I’d Surely Lose Myself

by iamawilderness

Summary:

“Do you think… Do you think it’d be better if I didn’t go see Dina after all?”

Maria looks at Ellie like she just sprouted Cordyceps tendrils from her nostrils. “Kid, you’ve asked me a lot of stupid questions over the years, but that one takes the cake.”

“So…you think I should go back?”

“To your partner and child who don’t know if you’re alive or dead? Yes, you fucking idiot.”

—————

Ellie comes back to Jackson to see if she can get a do-over, whether she deserves one or not.

Notes:

Though this fic is mostly based on the games, I’ve seeded in bits from the show, too, ’cause they’re both fucking great.

Chapter 1: No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross

Summary:

Chapter title is from the Sufjan Stevens song, because “sad queer Christian redemption” feels like the right vibe for this particular moment in Ellie’s life.

Ellie knows what she deserves: to wander the wilderness, alone with the memories of how many lives she’s destroyed, how many mistakes she’s made, how much grief she’s left in her wake. Then one day, maybe, maybe she’d earn the right to turn up on Dina’s doorstep, having suffered enough to be forgiven. But she doesn’t have time for penance. Because every day she’s not in Jackson is another day of JJ’s childhood she’s missing, another day of him thinking his mom has abandoned him. 

She takes the long way to Jackson, hiking up into the mountains and back down into the valley, passing through desolate towns that even the infected have turned their backs on. She thinks best to the rhythm of her footsteps as they devour the miles between where she came from and where she’s headed. 

Ever since she left Santa Barbara, it hasn’t been Joel’s bloody, battered face that comes to her on sleepless nights; it’s Abby’s—sunken-in cheeks, cracked lips, livid bruises. Ellie saved that miserable bitch from the Rattlers’ grim justice only to dole out an even harsher punishment. Those guys were sick fucks for sure, but at least when they threatened the life of that poor Scar kid, it wasn’t personal.

Ellie considers what she’d do if she ever came face to face with Abby one last time. (Not that she’d ever go looking for her again; despite all evidence to the contrary, she isn’t completely insane.) But if she did, she’d leave all her rifle and Molotovs on the sand and just listen. She’d give Abby the chance to explain why she spared Ellie’s life not just once, but three times, even though she had every reason to bash her skull in. She’d ask about the two people she murdered at the aquarium, and she’d ask how it came to be that Abby turned her back on the WLF and took a Seraphite under her wing. Then Ellie would apologize, and apologize again, and never stop apologizing until her throat ran dry.

Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves. She can’t remember who first said that to her—Marlene, maybe?—or whether it’s an old proverb or a quote from an ’80s movie, but it’s pretty fucking accurate. Ellie might have walked away from that beach with her life, but something in her did die when she let Abby go. If she can’t use her immunity to save the human race, and if she can’t use her switchblade to avenge Joel, then what the fuck is she good for?

There’s the obvious answer, of course. But she already tried being happy, and it didn’t take. At the farm, she was finally safe, finally done running, chasing no one and no one chasing her, living on a sweet little plot of land with seven chickens, a couple dozen sheep, and the two people she loved most in the world. Even before the world went to hell, a chance at that kind of contentment was incredibly rare. And there she was, lucky as a pig in shit and totally incapable of appreciating it.

Out here in the Tetons with no one to witness her misery, the temptation to just be done with it once and for all is powerful. It would be easy: a step too close to the edge of a cliff, a run-in with another bullshit militia, shouting “fire!” in a basement full of clickers. Really, every minute that’s passed since Riley died and she didn’t has felt like stolen time. So why not give it back?

But suicide is a luxury she can’t afford. Because her lousy DNA could still be the key to synthesizing a cure someday, of course, but also because she can’t stand the idea of Dina and JJ and Tommy living with the uncertainty of never knowing what happened to her.

Ellie will never be able to forgive Abby for what she took from her, but she’ll just have to learn to live with her demons—and her ghosts. 

 

---

 

The sun is high in the sky when she arrives at the gates of Jackson. The guards on duty gawp at her, and she can guess what they’re thinking: Well, I’ll be damned. Crazy motherfucker made it back in one piece.

She makes a beeline to the diner, where she finds Maria sitting in her usual booth, poring over patrol logs and lists of provisions. Ellie’s knee-jerk instinct is to grab her by the collar and demand to know where Dina is. Instead, she sits down on the other side of the table and says a quiet, “Hey.”

Maria looks up from her papers with eyes like dinner plates. “Holy shit. You’re alive.”

“More or less,” Ellie says, wiggling the three remaining fingers on her left hand.

“Figured you’d have lost a hell of a lot more than that out there.”

“I got lucky.” It’s a lie, of course. Lucky would be if Abby had drowned her in the tide and left her corpse to be eaten by sharks.

“I’m guessing you’re looking for Dina,” Maria says.

“Yeah. The farm was cleared out, so I figured…”

“They’re at Jesse’s old place. She’s out on patrol right now, but she should be back a little before sunset. Gus is watching JJ.”

“Gus?” Ellie doesn’t recognize the name.

“Newbie. He and his husband showed up at the gate a few months back.”

“Geez. Guess I’ve missed a lot.”

Maria raises an eyebrow. “Whelp, that’s what happens when you skip town to go on a half-baked revenge mission on the other side of the country.”

Ellie groans. “I’m such an asshole.”

“Not gonna disagree with you there.”

Maria has been in a relationship with a stubborn, impulsive motherfucker for years, which means she’s probably the perfect person to ask for advice on this particular subject: “Do you think… Do you think it’d be better if I didn’t go see her after all?”

Maria looks at Ellie like she just sprouted Cordyceps tendrils from her nostrils. “Kid, you’ve asked me a lot of stupid questions over the years, but that one takes the cake.”

“So…you think I should go back?”

“To your partner and child who don’t know if you’re alive or dead? Yes, you fucking idiot.”

This pulls a laugh out of Ellie for the first time in months. It feels good, even if it’s at her own expense. “Sorry. I don’t know why I’m like this.”

Maria rolls her eyes in a way that says I can’t believe I married into this fucking family. “I do.”

Notes:

“I did not know how to get
out of the world, or how to stay—”
— Sharon Olds, “Easter, 1960”

Chapter 2: Hello Dear Acquaintance

Notes:

Chapter title is from “Another Season” by Frances Quinlan.

It’s weird knocking on Jesse’s door when there’s no Jesse around to answer it, and never will be again. 

“It’s open!” an unfamiliar voice calls from somewhere inside.

Even though Ellie never got to meet Bill and Frank, Joel’s description of them has stuck with her over the years. And with his kind eyes and easy smile, the fiftysomething stranger sitting on the living room couch is most definitely giving off Frank vibes. It makes her wonder how the hell he survived long enough to make it to Jackson.

“Holy cow,” he says. “You’re her, aren’t you?”

“If by ‘her’ you mean JJ’s deadbeat dad, then, yup.”

He laughs—laughs!—and holds out his hand for a shake. “Gus. Formerly of Atlanta, currently of Jackson.”

Fuck. From what she’s heard, Atlanta got completely overtaken by infected a couple years back. This guy must be a lot tougher than he’s letting on.

“Ellie. Formerly of Boston, currently of…” She trails off, unsure of how to end that sentence. She settles on “nowhere.”

Gus looks at her with a curious expression. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I thought you’d be, um, scarier?”

“I am scary,” Ellie says. “It’s just hard to tell ’cause I’m short and I don’t have my switchblade on me right now.”

There’s that smile again. “Well, hopefully I won’t give you a reason to pull it out.”

 

---

 

When Ellie left, JJ was still crawling around in a onesie and diapers. Now, he’s dressed in a tiny flannel shirt and jeans and acting out what seems to be a very elaborate story with his Lego spacemen.

“Hiya, Spud.” 

His head snaps up at the sound of Ellie’s voice—and, fuck, he looks so much like Dina that she could die. 

“Mom! You found me!”

She falls to her knees just in time for him to barrel into her chest. She inhales the sweet smell of his hair—dark and messy, like his dad’s—and tells him, “I’ll always find you.”

 

---

 

JJ spends the first hour of their reunion dragging Ellie from room to room and catching her up on what he’s been up to since she left. She’s happy to be led, his hand small and squishy in hers as he tells her about a cool bird he saw last week and how he can jump so high and the two creepy twins at his daycare.

She only interrupts when she sees a guitar case stashed in the back of a junk room. It’s Joel’s 1976 Gibson Hummingbird—the prize of his collection. 

“How’d you get here, buddy?” she says to the guitar.

“I walked!” JJ declares.

“Not you, buddy. This buddy,” Ellie says, patting the body of the Gibson with her palm.

“Mom says it used to be Grandpa Joel’s, but now it’s ours.”

Grandpa Joel. That one sure hits Ellie in a place. She pushes the feeling down and turns to JJ. “You up for a jam session?”

 

---

 

Golden hour finds the two of them side by side on the porch swing where Ellie and Jesse used to smoke weed and gossip about who was hooking up with who. Now, she’s picking out the opening bars of one of Joel’s favorite oldies—“Sweet Baby James.” She used to think it was cheesy; but, like a lot of things, parenthood has made her see it with fresh eyes. Mostly she picks it because the chords are basic enough to play with only three fingers. In a shaky voice, she begins:

There is a young cowboy
He lives on the range
His horse and his saddle are his only companions…

It isn’t the first time she’s played this song for JJ, which is why she’s able to get through it without breaking down. Because now, it’s just as wrapped up in the simple love she feels for her son as it was in the tricky love she felt for Joel.

As she begins her second round of “Goodnight you moonlight ladies,” Ellie realizes JJ isn’t paying attention anymore. She follows his gaze upward, and there’s Dina, wearing a Nirvana T-shirt, skin buttery orange in the glow of the sunset. The sight of her makes Ellie want to die; but it also makes her want to live.

“Uh, hey,” she says dumbly, leaning the Gibson against the wall.

Dina looks Ellie up and down, making sure she’s come back in one piece. Which, of course, she hasn’t.

“Your fingers,” she murmurs.

Ellie reaches for something to say and lands on a dirty joke. “Only really need three anyways.”

Dina’s eyes fill with tears. “Fuck you,” she chokes out, then storms into the house.

A tug at her jeans reminds Ellie that she’s still here, in her human body. 

“Mom? Are you in trouble?” 

She gives JJ’s hand a squeeze. “Kid, I’m always in trouble.”

 

---

 

Gus gallantly offers to take JJ on a trip to the playground so he won’t have to be around to see whatever’s gonna go down between his moms. Once they’ve left, Ellie skulks inside with her tail between her legs to find Dina furiously washing her hands in the kitchen sink.

“Sorry.”

“For what?”

“For making a dumb sex joke. And also for literally everything else.”

“Oh, cool. Incredibly vague apology accepted.”

“Dina, I… I don’t know where to start.”

“So maybe just don’t.”

Ellie takes a steadying breath. “I didn’t kill Abby. I mean, I almost did, but then I didn’t.”

“Wow. Congratulations.” Ellie had almost forgotten how sarcastic Dina gets when she’s pissed. “Why didn’t you?”

Ellie’s mind travels to JJ and all the ways she’d die for him. “Because she has a kid.”

Dina laughs derisively. “You finally noticed that, huh?”

Ellie feels backed into a corner. And whenever she feels trapped, the claws will come out. But that simply cannot happen right now.

“I shouldn’t have come,” she says. “I’m just gonna…”

“Don’t you dare walk out that door,” Dina growls.

“Then what, Dina? What do you want me to say? I fucked up. I am fucked up. And I saw some fucked-up shit out in Santa Barbara, and now I’m even more fucked up.”

Dina falters. “How fucked up are we talking?”

Ellie flashes back to the sight of the crucified bodies rising out of the ocean mist. “So fucked up it makes what the Scars did to that guy in the woods look like friggin’ Gandhi.”

“Shit.”

“But I’m here,” she continues. “Because I want you to know that I didn’t die, and that I love you and I’m sorry that I ditched you and JJ. You didn’t deserve that.”

“So what do I deserve?” Dina says, finally turning to look at her.

“I mean, the best, hottest, sanest girlfriend in the world! Or boyfriend or someone of whatever gender who’ll be there for you and JJ and not have panic attacks every ten seconds, and not abandon you to go do a murder a thousand miles away, and not trick you into thinking they can give you a normal life.”

Ellie nearly falls on her ass from the force of Dina bowling into her. But just like always, she catches them both. Once Ellie gets over her shock, they just hold each other for a long, long time. 

“If I’d wanted a sane girlfriend,” Dina says into the collar of Ellie’s dirty T-shirt, “I wouldn’t have flirted with the girl who asked me to steal a horse and join her on a killing spree.”

Ellie feels herself smiling. “Yeah, that is pretty fucked up of you.”

Dina wipes a tear from Ellie’s cheek with the pad of her thumb. “I’m fucked up, too, y’know. But we’ve got a kid now, and that means keeping our fucked-uppedness to a dull roar. ”

Ellie sits down on the kitchen floor, too wrung out to keep her legs under her. “I don’t know how to not lose my shit, Dina. I don’t know how to be a good mom to JJ.”

“It’s okay to lose your shit. And it’s okay not to be a perfect mom. Fuck knows I’m not. What isn’t okay is throwing in the towel when shit gets hard.”

“I’m sorry,” Ellie murmurs.

“You said that already.”

Words have never been Ellie’s strong suit. Puns and shit talk, sure—but not serious stuff. Not the stuff that wraps icy fingers around your neck and keeps you up till sunrise. But she tries anyway.

“I don’t know how to stay. And I don’t just mean in Jackson with you guys. I mean that I don’t know how to stay here.” She presses her palms to the floor and the soil beneath it, and the mycorrhizal network under that where the Cordyceps came from, and the dormant supervolcano under Yellowstone, less than a day’s ride away. It’s nuts that anyone calls all that shit “solid ground.”

“I know,” Dina says softly. “And it scares the shit out of me.” She pries one of Ellie’s hands from the tile and laces their fingers together, and Ellie stares at the place where their bodies connect—a closed circuit.

“So, what now?”

Dina sighs. “I think now you fuck off for a while so I can cry about the fact that you’re not dead without having to look at you the whole time. And then after that, I need to have a drink and decide how angry at you I am.”

“Pretty packed agenda,” Ellie says.

“Okay, yeah, you gotta leave right now, because if you say one more glib thing, I’m gonna ax-murder you.”

 

---

 

On the way to her and Joel’s old house, Ellie is accosted by a tiny gremlin.

“Yay! Mom didn’t kill you!” JJ cries.

“I escaped by the skin of my teeth,” she says, picking him up. “Speaking of… Where’s Gus?”

The man in question skids around the corner, shouting JJ’s name.

“Looking for this?” Ellie asks, strolling up to him.

“Oh, thank god. That kid’s got some serious legs on him.”

Ellie knows she should scold JJ for running away, but she’s powerless in the face of that toothless smile.

“Sorry about that. Guess he takes after his old lady.”

 

---

 

She really, really wishes that the two half-naked teenagers rolling around on her bed were a figment of her exhausted imagination, but unfortunately, they’re all too real. If you leave a place abandoned for this long, odds are pretty fucking good that you’ll wind up with some horny squatters.

“Yo, you ever heard of knocking?” the scrawny boy says, trying and failing to hide his boner under a sheet.

“Considering this is my house, nope, didn’t cross my mind.”

“Oh, shit,” the girl murmurs, hands flying up to conceal her boobs. “You’re Ellie.”

“Damn. Guess I’ve got a reputation.” She isn’t not proud of the idea that she’s become an urban legend among the teenage population of Jackson. “Yeah, I am Ellie. And I just got back from murdering a whole bunch of people, so how about you fuck off before I add two more to the list?”

She steps aside to let the two terrified little shits flee out of the room and out into the night. To her delight, they’ve left half a joint smoldering on the nightstand. 

As the smoke fills her lungs, Ellie is wrenched back to the night when Joel caught her and Kat getting to second base. She hated him for it at the time, but now it just makes her nostalgic. For all his haunted brutality, he was just another clueless dad.

After taking a long, lukewarm shower and popping open a dusty bottle of whiskey she finds in the kitchen, Ellie lies back on the couch and tries to gather her thoughts. Shit could’ve gone way worse with Dina. Honestly, she feels a little bad that they didn’t. If she’d been in Dina’s shoes, she’d have booted her out on her ass immediately.

But unlike her, Dina believes in giving people a second chance—or in Ellie’s case, a two hundredth chance. Where Ellie goes on the warpath, Dina hopes. And maybe her big, bleeding heart will extend far enough to let Ellie back into her life. If she gets that opportunity, she swears she won’t fuck it up again.

Notes:

“Can the killer in me tame the fire in you?
Oh, is there nothing left to do for us?”
— Phoebe Bridgers, “Killer”

Chapter 3: The Mess Inside

The banging on her front door at two a.m. doesn’t wake Ellie up; because to get woken up, you’d have to be asleep, which isn’t a thing she does much anymore.

It’s Dina, of course, leaning languorously against the doorframe, drunk as a skunk.

“Hey,” she says, eyes shining in the dark as she taps a half-empty bottle of hooch against her thigh.

“Hey,” Ellie replies.

“Couldn’t sleep, knew you’d be up.” Dina nudges past her into the mudroom, and Ellie lets herself be nudged. Then she executes a clumsy pirouette and ass-plants onto the dusty sofa. 

Ellie approaches slowly; she feels like she doesn’t know what kind of animal Dina is these days. “Where’s JJ?”

“At Gus and Danny’s,” Dina slurs. “Gus intuited that mama needed some alone time.” She takes a swig of the hooch and lets out an epic burp.

“Very intuitive, that Gus,” Ellie says, perching on the edge of the coffee table. When she reaches for the bottle, Dina yanks it roughly away.

“Nuh-uh. It’s my turn to be the mess now.”

Ellie nods and retreats back into herself, waiting for Dina to go off on her. But she just watches Ellie, lips slightly parted. She’s always been fearless about making eye contact, whether she’s just met you or she’s known you for years. It made Ellie uncomfortable when she first moved to Jackson, until that discomfort turned to something else entirely. Everything about Dina is a dare, and Ellie’s not one to back down from a challenge. But right now, with everything unspoken between them, the probing silence is unbearable. “Please say something,” Ellie says finally.

Finally, Dina lets out a shaky breath and begins, “It was easier to assume you were dead. Because if you were alive, it meant that every morning, you woke up in god knows what hellhole and said to yourself, ‘Yup, this pointless suicide mission? Still a great idea. Way better than being back home with my hot girlfriend and our perfect child.’”

She pauses, as if she’s waiting for Ellie to defend herself. But there’s nothing to say, because she’s got no excuse.

Dina leans into Ellie’s space, breath reeking of grain alcohol. “Tell me. How the fuck did you live with yourself?”

Finding the words is hard, but she owes it to Dina to try. “Honestly? I don’t remember. It was like I wasn’t even there, like I wasn’t Ellie, I was just, like, this animal anger. I kept pushing myself harder and harder, sleeping less and less, because I knew if I slowed down long enough to be able to think about what I was doing, I’d…”

Dina lets out a loud sob, tears streaming freely down her face.

Ellie presses on. “When I let Abby go, it all came flooding back. Everything I’d been burying deep, everything I wasted, everyone I hurt, everything I walked away from. And for what? For fucking what?”

“Ellie.” There’s only compassion in Dina’s voice; only sorrow; only love. 

“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, Dina. And I left you. I left you. How can you even stand to look at me?”

“Ellie,” she says again, like a prayer for something that’s already gone. And then she’s pulling Ellie into her lap, and they’re kissing, desperate and messy and bruising, a mouthful of moonshine. 

Just as suddenly, Dina shoves her away and chokes out, “Fucking stop. Just fucking stop.”

Ellie’s back hits the wall, and she’s frantic to fix this. “Dina, I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have—”

“Not that. I mean fucking stop trying to die.”

Oh. That. 

Every muscle tensed, Ellie waits for Dina to flee. But she doesn’t move an inch. 

“Jesus christ. Just…” Dina holds out the bottle of hooch, looking more exasperated than she did back at the farm whenever Ellie forgot to do the dishes and they wound up with ants.

“I thought it was your turn to be the mess?”

Dina pats the spot on the couch beside her. “We can go on the same turn.”

 

---

 

Despite everything she’s lost over the years, Ellie’s collection of scavenged VHS tapes has miraculously remained intact. To soothe them both, Ellie puts on one of their all-time faves: Empire Records. It’s an amazing relic of what it was like to be her and Dina’s age before society collapsed—just dumb kids, free to fuck around and fuck up, free to bicker over what record to put on next, rebelling by shaving their heads instead of running into active war zones. They’ve watched it enough times over the years that, even as drunk as they are, they can still quote most of the lines. 

“Who glued these quarters down?” Ellie says in time with the scrawny kid on the TV.

“I did,” Dina replies in unison with AJ.

“What the hell for, man?”

“I don’t feel the need to explain my art to you, Warren.”

By the time Gina is wailing “Sugar High” on the rooftop, the bottle is mostly empty and Dina is dead asleep on Ellie’s shoulder. 

She’s not sure whether she’ll ever be forgiven, or whether their relationship will ever be what it once was. But Dina’s here, in Ellie’s house, drooling all over her hoodie like she used to. And even though Ellie knows Dina will be gone before sunup, she allows herself to bury her nose in the hair of the woman she loves and drift off to the sound of her steady breaths.

Notes:

“But I cannot run
And I can’t hide
From the wreck we've made of our house
From the mess inside”
— The Mountain Goats, “The Mess Inside”

Chapter 4: The Get Your Shit Together Tour

Notes:

I am of course adding Gale to the story, because if life gifts you with a Catherine O’Hara character, you sure better put her to good use.

Ellie wakes to the sound of screaming. She bolts upright, hand instinctively reaching for her revolver, which she always keeps tucked under her sleeping bag. But it’s not there. Where the hell is it? Did she forget it in her pack? Or worse, leave it outside the tent?

It isn’t until she opens her crusty eyes that she realizes she isn’t sleeping in the shadow of a dune in Death Valley with raiders torturing some poor fucker right outside her door. She’s on the old corduroy sofa at Joel’s house, and the screaming outside is actually the laughter of a pack of kids on their way to school, and she doesn’t have her revolver within arm’s reach because she doesn’t need it.

“Get it the fuck together, Ellie,” she mutters through a wicked case of cottonmouth. She pads into the kitchen to find a glass of water on the counter with a note underneath it: 

Come by and see JJ later today if you want. He won’t shut up about you.
— D

PS: Who knows where thoughts come from? They just appear

That’s when she remembers Dina’s hooch, and Dina’s comforting weight against her, and other things about Dina that it would be better not to remember for the sake of her tenuous sanity. 

 

---

 

She’s not feeling up to more reunions right now, but Ellie might pass out if she doesn’t get some bacon grease in her. So she pulls on one of Joel’s old sweaters and heads to the diner.

“Mornin’, kid.”

Christ. She’d rather run into friggin’ Glen than Tommy.

“Fuck you,” she mutters by way of greeting, then walks into his arms. Maybe it’s a sibling thing—Ellie wouldn’t know—but Tommy smells a lot like his brother: cedar and gunpowder, with something musky underneath. He looks like he’s aged about twenty years since she last saw him.

“How’d the Golden State treat you?”

“Is that really what you want to ask me?” she says, settling into the booth across from him.

He sighs. “Fine. Did you track her down?”

“Yes.”

“And?” 

His look of feverish anticipation makes Ellie feel queasy. “And I let her go.”

He slams his fist down on the table, sending droplets of coffee flying like blood from a gunshot wound. “Now, why the fuck would you do a thing like that?”

Whenever he gets pissed, Ellie understands why Joel and Maria always shied away from going into detail about his time with the Fireflies. His anger is swift and violent; it would scare the shit out of her if she hadn’t seen things that are a whole lot scarier.

“Because I’m done, Tommy.”

“You’re a lot of things, girl,” he growls, “but I never thought I’d see you turn coward.”

“She was half-dead when I found her. Finishing the job wouldn’t have been anyone’s idea of brave.”

Tommy lets out an animal sound of frustration. “Then what the hell was it all for? Riding to Seattle? Fucking up my leg? Losing my eye? Losing Jesse?”

“If I’d finished the job, what would it have fixed for either of us?” Ellie shoots back. “Killing Abby won’t bring Jesse back, or your kneecap, or your eye. And it sure as fuck won’t bring Joel back.” She’s trying to convince herself as much as she’s trying to convince him; she hopes it’ll work on at least one of them.

He fights back tears, as if everyone in the room isn’t already watching them go at each other like two cats in a sack. “It would have given them peace,” he says in a broken voice.

“They’re dead, man. They can’t feel peace. Or anything else.”

“Well, maybe it would’ve given us peace.”

Ellie leans into his space. “Y’know, when you showed up at the farm with that goddamn map, I felt the same way. I thought if I snapped Abby’s neck, it would make the nightmares go away, and the panic attacks, and all the other shit. But all I got from Santa Barbara was a tree branch through the kidney and a whole bunch of new shit to have nightmares and panic attacks about.”

Even with only one eye, Tommy has an uncanny knack for looking like a sad old hound dog. “It should’ve been me.”

“And you think Maria would’ve forgiven you if you’d gone? ’Cause Dina sure as hell hasn’t forgiven me.” 

He winces at the name; she can only imagine how hard Dina must’ve laid into him after Ellie left.

She reaches for his hand across the table, feeling all the calloused places on his palm from decades spent holding a sniper rifle. “I’m sorry I couldn’t give you the justice you wanted,” she says, looking him in the eye—the one Abby didn’t shoot out of his skull. “But it’s over. It has to be. For both our sakes.”

Tommy’s fingers tighten around hers. “For you, maybe. But it ain’t over for me.”

Without another word, he rises painfully to his feet and limps over to the counter without the support of his cane. Stubborn, prideful motherfucker. Then he returns to the table and grunts, “Ordered you the lumberjack special. And before you argue with me about it, don’t. You’re thin as a fence post, and Joel would kill me if I let you starve yourself to death.”

 

---

 

“Well. Never expected you to darken my doorstep again,” Gale says.

“Because you thought I was dead?”

“Oh, no. I knew you’d make it. You’re a cockroach. I mean because I thought you’d decided that living with untreated PTSD was delightful.”

As much as she’d avoided Gale like the plague in the months after Joel’s murder, Ellie finds that she’s hungry for the presence of someone who can see straight through her. Because aside from a freakish amount of Cordyceps, Ellie’s never gotten close to figuring out what’s roiling around inside her brain.

“I don’t have any weed to pay you with,” she says as Gale opens the door for her to step inside. “Horny teens cleaned out my stash while I was gone.”

“Let’s call this session pro bono. Consider it a favor from a fellow survivor of Joel Miller’s bullshit.”

Ellie stops herself from lashing out in Joel’s defense. If anyone’s earned the right to be pissed at him for the rest of her natural life, it’s Gale.

“So. Did you find the person you were looking for?”

“Yup.”

“Did you kill her?” 

“Nope.” 

Gale is pretty hard to read—probably an essential skill for a shrink—but Ellie’s pretty sure she catches a flash of surprise in the upward slant of her eyebrows.

“And how do you feel about that?”

“Not sure,” Ellie tells her. “I was actually hoping you could help me figure that out.”

Gale’s heard every horror story in Jackson, so it says something that Ellie’s tale has a demonstrably chilling effect. By the time she gets to the part about watching Abby and Lev disappear into the mist, Gale’s lips are a thin line and her eyes are rimmed red.

“Jesus fucking christ,” she mutters.

“Is that your professional opinion?”

Gale gives her a stern look. “Oh, no. You’re not pulling that crap on me. Not about this.”

“You mean the thing where I deflect with wry humor?”

“Yes, Ellie. That thing.”

No use beating around the bush. “If I can’t find anything funny about all the shit I’ve been through, I’ll kill myself.”

Gale gives her a look like: Now you’re getting it. “I’m not saying you should stop. Laughter is a natural response to grief and trauma—healthy, even. But if you can’t set that coping mechanism aside now and then in a safe environment, whether it’s here with me or alone with someone you trust, then those wounds can never start healing.”

Considering how many literal wounds she’s sustained over the course of her lifetime, Ellie has always found the idea of metaphorical wounds to be completely ridiculous. Actual wounds do heal. You can watch the cut scab over, feel the broken rib mend, remove the stitches, trace the scar. But mental ones? There’s no ointment or bed rest that can treat the injuries the world has left on her.

“Right, I forgot that metaphors don’t work on you,” Gale says. “Let me put it another way: If you don’t start dealing with your unprocessed trauma, you will alienate the people who love you, and you will lose them. And that will eat away at you until there’s nothing left, not even your anger. And if that’s what you want, great. You’re on the right track.”

You’re a miracle worker, doc! Ellie doesn’t shoot back. She just takes a deep breath and nods.

“Good,” Gale says, leaning back in her armchair. “Then we can get started.”

 

---

 

Ellie’s next stop on her Get Your Shit Together tour is Maria’s office. 

“Finally ready to start pulling your weight around here again?” Maria asks without looking up from her paperwork.

“Yep. Except I have one request.”

“What’s that?”
“Don’t put me on patrol duty? I’ll do anything else. I just…”

Maria comes around the side of her desk and gives Ellie a small smile that betrays the smallest hint of pride. “Gus could use some extra help in the pasture. It’s lambing season, and I know you’ve got experience.”

Ellie couldn’t ask for better. For now, and maybe forever, she’s done with killing—even if it’s only runners in her rifle sights. Helping to bring new life into the world, on the other hand, seems like a great way to begin evening out the scales.

“Cool. When do I start?”

 

---

 

When Dina opens the screen door, JJ immediately barrels into Ellie’s legs; she lifts him and spins him in a wide circle, and he giggles with delight.

“Mom!” he cries between happy shrieks. “You’re still here!”

“Fuck,” Ellie mutters, then crouches down in front of him. “Listen, Spud. I’m gonna keep being here. Every day. I messed up big time when I left, and I’m never gonna do that again. Promise.”

She chances a glance at Dina, who looks relieved, but also like she doesn’t trust her to follow through. Ellie aims to prove her wrong.

“So, how bad was your hangover?” 

“Friggin’ atomic,” Dina grumbles. “Yours?”

“Still feeling it, honestly.”

“Have you eaten?” It’s a fair question; even in times of plenty, Ellie often forgets to feed herself. And after walking thousands of miles through territory where game was scarce, she can see every bone in her ribcage.

“Not since breakfast. But in my defense, it was the lumberjack special.

“El. You gotta take care of yourself. If not for your sake, then for his.” She nods to JJ, who’s looking up at Ellie like she hung the moon.

She was never more well-fed than when they were living on the farm. It didn’t matter if Ellie forgot to eat, because Dina would thrust a plate of eggs or a bowl of stew into her hands regardless.

“I know,” she says finally. “It’s…hard.”

“Stay for dinner.” It’s not a request.

As Dina bends over the fridge to see what’s on offer, Ellie grabs her arm to get her attention. “Hey. Thanks for watching out for me. And for letting me spend time with JJ. It’s more than I deserve.”

Dina stands and fixes Ellie with a serious expression. “No matter how pissed I am—and to be clear, I’m really, really pissed—I’m never gonna stop caring about you, and I’ll never keep you from JJ. He’s your son, too.”

Fuck, Ellie loves her so much. She loves her and loves her and loves her. 

“Thank you,” she says in a thick, gravely voice that sounds uncannily like Joel’s.

Notes:

“It’s not obligation. It’s believing that you can put your head up and look for a day where you won’t be so tired anymore.”
— Brennan Lee Mulligan, Dimension 20: Burrow’s End

Chapter 5: About Those Bitter Songs You Sing

Notes:

Chapter title is from “Plea From a Cat Named Virtute” by the Weakerthans

“Wow, you still really suck at chopping vegetables,” Dina says as she watches Ellie hack away at the kale.

“Yeah, crazily enough FEDRA’s knife skills course didn’t cover dicing leafy greens.”

“Dude, you don’t dice greens.”

“How am I supposed to know that?!”

“Because I showed you how at the— Ugh. Just…” Dina pulls the knife from Ellie’s hands and proceeds to slice the kale into perfectly even strips.

“You realize that didn’t actually involve you teaching me how to do that,” Ellie points out.

“You’re smart. You’ll pick it up,” Dina says with an unbearably sexy smirk.

Ellie does, in fact, pick it up. Before long, she’s losing herself in the meditative rhythm of dicing carrots, mincing garlic, and chopping broccoli. But she freezes when she gets to the cantaloupe. 

“Hey, what’s wrong?” Dina asks in her Uh-oh, looks like Ellie’s having another PTSD flashback voice.

Ellie doesn’t answer; she’s trapped inside the memory of holding her switchblade over the swell of Mel’s belly at the aquarium.

Dina gingerly prises the kitchen knife from Ellie’s fingers and wraps her arms around her from behind.

“I’m so fucked up, Dina.”

“I know. I’ve got you.”

“Even though I didn’t have you.”

“Stop trying to get me to yell at you, bitch,” Dina murmurs.

“I destroy everything I touch!”

“Only some things.”

Too worn out to keep fighting this simple kindness, Ellie allows herself to go slack in Dina’s embrace.

“I don’t know how I ever lived without you,” she says.

She feels Dina freeze. “You did live without me, though.”

“Not well.”

“I lived without you, too. Do you think that was easy for me?”

That’s when it hits Ellie: She’s been back in Jackson for almost a month, and she’s still making this whole damn thing about herself.

“Shit.” She turns to face Dina. “I haven’t even asked you what it was like for you while I was gone.”

“You just noticed that, huh?” Dina deadpans. But her wry expression barely conceals the hurt beneath.

 

---

 

After they’ve eaten dinner and put JJ down for the night, they head to the living room and perch on opposite sides of the sofa. They sit in silence for a long time, sipping wildflower tea (courtesy of Gus) and listening to the chirp of crickets outside the open window. As Ellie looks around at the Bruce Lee posters tacked to the wall, the photos of Jesse and his mom on the mantle, it hits her how much this isn’t either of their homes.

“I haven’t had the heart to take this stuff down,” Dina says, as if reading her mind. “I feel like if I do, he’ll really be gone.”

“I know what you mean,” Ellie says. “I know I should make Joel’s house mine, but the idea of getting rid of any of his shit makes me feel sick.”

In the empty space that follows, she thinks they’re both having the same thought: The farm was theirs. The farm didn’t have any ghosts.

Ellie nudges Dina’s calf with her foot. “But we’re not talking about my shit right now. I wanna hear about you.”

She looks almost flattered, which is kind of fucked up. “About what?”

“Anything.”

“Woof. In that case, buckle up, Williams.”

After Ellie left, Dina cried for three days straight. Then she realized she didn’t have the luxury of breaking down, because she was a single mom now, and JJ needed her. When he asked where Ellie went, Dina told him she was just visiting a friend in another town and would be back soon. He was too young to know the truth. Then she rode to Jackson and punched Tommy in the nose, and kept punching him until Maria hauled her off. But when Dina told her why she was beating the crap out of her husband, Maria punched him herself. 

Maria all but forced Dina and JJ to move back to town, enlisting a group to transport her furniture to Jesse’s old place. She even offered to send a posse after Ellie, but Dina told her it wasn’t worth the manpower. Jackson welcomed back their prodigal daughter with open arms, inviting her to dinner, offering to babysit JJ so she could have time alone to process. In those early days, her anger reignited with each sunset that Ellie didn’t return, because it meant she’d once again decided not to turn around. 

Eventually, Dina got her legs back under her and began to think about the shape her and JJ’s lives should take going forward. She returned to patrol duty, reconnected with old friends, and even made some new ones. And for a while, things were good. Not great, but good. She stopped waiting for Ellie and started to grieve her, because assuming she was dead was the only way she could let go of her anger and move on.

“And then you fucking turn up on my porch, all cute with your stupid guitar and your stupid haircut, and it all came back with a vengeance,” Dina says with a hollowed-out expression. “Honestly? A part of me wishes you’d just stayed away.”

Ellie doesn’t know what to say to that, so she keeps quiet.

“Do you have any idea what it’s like to love and trust someone so much, to build your entire life around them, and then watch them throw it all away?” Dina’s voice breaks on the last word. “It made me feel like, no matter what I did, I would never be enough for you.”

Ellie finds her voice then. “Dina, no. It wasn’t about you. It was my stupid revenge bullshit.”

Dina’s eyes go black. “Exactly. It wasn’t about me. Do you know how fucked that sounds, Ellie? I would’ve done anything for you. But for you, going on a suicide mission for the sake of a dead man was more important than I was.”

The words are a knife between Ellie’s ribs. “I thought I was doing you a favor, saving you the effort of trying to put me back together when I was just…broken.”

“God, El. What’s it gonna take to get it through your thick head that you were never a burden to me! I wanted to take care of you. That’s the whole fucking deal of, like, being human!”

“Am I, though? Human?” It’s the first time Ellie’s let herself say it out loud. “There’s so much Cordyceps in me that it’s wrapped around my fucking brain stem. Some days I wonder if I’m actually one of them, you know? It would explain why I’ve done all the things I’ve done.” She looks down at her shaking hands. “Sometimes I think…sometimes I think I should’ve just let you shoot me after I got bit in the subway.”

Dina launches herself across the sofa so fast that she knocks Ellie flat on her back. And Ellie’s buried in her, hot breath and pumping blood and racing pulse.

“Stoppit,” Dina murmurs. “I swear to god, Ellie. Just fucking stop.”

“All I do is hurt people.”

Dina takes Ellie’s face in her hands. “The way you stick your neck out for the people you love, the way you take care of me, the way you hold our son. The way you always come back,” she says. “Ellie. Sweetheart. You’re so human.”

A film reel unspools behind Ellie’s eyes: Breaking Nora’s kneecaps as she choked on spores. Doing nothing as Mel pleaded for her child’s life. Abby going slack beneath her hands as she drowned her in half a foot of seawater. Turning her back on Dina even though she was literally begging her to stay. Nothing’s human about any of that.

Ellie returns to the present moment when fingers tighten around her chin. “Hey,” Dina whispers. “Where’d you go just now?”

“I never should’ve come back,” Ellie chokes out. “I should’ve died in Santa Barbara. I should’ve—”

She has to hand it to Dina: The kiss is a really, really effective way to shut her up. It’s impossible to speak, impossible to wish she was dead, with Dina’s tongue parting her lips, Dina’s fingers tangling in her hair, Dina’s body flush with hers. And she doesn’t need words to know what Dina is trying to say: But you did come back, and now you’re here. So fucking *be* here.

Ellie lets her body take over. She pulls down the fly on Dina’s jeans and dips inside of her with her two remaining fingers; what she finds there is warm and wet and slick as tears. 

It’s an echo of that night in the theater. But that was an admission, a beginning. This is a recognition of what she already knows, but somehow forgot: As much as the cliff’s edge beckons, this woman and the thing between them is so, so worth sticking around for.

Dina’s orgasm hits a lot faster than usual, because you can’t take things slow when you’re trying to save someone’s life. Then, lightning quick, she’s whipping off Ellie’s boxers and work pants in one smooth motion, her nails digging into the skin of Ellie’s stomach as she presses inside her, determined and possessive.

Someone’s muttering Yesyesyesyes over and over again, and it takes Ellie a beat to realize it’s her. Yes to Dina; yes to this; yes to all of it.

As she’s coming down, Dina crawls up the length of her body and kisses her, sweet and messy. And for the first time in who knows how long, Ellie can’t stop smiling.

“Stay?” Dina says, real doubt in her voice.

“Always.” And Ellie means it. She really, truly does.

Notes:

“stretch the body long, let
the body do the the living.
keep me quiet, just a moment.
however long it lasts.”
— Kristin Lueke

Chapter 6: Crepuscule

Ellie is wrenched from sleep by, of all things, a wet willy.

“Rise and shine, babe,” a voice whispers in her ear.

Holy shit. Dina. She spent the night with Dina.

Ellie opens her eyes and is greeted by that wicked grin she loves more than anything in this world (with the possible exception of JJ).

“Rude.”

“You like when I’m rude,” Dina says, wiping her earwaxy finger tip on the sleeve of Ellie’s T-shirt. 

Ellie sits up and wipes the sleep from her eyes. “What time is it?”

“Five thirty. Up and at ’em, Williams.”

“Fuckin’…why?”

“Because you can’t be here when JJ wakes up.”

All the fizzy warmth leaves Ellie’s body. “But…you said you wanted me to stay.”

“Yeah, for like. The night.”

“It’s still night, Dina.”

“Don’t be obtuse.”

“I’m being obtuse?” Ellie shoots back.

There’s every indication that Dina is gearing up for a fight, but she seems to catch herself. “Just because we had sex doesn’t mean everything is suddenly fine now.”

“I’m such an idiot,” Ellie says, trying to keep the wobble out of her voice. 

Dina’s expression softens. “Hey. No. You listening to me last night and actually being fuckin’ vulnerable for once? That meant a lot. But I don’t—I can’t—trust you yet.”

Ellie nods, resigned to her fate. If that was the last time she got to be with Dina, at least she made it count.

“Ellie.”

“Hmm?”

“What do you think I just said?”

“That it’s never gonna work between us because you don’t trust me?”

Dina grimaces. “That filter in your head? It fuckin’ sucks. What I actually said is that I don’t trust you yet. Which means I want you to prove me wrong.”

“You do?”

“Yeah, dickface. I’m rooting for you. Just like always.”

Ellie lets out a sudden, loud sob, and Dina pulls her close. “Y’know, for such a badass, you’re really fucking weepy.”

“Don’t tell the other guys at school.”

That earns Ellie a smile and, miraculously, a quick peck on the lips. Then Dina immediately shoves her off the couch. “Seriously, get out of here. I don’t wanna confuse our kid.”

 

---

 

“Dina and I had sex last night.”

Gale looks momentarily surprised, but she schools her features back to neutral faster than Tommy can draw a pistol. “And how do you feel about that?”

“Fuckin’ aces,” Ellie says. “But she still doesn’t trust me. How do I fix it?”

“That isn’t the kind of thing you can rush,” Gale tells her. “There’s no shortcut to healing what’s broken between you.”

“Okayyyy, but say I’m really impatient and I’m willing to cut corners.”

Gale gives her a look like: You do realize that’s the entire fucking problem, right?

Ellie groans. “I just really, really love her, and I hate that I only get to see her sometimes, y’know? I’m better when I’m with her.”

“There’s a fine line between love and codependency,” Gale says. “If you rely on Dina to make you ‘better’—whatever that means to you—then you’ll never learn how to make yourself better.”

Ellie knows she’s pushing it, but she can’t help herself: “Did Eugene make you better?”

She winces as she waits for Gale to slap her across the face, but she doesn’t. “Yes,” she says, her hands shaking almost imperceptibly. “In a healthy relationship, whether it’s romantic or familial or platonic, both parties make each other stronger. But if I hadn’t already learned how to be my own person, I don’t know if I would have survived the loss.”

That’s when Ellie finally gets it. If Dina hadn’t been there for her after Joel died, she absolutely wouldn’t have survived. She’d have set out for Seattle with nothing but a stolen horse and the clothes on her back, and the Wolves would’ve gunned her down the second she crossed city limits. If she’s going to be the person she needs to be for her family, she has to be stronger than that. She has to figure out who she is without a revenge mission and without Joel or Dina or Jesse to pull her back from the brink, beyond a rabid animal whose greatest contribution to the world would be to donate her brain to science. 

“I have to learn how to survive on my own,” she says finally.

Gale looks more sympathetic than Ellie’s ever seen her. “God, no. You already know how to do that better than anyone in this town, in ways no one should ever have to. Especially someone as young as you.” She leans in. “I’m saying you need to explore who you want to be now that you have survived.

“Well, that sounds a fuck of a lot harder.”

Gale snorts. “No shit.”

 

---

 

“You look…different,” Dina says as she and Ellie sit side-by-side on the porch steps.

No use beating around the bush. “Gale says I gotta figure out who I am outside of our relationship.”

“Wait, you’re going to therapy? Like, on purpose?”

“Have been since I got back.”

“Who are you and what have you done with Ellie Williams?”

I buried her in a shallow grave on a beach in Santa Barbara, Ellie doesn’t say. “Maybe I’m a pod person and you’ll never know.”

Dina laughs. “Nah. If you were an alien clone, you wouldn’t know how to do that thing with your tongue.”

“Yeah…about that. Not the tongue thing specifically, but, like, the sex thing in general.” Ellie turns to face Dina fully. “I don’t think stuff between us can be just physical. When it comes to you, it’s sort of an all-or-nothing deal for me. Otherwise, it hurts too much.”

Dina looks sad, but not surprised. “I get it.”

“Which isn’t to say I don’t want to bang you literally all the time. I just…”

“I know.”

One of the best things about Dina is that she usually saves Ellie the effort of trying to put the big, inexpressible things into words. Gale said no shortcuts, but this seems like the good kind.

 

---

 

Ellie sleeps in fits and starts that night, which is nothing new. When she wakes up from her millionth nightmare to the sound of meadowlarks outside, she decides to give up on the whole sleeping thing. 

Ten minutes later, she steps out into the cold morning with a rifle slung over one shoulder and a guitar over the other, the light caught in that strange in-between before night turns into dawn. Crepuscule, she thinks as she gazes up into the bruise-blue sky, tinged pink at the horizon. Jesse taught her that word one time on morning patrol; he said he thought it sounded pretty. (“Dude, it has the word ‘pus’ in it,” Ellie had said, but he’d just shrugged and answered, “Still pretty.”)

The sun is just cresting over the Tetons when she rides up to the edge of the town’s ad-hoc cemetery. It seems like the population of corpses has tripled since she was last here. As safe as Jackson is, they’re not immune to irregular attacks from waves of infected rolling down from the mountains like a really gross avalanche. (There’s an ex-scientist in town who thinks they’ve started migrating seasonally. She’s been working to figure out the patterns so Jackson can be prepared for the onslaught. But no one’s exactly lining up to strap a GPS tracker to a bloater.)

There’s a shriveled bouquet of black-eyed Susans on Joel’s grave that can’t have been here for more than a couple weeks. “Tacky,” Ellie grumbles, tossing them aside. Joel didn’t give a shit about flowers when he was alive, so why the fuck would he now?

The last time she stood here, his murder was horribly fresh. She was so sure of herself then—sure that she’d track Abby down without much trouble, and even more sure that she’d enjoy watching her suffer. She’d never stopped to think about how she’d feel afterwards, or what any of it would have accomplished. It sure as hell wouldn’t have brought Joel back. And even if there was an afterlife (which there isn’t), it’s not like he would’ve been looking down from the clouds or whatever going, Good job avengin’ my death, baby girl. You done made me proud.

“Hey, Joel,” Ellie says to the rough-hewn tombstone. “Sorry I didn’t bring any coffee beans this time. They’re really fucking hard to get, so. Y’know.” Ellie pauses to clear her throat, suddenly nervous. Which is dumb; it’s not like he can hear her. All that’s down there is a moldering skeleton draped in rotting flannel. But what the hell, right?

“I fucked up. And then I just kept fucking up,” she begins. “But then I didn’t fuck up for a few years. So when I inevitably fucked up again, it was even worse. But think I’ve always been fucked up. Even before you got killed. And I think maybe you were, too? I wish I could’ve asked you how to be fucked up but still, like, do what needs doing. ’Cause you always did, even when I was just this random, annoying kid you got saddled with. So how the fuck did you wind up caring about me so much that you killed a bunch of doctors about it?” 

There’s no reply, of course, just a cold wind sweeping across the prairie.

“The world would’ve been better off if you’d just let them cut me open like they were supposed to. You’d still be alive, and Jesse would still be alive, and Tommy wouldn’t be all messed up, and Dina—”

The realization hits Ellie like a shotgun blast: If she’d died on the operating table in Salt Lake like she was supposed to, she’d never have met Dina. And maybe that would’ve been better. Dina would have settled down with Jesse and had a quiet, simple life with JJ; who wouldn’t even be called JJ, actually, because his namesakes would still be alive.

But it wouldn’t have been, she realizes, because Dina never loved Jesse the way she loved Ellie. For whatever crazy reason, Ellie made Dina happy—like, really, really happy. Hell, maybe Dina would still be in the closet—which would be a damn shame, because she’s extremely good at eating pussy. 

Then Ellie remembers this isn’t supposed to be about Dina or anyone else; it’s supposed to be about her. That’s a tall order, but Ellie tries.

If the Fireflies had killed her, she would never have found out what it felt like to live a life that’s about more than just surviving. She wouldn’t have known what it was like to have her own bedroom, or smoke weed, or have sex, or make friends who didn’t up and die on her. She’d never have learned how to play guitar, or stood on top of a T. rex, or sat inside a space capsule, or known what it was like to have a father. She wouldn’t have held JJ in her arms for the first time and felt an overwhelming love that lit up every dark room inside her.

Maybe all that was worth the pain of what she lost and took. Maybe it still is. Maybe instead of asking Joel why he saved her life, she should just say thank you. But neither of them has ever been good with words; so she opts for a more familiar language. 

“I never got why you were so obsessed with folk songs from, like, a hundred years ago,” she begins, sitting cross-legged in front of the headstone as she tunes Joel’s old guitar. “But I think I get what you were trying to say when you taught me this one.” 

It’s been a minute since Ellie’s tried her hand at fingerpicking, and her playing is more than a little clumsy. But this isn’t really about nailing it—just getting the music out there. 

“Old man, look at my life, I’m a lot like you were…” she begins in a small, shaky voice. 

The song feels right played under the open sky, with a fresh breeze on her face and the horizon stretching out before her. Like she’s traveling to someplace she’s never been before, and no one’s trying to kill her, and she’s not trying to kill anyone, either. Like maybe there’s a future she could have. She finally cuts loose when she gets to the chorus:

Old man, take a look at my life, I’m a lot like you
I need someone to love me the whole day through
Ah, one look in my eyes and you can tell that’s true…

She’s startled out of the moment by the crunch of a twig behind her. Within seconds, the guitar is on the ground and she’s on her feet, rifle locked and loaded. 

“Aw, hell,” Tommy says. As he raises his hands skyward, half a dozen black-eyed Susans tumble to the grass.

Notes:

“But if I’m dark I’m strong
as my own darkness”
— Alice Notley, “30th Birthday”

———————

Ellie is playing “Old Man” by Neil Young, because I guarantee Joel was super into every goddamn song on Harvest.