Chapter Text
"If you want, I will love you
I'll open my cupboard and show you my jumpers & posters and you'll say;
Don't be afraid, I fall overboard
I'm made of ivory, I'm a cannibal
What have you done? You're not a weapon, are you?"
Ellie didn’t go back to Jackson. She headed into the woods north of the farm, wandering. There was no plan. All these months, she’d been goaded on and on. Even in the short peace she had found with Dina and JJ, the memories of Joel and the thoughts of Abby kept her mind on overdrive, only allowing her the briefest moments of respite before bombarding her again with the thought that she should be doing more, be doing something . It was why she left so quickly, so readily, abandoning her family the moment Abby’s whereabouts were known to her. She had to. She couldn’t have explained it to Dina, but she knew there would be no true rest for her until Abby was in the ground.
Or, at least, that’s what she thought. Funny, she had thought to herself more than once since leaving Santa Barbara, that she had to go all that way, and fail her mission, and lose so much, to find her peace. Funny as in tragic, funny as in agonizing. She couldn’t think of it too long. But as much as she tried to avoid the thoughts, the reminders were ever present in the missing space where her fingers used to be, in the memory of Dina’s dark, tearful, devastated eyes the morning she left.
She made her way north and then east, heading through familiar forest paths she’d forged herself on her hunting forays. The area was relatively clear of infected except for a few stragglers that she picked off easily. She moved slowly, biding her time as she tried to figure out where she would go. It was in those moments, of steadily sorting through her catalog of known people and places, that she became acutely aware of her aloneness. Seattle, Jackson, Boston, Salt Lake, Santa Barbara. No place for her anywhere. Joel, Jesse, Tommy, Dina. No one she could turn to.
Not that she deserved to. No, never in a million years would she ever fool herself enough to believe that. Everyone she loved was either dead, or she was dead to them, and she had no one to blame for any of it but herself. The thought overwhelmed her the first time she really allowed herself to realize it, took the breath from her lungs, left her heaving over an old log, holding on for dear life as her insides turned out. She sat there for a long while after, curled up against the rotted bark, shaking, hand clamped over her mouth to stifle the sound of her sobs, tears streaming over her knuckles in spite of her tightly closed eyes.
Alone, alone alone. And no one else in the world to blame but herself.
The thought struck her, like a knife between the ribs, that not even Abby was alone in the world. She had that little Scar boy. Someone to fight for, someone to love, to love her. As painful as the thought was, Ellie couldn’t bring herself to feel angry about it. She had fucked up so many things, but she was glad that she at least hadn’t killed him as he lay weak and helpless in that boat. She hadn’t thought of it in the moment, but that kid was the reason Dina was still alive. Killing him would have been a monstrous act. Nothing she wasn’t capable of, but she was glad that just that once, she’d stayed her hand.
The days pressed on, and so did she. After a while she gave up trying to think of a place to head toward. She decided that she would wander until she found somewhere safe to land, or until she died. The latter seemed the most likely of the two all things considered, but she’d survived so much she’d kind of stopped expecting death to be around the corner. God must have decided it was her lot to live with all of the shit she was responsible for. Seemed only fair - let the punishment fit the crime.
But one thing was undeniable. Santa Barbara, for all its horror, for all it had cost her, had healed something in her. If psychologists were a thing anymore, Ellie bet they would’ve lost their goddamn minds picking her brain about it, because in those moments of nearly drowning Abby alive, a peace had found her. And, miraculously, it had stayed. The dreams of Joel, the haunting attacks wherein his screams ripped her soul along the same jagged seam, had eased. They still popped up every so often, but with less frequency, and less intensity each time.
More often, she dreamed of him playing his guitar, of the gruff drawl of his “kiddo,” of the wrinkles around his eyes. More often, she woke with a cavernous ache beneath her sternum, but it was better than in a cold sweat, screaming her own throat raw, thrashing for the nearest weapon. The ache she could live with.
In the days since leaving the farm, she had moved into unfamiliar territory. She had told herself that this was what she was after anyway, with nowhere in the world to go, but something about the aimless wandering put a pit in her stomach. She did her best to clear areas of infected, and she hadn’t run into too many large herds thus far. Every night, she bunkered down in a house she had cleared herself, barricading the windows and doors and keeping her fires low as an added precaution. She slept fitfully anyway, jerking awake at the slightest sound, spending hours each night staring into the dark, her fingers wrapped tightly around the hilt of Joel’s old revolver.
She didn’t know if it was the lack of sleep or the yawning void of loneliness, but somewhere along the way, she began to see things that couldn’t possibly be there. The first time it scared her. She saw the figure moving up ahead and dropped prone, thinking it must be an infected. But she couldn’t hear the familiar groaning or clicking, so she lifted her head, looking closer.
It was Jesse. He looked back at her as she stood, and smiled. Lifted his hand, beckoning her to follow. She did. What the hell else was she supposed to do? He slowed his pace until they were walking side by side.
She allowed herself lingering sidelong glances at him, half believing he was real. He looked real. At one point, he caught her looking, and he chuckled.
“What?”
“You’re not here,” Ellie said, fixing her eyes on the trees ahead.
“Of course I’m not. I’m dead, remember?”
A gunshot. Jesse collapsing, eyes blank, the bullet hole in his face leaking blood.
“I remember.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Jesse said, as if reading her mind.
“You’d be alive if it weren’t for me.”
“No,” he said, his tone conversational. Not trying to convince her of anything. “I died because I was meant to. Didn’t have anything to do with you.”
They walked on in silence for a moment. Then Ellie asked, “So, are you a ghost?”
Jesse didn’t answer right away, ducking a little to avoid a low-hanging branch. He looked at her, his dark eyes familiar and warm.
“I’m company,” he said. “That alright with you?”
“Yeah,” Ellie said, and meant it.
He was mostly a silent companion. Sometimes he’d point out the presence of infected, warning her well before she would have seen them on her own, allowing her to skirt around and avoid an unnecessary fight. She didn’t know how he was doing it, or whether she was hallucinating the infected swarms too, but either way it put her at ease. She slept better, and longer. In the moments when she would wake, she would see Jesse, sitting in the half-glow of the dying embers, his back protectively toward Ellie, the profile of his face shadowed as he kept watchful eyes on their surroundings.
As the days passed, the air grew colder each night, waking her shivering to stoke the fire into providing more warmth. She managed to scavenge a sweater from a neighborhood they passed through - though it was oversized, it did a better job of keeping her warm than the thin flannel she had been wearing - but nothing else of real use, any kind of winter jacket or weather-proof clothing could be found. She wasn’t surprised; those kinds of useful clothes would’ve been snatched up by the first scavengers to come through after the outbreak, if they hadn’t been taken by the original owners to begin with.
She tried her best to ignore the way the sun had started setting earlier in the day, and the chill that she couldn’t work out of her bones until well into midday. But Jesse wouldn’t have it.
“Ellie,” he said one night as she sat roasting a rabbit over the fire. “Where are you going?”
She knew what he was asking. What’s your plan? What happens when winter gets here?
“I’ll find somewhere. Some old house, I can bunker down and make it secure.”
“But where?”
“I don’t know,” she said shortly. “I’m figuring it out, okay?”
“Ellie,” he said. His voice was kind, patient. She looked up at him. He smiled softly at her. “You have to go home.”
“I don’t have a home,” she said, surprised by the tears that suddenly flooded her eyes. “I don’t have anywhere to go, Jesse.”
“You know that’s not true,” he replied.
She looked away from him, suddenly hyper-focused on the steaming body of the rabbit on the spit. She absently rubbed the stumps on her left hand where her fingers used to be. The flickering of the flames doubled in her clouded vision.
“I can’t go back to Jackson,” she mumbled finally. “Not after what I did to Dina.”
“Dina’s not the only person in Jackson.”
“She’s the only person that matters.”
“What about JJ?”
Ellie scoffed, “You can’t bring him into this just because he’s your kid. That’s a dick move.”
“Hey, he’s your kid, man. Just as much he is mine. Don’t act like he isn’t.”
Ellie sighed. She couldn’t argue with that.
“Dina won’t want to see me.”
“She doesn’t even know you’re alive. I think seeing you safe would help soften things a bit.”
“Well even if I did get the stones to go back, I wouldn’t know how. I’ve been wandering for weeks. I have no idea where I am, or where Jackson is from here.”
Jesse put his hands up at that. “Alright, fine, fine. I won’t keep arguing.”
They sat in silence after that, both staring quietly into the flames of the campfire. Even as it burned down to coals, Ellie couldn’t bring herself to sleep. She just sat there, arms wrapped around her knees, feeling the strange empty space where her fingers used to be, the stumps pressing against her arm as if to grip, but holding onto nothing. The embers rolled and flickered beneath their coat of ash. She toyed with the lucky bracelet on her wrist. She thought of Dina.
Dina, who had been by her side during the worst time of her life, through the nightmares and the waking terrors, through the silence when Ellie couldn’t find her voice and became a mute shadow for days on end, staring out the kitchen window or sitting still and empty on the porch. Dina, who had given birth away from Jackson’s medics and pain medication because Ellie was too traumatized to make the trip and Dina wanted Ellie to be one of the first people JJ met. Dina, who had traveled with her to Seattle even when she knew she was pregnant because she wanted to support Ellie’s mission, wanted to do whatever it took to help Ellie see it to the end. Dina, who had guided her out of her worst visions, whose hands had touched her so gently, whose eyes had become a haven of safety. Dina, who had begged her to stay. Dina, who had loved her.
Ellie rested her forehead against her knees, letting out a long breath. “There’s nothing I could say to her to fix what I’ve done. She needed me, and I left. She begged me to stay, and I left . How do I come back from that? How do I make that right?”
Jesse didn’t answer. Ellie didn’t need him to.
“I can’t,” she continued. “The best thing I can do for her is die alone out here. The best thing I can do is make sure she never has to see my face again.”
“I think you’re underestimating how much she loved you, Ellie,” Jesse said after a pause. “And if you think she doesn’t have you in mind every day, wondering if you’re alive, you’re lying to yourself.”
“Yeah, cause she wants to rip me to shreds herself,” Ellie muttered, planting her chin on her knees.
Jesse chuckled. “You may be right about that. But it seems to me that you owe her the peace of mind that you made it back alive.”
“Well if you’ve got a magic compass that can show me the way to Jackson, I’m happy to say hello at the gates. Otherwise…” She heaved her shoulders into a shrug, “I’ll have to stick with the dying alone plan instead.”