Chapter Text
Ellie
Grief is not a single moment.
It is not a scream torn from the lungs ('Joel! Fucking get up!'), not a bone-resounding gunshot in a theater, not the manic mutterings of an enemy's name as a clutch for the shattered sanity, not a switchblade lay forgotten somewhere below bloodied waters.
It's a hideous amalgamation of everything; a quiet decline or a breakneck freefall, maybe both. It's a corrosive ache that hollows a person from the inside out. Ellie learned that the hard way. The loss of Joel didn't just feel like a gaping wound; Ellie's insides are rearranged like a labrynth of gore clawed at by daggered fingers, and the only way that she can walk it was through her anger—step by step, turn by dead end turn, flesh between gnashing teeth, blood dripping, sighing to the heavens when will this end?
Grief was weird, so was Ellie's tool for it. Revenge had dislodged her from whatever's left of her after Joel. It stripped her from whatever Joel had known of her before.
Her hands stopped shaking only when she held nothing at all—no switchblade, no dripping blood of the enemy, no anger, no purpose. Just the empty weight of everything she had done and she had sacrificed.
As if the shame and guilt were haunting her, snapping their teeth at her heels, she run away. She disappeared.
No goodbye to Jackson. No trail to follow. She let the world lose her because she didn’t know who she was if she wasn’t someone’s daughter, someone’s girlfriend, someone’s enemy. She drifted like a ghost through forgotten towns and winter-burnt forests until she stopped somewhere that even the maps hadn't bothered plotting. A half-rotten farmhouse. A frozen lake. A few deer trails.
Silence has become her friend, and she let it guide her as she wrote.
She wrote not songs, not journal entries. Letters. To the dead. To the living who might as well be. To the past. To the future she doubted she’d ever have. Words spilled where blood had only stained before. Some letters were venom. Some were apology. Some were questions she would never have the courage to speak.
Some… to the one person who was never meant to read them.
But the world has teeth. And it has a way of tearing open even the things she fought tooth and nail to bury.
Because far from Ellie’s broken cabin and frozen lake, a storm was building. And like a tornado that wreak havoc on a shaky, war-torn town, the storm carried with it the footsteps of someone who she once swore she would never see again.
Someone carrying her notebook.
And the words that no one was meant to see.
Abby
The wind howled like something alive, beating against the side of the cabin with rage and hunger of a ravenous beast. Abby slammed the door shut and leaned her weight into it until it latched. Her breath rose in clouds, her hair dripping with half-frozen sleet. Lev stumbled in behind her, teeth chattering so hard he could barely speak.
“That came out of nowhere,” he muttered, kicking slush off his boots.
“It didn’t,” Abby said, finally pushing off the door after insuring it's locked. “I told you we had an hour before it hit.”
“And we almost made it,” Lev shot back, shrugging off his soaked jacket.
The cabin was small, a one-room survival shack. The air smelled like old wood and dust, but it was evident that it has been abandoned by only a few weeks; the footprints, the empty food rations left behind, the cold cinders the last traces of a fire that had burned days ago.
It would do, for now.
Abby dropped her pack and started a fire in the stone hearth while Lev explored the room with careful eyes.
“No infected,” he said after a quick scan. “No bodies either. It's still warm from whoever had lived here.”
“Check for supplies,” Abby said, striking flint on steel, knowing supplies would be nonexistent in a recently abandoned shack.
Well, you can never be too sure.
He moved to a set of broken shelves, searching through whatever had been left behind. Abby let the crackle of kindling fill the silence. Fire bloomed, orange and alive, spreading warmth into the frozen air.
Outside, the blizzard tore through the world, buffetting the cottage and rattling the seemingly fragile windows.
Abby heard Lev pulling open drawers that she knew were empty, fidgetting with and prodding at neglected things that she was sure would be hidden inside a compartment at the back of his pack. He's been collecting pieces of old world relics from the places they've crossed and gave away some of his belongings in turn. It's endearing, Abby decided, how Lev wanted to take a piece of a state to discover and leave something of him behind to remember. In his time with the Seraphites, Lev's world had been confined to the dreary, grey borders of Seattle. And with their stance against anything outside of their insane little cult, he hadn't seen much of America. Abby was all the more happy to introduce him to the world.
She unloaded her pack onto a rickety table—guns, knives, scraps of ammo—and started checking each piece, tightening what she could. She sorted through the food they somehow scrapped from a town a few miles away—crushed cans, stale biscuits, a few packets of powdered soup. It would last for at least tomorrow, maybe a day and a half if they have to stretch their rations extra carefully, so they need to gather for supplies as early as the next morning. They'd have to hunt, since the next town would be a few miles from their location.
The wind slammed against the windows, particularly hard, reminding Abby that the storm won't let up for the forseeable future.
“Uh. Abby?”
Abby didn’t look up. “If it’s half a can of beans, I’m not eating it.”
“It’s not beans.”
Something in Lev’s tone made her glance over. He was holding a small leather notebook, dark brown and weather-worn. A thin leather strap had once kept it closed, but it was torn now, like someone had ripped it open too many times.
“Probably trash,” she said, shrugging and going back to rationing their supplies.
“No,” Lev said quietly. “It has a name inside.”
Abby hummed. “Whose?”
Lev thumbed the inside cover and read aloud.
Property of Ellie Williams. Do not read.
The fire popped behind her. For a long moment, neither of them spoke.
Abby stared at the notebook like it grew fangs and would strike her if she so much as move.
Ellie Williams.
Blood on the aquarium floor. Sand on her tongue. Flesh between her teeth. A moonlit beach. A blade shaking in Ellie’s hand. The face of someone who refused to die even when she chased for death. The woman who refused to be buried even as Abby repeatedly pushed her inside the grave of her mind.
Ellie fucking Williams.
Lev looked up at her. “What do we do?”
Abby didn’t answer. She moved toward him slowly, carefully, like walking on a tight rope hundreds of meters off the ground and she's working against gravity that wanted nothing but pull her down. When she took the notebook, her hands felt suddenly, violently chilly.
Abby shouldn’t open it. She should throw it into the fire and never think about it again.
She sighed and opened it.
She didn’t expect the first page to punch her directly in the gut.
Joel,
I don’t know if I hate you for lying to me or if I hate myself for still missing you.
Maybe both. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe we were both just mistakes pretending to be—
Abby's fingers trembled. She flipped a page.
Dina,
If I ever see you again, I want you to know I tried. I tried to be okay. I tried to be whole. I couldn’t. I’m sorry.
Another. And another. Every page was filled with names Abby can't put faces on. JJ. Jesse. Tess. Maria. There were a few for Tommy that Abby didn't even think about skimming through. Henry and Sam. Riley. Cat. More for Dina. More for—him.
And then Abby flipped a page and her breath hitched.
Abby,
I don’t know why the hell I’m writing this. You’d laugh. Or maybe you’d just walk away again, like the beach. I don’t know. Maybe I just need someone who understands. Maybe I hate that it’s you. Maybe I hate that you might be the only person who—
Sentence unfinished. A few scartched out sentences that looked like they were written in a feverish state and an outline of, Abby was sure, her face being scribbled on. Her hand tightened around the notebook.
Outside, the storm raged. Inside, something old and hastily stitched bled open.
“Abby?” Lev whispered.
She closed the notebook with a snap and turned around. “Get some rest, Lev.”
Lev hesitated, concern in his voice, “what about the notebook?”
Abby stared into the fire, jaw clenched. “I'm burning it.”
The words settled like ash above her tongue.