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The crunch of leaves under her boot provided a sort of background noise as she staggered through the overgrown tall grass that surrounded her farm. But it wasn’t hers though, was it? No, it was Dina’s. She was the one who found the dilapidated building, only a few ways off from Jackson City, regardless of it being Ellie that went and fixed it up throughout the summer. Even with her eyes glazing over from exhaustion, and the phantom aches of scabbing wounds thrumming below skin, she can still make out the blurry figures of her wife and child in the bedroom window. It isn’t real, she knows it. Dina left back home to Jackson, back home to Jesse’s parents, the second Ellie stepped out of the door, gun strapped to her waist and the horizon in her sights.
Ellie wishes she could dream a little longer.
The door creaks when she pushes it open, and the dust that flies in her face doesn’t surprise her, but it doesn’t stop the hurt either. The dining table, empty of the flowers Dina would pick daily from the garden, the halls, silent without the gramophone Tommy had gifted them when they first moved out of Jackson, the farm, it’s all barren, especially so without JJ’s tumbling footsteps as he babbled by their feet. Ellie feels cold. Colder than when she lay motionless in the lakes of Santa Barbara, blood dripping from her temple and staining the water red.
She avoids searching the kitchen as if it were the plague, the feel of the metal pipe in her hand unforgettable as she gripped the cold bar tight enough to have her knuckles whiten. She sees Nora’s body flinch from every impact whenever she closes her eyes, blood spraying across her cheek as the WLF soldier screams, but never answers. She can still feel Dina caressing her from behind, holding her as she sobs, bile in her throat because Nora wouldn’t stop screaming, I had to do it, it was for Joel, it’s their fault, please, please, just stop screamin-
Ellie breathes.
Four in, four out, and then she takes the stairs instead.
The second-floor bathroom is empty, cobwebs taking place in corners where people used to live, and JJ’s bedroom isn’t any better — Ellie curses God, curses Abby, and finally curses herself, for leaving everything to find Abby and not even having the guts to kill her afterwards.
The floorboards have never been so bare, JJ’s crayons nowhere in sight and it’s a pain so visceral that she shakes with it.
When Ellie finally reaches her own room — the one she shared with Dina, the one where she held her close and pressed her nose into the other woman’s shoulder, breathing in and trying to find some semblance of normality, trying to pretend she doesn’t dream of her pseudo-fathers tortured body Infront of her every night — she expects to find it empty as well. When she’s greeted by walls plastered with her own charcoal portraits of J.J and Dina, of Joel, and Tommy, and of all the people she loved enough to immortalise, she breaks.
Dina had left her things. All her posters and vinyl's, her books, her art, she had left it all. It meant one of two things; that she was unwelcome to follow them back to Jackson City, broken pride and all, or –
Or, that Dina hadn’t expected for Ellie to return at all, her decaying body floating through the marshes of California, half eaten by whatever runner or stalker that could lay their hands on her.
It was… a grim prospect. One that very well could have become a reality had she not fought off the slavers in Santa Barbara, who would have surely dumped her body as soon as they saw she was bit, regardless of her — frankly unbelievable — immunity.
Ellie crouches down by her posters, the wind blowing through the rafters and disturbing the molded blinds. She thinks of Dina, packing away her things, whispering comforts into JJ’s hair as he cries, unwilling to leave. She wonders what Joel would think of her now, beaten, bruised, and alone, just like he had been when the infection had first started.
The snaps of the guitar case — Joel’s guitar case — makes the dust fly off into the air. The instrument is out of tune, naturally, Ellie’s more surprised that the strings hadn’t rusted over to the point of immediate snapping once she turns the tuning pegs. It’s a point of nostalgia, an immediate reaction to whenever she reminisces about Joel — what she imagines a father would've been had Ellie ever met hers — the man who taught her how to shoot a gun, to swim, to play the guitar. The man who slaughtered towns to rescue her. The man who betrayed her dying wishes to save her; the man who made it worth for her to live.
She barres across the frets, fingers splaying over the wood. It’s different now. Everything’s different.
There’s more blood on her hands — blood that never washes off no matter how hard she scrubs — and there’s no Dina sitting by the window, eyes closed and wind blowing through her hair as she listens to Ellie play.
More evidently than that, the hand that she used to create music with — the fingers she used to wipe food from the corner of JJ’s mouth, the ones that held the edge of Dina’s jaw as she kissed her — now had three instead of five, two half healed stubs of flesh in place of her pinkie and ring finger.
Some nights she can still feel the grind of Abby’s teeth as she chewed off the bone, the manic fight for survival making them both animalistic as they thrashed in the freezing lakes of the slave docks. Kill or be killed.
But they both survived — Ellie was a coward above all, and Joel is in the grave, his killer on a boat to Catalina Island instead of choking on her blood as she sinks below sea level.
Ellie can’t play Joel’s song anymore, not with her hands like this, not anymore, never again. Every strum is followed by the buzz of an unpressed string, and Ellie is reminded of everything she has lost in an effort to seek retribution in Joel’s name – clubbed to death by the WLF’s, each taking turns with Abby at the forefront, and Ellie can never forget his face, not after that, but his voice gets further and further every day and Ellie wants to scream.
Her blade — the one her mother gave her before she died, before Ellie stopped remembering what she looked like when she smiled, and before her hands glowed red, red, red — sunken into the depths of Santa Barbara, the waves whisking away her weapon, and with it, her strength.
Her son, her wife, both tiring of her vengeance, aching for a peaceful living, something so very few could afford in these times, and something Ellie threw away in an effort to stop the grief.
It didn't work.
She had lost everything.
All she had gained were nightmares. Dreams of Dina being strangled in a decrepit room, glass shattered across the floor, before Ellie had pierced that damn WLF in the jugular with her blade, blood spurting across the floor as he gurgled. Her chest aches every night, and when she grazes what is left of her fingers across naked skin, they stop across her ribs, where she had shot Owen, right before he tells her that she had murdered a pregnant woman, that she was the killer of an innocent child, and its JJ now, in the foetus’ place, bloody, and malformed.
Killer, killer, killer.
Ellie wonders how Joel ever slept, knowing that the spirits of the dead haunted him at every turn.
She picks herself up off of the floor, guitar pursed across the wall as the wind blows. The sun is setting now, and the blues of the sky melts away into oranges and pinks.
Ellie breathes.
Four in, four out,
And she leaves the farm.
Joel is dead, and Ellie’s hands are stained red, but Dina is in Jackson, JJ in her arms, and Ellie’s done chasing the past. She just wants to go home.