the haunted and the haunter

by KreativeYao

Summary:

What Ellie finds upon turning her head is not what she expected. Lingering next to Joel, atop the armrest of the couch, is a girl. Her hair is frizzy and controlled, kinky and coiled and no less beautiful than the rest of her. Her skin bears no filth, not like the dirt that’s accumulated all over Ellie’s. Her lips are large, her face full, like she’s been receiving full rations from the day she was born. There’s scorn in her eyes as her fingers trace over the broken watch on Joel’s wrist.

Ellie opens her mouth to ask about who in the hell she is when she notices the bloodstains on the girls’ violet shirt.

She then notices the inhuman translucency of her skin.

She then notices the way part of the girls’ leg phases through the couch.

 

Oh.

 

(TLDR: ellie can see ghosts. she can see sarah. it changes everything-- and nothing-- about her journey with joel.)

Chapter 1: ellie's imaginary friends

Summary:

Ellie's going to be snuck out of the QZ, but before that, she finds herself stuck in an apartment with one of the smugglers, and his ghostly guest.

Ellie isn’t thrilled to be stuck in the apartment with the man– Joel , he’d been called, unfamiliar to her in everything except name. He won’t hurt her– Marlene had promised as much– but he doesn’t seem particularly friendly.

Oh, well. Ellie’s stayed in worse places with worse people, she supposes. And while the wallpaper might be shredded, and the residence might reek of cigarettes and sweat and smoke, there’s still the gentle thrum of heat that seeps into her skin, and the promise of shelter from the rain pelting down outside. And it's a great comfort to her, the knowledge that she’ll only be here briefly; either these people will choose to smuggle her out of the city or they won’t, and either way, she’ll be out of this place by the morning.

Her legs ache from the hours she’s been standing and walking– the Boston QZ is infamously large, and the journey from the Firefly hideout to the smugglers’ apartment is just that: a journey . Now, longing for a spot to rest her legs, and, frankly, not knowing what else to do, she scrambles towards the couch, only to be beaten out by Joel. He settles on the cushions, pillowing his head with his right arm. 

Ellie can’t bite back a scowl. “What are you doing?”

He doesn’t even open his eyes to regard her. “Killing time.”

“What am I supposed to do?” God, she sounds petulant. The man must think so too, as his response is cold, bordering on hostile.

“I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

That’s that, then. Ellie glares at him for a while, her lips curling into an ugly, disapproving frown. The guy’s impolite as all hell, and a few theories spring into her head as to why; maybe he’s not good with kids, maybe he’s grouchy when he’s tired but the most convincing one is the all-encompassing he’s an asshole.

She gives one last eyeroll that isn’t met with any response whatsoever; the man seems to have fully fallen asleep. His breaths even out, his chest rising and falling in a rhythm indicative of a light sleep. She’s jealous of people who can just do that– fall asleep with ease, without having to count up to four digit numbers or entertain their brains with imaginings of dinosaurs and space. 

She stares at him for a moment more, in jealousy, perhaps, but more likely in observation. Her eyes search over his form: unruly, silvering hair, salt and pepper beard, rumpled but not dirty clothes, obvious muscles. He’s definitely strong and well-exercised, she’ll give him that. 

Her eyes flit to the watch on his wrist. The glass is fragmented, and it doesn’t seem to be ticking anymore.

“Your watch is broken,” she comments. She doesn’t know what she’s trying to get out of him– a reaction, maybe? But the man seems to be fully submerged in sleep, and the snarky comment doesn’t disturb it. 

Scanning over Joel proves boring quite fast. He’s nothing special; she’s seen a million gruff assholes who can pack a punch. With nothing better to do, Ellie moseys over to the window, hoisting herself up onto the cement ledge. Rain patters against the glass, blurring the view of what Ellie knows is the QZ wall. 

Even in this weather, there’s FEDRA soldiers patrolling. Their helmets and uniforms must protect them from the rain well enough, but Ellie definitely doesn’t envy them.

That would’ve been me.

The thought emerges unbidden but not untrue. She would’ve been a FEDRA soldier if not for her circumstances. She certainly didn’t perform well enough in drills and training to climb the ladder any higher than that. 

(A lie; she’s one of the best in her class, in both academics and with a gun, but her general disobedience and reputation keep her barely above the Culling Line.)

It’s now, upon the realization that she no longer has to be resigned to the FEDRA life, that Ellie fully comes to terms with the impending future.

She’s going to leave the wall.

The notion invites goosebumps all across her arms. She doesn’t know if they’re reflecting nerves or excitement.

She’s never once been outside the wall. She’s never been outside of QZ, let alone outside of Boston. There’s a whole world out there that she’s only heard about in travel books and on maps. And she’s going to go there.

Her right arm throbs, and she spares a glance to it. She shifts a bit where she's sat, making sure the limb is hidden from the view of Joel, before she rolls up her sleeve and gazes at the damning crescent marks on her forearm. The only reason she’s being smuggled out of the wall in the first place.

I’m immune.

It’s surreal. It’s surreal to think that she, out of all people, has something going on that’s preventing her from becoming infected.

It’s surreal to think that there’s people out there who’ve been looking for her. That she’s a saving grace. That she’s something more than the weird infant FEDRA girl who’s disrespectful at best and execution-prone at worst.

Ellie’s never been well-liked. She’s always been snarky, but more than that, she’s always been unbelievably and indescribably odd–

From somewhere behind her, she hears a scoff, followed by a voice, light and feminine and almost friendly.

“You’re not a very good host.”

Ellie’s head whips around, grip tightening on the switchblade hidden in her sleeve. She doesn’t know who’s speaking, but it’s certainly not Joel, unless he had somehow inherited the vocal chords of a girl four decades younger than him. And it didn’t sound like the woman– Tessa, maybe?– who’d gone along with Marlene.

So, her automatic assumption is that there’s an intruder, and she needs to kill them before she’s killed first.

What she finds, though, upon turning her head, is not what she expected, not in the slightest. Lingering next to Joel, atop the armrest of the couch, is a girl. Her hair is frizzy and controlled, kinky and coiled and no less beautiful than the rest of her. Her skin bears no filth, not like the dirt that’s accumulated all over Ellie’s. Her lips are large, her face full, like she’s been receiving full rations from the day she was born. She smiles, but there’s scorn in her eyes as her fingers trace over the broken watch on Joel’s wrist.

She’s chastising him, Ellie realizes, with equal parts amusement and concern, because it’s a little funny for this girl, a truly soft-looking thing who can’t be older than fifteen, to be scolding a grown man, but concerning, because seriously, where did this girl come from? Who is she? Is she a threat? What the hell is she doing in this apartment in the first place?

Ellie opens her mouth to ask when she notices the bloodstains on the girls’ violet shirt.

She then notices the inhuman translucency of her skin.

She then notices the way part of the girls’ leg phases through the couch.

Oh.

 

✧

 

Ellie Williams can see ghosts.

Unlike her immunity, which is a new discovery as of two weeks ago, she’s been seeing ghosts since birth. Before the bite, before she and Riley had been caught holding hands, before any of it, that had been the thing that condemned her.

That was the reason she was a freak.

“Who are you talking to, sweetheart?” Paulina, the FEDRA caretaker of all children under six who weren’t useful because they couldn’t yet hold guns, had asked.

“Her!” Ellie, young and naive, pointed to the corner of the orphanage playroom. At the apex of two walls, covered in the crayon drawings well-loved by unloved children, there was another little girl, with a bite on her ankle and a pinpoint dot on her neck from a needle. “My friend!”

Paulina sat down beside Ellie, cocking her head and seeming genuinely interested when she asked “Who, Ellie?”

“Her!” Ellie pointed again. To her, the girl was in plain sight, sticking out like a sore thumb. Sure, she was a little foggy, and her features were relatively undefined, she was still obvious, and she was there.

Paulina didn’t seem to think so. She did no more than frown. She didn’t say hello to the little girl in the corner, didn’t even look at her. Ellie thought it was rude to ignore her, and said as much, criticizing the woman for her manners as had been done to her time and time again.

“Ellie,” Paulina had murmured, her soft voice edged with irritation, “there’s nobody there. Let’s get you to bed, okay?”

 Paulina couldn’t see the girl in the corner.

Nobody could see her– a fact that Ellie didn’t grasp until the other kids started taking her food and shoving her around.

“Why don’t you ask your friend to help you?” One of the girls– she was the same age as Ellie, but she was bigger and stronger and always fully fed– jeered. She then kicked Ellie into a corner and snatched her lunch tray away. It was a Friday, which meant that the FEDRA orphanage had gotten a restock, and they gave the children the good food: sometimes chicken, sometimes fresh fruit. Once, they even brought cake.

Not that it mattered anymore. Ellie stared at her empty hands, and cried more for the loss of food than she did for the contusions on her skin.

The corner girl never helped. She never talked, not really. She was a weak thing, barely remembered, barely wanted. So Ellie went to Paulina instead, in tears, bruises blossoming across her back where she’d been battered.

Paulina put ice to her wounds and offered her tissues for her tears. And nothing more.

“They’re always being mean to me,” Ellie sniffled into her tissue as Paulina finished placing a bandaid over wherever Ellie was bleeding, “can you tell them to stop?”

Paulina placed a hand on Ellie’s shoulder. “Why are they mean to you?”

“They say I’m a liar!” Ellie wailed, poorly-contained tears trekking down her cheeks. “They think I’m making up my friend!”

“And who’s your friend?” Paulina had asked, not bothering to wipe the tears from Ellie’s cheeks.

“Right there! In the corner, like I told you!”

Paulina sighed, and her hands gathered Ellie’s red hair, sifting through it in an act of almost-comfort. 

“You’re too old for imaginary friends, Ellie.”

 

✧

 

Ellie stopped talking about them by age seven. She never stopped seeing them, though. 

Turns out, in an abusive institution run by an overreaching, powerhungry government, a lot of people tend to die, and they die angry.

Angry ghosts don’t fade easily. They’re red-tinted and rageful, seeking retribution wherever and however they can find it. Ghosts barely interact with the living plane, thank god, but they can leave small traces– a brief flicker of a light, a cold, momentary breeze, a wispy whisper. They can do enough to haunt whoever hurt them, to royally screw them over, and then move on to wherever they go.

Under her bed in the FEDRA dormitory, Ellie had kept a notebook, started when she was eight years old. She wrote down everything she could possibly ascertain on the ghosts she saw; some are more solid than others, some are more clear than others, some are silent and some are screaming.

Two facts stood out among the rest, ones she’d learned from a fleeting conversation with a young boy she’d found in an alley, only seconds after his cruel death, ordered by the Culling Panel.

“There’s nobody to remember me,” he had sobbed, “no reason or way to stay.”

She’d written down two things, both with question marks following them.

Ghosts need to be remembered to stay?

Ghosts need to want to stay?

She’d confirmed the theories once she was twelve, and had seen a couple hundred ghosts in the school, in the alleys, in the streets of the QZ. She saw– sees –angry ghosts most commonly, who stay to enact revenge, to exert their vengeance until they succeed or they get tired. Other times, she sees ghosts looming behind someone living, capitalizing on the fact that they’re remembered to stick around with whoever’s still left alive.

She’s seen a couple stray ghosts, with neither desire nor reason to stay. But they end up like corner girl; foggy and unspoken. They’re not very strong ghosts, and with wills as fragile as their frames, they fade into obscurity quickly.

She knows enough that they don’t scare her. She knows how to distinguish them from living people, how to keep quiet, how to pretend that they aren’t present, that their shrieks and sobs don’t tear into the fabrics of her very soul.

Ghosts who stay always want something. Ghosts who can speak like to verbalize it.

“ I’m gonna fucking kill you, Christopher.”

“Ma? Ma, I’m gonna follow you, okay? You don’t have to see me.”

“Just one more look at her face…”

“You’re going to regret that.”

Ellie hears it all, and she hates it all, because there’s nothing she can do for them. She can’t talk to them without weird glances or neverending allegations of being FEDRA’s resident fucked-up-freak. She can’t help them, won’t let herself, will never let herself again after what happened in that god-foresaken mall–

The point is, Ellie sees ghosts. 

She fucking hates it.

 

✧

 

The ghost girl makes herself at home next to Joel. She’s quite bouncy, moving from the armrest to the cushion to the floor to the cushion again. She tucks herself next to Joel’s chest like she belongs there, and Ellie stares, completely and utterly lost at the actions.

Joel doesn’t really seem like the cuddly type. Not that it matters– the girl is a ghost and he won’t have a clue she’s there– but Ellie still snorts at the thought of how the man would react to having some random little girl in his arms.

Speak– rather, think– of the devil, Joel lets out a low, sleepy grumble. His eyebrows furrow, and his face crinkles with worry.

Nightmare , Ellie figures, shrugging it off. Everyone gets them. They’re living in the damn apocalypse.

What’s weird about the situation, though, is how the ghost girl seems to solidify, how her form is elucidated as the man twists and turns and groans. Her picture-perfect face warps, a frown tugging on her lips as she, too, sees the state of the man.

“Come on, wake up, wake up!” She calls out the man, as if he can hear her. “Stop dreaming about that, old man, c’mon.”

She’s got the softest voice Ellie’s ever heard on a ghost. Ghosts are wordless or ear-piercingly loud, their voices shrill and distorted with rage. This girl, though, speaks soothingly, with clarity. If not for the wounds marring her skin and the way her body parts phase through matter, Ellie could’ve feasibly mistaken her for somebody who’s alive.

Joel’s angsty, nightmare-driven murmurs grow louder. He calls out a name, though his words are so jumbled Ellie can’t quite make it out from where she’s perched on the windowsill. The ghost girl can, though, and her features further crumple with anguish.

“Stop, stop, stop, you’ve gotta get up now, c’mon,” she pleads, reaching out to shake his arm, though her hands permeate right through the skin. 

Perhaps it’s the sheer desperation in the ghost girls’ tone, or Ellie’s own distaste for nightmares that compels her to rouse the man. She turns back to the window and clears her throat dramatically, far louder than necessary, enough to bring the smuggler right back to the world of the waking.

He sits up with a jolt, and the ghost girl leaps backwards too, but it’s only a matter of seconds before she rushes forward to crush Joel in a hug. He can’t feel it, of course he can’t, and instead of embracing her in return, he brings both hands to his face to wipe the sleep from his eyes.

“You mumble in your sleep.” Joel’s head swivels towards Ellie as she speaks. The ghost girls’ attention is caught as well, but Ellie makes a very pointed decision to not look her way. “I hate bad dreams.”

“Yeah, me too,” Joel replies, much to Ellie’s surprise. She’d expected him to ignore her entirely, or to respond with nothing but a grunt. She lets her gaze stray to the ghost for just a moment, but the ghosts’ chocolate-brown eyes are on Joel again, somber and apologetic. As if she understands exactly what he’d been dreaming about, as if she understands what haunts him.

Who the hell is she?

Notes:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

i love ghost-seeing fics. i had this idea when i was laying in bed after passing my drivers test (holy shit i'm 16 and have a license now) and was just like 'ellie williams probably shouldn't ever be allowed to drive. she'd probably kill someone.'

...

'what if she could see dead people?'

anyways. this is probably gonna be a longer(ish) fic, so please, all comments & kudos are greatly appreciated! i adore them so so so much and i hope somebody out there is as interested in this idea as i am :)

Chapter 2: breakfree

Summary:

Tess & Joel smuggle Ellie out of the QZ. Things go as far from smoothly as possible.

Notes:

soooo... am I taking my favorite parts of the show and the game that don't correlate and combining them to fit my AU? yes.

sue me >:(

Tess, Ellie decides, as she stands beside the woman in a rusty elevator platform, is way cooler than Joel in every way that counts.

She’s got good hair, for one. Some of it’s down, cascading over her shoulders, while half of it is pulled up and held in place by a hair tie– a precious commodity, Ellie knows. She holds a gun in hands that don’t shake, and in every situation, especially the stressful type, she always seems to take the lead. 

“Joel and I are partners,” Tess had told Ellie (who doesn’t quite know if she’d meant in smuggling or in love, but Ellie doesn’t ask), but based on the way the woman barks out orders that Joel follows without question, Ellie can tell that Tess is definitely the boss.

Plus, she doesn’t have a weird ghost following her around, and that earns her some extra points in the Ellie Williams Approval Meter.

It’s not that Ellie hates Joel for having his own little ghostly sidekick, so much as it is that she’s envious.

It taunts her, seeing the way the spirit stands besides Joel as the elevator descends. How she looks up at him with her dark eyes, how she tirelessly tries to wipe the mud off of his green flannel. She can’t really interact with the living world, and she knows it, but she still tries, again and again, to rid his clothes of muck. The gesture is a testament to her love, Ellie thinks, the love that’s motivating her to keep lingering around the man, the love that’s keeping her tethered to this world instead of whatever afterlife awaits her.

The ghost chooses to stay, because she has love for Joel.

Ellie wonders why no one had stayed for her.

It’s easier to feel less bitter when she sees that Tess doesn’t have a ghost following her, either, despite how unmistakably cool she is.

Speaking of Tess, the woman is peering right at Ellie, and with some embarrassment, Ellie realizes that she’d completely zoned out while Tess’d been talking.

“What’d you say?” Ellie prompts, hoping that her inattentiveness isn’t as much of a problem with these two as it was with FEDRA instructors.

“Jesus, girl, get your head out of the damn clouds,” Joel admonishes from where he’s stood, purposefully near the elevator gate, as if to serve as a door. He’s in a protective stance, but it does little to prevent Ellie’s irritation towards him.

“Joel,” Tess’s voice is edged with warning, pressing him to relent. She tilts her head towards Ellie again. “I asked what your deal is. The Fireflies seem pretty antsy to get you out of this place,” she rolls her shoulderblades in preparation, “and they’re offering us a pretty penny for doin’ this. So it’d be great if someone could play nice.” She steps on the back of Joel’s foot for a moment before pulling back when he grunts.

“If we’re gonna get her out alive, she needs to be alert,” he counters.

Tess rolls her eyes with a certain degree of fondness and points at him behind his back, the sarcastic action for Ellie and Ellie alone, as if to say men.

Ellie can’t bite back a smile. 

“I’m still curious, though,” Tess tells Ellie. “What do they want with a little girl? You some big-wig’s daughter or something?”

“I’m not a little girl,” Ellie insists, only barely fighting the urge to swear, but she reminds herself that she’s speaking to Tess, and Tess is the kind of person she wants firmly on Team Ellie, “and… yeah. Something like that.”

“Okay, then. Be cryptic,” Tess replies, but her tongue-in-cheek smile signals to Ellie that she’s not too upset about her lack-of-explanation. 

Joel, on the other hand, snorts; not a humored snort, but a disbelieving one. “‘Not a little girl’ my ass. How old are you?”

“None of your fucking buisness,” Ellie snaps back.

“Woah, hey.” Tess cuts them both off before the argument can escalate, “let’s all be cordial, here. Being at each other's throats isn’t gonna get us anywhere.”

Joel’s quiet after that, because apparently, he’s either dead silent or argumentative. Ellie glowers at him, and her indignation is only worsened as the ghost girl takes his side, both literally and figuratively. She crosses her arms, parroting the smuggler’s stance before muttering “she’s the one that started it.”

Well, fuck you, too , Ellie squashes the urge to reply. She’s well aware that voicing that thought would be, to say the least, a colossal mistake. She’s finally found a few people who aren’t privy to the rumors that circulate through FEDRA school– that she’s a freak, that she talks to herself, that she’s nothing short of schizophrenic– and she doesn’t intend to give them reason to make those conclusions on their own. 

Plus, Ellie hasn't given the ghost girl any hints that yes , in fact, she can see her, and she doesn’t plan to. She’s discovered, as a general rule of thumb, that most ghosts are used to being unseen, and once they learn that they’re visible and audible to her, they don’t shut up. They beg and nag her endlessly to fulfill the tasks that they couldn’t before death.

Please, you have to make sure he’s okay–

Kill him! If you know what’s good for you, kill him!

Protect that little girl, please, you have to, I’m begging you.

Ellie used to help out ghosts. She doesn’t anymore. She never will again. She’s not about to change her stance for the sake of some random girl who’s trailing a smuggler she’s already deemed an asshole.

The elevator arrives at one floor below QZ street-level with a clatter. It rattles Ellie out of her thoughts. Joel keeps the two of them– Ellie and Tess– back for a moment while he inspects the tiny underground room. Meanwhile, the ghost girl leaps off of the elevator platform. She has no need to be afraid of whatever could be lurking, Ellie supposes.

“Clear,” Joel grunts, stepping into the brick-walled room. There’s a space in one of the walls where a convenient smuggler-sized crawlspace is carved out, which the man drops down and climbs through without a second thought. Ellie is very quickly reminded that while this whole escaping the QZ that she’s been in her entire life thing might be a newfangled operation for her, the two living people she’s with have done this countless times before.

Tess ambles off of the platform next, ushering Ellie along with her. Before letting her go after Joel, though, Tess halts her with a hand on the shoulder. Touch is rarely so kind, Ellie’s found, from years of punishments after infractions at FEDRA school. The hands she’s accustomed to like to hurt, and perhaps that’s why she flinches away from the woman’s grip.

Tess doesn’t seem particularly offended, though. She’s too busy pillaging through the bag on her back. After a few moments, she pulls out a small flashlight, clearly a spare, and hands it to Ellie.

“You go next,” she says, nodding towards the hole in the wall, “I’ll caboose.” 

“Right.” Ellie crouches down, getting her body low before entering the tunnel. She’s instantly blasted with the aroma of earth and rain, which she’s not opposed to. She is, however, not a huge fan of the occasional drop that lands on her head, or the wet sensation on her palms. The ground beneath her hands is slick, and she can already imagine the mud that will be caking the knees of her jeans when she escapes the passage.

As if to make matters worse, she swears she hears the skittering of something with four legs. 

“There’s no scorpions in here, right?” Her voice echoes slightly, bouncing back into her own ears. She sounds humorous enough, but there’s a hint of fear in her tone she can’t quite eradicate.

Tess, from somewhere behind her, snickers. “In Boston? No. Why, kid? You scared?”
“No,” Ellie answers, too quick to be honest, “of course not! I’m looking out for you guys. Who knows what a scorpion sting would do to your brittle bones?”

“I’m not that old,” Tess huffs. “Joel, though…”

Joel is either too far ahead of them to contribute to the conversation, or has no interest in doing so. 

Ellie inches through the tunnel and is glad when she finally emerges from an opening on the other side (without encountering any scorpions). Joel is halfway up a ladder, holding up a massive wooden plank with a single hand. He’s only lifting it high enough to get a glimpse of whatever’s above it, but Ellie can’t help but wonder how strong is this guy, exactly?

“Clear,” he says, repeating his words from earlier. He climbs out of the hole first, before hoisting the wood up entirely for Ellie and Tess. “C’mon.”

Ellie doesn’t keep him waiting. She clings to the rungs of the ladder, which are a little more slippery than she’d like them to be, but by some miracle, she makes it out of the pit without slipping and completely wrecking whatever cred she’s built with the two smugglers.

And– woah. There’s no wall wrapping around her surroundings anymore. Her first thought is how very vast the world is, how far she can see. The Boston QZ was large, sure, but shriveled in comparison to the world.

Even without the blockades, though, there’s still the fog of the incessant downpour that obscures the expanse of the outside. 

The rain is loud, too, thunderous and booming. Ellie’s never been one for booming noises. They all blend together: thunder, shouting, gunshots, screams.

“Okay,” Tess calls, commanding her attention. Ellie shifts towards her. “Stick together. If everything goes smoothly, we get out of the zone unnoticed.”

“The zone?” Ellie asks.

“The space occupied by FEDRA officers,” Tess explains. “They don’t bother coming out too far. Now, if it all goes fine, nobody sees us, and we make a flawless run to the capitol.”

Ellie bobs her head in a nod, and she doesn’t ask and if it doesn’t go fine? What do we do then?

Unfortunately, she gets to find out first-hard.

She’d followed Joel flawlessly. She’d kept her steps quiet, had turned off her flashlight, had kept her head down and her questions unasked. She hadn’t even tripped in the mud, or on the unstable footing, or when climbing through the sideways sixteen-wheeler.

They’d just gotten unlucky.

A FEDRA officer– one with a badge Ellie doesn’t recognize, so she figures that he’s exclusively part of the Outer-Wall Brigades and doesn’t participate in the schooling program– topples Joel over. The officer swings at the back of Joel’s head with the butt of his rifle, and Joel goes down, landing on his ass in the mud. Ellie’s hands shoot up in surrender.

For a long moment, she fears that it’s not the right move, that she’ll get shot regardless, or that Tess and Joel will see it as cowardly or moronic. Should she be doing something else? Should she be tackling the man who’s twice her size?

It’s a small relief when she notices Tess’s hands are also up. Her mind oscillates between solace and panic; conflicting voices of at least I didn’t do the wrong thing and we’re fucked, we’re so fucking fucked and we’re gonna die .

“Don’t do anything stupid,” a different officer, a woman this time, barks out, pointing her flashlight right at Ellie and Tess. It’s blinding, and Ellie lowers her head in a move to protect her eyes.

“Listen,” Tess starts, her voice all sunshine and sweetness.

“On your knees. Hands behind your head,” the FEDRA woman interrupts, her gun pointed right at Ellie. Tess must appear more dangerous than she does, though, as it tracks the female smuggler as she follows Ellie out of the back of the semitruck and onto the ground. “You scan ‘em, I’ll call this in,” the officer says to her colleague, whose respective gun is aimed at Joel.

“Right.” The male officer pulls back for a moment, letting his gun rest in its holster while he searches for another device. Finding it, he presses it to Joel’s neck. There’s a moment of silence– well, not silence, the rain is far from soft, but wordlessness– before an affirmative beep follows.

Oh.

It’s an infection scanner.

Ellie’s no expert on FEDRA technology. Hell, she couldn’t care less about how their shit works. But she gets a feeling now, a prying, invasive feeling that settles in her gut like a parasite, that the scanner detects traces of cordyceps found in people before they’re completely overrun with the fungus.

She’s got traces. The marks on her arm, which she had thought were safely concealed beneath her sleeve, are proof of it.

FEDRA won’t hear her out. Not like the Fireflies, not like Marlene did. The second the scanner comes back a blaring, vibrant red, they’ll blow her brains out.

She’s dead. She’s going to die. She’s going to die, and she won’t ever be able to fulfill her purpose and help people. She won’t ever get her brain fixed, so she stops seeing shit, so she can be normal.

The only thing that brings her out of the fog of her panic is a shaky voice to her left. “Come on, you can take them down, why are you waiting?”

The ghost girl.

She’s slotted near Joel, as always. Currently, she’s behind him, as if she could actually offer him any shelter from gunfire. Ellie, even through the dread that shrouds her own head, catches the fear in the girls’ tone. It makes her wonder how often Joel and Tess get caught.

She wonders if this is the first time.

She wonders if it’s her fault.

“If you turn the other way, we can make it worth your while,” Tess tries again, still all sweet and smiley, as if there’s not a gun trained on her. “Whatever you want, we’ve got. A fuck ton of ration cards, or some pills… really, whatever you need.”

“Shut up,” the man snarls, placing the scanner to her neck. There’s quiet, and then a beep. Safe.

He then moves to Ellie.

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, I’m going to die.

She’s heard the saying, in books and in the few movies that FEDRA had projected on walls back at school on days when the students were obedient, that before death, people have their lives flash behind their eyes, like a film reel.

It doesn’t happen to her. She doesn’t get a playback of her entire life. All she gets is a single spoken sentence, overtaking her mind.

“You know, we… we can be all poetic and shit and lose our minds together.”

Ellie knows she should’ve died then.

But she didn’t.

I’m immune.

It has to mean something.

It’s those thoughts that drive her to unsheathe the switchblade in her hand. It’s those thoughts that have her jabbing the FEDRA guard in the leg with a force that sends him stumbling back. The device in his hand makes a lower beep, and all Ellie can do is pray that the sound is lost in the chaos that ensues.

Before the officer can get up, Joel’s on him in an instant, bashing his face in. Tess unholsters her own gun and shoots the female officer, twice to be safe, before moving to Joel’s side.

The dance between life and death is an uncertain one, but for the female officer, it’s a quick shift. The woman’s body goes stiff, first. Then, blood seeps out of her mouth, and out of the bullet-formed gash in her forehead. Life drains from her body in a quick instant, one that looks nearly painless.

Then, her ghost appears. It detangles itself from her body, and she stares at her own corpse. Ellie can’t begin to imagine her confusion. The soul and the body were supposed to be combined, two inextricable things that couldn’t manage without one another.

Ellie can’t bear to look at the sight any longer, especially not with the knowledge that her death is Ellie’s fault, at least partially. Ellie was the one who had attacked the other officer. She’d forced Tess’s hand, had certainly played a part in the death of this woman.

Thankfully, though, the woman doesn’t seem to want to stick around and exert her rage on them. She’s there one moment and gone the next, so quickly, she’d have been missed with a blink.

Ghosts need to be remembered to stay. Ghosts need to want to stay.

“I– I thought we were just gonna hold them up,” Ellie whispers, perhaps dumbly.

Tess shakes her head, and then places a hand on Joel’s shoulder. Joel is punching, still, though the man he’s on top of isn’t struggling anymore.

The man he’s on top of is a corpse now, Ellie recognizes, as the man’s disembodied spirit goes through the exact same experience of the female officer. It feels like deja vu, how his eyebrows furrow, how he stares at his body, and how he disappears without a sound.

He’s dead, and he’s gone.

And Joel’s still going.

There’s a look in his eyes, a glint of something that isn’t quite satisfaction, but perhaps retribution. He brings his fists down to the man’s face, his body, again and again and again and he doesn’t let up–

“ Joel ,” Tess hisses. “Come on. Snap out of it.”

He doesn’t.

He keeps punching .

Even the ghost girl, who has no reason to be afraid– it’s not like he can turn his wrath on her– seems frightened.

Sparing her a brief glance, Ellie thinks the girl looks even more afraid than she feels.

“Stop,” the spirit manages, her voice fragile. “Stop, he’s already gone, it’s not like that. It’s not like that again, you have to stop.”

Ellie can’t decipher the meaning of her words. They’re obscure at best and nonsensical at worst, and she can sense, not for the first time, that they’re not really meant for her ears.

“Joel,” Tess murmurs again, her voice something quiet and understanding. Loving, Ellie recognizes.

It still doesn’t drag him out of whatever place he’s in. 

The ghost girl takes matters into her own hands, and she runs up to the man and proceeds to step through him. Ellie has to suppress a shudder of her own– she knows how goddamn cold it is to walk into a ghost, or vice versa. Glancing at Joel, she can tell that he’s in the midst of experiencing his own mental blizzard.

It’s a successful move, though. Joel shudders and his hands tense up. He blinks once, then twice, his angry features melting into something less violent and more guarded and distant.

He clambers off of the corpse with tense limbs. He doesn’t even look at the battered body. He takes the now-ownerless gun and whatever ammo the officer had, and stands up.

“Let’s go,” is all he says.

Ellie’s more than ready to get away from the blood and death. She can’t smell it, not with the rain that’s completely drenched her by now, but the stench of rotting flesh is all-too-ingrained in her mind, and she doesn’t have any desire to watch these people– FEDRA officers, but still people – rot.

It’s the ghost girl, of course, who decides to fuck Ellie over in the end.

As Tess and Joel check each other over, ensuring that the other is unharmed, the curly-haired ghost floats on over to the scanner that’s conveniently facing upwards, with big, bold, red letters blinking across its screen.

Ellie can’t read it from where she sits, still on the muddy ground,, but she knows what it says.

Infected.

She can hear the gasp that the ghost draws in, and she can see the urgency that overtakes the girls’ face. And Ellie knows, she just knows , that she’s about to get ratted out.

And, as per usual, she’s right.

Ghosts have little influence over the living realm, but one of their preferred methods of interaction is through light. The girl taps the little scanner device several times, and Ellie watches as it brightens, painting much of the surrounding area in a loud, condemning red.

A red that Tess notices, from the corner of her eye.

No , Ellie begs mentally, go back to making googly-eyes at Joel, don’t walk over to it.

And, as per usual, she does not get what she wants. 

Tess trudges through the mud, making her way over to the scanner. She fishes it out of the puddle it landed in and holds it up, reading over the words once or twice or thrice.

Ellie’s dread is back in full force, right in the pit of her stomach. It’s clawing at her now. She wouldn’t be surprised if she found her intestines all shredded.

What makes it worse, though, is that Tess’s eyes don’t meet hers. They stay on the scanner for another moment, taking in Ellie’s status for a final time. She curses, an “oh, shit,” tumbling from her mouth, before she looks up and stares at Joel.

Seemingly recovered from his fuck-ass episode, Joel cocks an eyebrow. Tess tosses the scanner right over to him, letting him see it for himself.

Infected. They know I’m infected. They know. They know, they know, they know–

“Shoot her,” the ghost girl says. It almost sounds like a cheer, like she’ll be doing victory laps around Ellie’s dead body. But her words are shaky and unsure.

No matter how much her voice wavers, Ellie can’t scrounge up any pity for the girl. She’s too scared, too aware of the guns that Joel and Tess both wield, too aware of her own helplessness. Her mind leaps to anger, and there’s a jurassic desire to scream at the ghost, but Ellie’s more sensible than that.

Maybe, just maybe, she can talk her way out of being shot for her infection. She can explain herself, probably not to Joel, but at least to Tess. She’s cool. The woman seems to like Ellie enough to listen.

She can’t explain ghosts . She barely understands them herself. She’ll just sound crazy, and crazy people, especially crazy people with bitemarks, get shot.

She settles for glaring at the ghost instead. It’s easier to do that than to shift her eyes towards Tess and Joel, who are currently having a hushed conversation of which Ellie can only pick up snippets of.

“...Marlene… set up… infected girl…”

“I’m not infected!” Ellie pipes up. It sounds more like a plea.

“No?” Joel tosses the scanner on the ground. It lands right next to Ellie. “So was this lyin’?”

“No, it– I can explain–”

“You better explain fast,” Tess warns. She’s the one to hold up a gun first, and something about the action sends hurtful little pricks right at Ellie’s heart. They’re completely illogical. It’s not like these people know her. They don’t owe her a damn thing. They care for themselves and their own lives first, of course they do. An infected girl is a threat to that.

With no clue what else to do, Ellie rolls up her sleeve with a shaking hand. The bite is so very there . She’s been trying to avoid looking at it. It’s a far-too-potent reminder of what happened to her, what happened in the mall, what happened to Ri–

“Christ. I don’t care how you got infected,” Joel says, disgruntledly. He wipes some of his rainwet hair off of his forehead. 

“That’s– that’s not what this is,” Ellie replies, more snarkily than she knows she should be. They have guns, she reminds herself. They call the shots. Literally. “It’s three weeks old.”

“Bullshit,” Joel growls out. “Everyone turns within two days.” 

“Look at it,” Ellie urges. “Really, look at it. Have you ever seen a bite look like that? It’s three weeks old. I swear.”

“Everyone who gets bitten turns,” Tess says, but her eyes are on the bitemark, the bitemark that Ellie knows looks remarkably different from a fresh, immediately dangerous one. The smuggling woman's hands aren’t so steadily wrapped around her gun anymore.

“Not me,” Ellie insists. “You want to know why the Fireflies are interested in me? This,” she extends her arm out further, “is why. Marlene says I’m immune.”

“I’m not buying it,” Joel says brusquely. “She’s bullshitting us.”

The ghost girl nods along with his logic. She’s positioned between him and Ellie. Another protective gesture, Ellie assumes.

She stares right past the spirit and up at Joel. “I’m not. Why.. why would Marlene set you up?”

That seems to have him reconsidering. Yeah, okay. So my word means nothing to you, but the logic of business does? Asshole.

She tries to lay the sarcasm on thick, even in her own head, but the only emotion she can really muster at the moment is relief as Tess lowers her gun.

And then, a whole lot of anger as the ghost girl protests.

“No! She’s infected! You saw the scanner, just shoot her!”

Ellie opens her mouth to reply, and she has to physically slap a hand over her mouth to prevent herself from responding. She tries to transition the movement to come off as inconspicuous, and instead, uses the hand to wipe the rainwater off of her face.

The ghost girl doesn’t stop speaking.

“She’s got a bite mark. Now’s not the time to be ethical, dad ,” the last word is all garbled to the extent where Ellie can’t make it out, “you need to protect yourself.”

There’s a part of Ellie that recognizes that this girl is trying to keep Joel safe. There’s a part of Ellie that respects it. There’s a much larger, much more spiteful part of Ellie that is growing increasingly upset at the girl rallying for her death. Even if nobody– other than Ellie, of course– can hear her.

“Shit.” Tess rears her head in the other direction. There’s bright headlights in the distance, and they grow closer with every moment they dawdle. “Let’s go!” She calls out, grabbing Ellie’s unharmed arm and dragging her to her feet.

“Tess–” Joel begins, his eyes still uncertainly lingering over Ellie’s bitemark.

“No.” She shoots him a look, a we’ll talk about this later , look. "Let's move.”

Notes:

i sure do love tess! i sure hope nothing bad ever happens to her!!

 

also i promise i'll let sarah be named next chapter :'( i'm doing her a disservice by only letting ellie know her as "ghost girl" up until this point...

 

i hope that you guys enjoyed thisss <3 comments & kudos are always appreciated!

Chapter 3: guilt and other things that bite

Summary:

Ellie meets Joel's ghost follower officially, and watches other ghosts be born anew.

Notes:

i apologize to all my tess lovers out there

They make it out of the FEDRA occupied zone without another encounter. 

The building they stay in is, in Ellie’s humble opinion, a piece of shit. There’s two rooms, separated by a doorway, and the one she’s assigned to has a raptor-sized hole in the roof. Roots and fauna spiral up the walls, and bugs mingle in the plush grass that blankets the ground. A few mosquitos and one very unlucky moth have already met their demise from Ellie’s own two hands.

Ellie tries very hard not to think about the FEDRA officers from earlier, and how their blood is on her hands, too.

The walls of whatever this building was Before have decayed over the last couple of years. They’re thin, much unlike the heavy, cement walls that Ellie’s contained in at school. Walls like that were for keeping people out, the soldiers had said.

Ellie knows they were used just as much to keep people in.

Point is, she’s not accustomed to the sound of voices through a surface that’s meant to keep them separate. It sparks curiosity in her, something itchy and relentless that has her sitting up and focusing.

“It’s not safe,” the first voice, deep and exhausted, argues. Joel.

“Did you look at the bite? It didn’t look fresh.”

“It doesn’t matter. She’ll turn eventually.”

As Joel voices the exact concern that’s been gnawing at Ellie for weeks, she decides that it’s just about time for her to go to sleep.

She draws her knees close to her torso, curling up in a ball. Riley had always told her she slept like an isopod. Ellie always insisted on calling them rollie-pollies. It was one of those exchanges of playful banter that she was allowed to have without worrying about being punched in the jaw or zapped with an electrostaff or shot in the face.

As she clutches and pleads for sleep, there’s a sensation on Ellie’s left arm. A crawling, the light tap of small, spindly legs against her skin. She’s quick to brush it off as a phantom sensation, but as it continues, she reconsiders.

Upon opening her eyes, she’s met with the sight of a bug on her bicep. It’s big, with wide wings and antennae sprouting from its head. Ellie’s immediate assumption is that it’s another moth, but under the moonlight that spills in from the giant fucking hole in the ceiling , the orange of the creature’s wings is illuminated.

A butterfly.

Ellie hasn’t seen one in years.

She sits up with as little movement in her left arm as possible to get a closer look at the thing, and very quickly realizes she’s not the only one who’s observing it.

Across the room, leaning against the closed door linking to Tess and Joel’s space, is the Ghost Girl.

Rage boils in Ellie’s gut. She hadn’t been avidly anti-ghost girl before, until the spirit had decided to champion her death, with as much volume as she could muster. She’d brightened the light of the infection-scanner, had called Tess’s attention to it, had played a part in the situation that Ellie’s in now.

Everything could’ve gone off without a hitch. Joel and Tess would’ve delivered her to the Firefly base, clean and easy, instead of keeping each other up debating whether or not to put a bullet between her eyes. They wouldn’t have had to know her as a freak. They could’ve remembered her fondly– hey, there was that time we smuggled an actual person out of the wall, wasn’t that fun? Wasn’t she sparky?

Now, it’ll be remember that time we dealt with that freak of a kid and she almost got us killed? Or, god forbid, remember that time we shot that little girl?

It’s the ghosts’ fault.

(It’s not; Ellie knows it’s her own, for going into that mall, for getting herself bitten, for surviving while Riley succumbed to the fungus and turned into a monste– )

Ellie’s mad at the ghost girl.

Ellie’s also tired, and she’s scared, and she’s cold.

One of those, or some combination, compel her to growl under her breath, “what the fuck are you looking at?”

The spirit lifts her head, her springy hair following the movement. Her eyes don’t stray from the butterfly that’s still planted on Ellie like a leech.

In her current mental state, Ellie doesn’t account for the fact that this girl is a ghost who’s been around for god-knows-how-long and has never once been addressed by a warm, living person. She doesn’t deliberate over the reality that the ghost is just that–a ghost–and like every other ghost she’s ever spoken to, it takes a few tries, and often, a very calculated callout to them, before they realize they’re being addressed. 

In her current mental state, Ellie just gets offended that she’s being ignored.

“I’m talking to you,” she snaps, her eyes boring right into the ghost.

This time, the ghost girl has more of a response. Drastically so. She looks up in full now, her eyes drifting upwards to meet Ellie’s.

She then physically recoils and ends up falling backwards, her head coming into contact with the wall in a way that, for a breathing being, would result in a concussion, but for her, ends with her upper half phasing through the wall.

She bolts back up, her jaw falling open, then closed, then open again as she scrutinizes Ellie’s face for any sign of dishonesty.

Then, the ghost asks a simple, “me?”

“Who else, dipshit?” Ellie sucks in a breath. “You’re a fucking asshole, you know that? What did I do to you? Why are you trying to get me kil–”

“You can see me?” The ghost asks, seemingly unaffected by Ellie’s tirade, “like, you’re actually talking to me right now? And you can hear me?”

“Yes, and you–”

“Prove it. Clap your hands,” the girl instructs, cutting off Ellie easily. Her tone tells of skepticism and sheer confusion. “Wait, no, that’ll scare the butterfly– scratch that. Um. Put up four fingers.”

Ellie obeys, begrudgingly. With her right hand, she puts up four digits, before lowering them, one by one, until only her middle finger remains.

“Good enough for you?”

“What the fuck ,” the spirit exhales, her voice nearing hysteria. 

Ellie, despite herself, feels a pang of pity for the ghost. She knows that distress, has felt it over and over. As perplexing as it is to be a living person who sees ghosts, it must be similarly mind boggling to be a ghost and realize a living person can see you.

“Yes, I can see you,” Ellie responds, the red-hot anger draining from her voice as she runs through the answers to the typical questionnaire ghosts bombard her with, “and I can hear you, and no, I can’t bring you back to life. So don’t fucking ask.”

The ghost takes it all in with those big, brown eyes of hers. Her lips are pressed into a tight line.

“How?” is all she says after a few moments of dreadful silence.

And, lord, if that’s not the question Ellie’s been trying to figure out the answer to for the past fourteen years of her life. 

She’s never been given a how. She’s never been given a why. All she knows is that she can see ghosts, and she can hear them, and nobody else can, and she’s a fucking freak, and nobody will ever believe her.

“I don’t know,” she replies, simple and soft. She keeps her voice hushed, not wanting to give Joel or Tess any clues that she’s awake. She hasn’t been with them for long, of course, but survivors' brains tend to be hardwired similarly; a threat is not so much of a threat when it’s asleep.

Asleep, she sure as hell isn’t.

“How long?” The ghost prompts next, and Ellie isn’t sure whether she’s asking how long Ellie’s been able to see ghosts, or how long Ellie’s been seeing her, specifically. The ghost girl’s skin, translucent as it is, is unwrinkled, and her eyes speak of wisdom but her cheeks that cling to baby fat speak of youth. She’s definitely a teen, and Ellie recalls what many of her FEDRA instructors said– “teenagers are such self-centered creatures”-- and chooses to believe the girl is pondering on the latter.

“Since they brought me to their apartment,” Ellie confesses, “and ever since.”

“Christ,” the ghost mutters, with a hint of a southern twang, “so, the entire time you’ve been around him?”

Ellie takes it upon herself to surmise that him means Joel , who is very apparently the person the girl is tethered to.

“Yeah,” Ellie confirms. “The whole time.” And, as she reflects on everything she’s seen the ghost do, her anger’s back in full force, “including your shitty stunt with the scanner, which, thanks a lot , by the way. Now I’m good as a ghost, too.”

The bewilderment in the girl’s face saps away quickly, her expression morphing into something hard and defensive. “You’re infected.”

“But I’m not!” Ellie’s volume rises now, her frustration boiling over. “I was bitten three weeks ago. Anyone who takes a two second glance at my arm can see that! It’s not a fresh bite. It’s not.” A strand of humiliating tears sting at the corners of her eyes. She blinks them back. “I’m not fucking infected. I’m not just gonna lose my mind out of nowhere.”

‘You know, we… we can be all poetic and shit and lose our minds together.’

Ellie understands the ghost’s suspicion. She really does. Everyone else loses their minds. Every other person on the shitty ass planet goes batshit crazy when they get bitten. Nobody should be spared. Riley wasn’t.

But she’s so tired of nobody believing her.

“You don’t know that,” the ghost mumbles. She’s less certain, now, and she slots a finger near her lips to chew on one of her nails. Do ghosts' nails even grow back? “You could just be turning really, really slow.”

“Or I could be not turning at all,” Ellie retorts. She tries to embody Marlene, in all the woman’s confidence and sureness. “I’m immune.”

The ghost girl doesn’t seem to know what to say to that. She stares at Ellie, her eyes fluctuating between emotions Ellie can’t even begin to construe. 

There’s a pregnant pause. So pregnant, in fact, that it gives Ellie a chance to listen to the world around her. There’s the distant chirping of crickets, and the near sound of quiet. Joel and Tess don’t appear to be arguing anymore. Ellie hopes it means that they’ve come to an agreement that doesn’t include blowing her brains out, but she knows better than to get her hopes up.

The ghost begins to make her way towards Ellie. It shouldn’t make Ellie flinch the way it does. She’s aware that the power of ghosts is incredibly limited, that they cannot hit her or punch her or choke her or anything of the sort. They’re innocuous beings, usually, especially those who don’t glow red with unbridled rage.

The ghost girls’ aura is a pale, milky blue that’s nearly white. She’s a peaceful ghost, or, at the very least, a spiteless one. The most she can do is make Ellie very cold very briefly.

She doesn’t walk through Ellie, though. She drops down to her knees beside her and gestures for Ellie to roll up her right sleeve. After a moment of consideration, Ellie acquiesces, allowing the air of the night to slither up her forearm as she pulls back her sleeve.

The bitemark gleams under the moonlight. It doesn’t even bleed anymore, it just sits there, a little condemning thing stationed right on her arm.

The ghost reaches towards Ellie’s arm, and Ellie flinches back out of habit. The girl cocks her head, and Ellie scrambles for a feasible explanation. 

“Sorry,” she mutters, “you guys– um, ghosts, that is– are really cold to, like, touch.”

“Oh.” The girl seems to contemplate that for a moment. A satisfactory smile fights its way onto her face. It must be nice to know she has some sort of impact on people, Ellie thinks.

 Ellie takes what she hopes is no longer than five seconds to prepare herself, before breathing out a long, exasperated breath and holding out her arm to the girl again, unflinching this time. The ghost creeps closer before inspecting the bite, purposefully keeping her hands to herself. It’s an act of kindness Ellie doesn’t think she’ll forget for a good while.

“Immune,” the ghost echoes, staring at the wound that’s clearly aged. “How do you know?”

“Maybe because I’m not a fucking monster right now?” Ellie offers. 

The girl shoots her an unimpressed look in return, and Ellie dials her snark down, surrendering the legitimate answer. Who can she tell, anyway? “That’s why the Fireflies want me. They’re gonna use me to make a cure. They wouldn’t have put this all together if they weren’t sure.”

Right?

Another long stretch of quiet occurs. Ellie lets the spirit take in the sight of her arm, and she, herself, looks at her other shoulder. The butterfly, by some miracle, is still positioned there, basking in the gentle light of the moon.

“What if you start to feel symptoms?” The ghost asks, summoning Ellie’s attention. “Fever and fogginess and all that.”

“Then I’ll tell them.” Ellie nods her head towards the door that Joel and Tess are sleeping behind, likely as paranoid, if not more so, than the ghost.

“You’d tell them?” 

“I don’t want to end up as one of those things,” Ellie answers simply. She doesn’t have to elaborate as to why; ending up as a mindless zombie is no doubt a nightmare for anyone. 

It’s even more nightmarish when she knows what happens to the people. She’s seen one infected, the one who had left the scar on her forearm, the one who had condemned Riley to death.

That infected had a ghost, a faded, broken thing who could barely speak, who was begging to die so she could go, so she could finally leave.

Like she’d been stuck to the body that wasn’t hers to control anymore.

Ellie shudders at the thought and focuses back on the ghost, who’s eyeballing the door again. Both Joel and Tess are behind that door, but Ellie gets the feeling that the ghost is only truly focused on the safety of the former.

“You promise?’

Ellie doesn’t have to think about it. “I promise.”

“Okay.”

And finally, somebody believes her.

Not really a some body , Ellie reminds herself. She peers at the ghost for a moment longer, and– oh, she’s just kind of been referring to her mentally as the ghost or the ghost girl.

“What’s your name?” Ellie asks, in the spirit of politeness and the need to figure out how to address her newest… companion? Ally? Acquaintance? She doesn’t quite know what they are.

Not friends, though. Definitely not.

“My– oh.” The ghost girl seems genuinely taken aback. Ellie presumes she hasn’t been asked something as simple as her name in a while. “Sarah.”

 

✧

The morning is a blur.

Under the moonlight, after her conversation with the ghost– Sarah – had grown stunted and sleepy, Ellie must’ve succumbed to unconsciousness. 

When morning arrives, Sarah’s the one to wake her, with a whispered “Ellie,” to rouse her. She uncurls, sits up, and finds herself face to face with the barrel of a gun.

Joel’s the one holding it. Ellie doesn’t know if that heightens or lessens her mortality rate.

“Good morning to you, too,” she says, drawing on all the sarcasm she can muster, wearing it like armor. “Could you not?”

“Let us see your arm,” Tess replies, cold and firm and demanding. It confirms all of Ellie’s theories on how their operation works; Tess does the talking, Joel does the brute work. 

Ellie rolls up her sleeve, lets them look over the injury that’s not getting any fucking worse, lets them argue and work out their shit, lets them come to a conclusion regarding her.

They’re not going to shoot her. Yay.

She’s on infection watch. Boo.

Conversation morphs into a flurry of sounds and syllables after the gun is moved away from Ellie’s face. She’s too relieved to listen to much, and then, too occupied eating her sandwich to talk much, either. Tess goes on some tangent about how she and Joel ‘aren’t good people’, but Ellie doesn’t care. They’ve been good to her– as good as she could ask for given the circumstances, anyway.

Her head clears up when they get moving through the city. Ellie gravitates towards Tess, orbiting her as the older woman offers her conversation.

“Where are all the infected?” Ellie asks, surveying her surroundings. They’re on a thick, cement platform– it’s a highway! A real one! -- and they’re right out in the open, exposed to anything and anyone who could be lurking.

There’s nothing, though. Just wind and sun and dust and so many rusted, dysfunctional cars.

“In the buildings,” Tess answers, gesturing to the structures around them. Some buildings are still standing, some are dilapidated, and some have lost all stability altogether. One skyscraper leans on another for support, and as they cross under them, Ellie can’t even pretend she hasn’t sped up.

“But there’s no people in the buildings,” Ellie points out.

“Hopefully not,” Tess hums, cracking her knuckles, “but the cordyceps don’t like the sun.”

“Why?”

Tess looks back at her, her eyes swirling with a concoction of amusement and annoyance that Ellie’s deeply familiar with.

“It dries them out. They prefer to stay inside. They like the shadows.”

“Creepy.”

That earns her a laugh. “Very creepy.”

A comfortable silence settles between them as they continue trekking through the ruinous city. Ellie’s eyes dart around faster than she knew they could; there’s so much stuff , and it’s all over the place, and it makes her long for a time she didn’t even exist in.

I could bring that world back .

The thought occurs to Ellie as they pass by a toy store. The shelves are still partially stocked. No use collecting plastic dolls during the apocalypse, Ellie figures. Through the window, though, her eyes catch on a plastic dinosaur figurine. It’s painted green with darker green stripes, and she knows it’s historically inaccurate, that dinosaurs probably had feathers, but even so, it makes her dream.

There was a time when parents spoiled children with items so useless for survival, just so that the children would be happy.

If she’s what Marlene says she is, if she could be the cure, couldn’t she bring the world back to that?

She’s caught in her own head when Tess and Joel stop abruptly. Ellie goes on a few steps more before freezing, moving back, and raising an eyebrow.

Tess and Joel don’t explain the situation. They’re caught up in their own conversation, though the majority of it is just intense eye-contact that Ellie doesn’t read too far into. They seem to understand each other without words. Ellie’s convinced half of their interactions are telepathic.

“We could go through the museum,” Joel says finally, “otherwise, we’re backtracking, and that’d keep us out here an extra day.”

Ellie veers her head towards the path ahead. And– oh, it’s just her luck that there’s a hefty pile of debris, right where they had needed to go.

“Museum,” Tess agrees, uneasily. She pulls her gun out of its holster. “Okay. C’mon, kid.”

Ellie follows behind her, and Joel takes the rear. Both of the adults have drawn their weapons, and Ellie feels ridiculously small and helpless with her flashlight in one hand and nothing in the other.

“I have an extra hand,” she informs them, trying to mimic Tess’s convincing nature.

“Congratulations,” Joel responds, icy and uncaring. Ellie glowers. Asshole.

Sarah, presumably next to Joel, but Ellie doesn’t spin around to check, snorts unhelpfully. Ellie’s frown deepens, and she wishes there was an inconspicuous way for her to flip off her new… she’s still not sure what her relationship to Sarah is yet. But whatever she is, Ellie has an insatiable urge to sass her.

It’s not the time for that, though. 

They enter the museum, and Ellie’s horribly gunless. She digs through her coat pocket for her knife, gripping it tight when she notices the fungus sprawling across the walls. It climbs the staircase, intertwines with the light fixtures and the railings and essentially anything it can get its tendrils on.

They’re on the second floor, quietly padding through a room that hosts memorabilia from the Revolutionary War, when there’s a horrifying, raspy click.

It’s not the click of a gun. It’s the click of a creature.

They prefer to stay inside. They like the shadows.

Ellie doesn’t know how freaked out she should be. She’s only encountered one infected in her life, one in the early stages, she assumes, based on the fact that the ghost attached to it could still speak and plead for her life to be ended..

Ellie doesn’t hear any voices, though. Just another click.

When she sees how pale Tess and Joel both are, and how Sarah slinks closer to Joel protectively, the sensation of dread settles uncomfortably in her gut.

The clicks grow near, and Joel only gives Ellie one instruction: his pointer finger over his lips. Quiet.

These are the ones there’s rumors about , Ellie realizes as she creeps behind Tess, who’s quiet and quivering as she tries to make her way towards the stairwell on the far end of the room, the infected that’re like bats.

FEDRA school doesn’t teach much about the infected, about how the almighty, all-powerful government failed to protect the world from such tragedy. But rumors circulate, especially in an institution for teenagers, typically troubled, and enough people know enough about the world for some truth to be interspersed with the bullshit that goes around.

It was a poorly kept secret, that the infected didn’t just die. They mutated, adapted, and consumed every part of their host's body, eyes included. There’s a point where they can no longer see, when they rely on sound, instead. 

Click.

Ah. That’s what the noise is. Some form of echolocation.

As long as they don’t hear us, we’ll be fine, Ellie thinks.

It doesn’t stop her from stiffening as one of the creatures stumbles into eyesight. It’s all hunched over, its gait wobbly. The fungus sprouts from the brain of what used to be a person, reaching outwards to the world, mutilating what used to be a human face.

The ghost linked to the body still bares a human face, but it’s terribly hazy. It’s a young man with undiscernible features. He’s moving as the creature moves, shoulders slumped, head hung.

Defeated.

Ellie’s not used to seeing ghosts with no purpose. Every ghost has a purpose, it’s why they stay. They need to want to stay, for some sort of mission, or for the sake of a person. They’re never meant to look so hopeless.

Ellie’s focusing too much on the ghost and too little on her feet.

She steps on some shards of glass, not sharp enough to slice into the soles of her shoes, but significant enough to make a sound as they shift under her weight.

The next several minutes stretch into what Ellie could mistake for hours. Joel and Tess both bark out orders as the creature– fuck, there’s two of them now– scream and track them down. There’s the clicks of both the creatures and guns, but all Ellie can hear is her heart, hammering in her chest.

And, of course, a storm of thoughts.

Stay low, stay quiet, you’ll be safe.

Get up and help them. Why aren’t you doing anything?

Smart girl.

Coward.

She’s relieved as Joel finds her, squeezed against a cabinet, her lips pressed together tightly, her breaths rapid but intentionally quiet. He wipes the sweat off of his brow, gives her a nod, and lowers himself down so they’re both against the wooden floor, silent, waiting for the creatures to pass.

And, of course, one of the things moseys right on by them, turns its ugly, fungus-mangled face towards them, and lets out an ear-piercing scream.

In an instant, It lurches towards them, pinning Ellie’s body beneath it. It opens its mouth, the only vaguely human feature it still has, and begins to snap its teeth at her, trying to get a bite. Ellie’s been bitten before, sure, but something tells her that this thing doesn’t just want to leave a sweet little indent on her skin; it wants to chew her up.

She matches its screams with one of her own, thrashing and dodging its attempts to sink its teeth into her flesh. She catches sight of the ghost intertwined with the creature, meets his dull, careless eyes, and shrieks, “STOP HIM!” as if the ghost has any control over the body, or any loyalty to her whatsoever.

Predictably, the ghost doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t even look up.

Joel, on the other hand, does.

He wrenches the infected off of Ellie, places the barrel of his rifle to the things’ head, and the click click click click click click click that follows is no longer the sound of the creature, but instead of bullets, hitting the floor.

The infected goes limp, its limbs stiffening. It manages a gurgling, dying hiss as blood trickles out of its head.

The ghost boy, attached to the newly-dead body, finally makes a noise: one sharp intake of breath, a loose smile, and a soft “thank you” before dissipating.

Ellie nearly misses it, over the thumping in her chest and the tingle of adrenaline coursing through her veins. She blows out a breath of her own, a thing of much-needed relief.

Joel, she notes, seems to allow himself the same momentary solace, before turning on his sturdy feet and striding in the direction of Tess. The echo of gunshots through the building urges him onward, and Ellie gets to her feet to fall into step with him.

They find Tess, braced like a statue. She stands with her pistol clutched tight, aimed at the second beast. It’s on the ground, bloodied and mostly unmoving, but it still croaks.

Joel recognizes its vitality and fires a few extra bullets into its skull, for good measure.

There’s no time for relaxation after that. They all dash to the stairwell in a manner so far from orderly it’d make FEDRA shit itself. They were big on organization, on tidy lineups. Joel and Tess, on the other hand, are solely focused on survival, which, Ellie’s finding out, is never neat.

They ascend the grimey stairs, and Joel busts open the door to the ceiling, and fuck , if it doesn’t make Ellie feel better to be in the sun again.

They won’t come out here, they’ll dry up in the sun, she reminds herself. She relishes the fact.

“Shit,” Tess grunts from behind Ellie, moving as if she’s hauling more than her own weight.

Ellie figures Tess is just trying to express her newfound repose, or process whatever the fuck that was. Joel, though, who seems to know Tess like the back of his stupidly strong hands, turns on his heel in an instant, concern overtaking his darkened eyes.

“What’s wrong?”

“Just– shit , I think I twisted an ankle.”

Not a big deal, then. 

Joel kneels down and gathers tape from his bag. There are words exchanged between the two adults that Ellie can’t muster up care for, so she leaves them to talk. 

The only conceivable way to the capitol is straight across the ceilings, and there’s a convenient platform bridging two of them. She keeps her balance stable as she crosses the wooden plank spanning from one building to another. She’s never been afraid of heights, but even so, the mantra don’t look down don’t look down don’t look down repeats in her head like a broken record the entire time she’s traversing it.

She reaches the edge of the final structure in the row of building ceilings that she assumes they’ll climb down from.

Ellie can see the world from the ceiling ledge, in full, for the first time in her life.

While the horizon had been cruelly obscured by the fog of rain the night before, she can see everything now. The sky is clear, and the city rolls out for miles. It’s all in shambles, a pathetic shell of what Ellie assumes it once was, but god, it’s pretty.

“Is it everything you hoped for?”

The voice behind her is almost amiable. It’s also masculine, and could only possibly be coming from Joel, and the juxtaposition of these things is not lost on her.

He’s being friendly, and Ellie’s still reeling from what she’s mentally dubbed the Morbid Museum. The two things work in tandem, and the response that escapes her lips lacks all animosity.

“Jury’s still out.” Her eyes land on the golden tip of the capitol building, drenched in the light of the sinking sun, “but man, you can’t deny that view.”

Tufts of clouds are speckled in the sky. Weeds and overgrowth are rife, mounting buildings and twisting upwards. It’s so green, and so beautiful. There’s a million things to look at, and Ellie can’t tear her gaze away, not even to acknowledge the man at her side.

To Sarah, though, he seems to be the most interesting thing in the world. From Ellie’s periphery, she notices the ghosts’ angled head, how she’s ignoring the world in favor of seeing Joel.

“You smiled, old man! I saw it!” Sarah exclaims.

Joel doesn’t really seem like the type to smile. The entire time Ellie’s been around him, which, mind you, has only been about a day or so, he’s been sullen and grouchy, his mouth locked in a perpetual frown. Ellie brushes off Sarah’s words as hopeless delusion, especially when she tilts her own head up to take in Joel’s face, and all she can see is a familiar sternness set in his hard features.

“Let’s get a move on,” Tess’s voice instructs from behind them. “We don’t have time for this.”

She sounds unnecessarily impatient, her earlier conversationalism gone with the wind. 

“What’s got her panties in a twist?” Sarah grumbles, her form bobbing behind Joel as he descends the ladder of the building. 

Ellie can’t exactly respond, can’t ask Sarah what she’s talking about. Sure, Tess was being a little irritable, but it wasn’t so drastic that she’d say anything about it.

That’s a rule of the outbreak. You don’t complain, not when there’s no significant reason to, especially not when it's about the attitude of a person infinitely more capable than you.

Or a person with a gun.

Sarah is such a visible ghost, with such defined attributes and such a bold, unwavering voice, that Ellie had inferred she was new. Newer ghosts don’t exhaust as soon. Their motivation doesn’t drain, and the memories of them don’t wane. They’re lively beings.

It’s odd to Ellie that, to Sarah, the unspoken guidelines of the post-apocalyptic world aren’t ingrained in her mind. If she’s a recent death, then she was born during the hell they’re living through. She ought to be familiar with how the world words now.

“Kid,” Joel hollers from the bottom of the ladder. “Get a move on.”

Ellie wheels out of her head and follows him down the ladder. “Yep! Sorry!”

“Don’t be sorry,” Tess scoffs when Ellie reaches the bottom of the ladder. “Be better.”

What’s got her panties in a twist?   Ellie’s thoughts parrot Sarah’s words from earlier, but she’s smart enough to keep quiet. They can actually hear her, after all.

“Come on,” Tess calls, already hiking down the street, “let’s go.”

 

✧

 

“Why is it so quiet?”

Ellie’s the first to speak up. Maybe it’s idiotic, giving away their location like that. They’re being stealthy, ducked down in an egregiously overgrown bush for cover. They don’t want the Fireflies, wherever they are, to shoot on sight.

Even as Ellie makes sound, as she calls all attention to where they’re all squatting, Tess and Joel don’t reprimand her. It appears that they’ve come to the same conclusion she has.

Nobody’s here.

They emerge from the bush and walk up the marbled staircase. Ellie has very little concept of monetary value, but she’s pretty sure that these are the most expensive stairs she’s placed her pair of raggedy converse on.

Joel shoves his way through the gilded doors of the capital building, but even his rough demeanor and his continuous display of strength isn’t as intimidating as Tess’s restlessness. It’s nearly violent, how she barges into the building, how she forages behind spiraling columns and gold-plated shelves as if there’s something to be found.

Well. There is something she finds.

A dead body.

“Something got them,” Joel breathes out. 

Tess shakes her head stubbornly. “No, no, there’s got to be someone– something here, we’ll find it, just look around.”

Ellie likes Tess enough to humor her. She nods along to Tess’s logic, even as she spots the gaping holes in it. She begins searching the building as well, double-checking nooks and crannies. She finds another body– two, actually– one with a bullet through his head, the other with both a gunshot wound and a bite.

Joel, for the first time their entire journey, doesn’t seem content to let Tess boss him around.

“Tess,” he starts sternly, “there’s nothing here.”

“Just look , goddamn it!” She snaps at him. Ellie recoils at the venom in her voice, and Sarah gestures at the woman like she’s proved a point.

“I told you. She’s being crabby.”

Ellie is so glad, for once, that they can’t hear Sarah. She imagines that the ghosts’ sass would really throw Tess over the deep end.

“No, you look,” Joel growls. He stomps over towards Tess. Ellie sees how his fists are curled, can hear the anger lacing his voice, and a bolt of concern for Tess strikes her.

Joel doesn’t hurt Tess, though. He steps close to her, lowers his voice, and mutters a simple “they’re not here. It’s over. We’re going home.”

Now Ellie’s struck by a bolt of concern for herself.

She can’t go back to the QZ. They’re all criminals, for one, in the eyes of FEDRA. And even if they sneak in, even if they avoid regular entry, which contains a mandatory scan of all new citizens, Ellie won’t have anywhere to go.

She can’t re-enroll in school. They have scans on entry, too. They won’t hear her out. They’ll just shoot her, point blank.

The orphanage is the same.

Joel’s entire proposal is unrealistic. Ellie doesn’t know what she expects Tess to do– stand in defense or, god forbid, meet Joel’s words with some degree of acceptance.

The way she breaks out into hysterical laughter, though, completely takes Ellie off guard. The older woman covers her mouth with one hand, and her body shakes with the force of her snickers. Once having collected herself, she turns to Joel and speaks, decidedly.

“I’m not going home, Joel. I’m staying here.”

There’s something materializing behind Tess. A faint flicker of a person. Ellie’s face scrunches in confusion as Joel replies to Tess.

“What?”

“This is my last stop,” is all the woman says.

There’s something materializing behind Tess.

A ghost.

Tess is fading into a–

But she’s still alive.

Alive people don’t just turn into–

“Holy shit.”

It’s Ellie who speaks this time, though her voice is more breath than anything. She looks to Tess, then to the ghost that slowly forms behind her, and then to Joel.

There’s only one viable explanation for this in Ellie’s head.

She’d seen it happen with Riley.

“She’s infected.”

When Joel snorts and Tess doesn’t, the man swivels around to face her. They have another one of their silent conversations, and Ellie can’t even be mad about it. Not with the way Tess’s face twists with something like sorrow, not with the way Joel’s eyes fill with something like regret.

“Show me,” is all he says. Firm and unreadable.

“Joel,” now Tess is the one who sounds desperate, her voice placating.

“ Show me. ”

Tess wraps her hand around the collar of her shirt. She tugs it back, and right on her neck are teeth marks, just as Ellie had suspected.

She’s so used to seeing her own mark– an obviously ugly thing, with major scarring but minimal gore– that the sight of Tess’s, which is horribly regular, feels foreign.

The indents of the bite are bleeding, leaving streams of blood down her neck and collarbone. The skin around it is discolored, a nauseating yellow instead of the typical pallor of Tess’s skin. Most disturbing, though, are the tendrils of fungus that snake under her skin, towards her brain. 

They want to pilot her body. They’re going to, unless Tess dies before they can.

The idea of this woman, one that commands respect so readily, one who Ellie’s grown fond of, left as nothing but a ghost, forced to watch as her body is overtaken and used as a senseless weapon to spread and spread and spread, makes Ellie want to throw up.

So does the idea of her body, left to rot on the floor, a bullet lodged in her forehead.

Just like Riley.

Before Ellie can become entirely engulfed in grief and guilt, Tess speaks again. It’s not to her, but she wants to hear it nonetheless, needs to hear, because she knows as well as anyone that the woman doesn’t have many words left.

“Oops. Right?”

Ellie can’t see Joel’s face. She can see Sarah, though, how her hand hovers over Joel’s shoulder as if to comfort him. A sweet gesture that’s so terribly futile.

“Roll up your sleeve,” Tess tells Ellie. She obeys, and Tess struts over to her, snatching her arm in a way that Ellie wishes didn’t make her flinch. Tess holds up Ellie’s own arm so that Joel can’t ignore it, not when her bite is in such contrast to Tess’s.

“Look. Joel. Look at hers.” Healed enough to leave a scar. “And look at…” Tess doesn’t say mine. Ellie wonders if it's because the bite dictates Tess, and not the other way around. “This is real, Joel. This is fucking real.”

Her point is emphasized by how much she’s shaking. Ellie hopes that it's from the infection, how twitchy it makes people, and not from fear. She doesn’t think she can stomach Tess, a woman of fucking steel, being scared.

“You need to get her to Bill and Frank’s. They’ll take her off your hands,” Tess says to Joel. Ellie doesn’t know who the hell those people are, but she’s not about to argue with Tess, not now.

“No,” Joel says. It doesn’t sound like refusal, though. Maybe denial.

“Yes,” Tess urges, “because you can convince them, You will convince them. I– listen, I don’t ask you for much, not…” she swallows down what might be a sob and continues her frantic ramble, “not to feel the way I feel, not to–”

Joel makes a sound like he’s going to interrupt, to say something , but Tess cuts him off.

“--shut the fuck up because I don’t have time. You know I don’t. I know it's not your strong suit, but you need to fucking listen.”

The ghost behind Tess is bolder, now. Its eyes are closed, but it’s so clearly Tess and it makes Ellie’s heart split in two.

“This is your chance. You get her there, you keep her alive, and you set everything right. All the shit we did.”

We’re not good people, they’d told Ellie. She’d never thought that was something they were guilty about, but it’s obvious now, by the look in Tess’s eyes.

Before Joel can turn her down again, there’s a groan from the ground, something inhumane and startling. They all jump this time, even Joel. He pulls out his gun and shoots blindly, the bullet wedging itself between the eyes of an infected on the ground.

The consequence of his action is immediate. In the distance, there’s the sound of shrieking. A cacophony. A choir.

Ellie’s glued in place as Joel rushes towards the door, opening it a crack, inspecting the cause of the noise, and then turning back to Tess. They begin to converse, out loud this time, but Ellie struggles to grasp the meaning of their hurried words. She’s too busy just looking at Tess.

They’ve not known each other long. But Ellie won’t let herself forget Tess. She wouldn’t dare dishonor this woman whose death Ellie is once again responsible for. 

If she hadn’t agreed to smuggle me out…

“What’re you doing?” Joel grills Tess as the woman slams the butt of her gun into a tank of gas. The substance spreads across the smooth floors, coats the marble so it shines.

“They’re coming. A horde. I’m buying you guys time. I’ll make sure they don’t follow you,” is all Tess says.

You guys. Not us.

The next thing Tess scatters across the floor is a bunch of fucking grenades. Ellie jumps back when one lands near her feet, and then stiffens when she finally realizes the implications of Tess’s plan.

She’s going to blow the place up once the infected arrive.

Herself included.

Ellie’s lips part to argue, to shout ‘you can't’ or ‘you shouldn’t’ in a million different ways. Nothing comes out. She knows why. She knows Tess is gone one way or another.

“Joel,” Tess murmurs, her voice softening into something nurturing again when she nears the man, whose face bears more emotion than Ellie’s ever seen, “save who you can save.”

Sarah, who is at Joel’s right side, as she always is, lets out a choked whimper.

Ellie doesn’t even have time to ponder why, because before she can, before she can even take a deep breath and say something to Tess, before she can apologize and atone, there’s a calloused hand on her bare arm that’s yanking her away.

“NO!” She screams, trying to plant her feet to the ground so Joel can no longer drag her. “We’re not leaving her– we can’t–”

Joel’s strength is unceasing. He pulls her out of the building, too soon, too fucking soon, before Ellie can get a final look at Tess’s face, before she can tell her that she’s sorry.

Not that sorries would save her. But at least Tess would know.

Ellie swats at Joel in rebellion, her hands landing on his backpack more than his actual skin. She gets one good swing in, one, before Sarah makes a low, threatening noise. A shiver runs through Ellie’s body, and her resistance falters after that. 

Joel hauls her what he must deem a safe distance away from the building before renouncing his grip on her arm, like her skin is suddenly scorching him.

She doesn’t dwell on it. Doesn’t dwell on the throb that he’s left her wrist with, how the skin feels raw and wrong.

She turns, looks at the building, and stiffens, but doesn't screech, as it erupts into flames.

 

✧

 

Tess had bled love for Joel with her eyes and her soft words and her occasional, fleeting touch. Ellie had seen it. Ellie had heard it, the woman’s longing, her love.

But Tess’s ghost doesn’t conjure near Joel. It doesn’t show up at all. 

Ghosts need to want to stay.

Notes:

isn't that interesting? after tess is bitten a ghost slowly forms and she's in this half-dead, half-alive state?
i wonder if that's at all related to why ellie can see ghosts..
but who knows.....

i hope you all enjoyed this chapter <3 its the start of the sarah and ellie sistership!! but its gonna take them a while to get there.
I've never written a chapter this long (7.5k words, holy moly) and i hope that you liked it

kudos are appreciated and comments are cherished. i am a 16-year old writer and i appreciate every bit of support <3