Riona (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rionaleonhart) wrote2023-11-28 04:40 pm
rionaleonhart) wrote2023-11-28 04:40 pm
Entry tags:
Fanfiction: The Other Option (The Last of Us, Ellie/Abby)
Here is a weird, moderately dark The Last of Us, Part II fic about Ellie cornering Abby into sex and having a lot of feelings about that.
'Dark femslash' is a genre that's pretty underrepresented in my writing, so I'm glad to have written something in that field! Although I'm also slightly nervous to see how this will be received on AO3, because I've previously experienced negative feedback from The Last of Us fandom for writing about concepts much milder than this.
Title: The Other Option
Fandom: The Last of Us, Part II
Rating: 15
Pairing: Ellie/Abby
Wordcount: 3,400
Summary: Ellie’s spent weeks thinking about nothing but Abby. Dreaming about her. Apparently it’s fucked her up in ways she was seriously unprepared for.
Warnings: Dubious consent.
She tracks Abby down in a shopping mall.
For a moment, they just stare at each other.
Ellie’s found her at last. Abby is right in front of her, she’s here.
Abby is – dropping into a crouch, shit, and Ellie fires a warning shot. Missing on purpose, but her hands are shaking; the shot goes closer than she was expecting.
Good. It’ll tell Abby that she’s serious.
“Stand the fuck up,” Ellie says, holding the gun on her.
Abby stands up again, slowly. Something glints in her hand, and Ellie glances at it: a jagged shard of glass, big enough to do serious damage.
That’s both bad and good news. Abby’s managed to grab a weapon, and that’s not great. But she’s grabbing glass off the floor; she’s not going for a gun. Means she’s short on bullets, or Ellie managed to surprise her without her weapons on her. Ellie has the advantage here.
“You’ll want to stay still,” Ellie says.
Abby’s eyes widen a little. “You’re the girl.”
Ellie could object. Hey, I have a name, you know.
She doesn’t say anything. She kind of likes being the girl to these people. The one girl, the only one worth talking about. Like a legend, or a war; Joel would talk about the war sometimes.
She’s not far off being a war, when she thinks about it.
“We let you live,” Abby says.
Ellie’s aim doesn’t waver. “You fucked up.”
“You know it won’t end here,” Abby says. “My friends will come after you.”
Ellie half-shrugs, careful not to move the gun. “Not if there aren’t any left.”
There are a lot of Wolves out there, maybe. But she’s been killing them a lot faster than they’ve been recruiting. She just has to keep killing.
Abby breathes out, slowly. Still looking at Ellie, not at the gun. “So what happens now?”
What happens now is that Ellie kills her, obviously. That’s what she came here for, that’s what she’s been dreaming about every night. Every person she killed to get here, she was picturing them with Abby’s face.
She just—
She just doesn’t know how.
She can’t just shoot Abby dead. Joel didn’t get that kind of mercy, he didn’t get to die quickly. It’d feel like an anticlimax, it’d be a waste. And she only gets to kill Abby once; if she does it wrong, she’s fucked up any chance of finding peace.
More than anything, she wants to understand why Joel died. She wants to climb inside Abby’s skin and see through her eyes and understand every one of her reasons. And then she wants to dismiss them all, because they’re all fucking bullshit, and impale Abby through the throat like she deserves.
She’s been having this fantasy, ever since Joel died, where she corners Abby and they have a real talk about this. Abby lays out her reasons, and Ellie takes each of them apart, makes her see that Joel was so much more than whatever monster Abby thinks he was. Abby cries and apologises, says she wishes she hadn’t done it. And Ellie kills her anyway, because it’s too late.
She knows it’s not going to play out like that; she’s not a kid. She’s never going to get to hear Abby say she’s sorry. But she can still kill her, at least.
Abby lunges.
Ellie fires, jerking back. It’s pure instinct, no skill and no aiming. The shot grazes Abby’s face; she claps her free hand to her cheek, swearing, and comes to a halt as Ellie stabilises her aim on her again.
“Don’t,” Ellie says, “don’t fucking try anything.”
She’s shaking. She almost shot her, she almost killed her without even knowing what she was doing, and that can’t be how this ends, not after everything she’s done.
One bullet left. She’d better make it count.
“You’re here to kill me,” Abby says. “Why shouldn’t I try anything? What do I have to lose?”
They’re too close. Abby is being held at point-blank range, Ellie is within reach of that glass shard, and if either of them makes a move there’s a good chance they’ll both end up dead.
Something in Ellie boils over. She doesn’t have anything to lose either. Joel is dead. Dina left; she got almost as sick of Ellie’s stupid crusade as Ellie is, and the difference between them is that Dina knows how to turn back. Ellie can’t picture heading back to Jackson, walking those streets and thinking about all the hundreds of days she wasted there, living a few minutes from Joel’s front door and refusing to fucking talk to him.
No Joel, no girlfriend, no home. Nothing to lose but her life, whatever the fuck that’s worth. Abby doesn’t have any power over her. Ellie’s still the one in control here, she can do whatever she fucking wants, because she’s the one who doesn’t care if she ends up choking on her own blood.
She doesn’t know what she wants to do. She wants to kill Abby, but at the right moment, in the right way. What does that mean?
All she knows is that Abby’s right in front of her, tall and ripped as hell, radiating heat. And scared. Straight face, and she’s not shaking the way Ellie is, but Ellie can see the tension in the way she’s standing.
Fuck, it feels good to see her scared.
Ellie kisses her.
Maybe it’s the anger, maybe it’s the fear. Maybe the elation of finally finding her target is intense enough to tip over into something warmer and darker. Maybe they’re standing so close it’s hard to know what else to do.
Maybe the whole way Ellie’s wired is just fucked-up and faulty. It’d explain a lot.
Abby jerks sharply when Ellie touches her face, pulls her into the kiss, and for an instant Ellie’s expecting to get glass through the throat. But Abby doesn’t actually attack, maybe too confused by the situation, and – holy fuck, the situation is that Ellie is kissing her, why the hell would she—
Ellie jolts back.
Abby’s just staring at her, dead fucking silent. Ellie is breathing so hard she thinks she might throw up. Hand over her mouth, shielding it, like she’s the one who was kissed out of nowhere and not the one who fucking did it.
It takes Ellie a moment to realise she’s let her gun hand drop to her side. She raises the gun, tries to steady her aim on Abby again, but, fuck, if she thought she was shaking before—
“What the fuck was that?” Ellie demands.
Abby raises her eyebrows. “You... know I didn’t do that, right?”
She’s spent weeks thinking about nothing but Abby. Dreaming about her. Apparently it’s fucked her up in ways she was seriously unprepared for.
Ellie swallows, with difficulty. “I – I didn’t come here to do that. I came here to punish you. But not like that.”
“You seem pretty confused,” Abby says.
“Shut,” Ellie says, “the fuck up.”
Abby’s watching her, wary and calculating, and Ellie knows what’s going on in her head: she’s trying to work out what to do with this new angle, how this might help her get out of this alive.
It’s not going to work. Ellie’s not going to let Joel’s killer fucking seduce her way out of consequences. They can’t both walk away from this; one way or another, at least one of them is going to end up dead.
But they could fuck. She’s picturing that now, it won’t get out of her head. That might be the way this is going.
Ellie’s repelled by herself for even thinking about it. This is the woman who murdered Joel. But the disgust and the fear and the fury and the knowledge that she has the murderer cornered, it’s all winding together into something that feels horribly like being turned on.
She can’t delay the final shot any longer. Her head’s going in directions she’s not prepared for; if she keeps trying to find some hypothetical perfect revenge, she’s going to miss her chance. She needs to kill Abby now. That’ll have to be good enough.
This is for Joel, she wants to say. But, if she says anything, Abby will know this is the end, and she’ll attack. She just has to fire.
She’s still risking an attack even if she doesn’t give any warning, of course. Point-blank, she’s aiming at Abby’s head, but there’s still the chance Abby won’t die straight away, so she needs to put some distance between them.
Ellie pulls the trigger, leaps backward at the same time, and fuck—
The gun doesn’t fire. It doesn’t fucking fire.
Fuck, she thought she came into this with three bullets: the warning shot, the accidental shot, the fucking killshot—
Abby launches herself at her, pins her to the floor, and okay, there’s no time to think about when she lost track of her bullet count.
There’s no time to think about anything. Ellie’s fucking dead. The moment Abby physically gets her hands on her, it’s over; Ellie’s seen her muscles, she’s known that from the start.
Nothing to lose, and she’s still so turned on she’s shaking; it’s making her feel sick. The floor is marble, or something like it, cool against Ellie’s hot skin.
Ellie drops the stupid useless gun, grabs Abby’s face, kisses her again. Abby swears quietly against her mouth.
“What are you doing?” Abby asks, pulling back a little. Moving her hands to trap Ellie’s wrists against the floor. The glass shard is pinned between them; Ellie can feel the bite of it against her arm.
“I don’t fucking know,” Ellie growls. “Just – ugh, just kill me, just get it over with, and then we won’t have to think about this.”
Abby stares down at her; she’s breathing almost as fast as Ellie is. Probably for normal fucking reasons, the whole ‘someone’s threatening to kill you’ thing, not whatever the hell is going on in Ellie’s body right now.
“I don’t want to kill you if I don’t have to,” Abby says.
Ellie chokes out a laugh. “Don’t lie. You went all the way to Wyoming to kill Joel, right? I’m meant to think you can let things go?”
“And you came here to kill us,” Abby says. “And instead you’re kissing me? What do you want?”
“I don’t know!” Ellie snaps. “I don’t know. I want—” She’s on the verge of tears; she can feel them in her throat, she can hear them in her voice. It’s humiliating. “I want Joel back, I want to not have fucked things up with my girlfriend – I want my fucking life back, and you’re the one who took it from me.”
“We spared you,” Abby says.
“Yeah?” Ellie asks. “Doesn’t feel like it.”
“Okay,” Abby says. She casts the shard of glass to one side in a small, sharp movement; she’s quick to pin Ellie’s arm down again. “No weapons. Let’s talk.”
“You could break me in half,” Ellie says. “You don’t need weapons.”
Just saying it seems to tighten something in her stomach. What’s wrong with her?
“Fine,” Abby says. “If I break you in half, you can consider the conversation over.”
“I don’t want to talk,” Ellie says. “Kill me, or – or fuck me. I don’t know. Words aren’t gonna fix this.”
“And sex will?” Abby asks, eyebrows raised.
It won’t, obviously. But it’s all Ellie can think about; it’s what her body is craving. Maybe it’ll make her feel better, in some fucked-up way. More likely it’ll make her feel worse, if it’s possible to feel any worse than she already does. But it’ll make her feel worse in a way she needs right now.
She doesn’t know how to articulate all that. She just shakes her head.
“How about we both just walk away from this?” Abby suggests.
“If you let me go, I’m going to kill you,” Ellie promises.
Abby stares at her for a long, long moment. Ellie’s heart is beating so hard it feels like she might pass out.
“You know what?” Abby says at last. She yanks Ellie’s jacket open, and Ellie’s mind goes totally blank. “Fine. If I give you what you want, maybe you’ll fucking leave us alone.”
I won’t, Ellie almost says. But her breath’s caught in her chest, and she doesn’t want to do anything that might stop this happening.
“Never even done this with a woman before,” Abby mutters.
“Wait, seriously?” Ellie asks. “Kind of a waste of those muscles.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve still had plenty of sex that’s obviously a bad idea, so don’t think you’re special.”
She’s avoiding Ellie’s eyes. Is she – is she feeling shy? Awkward about this? The insanely muscular murderer? The woman who beat Joel to death?
Fuck. Ellie’s doing this with the woman who beat Joel to death.
She’s had sex that felt high-stakes before. Her first time, obviously, and her first time with Dina. She’s never—
She’s never gone into sex with the knowledge that one or both of them might be dead by the end of it. That’s new.
It’s kind of a turn-on for her, apparently, but what about this fucked-up situation isn’t? At least she might not have much time left to worry about what that says about her.
Letting Abby undress her feels too intimate, somehow. And Ellie gets that that’s a stupid concern to have, with what she’s asking. But it’s how she’s feeling, so she quickly unbuttons her own jeans, tries to wriggle out of them as much as she can manage with Abby still mostly pinning her down.
“Right here on the floor?” Abby asks.
It’s not exactly comfortable. But Ellie’s already fighting against her second thoughts, trying not to give them a foothold. They can’t delay this, or Ellie’s brain is going to kick in, and right now she can’t handle the idea of making the sensible decision. “Right here.”
“Without washing?” Abby asks. “We’re both going to die of some kind of infection before you get the chance to shoot me.”
It actually makes Ellie feel better about this whole thing. She’s not losing sight of her goal; this is just another way to kill Abby.
She pushes a hand under Abby’s waistband, and Abby inhales quietly through her teeth, closing her eyes. It doesn’t feel right; it’s a more human reaction, somehow, than the image of Abby Ellie’s built up in her head.
-
Ellie keeps expecting to feel Abby’s hands around her throat. She tore through a lot of Wolves to get here, and she’s put herself in a vulnerable position with an enemy who’s pretty much made entirely of muscle. If Abby decides to kill her, she is super, super dead.
Whatever the reason, though, Abby hasn’t killed her yet.
Ellie’s been taking the lead, as the one who’s more experienced in this particular department. Right now she’s down between Abby’s legs, which feels especially unsafe. It’s like she’s put herself between a pair of giant pincers.
Ellie bites Abby on the thigh. Not hard; just as a reminder. She wants Abby to remember that she has teeth, that she’s dangerous, that she could do some real damage down here. Ellie’s not the only one who’s vulnerable right now.
Abby twitches underneath her, draws breath as if to say something. It’s a moment before she actually speaks.
“What would you do if I asked you to stop?” Abby asks, quietly.
Ellie freezes. I asked you to stop hitting Joel is the response that comes automatically to her throat, like bile.
She swallows it down, raises her head. “You’re asking me to stop?”
A pause. “I’m just asking.”
Fuck. She’s glad she doesn’t have to find out how she’d have reacted to that. Not yet, at least.
Like she can tell herself her conscience is clean, anyway. She tracked a woman down and pointed a gun at her, and now they’re having sex. Doesn’t exactly sound like a normal, non-coerced way of ending up in this situation. Abby’s just trying to get out of this alive.
So Ellie’s a monster. Fine. She knew that already; that became pretty clear to her when she was beating Nora to death.
She doesn’t have to be able to live with herself. She’ll probably be dead in the next twenty minutes, anyway.
-
“How many of my friends did you kill?” Abby asks.
Is she talking Wolves in general, or is she just thinking of the people who helped her kill Joel? Either way, hard to calculate with Abby’s fingers inside her.
Abby lets out a disgusted scoffing noise. “You can’t even fucking count.”
“You killed my dad,” Ellie says.
She’s never called him that before. It doesn’t feel right in her throat, even ignoring the fact that this isn’t really the situation to be saying things like that.
Abby goes still. “He killed mine.”
Ellie stares at some unfocused point past Abby’s shoulder, thinking about that.
“Maybe you should’ve been better than him,” she says at last. Knowing as she says it that she’s being a hypocrite.
Abby’s fingers clench sharply, like she’s trying to make a fist, and Ellie gasps in something that’s mostly pain.
-
Ellie’s used to sex just reaching a natural stopping point. But it goes on until she’s exhausted and overstimulated, until it’s closer to pain than pleasure, and it takes a while for it to filter through her mind: she’s too stubborn to end it herself, and this was her demand, so Abby doesn’t know when it would be safe to stop.
The thought fucks her up. She rolls away from Abby without a word, curls up on the cold stone floor, closes her eyes tightly. She can feel something like tears creeping up on her, and like fuck she’s ever going to let herself cry in front of Abby again.
“Satisfied?” Abby asks, after a moment. There’s a breathlessness to her voice that Ellie might feel kind of smug about if she didn’t feel so unbelievably shitty.
Ellie was so sure that, if she somehow came out of this alive, she’d find a way to kill Abby afterwards. But her mind keeps going back to her earlier thought. Abby’s just trying to get out of this alive.
And it’s not going to work? Ellie’s going to corner this woman into fucking her, and then she’s just going to kill her anyway?
It doesn’t feel good. None of it feels good; nothing she’s done has felt good for a long time, except being with Dina, and now she doesn’t even have that. But... honestly, she doesn’t know if that in particular is something she can live with.
And Abby’s still not making any move to kill her, even with Ellie just lying on the floor and facing away, so maybe being able to live with herself actually matters.
But she can’t live without avenging Joel, either. So what can she do?
Just not be able to live with herself, she guesses. Might as well take the route that requires less effort.
“Fine,” Ellie mutters, between clenched teeth. “I’m satisfied. Do what you want.”
There’s a shifting noise behind her. Abby sitting up, maybe?
“Are you crying?” Abby asks.
“No.” Technically true. Her throat is tight and her voice definitely sounds like she’s crying, but she’s keeping the tears in check. “I, uh.” Fuck. Is she actually going to say this? To Abby? “I shouldn’t have made you do that.”
There’s a long pause. Some rustling; it sounds like Abby is pulling her clothes back on.
“If you’re going to feel bad about something you did to me,” Abby says at last, in a voice so tightly controlled and even that it’s kind of scary, “feel bad about killing my friends. They deserve it more than I do.”
She’s right, isn’t she? What a fucking waste, killing all of Abby’s friends and not even killing Abby herself. Ellie’s been telling herself all along that those deaths were necessary; necessary for what?
“I can feel bad about both,” Ellie says. “I didn’t give you a choice. I—” She presses the back of her hand over her eyes. “God, this is so fucked up.”
Another long silence. Long enough for her to start wondering if she’ll look back and Abby will just be gone.
“I had a choice,” Abby says, eventually. “You told me to fuck you or kill you.”
Ellie keeps her eyes covered for a moment longer, then drops her hand to her side and rolls over, a question in her throat: what does that mean?
But Abby’s already walking away, and in the end Ellie just lies there and watches her go.
'Dark femslash' is a genre that's pretty underrepresented in my writing, so I'm glad to have written something in that field! Although I'm also slightly nervous to see how this will be received on AO3, because I've previously experienced negative feedback from The Last of Us fandom for writing about concepts much milder than this.
Title: The Other Option
Fandom: The Last of Us, Part II
Rating: 15
Pairing: Ellie/Abby
Wordcount: 3,400
Summary: Ellie’s spent weeks thinking about nothing but Abby. Dreaming about her. Apparently it’s fucked her up in ways she was seriously unprepared for.
Warnings: Dubious consent.
She tracks Abby down in a shopping mall.
For a moment, they just stare at each other.
Ellie’s found her at last. Abby is right in front of her, she’s here.
Abby is – dropping into a crouch, shit, and Ellie fires a warning shot. Missing on purpose, but her hands are shaking; the shot goes closer than she was expecting.
Good. It’ll tell Abby that she’s serious.
“Stand the fuck up,” Ellie says, holding the gun on her.
Abby stands up again, slowly. Something glints in her hand, and Ellie glances at it: a jagged shard of glass, big enough to do serious damage.
That’s both bad and good news. Abby’s managed to grab a weapon, and that’s not great. But she’s grabbing glass off the floor; she’s not going for a gun. Means she’s short on bullets, or Ellie managed to surprise her without her weapons on her. Ellie has the advantage here.
“You’ll want to stay still,” Ellie says.
Abby’s eyes widen a little. “You’re the girl.”
Ellie could object. Hey, I have a name, you know.
She doesn’t say anything. She kind of likes being the girl to these people. The one girl, the only one worth talking about. Like a legend, or a war; Joel would talk about the war sometimes.
She’s not far off being a war, when she thinks about it.
“We let you live,” Abby says.
Ellie’s aim doesn’t waver. “You fucked up.”
“You know it won’t end here,” Abby says. “My friends will come after you.”
Ellie half-shrugs, careful not to move the gun. “Not if there aren’t any left.”
There are a lot of Wolves out there, maybe. But she’s been killing them a lot faster than they’ve been recruiting. She just has to keep killing.
Abby breathes out, slowly. Still looking at Ellie, not at the gun. “So what happens now?”
What happens now is that Ellie kills her, obviously. That’s what she came here for, that’s what she’s been dreaming about every night. Every person she killed to get here, she was picturing them with Abby’s face.
She just—
She just doesn’t know how.
She can’t just shoot Abby dead. Joel didn’t get that kind of mercy, he didn’t get to die quickly. It’d feel like an anticlimax, it’d be a waste. And she only gets to kill Abby once; if she does it wrong, she’s fucked up any chance of finding peace.
More than anything, she wants to understand why Joel died. She wants to climb inside Abby’s skin and see through her eyes and understand every one of her reasons. And then she wants to dismiss them all, because they’re all fucking bullshit, and impale Abby through the throat like she deserves.
She’s been having this fantasy, ever since Joel died, where she corners Abby and they have a real talk about this. Abby lays out her reasons, and Ellie takes each of them apart, makes her see that Joel was so much more than whatever monster Abby thinks he was. Abby cries and apologises, says she wishes she hadn’t done it. And Ellie kills her anyway, because it’s too late.
She knows it’s not going to play out like that; she’s not a kid. She’s never going to get to hear Abby say she’s sorry. But she can still kill her, at least.
Abby lunges.
Ellie fires, jerking back. It’s pure instinct, no skill and no aiming. The shot grazes Abby’s face; she claps her free hand to her cheek, swearing, and comes to a halt as Ellie stabilises her aim on her again.
“Don’t,” Ellie says, “don’t fucking try anything.”
She’s shaking. She almost shot her, she almost killed her without even knowing what she was doing, and that can’t be how this ends, not after everything she’s done.
One bullet left. She’d better make it count.
“You’re here to kill me,” Abby says. “Why shouldn’t I try anything? What do I have to lose?”
They’re too close. Abby is being held at point-blank range, Ellie is within reach of that glass shard, and if either of them makes a move there’s a good chance they’ll both end up dead.
Something in Ellie boils over. She doesn’t have anything to lose either. Joel is dead. Dina left; she got almost as sick of Ellie’s stupid crusade as Ellie is, and the difference between them is that Dina knows how to turn back. Ellie can’t picture heading back to Jackson, walking those streets and thinking about all the hundreds of days she wasted there, living a few minutes from Joel’s front door and refusing to fucking talk to him.
No Joel, no girlfriend, no home. Nothing to lose but her life, whatever the fuck that’s worth. Abby doesn’t have any power over her. Ellie’s still the one in control here, she can do whatever she fucking wants, because she’s the one who doesn’t care if she ends up choking on her own blood.
She doesn’t know what she wants to do. She wants to kill Abby, but at the right moment, in the right way. What does that mean?
All she knows is that Abby’s right in front of her, tall and ripped as hell, radiating heat. And scared. Straight face, and she’s not shaking the way Ellie is, but Ellie can see the tension in the way she’s standing.
Fuck, it feels good to see her scared.
Ellie kisses her.
Maybe it’s the anger, maybe it’s the fear. Maybe the elation of finally finding her target is intense enough to tip over into something warmer and darker. Maybe they’re standing so close it’s hard to know what else to do.
Maybe the whole way Ellie’s wired is just fucked-up and faulty. It’d explain a lot.
Abby jerks sharply when Ellie touches her face, pulls her into the kiss, and for an instant Ellie’s expecting to get glass through the throat. But Abby doesn’t actually attack, maybe too confused by the situation, and – holy fuck, the situation is that Ellie is kissing her, why the hell would she—
Ellie jolts back.
Abby’s just staring at her, dead fucking silent. Ellie is breathing so hard she thinks she might throw up. Hand over her mouth, shielding it, like she’s the one who was kissed out of nowhere and not the one who fucking did it.
It takes Ellie a moment to realise she’s let her gun hand drop to her side. She raises the gun, tries to steady her aim on Abby again, but, fuck, if she thought she was shaking before—
“What the fuck was that?” Ellie demands.
Abby raises her eyebrows. “You... know I didn’t do that, right?”
She’s spent weeks thinking about nothing but Abby. Dreaming about her. Apparently it’s fucked her up in ways she was seriously unprepared for.
Ellie swallows, with difficulty. “I – I didn’t come here to do that. I came here to punish you. But not like that.”
“You seem pretty confused,” Abby says.
“Shut,” Ellie says, “the fuck up.”
Abby’s watching her, wary and calculating, and Ellie knows what’s going on in her head: she’s trying to work out what to do with this new angle, how this might help her get out of this alive.
It’s not going to work. Ellie’s not going to let Joel’s killer fucking seduce her way out of consequences. They can’t both walk away from this; one way or another, at least one of them is going to end up dead.
But they could fuck. She’s picturing that now, it won’t get out of her head. That might be the way this is going.
Ellie’s repelled by herself for even thinking about it. This is the woman who murdered Joel. But the disgust and the fear and the fury and the knowledge that she has the murderer cornered, it’s all winding together into something that feels horribly like being turned on.
She can’t delay the final shot any longer. Her head’s going in directions she’s not prepared for; if she keeps trying to find some hypothetical perfect revenge, she’s going to miss her chance. She needs to kill Abby now. That’ll have to be good enough.
This is for Joel, she wants to say. But, if she says anything, Abby will know this is the end, and she’ll attack. She just has to fire.
She’s still risking an attack even if she doesn’t give any warning, of course. Point-blank, she’s aiming at Abby’s head, but there’s still the chance Abby won’t die straight away, so she needs to put some distance between them.
Ellie pulls the trigger, leaps backward at the same time, and fuck—
The gun doesn’t fire. It doesn’t fucking fire.
Fuck, she thought she came into this with three bullets: the warning shot, the accidental shot, the fucking killshot—
Abby launches herself at her, pins her to the floor, and okay, there’s no time to think about when she lost track of her bullet count.
There’s no time to think about anything. Ellie’s fucking dead. The moment Abby physically gets her hands on her, it’s over; Ellie’s seen her muscles, she’s known that from the start.
Nothing to lose, and she’s still so turned on she’s shaking; it’s making her feel sick. The floor is marble, or something like it, cool against Ellie’s hot skin.
Ellie drops the stupid useless gun, grabs Abby’s face, kisses her again. Abby swears quietly against her mouth.
“What are you doing?” Abby asks, pulling back a little. Moving her hands to trap Ellie’s wrists against the floor. The glass shard is pinned between them; Ellie can feel the bite of it against her arm.
“I don’t fucking know,” Ellie growls. “Just – ugh, just kill me, just get it over with, and then we won’t have to think about this.”
Abby stares down at her; she’s breathing almost as fast as Ellie is. Probably for normal fucking reasons, the whole ‘someone’s threatening to kill you’ thing, not whatever the hell is going on in Ellie’s body right now.
“I don’t want to kill you if I don’t have to,” Abby says.
Ellie chokes out a laugh. “Don’t lie. You went all the way to Wyoming to kill Joel, right? I’m meant to think you can let things go?”
“And you came here to kill us,” Abby says. “And instead you’re kissing me? What do you want?”
“I don’t know!” Ellie snaps. “I don’t know. I want—” She’s on the verge of tears; she can feel them in her throat, she can hear them in her voice. It’s humiliating. “I want Joel back, I want to not have fucked things up with my girlfriend – I want my fucking life back, and you’re the one who took it from me.”
“We spared you,” Abby says.
“Yeah?” Ellie asks. “Doesn’t feel like it.”
“Okay,” Abby says. She casts the shard of glass to one side in a small, sharp movement; she’s quick to pin Ellie’s arm down again. “No weapons. Let’s talk.”
“You could break me in half,” Ellie says. “You don’t need weapons.”
Just saying it seems to tighten something in her stomach. What’s wrong with her?
“Fine,” Abby says. “If I break you in half, you can consider the conversation over.”
“I don’t want to talk,” Ellie says. “Kill me, or – or fuck me. I don’t know. Words aren’t gonna fix this.”
“And sex will?” Abby asks, eyebrows raised.
It won’t, obviously. But it’s all Ellie can think about; it’s what her body is craving. Maybe it’ll make her feel better, in some fucked-up way. More likely it’ll make her feel worse, if it’s possible to feel any worse than she already does. But it’ll make her feel worse in a way she needs right now.
She doesn’t know how to articulate all that. She just shakes her head.
“How about we both just walk away from this?” Abby suggests.
“If you let me go, I’m going to kill you,” Ellie promises.
Abby stares at her for a long, long moment. Ellie’s heart is beating so hard it feels like she might pass out.
“You know what?” Abby says at last. She yanks Ellie’s jacket open, and Ellie’s mind goes totally blank. “Fine. If I give you what you want, maybe you’ll fucking leave us alone.”
I won’t, Ellie almost says. But her breath’s caught in her chest, and she doesn’t want to do anything that might stop this happening.
“Never even done this with a woman before,” Abby mutters.
“Wait, seriously?” Ellie asks. “Kind of a waste of those muscles.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve still had plenty of sex that’s obviously a bad idea, so don’t think you’re special.”
She’s avoiding Ellie’s eyes. Is she – is she feeling shy? Awkward about this? The insanely muscular murderer? The woman who beat Joel to death?
Fuck. Ellie’s doing this with the woman who beat Joel to death.
She’s had sex that felt high-stakes before. Her first time, obviously, and her first time with Dina. She’s never—
She’s never gone into sex with the knowledge that one or both of them might be dead by the end of it. That’s new.
It’s kind of a turn-on for her, apparently, but what about this fucked-up situation isn’t? At least she might not have much time left to worry about what that says about her.
Letting Abby undress her feels too intimate, somehow. And Ellie gets that that’s a stupid concern to have, with what she’s asking. But it’s how she’s feeling, so she quickly unbuttons her own jeans, tries to wriggle out of them as much as she can manage with Abby still mostly pinning her down.
“Right here on the floor?” Abby asks.
It’s not exactly comfortable. But Ellie’s already fighting against her second thoughts, trying not to give them a foothold. They can’t delay this, or Ellie’s brain is going to kick in, and right now she can’t handle the idea of making the sensible decision. “Right here.”
“Without washing?” Abby asks. “We’re both going to die of some kind of infection before you get the chance to shoot me.”
It actually makes Ellie feel better about this whole thing. She’s not losing sight of her goal; this is just another way to kill Abby.
She pushes a hand under Abby’s waistband, and Abby inhales quietly through her teeth, closing her eyes. It doesn’t feel right; it’s a more human reaction, somehow, than the image of Abby Ellie’s built up in her head.
Ellie keeps expecting to feel Abby’s hands around her throat. She tore through a lot of Wolves to get here, and she’s put herself in a vulnerable position with an enemy who’s pretty much made entirely of muscle. If Abby decides to kill her, she is super, super dead.
Whatever the reason, though, Abby hasn’t killed her yet.
Ellie’s been taking the lead, as the one who’s more experienced in this particular department. Right now she’s down between Abby’s legs, which feels especially unsafe. It’s like she’s put herself between a pair of giant pincers.
Ellie bites Abby on the thigh. Not hard; just as a reminder. She wants Abby to remember that she has teeth, that she’s dangerous, that she could do some real damage down here. Ellie’s not the only one who’s vulnerable right now.
Abby twitches underneath her, draws breath as if to say something. It’s a moment before she actually speaks.
“What would you do if I asked you to stop?” Abby asks, quietly.
Ellie freezes. I asked you to stop hitting Joel is the response that comes automatically to her throat, like bile.
She swallows it down, raises her head. “You’re asking me to stop?”
A pause. “I’m just asking.”
Fuck. She’s glad she doesn’t have to find out how she’d have reacted to that. Not yet, at least.
Like she can tell herself her conscience is clean, anyway. She tracked a woman down and pointed a gun at her, and now they’re having sex. Doesn’t exactly sound like a normal, non-coerced way of ending up in this situation. Abby’s just trying to get out of this alive.
So Ellie’s a monster. Fine. She knew that already; that became pretty clear to her when she was beating Nora to death.
She doesn’t have to be able to live with herself. She’ll probably be dead in the next twenty minutes, anyway.
“How many of my friends did you kill?” Abby asks.
Is she talking Wolves in general, or is she just thinking of the people who helped her kill Joel? Either way, hard to calculate with Abby’s fingers inside her.
Abby lets out a disgusted scoffing noise. “You can’t even fucking count.”
“You killed my dad,” Ellie says.
She’s never called him that before. It doesn’t feel right in her throat, even ignoring the fact that this isn’t really the situation to be saying things like that.
Abby goes still. “He killed mine.”
Ellie stares at some unfocused point past Abby’s shoulder, thinking about that.
“Maybe you should’ve been better than him,” she says at last. Knowing as she says it that she’s being a hypocrite.
Abby’s fingers clench sharply, like she’s trying to make a fist, and Ellie gasps in something that’s mostly pain.
Ellie’s used to sex just reaching a natural stopping point. But it goes on until she’s exhausted and overstimulated, until it’s closer to pain than pleasure, and it takes a while for it to filter through her mind: she’s too stubborn to end it herself, and this was her demand, so Abby doesn’t know when it would be safe to stop.
The thought fucks her up. She rolls away from Abby without a word, curls up on the cold stone floor, closes her eyes tightly. She can feel something like tears creeping up on her, and like fuck she’s ever going to let herself cry in front of Abby again.
“Satisfied?” Abby asks, after a moment. There’s a breathlessness to her voice that Ellie might feel kind of smug about if she didn’t feel so unbelievably shitty.
Ellie was so sure that, if she somehow came out of this alive, she’d find a way to kill Abby afterwards. But her mind keeps going back to her earlier thought. Abby’s just trying to get out of this alive.
And it’s not going to work? Ellie’s going to corner this woman into fucking her, and then she’s just going to kill her anyway?
It doesn’t feel good. None of it feels good; nothing she’s done has felt good for a long time, except being with Dina, and now she doesn’t even have that. But... honestly, she doesn’t know if that in particular is something she can live with.
And Abby’s still not making any move to kill her, even with Ellie just lying on the floor and facing away, so maybe being able to live with herself actually matters.
But she can’t live without avenging Joel, either. So what can she do?
Just not be able to live with herself, she guesses. Might as well take the route that requires less effort.
“Fine,” Ellie mutters, between clenched teeth. “I’m satisfied. Do what you want.”
There’s a shifting noise behind her. Abby sitting up, maybe?
“Are you crying?” Abby asks.
“No.” Technically true. Her throat is tight and her voice definitely sounds like she’s crying, but she’s keeping the tears in check. “I, uh.” Fuck. Is she actually going to say this? To Abby? “I shouldn’t have made you do that.”
There’s a long pause. Some rustling; it sounds like Abby is pulling her clothes back on.
“If you’re going to feel bad about something you did to me,” Abby says at last, in a voice so tightly controlled and even that it’s kind of scary, “feel bad about killing my friends. They deserve it more than I do.”
She’s right, isn’t she? What a fucking waste, killing all of Abby’s friends and not even killing Abby herself. Ellie’s been telling herself all along that those deaths were necessary; necessary for what?
“I can feel bad about both,” Ellie says. “I didn’t give you a choice. I—” She presses the back of her hand over her eyes. “God, this is so fucked up.”
Another long silence. Long enough for her to start wondering if she’ll look back and Abby will just be gone.
“I had a choice,” Abby says, eventually. “You told me to fuck you or kill you.”
Ellie keeps her eyes covered for a moment longer, then drops her hand to her side and rolls over, a question in her throat: what does that mean?
But Abby’s already walking away, and in the end Ellie just lies there and watches her go.