Riona (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rionaleonhart) wrote2020-07-08 02:26 pm
rionaleonhart) wrote2020-07-08 02:26 pm
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Fanfiction: If Nowhere Else (The Last of Us)
Another fic for The Last of Us, Part II! This one's an alternate ending.
Title: If Nowhere Else
Fandom: The Last of Us, Part II
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 3,200
Summary: Ellie's not sure exactly how she ends up travelling with Abby and Lev, after everything.
Ellie’s burned her bridges with Dina. Tommy’s probably not going to welcome her back to Jackson, either, after she had Abby and let her go.
She could lie, say she finished Abby off, but then she’ll just end up living under that shadow, waiting for her lie to catch up with her. Waiting for it to turn the people she cares about against her.
Is that what Joel was feeling, after Salt Lake?
Where does she go?
-
She winds up following Abby’s boat.
Abby keeps glancing back at her, staying aware. Doesn’t say anything.
They come in to land, eventually, and Ellie doesn’t ask where.
Abby lifts the kid out of the boat, carefully, keeping her eyes on Ellie. Seems to be struggling, a little, which is weird to see. Abby’s strong as hell, you can see it just by looking at her, Ellie’s felt those fists. But Ellie guesses they’re both fucked up, weak, after what they’ve been through.
Ellie might be dying. She’s still not sure.
“I could help you carry him,” Ellie offers.
Abby laughs, dry. “Why are you still here?”
Ellie shrugs. “Nowhere left to go.”
-
Abby carries the kid alone, in the end. Ellie trails silently after them.
They encounter infected at one point. Runners. Abby doesn’t have any weapons, she grabs the submachine gun out of Ellie’s holster, and between them they manage to clear them out.
Ellie doesn’t bother to ask for it back, afterwards. She has other guns. Probably not much ammo to be found for it, either, if they’re out of Rattler territory.
She wonders if Abby’s going to kill her, so she doesn’t have to worry about whether Ellie’s planning to do them harm. It’d make sense.
She’s done with this fight. If Abby decides to kill her, she guesses she’ll die.
It’s a long walk, and slow, but eventually they come to a hospital. Doesn’t look occupied, but the doors and windows on the ground floor are barricaded. If they’re lucky, maybe that means they won’t find infected inside.
There’s a second-floor window it looks like they might be able to get through. If they can get up on that truck...
Ellie helps Abby lift the kid up onto the roof of the truck, so they can get him inside. They don’t speak.
Abby disappears through the window with the kid, and Ellie clambers up after them. She winces, bites her tongue to keep herself from crying out; she thinks all this effort might have reopened the wound in her side, and she’s not sure how much blood she has left to lose.
-
Abby finds a room with four beds and a door that can be shut securely. She sets the kid down gently, gets to work shaking the dust off the sheets. Ellie watches for a moment, then goes to scout for infected or any humans they might be sharing the hospital with.
Place seems clean. That’s a relief. She doesn’t like the idea of trying to take something down quietly without her knife.
She guesses she’ll have to get used to it. Just another of the things it cost to get her fucking nowhere.
There’s a guitar in the paediatrics ward. Looks intact, all six strings. She’s not exactly in a guitar-playing mood right now, but she brings it back to the room, along with whatever supplies she was able to find.
She knocks before she opens the door. “It’s me.”
Seems best to announce herself before coming in. She knows that Abby can shoot a person dead in an instant if they surprise her.
(Fuck.)
The kid’s on one of the beds, sleeping or unconscious. Abby takes the supplies from Ellie, spreads them out on another bed, inspects them. Takes some saline and cloth and bandages and goes to treat the kid’s wounds.
Ellie sits down, peels off her blood-saturated shirt, takes a look at herself. She’s too exhausted and too physically fucked up to be selfconscious about it. Abby’s focused on the kid, anyway.
Yeah, her attempt at stitches hasn’t held.
She tries to clean the wound, breathing through her teeth. She can do this. She’s not sure what she’s living for, by this point, but she’s not going to die.
Time kind of goes strange. Just a haze of cleaning away blood and grit, and she just keeps finding more injuries, and she’s not sure how long she’s been sitting here, trying to clean herself up. She doesn’t feel clean. It’s hard to remember what being clean ever really felt like.
Fuck, her fingers are in agony, she’s going to have to try to do something about those as well...
And Abby touches Ellie’s shoulder, touches her arm, moves her hands aside to look at the wound in her side.
Ellie’s instincts tell her to fight. She doesn’t.
Abby goes through the supplies again, and crouches next to Ellie, and gets to work patching up the worst of it. She doesn’t say a word.
Ellie’s back in that theatre, Dina tending to her wounds. She can’t breathe. She tries to stay focused on Abby, tries not to blink, so she doesn’t forget where she is.
Abby’s bandaged herself up as well, shoulder and side and collar. Places Ellie sank her knife into. She’s not gentle, but she doesn’t seem to be trying to hurt Ellie, either.
“Those fingers will need a clean amputation,” Abby says at last. It’s the first thing she’s said since their brief exchange when they landed.
Honestly, Ellie had a feeling this was coming. “Do it.”
-
Ellie wakes with the kid holding a scalpel to her throat.
“How did you find us?” he demands.
“Look, kid,” Ellie says, carefully, “I’m not here to hurt you.”
“I won’t let you harm Abby,” he says.
“I’m not planning to hurt her either.” Although she can’t really blame him for reaching that conclusion. “I cut her down from the pillar on the beach. Technically, I actually saved your lives.”
She doesn’t know if he remembers what happened after that. He seemed pretty out of it, and she’s not sure when he passed out, exactly. Probably best not to bring it up.
“You think I’d sleep in the same room as you if my plan was to kill you?” Ellie asks.
The kid hesitates. Draws the scalpel away slightly, although he doesn’t quite lower it.
“Lev?”
The kid – Lev? – looks sharply in the direction of the voice, and so does Ellie. Abby’s in the doorway, staring at him. Ellie guesses she must have chosen a bad moment to go to the bathroom.
“You woke up,” Abby says, softly. She takes in the scene, makes a gesture: touches her hand to her throat, then moves it away.
Lev lowers the scalpel. He looks more relieved than Ellie feels. Ellie takes the opportunity to sit up.
“How are you feeling?” Abby asks.
“Fine,” Lev says. “What is she doing here?”
“I don’t know.” Abby scratches her bandaged shoulder, and Ellie’s fingers twitch at the memory of her knife sinking into the flesh. “I think we might have a kind of truce.”
Lev nods. “Like the Seraphites and the Wolves.”
“Hopefully not exactly like that,” Abby says.
Do they have a truce? Ellie’s not sure what to call it.
“Is this the Firefly island?” Lev asks.
Abby looks at Ellie.
“No,” she says. Speaking to Lev, eyes still on Ellie. “We’re just further down the coast.”
“You’re looking for Fireflies?” Ellie asks.
“It might not even be real,” Abby says. “I thought we had a lead. But the Rattlers jumped us right after.”
“Are we still going to check?” Lev asks.
Abby hasn’t taken her eyes off Ellie.
“I won’t hurt them, if you find them,” Ellie says. “Not if they don’t try to hurt me first.”
“Can’t promise they won’t recognise you,” Abby says. “If there’s someone there with the medical knowledge, they might have ideas about a...” It seems like it’s hard for her to say it. “A vaccine.”
“If there’s someone there with the medical knowledge, they can have me,” Ellie says.
Abby makes a choking noise, covers her mouth with her hand. For a moment it looks like she’s about to throw up.
“Abby?” Lev asks, alarmed.
“No,” Abby says. “You’re alive. It’s cost too much.”
-
Abby’s said they’re staying here until Lev’s got his strength back, although Ellie privately wonders whether she’s hoping Ellie will get bored and wander off in the meantime. Maybe she doesn’t want Ellie to follow them, find out where the Fireflies are.
They all need a lot of sleep at the moment; they’ve all got a lot of damage to recover from. Ellie offers to keep watch while Lev and Abby rest.
Abby doesn’t refuse the offer, exactly, but she doesn’t go to sleep. She stays just as awake as Ellie, keeping watch over Lev.
Turns out it’s easy to see the difference between Lev when he’s sleeping and Lev when he’s unconscious. Lev twitches in his sleep, shifts, makes tiny restless noises. Nightmares, maybe. Seems like anyone who grew up in that cult would have a lot of material for them.
“How did you end up with him?” Ellie asks, with a glance at Abby. “Thought the Wolves hated the Scars.”
“Yeah, well, that’s one thing the Scars and I have in common.”
She fell out with the Wolves? It’d explain why she ended up two states south of Seattle. “What happened?”
Abby shrugs. “He and his sister saved my life. I had to return the favour. I mean, I tried to.”
Well, Lev’s still alive. Probably best not to ask about the sister.
“Turns out saving people feels better than killing them,” Abby says. “But it really pisses people off if you save the wrong ones.”
Ellie’s pretty sure sparing Abby felt worse than killing her would have. If she’d killed her, at least she could have told herself she’d accomplished something. Sparing her... it meant it was all for nothing. Jesse, Nora, Tommy’s injury, every Wolf and Scar and dog she put a knife through, leaving Dina and JJ behind...
But saving her—
Saving her was a different thing, right? Abby and Lev were strung up on pillars, they were going to die there. Ellie let them down.
It’s not like it felt amazing. She hasn’t really felt good since she left the farm, maybe before that. But it felt better than that fight in the surf, at least. She almost went straight for the other boat, she almost just let them go. She’d gone there to kill Abby, but for a moment it had almost felt like saving her was enough.
It hadn’t really hit her before. She’s here, talking to someone who wouldn’t be alive if she hadn’t been on that beach.
And it’s fucking Abby.
-
It’s a couple hours of silence before Ellie finds it in herself to say what she needs to.
“The guy you shot, in the theatre,” Ellie says, sitting on the edge of her bed. Keeping it quiet, so she won’t wake Lev.
“Which one?” Abby asks.
Ellie pauses. “The guy you shot dead. When he was coming through the door.” With me.
Abby looks up from cleaning the submachine gun. “The other one survived?”
She shot to kill. She wouldn’t know. Somehow, it’d slipped Ellie’s mind. “Yeah. His leg’s fucked up, he can’t move it. But yeah, he’s alive.” Pause. “He’s back with his wife.”
Abby goes back to the gun. It’s a moment before she speaks. “That’s good.”
Does she mean it? Ellie tries to think of how she’d feel, if it turned out one of the people she attacked to get to Abby pulled through.
She has to stop thinking about it; it’s making her feel sick. Abby means it.
“The one you killed,” Ellie says. “His name was Jesse. He...”
She forces a swallow. She hates talking about the people they’ve lost.
(The people she’s lost. She can’t keep thinking they, like she’s still with Dina, like she’ll ever be anything other than alone.)
“He was a really good friend,” she says. “Like, he took himself too seriously sometimes, he kept thinking he had to be some kind of responsible parent ’cause he was, like, two years older. But, uh, he was reliable. Funny. He cared.” They’re half her own words, half Dina’s. “He was the first person I really got to know at Jackson.”
Abby looks directly at her. Her expression is unreadable, but Ellie can see a tremor in the gun she’s holding. “Why are you telling me this?”
Ellie hesitates. “I don’t know.”
“He was a guy with a gun,” Abby says. “I shot him before he could shoot me.”
“Yeah,” Ellie says. “I guess I just wanted you to know he was more than that.”
Abby sets the gun down. “I could tell you about some of the people you killed,” she says, low and challenging. “You wouldn’t enjoy it.”
“Probably not,” Ellie says. “But I...” She doesn’t really want to say this, but it’s something she’s been thinking. “But I think I need to hear it.”
From Abby’s soft inhale, that’s not the response she was expecting.
“I’m sorry about Jesse,” Abby says, after a moment.
“Yeah.” Ellie looks down, at her hands between her knees. If she hadn’t pushed the whole revenge thing... “Me too.”
-
Abby tells Ellie about the people she killed. Ellie sits there, her eyes closed, and listens.
After, Ellie sits out in the hospital corridor. Tries to sketch them from memory in her journal. Makes notes of the details Abby told her about them, the details that made them human.
Abby comes out eventually to tell her Lev’s woken up, offers her the next shift sleeping.
Ellie shakes her head. “It’s yours.”
Abby takes a look over her shoulder. Ellie fights the urge to hide the journal. It feels like Abby has the right to see this.
“That’s Owen,” Abby says, and there’s something Ellie hasn’t heard in her voice before: a strange, breathless vulnerability.
Ellie nods, although she’s not sure how well Abby will be able to see it from her angle.
“You’re a good artist,” Abby says, after a moment.
-
Ellie doesn’t know how to make the offer, so she doesn’t say anything. Just does another drawing of Owen, more careful, more detailed, and tears the page out of her journal, and leaves it next to Abby’s bed while she’s sleeping.
Lev watches her in silence.
Abby doesn’t say anything about it, but it’s gone when Ellie comes back from her second sweep for supplies.
-
Ellie manages to sleep in the night, a little. She wakes up, so apparently Abby hasn’t decided to kill her in her sleep yet. Not like she’s got someone she trusts to keep watch.
She heads out early to look for food in the neighbouring buildings. Doesn’t find much, but there’s a boarded-up place Abby might be able to boost her into.
She doesn’t really like the idea, but she guesses she should ask for help.
Both Abby and Lev are awake by the time she gets back to the hospital. She wonders if Abby thought she wouldn’t come back.
It’s crossed her mind. She just doesn’t know where she’d go. She’s in this weird, weird situation where Abby, of all people, is her only real connection to her old life.
Lev is looking intently at her.
“Something up?” Ellie asks.
“I heard you talking about Jesse yesterday,” Lev says.
Ellie had thought he was asleep. It feels kind of wrong to talk about murder in front of him, even though he was there, he saw it. Even though he can’t be much younger than Ellie was when she first killed someone.
“What happened to the woman I shot?” Lev asks. “You said she was pregnant.”
That’s not a question she was expecting. It might not be a question she’s ready to be asked.
“She’s fine,” Ellie says, after a moment. Her voice sounds strange. She swallows. “She had the kid. He’s beautiful, he’s... Jesse was the dad, and you—” She’s getting choked up. “You can really see it.”
Abby’s on the other side of the room, looking at her. She’ll never leave Lev alone in a room with Ellie.
Ellie doesn’t want Abby to see her cry. Not again, not after—
Ellie looks away and focuses and breathes herself steady.
“I’m glad to hear it,” Lev says.
He’s so formal. “You’re a weird kid, aren’t you?”
Lev frowns. “You’re a weird adult,” he says, defensively.
-
“About the pregnant girl,” Abby says, when she and Ellie are heading for the building Ellie spotted.
“I don’t want to talk about her,” Ellie says.
“Lev’s not the only one, you know,” Abby says. “I was glad to hear she made it out.” She pauses. “I’m glad I didn’t kill her.”
Ellie stares at nothing for a moment, seeing Dina. Still alive. She probably doesn’t want to see Ellie again. But she’s alive.
“Do you regret...” Ellie’s throat almost seems to close up, and she has to stop walking. It’s an effort to get the words out. “Do you regret killing Joel?”
Abby looks at her for a long, long moment.
“Yes,” she says at last.
Because she realised he didn’t deserve to die? Because Ellie ended up seeing it? Because killing him killed Abby’s friends?
(Ellie killed Abby’s friends. She can’t keep shifting the blame like that.)
Ellie decides not to ask. At least, that way, she can believe whatever makes it easier to keep this fragile alliance going.
At least, that way, she can believe whatever makes it easier to remember her own hands loosening around Abby’s neck.
-
Lev’s quietly humming a simple tune, it sounds like a kind of lullaby, and Ellie suddenly remembers the guitar. She takes it out of its case, sits down to check the tuning, and—
“Fuck,” Ellie whispers.
Abby looks up at her. “Hm?”
Ellie looks down at her left hand, the useless stubs where two of her fingers used to be. God, she can feel this aching in her chest. “I can’t play guitar. I didn’t even think about it.”
“You play guitar?” Abby asks.
Ellie nods. “Jo—”
Fuck, this is Abby, this is Abby. She cuts herself off.
“Someone taught me,” she says, instead, which just seems like a really pointless thing to say.
Abby’s eyes flicker down to Ellie’s fingers. Ellie wonders if she’s about to apologise.
Ellie’s not sure she’d want to hear it. It’d just make her think about how it’s her own stupid fault. Abby didn’t want to fight her.
“You could try playing left-handed,” Abby says.
“Huh?”
“I mean, I don’t know if you just flip it upside down or you’re meant to switch the strings around or what,” Abby says. “But I know playing guitar left-handed is a thing. You do the, uh.” She mimes, vaguely. “The chord stuff with your right hand.”
Fret with her right hand, strum with her left? Joel never mentioned that. Ellie guesses he wouldn’t have had any reason to.
Maybe she could do it. Her left hand’s fucked, but there’s still enough to strum. If she could figure out how to do the chord shapes upside down... and, yeah, she’ll need to build up new callouses, that’ll suck, but...
Maybe she could do it. Maybe she could try, at least.
But that means she’d be accepting something from Abby.
“I haven’t forgiven you.” It feels important to say. “I can’t.”
“Got it,” Abby says. “I’m not planning to forgive you, either.”
“Okay.” Ellie nods, slowly. Turns the guitar over in her lap. “Let’s figure this out.”
Title: If Nowhere Else
Fandom: The Last of Us, Part II
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 3,200
Summary: Ellie's not sure exactly how she ends up travelling with Abby and Lev, after everything.
Ellie’s burned her bridges with Dina. Tommy’s probably not going to welcome her back to Jackson, either, after she had Abby and let her go.
She could lie, say she finished Abby off, but then she’ll just end up living under that shadow, waiting for her lie to catch up with her. Waiting for it to turn the people she cares about against her.
Is that what Joel was feeling, after Salt Lake?
Where does she go?
She winds up following Abby’s boat.
Abby keeps glancing back at her, staying aware. Doesn’t say anything.
They come in to land, eventually, and Ellie doesn’t ask where.
Abby lifts the kid out of the boat, carefully, keeping her eyes on Ellie. Seems to be struggling, a little, which is weird to see. Abby’s strong as hell, you can see it just by looking at her, Ellie’s felt those fists. But Ellie guesses they’re both fucked up, weak, after what they’ve been through.
Ellie might be dying. She’s still not sure.
“I could help you carry him,” Ellie offers.
Abby laughs, dry. “Why are you still here?”
Ellie shrugs. “Nowhere left to go.”
Abby carries the kid alone, in the end. Ellie trails silently after them.
They encounter infected at one point. Runners. Abby doesn’t have any weapons, she grabs the submachine gun out of Ellie’s holster, and between them they manage to clear them out.
Ellie doesn’t bother to ask for it back, afterwards. She has other guns. Probably not much ammo to be found for it, either, if they’re out of Rattler territory.
She wonders if Abby’s going to kill her, so she doesn’t have to worry about whether Ellie’s planning to do them harm. It’d make sense.
She’s done with this fight. If Abby decides to kill her, she guesses she’ll die.
It’s a long walk, and slow, but eventually they come to a hospital. Doesn’t look occupied, but the doors and windows on the ground floor are barricaded. If they’re lucky, maybe that means they won’t find infected inside.
There’s a second-floor window it looks like they might be able to get through. If they can get up on that truck...
Ellie helps Abby lift the kid up onto the roof of the truck, so they can get him inside. They don’t speak.
Abby disappears through the window with the kid, and Ellie clambers up after them. She winces, bites her tongue to keep herself from crying out; she thinks all this effort might have reopened the wound in her side, and she’s not sure how much blood she has left to lose.
Abby finds a room with four beds and a door that can be shut securely. She sets the kid down gently, gets to work shaking the dust off the sheets. Ellie watches for a moment, then goes to scout for infected or any humans they might be sharing the hospital with.
Place seems clean. That’s a relief. She doesn’t like the idea of trying to take something down quietly without her knife.
She guesses she’ll have to get used to it. Just another of the things it cost to get her fucking nowhere.
There’s a guitar in the paediatrics ward. Looks intact, all six strings. She’s not exactly in a guitar-playing mood right now, but she brings it back to the room, along with whatever supplies she was able to find.
She knocks before she opens the door. “It’s me.”
Seems best to announce herself before coming in. She knows that Abby can shoot a person dead in an instant if they surprise her.
(Fuck.)
The kid’s on one of the beds, sleeping or unconscious. Abby takes the supplies from Ellie, spreads them out on another bed, inspects them. Takes some saline and cloth and bandages and goes to treat the kid’s wounds.
Ellie sits down, peels off her blood-saturated shirt, takes a look at herself. She’s too exhausted and too physically fucked up to be selfconscious about it. Abby’s focused on the kid, anyway.
Yeah, her attempt at stitches hasn’t held.
She tries to clean the wound, breathing through her teeth. She can do this. She’s not sure what she’s living for, by this point, but she’s not going to die.
Time kind of goes strange. Just a haze of cleaning away blood and grit, and she just keeps finding more injuries, and she’s not sure how long she’s been sitting here, trying to clean herself up. She doesn’t feel clean. It’s hard to remember what being clean ever really felt like.
Fuck, her fingers are in agony, she’s going to have to try to do something about those as well...
And Abby touches Ellie’s shoulder, touches her arm, moves her hands aside to look at the wound in her side.
Ellie’s instincts tell her to fight. She doesn’t.
Abby goes through the supplies again, and crouches next to Ellie, and gets to work patching up the worst of it. She doesn’t say a word.
Ellie’s back in that theatre, Dina tending to her wounds. She can’t breathe. She tries to stay focused on Abby, tries not to blink, so she doesn’t forget where she is.
Abby’s bandaged herself up as well, shoulder and side and collar. Places Ellie sank her knife into. She’s not gentle, but she doesn’t seem to be trying to hurt Ellie, either.
“Those fingers will need a clean amputation,” Abby says at last. It’s the first thing she’s said since their brief exchange when they landed.
Honestly, Ellie had a feeling this was coming. “Do it.”
Ellie wakes with the kid holding a scalpel to her throat.
“How did you find us?” he demands.
“Look, kid,” Ellie says, carefully, “I’m not here to hurt you.”
“I won’t let you harm Abby,” he says.
“I’m not planning to hurt her either.” Although she can’t really blame him for reaching that conclusion. “I cut her down from the pillar on the beach. Technically, I actually saved your lives.”
She doesn’t know if he remembers what happened after that. He seemed pretty out of it, and she’s not sure when he passed out, exactly. Probably best not to bring it up.
“You think I’d sleep in the same room as you if my plan was to kill you?” Ellie asks.
The kid hesitates. Draws the scalpel away slightly, although he doesn’t quite lower it.
“Lev?”
The kid – Lev? – looks sharply in the direction of the voice, and so does Ellie. Abby’s in the doorway, staring at him. Ellie guesses she must have chosen a bad moment to go to the bathroom.
“You woke up,” Abby says, softly. She takes in the scene, makes a gesture: touches her hand to her throat, then moves it away.
Lev lowers the scalpel. He looks more relieved than Ellie feels. Ellie takes the opportunity to sit up.
“How are you feeling?” Abby asks.
“Fine,” Lev says. “What is she doing here?”
“I don’t know.” Abby scratches her bandaged shoulder, and Ellie’s fingers twitch at the memory of her knife sinking into the flesh. “I think we might have a kind of truce.”
Lev nods. “Like the Seraphites and the Wolves.”
“Hopefully not exactly like that,” Abby says.
Do they have a truce? Ellie’s not sure what to call it.
“Is this the Firefly island?” Lev asks.
Abby looks at Ellie.
“No,” she says. Speaking to Lev, eyes still on Ellie. “We’re just further down the coast.”
“You’re looking for Fireflies?” Ellie asks.
“It might not even be real,” Abby says. “I thought we had a lead. But the Rattlers jumped us right after.”
“Are we still going to check?” Lev asks.
Abby hasn’t taken her eyes off Ellie.
“I won’t hurt them, if you find them,” Ellie says. “Not if they don’t try to hurt me first.”
“Can’t promise they won’t recognise you,” Abby says. “If there’s someone there with the medical knowledge, they might have ideas about a...” It seems like it’s hard for her to say it. “A vaccine.”
“If there’s someone there with the medical knowledge, they can have me,” Ellie says.
Abby makes a choking noise, covers her mouth with her hand. For a moment it looks like she’s about to throw up.
“Abby?” Lev asks, alarmed.
“No,” Abby says. “You’re alive. It’s cost too much.”
Abby’s said they’re staying here until Lev’s got his strength back, although Ellie privately wonders whether she’s hoping Ellie will get bored and wander off in the meantime. Maybe she doesn’t want Ellie to follow them, find out where the Fireflies are.
They all need a lot of sleep at the moment; they’ve all got a lot of damage to recover from. Ellie offers to keep watch while Lev and Abby rest.
Abby doesn’t refuse the offer, exactly, but she doesn’t go to sleep. She stays just as awake as Ellie, keeping watch over Lev.
Turns out it’s easy to see the difference between Lev when he’s sleeping and Lev when he’s unconscious. Lev twitches in his sleep, shifts, makes tiny restless noises. Nightmares, maybe. Seems like anyone who grew up in that cult would have a lot of material for them.
“How did you end up with him?” Ellie asks, with a glance at Abby. “Thought the Wolves hated the Scars.”
“Yeah, well, that’s one thing the Scars and I have in common.”
She fell out with the Wolves? It’d explain why she ended up two states south of Seattle. “What happened?”
Abby shrugs. “He and his sister saved my life. I had to return the favour. I mean, I tried to.”
Well, Lev’s still alive. Probably best not to ask about the sister.
“Turns out saving people feels better than killing them,” Abby says. “But it really pisses people off if you save the wrong ones.”
Ellie’s pretty sure sparing Abby felt worse than killing her would have. If she’d killed her, at least she could have told herself she’d accomplished something. Sparing her... it meant it was all for nothing. Jesse, Nora, Tommy’s injury, every Wolf and Scar and dog she put a knife through, leaving Dina and JJ behind...
But saving her—
Saving her was a different thing, right? Abby and Lev were strung up on pillars, they were going to die there. Ellie let them down.
It’s not like it felt amazing. She hasn’t really felt good since she left the farm, maybe before that. But it felt better than that fight in the surf, at least. She almost went straight for the other boat, she almost just let them go. She’d gone there to kill Abby, but for a moment it had almost felt like saving her was enough.
It hadn’t really hit her before. She’s here, talking to someone who wouldn’t be alive if she hadn’t been on that beach.
And it’s fucking Abby.
It’s a couple hours of silence before Ellie finds it in herself to say what she needs to.
“The guy you shot, in the theatre,” Ellie says, sitting on the edge of her bed. Keeping it quiet, so she won’t wake Lev.
“Which one?” Abby asks.
Ellie pauses. “The guy you shot dead. When he was coming through the door.” With me.
Abby looks up from cleaning the submachine gun. “The other one survived?”
She shot to kill. She wouldn’t know. Somehow, it’d slipped Ellie’s mind. “Yeah. His leg’s fucked up, he can’t move it. But yeah, he’s alive.” Pause. “He’s back with his wife.”
Abby goes back to the gun. It’s a moment before she speaks. “That’s good.”
Does she mean it? Ellie tries to think of how she’d feel, if it turned out one of the people she attacked to get to Abby pulled through.
She has to stop thinking about it; it’s making her feel sick. Abby means it.
“The one you killed,” Ellie says. “His name was Jesse. He...”
She forces a swallow. She hates talking about the people they’ve lost.
(The people she’s lost. She can’t keep thinking they, like she’s still with Dina, like she’ll ever be anything other than alone.)
“He was a really good friend,” she says. “Like, he took himself too seriously sometimes, he kept thinking he had to be some kind of responsible parent ’cause he was, like, two years older. But, uh, he was reliable. Funny. He cared.” They’re half her own words, half Dina’s. “He was the first person I really got to know at Jackson.”
Abby looks directly at her. Her expression is unreadable, but Ellie can see a tremor in the gun she’s holding. “Why are you telling me this?”
Ellie hesitates. “I don’t know.”
“He was a guy with a gun,” Abby says. “I shot him before he could shoot me.”
“Yeah,” Ellie says. “I guess I just wanted you to know he was more than that.”
Abby sets the gun down. “I could tell you about some of the people you killed,” she says, low and challenging. “You wouldn’t enjoy it.”
“Probably not,” Ellie says. “But I...” She doesn’t really want to say this, but it’s something she’s been thinking. “But I think I need to hear it.”
From Abby’s soft inhale, that’s not the response she was expecting.
“I’m sorry about Jesse,” Abby says, after a moment.
“Yeah.” Ellie looks down, at her hands between her knees. If she hadn’t pushed the whole revenge thing... “Me too.”
Abby tells Ellie about the people she killed. Ellie sits there, her eyes closed, and listens.
After, Ellie sits out in the hospital corridor. Tries to sketch them from memory in her journal. Makes notes of the details Abby told her about them, the details that made them human.
Abby comes out eventually to tell her Lev’s woken up, offers her the next shift sleeping.
Ellie shakes her head. “It’s yours.”
Abby takes a look over her shoulder. Ellie fights the urge to hide the journal. It feels like Abby has the right to see this.
“That’s Owen,” Abby says, and there’s something Ellie hasn’t heard in her voice before: a strange, breathless vulnerability.
Ellie nods, although she’s not sure how well Abby will be able to see it from her angle.
“You’re a good artist,” Abby says, after a moment.
Ellie doesn’t know how to make the offer, so she doesn’t say anything. Just does another drawing of Owen, more careful, more detailed, and tears the page out of her journal, and leaves it next to Abby’s bed while she’s sleeping.
Lev watches her in silence.
Abby doesn’t say anything about it, but it’s gone when Ellie comes back from her second sweep for supplies.
Ellie manages to sleep in the night, a little. She wakes up, so apparently Abby hasn’t decided to kill her in her sleep yet. Not like she’s got someone she trusts to keep watch.
She heads out early to look for food in the neighbouring buildings. Doesn’t find much, but there’s a boarded-up place Abby might be able to boost her into.
She doesn’t really like the idea, but she guesses she should ask for help.
Both Abby and Lev are awake by the time she gets back to the hospital. She wonders if Abby thought she wouldn’t come back.
It’s crossed her mind. She just doesn’t know where she’d go. She’s in this weird, weird situation where Abby, of all people, is her only real connection to her old life.
Lev is looking intently at her.
“Something up?” Ellie asks.
“I heard you talking about Jesse yesterday,” Lev says.
Ellie had thought he was asleep. It feels kind of wrong to talk about murder in front of him, even though he was there, he saw it. Even though he can’t be much younger than Ellie was when she first killed someone.
“What happened to the woman I shot?” Lev asks. “You said she was pregnant.”
That’s not a question she was expecting. It might not be a question she’s ready to be asked.
“She’s fine,” Ellie says, after a moment. Her voice sounds strange. She swallows. “She had the kid. He’s beautiful, he’s... Jesse was the dad, and you—” She’s getting choked up. “You can really see it.”
Abby’s on the other side of the room, looking at her. She’ll never leave Lev alone in a room with Ellie.
Ellie doesn’t want Abby to see her cry. Not again, not after—
Ellie looks away and focuses and breathes herself steady.
“I’m glad to hear it,” Lev says.
He’s so formal. “You’re a weird kid, aren’t you?”
Lev frowns. “You’re a weird adult,” he says, defensively.
“About the pregnant girl,” Abby says, when she and Ellie are heading for the building Ellie spotted.
“I don’t want to talk about her,” Ellie says.
“Lev’s not the only one, you know,” Abby says. “I was glad to hear she made it out.” She pauses. “I’m glad I didn’t kill her.”
Ellie stares at nothing for a moment, seeing Dina. Still alive. She probably doesn’t want to see Ellie again. But she’s alive.
“Do you regret...” Ellie’s throat almost seems to close up, and she has to stop walking. It’s an effort to get the words out. “Do you regret killing Joel?”
Abby looks at her for a long, long moment.
“Yes,” she says at last.
Because she realised he didn’t deserve to die? Because Ellie ended up seeing it? Because killing him killed Abby’s friends?
(Ellie killed Abby’s friends. She can’t keep shifting the blame like that.)
Ellie decides not to ask. At least, that way, she can believe whatever makes it easier to keep this fragile alliance going.
At least, that way, she can believe whatever makes it easier to remember her own hands loosening around Abby’s neck.
Lev’s quietly humming a simple tune, it sounds like a kind of lullaby, and Ellie suddenly remembers the guitar. She takes it out of its case, sits down to check the tuning, and—
“Fuck,” Ellie whispers.
Abby looks up at her. “Hm?”
Ellie looks down at her left hand, the useless stubs where two of her fingers used to be. God, she can feel this aching in her chest. “I can’t play guitar. I didn’t even think about it.”
“You play guitar?” Abby asks.
Ellie nods. “Jo—”
Fuck, this is Abby, this is Abby. She cuts herself off.
“Someone taught me,” she says, instead, which just seems like a really pointless thing to say.
Abby’s eyes flicker down to Ellie’s fingers. Ellie wonders if she’s about to apologise.
Ellie’s not sure she’d want to hear it. It’d just make her think about how it’s her own stupid fault. Abby didn’t want to fight her.
“You could try playing left-handed,” Abby says.
“Huh?”
“I mean, I don’t know if you just flip it upside down or you’re meant to switch the strings around or what,” Abby says. “But I know playing guitar left-handed is a thing. You do the, uh.” She mimes, vaguely. “The chord stuff with your right hand.”
Fret with her right hand, strum with her left? Joel never mentioned that. Ellie guesses he wouldn’t have had any reason to.
Maybe she could do it. Her left hand’s fucked, but there’s still enough to strum. If she could figure out how to do the chord shapes upside down... and, yeah, she’ll need to build up new callouses, that’ll suck, but...
Maybe she could do it. Maybe she could try, at least.
But that means she’d be accepting something from Abby.
“I haven’t forgiven you.” It feels important to say. “I can’t.”
“Got it,” Abby says. “I’m not planning to forgive you, either.”
“Okay.” Ellie nods, slowly. Turns the guitar over in her lap. “Let’s figure this out.”
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This was a great introspective piece and loved reading it. Many thanks for writing and sharing it!
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♥
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