atom-eve

[atom-eve]

Appropriate gym attire and appropriate hand gestures...the girls are loathing!

[atom-eve]

me: i wanna talk about my ocs

someone: ok tell me about your ocs

me, suddenly convinced that every single thing about my ocs is stupid and cringy and probably offensive: i. have them

[atom-eve]

Where the Flowers Don't Grow - Chapter 16

Word Count: 7.2k OOPS

Warnings: basically everything you should be warned about with TLOU, honestly.

Notes: This chapter is based off of GAME CONTENT!

Fic Masterlist

Abby Anderson had grown up in the apocalypse.

She’d always known the world had been different before her birth. That there hadn’t been any infected, anywhere. That FEDRA wasn’t such a big thing before the outbreak, after which they controlled everything — and she knew that the Fireflies had risen to fight them, to make things better.

She knew the Fireflies were the good guys. She was sure of that.

And there was no one better than her father.

Neither was there anyone as frustrating as him, especially when he decided to run off every now and then without telling anyone, which somehow always resulted in her getting scolded by the others.

That’s where she’d been that morning — chasing after him through the trees near Saint Mary’s Hospital, where they lived. He was the head doctor there. Both of them were Fireflies. He was also fucking stubborn.

He had a habit of exploring the outskirts of the hospital when he needed a break — said it helped him clear his head. But Abby knew what really drew him out there: the animals. What was left of them, anyway. A few had escaped the city zoo during the early chaos of the outbreak. Most hadn’t survived, but some… some had. A family of giraffes. A few zebras. She’d once seen a koala watching her from between the trees.

Her dad always lit up when he talked about them — about how life found a way, even after everything. He said they were proof the world could heal.

Abby didn’t always get it. But she went with him anyway. Because he was her dad. And because she liked seeing him smile.

That morning, though, she’d lagged behind. He’d gone out early, and when she realized it, she’d grabbed her pack and followed the trail he always used, cursing under her breath. He never waited. Never left a note. Never told her when he’d be back.

The old path to the zoo still had posts with signs of the animals that had once lived there: tigers, elephants, giraffes… She was glad the lions weren’t around anymore, although the rather would’ve faced a lion than an infected while being alone out here.

She didn’t hear anything, though. No roars, no screams or clicks.

The entrance to the zoo was closed. There were footsteps in the mud, though.

“There,” she murmured to herself. He’d been there. “Dad?!”

No response. Also no way trough that door. She had to find a way to get through the fence, though. And she did: she crawled inside an old restroom, and broke one of the windows throwing an empty glass bottle at it. She jumped through it to the other side, and landed in an enclosed area on the other side of the fence, near some trash cans.

She could pull one of those next to the wall and climb up to the roof. Easy.

Abby stopped, though, when her eyes caught onto a small silver forgotten coin.

“Look at that,” she mumbled, flipping it between her fingers. It was a penny coined in Virginia in 1978. Her dad collected these with her, small treasures with no value in the current world, but still a great hobby they shared. And they didn’t have this one yet.

She put it in her back pocket and got to work, dragging the trash can against the wall. Her arm muscles stretched as she moved the heavy metal can, its rusty wheels screeching against the broken pavement as she pullet at it.

Getting on the roof then was easy. Jumping between a gap wasn’t all that difficult too, though she did stumble a bit and had to pull herself up, huffing.

“Smooth, Abby,” she told herself. From up there she could see the path her dad would have followed. She only had to jump back down now.

And so she did. However, the metal awning on which she fell gave was slippier than she had expected, and she glid down it as if it was a slide with no control of her landing, crashing hard onto the ground in the middle of a mud puddle.

“Abs?”

And there he was.

Jerry, the Fireflies’ head doctor at Saint Mary’s, her dad, appeared around the corner with his rifle slung over his shoulder, walking over to her as he chuckled under his breath.

“You, uh, you got a little mud on you there, sweetheart.”

“So do you,” she said, off handedly.

He frowned, looking down at himself. “Where?”

She threw some at him, hitting him in the chest getting it dirty with mud. “Right there!”

He groaned but didn’t complain, meanwhile Abby stood up shaking all the mud she could from her arms. “You know, every time you run off like this, they give me shit about it. Believe it or not, they actually care about your safety.”

“These woods are safe,” he replied.

“Dad –”

“Abs,” he interrupted her, pointing towards where he had come from. “She’s been hanging out right on the other side of those trees.”

So this was about the pregnant zebra. Again.

“And?”

“She’s due any day now! We’ll just check on her and then we’ll head back. I promise.”

In the end, after a few seconds of internal debate thinking about the people back at the hospital probably looking around for her dad and herself, and the look her dad was giving her right now, hopeful, soft, all that was so him, she gave in. She always did. “Let’s just… make it quick.”

Jerry smiled, already starting to walk away again. “See? I’ve got my little girl to keep me safe.”

In a clearing, while they stopped to look around and asses the area, she remembered the coin she had found earlier, now in her pants’ back pocket. She pulled it out, holding it out to her dad:

“Look what I found,” she said, showing him.

“Oh, wow!” he got closer, taking a look at the coin in her hand. “1978. Don’t have that one in my collection.”

“You can keep it,” offered Abby, quickly adding: “If you promise not to pull anything like this again.”

He breathed a laugh, nodding and stretching out his hand. “You got yourself a deal.”

She left the penny in his palm and he quickly wrapped his hand around it. “Why don’t I believe you?”

“No reason I can think of,” he shrugged. “Come on! Let’s keep looking!”

He started to annoy her about Owen. He was another Firefly. He and Abby were growing… close. They’d started going out lately, or whatever you could call dating someone as a teenager in the apocalypse, not that they went out much. But they got along, had a good time together… so yeah, they were seeing each other.

“How long have you known?” Abby asked her dad, groaning. She was still a teenager, after all. Dating and relationships and boyfriends were still embarrassing to talk about with your parents even if the world had ended.

“I’m your dad,” he replied, simple as that. “I see things. Like the way you both try really, really hard not to look at each other when you’re around me. You get all serious… It’s very cute!”

Abby, trotting behind him, shook her head even if he couldn’t see her. “I can’t handle this…”

“And he makes you laugh!” added Jerry.

“Well, that’s because he’s such an idiot.”

“I just like how he’s extra nice to me now,” he chuckled. “He gets all nervous when he has to keep me in check.”

“So… you’re taking advantage of him?”

“Never!” oh, he totally was. He stopped then, crouching down between the grass having spotted something. “Abs, look!”

It was fresh tracks. Hooves. The zebra.

“Wait –” Abby’s eyebrows frowned with the rest of her face. “This is just your sneaky way of giving me a tracking lesson, isn’t it?”

“I would never,” oh, he would. “… Is it working?”

There it was.

“Well, I mean, I found you,” she shrugged.

“Yeah, but you cheated!” he laughed. “Owen told you where to look!”

Abby rolled her eyes, and then she quoted Jerry himself, doing a poor impression of his voice “Yeah, well… You do what you need to do to get it done, isn’t it?”

“Wow… You actually listen!”

“You have your moments of wisdom,” she said, smiling. They were trotting up a small hill now, no sign of the zebra. “Dad, she isn’t here.”

“Let’s see if we can find anything else, come on!”

Abby sighed, but started to look around.

Everything around them was tall grass and tall trees. She tried to focus on her other senses, as he had taught her, trying to hear or smell anything revealing.

A butterfly flew past her side, and she followed its path with her eyes, her lips curling into a small smile.

“Keep looking!” said her dad then, again.

She nodded, focusing back on the task at hand. Abby walked around, seeing if she could find any more hoove marks, when she heard it: mosquitoes, a whole lot of them, buzzing a bit further down the path. As she got closer to it, she saw it: a discarded and bloodied pink placenta and what remained of an umbilical cord.

“Dad!” she called. “I found… Something.”

He approached quickly, assessing the scene. “Oh my god… She already gave birth.”

Abby couldn’t help the ‘ew’ sound that came out of her mouth as her dad pointed at not one, but two sets of tracks, one clearly smaller than the other ones.

Then they heard it. An animal wailing in pain.

“It’s her, let’s go!”

He got a hold on his rifle and ran towards where the sound came from, Abby following him.

“That doesn’t sound good!”

“No,” he said. “She’s in pain.”

Jerry kicked down a metal fence and helped Abby through the gap. Once she was there he took off again.

“Dad, wait! What if there are infected around?”

“This area’s clear,” well, hopefully. “And you brought your gun, right?”

She had. It was in her hands already, prepared to come into action if needed.

“’Course,”

“Then I’m not worried,”

They found the zebra not long after.

“Oh my god…”

She was stuck in a barbed wire fence. How had this happened?

“We’ve got to cut her loose,” Jerry looked at the zebra with sorrow, slowly approaching the mare with one of his hands stretched out in front of him. “It’s okay, calm down… Don’t worry, we’re not going to hurt ya…”

He couldn’t free her alone, though. He called Abby over, handing her a pair of pliers as he told her he’d hold her zebra while she’d have to cut her free.

The zebra struggled, though, shaking and trying to fight Jerry off as the pain got worse from her own movements.

To their surprise, then, they heard someone calling for them:

“Over here, Owen!”

He’d come to fetch them after Marlene, the Firefly leader from Boston who had arrived at Saint Mary’s not that long ago, had demanded to know where Jerry was. Owen knew Jerry would be at the zoo, the pregnant zebra was all he talked about lately, and he knew he’d find Abby there too, because he’d told her himself where to look for Jerry.

Was he didn’t expect to find, though, was the father and daughter duo trying to cut the zebra free from a barbed wire fence and he held the animal and she tried to cut the wire loose.

“Get over here and help me hold her!” Jerry motioned him over, and Owen blinked.

“We need you back up at the –”

“Owen!” Jerry interrupted him. “Hold her. Come on!”

They had to help the animal, of course. They couldn’t leave her there like that.

Owen passed Abby, and he held the zebra down with Jerry, who urged Abby to get to work. Three struggling cuts of the pliers later and the zebra broke free, running away quickly.

“Holy fuck!” exclaimed Owen. He turned towards Jerry then. “Doc, everybody’s looking for you, we gotta –”

Jerry didn’t stay to listen. He ran after the zebra, ignoring Abby and Owen calling for him. Fortunately, he wasn’t too far: they found him watching the zebra reuniting with its child in a clearing close to the lake. He was smiling seeing the scene unfold.

“We did good back there,” he breathed.

There wasn’t time for this, though. Owen stepped forward, telling him the news for which he had come to fetch him: “Doc, that girl showed up.”

“What girl?”

“The one Marlene keeps talking about. They found her in the tunnels. She has old bite marks on her arm. No signs of infection.”

Jerry couldn’t believe it. He’d herd Marlene talk about that girl himself. Her name was Ellie. Supposedly, she was immune. “That can’t be.”

No one had been immune in twenty years. He hadn’t believed Marlene when she’d told him. But if the girl was really there now, if she was really alive, healthy, with the bite marks on her arm…

“They’re already running tests on her,” added Owen. “But you gotta get down there.”

Abby caught her father’s eyes, searching his face as it shifted — wonder, disbelief, and then that sharp edge of purpose he always wore when something big was at stake.

“Dad?” she asked, quiet.

Jerry didn’t answer her at first. He looked past her, to where the zebra had disappeared into the trees, then down at his hands still stained with dirt and a bit of blood. He exhaled slowly.

“If it’s true…” he said, his voice barely above a whisper, “it changes everything.”

Then he turned, already walking. “Come on.”

Owen and Abby followed without hesitation, trailing him out of the clearing. The mood had shifted. The zebra was forgotten. Now it was the girl — the one Marlene had risked everything to smuggle west, the one who was supposed to be impossible.

Jerry walked fast, his mind racing faster.

“They said no signs of infection?” he asked again, just to be sure.

“Nothing,” Owen confirmed. “Not even a fever. Doc, if she’s really immune…”

“Then we need to find out why,” Jerry muttered. “We need to find out how. This could be the breakthrough we’ve waited for.”

Behind him, Abby frowned. Her father had saved lives her whole life, stitched people back together, treated the broken, the sick, the scared. But this was different. This wasn’t healing. This was something bigger. Something that felt… heavier.

As they reached the gates of Saint Mary’s, she jogged to catch up with him.

“Dad?” she asked. “What are you gonna do?”

Jerry finally looked at her again. He smiled, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes.

“I’m gonna save the world.”

(…)

Abby didn’t see her father until the late afternoon again.

He’d gone up to the labs to check with his team on the tests they’d had going on on that girl, and she went up to their makeshift rooms to shower and get out of her muddy clothes. The water was lukewarm at best and sputtered like it wanted to give up entirely, but it did the job. She scrubbed the grime from her arms and legs, pulled her hair back into a tight braid, and tried to pretend that she wasn’t still thinking about the stupid zebra.

She hated staying still, so she took a walk around the hospital. She knew where she could roam freely and where better not to go. She passed by the hallway where some guys usually smoked during their breaks. She wasn’t trying to listen — not really — but voices carried in that place, echoing off the concrete and tile.

“…the girl they brought in, she can’t be older than fourteen. And she’s not alone. Had two people with her. Some guy and another girl her age.”

“Yeah, heard that too. They’re keeping them under guard down on the fourth. Guy got knocked out. Marlene was furious, but hey, patrol didn’t know who they were.”

“Huh. You think they’re Fireflies from Boston? Like her?”

“Doubt it.”

Abby kept walking, but slower now. A man and a young girl. Traveling with the immune kid. It made sense — no way someone as young like that would survive the trip across the country on her own. She pictured them: maybe the guy was ex-military, or just one of those hardened survivors who knew how to keep going. And the girl? Maybe they were family.

She didn’t know why, but something about that stuck with her.

The vaccine was all anyone could talk about now — the possibility of it, the miracle of it. For Abby, it was hard to imagine what the world could look like if it actually worked. Her whole life had been shaped by loss and infection, by hiding and running. The idea that there could be a cure felt… unreal. Like it belonged in an old comic book. But if it was true? If that girl’s immunity could actually be turned into something that would stop this thing once and for all?

It would mean no more dead mothers, no more infected. No more kids orphaned in the dark. It would mean her dad had done it — had saved more than just lives. He’d saved the future.

And Abby was proud of that. Proud of him.

She turned a corner and that’s when she spotted them — Manny slouched against the wall, boots kicked out in front of him, a cereal bar halfway to his mouth. Owen stood next to him, fiddling with the strap of his rifle, the way he always did when he was bored or anxious or trying not to say something.

Abby didn’t mean to stop, but they both looked up at the same time, and Manny grinned.

“¡Mira quién es! Our local zebra wrangler.”

Abby snorted, arms crossing. “Word travels fast.”

“You showered?” Manny called the second he saw her clean clothes and for once not greasy hair. “Madre mía, it’s a miracle.”

Abby rolled her eyes. “Yeah, some of us like to be clean.”

“You should tell your friend here,” Manny said, jerking a thumb at Owen. “I think he’s starting to rot.”

“I don’t stink,” Owen mumbled, sniffing his shoulder.

Abby leaned on the wall across from them, raising an eyebrow at the two. “What are you guys doing?”

“Wasting time,” Owen said. “Apparently, Marlene’s got the entire upper floor on lockdown while they run tests on that girl.”

“Dad’s up there,” she mentioned, her mind drifting back to her father. “Went up right after we came back.”

“What the hell were you and your dad doing out there this morning anyway?” Manny asked, tossing the last bite of his protein bar into his mouth. “Ditching us for a bit of fresh air and wild animals?”

Abby rolled her eyes again. “Dad went to check on the pregnant zebra. I went after him. We found her after she’d already given birth, caught in some wires behind the zoo. We cut it loose. It was fine.”

“No way,” Manny said, leaning forward, curious now. “Did you see the baby zebra?”

“Yeah,” she shrugged. “The mom ran to it the moment we set her free. Nearly knocked us over when she bolted away.”

Manny let out a low whistle. “You and your dad, saving the wildlife while the rest of us are stuck doing sweeps and kitchen duty. That’s adorable.”

“Shut up,” Abby said, but her smirk betrayed her.

Owen watched her for a beat, quieter than usual. “You okay?”

She nodded, then, glancing around, lowered her voice. “You guys hear about the girl they brought in?”

“You mean the girl?” Manny asked. “The one they say’s immune?”

“Yeah. I heard she wasn’t alone?”

“Oh, she wasn’t,” Manny said, voice dropping in volume too. “I was down on Four earlier, helping deliver some stuff. Nora’s still there. She told me they got the other two under guard. A girl and a guy. The guy’s apparently rough looking. Was out cold when they dragged him in. Nora said he had a nice beard, but that it looks like he’s been through hell, though.”

“And the girl?” Abby asked.

“Little older than the immune one, probably. Maybe fifteen, or sixteen? Nora didn’t know, saw her just for a few seconds. Looked like shit too, to be honest. She was screaming as they wrangled her inside a room and locked her in. Can’t blame her, really.”

Owen frowned. “You think they’re family?”

“No idea,” Manny said with a shrug. “Could be. Or maybe they’ve just been together long enough to be.”

Abby leaned against the wall beside them, her arms still crossed but her mind elsewhere now. A man and two girls. A makeshift trio surviving cross-country just to get one of them here. Just to make her a cure.

“You think they knew?” she asked softly. “That she’s the cure?”

Manny shook his head. “Well, yeah. If Marlene set the guy up to bring the kid here, they had to know, right?”

“Then what’s all the fuss about then?” Owen frowned.

Abby was quiet for a long moment, then finally said, “I keep thinking what it means, if it works, you know? No more patrols. No more infected. No more waiting to lose someone every damn time we step outside.”

Owen glanced at her, eyes thoughtful. “You really think it’s possible?”

She met his gaze. “Yeah. If anyone can do it… it’s my dad.”

Manny raised an eyebrow. “And here I thought you were just proud he taught you how to shoot.”

“I am,” she smirked. “But I’d rather he save the world.”

They laughed, and for a second, the heaviness in her chest lifted. But even as their voices faded into casual chatter and teasing, Abby couldn’t shake the image in her head: the girl they brought in, the one everyone said was immune. And the two people who’d gotten her here. She didn’t know their faces or how they looked like, so they were just shadows in her mind shaped as people without any features.

Owen walked to her side then and nudged her elbow gently. “Hey. You eaten anything?”

Abby blinked, pulled from her thoughts. “Not yet. Just showered and walked around.”

“You should eat,” he said. “You’re gonna pass out one of these days, running around like you do.”

“I’m going now,” she said with a tired smile. “I’ll grab something for my dad too. He’s probably still up there working while pretending not to be hungry.”

“Tell him Manny says to stop being a nerd and take a break,” Manny chimed in.

“I’ll pass it along,” she said, already backing away, laughing under her breath.

(…)

A while ago, in the morning, back when Abby had made her way up to get a shower and Owen had went to join a shift on the third floor, Jerry had pressed the button to call the elevator to go up to the labs. But the power hiccuped again, like it had three times already that week. He had sighed then, and taken the stairs.

The hallways felt too quiet that morning, the kind of silence that came not from peace but from anticipation. People moved like they were holding their breath. No one said it aloud, not yet, but it was there — the thing they’d dreamed of, bled for. The chance of a vaccine. A cure.

He didn’t stop to change into his scrubs. He wanted to see the preliminary data before anything else. That kind of hope had to be handled delicately. People lost their minds when they thought the world might shift under their feet. Jerry knew better. Science didn’t deal in miracles — only in facts.

He stepped into the corridor leading to the observation room and paused.

Through the glass window, across the short distance between labs, he could see her.

The girl — Ellie.

She was sitting upright on the padded table, legs swinging slightly as two nurses worked at her arm. Drawing more blood, probably. She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t even scared. She just seemed… tired. Her expression wasn’t really blank, but alert. She allowed the nurses to do their work, but she still looked tense, glancing over at the door every few seconds as if expecting to see someone coming through it anytime.

Jerry recognized that kind of resilience. A kid who’d been through too much and survived anyway.

He felt a pang in his chest that he didn’t expect.

Jerry turned away before the girl could glance in his direction. He walked into the lab, shoulders tight, nodding at his team. They’d been up there already for a while running the first tests — protein assays, receptor mapping, brain imaging.

They handed him the data. And there it was — unmistakable. The mutated strain of Cordyceps didn’t attack her the way it did others. It was there — present, active — but it didn’t consume her. It lived inside her in symbiosis, like a parasite that had made peace with its host.

“Where is it?” he asked, already knowing.

One of the techs hesitated. “The concentration is in the cerebral tissue. Mostly frontal cortex, some deeper structures. It’s not just blood-borne.”

Of course it wasn’t.

That was where Cordyceps grew. In the brain. That was why the infected always moved in those twitching, violent patterns — their neural networks overtaken, overridden by the fungus as it burst from their skulls.

Jerry felt cold all over.

If the key to her immunity was the mutated Cordyceps strain living inside her brain…

Then they’d have to extract it.

And she wouldn’t survive that.

He sank into a stool, staring at the scans. It was all there. Tangled, elegant, irreversible. Her immunity was coded into her infection. The only way to develop a vaccine was to dissect the fungus itself. Study it. Replicate the effect. And that meant brain surgery. That meant the girl — this tough, thin, impossibly lucky kid — had to die.

Jerry didn’t cry. He felt sorry for her, but he didn’t shed a tear. Couldn’t let them fall, because if he did, he knew he would never be able to perform the surgery he was there for. He just sat there, numbly organizing the facts into neat mental boxes. It was the only way he knew how to survive this part of the job. Someone was going to come ask him what it meant — what had to be done. And he would have to say it plainly.

A while later, the sun was starting to set through the west-facing windows of his office when Marlene arrived, looking for answers. She didn’t knock. She never did. Her face was unreadable. That unnerved him more than anything.

Jerry stood. He had changed into his scrubs already, but he hadn’t eaten anything in hours. His head was pounding, as was his heart.

“Heard she’s stable,” Marlene said. “Kari says her vitals are strong.”

Jerry nodded. He didn’t sit. Neither did she.

There was a long pause before he spoke.

“I can take the Cordyceps out to draw a sample,” he said quietly. “But… there’s something you should know.”

“What is it?” Marlene frowned, hands on her hips.

Jerry exhaled slowly, bracing himself.

“When we first got the samples, we were hopeful we could isolate antibodies from her blood. Something circulating in the bloodstream that might explain her immunity — maybe a mutated protein, or a cellular blocker preventing the fungus from taking hold.” He paused, glancing at the table strewn with lab notes. “That would’ve been the ideal scenario. Clean. Non-invasive.”

“… But that’s not the case,” Marlene said. “Isn’t it?”

“No,” Jerry said. “The antibodies in her blood aren’t unique. They’re present, yes — elevated — but not in a way that explains full immunity. The immune response is systemic, but the source is localized.”

He turned and picked up one of the scans. The cross-section of Ellie’s brain was clear — stark, clinical. He pointed to a shaded region.

“It’s in here. The Cordyceps. We ran multiple imaging tests. It’s dormant — altered, not behaving like any strain we’ve seen. But it’s there. Grown inside the cerebrum, rooted into the neural tissue. It’s not attacking her. It’s coexisting.”

Marlene’s brow furrowed. “So what does that mean?”

“It means her immunity isn’t in the blood,” Jerry said, gently now. “It’s in the infection. The fungus itself — mutated, adapted — has created a unique response in her nervous system. That’s what’s preventing a full-blown transformation. Her brain isn’t rejecting the infection. It’s integrated with it. I don’t know how  her brain does it… But it works.”

He let the silence stretch.

Marlene’s voice was low when she asked, “So how do you get a sample?”

“I have to remove the infected tissue,” Jerry said. “Carefully. It has to be whole, intact. I need to study the growth, its cellular structure, the host integration… If I can study the fungus in that state, I can try to replicate its properties. Engineer a vaccine from that.”

Still, Marlene didn’t move.

Her lips parted, but no sound came out. Then finally: “You’re talking about her brain.”

“I’m talking about the only place the mutation exists,” Jerry said softly. “It doesn’t shed through the body. It doesn’t live in the bloodstream. It’s central. It’s interwoven with the brain. That’s the origin of her immunity.”

Marlene stepped back, like the words had shoved her.

“You’d be killing her,” she said.

Jerry looked down.

“I’d be saving millions,” he said.

“No,” Marlene snapped, voice rising. “You’d be cutting open a fourteen-year-old girl who fought her way across the goddamn country—who trusted me—because you think this might work.”

“I don’t think,” Jerry said, finally looking her in the eye. “I know. This is how Cordyceps behaves. It grows in the brain. And this one has changed. This girl has never turned. Not after exposure, not after a bite, even more than one! Her body’s learned to live with it. The fungus is the key, Marlene. She is the key.”

Marlene turned away, pacing once before gripping the edge of his desk with both hands.

“She doesn’t even know,” she whispered.

Jerry’s voice was quiet now. “She wouldn’t feel it. I’d sedate her before the procedure. She wouldn’t suffer.”

Marlene shook her head slowly. Her shoulders were trembling.

“She’s just a kid, Jerry.”

“I know,” he whispered again, more broken this time.

But he couldn’t unsee the scan. Couldn’t ignore what he’d found. The opportunity was right in front of him — a path to something bigger than either of them had ever dared hope. A future.

Even if it came at the cost of a child.

Especially then.

“Find something else,” said Marlene, eyeing the same scans he was looking at. “Something in her blood, her system, anything –”

“It’s intertwined with the brain,” he repeated. “There’s no other option.”

“There has to be some other way.”

Jerry shook his head. He wasn’t a fan of this either, but he had to keep a cool mind. Clinical, scientifical. There was no place or time for feelings or remorse. “There’s no way to remove the specimen without destroying the host.”

“The host?” spat Marlene. “She’s a child! Not some petri dish!”

“You think I don’t –!” he almost lost it. His back straightened, as he stood to his full height, finally looking at Marlene’s face. “I’m aware of the situation.”

“And you’re okay with killing her?”

“No, I’m okay with developing a vaccine that’ll help save millions of lives,” he refuted. “How many fireflies have died for less?”

Marlene’s expression turned furious, pointing at him straight in the face. “That was their choice!” Ellie wouldn’t have that choice. They couldn’t tell her, she wouldn’t… did they want her to? To sacrifice herself? “Are you asking me for permission, or are you telling me this is how it’s gonna be?”

“I am begging you to buy in.”

He was desperate, lost in a dark sea of indecisions looking for any kind of light to show him the way.

Good thing he was with the Fireflies, then.

“And what if this was Abby?”

Jerry hadn’t let himself go down that path. The mere idea of his daughter being the one in the OR, giving up her life, her future… No. He would understand the weight of her sacrifice, but as a parent he would never allow anyone to lay a finger on his child.

“Look,” he started, ignoring Marlene’s question. “Everything that we’ve been fighting for, all the sacrifices, all the horrific…” he held his breath, gathering his thoughts. “All of that is justified with this one act.”

But Marlene wasn’t letting him off the hook that easily:

“If this was your daughter,” she said now. “What would you do?”

Both of them knew what his true answer would be: Tell them to find someone else. Take her away from this place and never look back again. Shield her from everyone who would even think about ripping her away from his arms.

He’d never say yes to the surgery.

Jerry was spared from answering, though, when a knock on the door interrupted them.

It was Abby.

“I brought you some dinner,” she announced, walking into the office. She eyed Marlene warily, leaving the plate she’d brought her dad on the table.

“Thank you, sweetheart,” replied Jerry, in a choked voice.

Abby didn’t walk out after that. She stayed behind her father’s desk watching him approach Marlene again, but the woman cut him off. Abby couldn’t see her face as her back was turned to her, but she could hear her sniffling as she told her dad:

“Do it.”

Jerry nodded, and thanked her in a small voice.

Marlene sighed, and nodded. “I’m gonna tell Joel,”

“Why?” asked Jerry, growing nervous. Marlene looked at him with spite.

“He travelled across the country with her. As did the girl with him and Ellie,” if she hadn’t gotten shot back in Boston, if she had been more careful, if she had done everything better… Joel wouldn’t be here now, having to say goodbye to the girl he had been protecting for over half a year just to bring her here to die. “They have a right to know.”

It wasn’t up for discussion. Jerry noticed, and Abby did too.

Marlene cast Jerry a final look before walking away. “Good luck with your surgery,” it didn’t seem like she was truly wishing him luck, though. Her tone was flat, and empty. She accepted what he had to do in order to fabricate the vaccine… but she would resent it forever.

Abby watched Marlene leave her dad’s office, and then she glanced at her dad himself. He sat down on the edge of his desk, releasing a big sigh as he closed his eyes briefly.

She’d been outside the office for a while before knocking on the door. She’d heard part of their discussion. And she had her own opinion about it, too.

“You’re doing the right thing,” she told her dad, rounding the desk to sit next to him.  

He scoffed, looking down at this shoes, but finally nodded. “Yeah.”

He still seemed conflicted, though. Which was normal, of course. Expectable. Human. He was about to end a girl’s life for the chance there was of creating a cure. To safe lives, they still had to go through death.

Abby wanted to help her father ease some of the weight of this decision off his shoulders. She saw this whole thing clear as day: a great sacrifice, for a greater good.

It’s what he always said.

You do what you need to do to get it done.

“If it was me,” she told him. “I’d want you to do the surgery.”

Jerry’s eyes flicked to her. For a moment, he said nothing. Just looked at his daughter — his little girl, who’d once needed help reaching the kitchen counter, now sitting beside him and giving him permission to become the kind of man who could cut a child open.

A soft, bitter laugh escaped him — a breath more than a sound. “That’s easy to say when it isn’t you,” he said, not unkindly.

Abby didn’t back down. “No. I mean it. If I could save people… if my life meant something like that—” she paused, brow furrowed, eyes locked ahead — “then yeah. I’d want you to use it. What else are we doing this for?”

Jerry stared down at the floor again. His scrubs were wrinkled from hours of pacing. His hands were trembling, almost imperceptibly.

“This girl has family, you know,” he said. “What do you think they’ll say to this?”

“They brought her here knowing you’re looking for a way to make a cure.” Abby leaned into him, bumping her shoulder gently against his. “You always said the world needs people willing to make hard choices. Maybe this is yours.”

He nodded faintly, swallowing hard. “Maybe.”

Jerry couldn’t help but feel like whatever light they were chasing — the cure, the hope — came at a cost they would never be able to measure.

He had one job now. He’d do it. Because it was the right thing. Wasn’t it?

He stood, squeezing Abby’s hand one last time.

“Go get some rest,” he said to Abby, forcing a thin smile. “I’ll be out of the OR by morning.”

She looked at him, wanting to say more — but then thought better of it. She nodded, gave his arm a reassuring squeeze, and left the room.

Jerry remained alone in the office for a few more seconds. Just long enough to stare again at the scans on the lightboard — the lines, the growth, the ghost of a girl whose name he now carried like a stone in his chest.

Then he turned away, and headed for the OR.

(…)

Abby couldn’t sleep.

Not even if her dad told her to. Not even after she crawled onto the stiff cot in the corner of their temporary apartment — a dim, sterile little room in the eastern wing of the hospital, far from the operating floor, far from the chaos, trying to take a nap.

She’d tried. Closed her eyes. Counted breaths. Told herself everything would be fine, that he knew what he was doing. That the Fireflies had it under control.

But how could anyone sleep, knowing what was about to happen?

Abby had stayed up instead, sitting cross-legged by the narrow window as the sun sank below the crumbling skyline, bleeding orange into purple and then into grey. The night fell slow, and heavy, like a curtain being drawn.

She kept listening — not even sure for what.

Footsteps? Voices? News? Anything.

She was buzzing with something close to adrenaline. Too wound up to lie still, too anxious to pace.

Part of her wished she’d gone with her dad. Just to be near him. But she didn’t know shit about surgeries. She would’ve just been in the way.

Still, she hated being stuck here. Useless.

She watched the minutes pass. Her legs started to go numb. She shifted. Rubbed her face. Looked toward the hallway.

And then she heard it.

A sharp crack. Gunfire. Faint — but real.

Her body went rigid.

She held her breath. Waited. Listened. Another shot. Then another.

Her heart stuttered.

In the next second, she was moving — pure instinct. Boots jammed on, door flung open behind her, Abby bolted down the hallway, each footstep slamming against the floor like a warning drumbeat.

Their quarters were tucked into one of the older hospital wings — quiet, mostly unused, repurposed for longer-term living. It took her nearly a full minute to reach the main stairwell.

She hit the steps running, taking them two at a time, her lungs already burning.

By the second floor, she saw the first body.

A Firefly. Shot clean through the chest, another shot in his thigh. Blood streaked across the wall where he’d tried to push himself forward, pooling beneath him. Another body was close to the first one, another Firefly, dead after a shot in the neck that was still coating the steps in deep red.

Abby stumbled. “Shit—” she whispered, a hand flying up to cover her mouth.

But she kept going.

And then she found more.

A woman in a familiar jacket — one she remembered from the cafeteria just yesterday — slumped over with her eyes still open. A lab tech, face-down in a puddle of blood. Another Firefly with a stab wound his gut.

Her grip tightened on her pistol. She raised it.

Not because she expected to shoot. But because she needed something to hold onto. Something that made her feel like she had control.

She moved through the carnage, body after body, each one adding weight to the pit in her stomach. Her legs were shaking.

Every time she turned a corner, she braced for familiar faces.

Owen. Manny. Nora.

Her throat locked up every time she saw a body that might be them. But none were. Not yet.

Still, this wasn’t a skirmish. This was a bloodbath. A goddamn massacre.

And the only thing her brain could scream was: Get to Dad.

The sixth floor. That’s where they were doing the surgery. That’s where her father had gone — to do what had to be done. To save the world.

But as soon as she reached the stairwell door and stepped onto the sixth floor, something changed.

The air felt colder. Still.

There were no voices. No beeping machines. No footsteps.

Only silence. And the smell — that sharp hospital antiseptic, and underneath it... blood. Warm, metallic. Fresh.

She didn’t want to go forward. But she did.

Step by step, hallway by hallway, her boots echoing against the tile. Past more bodies. All Fireflies. All dead.

Her insides curled tighter and tighter. Her vision blurred. She couldn’t feel her fingers anymore. Her ears rang.

Something was very wrong.

And then she reached the last hallway.

“Dad?” she called out, her voice barely more than a breath. She pushed the next door open.

No answer.

At the far end of the corridor, an open operating room door swung open. Lights still on inside, but no sounds coming from there.

And directly in front of the elevator in the middle of the hallway — there they were.

A man with a girl in his arms, her head resting limp against his shoulder, a hospital gown covering her pale form. Another girl stood beside them — a bit older than the other one, rifle in hand, blood on her cheek.

As soon as Abby pushed the door open, the girl looked up.

Their eyes locked.

And something inside Abby broke.

She saw the blood. The silence. The open OR. She saw the girl with the rifle. She saw the man with the unconscious kid, stepping inside the elevator as the doors opened.

And she understood.

They were taking her.

The immune kid. The one her dad had promised to save the world with. The one he never would’ve let go.

If she was here—

If they were taking her—

Then her dad—

“No,” Abby whispered.

She raised her gun.

Fast. No hesitation. Just burning hot fury coursing through her chest as she levelled it directly at the girl’s face — the one still staring back at her with wide, shocked eyes.

Time stopped.

And then the gun went off.

Taglist: @kitdjarin1@christinamadsen@abtjudex@hongjoong-titties@cokoladasljesnjakom@puppi-sonnenschein@elisha-chloe@wwefan2002@hello-lisa1026

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TELL ME WHY (2020) dev. Don't Nod

Tell Me Why is currently free for Pride Month!

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Where the Flowers Don't Grow - Chapter 13

Word Count: 6k oops

Warnings: basically everything you should be warned about with TLOU, honestly, and some harder stuff that is also implied in the show and also implied here (implied rape/non-con)

Notes: I want to apologize before hand for what's gonna happen here/be talked about here. Although I had this outcome planned very early on into writing this story, I won't deny it still hurt to make someone go through this. All of this said, chapter warnings: implied rape/non-con.

Fic Masterlist

Joel had a bad feeling.

The kind that sat in his gut like rot, twisting with every step he took through the snow-covered forest. His breath came out ragged, each exhale a hiss of pain and panic as he trudged through the knee-deep drifts. A snowstorm was picking up fast—whiteout conditions just minutes away—but he didn’t slow down. Couldn’t. Not when every instinct screamed that something was wrong.

The cold bit at his fingers, and paint tugged at his every step coming from his poorly healed wound. The girls had kept him alive, though. He was proud of them. So fucking proud. Still, his body screamed to rest—but he didn’t stop.

Because Ellie was out here. Faith was out here. And he had to find them.

He had failed enough people in this life. He wouldn’t fail them too.

The rifle on his back shifted as he climbed the hill overlooking a frozen lake, snow crunching underfoot. His right hand pressed into his wound to keep the pressure steady, while the right shielded his eyes from the whipping wind. Shapes loomed out of the snow—cabins, houses—half-buried in white, sagging under the weight of winter.

His heart stuttered.

Silver Lake.

It had to be. God, please let it be.

He pushed toward the cabins by the shore, passing half-buried canoes and rotting picnic tables. Everything looked still. Dead. The kind of quiet that screamed at the back of his skull. And then—

Blood.

A trail, smeared across the snow, not fresh but not old either. Leading straight into the cabin ahead.

Joel’s breath caught in his throat. He didn’t hesitate.

He raised his rifle and smashed the lock with a crack that echoed through the trees. The door creaked open with a reluctant groan, and the moment he stepped inside, he was hit with the sharp scent of mold and rot.

And something else. Something metallic. Blood.

He turned his flashlight on, and its beam cut across the room—shelves of junk, stacks of boxes, rusted tools—and then landed on the far wall.

Two backpacks.

He stumbled forward, fell to his knees.

Ellie’s. Green canvas, battered and worn, with that stupid pink alien plush hanging from the zipper like a guardian. And beside it, Faith’s. Brown and weathered, the leather straps cracked from wear. Joel’s fingers trembled as he opened it—and there it was.

Monica’s journal. Her mom’s. Faith’s most precious possession.

She never would’ve left without it.

He held it between his fingers tightly for a few seconds, head bowed, eyes closed against the wave of relief that hit him—but it was fleeting. Because if they left the bags… they were still somewhere here, but definitely not safe.

A new kind of fear took hold. Sharper. Wilder. He stood again, swaying slightly, the flashlight’s beam jerking as he caught sight of the blood trail again, winding deeper into the cabin.

Joel followed, every step like walking toward a nightmare.

He reached a pair of old double doors and shoved them open with his shoulder.

The room beyond was freezing. His flashlight flicked across the space— —and froze.

Two horses.

Their horses.

Frozen stiff on the ground, blood pooled beneath them. Joel clenched his jaw as bile rose in his throat.

God.

His girls. They’d ridden away, hadn’t they? Tried to escape. But they’d gotten to them. And now their animals were dead.

But the girls… They couldn’t. They weren’t. He refused to believe that.

His light moved further, scanning the corners, until—

Something behind a pile of overturned canoes caught his eye. He stepped closer, the beam quivering in his grip, and—

Stopped.

Three human bodies. Hanging upside down. Bloodied. Skinned. Beheaded.

The colour drained from Joel’s face. His stomach lurched, and he staggered back against the wall, a low sound catching in his throat. Not from pain this time, but from horror.

His knees almost gave out. His mind raced with images—Ellie, Faith, their faces pale, their bodies—

No.

No.

They weren’t here. They weren’t them. These were men.

These poor souls weren’t his girls.

But it was a warning.

A sign.

A fucking message.

Someone had brought people here to die like cattle. To be carved up and stored like meat. And if they’d done that to their own people—

What the hell could they have done to Ellie and Faith?

He tore his gaze away, his vision swimming, his mind racing through images he didn’t want to see — Ellie’s smile, Faith’s stubborn glare, both of them laughing over dinner by the fire.

This was a nightmare.

And someone had taken them into it.

Joel’s breath came in ragged gasps. Pain screamed from his stomach, but he barely felt it now. His grip tightened around the rifle.

Whoever had done this… whoever had touched his girls…

He would make them pay.

(…)

Ellie had no idea how long she’d been alone for.

Could’ve been an hour. Maybe more. Maybe less. Time had stopped meaning anything the second the door slammed shut when David took Faith away.

She’d screamed until her throat was raw, kicked the door, thrown herself at it like it could break under the weight of her fury.

But it hadn’t. And no one had come.

Now the silence felt louder than her own thoughts — and those were loud enough already.

She paced around the cage, one arm wrapped around her ribs like she could hold herself together, the other dragging along the iron mesh as she walked in tight, frantic circles. Back and forth. Round and round.

Now all Ellie had was the silence.

And her thoughts.

Faith.

Where was she? What had David done to her?

She had a bad feeling. An idea of what he… of what he could’ve…

She blinked fast, swallowed the lump in her throat. Couldn’t cry. Crying wouldn’t help. It wouldn’t get her out, wouldn’t help Faith. Wouldn’t keep either of them alive.

"Come on, come on..." she muttered under her breath, forcing her body to move. She held onto the iron mesh again, searching for any loose points, nails scraping against grime and frost. She had to find something. Anything.

She kept her ears tuned, alert for footsteps, voices, anything. But the silence stretched on. Her fingers ached. The skin split under her nails, blood warm against the cold. Still, she twisted on a screw, trying to break it off.

Don’t think about it. Don’t think about her. Don’t think about—

But she couldn’t stop.

Faith, crying out, reaching for Ellie as they dragged her away.

Faith, always trying to be brave, even when her hands shook.

Faith, who had made her laugh in the dark, who had laughed at her dumb jokes and whispered secrets through walls of fear. Who had showed up one day in her life, just like that. Ellie couldn’t imagine not having her around anymore. She didn’t want to. She wasn’t just some other girl. Not anymore.

She was to Ellie what she imagined family to be like.

Ellie squeezed her eyes shut, biting down a sob. She gave the bolt another savage twist — and it came loose, falling to the floor with a soft, metallic clink.

Her breath caught.

One down. She scanned the mesh, found another loose one, started working on it.

Come on, come on…

She could hear her own pulse pounding in her ears.

And under that… something else.

A creak. A shift of wind.

She froze. Waited.

Nothing.

She went back to work. Didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. Not when Faith could be—

Don’t think about it.

The second screw was almost loose when she heard it.

Footsteps.

Fast. Heavy. Not the slow, calculated tread she’d come to dread. These were rushing. Urgent.

The footsteps got louder.

Not calm. Not in control. Something was wrong.

Keys rattled. Someone was unlocking the door.

Ellie held her breath.

David swung the door open, followed by his partner, James, walking to Ellie’s cage with a fast pace, keys in hand.

She backed away instantly, putting as much distance as she could between her and the door he was unlocking.

James lunged himself at her first.

Everything in Ellie exploded at once — rage, terror, instinct. She screamed. “NO! NO! GET OFF OF ME!”

She lashed out wildly, fists and knees and elbows, kicking, biting, fighting like her life depended on it — because it did. They were grabbing her now, trying to subdue her. David’s hands were cold and strong and wrong, and she twisted away just in time for his knee to slam straight into her stomach.

White-hot pain. The air was gone.

She crumpled forward with a strangled gasp, and they lifted her like dead weight, dragging her out of the cage and pulling her up onto the prep table.

“Wait—wait, wait, wait—” she begged, voice cracking as they threw her on the table.

“Shut up!” David’s voice was venom now, unhinged and angry.

“Don’t!” Ellie pleaded, her voice breaking. “Don’t do it! Please, don’t do it!”

But she could see it. He wasn’t listening. He wasn’t going to stop. He picked up a kitchen knife off the table, a meat cleaver, the blade gleaming in the dim light.

David’s face was calm in a way that made Ellie sick — serene, even, like he was just doing what had to be done. Like this was righteous.

“You had your chance,” he said. “How did you put it earlier? Tiny little pieces?”

He raised the knife.

And Ellie did the only thing she could think of. The only thing that might buy her one more second.

“I’m infected!” she screamed.

Time broke.

David froze, the knife still raised above her. James faltered beside him, confused.

“I’m infected,” Ellie said again, quieter, breathless now. “…And now so are you.”

Her eyes locked with David’s — then dropped pointedly to his hand.

The one she’d bitten during the struggle. The skin there was broken. Bloody teeth marks stared back at him.

“Roll up my sleeve,” she said, heart racing so fast it made her dizzy. “Look at it. Fucking look at it!”

For a second, no one moved.

Then David exhaled through his nose, hard, and stabbed the knife into the table beside her head, the blade slicing into the wood an inch from her face. Ellie flinched, turning her face away.

David grabbed her arm roughly and yanked up her sleeve.

His hand stilled.

There it was. The bite. Dark, healed—but wrong. Too real.

He looked at James.

The man was pale, sweating, eyes darting from the mark to David’s face.

“What did you say?” Ellie muttered, her voice low now — full of spite. “Everything happens for a reason, right?” She twisted the knife with every word. “That’s what you get for hurting Faith.”

David’s lips parted slightly, like he wanted to argue — wanted to tell himself this was a lie. James was shaking his head like he could undo what just happened.

“David—” he said, panic blooming in his voice.

“No,” David shook his head, more to himself than anyone. “No, she would’ve turned by now. This isn’t real. It’s not—”

But Ellie saw the doubt in his eyes. Saw the fear. And fear made people sloppy.

She didn’t hesitate.

The knife was still buried in the table next to her. She grabbed it with her free hand, ripped it free, and slammed it straight into James’s neck before either man could react.

His eyes went wide. A sick, wet sound filled the air. Blood gushed from the wound as he stumbled back, grabbing at the knife with a useless hand, falling hard.

Ellie didn’t stay to watch.

She jumped off the table, hitting the floor hard and sprinting for the door.

David shouted something behind her — something furious and inhuman — and the next second gunshots rang out. One. Two. Three.

The bullets tore past her, one close enough she felt the air shift against her cheek.

But she didn’t stop. She couldn’t.

The door was still unlocked. And she ran.

Ran like hell, down the corridor, boots skidding on the icy floor, lungs burning.

She made it through an empty kitchen, and then out to a dining hall, also empty. She saw a door, she’d never been so happy for seeing a door before, and she ran to it, but it was locked. She could see outside through the door’s glasses, seeing everything snowed under, shockingly calm compared to the rush she was going through.

She couldn’t open it. She needed something, anything.

Not only to open the door, but to defend herself from when David came after her.

Ellie ran back to the kitchen and found some embers with some unburned wood inside. He grabbed a log that was within reach, lit at the other end, and went back to the dining room, hiding.

He didn’t take long.

She didn’t wait long, too.

She shot up from her hiding spot, facing him, and threw the log at him. He dug, dodging it, and it fell behind him close to a window. Its curtains lit up with the log, and a few seconds later fire began to spread through the fabric.

The dining hall had wooden panels on the walls, wooden chairs and wooden tables. It was a fucking matchbox that would quickly burn down.

He didn’t care.

His only goal right now, was to make Ellie pay.

David walked around the room, looking for her, holding the knife he had torn out of James’ throat, still dripping with his partner’s blood even now.

“There’s no way out, Ellie,” he said. “The doors are locked. And I have the keys.”

So she knew how to get out now.

“Ellie?” he asked again, watching as the flames quickly spread up to the ceiling, eating the wooden beams. “Ellie!”

He called out for her again, humming her name as if they were playing hide and seek.

It was more like hide and kill, though.

“I know you’re not infected. No one infected fights this hard to stay alive!”

She had made it behind a bar counter, crawling around looking for anything she could use as a weapon. She could still hear him talking:

“So how did you do it? What’s the secret? Or are you just that fucking special?”

He had lost all composure now.

“No one likes being humiliated, Ellie!” he spat. Especially not him. “You don’t know how good I am! You don’t know what I could’ve given you! If you had just… let me!”

Ellie had found a knife. It was smaller than David’s, but it had a sharp point and a good grip. It was her best chance. Probably her only one.

If he wouldn’t kill her, if she didn’t make it out on time, the fire would certainly end her.

“Well, I have news for you,” he said then, faking calmness again. “Neither one of us is dying today. Not even your friend! Faith, was it? She’s still alive!” he looked around, trying to spot Ellie, but she didn’t move. She was listening, though, clinging to every word.

Faith was alive.

Could Ellie believe him?

She wasn’t sure. She clang to the hope, though, and the strength it gave her.

“You see, I’ve changed my mind,” he followed. “I’ve decided you do need a father. You and Faith. She’s had her round of discipline already… A few more and who knows? I’m gonna keep you both… And I’m gonna teach you.”

Not fucking happening.

Ellie realized he was close. Closer than she thought. She peaked around the corner, and saw him there, standing a few feet away with his back turned to her as he hummed her name again.

Let’s get over with this.

She lunged at him with the knife raised. He turned barely a second before she made it close enough to him to stab him in the stomach with the knife. He still managed to grab her by her shoulders and throw her on the ground face down, her already bloody nose staining the red carpet with more red droplets.

“Fuck!” he muttered. David pressed his hand to his side, his fingers now red too with his own blood.

He looked at Ellie on the floor, panting, breathing heavily, and hit her in the middle with his foot when she tried to crawl away.

Ellie yelped in pain and turned on her back and lay then on her side, clutching her middle, but David quickly lay her back up, straddling her and covering her with his body, holding her hands above her head as he brought his face close to her.

She screamed. She screamed so loud it made her own ears hurt. He didn’t move.

“Oh… I thought you already knew,” he mocked, holding her down. “The fighting is the part I like the most.”

Ellie sobbed and wailed as he pushed further down on her.

“Don’t be afraid,” he told her, his lips curved into a wicked smile. “There’s no fear in love.”

He released one of her hands to move his own down between them. Ellie didn’t give him a chance to try anything else as she reached blindly for the knife, David’s, that she had spotted earlier under a table, the one they were next to, where she had tried to crawl at when David had pushed her down.

She got a hold of it, and she didn’t think twice.

With a scream she slashed him in the face with it, pushing him away as he screamed in pain.

He fell back, Ellie free now, and she quickly walked over to him, having him now under her.

She slammed the blade down.

And then she did it again.

And again.

And again.

So many times she lost count, her voice hoarse from screaming, her eyes burning from the tears, her lungs out of air with the ever growing cloud of smoke rising from the fire surrounding her.

His face became the punching bag for everyone that had been taken from her.

She didn’t stop until he was dead.

And still, there wasn’t any relief. Just… what remained.

David was dead.

He couldn’t hurt her anymore.

But Ellie was still shaking, even as she snapped out of her state and grabbed his keys, running to the doors to finally make it out of there.

(…)

The wind had finally died down.

The storm had passed, but it had left everything quiet — too quiet — like the world was holding its breath.

Joel pushed through the snowdrift outside the cabin, blood crusted on his knuckles, cold air biting at his cheeks. He was carrying the girls’ backpacks with him, trying to find them. His breath came in harsh, uneven pulls, but he barely felt it. The horror of what he’d found inside — those bodies, strung up like meat — still clung to him, made his stomach churn. Made the edges of his vision tighten with fury and dread.

What kind of monsters were these people?

What had they done to the girls?

He couldn’t think about that. Not yet. He couldn’t afford to.

Ellie. Faith.

He kept their names on loop in his head, like a prayer. If he stopped repeating it, if he let doubt creep in, the fear would paralyze him.

Ellie. Faith. Ellie. Faith.

God, he needed that. Faith. He had it, he held onto it as strong as he could, as hard as he hadn’t in years.

Then he saw it — smoke curling into the pale grey sky like a signal flare, rising from a building near the lake. One of the larger ones. The roof sagged under the weight of snow, but fire now poured from a broken window, the scent of burning wood thick in the air.

And then he saw her.

His heart nearly stopped.

A figure staggered out of the building — clothes bloodied, hair a mess. For a split second, she looked like a ghost. A shadow. But he knew that shape. That hair. The way she moved, even as she stumbled through the snow — half-defiant, half-ready to fall apart.

Ellie.

He didn’t think. His feet were already moving, crunching across the snow, stumbling, slipping — didn’t matter. His chest was tight with panic, with relief, with too many things at once.

He stretched his arms out to her, needing to hold her, needing to know she was real. When she felt him, though, she screamed in fear.

“NO!” she yelled. “Get off of me! Get off! GET OFF!”

He turned her around to face him as she tried to move away, still screaming and kicking and trying to break free from his hold.

“It’s me!” he said. “It’s me! Ellie, it’s me!”

He held her face between his hands. She had blood all over her forehead, cheeks and chin, some hers, most David’s.

“Hey, look,” his voice got softer, lighter, calmer. Not like David’s, no. In a peaceful way, warm and soothing. “It’s me. It’s me.”

Ellie calmed down, focusing her eyes on Joel’s. Her voice wavered in broken whispers, her breathing fast and uneven, her body still controlled by the shock and panic.

“He…” she couldn’t form a sentence. “He…”

“It’s okay,” whispered Joel. “It’s okay, it’s okay…”

Ellie melted into him, wrapping her arms around his shoulders as he held her up, burying her face into the crook of his neck as he kept muttering ‘it’s okay’ again and again into her ear.

“It’s okay,” he repeated. “It’s okay, baby girl. I got you… I got you.”

Joel held her like she was the only thing anchoring him to the earth.

“You’re safe,” he said into her hair, rocking them gently as if it could make her believe it. “You’re safe now. I’m here. I got you, baby girl. I got you.”

When she pulled away, he quickly took his backpack off and removed his winter coat, wrapping it around Ellie’s small trembling form.

He had never seen her like this, not this vulnerable, not this fragile, not this… young.

She held onto the jacket as he put it around her, looking at him, then at his hands, then to the ground where his backpack lay, next to two others he had dropped to hold her: her own, and Faith’s.

“… Joel –” she tried to speak, but her throat hurt from screaming. So she pushed through the pain. “Joel, she…”

He knew instantly who she was talking about. When he’d seen Ellie wandering through the snow alone, he hadn’t thought twice about getting to her, but in the back of his mind, a question bloomed: why was she alone? Where was Faith?

“Ellie, tell me,” he put his hands on her shoulders gently, scared she’d flinch away again, but she didn’t. She trusted him, more than anyone. “Where is she? Where’s Faith?”

She didn’t have the strength to speak.

Instead, tears welled up in her eyes as she turned her face to the cabin that was burning down to the ground because of a fire she had started herself.

(…)

The room was dark.

A heavy kind of dark — not just from the absence of light, but the weight of what had happened inside it. An old office, maybe once important, now forgotten. The shadows stretched long across the floor, only the dim flicker of light coming through the nearly shut curtains on the window behind the bureau.

She lay there, behind the desk. Curled up. Still. Small.

Faith.

Her arms were wrapped around herself, fists clenched tightly in the sleeves of her cream sweater — the one she'd gotten back in Jackson. She’d loved that sweater. It had been soft, warm, just her size. She remembered smiling when she’d first put it on, thinking how comfortable it was.

It wasn’t cozy anymore.

There was blood on it. Stiff where it had dried over her ribs and across the hem. Some of it was from her leg — the wound still throbbing, still warm with the pulse of her body. But not all of it.

Some of it was his, from when she had managed to scratch him when she tried to fight him off.

Most of it was hers, from when he managed to overpower her.

Her pants were soaked through at the thigh from her still fresh wound. Her knees ached from trying to crawl away. Her fingers were raw, nails broken and caked with blood from the door she’d tried to claw at when he’d—

She squeezed her eyes shut.

Don’t think. Don’t go back. Don’t remember.

Her hair lay messy across the floor, stuck to her face in places. Her cheeks were streaked with dry tears and dried blood, and her lips were cracked from cold air and silence.

The room was silent now too. She liked it that way. Quiet meant he wasn’t here.

Her body had gone still a long time ago. Stillness helped. Made her invisible. She imagined she was somewhere else. Somewhere far. Somewhere warm.

And in that place — in a forest she ran through in her mind, where she felt most at peace and at ease, she saw her mom.

Monica.

She remembered her voice. Not a specific sentence, not even a full specific memory. Just a sound. A hum, a laugh. A soft call of her name on a quiet morning.

She remembered her mom’s hands. The way they’d braid her hair gently. The way they’d hold her face when she was scared or sick or had a bad dream.

She wanted that now.

She wanted her mom to find her, curl up beside her, pull her out of this awful place and tell her it wasn’t her fault.

That she wasn’t ruined.

That she was still herself.

That everything was going to be okay.

Faith didn’t cry anymore. She had run out of that. The tears had dried, and the sobs had gotten stuck somewhere deep inside her throat and chest where she couldn’t get them out. There was only the quiet now. The hum of the wind outside.

She’d heard someone shouting, not too long ago. More than one person, screaming, howling, and then… Silence again. Faith had stayed there, still, behind the desk. Curled tight like she could disappear into herself.

She didn’t know what time it was.

She didn’t know if Ellie had gotten away.

She didn’t know if she’d ever leave this place. But God, she hoped Ellie had. That she’d run, fast and wild, the way she always did when she was mad or scared or being brave — and she was always being brave.

Faith closed her eyes tighter, breathing shallow and slow.

Please let her have made it out. Let her find him.

Joel.

His name cracked open something in her chest. Something deeper than pain.

She thought of him, remembering him — not as some towering figure with a gun, not just as the man who always stood between them and danger — but as home. As the closest thing she had felt to safety since everything had fallen apart.

She remembered the way his voice softened when he talked to them, especially when he didn’t think they noticed. The way he’d hand her a blanket in the middle of the night without a word. The way his eyes would flick between her and Ellie when he was worried, and try not to let it show.

She remembered the house in Jackson, the one they’d stayed at for a night. It was a bit older, it looked worn down, and it needed some love, sure… but it was just like themselves, right? In a way, the three of them were also worn down and in the need of love. Of someone to come home to.

They could live there. All three of them. In that creaky blue house with the wooden creaky stairs. It was warm, and quiet, and full of things that had belonged to someone else — someone who had lived a normal life once.

She thought of having her own room. One next to Ellie’s. Both near Joel’s.

She imagined how Ellie would decorate her room, maybe hanging up posters if they ever found some. She’d have dinosaur figures and drawings hung on the walls, and maybe they could find some of those… fairy lights things, to hang around the room.

Faith would love to have a room with a big wide window to sit at and look outside. She wished to find a camera someday, to take pictures of everything she thought was beautiful. Pictures of everyone she loved, so she would never forget their faces. She’d hang the pictures in her room, so she’d always have them close.

It was only a dream. A childish one, maybe. But real.

Waking up in her own room. Breakfast with them in the morning. Doing… whatever normal teenagers did. Even if the world was broken.

Even if things like normal didn’t really exist anymore.

She’d listen to music with Ellie — anything Ellie would want her to listen to, she would. She’d make that effort for her.

She remembered Ellie’s laugh when she had found her listening to music, back in that yellow room in the house in Jackson. How she’d laughed endearingly when Faith didn’t know who the singers were, as if she’d know a band that had existed decades ago just by their name.

And now, that same song she’d been listening to drifted into her head again.

God. It was so stupid. So fitting.

“So when you’re near me, darling, can’t you hear me…”

She let the words hum past her lips, so low it was almost nothing. A whisper against the silence. A joke, almost, except there was no one to laugh.

She remembered Dahlia then, too. Her little sister.

Dahlia had always hummed — everywhere, any time. While brushing her teeth. During dinner. While trekking through the forest. She used to drive Faith crazy with it.

And now it was the only thing she wanted to hear.

She sang another line, barely audible, voice cracked and dry:

“The love you gave me nothing else can save me…”

Her throat closed. Her lips trembled.

She bit them.

Stillness.

Still.

She pulled her knees tighter to her chest. The desk felt like a shield. A barrier. Like if she didn’t move, if she kept pretending… maybe she wouldn’t be here.

Maybe she’d be in Jackson.

In that blue house.

Joel would be brewing coffee in the mornings. Ellie would complain about the smell. She’d be laughing. She’d be warm. Her sweater would still be clean.

And no one would ever look at her like David had.

No one would ever touch her again like David had.

“When you’re gone… How can I even try to go on?” she hummed the last lines she remembered, her eyes falling shut. “When you’re gone… though I try, how can I carry on?”

(…)

The building was burning.

Not just smoke curling out the roof — flames were clawing their way up the wood, licking through shattered windows and doorways like the whole place had been soaked in vengeance.

“Faith was here,” Ellie said again, voice hoarse. “He took her. I don’t know where.”

Joel didn’t answer. Didn’t need to know who this ‘he’ was, not now. He just moved faster, eyes sharp as they rounded the back of the building. Ellie followed, bloodied and frantic, limping slightly and still shaken, but determined to find Faith.

Back here, the fire hadn’t reached as strong. Not yet.

The snow on the ground melted in streaks near the back wall, where heat bled through the old timber. Joel’s eyes landed on a door — rusted handle, paint peeling off in flakes, likely once for kitchen staff. It looked barely used in years.

He tried it.

Locked. Or jammed.

Joel gritted his teeth and backed up a step. Then slammed into it with his shoulder once. Twice.

On the third hit, the metal shrieked — and gave way. The door swung open, smoke rolling out in a low cloud.

A tiled hallway stretched before them, haze already beginning to settle at the ceiling. There were two doors — one straight ahead, one to the right.

He didn’t wait.

He pulled his gun out as he dropped their backpacks to the floor, nodded for Ellie to stay close, and moved fast.

The first door was open.

An office, maybe — long abandoned, papers scattered, light filtering in through broken glass. Empty. He didn’t linger.

He turned and pushed the other door open.

This one groaned.

Joel stepped into the dark room, Ellie at his heels, the door creaking open with a groan that felt too loud in the choking silence. His eyes adjusted quickly — low light, dust, and something metallic lingering in the air.

Then he saw it.

A pair of feet, boots he recognized, half-hidden behind an old wooden desk. Still. Unmoving.

His stomach turned before he even got closer.

He moved slowly, carefully. Ellie hung back at the doorway, her breath shallow and fast. Joel rounded the desk.

And stopped cold.

“Jesus.”

Faith was there. Curled tight on her side like she’d been trying to disappear into herself. Her sweater was bloodied and torn at one shoulder, the fabric jagged, stretched. One sleeve had slipped halfway down her arm. Her jeans were unbuttoned, the zipper pulled down just enough to tell the story without needing words. Blood — dark, dried — trailed from her temple into her hairline. Her lip was split. A wound on her thigh was still bleeding an angry red. Her fingers were dug into the fabric of her shirt, clutching it closed like she’d tried to hold herself together and run out of strength halfway through.

Joel’s vision swam.

His whole body locked. No sound. Just the roar of blood in his ears.

He crouched slowly, the weight of it crushing him.

Ellie was behind him now, whispering Faith’s name, but Joel couldn’t look away. Not yet.

Because he knew.

He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to believe what he was seeing — what those torn clothes and bruises and that faraway, frozen stillness meant — but he knew. It landed in his gut like a lead weight, thick and nauseating.

The girl was still breathing, barely. But her eyes were shut, her lashes trembling with some silent storm she was trapped inside. She was humming, he realized distantly. Quietly. A song, maybe. Her lips moved like she was praying, or begging, or both.

“Faith…” Joel’s voice cracked, almost whimpered. He hadn’t heard himself sound like that in years.

She didn’t react.

He reached a hand out, but stopped just short of her shoulder. The skin there was bruised. Ugly and fresh purple finger prints.

His throat closed.

A heat rose in his chest that had nothing to do with the fire outside. He swallowed it down hard.

“Faith,” he said, barely a whisper now. “It’s me. It’s Joel. I’m here.”

At that, her breath hitched. Barely. A flicker.

Her eyes opened, just a sliver. Cloudy. Dazed. But she saw him.

And something in her broke.

A sound came from her — not words. Just something raw and cracked and too deep to name after which her tears began to fall.

Joel didn’t hesitate.

He slid his arms under her gently, like she might shatter, and gathered her close. He didn’t care about the pain in his side, only about the weight of her in his arms. Small, hurt, but now safe.

Her body was stiff at first, then gave out all at once, slumping into his chest, her hands clutching weakly at his jacket with her torn bloodied nails. Her face pressed into him, hiding, as if the world behind her still had claws.

“I got you,” he murmured, his voice shaking, tears slipping down his own cheeks. He held her tightly against him as her body shook with broken sobs, one arm under her knees and the other cradling her head close, pressing his cheek against her hairline. “I got you, baby. I got you now, baby girl. I got you, I got you.”

Ellie was crying quietly behind him. He couldn’t even turn to look.

Joel stood with Faith in his arms, holding her as close as he could. Ellie clung to his side as they made their way back out to the snow, away from the smoke and the flames and the horror within.

Finally, finally back together again.

Taglist: @kitdjarin1@christinamadsen@abtjudex@hongjoong-titties@cokoladasljesnjakom@puppi-sonnenschein@elisha-chloe@wwefan2002@hello-lisa1026

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Dr. Jack Abbot in '8:00 P.M.' | The Pitt.

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I’m so attracted to shawn hatosy’s dr. abbot… his salt and pepper curls and calm demeanour have charmed me

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Shawn Hatosy as Doctor Jack Abbot The Pitt (2025)

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abbot's internal monologue: i wonder what the coolest pose is for me to stand in during this mass casualty briefing rn

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Shawn Hatosy as Doctor Jack Abbot The Pitt (2025)

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Where the Flowers Don't Grow - Chapter 9

Word Count: 8k oops

Warnings: basically everything you should be warned about with TLOU, honestly

Notes: how are we in chapter 9 already??? Finishing 1x06 here!

Fic Masterlist

Faith woke to a soft rustling beside her.

Ellie shifted under the blanket, pulling it tighter around her shoulders. The sun hadn’t risen yet, but the greyish blue of the sky outside the window said it wasn’t far off.

Neither of them had spoken much after Joel left. They’d cried. Then gone quiet. Eventually, Ellie had asked her, just above a whisper, “Can you stay?”

Faith had nodded without a word and climbed into the other half of the bed. Not only because Ellie needed it. But because she didn’t want to be alone this time, too.

Now, in the early hush of morning, Ellie blinked her eyes open slowly, glancing at Faith beside her. “You sleep at all?” she mumbled.

“A little,” Faith murmured. “You?”

Ellie gave the faintest shrug. “Dunno.”

They lay there for a moment longer in the quiet, the weight of the previous night still sitting heavy on their shoulders. Then Faith sat up, running a hand down her face and through her tangled hair. She exhaled, steadying herself.

“I’m going with you.”

Ellie turned to look at her fully now, brow furrowing. “What?”

Faith looked back, more sure of it now that she’d said it out loud. “To the Fireflies. Wherever they are. I’m not letting you go alone.”

Ellie blinked. The relief in her face was immediate and overwhelming, like someone had just cut loose a weight she didn’t realize she’d been dragging. “Seriously?”

Faith nodded. “Yeah. I’m serious.”

Ellie gave a half-smile, part disbelief, part exhaustion. “You’re kind of stuck with me now, huh?”

“Guess so,” Faith muttered, managing a small smile.

Around twenty minutes later, just a bit after the sun had begun to rise, Faith was back in the room with the yellow walls, gathering all her stuff. The room was dim, lit only by the early slant of morning light pushing through the curtains. Faith pulled on her thick coat, adjusted the strap on her backpack, and pulled her knit hat snug over her ears. Her gloves — the ones Joel had found for her on their way to Jackson— were already warming up her fingers.

The door creaked open behind her.

For a second she expected to find Joel behind the door, already used to seeing him every day, but also hoping he had made up his mind. She turned to see Tommy instead, already dressed for the ride, his own pack slung over one shoulder along with his rifle.

“Figured you’d come with us,” he said. “You ready?”

Faith nodded.

Tommy gave her a look — not quite a smile, not quite worry. Something in between. “You sure about this?”

“Yeah,” Faith said, honestly, firmly “I’m going.”

He gave a soft chuckle at that, something almost fond in his eyes. “Alright then,” he turned a bit, revealing another rifle he was holding behind his back, along with a gun and knife in their holster. “Got you some of your stuff back while no one was lookin’.”

Faith rushed to him, taking her weapons from his hands to get a hold of them herself. She smiled at Tommy sincerely, utterly grateful.

“Thank you,” she said. “Really… This means a lot.”

He nodded, smiling too, then turning to the door next to them. Ellie’s room.

She was sitting on the windowsill with her coat and hat on, her backpack at her feet.

“Ready to go?” Tommy asked her.

Ellie nodded, standing up without a word.

They stepped out into the hallway. As they passed the third bedroom, Faith’s eyes drifted toward the closed door.

Still shut. Still silent.

She wondered if Joel was in there, sleeping or sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the floor like the weight of the world was still crushing him. Maybe he’d already left. Maybe he’d never even slept.

She didn’t stop walking.

(…)

The town was quiet, colder in the morning. The kind of cold that made your breath fog up even as you talked. Faith pulled her coat tighter and buried her gloved hands in her pockets, her boots thudding softly on the frost-slick road. Beside her, Ellie looked tired but resolute, jaw set, eyes fixed straight ahead.

Main Street was deserted — no workers, no kids laughing near the school building. It was too early even for the chickens to be out. Faith glanced at the windows they passed, all of them still dark and closed for the day.

Tommy walked ahead of them, silent but watchful. He hadn’t said much since they left the house. Maybe he could tell the girls weren’t in the mood for small talk. Not after last night.

The familiar scent of hay and old leather hit them as they stepped inside. The horses were already awake, stirring in their stalls. Ellie caught sight of the young foal she’d met the day before, nestled against its mother. She hesitated for a second, a flicker of guilt crossing her face. It really was a good place. Quiet. Safe. It was getting hard to leave.

But then they turned the corner — and stopped.

In the next stall, two horses stood saddled and ready. Someone had beaten them to it.

It was Joel.

He was adjusting a strap, checking the saddle of one of the horses making sure it was tight enough. The second horse was already packed and waiting. Faith’s breath caught.

Ellie’s heart sank, her face hardening instantly. Still raw from the night before, her voice came sharp. “You come to say goodbye or something?”

Joel didn’t look at her at first. “No,” he said simply. “I came here to steal one of these horses and go.”

Tommy raised a brow. “I woulda gave you one.”

Joel finally turned to face them. There was tension still in his shoulders, a weight behind his eyes — but something else too. Restraint, maybe. Or hope.

“Anyway, huh… That was thirty minutes ago,” he added. “And I, uh… before I knew, I got two ready.” His voice was quieter now. “I guess… you deserve a choice.”

He stepped closer to Ellie, slow and steady, like he was still unsure if she’d let him.

“I still think you’d be better off with Tommy—”

But Ellie didn’t let him finish. She shoved one of her bags against his chest with a solid thud. “Let’s go,” she said.

Joel caught the bag, startled, but his expression shifted — just a little. Not a smile. But close.

“Okay,” he murmured.

Ellie didn’t wait. She walked past him to the horses, her hand brushing along one’s side as she approached the saddle.

Tommy chuckled under his breath, then followed after her, running a quick check over the reins and stirrups. “Let’s see if he actually remembered how to prep a horse,” he muttered to himself.

Faith lingered behind.

She stood with her bag slung over one shoulder, her fingers fidgeting with the frayed cuff of her glove. Joel turned his eyes to her now. She met his gaze, but didn’t say anything at first.

“…Faith,” he said, quietly. His voice dropped even lower, like this was the part he wasn’t good at. “About last night, I—”

“You were scared,” she said, simply. “So was I.”

He didn’t know how to answer that. His brow twitched, jaw clenched, like there were a dozen things he wanted to say but couldn’t find the words for. He gave a small, barely-there nod instead.

“I don’t blame you for being hurt,” she continued, her voice soft. “But thanks… for showing up anyway.”

He blinked. “Yeah. Well. You two… you were right.”

Faith smiled faintly at that, then took one step closer. He didn’t move when she reached up, resting a hand briefly on his arm. Then — light as air, and quick as a blink — she pressed a kiss to his cheek.

Joel’s breath caught. His face didn’t change, but he stood very, very still.

“Guess we’re stuck with each other again, huh?” Faith said with a half-smile, pulling back. Then she turned, walking after Ellie and Tommy, boots crunching softly in the hay.

Joel stood there a moment longer, watching her go, one hand still holding the bag Ellie had shoved at him.

Finally, he exhaled through his nose and shook his head to himself.

“…Damn kids,” he muttered, no bite to it.

Just tired affection.

Outside, Joel helped Ellie up one of the horses, telling her to hold onto both sides of the horse’s reins. He helped Faith up to her horse too, even if she didn’t need the help.

“General direction?” he asked Tommy, once the girls were ready.

“Head southeast till you hit I-25. It’s right off the interstate. Shouldn’t be hard to miss.”

Joel nodded. When Tommy went to pull him into a hug, he accepted him in his arms, returning it tightly.

Tommy knew Joel was making an enormous effort staying with Ellie and Faith. And he was proud of him. So goddamm much.

“There’s a place for you here,” he told him, when they parted from their embrace. “The three of you.”

“Countin’ on it.”

Ellie and Faith looked at each other then, eyes bright despite the cold. They couldn’t help but smile.

Joel wanted to come back. To this town. With them.

Maybe they could still have a happy ending, after everything was done.

Joel’s gaze drifted down to Tommy’s rifle, then back up again. “Think I could borrow that?” he asked. “Maria took mine, you know? Can’t only have Faith armed, can I?”

Faith let out a snort, adjusting the strap of her own rifle across her chest.

Tommy grinned faintly, handing his over. “Yeah, sure.”

Joel slung it over his shoulder with practiced ease, and the two Miller brothers locked eyes one last time. So much left unsaid between them, but maybe that was alright.

“Adiós, big brother,” Tommy said, quiet but firm.

He walked them to the gates, signalling the patrol to let them through. The big wooden doors creaked open slowly. Joel sat in front of Ellie now, reins in hand. Faith followed behind them on her own horse close by.

Tommy watched them go, the hoofbeats starting slow against the snowed in road, fading little by little.

He hoped they’d find what they were looking for. He hoped the Fireflies would be there. That it wouldn’t all be for nothing.

But more than anything — he hoped he’d see them again in a few weeks.

He really, really did.

(…)

Being back outside, travelling together, felt good. More than good. It was great.

The land stretched ahead, endless and unknown. Still full of dangers, but they knew they could face them. Together

Faith tugged her coat tighter, but there was a lightness in her chest that hadn’t been there in a long time. There was something about the rhythm of hooves on dirt, the familiar sound of Joel’s boots hitting the ground whenever they took a break, and Ellie’s non-stop commentary that made things feel right again.

Ellie was cracking jokes. Bad ones — groan-worthy puns and made-up horse names that made Faith shake her head and Joel let out tired little grunts that weren’t quite disapproval. In fact, Joel was… smiling. Not a big smile, not the kind that showed teeth, but his eyes crinkled sometimes, and he didn’t bother hiding it anymore.

It wasn’t just about being back on the road again, no. It was probably because… They’d stuck together. Jackson had been kind of a trial for that. And they’d all proven to be loyal to each other. Even Joel, in the end.

He stayed with them.

Faith rode beside Joel, letting Ellie do most of the talking, just soaking in the warmth of their banter.

At one point, Ellie reached out and poked Joel’s arm. “Hey. Think you’ll ever teach me how to shoot properly now? Faith’s already bragging sometimes about how she could hit a raindrop in a thunderstorm.”

Faith gave an innocent shrug, smirking. “I mean, if it’s true, it’s not bragging.”

Joel glanced back at both of them from over his shoulder, raising a brow. “Oh yeah? Think you can beat Faith, huh?”

Ellie grinned wide. “I’m willing to try.”

Joel’s lips twitched. “Alright then,” he muttered, adjusting the rifle slung over his shoulder. “Next break, we’ll see what you got.”

Faith turned toward Ellie, laughing. “You’re gonna lose.”

“Shut up,” Ellie snorted, but she was smiling too. “I’m gonna wipe the floor with you.”

Not long after, they let the horses rest and set up a few makeshift targets —They paced out about a hundred feet, Joel watching as the girls took position.

Faith went first, leaning into a fallen log with steady hands and narrowed eyes. She took a slow breath, holding her rifle with firmness but still being gentle, aimed down the sight, and fired.

The bullet hit just left of centre.

She lowered the rifle and turned to Ellie with a grin. “Try beating that.”

Ellie crouched down where Faith had been, stretching her fingers before gripping Joel’s rifle. “Yeah, yeah — we get it, you’re good at shootin’ stuff,” she muttered. “Now let a natural handle this.”

Joel chuckled under his breath, arms crossed as he watched them.

Ellie crouched down and grabbed the rifle with purpose… but after a few seconds of fumbling, it was clear she had no idea how to actually hold it in that position.

“Wait—how the hell am I supposed to balance this thing?” she asked, shifting her elbow awkwardly and nearly tipping the barrel skyward. “Do I just—what—hug it?”

Faith bit back a laugh and walked over, nudging Ellie’s elbow gently. “Here,” she said, crouching beside her. “Tuck this in against your shoulder—tight. You’ll want your eyes here. And your hand… yeah, right there.”

Ellie adjusted, squinting down the sight with exaggerated focus. “Alright. This is it. Prepare to be amazed.”

She took a huge, dramatic inhale like she was about to dive underwater… and pulled the trigger.

The shot rang out, but Joel saw with his binoculars that the target she was aiming at remained untouched except for the hole Faith had put in it.

“Uh-huh,” Faith said, grinning. “Real natural.”

“Shut it,” Ellie mumbled, already lining up again.

She fired again. Missed again.

“Dammit,” she hissed.

Another shot. Another miss.

Joel finally knelt down, handing Faith his field glasses while resting one hand on Ellie’s back and the other adjusting the rifle ever so slightly.

“Alright,” he said quietly. “You’re jerkin’ the trigger. That’s throwin’ your aim.”

“I’m not jerking it—”

“You are,” Faith and Joel both said at the same time.

Joel smirked and nodded at the sight. “You gotta breathe steady. Relax your shoulder. Let the shot come when you’re ready. Don’t rush it.”

Ellie rolled her eyes but listened, shifting her weight slightly under his guidance.

She shot again. The bullet hit a puddle of melting snow.

“You’re flinchin’” said Joel, amused.

“The target’s too small!” complained Ellie.

Joel shook his head. “I made it bigger than I should’ve. Come on, eject the cartridge.” Ellie did as he told her, insisting firmly that she wasn’t flinching.

“The rifle just sucks,” she lamented, her shoulders slumping.

“ – Okay, give it,” Joel took the rifle back, and Ellie stood back up next to Faith, who handed her the binoculars now to watch.

“It doesn’t aim right,” added Ellie. “You’ll see!”

“Sure,” Joel got in position, holding the rifle with expertise. “Okay, it’s a deep breath in, slow breath out. You have to squeeze the trigger like you love it,” Ellie made a ‘hmmm’ noise, and Faith didn’t even bother hiding her giggle. “Gentle, steady… Nice and slow…”

Ellie nearly burst out laughing, as did Faith when she heard her, “You’re gonna shoot this thing or get it pregnant?”

Joel gave her a look that made both girls laugh more, before turning back to the rifle with a small smile himself.

“It doesn’t gonna work it doesn’t aim right!”

Joel fired once.

Ellie’s mouth dropped.

Faith didn’t need the field glasses to see that the bullet hat hit the target. Right in the middle, in the ‘h’ of the word ‘Asshole’ they had written on it.

“You dick!” exclaimed Ellie.

Joel just shrugged smugly.

“You’ve got my respects,” said Faith, nodding, impressed. “Not bad for an old man.”

“Now don’t push it, young lady.”

(…)

They rode until the sky began to shift, dark velvet slowly giving way to streaks of pale blue and orange. At dawn, they set up camp near a lake, the glassy surface reflecting the quiet morning light. The air was crisp, with mist curling off the water like smoke.

Faith offered to take first watch, settling herself near a log with her rifle across her knees. She knew Joel wouldn’t wake her for second watch if he went first—he’d sit through the whole night to spare her, and she couldn’t let that happen again.

“So the way they ran stuff in Jackson…” Ellie asked, her arms looped loosely around Joel’s waist as they rode in the early morning, “Was that how things used to be? Y’know, before all this?”

Joel grunted thoughtfully. “No. The country was too big for that. Back then there were basically two main ways of lookin’ at things. Some people wanted to own everything… and some people didn’t want anyone to own anything at all.”

Faith, riding next to them, furrowed her brow. “So the ones who didn’t want anyone to own anything… those were the communists?”

“Kind of,” Joel nodded. “It’s called collective ownership. Everyone shares what they’ve got, more or less. Wasn’t real popular back then.”

Faith tilted her head. “Which one were you?”

“Neither,” he said plainly. “I just did my job.”

Ellie glanced up at him. “Which was building, right?”

Joel nodded once. “That’s right.”

“You built stuff?” Faith asked, a flicker of curiosity in her voice. “Like what?”

“Houses, stores, fences… That kinda thing,” he replied. He caught her small smile as she muttered ‘cool’ under her breath.

“We were called contractors.”

Ellie snorted. “Sounds like a comic book character.”

Joel craned his neck slightly to glance back. “What?”

“You know,” she said in a dramatic, gravelly voice, “The Contractor. Saving the post-apocalyptic world one support beam at a time.”

Faith burst out laughing, and even Joel couldn’t help but chuckle, shaking his head.

“Sounds pretty cool,” Ellie added, letting her cheek rest lightly against his back, her voice softer now.

Joel smiled—really smiled—at that. A rare, warm thing that creased his eyes.

“Yeah,” he murmured. “We were cool. Everybody loved contractors.”

(…)

They were riding through open plains now—dry grass occasionally rippling in the wind through the snow, the mountains distant in the haze behind them. The sky stretched wide and pale overhead, clouds moving slow and quiet. Conversation came and went in waves, mostly quiet stretches broken by bursts of chatter or dry commentary from Ellie, and also from Faith.

Joel noticed it more now—the way she smiled easier, spoke more freely. There was something lighter in the way she carried herself, even as she guided her horse with the same practiced steadiness. It was a stark contrast to how she’d been in the beginning: all clenched fists and sharp edges, brittle with silence. Back then, everything in her had been locked down tight. Now… she was letting them in.

At one point, Faith nudged her horse a little closer to his and Ellie’s. She leaned forward slightly, glancing over at him with something warm in her eyes.

“So,” she started, voice light, “Ellie and I went to the movies in Jackson. Y’know, the night we stayed there.”

Joel turned his head, a bit surprised. “That right?”

“Yeah. You remember that time we were out hunting and we talked about going to the movies and museums?”

Ellie huffed, faking offence. “See what I meant? You bond when you go hunting without me.”

Joel rolled his eyes and he nodded at Faith, the memory tugging at something in his chest. It had been light conversation. Nothing serious. Something different, for once. Something easy. “I remember.”

“So now I can say I’ve finally been to the movies. At least, the closest version to it you can get now.” Faith smiled faintly, the corners of her mouth curling up with something almost shy. “It wasn’t bad. The movie was about a mom with her daughter and a man moving into one of the rooms of their apartment because he rented it or something like that. I didn't get half of it, but I guess it was decent enough.”

Joel smirked. “You’re not supposed to get those movies. Just feel confused and fancy and happy when they get together in the end.”

Faith let out a soft laugh. “Yeah, well, didn’t get to see the ending. The screen was huge, though. The chairs were all creaky. I heard some people laughing even when I didn’t know why. It felt—” She paused, brow furrowing for a second, as if looking for the right word. “—weird. But good-weird. Like… like something that used to belong to the world. Something people were always supposed to do.”

Joel just looked at her for a moment—really looked. Her cheeks were flushed from the cold and the ride, her eyes brighter than they used to be. There was a kind of wonder in her voice, that rare glint of childlike amazement he hadn’t expected to ever hear from her.

It made something ache in him in the best way.

“Would’ve been cooler if you’d been there,” she added after a second, Ellie humming in agreement. “Could’ve explained the fancy parts.”

He gave a soft chuckle under his breath, glancing ahead. “Maybe next time.”

“Did you like going to the movies?” Ellie asked him, perking up, “Before the outbreak and stuff.”

“Sometimes, yeah,” he shrugged. “Didn’t have much time for it, but I watched movies at home.”

“What was your favourite one?”

Joel let out a long, theatrical sigh, like the question was a burden too heavy to bear. But there was a subtle shift in his expression—a flicker of something almost fond beneath the usual gruffness. “You really wanna know? You won’t even know which one it is.”

“Uh, yeah,” Ellie said, nudging his side. “Explain it, then.”

Joel glanced between the two of them, then ahead again, like he needed a second to decide whether it was worth indulging them.

“There was this one,” he said eventually. “Called Curtis and Viper 2: Dawn of the Cobra.”

Ellie let out a bark of laughter. “That sounds so fake.”

“It was very real,” Joel said, deadpan. “And very stupid.”

Faith snorted. “Okay, now I need details.”

Joel nodded, clearly warming to the telling now, even if his voice stayed even. “It was an action movie. There were four of them, actually. They were… Really bad, honestly. But also good. The kind that got you sitting through it for two hours straight eating popcorn with the need to see what’s gonna happen next, knowing it would probably be something stupid but that would look really cool with explosions and great music playing in the background.”

“Fuck,” Ellie breathed, “I’ve got to see them now. All four of them”.

“First we’d have to find some dvd’s and a dvd player… and a tv that’s not broken,” he warned. “Besides, they were considered to be kind of shitty, back in the day. Summer blockbusters to make cash. But it had everything you needed. Good guys, bad guys, explosions, cheesy one-liners. What more could you want?”

“We haven’t seen enough movies to know if they’re really good or bad,” Faith said, laughing. “To us they’ll probably be masterpieces.”

The girls laughed, and Joel found himself smiling again before he could help it.

(…)

They set up camp near a stream one night. Ellie had fallen asleep quickly, bundled in her sleeping bag with her arms tucked under her head, sleeping on her stomach. Joel sat by the fire, poking the embers with a stick. Faith joined him after a while, hugging her coat closer.

The silence between them was comfortable now. Familiar.

Joel cleared his throat.

“I been meanin’ to say…” he hesitated, glancing at Faith, then back at the fire. “I’m sorry. For what I said that night, before we left. About how you don’t know what loss is.”

Faith looked at him, her face unreadable for a moment. His apology had caught her off guard, to be honest.

“You were hurt,” she said finally. “I get that.”

“I was wrong. You’ve told me about your family yourself, and… I’m sorry, that’s all.”

Faith drew in a slow breath, then nodded. “It’s okay,” she said softly. “I’m sorry too, if it counts. For not… staying calm, and all.”

“You’re only sixteen,” he breathed out a quiet laugh. “And you already got more self-control and maturity than most teenagers I’ve met.”

He cast a glance over to Ellie’s sleeping form and added, dry, “Present company included, obviously.”

Faith let out a short laugh, muffling it into her sleeve. “Obviously.”

Joel offered the smallest of smirks, but it faded a bit as his gaze returned to the fire. His voice lowered. “Still. I was outta line.”

Faith shifted beside him, her hands tucked into her sleeves. There was a beat of silence before she spoke again—quieter now, like the words needed to be eased into the open.

“I don’t talk much about it,” she said. “The reason why you wanting to leave us behind hit so close to home… I’ve already told Ellie. I think I can trust you with it, too.”

Joel waited. Listening. Giving her time to start when she was ready.

“My dad,” she mumbled, still kind of unsure, “he was the one who taught me how to hunt, remember? He used to take me out early, before the sun came up. Said the world was quieter then. And when we’d camp overnight, he’d point out constellations while we were lying under the sky. He only did that with me. Dahlia always fell asleep once her head hit her pillow. So it became our thing. Just… him and me.”

Joel stayed still, just breathing, listening intently.

“When my mom died… something in him broke. He was still there, but not all the way, you know? Not the same.” Her voice caught slightly. “And then Dahlia got infected.” She paused. Joel’s heart sank. He already knew where this was going. “When my dad—” She stopped, bit the inside of her cheek. “When he did what he had to do... I think part of him disappeared when he did it, but he couldn’t let her become something like the infected. Not her.”

Joel’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t speak. Didn’t interrupt.

“My dad couldn’t live with it,” she went on, voice quieter than before. “Losing my mom hollowed him out, but losing Dahlia that way… it ended him.” Joel closed his eyes for a brief second, breathing slow through his nose. “So yeah,” she said, finally meeting his eyes. “He thought I’d be better off without him, so he took a bullet and… I’ve been alone since then.”

Joel met her gaze, and he saw it all—grief lived-in, worn smooth by time but still heavy. She didn’t wear it like a badge, didn’t weaponize it. She just carried it, the way people like them had to.

He gave a small nod, solemn and honest. “Thank you. For tellin’ me.”

Faith gave a tiny shrug, like it didn’t matter—but he knew it did.

Then, after a beat of silence, she leaned against his shoulder just briefly—enough to say I forgive you, staying there for a while, letting the silence wrap around them like a warm blanket.

(…)

They rode across a flat stretch of prairie the next afternoon, the wind kicking up dust in lazy spirals. The snow had thinned here, leaving behind patches of dry grass and earth. Faith kept a steady pace, the horse’s hooves crunching softly beneath them. Ellie sat behind her this time, arms wrapped loosely around her waist, chin resting on Faith’s shoulder.

“So, wait,” Ellie piped up suddenly, voice half-baffled, half-amused. “You guys really used to pay money to do laundry? Like, you'd go to a building just to wash your clothes?”

Joel, riding next to them, glanced at her with a faint smirk. “Yeah. Laundromats. Rows of washing machines. You'd feed quarters into 'em.”

“That's so dumb,” Ellie said. “What if someone just took your stuff?”

“They usually didn’t.”

“That's even dumber.”

Faith let out a laugh, shifting slightly in the saddle. “The other night she asked me if I knew if toothpaste really used to come in thirty different flavours, as if I would know.”

Joel chuckled. “It did. There were many, too many. Cinnamon, mint, bubblegum...”

“Hold up,” Ellie said, sitting up straighter. “Bubblegum? As in candy? For brushing your teeth?”

Joel nodded. “Yup.”

“That’s disgusting.”

Ellie grinned. “I dunno, I kinda want to try it.”

Joel chuckled at that.

“You people lived like kings,” Ellie muttered. “Toothpaste flavours. Laundry machines. Freakin’ everything just ready for you.”

Joel tilted his head thoughtfully. “There were a lot of things like that, yeah. Like cereal that didn’t taste like dust. Or vending machines,” he gave a low laugh. “Vending machines that actually worked. You’d just put a coin in, press a button and get a soda.”

“Wild,” she said. “Now to get a soda from a vending machine I have to break the glass first.”

(…)

They’d stopped to rest the horses and stretch their legs. The sun hung behind the trees, casting long shadows across the clearing. Ellie was pacing through the dirt, bored energy radiating off her as she kicked a rock from foot to foot.

Joel, sitting on a half-rotted stump, watched her with a crooked smile. “You’re restless.”

“I’m educationally curious,” Ellie corrected, smirking.

Joel huffed a laugh, tilting his head. “Alright then, smartass. You ever heard of soccer?”

Ellie squinted at him. “Like… football?”

“The real kind,” he said, ignoring the teasing scoff Faith let out from where she was leaning against a tree.

“Wait, wait—” Faith cut in, frowning. “That’s the one where you can’t use your hands, right? Just your feet?”

Joel nodded. “That’s the one. Two teams. Big-ass field. One ball. No hands unless you’re the goalie.”

“A goalie,” Faith hummed. “Sounds cute.”

“That sounds stupid hard,” Ellie said, clearly intrigued despite herself.

“That’s what made it good,” Joel said with a shrug. “Took skill. Strategy. You had to think fast, move faster. People trained their whole lives for it.”

Faith crossed her arms, curious now. “So there were big games just about that? Like, for real?”

Joel hesitated for a half second, then nodded. “Yeah,” his smile faltered a bit, but he quickly recovered. “It was cool. Big crowds. A lot of cheering. People painted their faces and everything.”

“That sounds… kinda awesome,” Ellie muttered, kicking the rock again. “So wait, it was just a bunch of people chasing a ball?”

“Not just,” Joel said, his tone dipping into something fonder. “There was a rhythm to it. And when someone scored—man, whole stadiums would shake.”

Ellie crouched down, picking up the rock and tossing it between her hands. “Weird how people used to just… do stuff. For fun.”

Joel didn’t say anything at first, just looked past them toward the trees, his expression unreadable. When he finally spoke, it was quiet. “World was noisy back then. But not always in a bad way.”

Faith glanced at him, something thoughtful in her eyes.

“Alright, coach,” Ellie said, tossing the rock aside. “So how do you play this foot-ball? Teach me the ancient ways.”

Joel chuckled. “You’re gonna need a real ball first.”

“I’ll make one,” Ellie said confidently. “Outta socks or something.”

Faith snorted. “If you make it, you gotta play with me.”

“You’re on,” Ellie said, already plotting.

Joel leaned back slightly on the stump, shaking his head with a faint smile. “Let’s get some rest before you two start your careers.”

Faith folded her arms behind her head. “If the world ever gets normal again, I’m putting Ellie in a football league.”

“Hell yeah,” Ellie said, grinning. “And I’m gonna score every goal.”

Joel gave a quiet, amused grunt. “You’ve got the confidence for it, at least.”

(…)

They rode through the snow in a slow rhythm, hooves muffled by the soft powder underfoot. The sky had dulled to a pale grey, the sun a faint white disc. Trees flanked both sides of the trail, bare branches etched with frost.

“So,” Ellie said, voice muffled slightly by her scarf. “If soccer is the one with no hands… then what the hell is football?”

They’d been discussing soccer rules the whole day. Faith wasn’t much interested, to be completely honest, but seeing Joel openly talking about something from the past without bitterness in his voice still made her listen.

“You mean the American kind?” Joel called back. “Completely different game. Less feet, more… tackling.”

Faith raised an eyebrow. “That sounds aggressive.”

Joel gave a low chuckle. “It was. You had a ball shaped like an egg, kind of. You throw it more than you kick it.”

“Okay, but why call it football, then?” Ellie asked.

“Ask whoever named it. I didn’t make the rules.”

“You just break ’em,” Ellie muttered under her breath, grinning.

Joel caught that but let it slide. “Game starts with one team kicking the ball to the other. That team’s goal is to move the ball down the field in chunks—ten yards at a time.”

Faith squinted through the snow. “Yards?”

“Like… three feet,” Joel offered. “More or less.”

“I barely know what a foot is,” Faith said dryly. “But okay. Ten of those.”

Joel smirked. “You get four chances—called downs—to move those ten yards. If you make it, it resets to first down and you keep going.”

“And if you don’t?” Ellie asked.

Joel pointed ahead with a gloved hand. “Then you turn the ball over to the other team. It’s called a turnover.”

“So it’s like… risk and reward. You keep going or give it up.”

“Exactly. Unless you’re close enough to kick it through the goalposts—then you go for a field goal.”

Ellie made a face. “So basically just moving in one direction the whole time.”

Joel nodded. “Basically. But violent.”

Ellie laughed. “Oh. Well. There’s that.”

Below them, cracked pavement peeked through a blanket of snow. A battered metal sign stood lonely ahead of them.

Faith pointed. “There, look.”

“I-25,” Joel confirmed, pulling up on the reins and letting his horse slow. “How ’bout that? Made it in five days.”

He sounded optimistic, even a little proud.

“Easy days,” mentioned Ellie. “I don’t know what Tommy was so afraid of.”

“Still time to find out.”

“Still time to find out,” Ellie did an impression of Joel’s voice, poorly. He faced her, unamused, and she smiled at him, adding “The Contractor” in a theatrical tone now.

They didn’t take too long to reach the University of Eastern Colorado. As every other building nowadays, it looked and actually was abandoned. Around campus the snow had melted a bit more, only a few white patches here and there.

At the entrance of college was a small dirty sign announcing the university.

“Home of the bighorns,” read Ellie.

“What does that mean?”

“Team mascot,” explained Joel, holding the reins with one hand and his rifle now with the other. “It’s a kind of sheep.”

Ellie hummed, “See? One step closer to your dream. Don’t see any Fireflies, though.”

“They’re probably in the middle,” Joel said. “Safer.”

“Let’s go then.”

Faith had never seen anything like it.

She’d been in big buildings before—government offices, shelters, repurposed old malls—but nothing like this. The university loomed ahead of them, terracotta-colored and sprawling. Its main entrance was wide and grand, flanked by two tower-like structures that gave the whole place the air of a castle torn straight from the pages of a fairytale. For a moment, Faith half-expected ivy to grow from the bricks and for banners to flutter in the wind.

Inside the campus gates, the atmosphere shifted. More buildings appeared, lower and less ornate, all connected by paved paths. Benches lined the walkways, and faded signs pointed in every direction—“Science Hall,” “Library,” “Cafeteria,” “East Lecture Wing.” It looked like a small city designed just for learning.

Ellie’s voice broke the quiet. “So these places… people would, like, live here? And go to classes and stuff?”

“Yup,” Joel said, his voice echoing a little in the open space.

“Even though they were adults?”

Joel gave a half-smile. “Sort of adults. I think it was just as much about partying and findin’ themselves as anythin’ else. Finding out what they wanted to do with their lives.”

Faith glanced at him. “You didn’t go to college?”

He shook his head once. “Nah. Didn’t have the time. Or the money.”

Ellie looked around again, eyes taking in the old brick buildings and wide lawns, some blanketed in snow. “What they wanted to do with their lives…” she echoed quietly. “That sounds incredibly comfortable.”

For a few steps, they walked in silence. Then Faith spoke again:

“I wonder if my mom studied in a college like this one,” Joel looked at her from his horse and Ellie rested her chin on Faith’s shoulder, listening too. “It’s like… Now being here, I can picture her, before everything. Younger. Sitting in a classroom with a notebook. Running experiments in a lab. Eating lunch on one of these benches. But even if I can picture it… It seems so out of place now. The normalcy.”

Ellie glanced over at her. “She probably did all of that. And also the partyin’ Joel mentioned.”

Faith gave a faint nod, smiling softly. “It’s strange. For a second, I can almost see it.”

They kept on riding through campus, looking for any signs of the Fireflies.

“So I’ve been thinkin’,” started Joel, suddenly. “I don’t want a sheep ranch, actually. I mean, if the deal is I can do anything?”

Ellie nodded behind Faith. “I still want to go to the moon, though. On a beach next to a sheep ranch on the moon, to be specific.”

“We’ll see what we can do about that,” he laughed under his breath. “Well, when I was a kid… I wanted to be a singer.”

“Shut up!” Ellie laughed.

“Why is that funny?”

“It’s not,” said Faith, nudging Ellie’s foot with her own, trying to get her to stop giggling. “Okay, maybe a bit.”

“You gotta sing something now.”

“No,” he shook his head, already regretting saying it out loud.

“Come on, man, we’re not gonna laugh.”

“You’re already laughin’” he retorted.

Yeah, okay, true. He had made a point there.

“You’re singing for us later,” said Faith. “After Ellie saves the world, you’ll give us a concert.”

“Exactly. I’m gonna save the fuckin’ world, man. It’s the least you can do for me. For us.”

He accepted his defeat, nodding. “Fair enough.”

They reached a clearance, kind of like a worn down amphitheatre like structure, when they heard some animals making noise.

“Are those monkeys?” Ellie exclaimed, wiggling behind Faith to get a better look at’em.

She saw their long tails, big mouths and grey fur before they ran away after seeing the trio approaching them.

“Must be from the old labs,” thought Joel, out loud. “First time seeing a monkey?”

“First time seeing a monkey,” confirmed Ellie.

Their horses moved forward and they came across another pole sign. On one of them, the one that pointed where to go to the ‘biomedical sciences building’, was a yellow symbol painted with spray paint.

“Look it,” Joel nodded towards it, and Ellie wiggled behind Faith looking ahead.

“What’s that?” asked Faith.

“The symbol of the Fireflies,” answered Ellie, nodding to herself. “Here we go.”

They knew which building they had to go to once they saw the guard stations built around it. There were no guards, though.

“Should I take my gun out?”

Joel looked at Ellie, who was already looking at him with her eyebrows raised. He nodded.

“Yeah.”

They tied up the horses’ reins on a tree, looking around for any other sign of the Fireflies. It seemed like no one was there, really.

Both Joel and Faith took off their gloves to get a better grip on their weapons, as did Ellie to carry her gun better.

“You ready?” Faith looked at the girl, checking her over quickly with her eyes.

“Yeah,” she still held onto her gun nervously, though. Faith was feeling uneasy too, to be honest, as did Joel.

“Let’s go inside.”

The Fireflies’ symbol was painted all around, over the doors and trash cans and also the windows that weren’t smashed down.

The lobby was a mess, with papers strewn everywhere and furniture broken and looted. There were overturned hospital stretchers, as well as trays of medical and laboratory supplies, some of which were still quite intact.

“There were definitely doctors here,” mumbled Ellie, looking at some pipette tips on a tray. Next to it was a folder that Faith opened, finding a notebook paper on top.

“Looks like a list,” she said. Joel came over to glance it, and nodded.

“This is a packing list,” he read it through quickly: medical stuff, ammo, food… at the top it said Colorado, and next to it, Salk Lake City. “It’s somethin’ you make before moving.”

“So they just left?”

The sound of something moving on one of the floors above startled them.

“Maybe not all of them.”

Upstairs it was the same mess: chairs knocked over in the hallway, some medical machines, broken blinds on the windows… Joel went up first, followed by Faith, covering Ellie, the three of them moving silently following the sounds.

They tracked it down to an old lab. The only thing between them and whatever was making that noise, were two double doors.

Joel turned to the girls, signalling to wait there. They listened, and his hand slowly turned the handle. The door creaked a bit, making him grimace, and he took a glimpse inside.

A monkey.

It was a fucking monkey.

Three of them, actually.

They screamed at Joel and they jumped out of the broken windows back outside, away from them.

“Well,” Joel said, as the three of them got inside the room. “At least it ain’t Clickers.”

“Yeah but no Fireflies either,” Ellie huffed, disappointed. “Maybe in all that research, they turned into fuckin’ monkeys.”

“Firefly monkeys,” Faith hummed, walking around the room. “Never heard that one, before.”

On a cork board there was a map of the country, with multi-coloured pins forming imaginary lines from north to south and from east to west.

There was a green pin approximately where they were now, in Colorado. Following the line they formed, and also considering what they had read on the packing list downstairs, there was one place where the Fireflies could be: Salt Lake City.

“Maybe they wanted to get ahead of the weather,” wondered Joel.

“Better facilities?” Faith offered.

“I don’t know.”

That’s when they heard the voices. Not indistinguishable sounds like a few minutes ago, but actual human voices, coming from outside through the broken windows.

Faith and Ellie shared a look with Joel and they quickly approached the wall to take a peek outside, guns at the ready.

They saw four men. Armed.

They didn’t seem like Fireflies at all.

Fuck.

“Out the back,” hurried Joel, running to the door, the girls following behind.

Outside, their horses were still there, seemingly unharmed. The men had probably entered the building through the lobby, like they had too.

Joel led them kneeling behind guard stations to check if there wasn’t anyone. When they reached the last guard station before having to head to the horses without coverage, Joel turned to look at the girls:

“Ready?”

They both nodded.

Heart pounding, Faith untied the horses. Joel helped Ellie up into the saddle, slinging his rifle back. He was reaching for Faith when her and Ellie’s eyes went wide.

“Joel!”

He spun, just barely ducking the baseball bat swinging at his head. Faith yanked the horses back, putting herself and Ellie out of reach as Joel tackled the attacker into a nearby tree. The bat cracked against the bark and splintered in half.

Ellie’s hands trembled around her pistol. Faith’s rifle was up, but neither of them could risk a shot—not while Joel was locked in the struggle.

Joel fought like hell. A headbutt. An arm around the man’s throat. A sickening crunch, and the man dropped, dead.

His eyes quickly abandoned the corpse, though, checking over the girls with urgency instead, breathing heavily.

They were fine.

They were okay.

So why did they look so terrified?

He followed their gaze.

Down to himself.

He felt it then, the adrenaline wearing off and the sharp pain sinking it.

The man who had attacked him had managed to stab him with the broken handle of the baseball bat. He hadn't even noticed.

Joel’s hand wrapped around it, pure instinct taking over as he pulled the wooden stick out of his abdomen.

“Don’t!” Faith tried to stop him, but it was too late. The baseball handle, a terribly sharp nail point at its end now red with his blood, which started to gush out of his wound the moment he had put the handle out.

Faith rushed to Joel, holding him up as he began to falter in his step. Ellie screamed then:

“Faith!”

She was pointing ahead of them, to the buildings. Faith quickly glanced over, seeing the other three men they’d spotted before now running at them.

“Get on the horse!” Ellie rushed.

“Come on,” Faith helped Joel forward, urging him up. “On the horse, Joel, come on!”

He cried out in pain as Ellie helped pull him up behind her. Faith scrambled onto her own mount.

“Go! GO!”

They kicked the horses hard. The animals bolted just as the men reached them. Bullets rang out—Ellie fired wildly behind them, screaming, and Faith joined her, covering their escape as best she could from the saddle.

“You motherfuckers!”

They didn’t look back.

They left the University of Eastern Colorado behind, galloping into the cold, open world again.

(…)

They didn’t stop.

They rode in silence through a snow-covered stretch of abandoned railway. The horses moved slowly now, worn out. Both Faith and Ellie were still shaken up. Ellie clung tightly to Joel, who was slumped in front of her, pressing a hand against his wound.

He was getting more and more pale every passing second as the adrenaline from the fighting and fleeing began to wear off completely.

“Joel?” Faith tried to talk to him, nudging her horse closer as she still gripped her gun in fear someone else would show up. “Joel?”

Nothing.

Then, his body swayed.

One second he was up on the horse with Ellie, the next he was falling to the side, his limp body hitting the ground hard as he kept bleeding out.

“JOEL!”

“Shit – no, no, NO –!”

The girls dismounted as fast as they could, kneeling next to the man with fear in their eyes.

“Joel!”

His wound was spilling blood, a lot of it. Probably too much.

“Shit, shit, shit!”

Ellie tried to make him press his hands over his stomach, on the wound, but he wasn’t responding.

“Joel, open your eyes,” Faith grabbed his face between her hands, dropping her gun on the snow, trying to shake his head without hurting him, although she was getting more nervous and scared every passing second. “Joel!”

“Joel, you gotta get up!” Ellie urged him, pressing with her own hands against his wound, her fingers soaking red now. “Joel! Joel!”

He didn’t answer. His eyes remained shut, his mouth slightly open.

“We can’t fucking do this without you,” muttered Ellie, just above a whisper, tears starting to spill from her eyes. Faith glanced at her, tears running down her cheeks now too. “I don’t know where the fuck I’m going, what the fuck I’m gonna do… We need you.”

“Please,” Faith said, almost sobbing. “Joel, please. Please.”

But no answer came to their pleads.

Taglist: @kitdjarin1@christinamadsen@abtjudex@hongjoong-titties@cokoladasljesnjakom @puppi-sonnenschein

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Jill Valentine in Resident Evil 5 (2009)

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Resident Evil HD Remaster (2015)

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"Requiem for the dead. Nightmare for the living." Resident Evil Requiem is the highly anticipated ninth title in the mainline Resident Evil series. Prepare to escape death in a heart-stopping experience that will chill you to your core. RESIDENT EVIL : R e q u i e m (27.2.2026)

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SINNERS 2025, dir. Ryan Coogler

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i'm going to become one of the most annoying people you've ever met in feb 2026

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Kaider Wedding Portrait version two~ (version one)