The dawn of a new sun drowned out the screams of people in her dreams, and Ellie welcomed the new day with a yawn that would have scared a clicker.
With a groan, she rolled off the mattress on the floor, sitting up with her knees pulled to her chest, glancing over to where Joel glanced back at her - or rather his picture. She had put it up right where he had died, so many months and weeks and even days ago. Ellie had woken up in here so many times now that this memory of a happy, smiling Joel had long displaced that other memory she had of him, the one she still could not face.
She smiled and stared at it a while longer, her thoughts racing as they usually did whenever she was awake.
Her first instinct was to cry, as it usually was, but it was as if her eyes could not decide what she even wanted to cry about. Was it losing Joel? Was it losing Dina? Jackson? Herself?
She had lost so much over the years that she could no longer focus on any single event, they all amalgamated in a slurred and blurry mess she could never quite escape. Things usually got better as the day grew older, but Ellie knew she would fall asleep with the same mixture of sadness and anger that she had awoken with.
A grim smile spread across her face as her mind raced through the many people who would never awake with any sort of feeling again, and her fingers twitched as if she was waiting behind a corner until an unsuspecting asshole walked around it.
No, not quite, that wasn’t quite it, Ellie thought. Those fuckers who had no idea she was even there - they hardly mattered. They were numbers more than anything, impossible not to kill unless she somehow royally fucked up. And she never did, it was just a trigger pull, the slightest curl of her index finger before they died. Nothing to it.
But standing there, waiting for those who KNEW she was out somewhere, waiting for those who were so angry to see their friends die, so scared that they might be next - they were the ones Ellie still remembered. Whenever she closed her eyes, she could hear them yelling commands, crying out as they noticed another corpse, or begging for their lives once they were increasingly alone.
She could picture the men she had killed with her knife, and she had vivid memories of hiding explosives under their bodies, a nice little birthday surprise for whoever made the mistake of rolling them over to check if they were still alive. Served them right, for being so stupid, for trying to hold on to their lives that were already lost.
Finally, the tears came to her eyes, but they weren’t over the men and women she had killed. They were tears wept over the girl she still remembered, but could no longer see whenever she looked into a broken mirror. The holes, the half-blind shards - they almost perfectly encapsulated how she felt most days, and she was starting to feel more like the pieces that were dull or missing, rather than the ones that still reflected anything.
She cried some more, tears that morphed into a chuckling laughter, and before long, Ellie hung at the metal bar and pulled herself up until her arms could no longer hold her weight. She dropped back down, lying on the floor exhausted, sitting up and dropping herself back down whenever her breath had slowed enough to do it. Her stomach hurt, her muscles ached, but all that was better than not being able to feel herself at all. She welcomed the pain, and she welcomed the loudmouthed judgement of those eternally silenced.
Eventually, Ellie managed to get up and cook some breakfast, one of her last glass jars out of Jackson. Ellie smiled, momentarily transported back into the present, where good men and women worked hard and played hard, probably only just waking up as well after a long night of watching movies and getting drunk.
A part of her missed all that, missed the music and the laughter, and the determination of anyone who lived there, eager to get through their assigned day’s work. She missed Dina, missed Maria and Tommy, and all them other folks. She even found herself missing Seth a little, and that made her laugh.
But more than all that, she missed being someone who fit into that community, someone who had a place in between all them. Ellie remembered a time when she had felt like she belonged there, when she had walked those safe streets like someone who pulled more than just her own weight.
For a while, she had done right by them, and the town had done right by her as well. She had called Jackson home, and she had worked hard to make it feel like home. Worked hard, and failed nonetheless, because it had always felt like a mask that she had put on, clothes that she had worn.
For many, Jackson wasn’t just home, it was damn near paradise. For many of them, it was a close replica of how they remembered life before the outbreak, and they made sure to keep the memory alive of how everyone once used to be. Schools, movies, books and rules, so many rules. All the bigotry of the old world, too, with Seth just being the visible tip of the iceberg.
So many of them had said nothing, but silently agreed, and Ellie knew what they had all been saying. A shame, to live a free life instead of having children, a disservice to the community that was so dependent on growing a new generation.
But then again, those same voices would have probably wasted no time to run their mouths if she had, in fact, gone down that road, finding one reason or another to complain about every single parental decision she would have made.
Because she had never been made to fit in, not with them, not with anyone. Not with the bigots, nor the weak, and especially not the strong who commanded the weak. She wasn’t made to nod and do what anyone told her to, and she was made even less to stand in front and tell other people what THEY should do.
She thought back to David and shuddered, having long realized that in a different world, she could have been him, just like she could now be where Maria had envisioned her, slowly growing into a position of leadership in Jackson.
She could be the one who sent people on patrol by now, and she could have been in charge of everything and anything. She had worked hard enough to forever earn her place in Jackson’s young history, resting on her past accomplishments until her end of days.
Until she had thrown it all away, and there was no denying the fact that she had. Eight months away, and life out here had moved on like normal, all but forgetting that she even still existed. Surprising the few people who knew she had even come back, not even Tommy had expected her to survive after this long without a word from her. And really, could she fault them? Of course, she couldn’t, she could consider herself fortunate they still let her live out here.
Seeing Dina again had hit her the hardest, seeing her struggle in so many different ways at the sight of her face. Anger, happiness, all stirring into a mixture that tasted of sadness after they talked and realized there was no way back to how things had once been. For her sake, it would have probably been best if Ellie had never returned, never ripped open those wounds that had just about begun to heal.
But that was the thing about Dina, this unwavering strength of hers, this dedication to being good in the face of all the bad. Ellie rubbed the little bracelet on her arm, smiling as she thought about all the happy memories that had connected them in the first place. When she closed her eyes while holding onto it, she could still feel Dina’s lips on hers, could still evoke that same feeling of daring excitement when they had kissed in Eugene’s basement - back when everything had been so fucked up, yet seemed so calm, so controllable.
She had felt so much in charge of her own life, her own choices, own destiny. Back before everything she had ever loved in life had been stolen from her, or she had given it away in her attempt to make people pay for what they had done.
She waited for Joel to appear to her again, like he normally did, speaking those same last words he had said to her. How he, given the choice to do it all over again, he would have done the same, and would do it all over again. It was such a fleeting moment, such a short memory in the many years they had spent together - but this would always remain the one she would hold closest to her heart. And nobody could take that from her, she suddenly realized, not for as long as she was still breathing.
She would always remember that look in his eyes when she told him she would like to try forgiving him, how a weight seemed to have been lifted from his shoulders. Nobody could take that away from her, not even Abby, not for as long as Ellie still had her own head on her own shoulders.
And really, that was what counted, right? That’s why Maria sent supplies up here, that’s why Ellie was still a part of Jackson, even though she hadn’t set foot back into it apart from that first time. Because Ellie knew that if nothing else, she was still herself, for bad and worse. She wasn’t just someone, she was deadly. She was someone who runners were afraid of, and clickers feared. Someone who had seen Bloaters and lived to tell the tale, someone so used to sleeping on the floor that her own bed in Jackson had never managed to feel quite right.
She was, if nothing else, a line of defense, someone who had long lost count of how many men, women and infected she had defended. People in Jackson slept easy because of those who were daring enough to go on patrol - and those who went out on patrol slept a little easier because they knew that Ellie was out here, continuing to lose count.
Maybe, in a different life, she would have been down there, scared at the thought of going outside the town walls. But as things stood, Ellie felt no fear when the sound of approaching footsteps settled into her mind. Winter was on its way out, but there were still patches of ice that could splinter under someone’s boots, and mud that could pull on their soles and only give way with a deep smacking sound.
Ellie’s mind barely had to strain itself as she ran through her options, realizing at once that death was inevitable today. She was still two weeks away from another patrol bringing her another crate of food, and no one from Jackson would come out this way unless they had a reason. That only left people who had come from the other side, like Abby and her now dead friends once had.
But Ellie knew that things were different now than they had been on that fateful night, that the whole building was locked down tight, fortified and full of traps waiting to be sprung. There was only one way in, only two ways out, and Ellie did not intend to run anywhere today. The first three who could barge in were already dead, and Ellie smiled as she anticipated the smell of the explosives, the sound of the rigged-up shotguns.
If anyone was still alive after that, she stood up here, waiting for them with her rifle, her pistol and her knife. Nobody would even come close enough for her to need her knife, but they didn’t know that yet.
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