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Ellie’s felt pain before. Jesus, she fucking knows this. Bullet wounds, stitches- they’re long past the age of anesthesia, with barely any pain medication to be found, so most medical care is done awake, aware, and in pain.
Even back at that
stupid fucking hospital
- they didn’t have anything to give her, let alone a doctor who would know how to work that. So they gave her a shit ton of drugs to reduce her movement- but not to take away the pain. She briefly remembers the surface of the table, the look of pursed guilt on the doctor’s face. The drugs had successfully pulled her back under after about a minute, leaving her defenseless to those trying to kill her (and those trying to save her.)
So if she can say anything about the really shitty life she got born into, it’s this; she’s felt pain. Worse, much worse pain than this.
It doesn’t soothe her aching body, though. One week into the California heat is taking a toll on her- Overexposure to sun is something Ellie’s never had to experience in her days living in Seattle and Jackson with their cool temperatures and warm-ish summers, so when the first seven days pass by and Ellie finds her arms and shoulders blistering, she kind of just hopes it goes away and continues on.
By the second week, the sunburn has decidedly not just decided to go away. She’s pretty sure her skin is bleeding in places, but her mind’s been fuzzy recently- the unfamiliar territory leaves her wandering in loops half the time, and on the third week of her trip she falls asleep and wakes up with blood on her hands without knowing the donor. It’s.. troubling, she’ll admit that, but it’s not like she can head back now. No, she can’t head back now. Not after everything.
So she pretends like she doesn’t see eyes watching her from the ceiling, and everytime her eyes glaze over, she refocuses. Ellie’s doing just fine.
-
Ellie gets impaled by a fucking tree.
Between her less than reliable perception of the world and the open wound in her side, she half wonders if this was how Joel felt when he got impaled by that rebar. Oh, she misses Joel. Misses his flannels and his silent protection, the huff he made whenever she told one of her ridiculous jokes. She can’t wait to see him when she heads back to Jackson.
“Tell me-” Her hands automatically lower the gun slowly- it takes her a second to realize what’s happening, quickly bringing the shotgun back up to the man’s form. “Where Abby is.” Ellie glances strangely at the stars in the corner of her vision. When was the last time she ate or drank anything? Her entire life, she’d always had a decent amount of access to water- even with Joel, when the days were hot and they were running all the time- he made sure she was sipping water constantly.
“I ain’t draggin’ your body back to Marlene.” He’d said to her, holding out the freshly refilled bottle. “Drink.”
Joel. The name tastes weird in her mouth. Someone’s moaning out in pain, and there’s an awful sinking feeling in her gut that tastes like golf clubs and hardwood floor pressed against her cheek. But it’s not Joel- it’s just the guy she shot.
“Okay, on second thought, tell me where Abby is and give me your water.”
-
The sun still does numbers on her, making her woozy occasionally- but the water does clear her head, even enough she’s able to grab her bow and arrow and shoot a squirrel. Eating it is a whole other thing- she wasn’t exactly preoccupied with things like food during her tunnel vision quest to kill Abby- but her head is much clearer now, and the stars in her vision have disappeared. It gives her a chance to refocus, and it gives her direction. She knows where Abby is now.
At dusk, she sets up “camp” in an abandoned building- making a campfire and cooking her lone squirrel. Something pangs horribly in her chest, of multiple things: roasting marshmallows, a building on fire, her small hands clutching the pocket knife and sticking it through David’s eye, laughing with Joel, Joel, Joel…
She’s better physically, at least. She lies down on the asphalt floor, and tries not to think of a different time she fell asleep the exact same way- a healing, injured Joel beside her, from what feels like a million years ago.
-
Reaching the base feels like a fever dream. Not the kind she was having before- where the memories were rough around the edges, there but tinted in a weird color- this feels purposeful. There are dead bodies everywhere, and there’s blood all over her, she’s holding a machine gun and she can barely remember any of it. It’s just a blur. A blur, and a mass graveyard for all the people she’s killed.
She tries not to hope that none of them have daughters.
Staggering to the prisoner’s cage is not fun in the slightest- she got shot in the leg back in the fight with all those soldiers, and her only saving grace is that the pain hasn’t fully hit yet. She’s able to hobble towards the quarters she was given directions to, sighing in relief when she makes out the telltale pattern of prison bars ahead.
-
The prisoner told her to go to the pillars. She stopped drinking the water about four hours ago, and in Santa Barbara heat, that’s a death wish. Ellie knows she should, knows it’s dangerous, but whenever the lid of the bottle touches her mouth it.. she can’t.
She thinks, after this, it might be nice to just lay in the grass for a while. Sit in the sea for a bit. Anything that hurts less than breathing.
Her vision is weird and blurry again, and her head is actually killing her- throbbing over and over again, and she just wants it all to shut up, just shut up-
There’s so many people just in the peripheral of her vision. Sometimes, she catches Jesses standing against a wall, giving her the same look he did back ages ago on that awful day- just after the dance. Other times, it’s Riley, but not Riley- the infected version of her, the twitchy, awful, Riley-but-not-Riley thing that chased after her, with a gunshot to the head Ellie had given- still waiting for her turn. Her turn, her turn, her turn… why does that feel so familiar?
Then there’s Joel. He never stays long enough for her to really get a good look at him- he’s blurry, shiny around the edges, and sometimes he looks like he’s crying. She’ll see him just standing against a tree, or far off in the distance- or the worst one, lying on the ground on his side, bloody and dead, dead, dead, just like he is in all her nightmares.
She finds Abby on the pillar- strung up, starved, hair buzzed off. It’s insane- she tries to compare the Abby here to the Abby she saw raising that golf club up high above her arms, but her head hurts too much so she stops. Simply put, the girl looks awful. ( The pot calling the kettle black, she hears a voice that sounds like Joel say in the back of her head.)
And she.. she wants to hurt Abby. She wants to hurt Abby like she hurts- like she’s hurt for the past god knows how many months. Like she’s hurt every second of every minute, every day since Joel died. ( He’s dead, her mind repeats, like she isn’t aware.)
(But she’s not really aware. There’s still a part of her hoping he’ll say something- appear from a tree to tell her she looks like death, to go home, he’ll make her hot chocolate when she gets back and they can watch a movie together and all the unspoken things, and the betrayals, and the pain she feels so deeply, so agonizingly deep, can fade away and she can be fourteen years old again.)
(He’s dead.)
(She wants Abby to hurt.)
The pocket-knife flicks open, the same one Joel gave her. She runs a thumb against the cool, metal surface, feeling for the carved “E” he’d engraved into it for her sixteenth. It feels poetic- like justice.
Abby didn’t give Joel a fighting chance. ( He’s dead. Joel’s dead. He’s fucking dead, and he won’t ever come back.. Her mind shouts, moans, grieves. It’s fuzzy and blurry and clear at the same time- so very acutely aware. )
Every body, every name called out for a fallen fellow soldier- every bullet shot and every time this knife has sliced open someone’s throat like it did all of Abby’s friends and anyone else who stood in Ellie’s way.
All the blood spilt, for one death.
Abby groggily stares at her, like she’s accepted her fate. Ellie doesn’t think about how Joel had that same look. She doesn’t, because this is all for him. The pocket knife sinks into skin, Abby’s neck, like Joel’s knife sunk into her father’s, the way the gold club, sunk into Joel’s skull.
It should be the end, but it feels less like resolution and more like a soaking wet sweater falling on her shoulders.
Another death. Another body. Another grave that will never be dug. Abby’s body falls off the pillar, dangling by her wrists as blood runs out. Distantly, she hears a choked sob. Ellie turns around- there’s the boy. The boy with scars on his face, that Abby was traveling with.
( We could’ve killed you, her mind recalls. The heavy stench of copper, the red light blaring, and spores floating around her vision. Nora’s corpse lies limply on the ground, bleeding out, eyes still open.
Maybe you should have.)
“It’s okay.” She says weakly, voice hoarse and rough. He stares at her with hatred, real, furious hatred. The way she’d stared at David and Abby. The look that says Maybe you should have killed me.
The boy will never stop in the same way she didn’t, and Abby didn’t, and Joel didn’t.
Hope is the thing with feathers, and grief is the thing that never sleeps, never eats, never rests.
She takes one last look at him, and leaves to the boats.
Ellie hopes that when he kills her, he makes it quick, like she did for Abby.