She says, and Joel’s chest tightens. He doesn’t know this woman, doesn’t know anything about her character, what she did or didn’t do, but that wound on her throat is so brutal, so deliberate and hate-filled that he can’t help but feel a dumb flood of sympathy, if that’s what it is. If he’s still capable of such… feelings. His stomach lurches. He doubts, somehow, that she did anything, ever, to deserve it.
“How the fuck is she still alive?” Ellie asks, and Joel shakes his head, at a loss.
“We need to help her, Joel,” She says, suddenly, grabbing his arm. “Please. I can’t—she’s young. This is just too much. I don’t want another fucking death to add to the list of the ones I’m responsible for,”
That stings, as it was, he knows, intended to. But he doesn’t need convincing. Not this time. Inexplicable, but he can’t just leave this girl here. He knows it.
“We have to get her back to the car,” Joel whispers. “For now, we need to stop the bleeding. You’re going to have to hold your hand on her neck to put pressure on it until we get home, alright? Can you do that?”
Ellie nods, and he tugs off his jacket despite the cold, giving it to Ellie to bundle up to staunch the blood. “I don’t know if she’s going to make it, Ellie,” He adds, as gently as he can.
“I know,” She whispers back. “But we have to try.”