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“Ok.”
Ok, fucker. You lied to me.
Joel made a sharp turn on his heel and continued towards Jackson.
Ok***
“Need anything?” Joel asked, arms trapped in a mess of welcome gifts.
“No.”
I need to know why you lied to me.
***
Joel and Ellie sat on the porch of their new house, watching the sunset.
“Best get to bed.” Joel gestured with his head towards the house.
“Mmm-hmm.” Ellie hugged the blanket around her tighter.
“‘Kay. Long day tomorrow.”
With a creak of joints and door hinges, Joel vanished inside.
***
Ellie sat staring into the night, and soon fell into the darkness of sleep.
Her eyelids fluttered open as the sunrise crowned the mountains.
Huh. A new dawn.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
“Dammit!”, Ellie spat, “How do you even play this stupid thing!”Frustrated, Ellie shoved the guitar into Joel’s arms, and sat back on her bed. She folded her arms across her chest and screwed her face up in a pouty scowl.
Joel laughed.
“C’mon, jerk! How about a little help!” Ellie threw her arms up in righteous frustration.
Joel kept laughing, or more accurately, kept wheezing in amusement at Ellie’s outburst.
“Shut. Up.” She growled, leaning forward from her perch on the bed to slug Joel in the arm.
There. That stopped him.
“Fine, fine, I’ll-.” Joel snorted out a brief gust of laughter, cut short when Ellie stared daggers at him. “I’ll leave you to it.”
Joel heaved himself out of the chair, and gently laid the guitar in Ellie’s lap.
“Well,” he began, “I reckon we should get you a different teacher.”
For the second time that evening, Joel received a hearty helping of pissed-off-teenager-outburst.
“Asshole! First, you laugh at me for not knowing how to play the stupid thing and then you won’t teach me how to play! And worse, you promised me that you would.”
Joel, desperately tried to placate her, offering up a sheepish raise of his eyebrows and a noncommittal grunt.
“Really? Y’know what, if you won’t teach me how to play the damn thing, then at least show me how it’s done. Oh, and, you better sing too!”
Joel, looking for a way out, eyed the door cautiously. His only chance at a swift escape was cut off when Ellie marched up to him and shoved the guitar in his hand.
“You,” she demanded, “Sit. Sing.”
“Ellie-“
“No! Remember, the University? You promised you’d sing for me, after I saved your bacon. Well, I saved your ass plenty of times before and after that.”
Joel surrendered, and slumped into the chair. Ellie took her place opposite of him, trying (and failing) to look angry as Joel picked the opening melody to her favorite song.
“If, I e’er were to lose you, I’d surely lose myself”
Laughter over a campfire. Sorrow over a cannibal’s corpse in a burning restaurant.
“Everything that I have found dear,
I’ve not found by myself”
Tommy, Ellie, Maria, and Joel; a family. They crowded around the dinner table; air filled with familial banter and the aroma of fresh food.
“Try and sometimes you’ll succeed, to make this man of me”
Ellie had made a man of him. She had breathed life and light into what was an empty husk.
“All my stolen missin’ parts, I’ve no need for anymore.”
All of the bits of flesh and bone and blood that had been ripped from his body, scattered everywhere from Boston to Salt Lake City. They had all been worth it.
“‘N I believe, ‘n I believe, ‘cause I can see”
Joel saw himself carrying his daughter out of the hospital. He saw the gun that had spent so much time pressed against his temple. He saw that gun aimed at Marlene.
She wouldn’t ever see those things: he determined of that much.
“Our future days,
Days of you and me”
Those future days were beautiful indeed.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
It was always the nightmare.
It was always the restaurant.
It was always David.
Every night was purgatory. Every night, Ellie would be punished in her dreams (not that she deserved it, she thought, though, after all, maybe she did.)
Every night, all the terrible horrible people and the terrible horrible things they’d done to her, and she’d done to them would spin around in her mind like a terrible horrible journey- kind of like the one she didn’t want to go on (the journey she had made from Boston to Jackson to Salt Lake City and back to Jackson again), she just wanted to stay in Boston and be happy with Riley who was dead, but she was still alive in Ellie’s head, in her dreams and she was laughing at her as she burned in the flames, but that wasn’t possible because Ellie had killed her, had shot her in the head and, it was just too much and
***
Ellie woke up sobbing and screaming.
Joel threw open the door into her room, and wrapped himself around her like a lethal blanket.
***
Joel gently drew open the door and stepped back into the hallway, eyes trained on Ellie’s sleeping form.
“Good night.” He whispered.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Ellie told Dina and Jesse she was sneaking out- they were going to do stupid shit in one of the neighborhoods near Jackson. Meet up with friends. Light a house on fire. Smoke weed. Maybe fuck.
She told no one that she was going astray.
The last thing she needed to do was to ignore the itch, the urge, the need to know.
No matter how many tattoos and burns she layered over it, she couldn’t bury it.
***
Ellie led her horse down the highway
There .
Standing tall, the sign read:
H
EXIT 319
ROUTE 15 NORTH
Salt Lake City
Ellie glanced to her left at the engraving in the wall. The engraved deer galloped out at her, briefly obscuring her vision with memories of blood and fire.
No. Not now.
She brushed her hair from her eyes and kept moving.
***
Six infected and a few miles later: St. Mary’s.
Ellie glanced at the abandoned hospital, and then at the blood coating her forearm and drawing new patterns over her tattoo.
Answers.
She walked forward.