Work Text:
Joel and Ellie walked along the cracked and overgrown pavements of Boston, trying to get to Bill’s place. Joel just walked ahead as Ellie chattered on about her few hobbies, as you can’t really have a lot of hobbies in an apocalypse. But suddenly…
“Hey Joel!” Ellie caught the older man’s attention by pointing to a playground. Normally it would be overgrown, have puddles and have dead bodies everywhere but it actually looked fairly normal, like the playgrounds Sarah used to play at after school.
“Ellie, don’t get distracted by-“ but she immediately ran to it. It was pretty simple all things considered, it had a small jungle gym, one of those spinny climbing things and a play tower with a long metal slide connected to it, along with a couple stone blocks acting as seats of sorts.
She threw down her bag and was already climbing up the small hill to go the play set. “Ellie!” Joel called out after her, but she just replied with “C’mon! I’ll just go down the slide once that’s it!” And it’s not like he could follow up her up at his big age. So he stood with his arms cross waiting for her to go down.
“Alright I’m heading down!” The young girl called out after a good minute, she seated herself at the top and gave herself a little push down for some momentum.
It was smooth sailing for about two seconds before she crashed into the side, she exclaimed a yelp in surprise before crashing into the other side, “shit!-“ and she was launched a bit to her front by gravity itself as the slide came to it’s end.
From Joel’s perspective he suddenly began hearing bags and thuds and yelps from Ellie, “kid?-“ but before he could say anything else she came flying out and crashed face first into the pavement. “Shit!— Ellie!” Joel ran over concerned, “kid! Are you okay?!”
Ellie groaned and it took her a good few seconds to give a weak thumbs up and wobble onto her feet. She looked at Joel grinning, “can I go again?”
Joel in reply shoved her backpack into her chest and began walking again, “you said you’d only go once, and you went once. Now c’mon let’s go.”
“Ugh, you’re no fun!”