Work Text:
Ellie felt the world around her go radio silent.
When she saw the club strike Joel one last time (because the twenty-some other times weren’t enough to kill him), the life surrounding her was muted.
There was no chatter from the bastards holding her down, no screams from Tommy, nothing. And she felt herself screaming, the guttural type of scream, but she didn’t hear it.
Ellie didn’t hear anything, but she saw the blood pooling on the ground beneath his dead, beaten body that was a mere four feet in front of her.
The days following Joel’s death, there was nothing. Ellie saw Dina comforting her as she felt the tired, raw sob coming from her own throat. She saw people giving her apologies and their deepest condolences, and she felt the half-assed gratitude coming from her lips as well as the numbingly painful look she gave to them. She felt everything, so why couldn’t she hear anything?
The first time she heard something was when she laid in her bed at night: days after the burial. Ellie stared up at the ceiling, the skin under her eyes and on her cheekbones red and sore from wiping her tears so much. She cursed as she wiped tears away with her sleeve that felt more like sandpaper than anything else.
Ellie felt exhaustion take over, as she let herself fall into the limbo of being awake and being asleep, and almost let the responsibilities of being a barely-there-barely-functioning human be lifted off of her for just a couple of hours. But then she heard it:
The familiar strum of chords on a well-tuned acoustic guitar.
She thought that she must have been going crazy from sleep deprivation. She probably was. It was a sound, a sound so familiar. A sound that held purpose, that gave purpose. It used to give her glee, giddiness, frustration, and peace. All the times she practiced, saying, “Shit, how the fuck do you get your hands to play this one? My hand’s cramping,” or “Hell yeah! I finally got that stupid chord down!”
But now, she felt grief, resentment, pain, and pure, unadulterated indignation: all of it crashing against each other at once as reality hit the hardest it ever had before. There was no more “You’ll get used to it,” “Nice progress, kiddo,” or “Easy on the neck of the guitar, you might just break the damn thing.” Because he was gone, so was her purpose, and so was everything that she had ever lived for.
She briefly wondered if this was the blind rage he felt once, twice - Hell, maybe even hundreds of times before (the old man was beyond ruthless, so really, who knew?). But she didn’t care. That wasn’t what mattered.
God help the sons of bitches who took the single greatest thing to come into her life from her. Because she was more than willing to take on Satan himself to gift back the pain that they gave her on the coldest, quietest day in Jackson.