So, I may be fandom old, but never let it be said that I don't at least TRY to keep up with the times. So, I'll go with a new, cool, pinned 'about me' post.
I don't post my face or my real name here. I like to keep fandom and my writing something special just for me, and keep my RL out of it (even though I do tend to rant and scream into the void about my real life).
Here's what you DO get to know about me:
-I'm in my 40's in the Northeast US. I'm a licensed healthcare professional and I have a focus on dance medicine as I used to be a professional dancer and I currently still teach and choreograph part time.
-Yes, my Icon is me. That's me when I danced.
-I'm Cis/het/white/AFAB/non-religious and always looking to be a better friend and ally to those around me. She/Her/Hers. Politics lean liberal. Feminist. Eat the Rich.
-I've been writing fic since before I knew what fic was and I started reading it as soon as I found out what a listserv was! I consider myself fandom old (and stuck in some of my ways cough*disclaimers*cough) but fandom has been a huge mental health help for me throughout my life.
-I've been on Tumblr since 2012 and they will have to pry it from my cold dead hands, even if I don't use it right, tag anything right, or reply to people in a timely manner.
As for what I put on my blog, it's literally ANYTHING I like. It generally focuses on whatever fandom I'm focused on at the moment, and some politics. I attempt to tag, but honestly 1. I suck at it and 2. Don't necessarily want stuff going into the tags?
My ask is always open. Don't be shy- say HI, follow me, prompt, comment... I love meeting people on here. Just know I often suck at replying in a timely manner. Getting feedback on fics literally MAKES MY DAY.
Last, but certainly not least, when I write, I do it for fun, but I do my best to do it well.
I write for various shows and ship as follows in my writing and I'll try to keep this updated (In no particular order):
The Mandalorian: Din Djarin, with or without OFC/Reader
The Last OF Us: Joel Miller, with or without OFC/Reader
OUAT: Rumbelle With sides of Swanfire and the occasional TinkerHook
Marvel- Steve/Peggy or Steve/OFC, with a side of Clintasha and Pepperony
CSI- Grissom/Sara
X-Files- Mulder/Scully
X-Men- Rogue/Wolverine
House- House/Cameron
Stargate- Jack/Sam
BB/TDK- Het only- either Bruce/Rachel or Bruce/OC
BBT- Penny/Sheldon
Doctor Who- Nine or Ten/Rose
**All of my fic exists on AO3.**
AO3 is my preferred platform and where I keep everything MOST updated.
I also have these as a collection of my works:
My Steggy Events Materlist
My FanFiction.net profile
My live Journal
Postings to Paradox on Live Journal (Sheldon/Penny from BBT)
Actually SO ANGRY about what Google is doing. I had already stopped using them as a browser and search engine, but I’ve had a Gmail for 20 years now… what even are my alternatives that DON’T use AI and aren’t expensive???
Not sure why it's a new trend among fic readers to assume if the fic has not been posted within the week it's inappropriate to comment on it, like the fic has to be hot out of the oven to give feedback for.
I got a comment on a fic that is less than a year old and it was mostly an apology for being a comment on an "old fic" and how late they were in commenting.
Just comment on the fic. Doesn't matter how old it is.
Story Summary: Jackson is less idyllic than it seems, as is everything post-infection. He doesn't want to see you tossed out, and can’t take the way you flinch when the men come sniffing around, so he does the only thing he and Ellie can think of to keep you around.
Dead Dove: Do Not Eat.
Tender Payment For our Sins has significant Trigger and Content Warnings. Please see Chapter 1 for Full list of Trigger Warnings and Tags.
Full Story on AO3
Most recent CHAPTER on AO3
The Spotify Playlist
Chapter 67: I Believe Because I Can See our Future Days
Summary: You can’t stay where you are, how you are. But there is hope.
A/N: I can't believe that on Saturday I will post the last chapters. Thank you all for everything. Your comments and kudos carried me through some crazy times this past year.
Title from Pearl Jam’s Future Days
~*~
Ellie’s watching you when you wake up. You push from the floor of the shack, world tilting instead of spinning enough to disorient you but not send you reeling like it had earlier as you sit.
“Hey,” she says, eyes pinned on you, bottom lip between her teeth.
“Hey,” you reply, croaking and coughing around a dry mouth. “What time is it?”
“Probably around 3 or 4, don’t know for sure. Joel went for water. He said there’s a creek not too far away. He’ll be back soon.” She shrugs, reaching over and handing you some jerky before sitting back and picking at her jacket. “Sorry we don’t have more.”
You swallow a few times, trying to get the saliva in your mouth to soothe your throat before picking a piece of jerky off and chewing it. “It’s okay,” you finally manage, only a little hoarse. “How… how are you?”
Ellie avoids your eyes for a minute before looking straight at you, her smile fighting with a frown. “I’m glad you’re okay.”
You shake your head at her even though that makes it ache more. “How are you?” You ask. You know how they found you, you know what you looked like, half naked and bruised and covered in Robbie’s filth, tied up and blindfolded and gagged up against the building. It wasn’t a sight you’d ever want to see, and it certainly wasn’t a sight you wanted either of them to come across. You’re sure you still don’t look much better now.
Tears pool in her eyes and she wipes them away, trying to stay strong. “I’m good, you know. I-”
She stops, chin wobbling as you hold your arms out to her. They’re not held high, just a few inches off the ground as your shoulders scream at you, but they’re steady.
Fuck, if they’re not steady as they reach for her.
Not a single tremor, not a single suggestion of infection lacing down from your right shoulder like tendrils through your skin.
She hesitates before making her way over, slowly crawling into your arms and wrapping you back up in her own hug. “Fuck,” she whispers, her voice thick with tears, “I’m so fucking glad you’re okay.”
“Me too, sweetheart,” you whisper as you hold her tight. “Me too.”
~*~
It’s a familiar walk to the creek to fill up the canteens. It helps him clear his head to only have to focus on his footsteps and the sounds in the clearing.
They’ll have to step up patrols. It’s been all day, and not a single sign of another clicker. Clickers don’t usually walk alone, and this isn’t the first they’d found by itself, which means there is a hoard close enough they were splitting off from, there is a hoard somewhere nearby.
That would make the second hoard in about a year.
It is dizzying and terrifying to think that each day there seem to be more of them instead of less, that the human race is losing the fight, but he sees it in front of his face.
Jackson is a stronghold, but it will only last for so long, especially if it continues to turn on its own, especially if it continues to value appearances over actual security.
He crouches down, filling the canteens as he tries to keep his eyes on the trees. It’s quiet: only the wind and the cooing of a few birds.
No clicks. No heavy dragging of half-dead limbs through the underbrush.
It’s the quiet that does it, the quiet that finally breaks him.
He has to sit back, dragging the canteens with him, muffling the sobs in the corner of his arm so he won’t be heard.
Not by clickers, not by you, not by anyone.
It is a miracle you’re still alive. You should be dead.
And yet, you’re breathing and talking and still with him despite the haunting ring of scabbed teeth marks on your shoulder.
He lets it out only for a second, lets it overwhelm him only for as long as he has to before he locks it back up. The fear and anger and frustration are all too new, too raw to process. He will, one day. Just not today. He sniffs hard and dries his eyes and pulls himself as together as he can as he stands, taking the full canteens and turning back towards the outpost shack. He can’t do this right now. He can’t fall apart yet.
Not when you still need him to protect you.
Not when you need him to get you home.
~*~
You sit up. Time still feels fuzzy, your head does, too, and the light hurts through the cracks in the curtains, but you can’t sit like this for any longer.
You can’t have Robbie on you any longer.
The question is, who will you ask?
Joel will insist it be him. He’ll insist he’s the one to take you down to the water, to help you clean off, to hold you up and help you get out of the disgusting clothes. He’s seen you at your very worst.
Until now.
He hasn’t seen you like this. You know you’re filthy and bruised, and that there are scratches he hasn’t seen. That each glimpse more of it will tell him more about all the times, all the things you don’t want him to know, the things you don’t think you can ever say to his face about what that man did to you.
You know it’ll hurt him to see you like that.
But Ellie…
There’s something that feels safe about asking her, about asking another woman to help you take this off of you and emerge clean on the other side of it. And she understands. You know she understands at least a little.
But she only understands a little.
Her demon is so much tinier than yours.
You told her once it didn’t matter the size, but the truth is that the size does matter. That if she helps you to the water, if she sees the bruises and the scrapes and the way he violated you, you’ll be taking a part of her innocence away that can never be given back to her. That you’ll be showing her the darkest side of a world she only suspects exists.
You can’t do that to her.
It doesn’t seem like a fair choice.
You reach out your hand…
~*~
“You shouldn’t have asked her to come,” you mutter as he peals the tatters of your pants from your legs. He looks up at you, one hand on your hip to keep your balance as you step from the jeans.
“I gotta watch you,” he tosses them in the small pile of your clothing next to him, “someone has to be lookout.”
“I’ll be fine,” you protest, even as he has to lift your arm over his shoulder to help you down the bank of the creek. He pauses to look at you with narrowed eyes, but doesn’t say anything before continuing down to the water’s edge. You don’t need him to say anything, you’re lying to yourself as much as you’re lying to him. He ducks under your arm once your close enough that the ground gets rocky to turn and face you so he can steady you with both hands. His eyes are carefully peeled on the ground, watching each unsteady step you take into the creek.
He’s so focused. He hasn’t looked longer than he’s needed to anywhere, not when he was taking the shredded clothes off you and not when he was helping you down and even now, he’s not looking at the purpling bruises that are so fucking apparent on your thighs.
He’s just holding you and helping you.
It crosses your mind that it might be for his own sake, as well, that he doesn’t look at them. You can’t help but need to look, but he… he doesn’t have to.
Maybe it’s better that he doesn’t.
He turns you slowly, releasing you into the water that gently swells to thigh-high with each step in. The water is cool, cold enough to send a shiver to your body, chilled enough to feel like it starts to numb away the pain. He starts to let go of your hand from the bank, but you squeeze it instead, waiting for him to meet your eyes.
“Don’t let her see,” you whisper.
He turns his head back to the edge of the trees, where Ellie’s back is set to the two of you, rifle in her hands. “She won’t-”
“She’s had enough of this kind of violence in her life, Joel.” You sniff back the emotion in your voice. “You and I know, but she doesn’t need to. Okay?”
He nods stiffly, “Okay.”
You let his hand go, and slowly let yourself sink into a ball. Your chin wavers with the bite of the water as it rushes over your shoulders, breath coming in short gasps. You close your eyes and try to slow your breathing, try to focus on staying calm and letting your body get used to the cold, on the sharp sensation it sends through the raw skin on your calves and between your legs.
The splash behind you startles you, spinning you faster than you should go.
“Jesus, darlin’,” Joel, drawls, pulling you into his arms when you moan and squeeze your eyes shut at the way the world spins. “What’d you do that for?”
“Didn’t know what the splash was,” you reply slowly, the world righting itself after a few deep breaths.
“You thought I was gonna just sit there?” He huffs a laugh through his nose and turns you in his arms, hugging you tighter to the warmth of his body, bare skin to bare skin. “You can barely sit up for more than a few minutes, I’m not gonna let you drown out here.” He shakes his head, any teasing gone with the seriousness of what he’s come to do. He lifts his hand, his thin handkerchief in it, and squeezes the water out. “Look at me,” he commands gently.
His touch is feather-light as he drags the cool cloth over your face, his other arm wrapped around you, keeping you from floating away in the gentle current. He goes over every inch of skin, dipping it and wringing it out one handed and going over again and again until he’s satisfied before starting to run it over your chest and your arms.
He’s touched you with such care before. Cool towels on the back of your neck after a bad night, his hands in the shower when your migraines are so bad you can’t see straight enough to stand on your own. This touch, this side of him, is nothing new. His laser focus on you, on every detail of you, is familiar enough to be comforting.
It doesn’t stop you from trying to hide your body from him when he starts to move lower, when his hands dip below the crystal-clear water and his eyes narrow at the bruises, at the human teeth marks on your breast, at the scratches you can feel crisscrossing your shoulder blades.
The gnarled scar of an infected’s bite that didn’t take.
He doesn't peel your arm away from where you pull it across your body, but he does take your cheek in his hand, pressing his forehead against yours. “Don’t,” he whispers, voice low and thick and just broken enough that you know he’s fighting to be able to keep it as steady as he is. “Don’t hide from me darlin’. Not now.”
You close your eyes, shaking against him. From the cold or the fear or the emotions finally getting the best of you, you can’t tease out. “How can you look at me like this?” You eventually croak out, blinking up at him.
He leans back, tears sitting in his eyes as he tries to smile at you, smoothing the knots of hair away from your face. “How can I not? You’re alive.”
~*~
You told her not to look.
You told her to keep her eyes on the outskirts. Keep her ears open. Keep the gun ready. And with fear and anger and loss in your eyes, you told her not to look.
Ellie really, really wants to look.
She wants to see just what had happened to you. She can sort of imagine, she has an idea, but she doesn’t exactly know.
Whatever happened before that clicker came, it had been bad. She knows. She knows from the way you shook and the way Joel looked at you when they found you. She knows from the way dirt and blood streaked and caked on your skin, from where and how your clothes are torn.
It is Vegas. And Silver Lake.
Violation. Hate. Violence.
But she doesn’t know how to help, and she can’t know, unless she knows what happened. At least that is what it feels like, swirling in her brain. Too much has happened in the last day, too much fear and loss and Ellie isn’t going to lose another goddamnned person in her life.
But you told her not to look.
And you deserve that. She knows you deserve that choice.
So she walks the perimeter with nothing more than the goal of keeping you safe and the mantra don’t look echoing in her brain. It is something to think, something to keep her mind sharp and focused instead of letting it drift.
Letting it drift to the way they found you.
Letting it drift to when she thought she’d lost you.
Letting it drift to the fear in your eyes when they came running back to you.
And she is good. She is good until she hears you crying.
She thinks it is an animal at first. A bird maybe, with the soft, muffled sounds it makes. But then Joel’s warm voice joins in, whispering things she can’t hear, and Ellie knows.
She’s seen you cry.
She fucking hates it. She hates when you cry.
It makes her want to punch something, because no one as nice and kind and smart as you should be fucking crying, ever.
And so she turns. She turns because that is part of her job, to make sure you are safe. And maybe if there is a threat, Joel can’t yell. So, she has to.
She has to look.
And she turns right back around just as fast.
Joel has you. And he is crying, too. Holding one another in the little creek, talking low and broken, you are both crying.
So, Ellie redoubles her efforts. She tunes you out. She listens for the crunch of leaves and the tell-tale clicks and patrols the same little half circle over and over again.
There is no fucking way she is letting anyone hurt you again. Either of you. And you gave her a job.
She takes a deep breath, the vision of the both of you seared into her brain.
You told her not to look.
~*~
You’re more put together when you come back after washing. You can smell Joel all around you, clothed in his boxers and his long sleeve.
He wouldn’t put your torn up clothes back on you.
You didn’t want to wear them, either.
He set about in just his undershirt and jeans, going through the packs again and staring out the small window at the fading day with a pensiveness that keeps you jumpy. It is Ellie’s soft ministrations, her fingers raking through your wet, tangled hair over and over as she teases out the knots, that keeps you calm.
It is in that sense of calm, of feeling safe and protected and surrounded by family, that the situation suddenly becomes very clear.
“What are you thinking?” He asks, sitting next to you.
He’s caught you, and Ellie’s looking at you over your shoulder with that perceptive glare she seems to have that always knows when you’re thinking something they won’t like.
You rub your hand over your shoulder again, your cool, clean shoulder, hiding under Joel’s long sleeve button down. “We have to burn it.”
Joel’s eyebrows shoot to his hairline. “Absolutely not.”
“Joel-”
He stands, pacing the little shack. “You’re the one always tellin’ me that any little thing could end up being serious. The number of times you’ve scolded me for busting a lip-”
You put your hands on his leg as he passes you, stopping his rant. He’s serious, but so are you. “They won’t let me not see a doctor, Joel. You could try, but-” You shake your head. “As soon as I walk into Jackson, they’re going to demand it.” You look up at him, eyes pleading. “Wouldn’t you?”
He tries to come up with something, you see him open and close his mouth, shake his head as he crouches down and grips your hand tight. “Darlin’…”
You rest your hand on his cheek, “We burn it. Just… just a little fire and the flat of your knife there and it’s enough that they won’t be able to tell, okay?”
He shakes his head. “No, no I-”
“The longer we wait, the more suspicious it gets.” You hold his hand tight, but he doesn’t move. “I’ll do it.”
“No, no. If we’re doing this- I’ll do it.” He turns, suddenly full of action. You both know it’s the only thing that will hide it. That when you get back to Jackson, because you have to go back there until you’re at least feeling better, they will demand you be seen by the doctor. “Ellie- there should be a camping stove just under the bed there- see if we can get it going.”
It doesn’t take long for the camping stove to pop to life, for the flame to burn bright in the small room, and Ellie grabs an old rusted tackle box from the back corner that’s filled with bandages. You peel Joel’s shirt down, turning your back to him.
“We could…” His voice wavers, whatever suggestion he has falling apart as he turns the blade in his hands.
“Fast and hot,” you say as calmly as you can muster, turning away from him.
“Fast and hot,” he mutters, putting the blade into the fire.
~*~
He watches Ellie fidget by the window, hands running up and down the sides of her legs as she watches, vigilant.
He’s calmer, sitting against the wall with your head pillowed on his thighs, his one hand on his gun and the other running through your hair as you sleep, carefully avoiding the bandaged burn on your shoulder. He’s only calmer because you’re here, with him, touching him. It makes it easier to make the decision.
“Ellie,” he whispers, and she turns eyebrows raising before she looks back out, taking her job as watch seriously.
She only speaks as loud as she needs to. “Yeah?”
“Get some sleep.”
She shakes her head, eyes looking out over the black night. She can’t see anything, he knows she can’t see anything because the moon’s not full enough to see by. “Can’t.”
He sighs, but keeps his hand stroking through your hair, keeping himself calm and hopefully keeping you asleep. You need whatever rest you can get. “Ya have to. We’re leaving at first light.”
Ellie’s head snaps around, eyes wide. “She can’t walk that far, Joel.”
“She’ll have to.” He sighs, heavy, and motions for her to sit across from him. “I’m not waiting any longer. Either they’re not coming or we’re facing a bigger problem.”
Her eyes widen as she sits across from him. “You mean like a horde?”
“I mean like a horde.” Joel nods.
Ellie looks down at her hands, then over to you in the flickering lamplight. “There’s one we haven’t found, isn’t there? It’s why we keep finding strays on patrol, why there’s just one here.”
Joel nods again. “They break off, get lost by accident.” He shakes his head. “That camp that got busted up last year? We knew we didn’t get ‘em all.”
Ellie’s eyes widen. “You told us-”
“What I told you was we got all the ones we found.” He shrugs, shaking his head. “Everyone out there that night decided it was best to not scare everyone. But there were more- there had been more, but they were missing.”
“Missing?” Ellie narrows her eyes at him and curses under her breath. “Aren’t these the kinds of things I should know since I go out on patrols?”
He nods reluctantly. “We can talk about how they still got you on the short, safe routes later, okay? Either way- we’ve got a problem out here, we’ve got a problem in Jackson, or they just left us on our own. No matter what, staying here isn’t viable.”
“No food, no help,” Ellie mutters, looking around the shack as Joel nods again. She turns back to him, serious. “And what if there’s infected in Jackson? What if that’s why this one is here? If it got lost on the way?”
He raises his eyebrows. “I don’t think there will be, but if they are, we’ll deal with that then.”
He can see the betrayal in her eyes, how she resents that she’s been working with less information than everyone else on patrols. “What makes you think they won’t be?”
“They’re moving away from us, not closer.” He sniffs, leaning his head back. He can be honest with her now, and they can hash out how mad she is, and if she wants to keep doing patrols, once they get back. “We think they’re following the river.”
“They don’t need to drink…”
“People do.”
Ellie’s shoulders sink. “Shit.”
“Yeah, shit.” Joel looks up at the ceiling, hand still moving in a gentle rhythm against you, your breaths still heavy and slow and even.
Ellie’s quiet for a long time before she whispers, “Does she know?”
He takes a slow, deep breath. He’s gonna lose some of Ellie’s trust after this, he’s sure. “That there’s a bigger problem? Yes. Everything I just told you? No. And I want to keep it that way.”
Ellie sits taller, leaning back against the wall, tense with frustration. “So… what’s the plan, then? She’s better, but not good.”
“No, not good.” He slips his hand over your thigh. “Even more of a reason to get going.” He shakes his head. “We’ll go slow, you and I will keep a sharp eye, and if the shit hits the fan we deal with it then. Days have been pretty quiet on patrols, we just have to cross our fingers and hope for the best.”
Ellie sits with the plan for a minute, picking at her jeans. “Wouldn’t the people on the South route have come close to us today?”
“Should have,” Joel mutters. He’s thought about every possibility. He’s thought about what Tommy might have done, what he would have done. The South route, long and winding down the mountain, is the closest to where they are, but it’s not actually all that close. He’s not sure anyone on the regular patrol route would have noticed them, and if they weren’t told to stop out at the outpost, the regular patrol would have no reason to go out of their way. Even a search party might avoid the outpost in favor of looking through the rocky terrain and numerous caves and ditches this side of the mountain if they didn’t have tracks to follow. He had a hard enough time tracking last night, a whole day of animals and wind wouldn’t have helped matters. “Didn’t hear or see anyone today, but that don’t mean they’re not looking. They just might not be looking here. We might be on our own.”
Ellie looks at him for a long second, then smiles. “Since when haven’t we been on our own? We always do just fine.”
It makes him smile, just enough. He’s worried about you, he’s worried that the burn will get infected, that he didn’t bandage it good enough, that you’re right and they won’t let you get away with not seeing the doctor. He’s worried they’ll see right through everything and the three of you will be back out here with no supplies and a hoard to deal with. “Suppose we do.”
I thought dealing with the aftermath might bring some sense of relief, but holy fuck—the way you wove this chapter with such heavy doom and gloom had my anxiety churning the entire time I was reading 😭
Idk man, I care about these three so much that I had to take multiple breaks just to get through this chapter and grieve with them. The monumental pain they went through (or at least the different ways each of them experienced it) felt so visceral and heartbreaking. It genuinely left this growing pit in my stomach that only got heavier as their situation became more and more bleak.
I’m just hoping for something to go right. I hope the doctor in Jackson pulls through. I hope patrol pulls through. I hope Tommy is okay. These three deserve at least a little bit of kindness after everything they’ve been put through. I feel so fiercely protective of them.
Uff. I think I’m going to be sitting with this feeling for a while.
(Gratefully, of course, because it takes something really special for a story to affect me like this.)
My thoughts are all over the place right now, so I’m just going to put them down as they come—
Reader:
Her insistence on not letting Ellie see the physical aftermath of what she went through…that hit me.
On one hand, it’s exactly what she says, wanting to preserve Ellie’s innocence. But it also feels like something more. Like she needs to process it herself first, even just a little, before letting Ellie in. There’s this question underneath it all—how do you make that kind of vulnerability safe enough for someone else to witness? How do you guide them through it, knowing they’ll be affected too?
It almost feels like she’s processing her trauma externally first, through Joel and Ellie, before she can fully face it herself. Like seeing it reflected in them makes it just a bit more digestible.
Joel:
Joel, gosh, Joel.
The way he carves out small, private moments to let himself feel the pain, because he knows better than to let it fester unchecked. But at the same time, he keeps defaulting to being useful. Because if he stops moving, if he stops doing, then he has to feel everything all at once.
That need to fix things, to make it better for her, for Ellie, for himself, it’s so deeply ingrained in him.
And the way he carefully decides what to share and what to hold back, even when he clearly needs to unburden himself. But that clashes with his instinct to protect others from their own pain. That’s how he loves—by carrying more, so others don’t have to.
Ellie:
Sweet, sweet Ellie.
She’s so often underestimated—what she can handle, what she understands. People want to preserve her youth and let her hold on to some version of innocence. But her reality hasn’t allowed that.
She’s been forced to grow up faster than anyone should have to. And because of that, her strength gets overlooked in the wrong ways. She can handle the brutality of their world, but not because she should have to. Because she’s had to. And that’s the heartbreaking part.
It makes me wonder what she would choose for herself if she didn’t feel this constant need to prove her strength. If her circumstances hadn’t shaped her this way.
Ugh, truly. Another absolutely phenomenal chapter. I’m floored. I’m dazed. And yeah, I’m definitely still processing.
Hello my dear. Yeah- things in this chapter aren't happy yet- we still have a lot to work through to get to our happy ever after.
While I'm sorry you had to take breaks to get through the chapter, I'm glad that the pain and frustration and anxiety really came through. it's tense and bleak and they don't know what they're facing right away.
I think the reality of Jackson really seeps in in these chapters- that what we want and what we deserve and what we get are really all different things, and you'll see that in the resolution in the next two chapters. We HOPE Tommy is ok. We HOPE there's a Patrol looking for them. We HOPE there isn't a hoard in Jackson. But life so rarely ever goes the way we hope.
I love how you spaced out your thoughts by character, so that's how I'll respond, as well.
Reader- She was alone for so much of her trauma before she met Joel and Ellie. Her instinct now is to share it- to let them help her, but she's never done that before, and doesn't know how to do it in a way that doesn't make it worse for them, too. That's why this chapter has to be so heavy- it's all about how each one of them tries to process this huge event now that they have each other.
Joel- THANK YOU for seeing Joel like I do- to see that his pain is SO MUCH on the inside, but that the only way he knows how to carry on is to be useful, to push forward, to HELP. I feel like that aspect of his character gets missed so often in fic, but it's so KEY to how he's able to make hiss way through their world, but also how broken he is inside and how he doesn't want to have to deal with it. Usually, it's to his detriment, but here, here it's what's keeping everything all together for these few hours.
Ellie- She is such a tragic character because this IS all she's ever known. And yet- she's full of hope. She didn't see it all fall apart, so she has hope that it can be BETTER, and that's what's so beautiful about her to me. Being forced to grow up doesn't take away her innocence in many ways, and her child-like optimism and wonder. I deeply deeply love Ellie.
Thank you so much for this. I can't tell you how much I look forward to hearing what you thought of each chapter.
Don't take too long to process... I just posted the last two chapters. 😉
Story Summary: Jackson is less idyllic than it seems, as is everything post-infection. He doesn't want to see you tossed out, and can’t take the way you flinch when the men come sniffing around, so he does the only thing he and Ellie can think of to keep you around.
Dead Dove: Do Not Eat.
Tender Payment For our Sins has significant Trigger and Content Warnings. Please see Chapter 1 for Full list of Trigger Warnings and Tags.
Full Story on AO3
Most recent CHAPTER on AO3
The Spotify Playlist
Epilogue: In This Crimson Light I Find the Truth
Summary: Your garden thrives.
A/N: I cannot express the love I have for everyone reading this. TPFOS marks so many firsts for me as a fic writer, even though I’ve been writing for longer than I care to admit. It’s my first x Reader, my first TLOU fic, my longest ever fic by a staggering amount, and a piece of work that helped me work through some real-life emotions and two insane life events. The commentary and reviews and love I received in the process of posting was absolutely unexpected. I honestly thought no one would ever like my dark, twisted little fantasy. The fact that so many of you love this couple like I do is amazing and warms my heart.
This epilogue marks the end of this journey for Joel and Reader… an as “happily ever after” as you can get in the apocalypse. This story has always ended this way, and I hope you find it as interesting and as satisfying as I do.
I plan to write some one shots about these two… little alternate universe what-ifs. Please stay tuned for that.
Thank you all for taking this journey with me.
~*~
Your garden thrives.
For the third summer in a row it’s bountiful, overflowing into the grass around it, peeking under the fence into your neighbor’s yard. Next year you’ll have to ask Joel if you can till another corner of the yard or set up a window box just for the herbs.
You sit on the edge of the porch, looking out over the ripe tomatoes and the half-ready ears of corn glowing golden in the crimson sunset and smile. You have so much work ahead of you. There will be enough dried fruits and vegetables to last you through the winter without question this year, and maybe even enough to share.
You’ve given up on canning, it never worked right and you were too afraid to try again after you grew strings of mold that looked a little too close to cordyceps in a jar of strawberries for your liking.
No, drying works just well enough, and the potatoes keep all winter in the basement. Onions are going to be your next project, and if you can get your hands on some garlic, you know you’ll be in business.
Jackson isn’t exactly thriving anymore, but you sure as hell are going to make sure your family does. There are blackouts. Water shortages. People are turned away by the droves and there are fistfights in the streets when rationing gets tightest. It isn’t exactly safe, but it is sure as hell a lot safer than the rest of the world.
And it is a monster you know, a monster you understand.
“Hey darlin’,” Joel’s rough voice floats over you from the back door as he walks towards you, leaning down and pressing a kiss on the top of your head. “You got that look.”
“What look?” You smile up at him, playing innocent, knowing he knows exactly what that long stare means on your face. He narrows his eyes at you but it dissolves into a smile as he sits down on the stair with a groan, settling his hand on your knee.
Each year brings more wrinkles around his eyes, more gray in his hair. Slowly but surely, time is taking its toll on the both of you just as it’s taking its toll on Jackson. You don’t mind it. It means you’ve lived. You’ve survived. You’ve damn near thrived.
Ellie moved out to the garage after she and Joel spent the entire spring weatherproofing it and making it more like an apartment than a crusty garage.
You couldn't hold her back anymore. She has to find her own way in this world, and you know this is just the first of many steps away from you and Joel she’ll eventually take.
The house is too quiet without her, too big for just you and Joel.
You try to fill it with projects. You have your desk where you write, working on filing in others stories and writing your own when you feel inspired. You have a basket of crochet by the couch, your sewing is strewn through Ellie’s old room, projects and half unwound old sweaters in various states, and sprigs of herbs drying in the kitchen. Some of these things you trade, some of them are just for you.
Joel never complains, just smiles and looks at you like you hung the moon.
You reach for his hand and lace your fingers in his, setting your head on his shoulder.
“We need more potatoes,” he mutters, shaking his head. He points to the back corner, “There next year?”
You nod against him. “And a window box for more dill and mustard.”
He chuckles under you. “The day you manage to make vinegar is the day we’re all done for.”
“Pickled everything!” You announce happily. Joel’s managed to get you a little here and there, and you’ve stretched the vinegar as far as you can, but it only ever lasts so long and you haven’t quite managed to make it happen out of Donna’s homemade wine yet.
He wraps his arm around you and holds tight for a second, pressing his lips to your head. “Put ketchup on the list for me, then, right after you master vinegar.”
You never were the best at chemistry, or cooking, but you know you’re close. Vinegar will come soon, and then ketchup will be only a matter of the tomatoes and seasoning.
You have years, though.
You have as long as you need.
You’ve stopped worrying about tomorrow, because there’s always so much to do today. There’s always a patrol to be done or a construction project to be helmed or a stall to be mucked or a book to be re-written. There’s vegetables to be picked and flowers to dry to make tea. There’s stairs to repair and window boxes to build. There’s always something to occupy your time.
Somewhere along the line, and you don’t remember exactly when it was, you made peace with the idea that this will all, eventually, come to an end.
Your go-bags are ready. Two backpacks with clothes and water bottles and ammunition and dried food sit, ready to go at a second’s notice. You hope you never have to use them. You try not to think about them except when you venture in to switch out the food, to catalog the supplies and swap out what will go bad or add in something that might be useful.
You know invariably one day you will have to use them.
But for now, your garden is thriving and Joel is by your side. Nothing would make you happier than to live out your last days, many, many years from now, sitting on this same porch, holding his hand, smiling at your little garden.
Story Summary: Jackson is less idyllic than it seems, as is everything post-infection. He doesn't want to see you tossed out, and can’t take the way you flinch when the men come sniffing around, so he does the only thing he and Ellie can think of to keep you around.
Dead Dove: Do Not Eat.
Tender Payment For our Sins has significant Trigger and Content Warnings. Please see Chapter 1 for Full list of Trigger Warnings and Tags.
Full Story on AO3
Most recent CHAPTER on AO3
The Spotify Playlist
Chapter 68: Tender Payment for our Sins
Summary: Jackson will never be the same for you.
A/N: Welcome to the last chapter. It is, and always has been, my belief that despite Jackson’s surface shine, it’s a dark place. That doesn’t mean it isn’t full of well-meaning people, people who try, or people who need to pretend that things are okay. It also doesn’t mean it isn’t the best of a whole lot of bad options, for a lot of good and bad reasons.
There is an epilogue, which will be posted immediately after this.
To everyone who made it this far in the fic, when I thought I’d be the only one ever reading it, thank you. Thank you for loving my vision of Joel. Thank you for loving (and for many of us, seeing yourself) in an older female “reader.” Thank you, a million times over. I promise to slowly get to all the comments I haven't gotten to the last few months, but know I've seen them and cherished each one.
Please enjoy the last chapter of Tender Payment for Our Sins.
~*~
It’s still dark out, the first rays of light illuminating the sky an eerie gray when Joel helps you out of the shack. He tries to stay between you and the pile of bodies as he moves you towards the ridge, towards the hill you remember Robbie bouncing you down, towards the clearing where Joel and Ellie ran like hell to stop you from shooting yourself.
Fuck, you’re so glad you were too slow.
You stop him, though. You stop him and push him away and stand glaring at the pile of bodies in the purple dawn. Robbie is barely recognizable: pale with his blood spilled on the ground below him, half his body a grotesque wound, clotted with blood and dust. The clicker is draped over him, head a swirling pattern that anywhere else, any time else, you might find as almost beautiful with the way it weaves in and out of itself like a brain.
You almost feel grateful to the dead beast, to the thing that had once been human. It saved you. It’s long past identification as man or woman, past anything that could tie it to a life before it hungered.
Before it fed.
You feel like there are things you should say- that someone should say- if only to mark this as the end, but nothing comes out. No tears, no words.
You thought you’d be happy for it to be over.
You feel numb.
“Come on,” Joel whispers when the silence has stretched on long enough, wrapping his arm around you and helping you start to move up the incline.
Ellie keeps a careful eye out, sweeping in arcs that are calculated and precise. It’s impressive as you watch her, as you fall into a rhythm with how you and Joel step in time and how she watches the land around you for the tiniest sign that things aren’t alright. You’re not even at the top of the hill again when your thoughts get the best of you. “What will happen to the bodies?”
“Someone’ll burn ‘em. Next patrol that gets sent out, probably,” Joel answers quietly, helping you up, slowing his steps as you maneuver through a patch that’s more rocks than grass.
“You should have left me,” you mumble when your foot slips and Joel has to catch you before you hit the ground. “You two would have been faster back on foot, then could have gotten a horse.”
“What did I tell you?” The Texas comes out hard, his tone sharp even as his words are soft. “Ain’t never leaving you again.”
He’s the pragmatic one. The serious one. The one who has plans and thinks things through and for him to say that strikes you as so silly and romantic and deep in that moment that you just look at him. You can’t get your foot to move, to take a step, not before you look in his eyes and see that he’s telling the truth. He isn’t leaving you, he won’t leave you, and you’re sure it’s going to be a fight just to get him to patrol the gate from now on.
Not that you want him more than an arm’s length away for the foreseeable future, but the day will come when you need to be independent, when you need to be on your own again.
When you’ll want to be on your own again.
“Ain’t leavin’ you,” he reaffirms, brushing your hair from your face before turning you back to the hill where Ellie is staring in her arcs, eyes flitting back to the two of you from a few feet higher on the ridge, protecting you both. “Come on now, we gotta get to the trees before the sun hits, or you’re gonna have a hell of a headache.”
You let him move you forward without complaint after that. Slowly and quietly, you make it over the ridge, then through the clearing. Faster than you imagine, you’re in the trees, just as the sun was starting to break through the clouds, shining bright in the early morning.
It’s cool, in the trees, your bare legs prickling goosebumps as you head through the underbrush. Ellie slows, a leader for your little trio, staying close, as Joel takes a step back, eyes now scanning as hers did, but watching the rear of your group.
You never moved like this, with their confidence and precision. You had walked through deserts and forests and mountains, just being quiet and calm, hoping to not run into any animals or infected or raiders until your luck ran out. Even when you were with groups, you never traveled like this. Watching them it strikes you that you were always, always in so much more danger than you realized.
It makes you all the more thankful for them and that they love and protect you.
It’s slow, and your shoes make noises in the underbrush even as you all try to stay quiet, but none of you stop moving. No matter how many times Ellie looks back with questioning eyes or how many times Joel tilts his head, asking if you need to stop when you stumble without saying the words, you don’t let them stop. For all their bravery, you can be stronger for a little longer. They fought for you, you can fight through a little pain and nausea and exhaustion to get you all home.
It feels like hours. It feels like days. Each step gets tougher and tougher, but you keep going. You keep going when your stomach rumbles. You keep going when you trip on tree roots. You keep going when your vision starts to get little stars around the edges.
You keep going.
You keep going until Ellie stops in front of you, holding her hand up. Joel comes up close to you and is still as death, holding his breath as he listens to the trees.
You don’t hear it at first. It sounds like nothing. Like wind.
But wind doesn’t talk.
Wind doesn’t form words.
“South route’s only about a mile up that way,” Ellie whispers as she points. “If they’re going out…”
Joel nods and gives you a little push to follow Ellie as she starts moving again.
“Joel?” You can’t help but be worried as you stall, looking at him.
He smiles tight and kisses your forehead. “Should be the patrol from Jackson. If they left on time, we’ll meet up with them not too long from now.”
You let him turn you this time, and put one foot in front of the other.
~*~
It feels frighteningly familiar, Joel behind you on the horse, arms wrapped around you as exhaustion fights to drag you to unconsciousness. You don’t fight to stay away from his body this time, though. You sink into him, breathing in time as he whispers different words to you.
“We’re almost home, darlin’, just hang in there. We’re almost home.”
You hadn’t expected to see Eddie on a horse, flanked by Millie and Jesse. They absolutely weren’t the normal patrol, shouldn’t have been out, but it didn’t matter. Relief flooded through you, even as Millie’s eyes filled with tears and she held you tight while Joel got on her horse.
The ride home is quiet, Ellie with Jesse and Millie with Eddie, one driving and one watching the trees on each horse as Joel points you to Jackson. Joel didn’t say much about what had happened, but it was enough that they agreed quiet and quick was best.
Tommy and Rick were on the North trail, Eddie informed them, sure that Robbie had taken you up to an old ski chalet one mountain over. A pack of cayotes had been in the woods the night you were taken, obscuring the trail. They’d been guessing and hoping for the best over the last day as they looked.
But none of it mattered. Not to you.
Joel wanted to know. He wanted the story. He wanted names. He wanted to know who wanted to search and who didn’t, who left and when. You could feel the vengeful angel in him, gathering evidence, but you couldn’t muster the strength to care.
Not right now, anyway.
Not when that angel wrapped his wings around you, protected you, avenged you.
One day you would care. One day you would want to know each and every name on Joel’s list. Today, you just want to get home.
It is frighteningly familiar being in his arms, but so very, very comforting when he kisses the top of your head and tucks you closer, his horse sandwiched between the others, as safe as you can be on your way home.
~*~
There isn’t a fanfare when you get back to Jackson. It’s the farthest thing from a celebration. Eyes watch you: weary and sad, but move about their business. Jesse and Ellie put the guns away, Eddie takes the horses, and Millie flanks your left while Joel stands on your right when your legs decide they no longer want to hold you up once you get off the horse.
Maria’s there, waiting with Billy in her arms. It might be relief you see in her eyes and her shoulders, but you don’t much care.
“We’ll get you to the doc,” she says softly. It’s not a request.
Ellie stays back, nodding solemnly when Joel asks that she tell Maria what happened.
You know that if he has to, he won’t be able to do it without yelling. Without crying. Without making everything worse.
He knows it’s a bad idea for him to do it, so he stays with you instead.
Joel doesn’t leave the room while the doc looks you over. Doc cleans the back of your calves and slathers them in a stinging ointment; he does the same for the burn on your shoulder. He doesn’t ask about those things.
He does ask if you’re hurt anywhere else with an intense stare. You know what he’s asking, but you can’t fathom laying on the bed and lifting your legs for him right now. You shake your head. Joel almost interrupts, but just tightens his jaw instead, shifting his weight as the doctor gives you his final instructions about the care of the burn and the road rash on your legs.
Joel takes you home. He walks you slow and steady through town and down the street and you look straight ahead while he moves next to you like a prowling watchdog. You don’t want to see the faces, you don’t want to hear their placations. Each step cracks the façade you’ve fought so tightly for more and more.
It nearly breaks when you step through the door.
Tears roll down your cheeks to the sound of him deadbolting it behind you.
It seems so… foreign.
Just for a second, everything about your home seems wrong.
You haven’t been away that long, but it feels like forever. It feels like Groom Lake and Vegas and every damn step you took alone before you found Jackson.
And then he’s behind you, holding you tight, and you close your eyes. You feel his arms around you, his chest against your back, his breath on your neck, and when you open your eyes again, everything feels right.
You push out of his arms, moving to the stars without looking back. Your body takes you to your bedroom without thought, shedding his clothes from your body with each silent step.
You don’t stop until you’re standing in the shower, hot water beating down on you, soaking the new bandages the doc just put on, matting your hair down into your face.
That’s when the dam finally breaks.
It floods out of you in violent sobs, emotion that’s too deep, too dark to give simple names like anger and fear and hate. They shake your whole body until it physically hurts.
“Come on, sweetheart, just breathe. I got you. You’re alright now. Just breathe for me.” Joel slips in the steaming shower like a whisper, gathering you into his arms and holding you through the racking sobs. Over and over he whispers into your hair, rubbing your back, holding you tight, even though there’s no end in sight to the despair pouring from you.
“Just breathe,” He whispers into your ear, the words he said the first day you met. “You’re okay.”
~*~
You can hear their voices from the bedroom, they’re loud enough that probably half the town can hear them.
You’re sure Joel does not, in any way, care who hears when he tells his brother to go fuck himself when he comes knocking on your door to ask him to join the patrol to go look for infected. Not when it’s the first time anyone but the Doc and Millie have come to your house in two days.
Not Maria. Not Tommy. Not anyone else.
There’s venom in his voice. Pain. Anger. You can imagine what he looks like, hands on his hips as he nearly yells. “You think, for one fucking second, I’m going out there?”
“Joel, we have to-”
“No one lifted a damn finger when she was out there, Tommy! Not you, not anyone.” You hear his heavy sigh, hear the sound of his feet on the wood as he paces. “That fucking asshole kidnapped her in the middle of the day and y’all were acting like she was stuck in traffic on the way home from work.”
“You left at the worst possible time, Joel! Right at dusk, heading out overnight with god knows what in those woods! Not just infected, fucking animals, too. It was a stupid move and you got lucky and you know it!” He pauses, and you can only imagine their faces. “If there's a hoard out there it endangers everyone, Joel.”
His silence is deafening. Long seconds where you can imagine they square off before he speaks again.
“So, she’s not anyone then?” His voice is low and dangerous. “All that talk last month and my fucking wife is still just a goddamn nuisance to you, huh? Cause no one gave a damn she was out there in danger. Not when Robbie took her and not for the last fucking year when he wouldn't leave her the hell alone.” He doesn’t wait for Tommy to reply. “Get the fuck out of my house.”
~*~
He’s still heated from the conversation with his brother when he pauses outside the bedroom door. Through the crack he can see you snuggled up with Ellie at your side.
She’s been inseparable from you, coming home at lunch to check on you, sitting by your bedside at all hours as you heal.
He understands, because that’s where he wants to be, too.
“Do you think… nah.” Ellie stops, flipping to her back and looking away from you.
Joel can’t see the look you shoot her, but he can imagine it and smiles.
She huffs, humming a frustrated tone in the way that only teenagers can, and starts again, quieter this time. “You think, between me and you, there could be a cure?”
The question takes the breath from Joel’s lungs. He knows he’s eavesdropping. He didn’t intend to listen in on your conversation, but he can’t help but be afraid to listen to your answer.
“Maybe,” you start quietly. “But we’ll never know.”
“No?” She’s curious.
“No.” You’re firm.
The quiet between the two of you is heavy, and finally you sigh and sit up. “No, Ellie, we’ll never know, because I’m selfish. Because I’m not sacrificing any more of my life than I already have. After I die, whenever that may be, they can have whatever they want from me. But now? I’m not leaving you and I’m not leaving Joel.”
He relaxes, and knows he should turn away, but he doesn’t.
“And if they said-”
“Whose they, Ellie?” You nearly snap. “There’s no one to give us promises. No Fireflies, no government, no one knows enough to promise us anything.” You lean down, pulling her chin up to look at you. “You’ll be old enough to make your own decisions about that soon enough, but I’ve made mine.” You pause, and he feels the gravity of what you’re trying to impress upon her. “And I don’t feel bad about it.”
You let her chin go slowly, the sadness in her eyes enough to make you push back her hair, to try to take the sting away from your words as she turns her head away. She sighs, heavy, and can’t look at you. “I feel guilty. I feel guilty all the time.”
“You shouldn’t.” He watches you curl your arms around her and hold her close to you, tucking her head under your chin. “You have the right to live your life. I have the right to live mine, no great sacrifice needed.”
“But I-”
He loves how natural you look with her, how easy it is for you to curl Ellie into your body and protect her, even when you’re the one that needs the most protection right now. “When I’m better, we’ll go to the library. I think it’s time to introduce you to philosophy, since that damn school isn’t doing anything of the sort.”
Ellie pulls back and looks up at you like you told her to stand on her head. “Philosophy?”
“The Trolley Problem, specifically.” You smile at her, and Joel feels a little more contented, a little warmer inside. “Time for you to stop seeing the world under Fedra Black and White and start making your own decisions about the moral grey area.”
Joel almost makes his way into the bedroom when he hears Ellie whisper your name. He stops, hovering at the door.
“Yeah?” You ask, running your hand through her hair.
Ellie’s voice is quiet and small, filled with that tone she has that reminds him of just how young she really is sometimes. “Remember… remember my birthday?”
He can hear the smile in your voice. “I do. It was a great night. You watched Jurassic Park, what, three times?”
“Four,” she chuckles. Ellie turns serious quickly, though. “You, um- you remember the cake? How you said I could make a wish when I cut it, and if I didn’t say it out loud, it would come true?”
Joel hears the catch of emotion in your voice. “I do.”
“I wished for you,” Ellie whispers, soft and serious. “I wished you would stay with me forever. That… that you’d be alright for a long, long time so that… that I could have a mom.”
“Oh, Ellie.” Emotion fills your voice, and Joel’s vision blurs as tears fill his eyes.
“And… and you got hurt, but… but I got my wish,” she continues, emotion overflowing into tears, “because you can’t get infected, either. So now there’s two of us.”
“And I can stay with you forever,” you whisper, emotion clouding your voice. He sees you kiss her head and pull her tight. “Joel and I will stay with you forever, Ellie.”
~*~
Sleep is hard to come by.
You never really slept in the shack. You simply felt safe enough with Joel there to let oblivion claim you, to not fight it.
At home, you try to sleep.
It comes in fits and bursts, interrupted by nightmares. You wake up screaming, flailing, fighting.
Every time, every single time you wake with the images of Robbie and what he did wrapped up with the sound of the clicker devouring him, pulling shadows of Vegas from your past, Joel is there, gathering your panicked, sweaty body into his arms, cooing soft words in his low voice, and holding you until the shaking subsides.
“Just breathe,” he whispers to you in the dark, his warm body pressed to yours as your heart fights to slow down against the panic. “I’ve got you. You’re okay.”
And just like the first time he said it to you, and every time after, you believe it’s true.
Joel has you. Your heart starts to slow down. You’ll be okay.
~*~
Joel doesn’t sleep much anymore.
When he closes his eyes, he sees things he doesn’t want to see: you, battered and bruised and helpless.
You with the gun under your chin, seconds away from taking your own life.
The grotesque, fresh bite on your shoulder.
When he doesn’t dream of you, he dreams about the chance lost to him, the rights stripped of him by that damn clicker.
Robbie was his.
Robbie was his to kill and that damn clicker took that from him.
Joel never got to make him hurt, to break bones and separate joints, to drag his knife across his skin just deep enough to deliver searing pain but not deep enough to kill.
You deserve to be avenged, you need to be avenged, and there was no satisfaction in the empty hull of a body lying under that clicker.
Joel just kept telling himself that at least he suffered. At least Robbie fucking suffered.
But it’s not enough. It will never be enough.
And he doesn’t sleep, not anymore.
He passes out sometimes, when he has to, but most of the time he lies awake, waiting to comfort you, thoughts keeping him occupied.
He has to protect you. He has to do more.
He’ll spend the rest of his life doing it.
He’ll protect you.
~*~
Days pass, then weeks. You venture out of the house only when you need to at first. The looks you get make you shiver. Some are pity, some are anger.
The women pity you. You know they do. They look at you and feel sorry for you because they know exactly what happened when he took you. The fading yellow bruises across your cheek and on your arms tell their own story without you having to say a word.
But others, others are angry. Tommy’s scouting party came back with three men dead. Three lives lost to infected as they took out a colony just beyond the normal scouting lines.
They blame Joel’s absence.
As if he didn’t already do enough, he somehow could have miraculously saved those men had he been there.
You like to think that might have been the case, if only for the fact that you put all your faith in Joel constantly. He’s earned it more than enough times over, but the truth is that it would have been just as likely for Joel to be one of those dead, and you’re glad every day he never left with them.
You withdraw more than you had before. You keep to pleasantries, to kind greetings. The friendships that had started to blossom wither and die. Even Millie stops coming by when you can’t muster any more conversation, when you can’t fake your interest in those in Jackson anymore. You tolerate Maria and Tommy in public because they’re family and they’re the only extended family you’ll have now and little Billy doesn’t deserve to have his parents fighting with the only family they have left, too.
Ellie clings to you.
Joel keeps you tight to him like a body guard, like a human shield.
It hurts, this most recent betrayal of Jackson, but isn’t surprising.
You’re not sure how you’re going to stay here, hiding your newest secret and fighting the pointed stares.
Weeks turn into months. You go back to the stalls. You go back to walking around alone. You go back to slowly but surely starting to feel just a little bit safe. You talk to Mille and Donna and spend afternoons with Gladys on her porch.
But Jackson will never be the same for you.
You’re not sure how you’re going to stay, pretending that every single soul in town didn’t have some hand in what happened to you.
~*~
It’s dark when he finally comes into the bedroom, scooping you into his arms and holding you tight. “Why aren’t you sleeping?”
You can hear the worry in his voice. You've just only started to actually sleep through the night, to sleep well and without nightmares. “I’m thinking.”
He kisses you softly: the kind of kiss that questions, that prods, but doesn’t expect anything.
You chase his lips back, but ultimately pull away.
“Tell me again, Joel.”
He takes a slow, deep breath as he settles under you. “Bill left me a blueprint. What to do. How to set it up.” He sighs, pulling you close. “There’s a cabin a few miles west of here. We could do it.”
“Just the three of us?” You let your hand run through the sparse hair on his chest, drawing invisible patterns.
“Yeah,” he takes your hand in his, pulling it to his lips. “Just the three of us.”
It’s an intriguing idea: starting from scratch, setting up electrified fences, living off the land and getting the fuck away from Jackson. But it also means getting away from Jackson, with its running water and electricity and food and people…
Some days there is nothing you’d like more than to go away, to find a way to live off the land and be independent for whatever days you have left. When confronted with the ability to do that?
It’s terrifying.
You push up on your elbow, looking down at him. “Where would we even get the supplies?”
He sighs, lifting your hand in the air and fitting his fingers through yours, watching as you mesh them together while he thinks about his answer. “We already have some.”
You squeeze his hand, pulling it back down to his chest. “But not all of them. Not the fence.”
He sighs, “No, not the fence.”
You tuck into him again, head on his chest, and listen to the sound of crickets filtering in through the open window. You know the answer, but you want to ask it, anyway. “Why now?”
He doesn’t answer. For a moment you think he’s asleep and you are ready to drop it, but he turns and kisses your head. “Just… just think about it, okay?”
You almost stay quiet. For a minute you think that maybe you’ll indulge him and think about it for a few days, maybe even a week before asking him again, but you can’t sleep. You can’t relax. Your body feels restless with these ideas swirling in your head.
“If it was just us,” you start, voice soft in the darkness, “I’d think about it more.” You let out a slow breath. “I could go the rest of my life without seeing another soul aside from you, without having to look over my shoulder at every shadow.”
“I can do that for you,” he rolls to his side to look at you, but you silence him with your finger on his lips.
“I know you can. And I know you feel the same way.” In the moonlight in your bedroom his hair looks more salt than pepper, more silver than gray or brown, and it’s so easy to see your future together, growing old together. You slip the hair back on his temple, letting the soft curls slide through your fingers. “But Ellie…”
His head drops, shaking. “I need to protect her, too.”
You kiss the top of his head, hand falling to his shoulder. “But she can’t live her life waiting for us to die, Joel.” You slip against him, throwing your leg over his hip, his hand sliding up your thigh to keep you close. “She can’t have only us.”
“I know,” his confession slips out against the skin of your chest. “But…” his argument dies on his lips.
“I love that you want to do this for us, for me.” You pull him back, running your thumb over his cheek and down behind his ear before you kiss him softly. “But you know and I know that we’re safer here. We’re safer with people. And it’s better for Ellie.”
He kisses you again, holding you close and drowning in you. Your bodies move together, sliding as you push closer to one another, as your lips part to taste him, as you both shed your clothes and try to melt into one another.
Joel feels like safety and happiness.
He’s the only safety you’ve known since the day everything fell apart. He’s the only person that’s ever taken the time to stand up for you, stand with you. Sometimes, he seems so damn perfect that you’re afraid it’s fake, that you’ll wake up in Vegas in a dirty hotel room or back in your plastic cage in Groom Lake.
But he’s here, he’s real, kissing you and under you and in you and you both move like it’s the first and the last time, like you’ve never felt passion so wonderful and you might never again.
In this world, it could always be the last time.
His hands on your thighs, his tongue on the skin of your throat, and the hard, hot length of him pulsing within you, making you more than either of you were ever when you were alone.
Your bedroom is sacred.
It’s where the two of you exist as yourselves. It’s where you see glimpses of the people you were before, and the people you might be again.
It’s where you exist only for one another, to be safe, to be loved, to be alive.
To be alive.
You would do it. You would leave the safety of this room, of this house, of this town, if he truly wanted. You’d cross oceans and deserts for him. You’d grow gardens and write books and shovel shit to make it from one day to the next with him by your side.
You’d sleep rough and scavenge for food and risk run-ins with hunters and raiders.
You’d go back to a QZ.
You’d follow him to the ends of the earth and back.
You’d walk away from your little side table and your desk and your tiny collection of sweet-smelling lotion if he asked you to. You’d build a life out of nothing if it meant doing it with him.
And you know he’ll stay here if you ask him.
You stop him, hands pushing his shoulders away until he looks you in the eyes, until your breaths mingle as he holds himself still over you, chest heaving as he searches your face for a hint of why you pushed him away. He was so hesitant to touch you, really touch you, right after. He’d hug you and hold you, but it took time and talking and lots of coaxing before his hand didn’t shake with worry when he touched you again.
He’s afraid, just for a brief, flickering second in his eyes, that you’re pushing him away.
A smile blooms on your face, your hand sliding over his cheek and fingers ghosting over his brow. He chases your hand, nipping a kiss at it as you bring it back to his cheek. He slips down to his elbows, keeping his eyes on yours as he makes your world just a little smaller, until all that there’s room for is the two of you, sweaty and needy and wrapped tight together as one. “What?” His nose nudges against yours, the question playful as he tries to stay still inside you.
You have to swallow, emotion suddenly choking the words you wanted to say, words you’ve said a million times before, words that seem so simple. “I love you, Joel Miller,” you whisper out, “anywhere you go, I go.”
His lips quirk, just a little. “I love you, too,” he replies, leaning down to kiss you, soft and chaste. “And I don’t plan on going anywhere without you.”
“Promise?” Your hand winds in his sweaty hair, holding him close to you.
His hips start to move again, slow and shallow, as he presses together to you. “Promise.”
At first glance, Jackson was idyllic.
A safe haven.
But after almost two years you know the shadows, the darkness, that haunt it. It no longer hides in snide glances and double entendre, it lives right out in the open.
Your days in Jackson are numbered, not because they want you to leave, but because you’re not sure how much you want to stay.
The only safe haven is the man between your thighs, holding you and worshiping you and revering you like you’ve never been treated in your life.
As long as Joel’s by your side, you know you’ll make it another day.
And another day is all that matters in this world.
I'm about to post the last two chapters of TPFOS. I'm very... emotional about it. Happy, sad, excited, nervous...
The love and support for this story has been overwhelming and I appreciate every like, comment, kudos and reblog.
TPFOS will not get a sequel. It's done.
Writing will have to go on the back burner for a bit while I navigate my graduate program. That doesn't mean I'll never post, but it does mean nothing consistent for a...significant period of time.
Once again, thank you to everyone who made this such a wonderful and exciting experience. 💐
Story Summary: Jackson is less idyllic than it seems, as is everything post-infection. He doesn't want to see you tossed out, and can’t take the way you flinch when the men come sniffing around, so he does the only thing he and Ellie can think of to keep you around.
Dead Dove: Do Not Eat.
Tender Payment For our Sins has significant Trigger and Content Warnings. Please see Chapter 1 for Full list of Trigger Warnings and Tags.
Full Story on AO3
Most recent CHAPTER on AO3
The Spotify Playlist
Chapter 66: Left No Friendly Drop to Help Me After
Summary: Joel left. Everything in him, and Ellie, tells him to go back.
A/N- Thank you all for sticking through the last two chapters. That "Eventual happy ending" tag is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Title is a quote from Romeo and Juliet
~*~
Don’t Turn Around.
It’s all he can do to keep thinking it to himself, putting one foot in front of the other and dragging Ellie along as she struggles against him.
Don’t Turn Around.
He doesn’t know how far away he is from the little shack, can’t tell with the world fuzzy in his vision from the tears he can’t hold back. It doesn’t matter. He’ll never get far enough away.
The gunshot will echo for miles.
Don’t Turn Around.
He can’t. He can’t turn around. He has to keep moving forward, has to keep dragging Ellie, squirming in his grip, as far as he can.
He has to get as far as he can before you pull that trigger.
Don’t Turn Around.
His throat aches to scream, his hands itch to hit something. After all this time, the world is still crumbling around him.
Everyone leaves him.
Sarah.
Tommy.
Tess.
You.
He looks down, hauling Ellie another step away from you, batting her hand away from his face as she screams at him.
Don’t Turn Around.
Ellie.
Them.
Everyone leaves them.
Ellie is all he has left. He’s the only thing she has now, too. He won’t take that away from her. Not with you already leaving them both.
Don’t Turn Around.
He won’t leave her. It’s the only reason he’s still moving.
It’s the only reason he’s still treading away from you, heart pounding in his chest and every breath painful.
Don’t Turn Around.
He would, though. If he wasn’t holding Ellie back, he’d turn around.
Hell, he would have never left.
He told you he’d never leave you, and now you’re making him break that promise.
Don’t.
Turn Around.
He would have stayed right by you, holding your hand, holding you in his arms, as the fungus took over and stole you from him.
He fucking promised he’d never leave you again, and even as he walks away, it’s the last thing he wants to do.
Don’t.
Turn Around.
There is so little left for him in Jackson.
Tommy left him a long time ago, and being nearer to him hasn’t repaired their relationship. If anything, it’s more broken now than when he first got to Jackson.
The house will feel empty now. Less.
Don’t.
Turn Around.
He is just so fucking tired.
Tired of loss. Tired of this life. Tired of this world.
Every step that he takes brings him back to something he doesn’t even know if he wants.
Don’t.
Turn Around.
But by god if he would love to just stop now, to just hold you in his arms and let you kiss him one last time, to let the fugus take him, too.
To slip away in your arms.
To finally, finally rest.
He almost turns around…
…but the girl in his arms is what stops him, struggling against his hands, fighting for the rest of her life in this broken world.
He takes another step away from you. And another.
Don’t Turn Around.
~*~
“Put me down you fucking mother fucker!” Ellie finally struggles from Joel’s arms once they’re back at the ridge, the shack and the carnage around it only just visible in the distance. “Why did you do that?”
“She doesn't want us there, Ellie!” He pushes her forward, trying to turn her and get her back on the path to Jackson, but she doesn't move.
“Because she’s gonna fucking kill herself, Joel!” Her voice is harsh and broken with grief. “You didn’t even try to stop her!”
“So she can turn?” Joel spits the words at her, trying to push her forward again. “You think I fucking like this?”
That stops her, stops her ire and anger. “No,” she croaks out. “But there’s-”
“There’s nothing-” Joel’s voice cracks and he stops, wiping his hands down his face as he tries to force anything, anything except sadness and desperation into his voice. “There’s nothing left to do,” he says finally, slow and measured and utterly broken.
The tears fall from Ellie’s eyes, slipping down over her cheeks. She doesn’t even try to wipe them away. “There’s gotta be,” she whispers, desperately.
Everything in him sours, because he feels the same way. Yet, he’s got to be the voice of reason. He’s forced to lead the march away from the one person he wants to be with more than anything.
His chest hurts, his throat hurts, his head hurts.
He wants nothing more than to just sit down and crawl back to you, letting you take him with you into oblivion if he can get there before you shoot that gun.
If he can’t? Well, maybe it’s a good thing Ellie had to read Romeo and Juliet after all, because maybe there’ll be a sweet bullet left for him in the gun.
He doesn’t want to live in a world where he has to justify leaving the one he loves in agony. But he does. And he will. For Ellie, he’ll march on, less and less of him left by the day. And it all roars out of him: the pain, the anger, as he yells at the last thing left he loves. “You think I want this? Do you?”
“No,” Ellie mutters back, taking the shouting, and looking at her feet.
His voice drops as he gets in her face, rage still fueled by loss. “There isn’t any fucking thing we can do in the next few hours that the world hasn’t already tried in the last fucking twenty years, Ellie! She was right, okay? And she has the right to do this on her terms.” He roars with anger, all thoughts of being concerned about infected in the woods gone from his mind. “Fucking move. I don’t want to hear the-”
“Her terms…” Ellie pauses, turning back to the shack and shaking off his hand as he tries to turn her toward Jackson again. Her shoulders drop. The anger leaves her. She takes a heavy breath, and then another as her head cants to the side. Her eyes light up as she turns, wiping at her tears. “Fucking… her terms!”
She starts running back down the hill to the shack.
“Ellie!”
She stops, runs back up and grabs Joel’s hand and pulls him. “Her terms, Joel. She was coherent. She is coherent.”
He pulls her back the other way. “Ellie, I can’t-”
“That bite was on her fucking shoulder, Joel. Bullshit eight hours. You get eight hours at the wrist. She had two at most.” Ellie leans up, getting in his face. “She’s not gonna fucking turn, Joel! We gotta stop her!”
~*~
The world spins beneath you as you hold onto the door frame with one hand, the gun in the other. You want to be outside the small shack so maybe some of the people of Jackson will still use it. Ideally you can make it to the tree line, but even if you can just make it to the pile of bodies, it’s better than in the shack.
But the sun is blazing and your head is pounding and if the world would just stop spinning…
You might not get your wish. You might have to do it here.
You want to give them enough time to get far away, but each minute that slips away is another minute closer to a loss of control that will keep you from doing what needs to be done.
You bring the gun up under your chin, resting it against the bone.
You should probably sit for this. Your hand is already shaking. As soon as you let go of the doorframe you’ll fall, you know it.
You have to do it soon. You’re hearing things: you’re hearing your name, over and over in their voices. Hallucinations. Wishes.
It all signals that loss of control you’re dreading.
Your eyes blink open, just for a second, and it’s not a hallucination. They’re there, Joel and Ellie, running down the hill at you. It’s both the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen and the worst.
You don’t want to be alone, but you don’t want them here to see this.
You don’t have any fight left in you to send them away again, though.
But he’ll have to do it, now. Joel will have to.
He’ll have to kill you.
Doing that might very literally kill him, too.
“No,” you whisper to yourself, sliding down the doorframe, gun falling to your side. You can do nothing but wait as they make their way to you, calling out your name through the empty hillside. You didn’t want this. Your only saving grace was that they were gone, that they wouldn’t see you.
It is a betrayal.
Ellie slides in front of you, her young knees not caring as they shimmy in the dirt to grab your hands. “You’re not gonna turn!”
“Ellie, please,” you slide the gun away from you, if only to belay her fears for the moment. Her eyes are so wide, so full of hope and panic and tears. “You can’t just wish-”
She shakes her head and holds your hands tight. “You won’t, I know it!”
“She does,” Joel pants, finally catching up, settling himself in the dirt by your side. He pulls tugs at the edge of your sleeve to reveal your shoulder, to expose the bite you’ve kept covered since it was found.
None of you wanted to see it spread, watch the tendrils of fungus pop up along your skin like pustulant veins as your time ran out.
You still don’t want to look at it, at the future it heralds.
“She does, darlin,” he says, gentler and with a hint of home, still breathless. “Look.”
The turn of your head makes the world spin and you squeeze your eyes shut for a second before trying to look at the backside of your shoulder. The angle’s awkward, but it’s clear: the bite hasn’t changed. The uneven teeth marks are still there, the telltale beginnings of the tendrils of infection, but instead of angry red pustules and spreading lines marring your skin, it looks dried up.
It looks like Ellie’s.
“What?” You pull at your shoulder with your other hand, trying to get a better look at it. “But I’m…”
“You’re coherent.” Ellie calls your attention back to her. “You’re talking in full sentences, making sense and it’s been hours.”
“But I can’t…” You squeeze your eyes shut. Everything’s fuzzy. Everything hurts. You can’t hold your arm out without tremors and you can’t stand for more than a few seconds. Your brain feels heavy and your tongue is thick in your mouth.
“The concussion, darlin’,” Joel pulls you to him, wrapping you in his arms. “Everything that asshole did to you is…” He kisses your head, and it feels divine. “You’re not well, but you’re not going to turn.”
You want to believe it. You want to put all of your hope in this, but you can’t make it make sense. Your brain won’t make it make sense.
You’re going to turn. Even with the evidence in front of you, even with your dull bite scabbing over instead of blooming under your skin, you can’t believe there’s hope. You start to push him away. You’re weak and tired and the world tilts off its axis when you do, but it’s the only thing you want now: for them to leave. “No, go…”
“I am not. Leaving. Again.” He holds your face still, waiting to say the words until your eyes lock on his. “I am not leaving you again, and I shouldn’t have left in the first place.”
He doesn’t wait for you to reply, doesn’t give you the space to protest, instead he lifts you in his arms with a grunt, standing and moving into the small shed and setting you on the cot. There’s no fight in you left, even if you wanted to, and so you let him settle you on the cot, let him readjust the shutters on the small windows until there’s no light on you and you can open your eyes.
He knows. Joel always knows exactly what you need.
You hear him talk to Ellie, something about how much noise they made and keeping watch, but it doesn't register in your mind. Exhaustion creeps up on you now that your brain is screaming safe with Joel here, even if you don’t fully believe that it’s true, even if you don’t fully believe that you won’t turn now as soon as you close your eyes, or tonight or tomorrow or some other day.
He kneels in front of you, hand on your cheek until your eyes flutter open. “We’re gonna stay here for a bit. We gotta wait until you’re feeling better or a patrol finds us, ok? It’s a long haul back, too long to try to take you on foot like this, ok?” His voice is low and gentle as his calloused fingers brush the hair away from your temple.
You nod, letting your head push into his hand for a moment. There’s nothing more you’d like right now than to be curled up in him, lying in your bed at home. This cot will have to do for now, his touch lulling you into sleep.
You’re still afraid to fall asleep, you’re afraid that when you wake up you won’t be you, but you have little choice as oblivion claims you.
~*~
Joel stands at the front of the small shack, eyes out the crack in the window.
“You really think anyone’s coming?” Ellie asks from her spot on the floor, spreading out the contents of both of their backpacks.
He nods, “Tommy’ll have to after a day or so, if they don’t send a patrol before that. We’re off the normal patrol route, so I don’t think anyone will stumble on us, unless they heard us, but that’s a long shot.” He sighs, rubbing his hand over his face. “They usually wait a whole day before sending anyone when people go missing.”
“Threat assessment,” she mutters. Joel catches her eyes and nods, knowing she’s thinking over all the things she was taught about patrols, all the things he downright ignored to come out last night. “We need a horse,” Ellie adds. “She can’t walk back, it’s too far.”
“Not like she is now, no.” Joel’s eyes fall on the pile of bodies across from the shed, head shaking. “Mother fucker.” The curse falls from his lips, venom in every syllable.
Ellie looks up, leaning against the wall, her own face blank. “At least he got what he deserved,” she muttered.
“Doesn’t make what happened any better.” He paces back, bending by your side, brushing the hair from your face and pulling his jacket up over your shoulders. “Why?” He whispers out loud, more to himself than anyone.
“Cause Robbie’s a sick fucking prick,” Ellie responds, turning her head. “No one fucking liked him. He shoulda been dealt with a long time ago.”
Joel almost barks out a broken laugh. He’d had Robbie pegged since the first time he met him: an entitled asshole with just enough crazy in his eyes that Joel knew to stay away. After all the shit he’d done, it was sad that it didn’t surprise Joel what had happened. Joel has always known what he was capable of. But no, that wasn’t what he was asking.
“No,” he mutters, slipping the fabric around so he can see your bite, the breaks in the skin scabbed up, the tendrils of infection dried up and lumpy under his fingers when he touches it. It’s not hot and red or angry or festering. “This.”
Ellie sits up, sliding over on her knees until she’s next to you and Joel, and slides her sleeve along her arm to reveal her own bite. “Hers is even less,” she whispers with near wonder. “I don’t think you’ll be able to see it when it heals.”
“Can’t have been Robbie,” Joel muses out loud, his fingers running over the little lines of tendrils. “Human bite wouldn’t do that.”
Ellie shakes her head, sliding back to her spot to continue to reorganize their packs, holding out the little pile of jerky and canteens of water to the side. “No, it wouldn’t.”
His fingers work in your hair for long, quiet moments, trying to get the tangles and matting out from being dragged through the woods, as Ellie sets the packs to the side before taking up watch.
“I have a theory, you know,” Ellie mutters quietly. Joel hums low in his throat, looking at her before going back to your hair. “I heard Marlene talking to one of the other Fireflies once, about me. She said that my mom was bitten.”
Her voice is low and cold, detached in the way it is when she talks about her life before she knew Joel. It stops him from his task, turning him so he’s watching her with all of his attention. “She was?”
She shrugs, not liking the importance of it. “I didn’t hear too much. Just that she’d lied to Marlene.” Ellie swallows, eyes still set on the outside. “I kinda figure if she got bit, and then I was born, maybe I got some of it, you know? Like all those damn vaccines they gave us in Fedra school- a little bit of it makes you immune, right?”
Joel knows they tried that for cordyceps: live vaccines, dead vaccines. He lived through it. They didn’t work.
But he also gets flashes of books on his bedside table from another life he’d lived and VHS tapes he’d had to watch and birthing classes he went to, his mind screaming the word placenta over and over to him. He never fucking knew what it did, but he remembers it was important. Remembers hearing about it over and over again while they were waiting to bring Sarah into the world.
Into a very different world.
“You know, so I’m just thinking… if my mom was infected, but I’m immune,” she swallows, looking over at him, then eyes darting to you. “What if her babies were infected? Maybe that could make her immune.”
Joel didn’t know if it worked like that. He couldn’t remember, couldn’t bring up the words on the page or whatever that damn bubbly birthing coach had said during the Lamaze classes.
But it was enough.
It was close enough to a reason that made sense.
More than hope, more than prayer, biology actually made sense.
“Either that or her brain’s too fucked up from the concussion for the Cordyceps to live,” Ellie rambles out, shrugging, “but if that was true, you’d just have to hit an infected in the head and they’d be fine, so that can’t be fucking right.”
He almost, almost laughs at how contrary she is. “Jesus, Ellie.”
~*~
It’s the middle of the afternoon when you wake up, eyes flickering open to the cobweb covered ceiling of the cabin. There’s just enough light creeping in through the closed windows to see shapes: Ellie sleeping curled up against the wall opposite of you, Joel standing guard at the door, leaning cross legged against the frame. The day has marched on without you. You don’t know how many hours you’ve slept, but waking up with your own mind is a relief.
Maybe… maybe they’re right.
The cot squeaks when you try to stand and he’s by you before the world can stop spinning, hands on your shoulder to help you sit. “Hey, hey. Easy now.”
You let your head fall to his shoulder, waiting for his solidness to help to slow down the tilting sensation. “Just need to pee,” you mutter, wrapping your arms around his shoulders.
He helps you stand with quiet affirmations, holding you under your arms and around your waist as he helps you shuffle out towards the trees, pausing every time you grip him tight and the world tilts until you relax and start breathing again. It’s farther than you think to the tree line, and each step makes you regret leaving the cot a little more.
But each step is also a victory. You’re not shaky, not out of control of your body. Your body isn’t fighting you, like you’ve seen when people turn. No, you’re sore, and in pain, and your thighs and hips ache and it stings between your legs with each step and your shoulders burn each time you have to press down into Joel’s arms. You’ve never been happier to feel pain, to know exactly what caused each and every ache, to feel that the ache is different from your arms to your legs and know it’s not systemic.
He helps you prop yourself up against a tree and then steps away as you relieve yourself. For all he’s seen, for all he’s done, there are still some things you want to be private. You wish there was more light in the shady canopy, you wish you could move enough to look at your body, confirm the bruises that you feel, but you keep losing your balance and the longer you stay out the longer you’re in danger from all the things that could be hiding in the trees.
The trip back is somewhat easier with an empty bladder and his warm whispers in your ear encouraging you with every step. Some of the pains dull to an ache the more you move, but by the time you make it, you feel like you’ve walked all day instead of for a few minutes.
He moves to set you back in the cot but you grip him. “Just… just sit with me?” You whisper, trying to avoid waking Ellie.
He nods, slowly helping you to the floor and then climbing down next to you, soft grunts slipping from his lips as his knees click when they bend. It feels almost normal when he pulls you between his legs, wrapping himself around you, giving you his chest to lean back into. You sigh, happily, and he holds you tighter.
“It felt good to move,” you whisper. “Tiring, but good.”
“Good,” he drops a kiss to your hair, tucking you tighter against him. “Good.”
With his warmth around you and his heart beating under you, sleep claims you again easily.
I’M SO, SO GLAD THAT THE ABSOLUTE HELLHOLE THAT WAS VEGAS FINALLY PAID OFF FOR HER FOR ONCE IN HER LIFE!!!!!!
Holy shit, the relief that hit me the second I realized she’s safe??? I felt that in my entire body 😭😭😭 It should genuinely be illegal to put me through that kind of emotional torture!! (Actually, pls keep doing it. I’m clearly a masochist at heart. This is 11/10 writing. Pure gold.)
But seriously, the buildup to the moment where both the duo and us as readers realize she’s immune? That was incredible. The tension, the pacing, the way it all unfolded step by step—my jaw was literally on the floor.
From-
Don't turn around
To-
Don't.
Turn around.
Because what do you mean I could so clearly visualize the exact moment his resolve started breaking?? That shift in the sentence, the split in his internal monologue, I was literally fist-pumping like, “YES. FUCK YES. TURN AROUND.” The emotional high from that transition alone?? Unreal. God, I love your writing so much. I’m not even exaggerating when I say I love everything about it.
And the fact that Ellie is the one who pieces it together?? That was such an iconic choice.
Joel has only ever known the infection through one outcome—he lived through the beginning of it, saw how it spread, survived it in the most brutal way. Of course his mind goes to the worst-case scenario.
But Ellie? She’s only ever known the world after. She’s had to adapt, to think differently, to work with whatever she’s been given—and that gives her the clarity to see possibilities Joel can’t. That contrast? So so beautifully done with who had hope between the two of them, and who dismissed it as wishful juvenile thinking. And as someone who’s immune herself, it just feels so fitting that Ellie's the one to snap him out of it.
Gosh, the relief in this chapter was such a heavy hitter.
...the way I was waiting for your reaction to this chapter!
YES! VINDICATION! For all the shit that has happened to her, there was a REASON.
As for continued torture, after this is fully posted I have a few little ficlets I can post that are... not happy endings. So if you like torture... and then there are two longer fics BURNING to be let out, but no promises on when or how those will get posted with my program starting back up next week.
The Don't turn around to Don't. Turn Around. was probably one of my favorite things I've ever written. i'm so glad it felt so powerful to you.
I love how you really just nailed the difference between Joel and Ellie's outlooks. There's some commentary on Ellie's outlook in chapter 68 that I think you'll find interesting, and really opens her up for growth and contrasting how she sees the world as opposed to how Joel and Reader see it.
I'm really glad you enjoyed this chapter, and I hope you like the last couple as much. 💜
Story Summary: Jackson is less idyllic than it seems, as is everything post-infection. He doesn't want to see you tossed out, and can’t take the way you flinch when the men come sniffing around, so he does the only thing he and Ellie can think of to keep you around.
Dead Dove: Do Not Eat.
Tender Payment For our Sins has significant Trigger and Content Warnings. Please see Chapter 1 for Full list of Trigger Warnings and Tags.
Full Story on AO3
Most recent CHAPTER on AO3
The Spotify Playlist
Chapter 67: I Believe Because I Can See our Future Days
Summary: You can’t stay where you are, how you are. But there is hope.
A/N: I can't believe that on Saturday I will post the last chapters. Thank you all for everything. Your comments and kudos carried me through some crazy times this past year.
Title from Pearl Jam’s Future Days
~*~
Ellie’s watching you when you wake up. You push from the floor of the shack, world tilting instead of spinning enough to disorient you but not send you reeling like it had earlier as you sit.
“Hey,” she says, eyes pinned on you, bottom lip between her teeth.
“Hey,” you reply, croaking and coughing around a dry mouth. “What time is it?”
“Probably around 3 or 4, don’t know for sure. Joel went for water. He said there’s a creek not too far away. He’ll be back soon.” She shrugs, reaching over and handing you some jerky before sitting back and picking at her jacket. “Sorry we don’t have more.”
You swallow a few times, trying to get the saliva in your mouth to soothe your throat before picking a piece of jerky off and chewing it. “It’s okay,” you finally manage, only a little hoarse. “How… how are you?”
Ellie avoids your eyes for a minute before looking straight at you, her smile fighting with a frown. “I’m glad you’re okay.”
You shake your head at her even though that makes it ache more. “How are you?” You ask. You know how they found you, you know what you looked like, half naked and bruised and covered in Robbie’s filth, tied up and blindfolded and gagged up against the building. It wasn’t a sight you’d ever want to see, and it certainly wasn’t a sight you wanted either of them to come across. You’re sure you still don’t look much better now.
Tears pool in her eyes and she wipes them away, trying to stay strong. “I’m good, you know. I-”
She stops, chin wobbling as you hold your arms out to her. They’re not held high, just a few inches off the ground as your shoulders scream at you, but they’re steady.
Fuck, if they’re not steady as they reach for her.
Not a single tremor, not a single suggestion of infection lacing down from your right shoulder like tendrils through your skin.
She hesitates before making her way over, slowly crawling into your arms and wrapping you back up in her own hug. “Fuck,” she whispers, her voice thick with tears, “I’m so fucking glad you’re okay.”
“Me too, sweetheart,” you whisper as you hold her tight. “Me too.”
~*~
It’s a familiar walk to the creek to fill up the canteens. It helps him clear his head to only have to focus on his footsteps and the sounds in the clearing.
They’ll have to step up patrols. It’s been all day, and not a single sign of another clicker. Clickers don’t usually walk alone, and this isn’t the first they’d found by itself, which means there is a hoard close enough they were splitting off from, there is a hoard somewhere nearby.
That would make the second hoard in about a year.
It is dizzying and terrifying to think that each day there seem to be more of them instead of less, that the human race is losing the fight, but he sees it in front of his face.
Jackson is a stronghold, but it will only last for so long, especially if it continues to turn on its own, especially if it continues to value appearances over actual security.
He crouches down, filling the canteens as he tries to keep his eyes on the trees. It’s quiet: only the wind and the cooing of a few birds.
No clicks. No heavy dragging of half-dead limbs through the underbrush.
It’s the quiet that does it, the quiet that finally breaks him.
He has to sit back, dragging the canteens with him, muffling the sobs in the corner of his arm so he won’t be heard.
Not by clickers, not by you, not by anyone.
It is a miracle you’re still alive. You should be dead.
And yet, you’re breathing and talking and still with him despite the haunting ring of scabbed teeth marks on your shoulder.
He lets it out only for a second, lets it overwhelm him only for as long as he has to before he locks it back up. The fear and anger and frustration are all too new, too raw to process. He will, one day. Just not today. He sniffs hard and dries his eyes and pulls himself as together as he can as he stands, taking the full canteens and turning back towards the outpost shack. He can’t do this right now. He can’t fall apart yet.
Not when you still need him to protect you.
Not when you need him to get you home.
~*~
You sit up. Time still feels fuzzy, your head does, too, and the light hurts through the cracks in the curtains, but you can’t sit like this for any longer.
You can’t have Robbie on you any longer.
The question is, who will you ask?
Joel will insist it be him. He’ll insist he’s the one to take you down to the water, to help you clean off, to hold you up and help you get out of the disgusting clothes. He’s seen you at your very worst.
Until now.
He hasn’t seen you like this. You know you’re filthy and bruised, and that there are scratches he hasn’t seen. That each glimpse more of it will tell him more about all the times, all the things you don’t want him to know, the things you don’t think you can ever say to his face about what that man did to you.
You know it’ll hurt him to see you like that.
But Ellie…
There’s something that feels safe about asking her, about asking another woman to help you take this off of you and emerge clean on the other side of it. And she understands. You know she understands at least a little.
But she only understands a little.
Her demon is so much tinier than yours.
You told her once it didn’t matter the size, but the truth is that the size does matter. That if she helps you to the water, if she sees the bruises and the scrapes and the way he violated you, you’ll be taking a part of her innocence away that can never be given back to her. That you’ll be showing her the darkest side of a world she only suspects exists.
You can’t do that to her.
It doesn’t seem like a fair choice.
You reach out your hand…
~*~
“You shouldn’t have asked her to come,” you mutter as he peals the tatters of your pants from your legs. He looks up at you, one hand on your hip to keep your balance as you step from the jeans.
“I gotta watch you,” he tosses them in the small pile of your clothing next to him, “someone has to be lookout.”
“I’ll be fine,” you protest, even as he has to lift your arm over his shoulder to help you down the bank of the creek. He pauses to look at you with narrowed eyes, but doesn’t say anything before continuing down to the water’s edge. You don’t need him to say anything, you’re lying to yourself as much as you’re lying to him. He ducks under your arm once your close enough that the ground gets rocky to turn and face you so he can steady you with both hands. His eyes are carefully peeled on the ground, watching each unsteady step you take into the creek.
He’s so focused. He hasn’t looked longer than he’s needed to anywhere, not when he was taking the shredded clothes off you and not when he was helping you down and even now, he’s not looking at the purpling bruises that are so fucking apparent on your thighs.
He’s just holding you and helping you.
It crosses your mind that it might be for his own sake, as well, that he doesn’t look at them. You can’t help but need to look, but he… he doesn’t have to.
Maybe it’s better that he doesn’t.
He turns you slowly, releasing you into the water that gently swells to thigh-high with each step in. The water is cool, cold enough to send a shiver to your body, chilled enough to feel like it starts to numb away the pain. He starts to let go of your hand from the bank, but you squeeze it instead, waiting for him to meet your eyes.
“Don’t let her see,” you whisper.
He turns his head back to the edge of the trees, where Ellie’s back is set to the two of you, rifle in her hands. “She won’t-”
“She’s had enough of this kind of violence in her life, Joel.” You sniff back the emotion in your voice. “You and I know, but she doesn’t need to. Okay?”
He nods stiffly, “Okay.”
You let his hand go, and slowly let yourself sink into a ball. Your chin wavers with the bite of the water as it rushes over your shoulders, breath coming in short gasps. You close your eyes and try to slow your breathing, try to focus on staying calm and letting your body get used to the cold, on the sharp sensation it sends through the raw skin on your calves and between your legs.
The splash behind you startles you, spinning you faster than you should go.
“Jesus, darlin’,” Joel, drawls, pulling you into his arms when you moan and squeeze your eyes shut at the way the world spins. “What’d you do that for?”
“Didn’t know what the splash was,” you reply slowly, the world righting itself after a few deep breaths.
“You thought I was gonna just sit there?” He huffs a laugh through his nose and turns you in his arms, hugging you tighter to the warmth of his body, bare skin to bare skin. “You can barely sit up for more than a few minutes, I’m not gonna let you drown out here.” He shakes his head, any teasing gone with the seriousness of what he’s come to do. He lifts his hand, his thin handkerchief in it, and squeezes the water out. “Look at me,” he commands gently.
His touch is feather-light as he drags the cool cloth over your face, his other arm wrapped around you, keeping you from floating away in the gentle current. He goes over every inch of skin, dipping it and wringing it out one handed and going over again and again until he’s satisfied before starting to run it over your chest and your arms.
He’s touched you with such care before. Cool towels on the back of your neck after a bad night, his hands in the shower when your migraines are so bad you can’t see straight enough to stand on your own. This touch, this side of him, is nothing new. His laser focus on you, on every detail of you, is familiar enough to be comforting.
It doesn’t stop you from trying to hide your body from him when he starts to move lower, when his hands dip below the crystal-clear water and his eyes narrow at the bruises, at the human teeth marks on your breast, at the scratches you can feel crisscrossing your shoulder blades.
The gnarled scar of an infected’s bite that didn’t take.
He doesn't peel your arm away from where you pull it across your body, but he does take your cheek in his hand, pressing his forehead against yours. “Don’t,” he whispers, voice low and thick and just broken enough that you know he’s fighting to be able to keep it as steady as he is. “Don’t hide from me darlin’. Not now.”
You close your eyes, shaking against him. From the cold or the fear or the emotions finally getting the best of you, you can’t tease out. “How can you look at me like this?” You eventually croak out, blinking up at him.
He leans back, tears sitting in his eyes as he tries to smile at you, smoothing the knots of hair away from your face. “How can I not? You’re alive.”
~*~
You told her not to look.
You told her to keep her eyes on the outskirts. Keep her ears open. Keep the gun ready. And with fear and anger and loss in your eyes, you told her not to look.
Ellie really, really wants to look.
She wants to see just what had happened to you. She can sort of imagine, she has an idea, but she doesn’t exactly know.
Whatever happened before that clicker came, it had been bad. She knows. She knows from the way you shook and the way Joel looked at you when they found you. She knows from the way dirt and blood streaked and caked on your skin, from where and how your clothes are torn.
It is Vegas. And Silver Lake.
Violation. Hate. Violence.
But she doesn’t know how to help, and she can’t know, unless she knows what happened. At least that is what it feels like, swirling in her brain. Too much has happened in the last day, too much fear and loss and Ellie isn’t going to lose another goddamnned person in her life.
But you told her not to look.
And you deserve that. She knows you deserve that choice.
So she walks the perimeter with nothing more than the goal of keeping you safe and the mantra don’t look echoing in her brain. It is something to think, something to keep her mind sharp and focused instead of letting it drift.
Letting it drift to the way they found you.
Letting it drift to when she thought she’d lost you.
Letting it drift to the fear in your eyes when they came running back to you.
And she is good. She is good until she hears you crying.
She thinks it is an animal at first. A bird maybe, with the soft, muffled sounds it makes. But then Joel’s warm voice joins in, whispering things she can’t hear, and Ellie knows.
She’s seen you cry.
She fucking hates it. She hates when you cry.
It makes her want to punch something, because no one as nice and kind and smart as you should be fucking crying, ever.
And so she turns. She turns because that is part of her job, to make sure you are safe. And maybe if there is a threat, Joel can’t yell. So, she has to.
She has to look.
And she turns right back around just as fast.
Joel has you. And he is crying, too. Holding one another in the little creek, talking low and broken, you are both crying.
So, Ellie redoubles her efforts. She tunes you out. She listens for the crunch of leaves and the tell-tale clicks and patrols the same little half circle over and over again.
There is no fucking way she is letting anyone hurt you again. Either of you. And you gave her a job.
She takes a deep breath, the vision of the both of you seared into her brain.
You told her not to look.
~*~
You’re more put together when you come back after washing. You can smell Joel all around you, clothed in his boxers and his long sleeve.
He wouldn’t put your torn up clothes back on you.
You didn’t want to wear them, either.
He set about in just his undershirt and jeans, going through the packs again and staring out the small window at the fading day with a pensiveness that keeps you jumpy. It is Ellie’s soft ministrations, her fingers raking through your wet, tangled hair over and over as she teases out the knots, that keeps you calm.
It is in that sense of calm, of feeling safe and protected and surrounded by family, that the situation suddenly becomes very clear.
“What are you thinking?” He asks, sitting next to you.
He’s caught you, and Ellie’s looking at you over your shoulder with that perceptive glare she seems to have that always knows when you’re thinking something they won’t like.
You rub your hand over your shoulder again, your cool, clean shoulder, hiding under Joel’s long sleeve button down. “We have to burn it.”
Joel’s eyebrows shoot to his hairline. “Absolutely not.”
“Joel-”
He stands, pacing the little shack. “You’re the one always tellin’ me that any little thing could end up being serious. The number of times you’ve scolded me for busting a lip-”
You put your hands on his leg as he passes you, stopping his rant. He’s serious, but so are you. “They won’t let me not see a doctor, Joel. You could try, but-” You shake your head. “As soon as I walk into Jackson, they’re going to demand it.” You look up at him, eyes pleading. “Wouldn’t you?”
He tries to come up with something, you see him open and close his mouth, shake his head as he crouches down and grips your hand tight. “Darlin’…”
You rest your hand on his cheek, “We burn it. Just… just a little fire and the flat of your knife there and it’s enough that they won’t be able to tell, okay?”
He shakes his head. “No, no I-”
“The longer we wait, the more suspicious it gets.” You hold his hand tight, but he doesn’t move. “I’ll do it.”
“No, no. If we’re doing this- I’ll do it.” He turns, suddenly full of action. You both know it’s the only thing that will hide it. That when you get back to Jackson, because you have to go back there until you’re at least feeling better, they will demand you be seen by the doctor. “Ellie- there should be a camping stove just under the bed there- see if we can get it going.”
It doesn’t take long for the camping stove to pop to life, for the flame to burn bright in the small room, and Ellie grabs an old rusted tackle box from the back corner that’s filled with bandages. You peel Joel’s shirt down, turning your back to him.
“We could…” His voice wavers, whatever suggestion he has falling apart as he turns the blade in his hands.
“Fast and hot,” you say as calmly as you can muster, turning away from him.
“Fast and hot,” he mutters, putting the blade into the fire.
~*~
He watches Ellie fidget by the window, hands running up and down the sides of her legs as she watches, vigilant.
He’s calmer, sitting against the wall with your head pillowed on his thighs, his one hand on his gun and the other running through your hair as you sleep, carefully avoiding the bandaged burn on your shoulder. He’s only calmer because you’re here, with him, touching him. It makes it easier to make the decision.
“Ellie,” he whispers, and she turns eyebrows raising before she looks back out, taking her job as watch seriously.
She only speaks as loud as she needs to. “Yeah?”
“Get some sleep.”
She shakes her head, eyes looking out over the black night. She can’t see anything, he knows she can’t see anything because the moon’s not full enough to see by. “Can’t.”
He sighs, but keeps his hand stroking through your hair, keeping himself calm and hopefully keeping you asleep. You need whatever rest you can get. “Ya have to. We’re leaving at first light.”
Ellie’s head snaps around, eyes wide. “She can’t walk that far, Joel.”
“She’ll have to.” He sighs, heavy, and motions for her to sit across from him. “I’m not waiting any longer. Either they’re not coming or we’re facing a bigger problem.”
Her eyes widen as she sits across from him. “You mean like a horde?”
“I mean like a horde.” Joel nods.
Ellie looks down at her hands, then over to you in the flickering lamplight. “There’s one we haven’t found, isn’t there? It’s why we keep finding strays on patrol, why there’s just one here.”
Joel nods again. “They break off, get lost by accident.” He shakes his head. “That camp that got busted up last year? We knew we didn’t get ‘em all.”
Ellie’s eyes widen. “You told us-”
“What I told you was we got all the ones we found.” He shrugs, shaking his head. “Everyone out there that night decided it was best to not scare everyone. But there were more- there had been more, but they were missing.”
“Missing?” Ellie narrows her eyes at him and curses under her breath. “Aren’t these the kinds of things I should know since I go out on patrols?”
He nods reluctantly. “We can talk about how they still got you on the short, safe routes later, okay? Either way- we’ve got a problem out here, we’ve got a problem in Jackson, or they just left us on our own. No matter what, staying here isn’t viable.”
“No food, no help,” Ellie mutters, looking around the shack as Joel nods again. She turns back to him, serious. “And what if there’s infected in Jackson? What if that’s why this one is here? If it got lost on the way?”
He raises his eyebrows. “I don’t think there will be, but if they are, we’ll deal with that then.”
He can see the betrayal in her eyes, how she resents that she’s been working with less information than everyone else on patrols. “What makes you think they won’t be?”
“They’re moving away from us, not closer.” He sniffs, leaning his head back. He can be honest with her now, and they can hash out how mad she is, and if she wants to keep doing patrols, once they get back. “We think they’re following the river.”
“They don’t need to drink…”
“People do.”
Ellie’s shoulders sink. “Shit.”
“Yeah, shit.” Joel looks up at the ceiling, hand still moving in a gentle rhythm against you, your breaths still heavy and slow and even.
Ellie’s quiet for a long time before she whispers, “Does she know?”
He takes a slow, deep breath. He’s gonna lose some of Ellie’s trust after this, he’s sure. “That there’s a bigger problem? Yes. Everything I just told you? No. And I want to keep it that way.”
Ellie sits taller, leaning back against the wall, tense with frustration. “So… what’s the plan, then? She’s better, but not good.”
“No, not good.” He slips his hand over your thigh. “Even more of a reason to get going.” He shakes his head. “We’ll go slow, you and I will keep a sharp eye, and if the shit hits the fan we deal with it then. Days have been pretty quiet on patrols, we just have to cross our fingers and hope for the best.”
Ellie sits with the plan for a minute, picking at her jeans. “Wouldn’t the people on the South route have come close to us today?”
“Should have,” Joel mutters. He’s thought about every possibility. He’s thought about what Tommy might have done, what he would have done. The South route, long and winding down the mountain, is the closest to where they are, but it’s not actually all that close. He’s not sure anyone on the regular patrol route would have noticed them, and if they weren’t told to stop out at the outpost, the regular patrol would have no reason to go out of their way. Even a search party might avoid the outpost in favor of looking through the rocky terrain and numerous caves and ditches this side of the mountain if they didn’t have tracks to follow. He had a hard enough time tracking last night, a whole day of animals and wind wouldn’t have helped matters. “Didn’t hear or see anyone today, but that don’t mean they’re not looking. They just might not be looking here. We might be on our own.”
Ellie looks at him for a long second, then smiles. “Since when haven’t we been on our own? We always do just fine.”
It makes him smile, just enough. He’s worried about you, he’s worried that the burn will get infected, that he didn’t bandage it good enough, that you’re right and they won’t let you get away with not seeing the doctor. He’s worried they’ll see right through everything and the three of you will be back out here with no supplies and a hoard to deal with. “Suppose we do.”
a feel like the new generation of fanfic readers NEED to understand that clicking on a fic (interaction) does nothing. ao3 has no algorithm. your private discord discussions of fic do not reach the authors. if you do not actively engage with writers they will stop posting. this isn’t social media this is community.
Story Summary: Jackson is less idyllic than it seems, as is everything post-infection. He doesn't want to see you tossed out, and can’t take the way you flinch when the men come sniffing around, so he does the only thing he and Ellie can think of to keep you around.
Dead Dove: Do Not Eat.
Tender Payment For our Sins has significant Trigger and Content Warnings. Please see Chapter 1 for Full list of Trigger Warnings and Tags.
Full Story on AO3
Most recent CHAPTER on AO3
The Spotify Playlist
Chapter 66: Left No Friendly Drop to Help Me After
Summary: Joel left. Everything in him, and Ellie, tells him to go back.
A/N- Thank you all for sticking through the last two chapters. That "Eventual happy ending" tag is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Title is a quote from Romeo and Juliet
~*~
Don’t Turn Around.
It’s all he can do to keep thinking it to himself, putting one foot in front of the other and dragging Ellie along as she struggles against him.
Don’t Turn Around.
He doesn’t know how far away he is from the little shack, can’t tell with the world fuzzy in his vision from the tears he can’t hold back. It doesn’t matter. He’ll never get far enough away.
The gunshot will echo for miles.
Don’t Turn Around.
He can’t. He can’t turn around. He has to keep moving forward, has to keep dragging Ellie, squirming in his grip, as far as he can.
He has to get as far as he can before you pull that trigger.
Don’t Turn Around.
His throat aches to scream, his hands itch to hit something. After all this time, the world is still crumbling around him.
Everyone leaves him.
Sarah.
Tommy.
Tess.
You.
He looks down, hauling Ellie another step away from you, batting her hand away from his face as she screams at him.
Don’t Turn Around.
Ellie.
Them.
Everyone leaves them.
Ellie is all he has left. He’s the only thing she has now, too. He won’t take that away from her. Not with you already leaving them both.
Don’t Turn Around.
He won’t leave her. It’s the only reason he’s still moving.
It’s the only reason he’s still treading away from you, heart pounding in his chest and every breath painful.
Don’t Turn Around.
He would, though. If he wasn’t holding Ellie back, he’d turn around.
Hell, he would have never left.
He told you he’d never leave you, and now you’re making him break that promise.
Don’t.
Turn Around.
He would have stayed right by you, holding your hand, holding you in his arms, as the fungus took over and stole you from him.
He fucking promised he’d never leave you again, and even as he walks away, it’s the last thing he wants to do.
Don’t.
Turn Around.
There is so little left for him in Jackson.
Tommy left him a long time ago, and being nearer to him hasn’t repaired their relationship. If anything, it’s more broken now than when he first got to Jackson.
The house will feel empty now. Less.
Don’t.
Turn Around.
He is just so fucking tired.
Tired of loss. Tired of this life. Tired of this world.
Every step that he takes brings him back to something he doesn’t even know if he wants.
Don’t.
Turn Around.
But by god if he would love to just stop now, to just hold you in his arms and let you kiss him one last time, to let the fugus take him, too.
To slip away in your arms.
To finally, finally rest.
He almost turns around…
…but the girl in his arms is what stops him, struggling against his hands, fighting for the rest of her life in this broken world.
He takes another step away from you. And another.
Don’t Turn Around.
~*~
“Put me down you fucking mother fucker!” Ellie finally struggles from Joel’s arms once they’re back at the ridge, the shack and the carnage around it only just visible in the distance. “Why did you do that?”
“She doesn't want us there, Ellie!” He pushes her forward, trying to turn her and get her back on the path to Jackson, but she doesn't move.
“Because she’s gonna fucking kill herself, Joel!” Her voice is harsh and broken with grief. “You didn’t even try to stop her!”
“So she can turn?” Joel spits the words at her, trying to push her forward again. “You think I fucking like this?”
That stops her, stops her ire and anger. “No,” she croaks out. “But there’s-”
“There’s nothing-” Joel’s voice cracks and he stops, wiping his hands down his face as he tries to force anything, anything except sadness and desperation into his voice. “There’s nothing left to do,” he says finally, slow and measured and utterly broken.
The tears fall from Ellie’s eyes, slipping down over her cheeks. She doesn’t even try to wipe them away. “There’s gotta be,” she whispers, desperately.
Everything in him sours, because he feels the same way. Yet, he’s got to be the voice of reason. He’s forced to lead the march away from the one person he wants to be with more than anything.
His chest hurts, his throat hurts, his head hurts.
He wants nothing more than to just sit down and crawl back to you, letting you take him with you into oblivion if he can get there before you shoot that gun.
If he can’t? Well, maybe it’s a good thing Ellie had to read Romeo and Juliet after all, because maybe there’ll be a sweet bullet left for him in the gun.
He doesn’t want to live in a world where he has to justify leaving the one he loves in agony. But he does. And he will. For Ellie, he’ll march on, less and less of him left by the day. And it all roars out of him: the pain, the anger, as he yells at the last thing left he loves. “You think I want this? Do you?”
“No,” Ellie mutters back, taking the shouting, and looking at her feet.
His voice drops as he gets in her face, rage still fueled by loss. “There isn’t any fucking thing we can do in the next few hours that the world hasn’t already tried in the last fucking twenty years, Ellie! She was right, okay? And she has the right to do this on her terms.” He roars with anger, all thoughts of being concerned about infected in the woods gone from his mind. “Fucking move. I don’t want to hear the-”
“Her terms…” Ellie pauses, turning back to the shack and shaking off his hand as he tries to turn her toward Jackson again. Her shoulders drop. The anger leaves her. She takes a heavy breath, and then another as her head cants to the side. Her eyes light up as she turns, wiping at her tears. “Fucking… her terms!”
She starts running back down the hill to the shack.
“Ellie!”
She stops, runs back up and grabs Joel’s hand and pulls him. “Her terms, Joel. She was coherent. She is coherent.”
He pulls her back the other way. “Ellie, I can’t-”
“That bite was on her fucking shoulder, Joel. Bullshit eight hours. You get eight hours at the wrist. She had two at most.” Ellie leans up, getting in his face. “She’s not gonna fucking turn, Joel! We gotta stop her!”
~*~
The world spins beneath you as you hold onto the door frame with one hand, the gun in the other. You want to be outside the small shack so maybe some of the people of Jackson will still use it. Ideally you can make it to the tree line, but even if you can just make it to the pile of bodies, it’s better than in the shack.
But the sun is blazing and your head is pounding and if the world would just stop spinning…
You might not get your wish. You might have to do it here.
You want to give them enough time to get far away, but each minute that slips away is another minute closer to a loss of control that will keep you from doing what needs to be done.
You bring the gun up under your chin, resting it against the bone.
You should probably sit for this. Your hand is already shaking. As soon as you let go of the doorframe you’ll fall, you know it.
You have to do it soon. You’re hearing things: you’re hearing your name, over and over in their voices. Hallucinations. Wishes.
It all signals that loss of control you’re dreading.
Your eyes blink open, just for a second, and it’s not a hallucination. They’re there, Joel and Ellie, running down the hill at you. It’s both the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen and the worst.
You don’t want to be alone, but you don’t want them here to see this.
You don’t have any fight left in you to send them away again, though.
But he’ll have to do it, now. Joel will have to.
He’ll have to kill you.
Doing that might very literally kill him, too.
“No,” you whisper to yourself, sliding down the doorframe, gun falling to your side. You can do nothing but wait as they make their way to you, calling out your name through the empty hillside. You didn’t want this. Your only saving grace was that they were gone, that they wouldn’t see you.
It is a betrayal.
Ellie slides in front of you, her young knees not caring as they shimmy in the dirt to grab your hands. “You’re not gonna turn!”
“Ellie, please,” you slide the gun away from you, if only to belay her fears for the moment. Her eyes are so wide, so full of hope and panic and tears. “You can’t just wish-”
She shakes her head and holds your hands tight. “You won’t, I know it!”
“She does,” Joel pants, finally catching up, settling himself in the dirt by your side. He pulls tugs at the edge of your sleeve to reveal your shoulder, to expose the bite you’ve kept covered since it was found.
None of you wanted to see it spread, watch the tendrils of fungus pop up along your skin like pustulant veins as your time ran out.
You still don’t want to look at it, at the future it heralds.
“She does, darlin,” he says, gentler and with a hint of home, still breathless. “Look.”
The turn of your head makes the world spin and you squeeze your eyes shut for a second before trying to look at the backside of your shoulder. The angle’s awkward, but it’s clear: the bite hasn’t changed. The uneven teeth marks are still there, the telltale beginnings of the tendrils of infection, but instead of angry red pustules and spreading lines marring your skin, it looks dried up.
It looks like Ellie’s.
“What?” You pull at your shoulder with your other hand, trying to get a better look at it. “But I’m…”
“You’re coherent.” Ellie calls your attention back to her. “You’re talking in full sentences, making sense and it’s been hours.”
“But I can’t…” You squeeze your eyes shut. Everything’s fuzzy. Everything hurts. You can’t hold your arm out without tremors and you can’t stand for more than a few seconds. Your brain feels heavy and your tongue is thick in your mouth.
“The concussion, darlin’,” Joel pulls you to him, wrapping you in his arms. “Everything that asshole did to you is…” He kisses your head, and it feels divine. “You’re not well, but you’re not going to turn.”
You want to believe it. You want to put all of your hope in this, but you can’t make it make sense. Your brain won’t make it make sense.
You’re going to turn. Even with the evidence in front of you, even with your dull bite scabbing over instead of blooming under your skin, you can’t believe there’s hope. You start to push him away. You’re weak and tired and the world tilts off its axis when you do, but it’s the only thing you want now: for them to leave. “No, go…”
“I am not. Leaving. Again.” He holds your face still, waiting to say the words until your eyes lock on his. “I am not leaving you again, and I shouldn’t have left in the first place.”
He doesn’t wait for you to reply, doesn’t give you the space to protest, instead he lifts you in his arms with a grunt, standing and moving into the small shed and setting you on the cot. There’s no fight in you left, even if you wanted to, and so you let him settle you on the cot, let him readjust the shutters on the small windows until there’s no light on you and you can open your eyes.
He knows. Joel always knows exactly what you need.
You hear him talk to Ellie, something about how much noise they made and keeping watch, but it doesn't register in your mind. Exhaustion creeps up on you now that your brain is screaming safe with Joel here, even if you don’t fully believe that it’s true, even if you don’t fully believe that you won’t turn now as soon as you close your eyes, or tonight or tomorrow or some other day.
He kneels in front of you, hand on your cheek until your eyes flutter open. “We’re gonna stay here for a bit. We gotta wait until you’re feeling better or a patrol finds us, ok? It’s a long haul back, too long to try to take you on foot like this, ok?” His voice is low and gentle as his calloused fingers brush the hair away from your temple.
You nod, letting your head push into his hand for a moment. There’s nothing more you’d like right now than to be curled up in him, lying in your bed at home. This cot will have to do for now, his touch lulling you into sleep.
You’re still afraid to fall asleep, you’re afraid that when you wake up you won’t be you, but you have little choice as oblivion claims you.
~*~
Joel stands at the front of the small shack, eyes out the crack in the window.
“You really think anyone’s coming?” Ellie asks from her spot on the floor, spreading out the contents of both of their backpacks.
He nods, “Tommy’ll have to after a day or so, if they don’t send a patrol before that. We’re off the normal patrol route, so I don’t think anyone will stumble on us, unless they heard us, but that’s a long shot.” He sighs, rubbing his hand over his face. “They usually wait a whole day before sending anyone when people go missing.”
“Threat assessment,” she mutters. Joel catches her eyes and nods, knowing she’s thinking over all the things she was taught about patrols, all the things he downright ignored to come out last night. “We need a horse,” Ellie adds. “She can’t walk back, it’s too far.”
“Not like she is now, no.” Joel’s eyes fall on the pile of bodies across from the shed, head shaking. “Mother fucker.” The curse falls from his lips, venom in every syllable.
Ellie looks up, leaning against the wall, her own face blank. “At least he got what he deserved,” she muttered.
“Doesn’t make what happened any better.” He paces back, bending by your side, brushing the hair from your face and pulling his jacket up over your shoulders. “Why?” He whispers out loud, more to himself than anyone.
“Cause Robbie’s a sick fucking prick,” Ellie responds, turning her head. “No one fucking liked him. He shoulda been dealt with a long time ago.”
Joel almost barks out a broken laugh. He’d had Robbie pegged since the first time he met him: an entitled asshole with just enough crazy in his eyes that Joel knew to stay away. After all the shit he’d done, it was sad that it didn’t surprise Joel what had happened. Joel has always known what he was capable of. But no, that wasn’t what he was asking.
“No,” he mutters, slipping the fabric around so he can see your bite, the breaks in the skin scabbed up, the tendrils of infection dried up and lumpy under his fingers when he touches it. It’s not hot and red or angry or festering. “This.”
Ellie sits up, sliding over on her knees until she’s next to you and Joel, and slides her sleeve along her arm to reveal her own bite. “Hers is even less,” she whispers with near wonder. “I don’t think you’ll be able to see it when it heals.”
“Can’t have been Robbie,” Joel muses out loud, his fingers running over the little lines of tendrils. “Human bite wouldn’t do that.”
Ellie shakes her head, sliding back to her spot to continue to reorganize their packs, holding out the little pile of jerky and canteens of water to the side. “No, it wouldn’t.”
His fingers work in your hair for long, quiet moments, trying to get the tangles and matting out from being dragged through the woods, as Ellie sets the packs to the side before taking up watch.
“I have a theory, you know,” Ellie mutters quietly. Joel hums low in his throat, looking at her before going back to your hair. “I heard Marlene talking to one of the other Fireflies once, about me. She said that my mom was bitten.”
Her voice is low and cold, detached in the way it is when she talks about her life before she knew Joel. It stops him from his task, turning him so he’s watching her with all of his attention. “She was?”
She shrugs, not liking the importance of it. “I didn’t hear too much. Just that she’d lied to Marlene.” Ellie swallows, eyes still set on the outside. “I kinda figure if she got bit, and then I was born, maybe I got some of it, you know? Like all those damn vaccines they gave us in Fedra school- a little bit of it makes you immune, right?”
Joel knows they tried that for cordyceps: live vaccines, dead vaccines. He lived through it. They didn’t work.
But he also gets flashes of books on his bedside table from another life he’d lived and VHS tapes he’d had to watch and birthing classes he went to, his mind screaming the word placenta over and over to him. He never fucking knew what it did, but he remembers it was important. Remembers hearing about it over and over again while they were waiting to bring Sarah into the world.
Into a very different world.
“You know, so I’m just thinking… if my mom was infected, but I’m immune,” she swallows, looking over at him, then eyes darting to you. “What if her babies were infected? Maybe that could make her immune.”
Joel didn’t know if it worked like that. He couldn’t remember, couldn’t bring up the words on the page or whatever that damn bubbly birthing coach had said during the Lamaze classes.
But it was enough.
It was close enough to a reason that made sense.
More than hope, more than prayer, biology actually made sense.
“Either that or her brain’s too fucked up from the concussion for the Cordyceps to live,” Ellie rambles out, shrugging, “but if that was true, you’d just have to hit an infected in the head and they’d be fine, so that can’t be fucking right.”
He almost, almost laughs at how contrary she is. “Jesus, Ellie.”
~*~
It’s the middle of the afternoon when you wake up, eyes flickering open to the cobweb covered ceiling of the cabin. There’s just enough light creeping in through the closed windows to see shapes: Ellie sleeping curled up against the wall opposite of you, Joel standing guard at the door, leaning cross legged against the frame. The day has marched on without you. You don’t know how many hours you’ve slept, but waking up with your own mind is a relief.
Maybe… maybe they’re right.
The cot squeaks when you try to stand and he’s by you before the world can stop spinning, hands on your shoulder to help you sit. “Hey, hey. Easy now.”
You let your head fall to his shoulder, waiting for his solidness to help to slow down the tilting sensation. “Just need to pee,” you mutter, wrapping your arms around his shoulders.
He helps you stand with quiet affirmations, holding you under your arms and around your waist as he helps you shuffle out towards the trees, pausing every time you grip him tight and the world tilts until you relax and start breathing again. It’s farther than you think to the tree line, and each step makes you regret leaving the cot a little more.
But each step is also a victory. You’re not shaky, not out of control of your body. Your body isn’t fighting you, like you’ve seen when people turn. No, you’re sore, and in pain, and your thighs and hips ache and it stings between your legs with each step and your shoulders burn each time you have to press down into Joel’s arms. You’ve never been happier to feel pain, to know exactly what caused each and every ache, to feel that the ache is different from your arms to your legs and know it’s not systemic.
He helps you prop yourself up against a tree and then steps away as you relieve yourself. For all he’s seen, for all he’s done, there are still some things you want to be private. You wish there was more light in the shady canopy, you wish you could move enough to look at your body, confirm the bruises that you feel, but you keep losing your balance and the longer you stay out the longer you’re in danger from all the things that could be hiding in the trees.
The trip back is somewhat easier with an empty bladder and his warm whispers in your ear encouraging you with every step. Some of the pains dull to an ache the more you move, but by the time you make it, you feel like you’ve walked all day instead of for a few minutes.
He moves to set you back in the cot but you grip him. “Just… just sit with me?” You whisper, trying to avoid waking Ellie.
He nods, slowly helping you to the floor and then climbing down next to you, soft grunts slipping from his lips as his knees click when they bend. It feels almost normal when he pulls you between his legs, wrapping himself around you, giving you his chest to lean back into. You sigh, happily, and he holds you tighter.
“It felt good to move,” you whisper. “Tiring, but good.”
“Good,” he drops a kiss to your hair, tucking you tighter against him. “Good.”
With his warmth around you and his heart beating under you, sleep claims you again easily.
Story Summary: Jackson is less idyllic than it seems, as is everything post-infection. He doesn't want to see you tossed out, and can’t take the way you flinch when the men come sniffing around, so he does the only thing he and Ellie can think of to keep you around.
Dead Dove: Do Not Eat.
Tender Payment For our Sins has significant Trigger and Content Warnings. Please see Chapter 1 for Full list of Trigger Warnings and Tags.
Full Story on AO3
Most recent CHAPTER on AO3
The Spotify Playlist
Chapter 65: Fuel the Pyre of Your Enemies
Summary: Joel’s search for you comes to an end.
A/N: Title is from the Hozier song NFWMB.
Last chapter was rough… and this one's not much better. Thank you for sticking through it.
~*~
The sun’s just starting to rise when Joel stops Ellie. “Look, you stay back.”
“Joel-” She starts to move past him, towards the top of the hill that obscures their view of the rest of the little valley.
He stops her, a hand on his shoulder as he stutters the words out, looking worried. “I don’t- I don’t know what we’re gonna find, and-”
“I’m not afraid.” Ellie pushes past him, shaking her head. “I’m not stupid. I know what we might find.”
He follows, tense as he pulls his gun off his shoulder. “Doesn't mean you have to see it.”
“Thanks for that, I guess,” she mutters as they start to crest a small hill, “But I… Fuuuuck.” The curse drips from her lips as she ducks, her voice falling away.
“What?” Joel whispers, ducking and moving to her. He looks around blindly until she points to the small shack they are headed towards.
It’s not much, the shack: just a few slabs of plywood with a cot inside that patrols use when weather gets bad or they need a stop for the night on longer routes. What catches his breath, though, is the clicker hovering over a body a few yards away from the door, tearing at it with its teeth, while another person sits motionless against the far wall of the shack, blindfolded with their wrists tied.
He pulls the rifle up to his shoulder, and breathes a sigh of relief when he sees it’s Robbie’s body under the clicker. He scans across until he sees you, pressed tight against the shack, shaking. “She’s alive,” he breathes out.
“Thank fucking god,” Ellie whispers, relaxing just a bit. “Can you get it from here?” Ellie whispers, pointing to his rifle.
“Too fucking far,” he curses, moving between looking over at you and taking in the area through the scope.
“But she’s alive, right?” He doesn’t answer, and Ellie just stares at Joel while he looks at you through the scope for long seconds. “Right?”
“Yeah,” he blurts out quickly, trying to force himself to believe it. He takes a few deep breaths and then looks around. “We’re out in the middle of fuckin' nowhere here. Exposed.”
“Fuck,” Ellie mutters, looking around for the first time at how the trees had opened to a clearing. “There might be more.”
Joel nods. “Back to back, nice and slow. Even scans across, you got it?”
They hadn’t moved like this since they’d been in Jackson, they haven’t had to, but it comes back easy: slow, quiet steps, heads up, eyes and ears taking in everything like they used to do on their way across the country.
Ellie feels Joel pause at her back.
“I can get him from here.”
“Then fuckin’ do it.”
~*~
You could have dealt with the sounds of the clicker and the clicker alone.
But you’d never heard one feed before.
You aren’t even sure if that was what you could call it. It is disgusting: squelching and tearing sounds, shuddering breaths. The only saving grace was how quickly Robbie had stopped making noises, how fast he’d died.
At least, without his groans, you can pretend it is a tiger eating in the zoo. A dog with a bone.
Anything.
Anything except what it is.
You thank whatever is watching over you that clickers can’t smell. You are disgusting, coated in your own smelly, fear-drenched sweat, legs sticky with his release and piss and dirt.
As long as you keep your breathing slow, you have a chance.
The gunshot scares you. You aren’t prepared, you aren’t ready, and your body jerks. You hit the wall behind you, making a noise.
The clicker lets out an ungodly sound, but it doesn't die.
You’re almost ready for the second shot that rings out, knowing that if they hadn’t meant to hit you, they were aiming for the clicker. It screeches again, the sound closer and more strangled.
The question is, who is behind the gun?
An infected is always a common enemy. Everyone aims for a clicker.
A helpless woman is always, always a prize.
A third shot rings out.
Silence.
Nothing.
Nothing except your ragged breathing through your nose.
Then: footsteps. Two sets at least.
You hear them racing towards you and while you wish someone would say something, you know they can’t.
Clickers are so rarely alone.
You sit, focusing on your breathing, in and out, in and out, until they’re close enough that you can hear them.
You’d know that breathing anywhere. You sleep by it.
And then he says your name. It slips from his lips quietly, like a whisper.
Finally, you break.
You can’t cry, not really, but your chest heaves all the same as you hear him skid to his knees in front of you. You don’t know the words, can’t make out what he’s saying through the sheer relief coursing through your body, but he’s there and his hands are touching your face and you feel something drape around your shoulders and it is all fucking over.
His hands bounce over you, touching your face and hands and wrists and ankles as he tries to figure out where to start. He turns away from you, voice muffled as he asks for a knife, and then he’s cutting your hands free, cutting the wide band around your eyes until you blink and hide your head against him at the bright sun.
You’re fuzzy, so fuzzy. The world is spinning and the nausea is rampant and you can’t quite hear what he’s saying but he takes your face in his hands and he pulls you to look at him and he smiles.
Joel smiles, relief and fear in his eyes as he holds you close. “I’ll be gentle, okay?”
You nod, confused about what he’s referring to until you feel the pull of the tape at your lips. He goes slow, tries to slowly pry the duct tape from your skin, but it pulls and irritates and he’s mumbling apologies the whole time until it finally falls free of your skin and you’re taking big, deep breaths, coughing with the effort.
Ellie slips into your view, putting her canteen in his outstretched hand so he can hold it to your lips. You want to protest that she’s here, it should be Tommy or Rick or Eddie, but you’ll make a fuss about it later.
“Easy, easy,” he whispers when you try to drink greedily, holding it back. “Sips first, okay? We got as much as you want, just…” he trails off, letting you take small mouthfuls, the hand that isn’t supporting the canteen trying to card through your matted hair. “I’ve got ya, alright?”
You nod, squinting when the sun hits your face as he leans down, cutting the rope around your feet. He hands the blade and the bottle back to Ellie before slipping his hands around you. “We gotta get inside, in case there are more. Can you stand?”
“I don’t know.” The whispered words croak out of your lips, your throat raw and dry still.
“Okay, let’s try.” You keep your eyes on his, his confidence and small smile enough to get you to believe that you might have enough strength.
You’d try anything for this man.
With his hands under your shoulders, his arms around you, he stands and starts to lift, doing more work than you as you stumble to your feet like a baby deer. He pulls you close to his chest, holding you tight as you sway in his arms. “My head,” you mutter, squeezing your eyes shut and grabbing on to him as the world lurches.
“He hit ya?”
You nod, hiding against him as he growls under you, the jacket he’d slipped around your shoulders for modesty falling to the ground, pulling what was left of your shirt with it. You don’t care, though. Your modesty will survive until you can get the world to stop spinning and you get inside.
Ellie dashes around to the other side of the two of you, moving to pick up the coat where it slipped, but she stops, eyes on your shoulder. She’s never been good at hiding her emotions, and panic fills her voice even when she tries to keep it from shaking. “Joel?”
~*~
You sit against the wall, taking small sips of water in his flannel shirt and what’s left of your jeans, the monstrosity of the clicker’s bite on your shoulder hidden from view.
Ellie and Joel sit across from you, both trying to hide their own tears.
“I told you,” you can’t make your voice loud or forceful, the emotions and your throat are still too raw, “leave me a gun and go.”
Joel sniffs back the thickness in his voice. “And I told you I ain’t fucking doing that.”
You cover your face with your hands. The concussion is still making everything fuzzy, still pounding in your brain, and the mid-day light streaming in around the covers on the windows is still somehow too bright in the small shack. “And just what the fuck are you going to do here, huh?”
He says nothing, staring, eyes full of sadness and loss already.
“We’re not gonna let you turn alone.” Ellie replies confidently. “No one deserves that.”
“And you deserve to watch me turn into one of those things?” You spit out, fighting to hold back a sob. “You deserve for your last memory of me to be one of you fucking shooting me?”
Joel roars, his fist slamming out against the wall next to him, making Ellie jump.
“You can’t fucking change it, Joel.” You wish there was more bite to the words, you wish you could make him hate you in these moments so he would leave, but there’s too much sadness.
You’re leaving him.
You never want to fucking leave him.
Especially not like this.
“Please,” you beg, slipping to your knees and crawling across the space between you. You put one hand on his knee and take Ellie’s hand. "Please. I need you to leave. I need to know I won’t hurt you.”
“Ellie, go outside.” Joel’s voice is low and calm and garners no argument, so she doesn’t even try. She just sniffs back her tears and squeezes your hand and slips out the door. All the while he holds your eyes with his, something dark, something intense in them. He waits until the sound of her boots on the dirt fades. “I’m not fucking leaving,” he whispers out.
“Joel,” you plead with him as you crawl between his legs, hands on his shoulders as much to keep his attention as to ground yourself.
“I can’t,” his voice cracks as his eyes fill with tears. “I can’t without you.”
You tuck your head under his chin, curling into him even though your body aches as you do. “You can. You have, and you will again.”
“There ain't much left, darlin’,” he mutters, burying one of his hands in your hair, pressing his lips to your forehead. “I don’t have a lot of fight left in me.”
“And what about Ellie?” You wrap your arms around him and settle into his embrace, sitting in his lap. “She still needs you.”
“She don’t need me.” He says it as if he almost believes it.
You shake your head against him, tears dripping freely from your lashes. You don’t want to be alone. You don’t want to turn. But you don’t want him anywhere near you when you inevitably do, so you have to stay strong one last time. “She does. And so does Tommy. And Billy.” You kiss his chest, waiting for a particularly sharp dip in your senses to right the spinning room.
He says your name like his heart is breaking.
You know it is, because yours is, too.
You pull away and look him in the eyes. “I need you, too, Joel.” You take a slow breath, fighting for control of your voice. “I need you to… to leave me a gun and… and I need you to walk away. I need you to do that.” He shakes his head, trying to pull you back against him but you resist. “I know what I’m asking you to do,” you choke out, “but we’re running out of time, Joel-”
“Don’t,” he whispers, broken, as a tear slips over his cheek, “don’t do this.”
“It’s too late,” you whisper back, settling down in his arms again. “It’s already been done.”
“You can’t ask me to let ya go.” His voice is thick and soft, his lips moving against your hair. “I can’t let ya go.” He holds you even tighter. “I told you I was never leavin’ you, and I meant it.”
“I almost wish you hadn’t found me,” you mutter, fresh tears spilling out.
“And I wish I’d gotten here sooner.”
~*~
Ellie sits on a log a few feet away from the shack, eyes drifting over the body of the clicker where it lays on top of Robbie. She can’t see much from where she is, but the puddle of blood drying in the mid-day sun under the bodies tells its own story.
She can’t get the tears to stop, they keep falling over her cheeks no matter how hard she tries.
You aren’t her mom, not really, but you slipped in her life so easily, and you fill a hole she hadn’t realized was there. She likes how fucking tough you are around everyone but how relaxed and soft you are at home. She hates to see you cry and loves how Joel does everything he can to make sure it almost never happens.
She loves the way you smile at her when she talks about the last book she read or she shows you her newest sketch.
She doesn’t want to be exactly like you, but you were the first person who showed her that being a badass doesn’t only mean running and shooting and being a part of Fedra or a raider or like Joel.
Being a badass sometimes means working really hard at something you hate. Being a badass means filling in missing pages in books so people can enjoy stories. Being a badass means fending for your family by learning to grow a garden. Being a badass means not complaining about sitting up with her when she has nightmares and she can’t bear to be alone.
Being a badass means giving the middle finger to Jackson and marrying Joel to stay.
And now, just as quickly as you’d come into their lives, you are leaving.
Ellie doesn’t realize she has been rubbing at her own bite mark until she starts to irritate the skin. She draws her finger over it, the pattern ingrained in her brain.
Late at night, all alone, Ellie likes to pretend you are her mom, that she’d been your first baby and that her blood had helped save the world. Ellie likes to pretend that she’d been able to do that, that you’d both been able to do that and you got to live happily ever after in your little house in Jackson with Joel.
It is her favorite fantasy to indulge in, and the one that makes her feel the safest. The most loved.
She always kinda knew Joel cared about her, but Ellie didn’t feel love until you’d moved in, until you asked her warm questions full of curiosity and you actually cared what the answers were. Until you helped her see past Joel’s gruff exterior to the true softness in him, a softness she got glimpses of but never really understood before.
Ellie scratches at her bite, drawing blood.
It isn’t fair.
The unfairness of it all turns her stomach, makes her want to cry or scream or vomit or run.
She turns when she hears the door of the shack open, Joel standing on the porch, his eyes red and swollen. “You should,” he coughs, trying to keep the tears out of his voice, but failing. “You should say goodbye.”
Ellie doesn’t move, the finality of it freezing her in place.
“She understands if you can’t, though,” he forces out, harshly wiping the tears from his face. “Either way we have to get moving.”
“No, it-”
Joel shakes his head. “Been almost five hours, we have to go.”
You have seven, eight at most. Though with where it is on your shoulder, every minute you are still with them is a gift at this point. Some people have less. Ellie stands slowly, pulling her jacket over her arm.
She doesn’t look at Joel as she walks past him and into the small shack.
You’re still on the ground where Joel was sitting when she slips in, hiding your face in the darkness of your hands. You look up when she comes in, smiling a little.
Ellie hates that this will be her last memory of you: so dizzy you can’t stand, eyes swollen, clothes torn, bruised and battered and looking so much more broken than she’s ever seen you. She’ll have to draw Joel a picture of you, something nice, so he can remember you some other way.
Ellie steps closer, kneeling. “Joel said we gotta go.”
~*~
Ellie is trying so hard to hold it together for you, she’s shaking. “I need you to go, Ellie,” you whisper, taking her hand in yours. “I need you to not be here for this.”
“It’s not fair!” Ellie sniffs, her words whiny and high so it reminds you of a teenage tantrum.
You pull her to you, hugging her tight. “It’s not. Life isn’t. But I’m so glad I got to know you.” You pull back, smiling through your tears. “To be your ‘not mom.’ You’re so special to me, Ellie.”
“You’re my mom!” Ellie crashes into you, crying hard as she falls apart. “You’re the only thing like a mom I’ve ever had.”
Her words break the last pieces of you that are held together. You hold her tight as she cries, there are no words you can say to make this any better.
“Don’t go,” she cries out into your shoulder. “You can’t go, please!”
“I wish I didn’t have to, honey,” you pull her away from you and look into her eyes, but they’re wild with grief and she isn’t listening as she keeps repeating her words over and over. Your own words slip out full of desperation, of the grief you feel. “I don’t want to either.”
She’s gripping you tight, pulling at your shoulder and your arms and trying to bury herself in you as you try to push her away. Between the heartache and the vertigo you can’t hold her back and do the last thing you want to do.
“Joel!”
You don’t need to tell him. He knows. He steps in and wraps his arms around Ellie, hauling her off of you even though she fights him and screams and kicks as he struggles his way out the door with her.
He doesn’t look at you as he leaves.
You don’t know if that makes it better or worse.
Once they're out of sight you let the damn break, heaving tears pulling you into a ball on the floor.
His gun is only an arm’s reach away. You just need a minute. Just one. You just need to let this emotion out. You need to grieve your own death.
You need to be able to hold the gun straight when you pull the trigger.
YOU’RE TELLING ME SHE GOT BIT?!?!?!?!
I mean, okay, with how everything was unfolding, I guess it was kind of inevitable, but what in the actual fuck 😭
I am clinging—clinging—to the hope that the one silver lining from everything she went through in Vegas is that somehow, somehow, she beat the impossible odds and ends up immune to this whole fungal nightmare. Like, PLEASE. Let that be the one thing she gets out of that traumatic, hellfire of an experience, that she was bitten and nothing happened.
I am SOOOOO hoping that’s the case because I genuinely don’t think I’ll survive this otherwise.
The only thing keeping me going right now is the “eventual happy ending” tag. That phrase is doing so much heavy lifting right now 😭 I am not well.
Tho, what an emotional high of a chapter. My heart absolutely aches for Joel, Ellie, and the reader. These three fought so hard to carve out even a small sense of domesticity, to build a family together, only for it to be ripped away like this.
It was such a hard read. The writing was so beautifully done, and I think that’s exactly why it hit so hard. It felt like I was experiencing everything they were feeling, tenfold. And with all the reminiscing from the previous chapter? Calling this a gut punch feels like the understatement of the CENTURY.
Their fear was so raw. Their pain felt so real. That hesitation, that moment of not knowing what to choose, was so fkn heartbreaking.
And Ellie being pulled away by Joel. Joel, who’s already grieving? Who was already fighting every instinct to actually do as she says? That was so difficult to get through.
And I don’t know if this was intentional, but the reader being left alone with a gun to carry out her own execution felt like such a jarring mirror to the scar on Joel’s temple.
You need to be able to hold the gun straight when you pull the trigger.
Something about that line. Placed right after she’s grieving the loss of the only family she had, the only people she kept fighting for, it shifts the entire weight of the moment. The way it’s phrased makes me wonder—hope, even—that maybe she misses. That she survives. That she carries that “almost” with her later and somehow comes out the other side stronger for it.
Please. Just let her be okay.
We are literally so close to the end 😭😭
Listen, the eventual happy ending tag is doing a LOT of heavy lifting right now. Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better. No spoilers. Just... trust the process.
Thank you for all the lovely complements about my writing! 🥰 The softness of 63 was VERY purposefully done to contrast this horribleness. It's all very purposefully done to contrast what they want- because NONE of them are getting what they want or what they deserve.
I won't say any more, so no spoilers. Next chapter will be posted Tuesday (maybe Monday night... I need some good vibes for my last final on Tuesday.)
Thank you, as always, for reading and for all your kind and lovely compliments. 💕
Story Summary: Jackson is less idyllic than it seems, as is everything post-infection. He doesn't want to see you tossed out, and can’t take the way you flinch when the men come sniffing around, so he does the only thing he and Ellie can think of to keep you around.
Dead Dove: Do Not Eat.
Tender Payment For our Sins has significant Trigger and Content Warnings. Please see Chapter 1 for Full list of Trigger Warnings and Tags.
Full Story on AO3
Most recent CHAPTER on AO3
The Spotify Playlist
Chapter 65: Fuel the Pyre of Your Enemies
Summary: Joel’s search for you comes to an end.
A/N: Title is from the Hozier song NFWMB.
Last chapter was rough… and this one's not much better. Thank you for sticking through it.
~*~
The sun’s just starting to rise when Joel stops Ellie. “Look, you stay back.”
“Joel-” She starts to move past him, towards the top of the hill that obscures their view of the rest of the little valley.
He stops her, a hand on his shoulder as he stutters the words out, looking worried. “I don’t- I don’t know what we’re gonna find, and-”
“I’m not afraid.” Ellie pushes past him, shaking her head. “I’m not stupid. I know what we might find.”
He follows, tense as he pulls his gun off his shoulder. “Doesn't mean you have to see it.”
“Thanks for that, I guess,” she mutters as they start to crest a small hill, “But I… Fuuuuck.” The curse drips from her lips as she ducks, her voice falling away.
“What?” Joel whispers, ducking and moving to her. He looks around blindly until she points to the small shack they are headed towards.
It’s not much, the shack: just a few slabs of plywood with a cot inside that patrols use when weather gets bad or they need a stop for the night on longer routes. What catches his breath, though, is the clicker hovering over a body a few yards away from the door, tearing at it with its teeth, while another person sits motionless against the far wall of the shack, blindfolded with their wrists tied.
He pulls the rifle up to his shoulder, and breathes a sigh of relief when he sees it’s Robbie’s body under the clicker. He scans across until he sees you, pressed tight against the shack, shaking. “She’s alive,” he breathes out.
“Thank fucking god,” Ellie whispers, relaxing just a bit. “Can you get it from here?” Ellie whispers, pointing to his rifle.
“Too fucking far,” he curses, moving between looking over at you and taking in the area through the scope.
“But she’s alive, right?” He doesn’t answer, and Ellie just stares at Joel while he looks at you through the scope for long seconds. “Right?”
“Yeah,” he blurts out quickly, trying to force himself to believe it. He takes a few deep breaths and then looks around. “We’re out in the middle of fuckin' nowhere here. Exposed.”
“Fuck,” Ellie mutters, looking around for the first time at how the trees had opened to a clearing. “There might be more.”
Joel nods. “Back to back, nice and slow. Even scans across, you got it?”
They hadn’t moved like this since they’d been in Jackson, they haven’t had to, but it comes back easy: slow, quiet steps, heads up, eyes and ears taking in everything like they used to do on their way across the country.
Ellie feels Joel pause at her back.
“I can get him from here.”
“Then fuckin’ do it.”
~*~
You could have dealt with the sounds of the clicker and the clicker alone.
But you’d never heard one feed before.
You aren’t even sure if that was what you could call it. It is disgusting: squelching and tearing sounds, shuddering breaths. The only saving grace was how quickly Robbie had stopped making noises, how fast he’d died.
At least, without his groans, you can pretend it is a tiger eating in the zoo. A dog with a bone.
Anything.
Anything except what it is.
You thank whatever is watching over you that clickers can’t smell. You are disgusting, coated in your own smelly, fear-drenched sweat, legs sticky with his release and piss and dirt.
As long as you keep your breathing slow, you have a chance.
The gunshot scares you. You aren’t prepared, you aren’t ready, and your body jerks. You hit the wall behind you, making a noise.
The clicker lets out an ungodly sound, but it doesn't die.
You’re almost ready for the second shot that rings out, knowing that if they hadn’t meant to hit you, they were aiming for the clicker. It screeches again, the sound closer and more strangled.
The question is, who is behind the gun?
An infected is always a common enemy. Everyone aims for a clicker.
A helpless woman is always, always a prize.
A third shot rings out.
Silence.
Nothing.
Nothing except your ragged breathing through your nose.
Then: footsteps. Two sets at least.
You hear them racing towards you and while you wish someone would say something, you know they can’t.
Clickers are so rarely alone.
You sit, focusing on your breathing, in and out, in and out, until they’re close enough that you can hear them.
You’d know that breathing anywhere. You sleep by it.
And then he says your name. It slips from his lips quietly, like a whisper.
Finally, you break.
You can’t cry, not really, but your chest heaves all the same as you hear him skid to his knees in front of you. You don’t know the words, can’t make out what he’s saying through the sheer relief coursing through your body, but he’s there and his hands are touching your face and you feel something drape around your shoulders and it is all fucking over.
His hands bounce over you, touching your face and hands and wrists and ankles as he tries to figure out where to start. He turns away from you, voice muffled as he asks for a knife, and then he’s cutting your hands free, cutting the wide band around your eyes until you blink and hide your head against him at the bright sun.
You’re fuzzy, so fuzzy. The world is spinning and the nausea is rampant and you can’t quite hear what he’s saying but he takes your face in his hands and he pulls you to look at him and he smiles.
Joel smiles, relief and fear in his eyes as he holds you close. “I’ll be gentle, okay?”
You nod, confused about what he’s referring to until you feel the pull of the tape at your lips. He goes slow, tries to slowly pry the duct tape from your skin, but it pulls and irritates and he’s mumbling apologies the whole time until it finally falls free of your skin and you’re taking big, deep breaths, coughing with the effort.
Ellie slips into your view, putting her canteen in his outstretched hand so he can hold it to your lips. You want to protest that she’s here, it should be Tommy or Rick or Eddie, but you’ll make a fuss about it later.
“Easy, easy,” he whispers when you try to drink greedily, holding it back. “Sips first, okay? We got as much as you want, just…” he trails off, letting you take small mouthfuls, the hand that isn’t supporting the canteen trying to card through your matted hair. “I’ve got ya, alright?”
You nod, squinting when the sun hits your face as he leans down, cutting the rope around your feet. He hands the blade and the bottle back to Ellie before slipping his hands around you. “We gotta get inside, in case there are more. Can you stand?”
“I don’t know.” The whispered words croak out of your lips, your throat raw and dry still.
“Okay, let’s try.” You keep your eyes on his, his confidence and small smile enough to get you to believe that you might have enough strength.
You’d try anything for this man.
With his hands under your shoulders, his arms around you, he stands and starts to lift, doing more work than you as you stumble to your feet like a baby deer. He pulls you close to his chest, holding you tight as you sway in his arms. “My head,” you mutter, squeezing your eyes shut and grabbing on to him as the world lurches.
“He hit ya?”
You nod, hiding against him as he growls under you, the jacket he’d slipped around your shoulders for modesty falling to the ground, pulling what was left of your shirt with it. You don’t care, though. Your modesty will survive until you can get the world to stop spinning and you get inside.
Ellie dashes around to the other side of the two of you, moving to pick up the coat where it slipped, but she stops, eyes on your shoulder. She’s never been good at hiding her emotions, and panic fills her voice even when she tries to keep it from shaking. “Joel?”
~*~
You sit against the wall, taking small sips of water in his flannel shirt and what’s left of your jeans, the monstrosity of the clicker’s bite on your shoulder hidden from view.
Ellie and Joel sit across from you, both trying to hide their own tears.
“I told you,” you can’t make your voice loud or forceful, the emotions and your throat are still too raw, “leave me a gun and go.”
Joel sniffs back the thickness in his voice. “And I told you I ain’t fucking doing that.”
You cover your face with your hands. The concussion is still making everything fuzzy, still pounding in your brain, and the mid-day light streaming in around the covers on the windows is still somehow too bright in the small shack. “And just what the fuck are you going to do here, huh?”
He says nothing, staring, eyes full of sadness and loss already.
“We’re not gonna let you turn alone.” Ellie replies confidently. “No one deserves that.”
“And you deserve to watch me turn into one of those things?” You spit out, fighting to hold back a sob. “You deserve for your last memory of me to be one of you fucking shooting me?”
Joel roars, his fist slamming out against the wall next to him, making Ellie jump.
“You can’t fucking change it, Joel.” You wish there was more bite to the words, you wish you could make him hate you in these moments so he would leave, but there’s too much sadness.
You’re leaving him.
You never want to fucking leave him.
Especially not like this.
“Please,” you beg, slipping to your knees and crawling across the space between you. You put one hand on his knee and take Ellie’s hand. "Please. I need you to leave. I need to know I won’t hurt you.”
“Ellie, go outside.” Joel’s voice is low and calm and garners no argument, so she doesn’t even try. She just sniffs back her tears and squeezes your hand and slips out the door. All the while he holds your eyes with his, something dark, something intense in them. He waits until the sound of her boots on the dirt fades. “I’m not fucking leaving,” he whispers out.
“Joel,” you plead with him as you crawl between his legs, hands on his shoulders as much to keep his attention as to ground yourself.
“I can’t,” his voice cracks as his eyes fill with tears. “I can’t without you.”
You tuck your head under his chin, curling into him even though your body aches as you do. “You can. You have, and you will again.”
“There ain't much left, darlin’,” he mutters, burying one of his hands in your hair, pressing his lips to your forehead. “I don’t have a lot of fight left in me.”
“And what about Ellie?” You wrap your arms around him and settle into his embrace, sitting in his lap. “She still needs you.”
“She don’t need me.” He says it as if he almost believes it.
You shake your head against him, tears dripping freely from your lashes. You don’t want to be alone. You don’t want to turn. But you don’t want him anywhere near you when you inevitably do, so you have to stay strong one last time. “She does. And so does Tommy. And Billy.” You kiss his chest, waiting for a particularly sharp dip in your senses to right the spinning room.
He says your name like his heart is breaking.
You know it is, because yours is, too.
You pull away and look him in the eyes. “I need you, too, Joel.” You take a slow breath, fighting for control of your voice. “I need you to… to leave me a gun and… and I need you to walk away. I need you to do that.” He shakes his head, trying to pull you back against him but you resist. “I know what I’m asking you to do,” you choke out, “but we’re running out of time, Joel-”
“Don’t,” he whispers, broken, as a tear slips over his cheek, “don’t do this.”
“It’s too late,” you whisper back, settling down in his arms again. “It’s already been done.”
“You can’t ask me to let ya go.” His voice is thick and soft, his lips moving against your hair. “I can’t let ya go.” He holds you even tighter. “I told you I was never leavin’ you, and I meant it.”
“I almost wish you hadn’t found me,” you mutter, fresh tears spilling out.
“And I wish I’d gotten here sooner.”
~*~
Ellie sits on a log a few feet away from the shack, eyes drifting over the body of the clicker where it lays on top of Robbie. She can’t see much from where she is, but the puddle of blood drying in the mid-day sun under the bodies tells its own story.
She can’t get the tears to stop, they keep falling over her cheeks no matter how hard she tries.
You aren’t her mom, not really, but you slipped in her life so easily, and you fill a hole she hadn’t realized was there. She likes how fucking tough you are around everyone but how relaxed and soft you are at home. She hates to see you cry and loves how Joel does everything he can to make sure it almost never happens.
She loves the way you smile at her when she talks about the last book she read or she shows you her newest sketch.
She doesn’t want to be exactly like you, but you were the first person who showed her that being a badass doesn’t only mean running and shooting and being a part of Fedra or a raider or like Joel.
Being a badass sometimes means working really hard at something you hate. Being a badass means filling in missing pages in books so people can enjoy stories. Being a badass means fending for your family by learning to grow a garden. Being a badass means not complaining about sitting up with her when she has nightmares and she can’t bear to be alone.
Being a badass means giving the middle finger to Jackson and marrying Joel to stay.
And now, just as quickly as you’d come into their lives, you are leaving.
Ellie doesn’t realize she has been rubbing at her own bite mark until she starts to irritate the skin. She draws her finger over it, the pattern ingrained in her brain.
Late at night, all alone, Ellie likes to pretend you are her mom, that she’d been your first baby and that her blood had helped save the world. Ellie likes to pretend that she’d been able to do that, that you’d both been able to do that and you got to live happily ever after in your little house in Jackson with Joel.
It is her favorite fantasy to indulge in, and the one that makes her feel the safest. The most loved.
She always kinda knew Joel cared about her, but Ellie didn’t feel love until you’d moved in, until you asked her warm questions full of curiosity and you actually cared what the answers were. Until you helped her see past Joel’s gruff exterior to the true softness in him, a softness she got glimpses of but never really understood before.
Ellie scratches at her bite, drawing blood.
It isn’t fair.
The unfairness of it all turns her stomach, makes her want to cry or scream or vomit or run.
She turns when she hears the door of the shack open, Joel standing on the porch, his eyes red and swollen. “You should,” he coughs, trying to keep the tears out of his voice, but failing. “You should say goodbye.”
Ellie doesn’t move, the finality of it freezing her in place.
“She understands if you can’t, though,” he forces out, harshly wiping the tears from his face. “Either way we have to get moving.”
“No, it-”
Joel shakes his head. “Been almost five hours, we have to go.”
You have seven, eight at most. Though with where it is on your shoulder, every minute you are still with them is a gift at this point. Some people have less. Ellie stands slowly, pulling her jacket over her arm.
She doesn’t look at Joel as she walks past him and into the small shack.
You’re still on the ground where Joel was sitting when she slips in, hiding your face in the darkness of your hands. You look up when she comes in, smiling a little.
Ellie hates that this will be her last memory of you: so dizzy you can’t stand, eyes swollen, clothes torn, bruised and battered and looking so much more broken than she’s ever seen you. She’ll have to draw Joel a picture of you, something nice, so he can remember you some other way.
Ellie steps closer, kneeling. “Joel said we gotta go.”
~*~
Ellie is trying so hard to hold it together for you, she’s shaking. “I need you to go, Ellie,” you whisper, taking her hand in yours. “I need you to not be here for this.”
“It’s not fair!” Ellie sniffs, her words whiny and high so it reminds you of a teenage tantrum.
You pull her to you, hugging her tight. “It’s not. Life isn’t. But I’m so glad I got to know you.” You pull back, smiling through your tears. “To be your ‘not mom.’ You’re so special to me, Ellie.”
“You’re my mom!” Ellie crashes into you, crying hard as she falls apart. “You’re the only thing like a mom I’ve ever had.”
Her words break the last pieces of you that are held together. You hold her tight as she cries, there are no words you can say to make this any better.
“Don’t go,” she cries out into your shoulder. “You can’t go, please!”
“I wish I didn’t have to, honey,” you pull her away from you and look into her eyes, but they’re wild with grief and she isn’t listening as she keeps repeating her words over and over. Your own words slip out full of desperation, of the grief you feel. “I don’t want to either.”
She’s gripping you tight, pulling at your shoulder and your arms and trying to bury herself in you as you try to push her away. Between the heartache and the vertigo you can’t hold her back and do the last thing you want to do.
“Joel!”
You don’t need to tell him. He knows. He steps in and wraps his arms around Ellie, hauling her off of you even though she fights him and screams and kicks as he struggles his way out the door with her.
He doesn’t look at you as he leaves.
You don’t know if that makes it better or worse.
Once they're out of sight you let the damn break, heaving tears pulling you into a ball on the floor.
His gun is only an arm’s reach away. You just need a minute. Just one. You just need to let this emotion out. You need to grieve your own death.
You need to be able to hold the gun straight when you pull the trigger.
Every single fic update there is an author trying frantically to find the right balance between a nonchalant aside of "leave a comment if you enjoyed =)" and clinging desperately to the coat tails of a random stranger, dragging along behind them on the street wailing "Please, please! I have to know what you thought! I'm desperate to talk to people about this! Ask me about the alliterative repetition! Ask me about the symbolism!"
Story Summary: Jackson is less idyllic than it seems, as is everything post-infection. He doesn't want to see you tossed out, and can’t take the way you flinch when the men come sniffing around, so he does the only thing he and Ellie can think of to keep you around.
Dead Dove: Do Not Eat.
Tender Payment For our Sins has significant Trigger and Content Warnings. Please see Chapter 1 for Full list of Trigger Warnings and Tags.
Full Story on AO3
Most recent CHAPTER on AO3
The Spotify Playlist
Chapter 64: I Will Follow You Into the Dark
Summary: Someone’s decided you’re not worth it.
A/N: We are now in the home stretch. The next six chapters will be posted every Tues/Thurs/Weekend until we reach the end of the fic with the last chapter and epilogue being posted on 5/2. Thank you all for going on this journey with me. I hope everything comes to fruition as you’ve hoped.
Next chapter will be posted late Saturday night or Sunday.
Title from song by Death Cab for Cutie
Please review all the initial trigger warnings/tags for this fic before proceeding. This chapter includes SA. Things are about to get dark.
~*~
One minute you’re walking along the sidewalk, making a mental list of the things you need to get done in the barn today, and the next the world is fading to nothingness, pain radiating from the back of your skull.
When you come to, the world is still black.
It takes everything in you to push down the panic and focus on what you can feel, what you can discern. You can’t open your eyes, something’s pushing up against them, and your mouth is taped shut. You’re being dragged by your hands, tied together overhead, your legs bouncing over what feels like dirt roads, something under your hips and back, keeping you tied to it. Your feet are tied together, and even if you could move them, they feel heavy and sluggish. Everything’s quiet except for the sounds of you dragging and the huffing of whoever’s pulling you.
There’s only fear coursing through your veins. There is nothing else. You grip the fear tight in your mind: letting it run free will speed up your breathing, will make your heart pound even faster, will send you in a spiral you can’t afford right now.
The council. Robbie. Maria. Fedra.
Someone’s decided you’re not worth it.
You must be on the other side of the fence, because you can’t imagine anyone allowing someone to be dragged through Jackson like this, no matter who they are or what they’ve done.
The world feels like it’s spinning, and there’s pain radiating from the back of your skull.
Concussion? You’d never had one, but this is what it would feel like, right? Someone must have hit you. You don’t remember falling.
You don’t remember anything except Joel’s kiss goodbye from the breakfast table where he was sipping his bitter coffee. You kissed him, his hand sliding over your hip and pressing just enough for you to have second thoughts about getting to the barn on time.
You should have stayed with him.
You should have stayed.
It never crosses your mind that it would be Joel pulling you.
He would never.
And so you focus on that. It’s not Joel. He doesn’t know.
If he’d known, he wouldn’t have let it happen.
If he’d known, he wouldn’t have been able to look you in the eyes this morning.
He could barely look at you when he knew you were being kicked out a year ago before you were married. Now?
You’d have known.
You know everything in his eyes now. Pain. Love. Ecstasy. Loss. Fear.
You’d only seen love this morning as he tried to convince you to sit in his lap and be late.
No, he hadn’t known. Which meant Tommy hadn’t known.
For all the shit you give Tommy, he loves his brother, and he tries with you now. He’s sat with you for a few meals, tried to chat about the day. He smiles. He tries.
Which means it probably wasn’t Maria or the council, either, because Joel’s made it quite clear she tells Tommy everything, and Tommy has no problem telling it all right back over to Joel when it serves him or when it’s important. Especially now that they’re trying to rebuild bonds, Tommy spills everything.
You can’t imagine this would be a secret Tommy would try to keep, not with how hard he’s been trying to build a bridge back to you both.
“You awake yet?” Robbie speaks right as you start to figure out that he’s the only person left, his low voice that so many women might have found sexy striking fear into you. “You should fucking be.”
You try to speak, but it comes out as a muffled moan against the tape.
“Good.” He pulls you along the road roughly. “I want you to be awake for this.”
He doesn't say anymore, he doesn’t wax poetic about his plans or give you a villain's soliloquy as he pulls you through what you assume to be the woods outside of Jackson. You try to talk, try to get him to pull the tape off with muffled pleas, but it only earns you a kick to the ribs or to the hip any time you try.
After three of those, you decide that being quiet is, at least, going to prevent more bruises.
You’re not sure how long you've been gone for, it could be hours by now, but it doesn’t matter.
Joel isn’t expecting you until dinner. It will take him time to figure out you’re gone, and by that time it’ll be dark. They won’t send anyone out in the dark with the threat of hoards. The earliest they’ll send a patrol out to look for you will be tomorrow morning.
The dirt shifts to asphalt and then to concrete, you can tell the difference in how it drags along your jeans, the asphalt and concrete ripping them up as he pulls you on the makeshift sled. You’re sure there’s road rash on your calves by now, they have to be bleeding, but you don’t say anything, you just try to bend your knees and hold them up as he trudges along, stopping only every so often to catch his breath. You hear him take a drink, you hear him stop to piss after tying you to a tree so you can’t try to stumble away, but he always keeps going, always keeps you moving farther and farther away from Jackson.
You try to dredge up the ability to disconnect, to disassociate, to fly away. You haven’t had to use it in so long…
You just keep telling yourself to not expect anything, to stop daydreaming about valiant rescues. You want to believe that Joel will come.
But that’s only if he can find you… and if Robbie hasn’t done something to him, too.
~*~
Joel’s first stop is the stables, finding Eddie in the paddock when he doesn’t see you in the barn.
“Miller,” Eddie starts, leaning on the fence. “How are you?”
He shakes his head, unable to voice the feeling of dread low in his stomach. “My wife still here? She missed dinner and I can’t seem to find her.” He pauses, trying to hide his fear and looks back towards the barn. “I thought she was mucking stables today?”
Eddie sinks, and immediately the little pocket of worry in Joel’s stomach starts to grow. “Would have been, yeah, if she showed up.”
“What do you mean? She left for work this morning just like always.” He can’t help it now, the fear wraps around his heart like a vice at the way Eddie’s eyes grow wide.
“I just assumed she was laid up with a migraine, she’s about due for one how she gets ‘em every few months and what with the rain we just had…” Eddie stops, face just a little white. “I guess I shoulda checked- she never misses a day without sayin’.”
“Never,” Joel huffs out, turning away from the stables and ignoring Eddie’s calls after him, eyes open now as he starts to retrace every inch between the barn and the house, hoping you’re sitting in some corner with a twisted ankle. “Never.”
~*~
You fill time by wondering why he doesn’t have a horse. It would have been far easier for him to tie you to a saddle, to toss you over his lap and ride out wherever he plans on going instead of dragging this makeshift sled he has you tied to.
But if he took a horse, people would know who had it.
Jackson’s small, but not small enough that you could tell right away who was missing. It would take maybe a full day or two to account for everyone.
That must be what he’s counting on, that must be his plan.
You wonder just how far he’ll take you, legs aching, bladder full, head pounding, before he’ll at least stop for the night.
Except you don’t want to stop.
Not if Joel’s been right. Not if there are infected out here. He’s come home anxious every day from his patrols, checking locks and keeping a bat by the bed since they won’t let him keep a gun outside of the armory, sugarcoating and truncating his reports about what he’s seen.
There are infected around here. Robbie does patrols. He should know.
It’s the only thing that gives you some solace: Robbie does patrols. He should know where it will be safe to hole up for the night, where to avoid infected, what signs to look for with raiders and hunters.
You don’t know what his plans are with your life, but you’re fairly confident he would at least want to save his own.
Finally, he stops.
“Here will do. And we’ll be gone by morning, anyway.”
~*~
“You’re gonna get on a fucking horse, and you’re gonna come with me right now!” Joel grabs Tommy by the collar, pulling him out of his house as the sky starts to turn from pink to purple with dusk.
Tommy twists out of his grip, pushing Joel to arm’s length. “Joel, you know what the fuck is out there right now! In the dark we got no-”
Joel stops, pushing into his brother, nose to nose. “Yeah, Tommy, it’s getting fucking dark out. She’s been missing since this morning and no one’s-”
“What are you going to do in the fucking dark, Joel?” Tommy seethes, his voice dropping. “I don’t like it, either, but we’ve been finding more and more of ‘em. You stumble onto hoard in the fucking dark and then what?” Tommy shakes his head at Joel’s dark stare. “You get yourself killed, then who is gonna find her, huh?”
Joel pushes him away, knowing he’s right but not caring in the least. Some things you risk everything for. “Fine.”
“We’ll go out at first light!” Tommy calls out after him, but Joel doesn’t turn back, doesn’t even entertain the idea of waiting that long.
~*~
It’s a cabin or a tent. There’s some kind of wood floor under you, you’re inside something by the way the sound bounces and the wind stops. He still hasn’t untied you, hasn’t taken the band from your eyes or the tape from your lips.
When he starts to touch you, starts to undress you, he keeps those things in place. It’s all you can do to focus on breathing through your nose, on trying to keep the panic out of your body so you don’t suffocate. You fight every instinct you have to kick and punch and fight because you know you won’t be able to fight and breathe at the same time tied up like this, you know that he’s got enough weight on you to easily overtake you, and you don’t want to fight now and lose an opportunity later.
So you breathe. You focus on slow in and slow out and not on his hands on your body, his fingers pulling at your clothes and the ripping sound of the knife slicing through them. You try to ignore the pain of him flipping you on your stomach and bouncing your already painful head off the ground, you pretend you can’t hear his rant about the scar that splits you hip to hip.
Joel loves that scar.
He kisses that scar.
Every time you try to cover it or hide it, Joel reminds you that that scar is how you’re here with him. He reminds you that scar is your resilience and your perseverance.
Tears fill your eyes when you think about how fucking gentle Joel is with you in those moments when you doubt yourself, when you hate yourself, when you feel like you’re not good enough.
Hope fills your heart when you think about just how goddamn brutal he’s going to be when he finds you. With each slow breath you think about what Joel will do, how he’ll pull Robbie off of you, how he’ll hurt him.
You know it’s a dark place neither if you might come back from, but in this moment, the bloody revenge fantasy is no worse than the deep, dark pit that awaits you if you let yourself feel his hands on you, his body in and against you, as Robbie takes what he thinks is his.
He knows you’re Joel’s. You’ve told him. Joel’s told him.
Robbie knows you’re Joel’s.
He just doesn’t understand what’s coming for him.
~*~
“You shoulda stayed back,” Joel mutters, hand on his gun, trying to follow the odd scratch marks in the ground with his flashlight.
“Yeah, well,” Ellie follows his steps exactly, avoiding adding any confusion to the tracks he’s trying to follow. “I wasn’t gonna let you go alone, and we make a pretty good team.”
“Yeah,” he mutters. All the horses were accounted for, so that meant he was on foot, which meant he’d be harder to follow but that he couldn’t have gotten that far with you.
“You’re sure it’s Robbie?” Ellie asks quietly, evening settling into night now and making all the dangers just that much easier to sneak up on them.
“He’s the only one been bothering her, and he ain’t around.” Joel pauses, looks at the ground, and keeps moving.
“You think she’s okay?” Ellie asks, hesitant.
Joel keeps moving, never breaking stride. “If she ain’t perfect, he’s a fucking dead man.”
~*~
You don’t sleep. Even when he leaves you alone, huddled in on yourself in your shredded clothing, you don’t sleep.
You can’t see, can’t really move now that he’s tied your hands to your feet to keep you from getting up, and you can’t speak with the tape still on your mouth.
You’ve pissed yourself more than you care to think about, though it doesn’t seem to stop him or bother him. You're thirsty. Your stomach rumbles with hunger. He doesn’t feed you. Doesn’t give you water.
It makes you wonder what his goal is when he treats you like this. If he wanted to steal you away from Joel, get you to be his, he’d have to make you want to stay with him.
This? This is cruelty.
You can only see death at the end of this road.
His is preferable, but yours is more likely.
~*~
“Fuck!” Joel curses when he loses the trail to asphalt, the dragging in the dirt disappearing into the street.
The old road is broken, the way forward pitch black with only a sliver of the moon in the sky. “We keep going,” Ellie says quietly, stepping onto the street even as Joel paces next to her.
“How?” He asks, tired and frustrated and the adrenaline finally ebbing enough for his fear to seep through, his voice climbing louder than a whisper in his frustration. “How the fuck are we gonna find her on this?”
“Dunno,” Ellie sighs, reaching back and grabbing Joel’s arm, “But we’re not stopping.”
“No,” he finally agrees after a deep breath, falling in next to her. “We’re not stopping.”
“You do patrols more than me, you know all the little hidden places and trails,” she whispers, sweeping her flashlight back and forth, looking for any sign on the road of where anyone might have left a track. “Where would he go?”
“I don’t fuckin’ know,” he sighs, eyes higher, looking for signs of smoke or lights, hints of any of the dozens of dangers they could run into out here.
“Yeah, you do,” Ellie prods, stopping. “If you were gonna fucking kidnap someone, where would you take them?”
“I wouldn’t-” His protest dies on his lips. No, of course he wouldn’t kidnap anyone, but he knows what is out this way. He knows that if he wanted to stay away from the patrols, he’d have done the same damn thing. The realization hits him like a freight train, taking his breath. “Mother fucker.”
Ellie smiles, a little flicker of hope blooming. “Then lead the way, man. Let’s fucking go!”
~*~
It’s familiar and foreign all at once.
You pull your hand from the doorknob, turning around to look at the little backyard. It’s small, and the sun is warm on your face as you turn, squinting.
Something swishes around your legs, and you look down to see you’re wearing a dress, little flip flops on your feet. Your eyes flit back up at the half-finished woodworking project on the lawn. Sawhorses hold up long planks of wood, and there is a pile of tools next to them.
It makes your brain itch.
You start to step towards it, but something tells you to go into the house.
As soon as you move past the threshold, you feel right. Something is familiar and perfect about this place, even though you’ve never been here before, can’t recall it from a memory.
There’s a table by the back door, handmade, with keys and a wallet and a very familiar watch on it, ticking away the seconds. You only pause for a moment, looking at it, running your fingers over it, because you need to move further into the house. You need to find out what that sound is.
It’s laughter and light and happiness.
It’s soft singing.
There’s a teenage girl with her back to you as you move into the kitchen. She has a baby in her arms, holding the little one and bouncing them gently. There’s another baby in a bassinet, just next to the table.
“You’re not supposed to be here yet, you know,” she says, turning to you. Her riotous curls bounce around her face as she smiles at you. Her eyes are warm and soft and you see something in her, something so familiar…
She looks like Joel when she smiles. Just a little. Just around the eyes and the curve of her lip and the shape of her jaw.
“They’ve been so good.” She steps over to you and sets the child in your arms. You take him, because you know it’s a him and that he’s your him as sure as you know the girl before you is Sarah, and cuddle him tight.
“They were always so good,” you whisper, remembering the ease of the pregnancies, remembering the hours you whispered your hopes and dreams to the little beings in your belly and how they summersaulted as you talked to them.
Your only companions.
Your only lifelines for so long.
She takes the baby back, holding him tight. “He’s coming, ok?”
“Who?”
“Just, just hold on a little longer.”
“Who?”
“I promise he’s coming. They both are.”
She turns away from you, and no matter what you say, she can’t hear you as everything fades into a dark, empty void.
~*~
You must have drifted to sleep at some point, because you come to to him on top of you again, hips rutting into yours, pushing against torn and bruised flesh as he grunts his release.
You focus on your breathing, on the nothingness that is the blackness behind your eyelids, on the remnants of the dream or the vision or whatever it was that are quickly vanishing.
On the clicking sounds that come every so often.
It doesn’t register, at first, because for fifteen years those clicks surrounded you day in and day out.
But when he’s done, when he’s lying on you and panting in your ear and struggling to tie your feet together again, you hear it.
Only one thing makes that sound. Only one thing can.
You move your hands, lashing out, searching for his mouth to try to stop him from making any noise, hoping you can cover his mouth long enough for him to hear what you hear.
Instead, he curses and kicks you, drags you by the tied hands over the rough wood and out the door.
It must be morning; you feel warmer immediately.
You don’t know what happens next. You can only hear the screeching and the screaming. You get pulled and tossed and there are more than just two hands on you and there’s fucking pain in your shoulder before you finally wiggle yourself to the ground, and as you’re rolling away you hear Robbie screaming.
It’s the only chance you have. You roll as far away from the screaming as you can until you hit a wall. You slow your breathing even as you hear Robbie’s death cries.
You make yourself as small and as quiet as possible as you hear the clicker tear at his flesh, slowing the breaths from your nose until they’re barely there.
You work as hard as you can to make yourself disappear.
Oh man the latest chapter of Tender Payment for Our Sins was so hard for me. I knew the warnings but my god that was tough
I thought the readers SA was a thing of the past and wouldn’t happen again. What made you write her experiencing SA again? I really wish it didn’t happen at all.
I love your writing but I need a few days to come back from this one. Thank you 💕
Hi anon,
Yeeeaaaahhhhh...
I knew this wasn't going to be a fun chapter for people. I also have to apologize- going back as I was posting this chapter yesterday I realized I may not have been clear about the fact that SA would pop up again. I'm pretty "fandom old" and trigger warnings are still a new thing for me sometimes. I think if you were reading on AO3 it's a little more clear as I have the rape/non-con warning in the trigger warnings section. So... apologies if that was a lot.
I have a lot that I could say about why I chose to have this happen again, but I won't say all of it because some could be seen as spoiler-y for the last few chapters. We can absolutely revisit it after I finish posting if you have more questions.
What I will say is this: this story is, on it's most basic level, about finding agency and persevering when you can't control a lot of things. It's also about looking at what that darkness of future like we see in The Last of Us might really look like, especially for a woman. Also, from a character standpoint, if Robbie had taken reader and NOT assaulted her, it would not fit in with his character at all. He is NOT a good person, he does not have a redeeming bone in his body.
Robbie taking what he thinks he is owed could be looked at as a metaphor for so many things in life- how often are we screwed over by something that, in the end, has nothing to do with us? Life is not fair- if it were, Joel and reader would live happily ever after. But it's not, and what just happened in this chapter, and some of the things to come, really show that.
No matter how hard you work, no matter how good you are, no matter how kind you are, there are things out of your control that will take your life and turn it upside down. Chapter 64 is that. What we deserve and what we get aren't usually the same thing.
There's also a big point about autonomy coming up. I won't say more than that, but this is crucial in it.
And to me, as a writer, that is SO much more interesting than constant, happy fluff. The dark stuff is where we SEE the characters. (don't forget, though, eventual happy ending IS a tag on this story!!!)
This chapter, and maybe the next 1-2, are not going to be easy reads. They're not the happy, fluffy, soft life Joel and Reader have built in Jackson, but they are a look at what happens when you're at the end of the rope and there's nothing left to lose.
I hope that helped just a little. Let's circle back after the rest of the fic is posted and we can talk about the other themes that this needed to happen for.
I'm sorry it was rough enough that you needed a few days. Sending you love. 💕
