Chapter Text
you stupid bitch, can’t you see?
the perfect one for you is me.
The first time Ellie arrived in Jackson, Wyoming, it was nothing more than a thoroughfare on the journey to giving her life meaning. Every time that Ellie has arrived in Jackson, Wyoming, it’s been with a different goal in mind.
Getting to Salt Lake City, starting over, losing Joel, losing her mind, losing Dina, starting over (again).
This time, she arrives outside the city gates with her life’s meaning from eight years ago burning a hole in her pocket. She idles the Bronco outside the watchtower before killing the engine and hopping out of the truck. There’s a moment of haziness where she half-expects to see Jesse standing guard, his feet kicked up on the fence and a sandwich hanging out of his mouth. Instead, she sees one of the kids that she remembers used to antagonize her and Dina, constantly goading them and egging them on for a challenge: an arm-wrestling match, a foot race, a snowball fight. No longer a child, but a teenager standing guard.
He gazes down at her, and doesn’t say a word. Instead, he reaches for the walkie talkie on his hip and says something inaudible into it. His eyes never leave hers, and he nods along with whatever the person on the other end of the walkie-talkie is saying. She distinctly sees his mouth form the word “okay,” before he’s nodding back down at Ellie and hollering down to the guys who are behind the gate.
The doors rumble as they creak open, parting enough that she can make her way through them. Before she can get very far, she sees the distinct, familiar shape of Maria emerging through the guards.
“It’s about time,” she hums, and there is no frustration in her voice. There is no judgement. She knows that if Maria knew even half of what she’d been doing and who she’d been doing it with, that would change drastically. Instead, Maria steps forward, scoops Ellie into her arms and pulls her in. “Thought I’d have to send Tommy to track you down.”
“This new guy heard my story, told me about a woman that he traded with while he was moving through California. Described her as built like an ox, traveling with a kid with scars across his face."
“‘I’ll make her pay.’ That’s what you said when we got back to Jackson.”
I’ll make her pay.
She didn’t speak to Tommy when she came back to Jackson the last time, when she came to say goodbye. She didn’t speak to anybody but Dina, and that had been hard enough.
Fuck. Dina is here. Not in front of her, but here. In this proximity. In this area. Too close and too far at the same time.
Ellie brings herself back to the present, giving Maria a weak smile that comes up slightly higher on one side of her face than the other – an awkward, uncomfortable, lobsided attempt at normalcy. “It’s been a long time,” she finally manages.
“I’ll say,” Maria laughs, stepping away just to drop an arm around her shoulder. “Where’ve you been? How’ve you been? Do you need anything? Food?”
“I’m okay,” Ellie says quietly, uneasily. “I would like to talk to you about something, if you have the time.”
“Time? For you? All the time in the world, El.”
Maria’s home is at the end of a cul-de-sac. It’s smaller than the one that she and Tommy once shared, one street down from Joel’s. Ellie used to spend time imagining what the lives of the people who once lived in these homes were like. Did they have kids? Did they disappoint those kids? Did they take care of one another? Were they honest? Were they good? Nowadays, she doesn’t wonder anymore. She’s tired of imagining the ghosts that once wandered the halls and cooked in the kitchen. She’s tired of being plagued down with the thought of where they wound up.
Maria is sitting across from her at the kitchen table, a glass of lemonade set down in front of them both. Jackson never seems to get too hot, even in the summertime, but Maria’s lemonade always manages to hit the spot no matter the weather.
“So,” Maria speaks, filling the silence that Ellie wedged between them, “where have you been?”
“Around,” is Ellie’s sorry excuse for an answer. She scratches at the inside of her arm, fidgeting in her seat. She knows it’s not a good enough answer, just as she knows that she owes it to Maria to at least give her some version of the truth – especially when that truth is what led her back here in the first place. “I, uh. I went to Austin,” she finally spits out. “Went back to Joel’s place. Saw where he lived.” She reaches for her glass of lemonade, desperate for a distraction, for something to do with her hands before continuing.
“I found a letter a while back. It was from this woman named Lydia. It was a birthday card for Sarah.” She watches the way Maria’s gaze flickers with the name, one that she had very clearly heard before in passing. “Lydia was – is – was… Sarah’s mom.”
“I know,” Maria hums after a moment. “She and Tommy used to write letters back and forth, before you and Joel made your way to Jackson. He said he owed it to Joel to keep in touch with her.”
It still sends a stone dropping to the pit of her gut to hear people bring up Joel’s name. She doesn’t know if that feeling will ever go away, but she tries her best to swallow it down. “So, I found her. They have a community down in Texas that’s a lot like this. Self-sustaining, farming, hunting. She’d never left. And…” Carefully, quickly, she tries to piece together the pieces of this story that she can divulge without addressing the ox in the room. “There was this girl I met. Her name is Hanna. And…”
It gives her pause. The thought of Hanna. The brief journey her mind wanders off on, thinking about what Hanna is doing right now. Where Hanna is. Who Hanna is with.
She knows the answers to some of these questions, and it makes the knot in her gut clench even further.
Maria doesn’t know, and Maria won’t understand. That’s the thing. Nobody will. There is not one thing she could say, one way that she could frame this story, where it would end in any way other than Ellie being sent packing. Or worse.
Probably worse.
Probably a lot worse.
Another few careful edits are made.
“It turns out, Joel was right when he said that there were more immune people out there than just me. Because Hanna is immune.” Maria’s eyes widen, lips parting with no words coming out. Ellie continues.
“We went to Galveston and… there was a Firefly base there. People who have been working, still working, on finding a cure. And finding Hanna? That was big. That…” she wrestles with her hands in her lap. Inhale. Exhale. “I’d told Joel that I wanted my life to matter, I wanted to do something – be something more. And this was my chance. I wanted to finish what I started.”
“Ellie,” Maria speaks, treading lightly and warily. “Joel did what he did—”
“—to save me,” Ellie cuts her off. “I get it. I know. But my choice was taken from me. And I don’t know if that’s something that I have ever really been able to let go. But… meeting Hanna? Meeting the Fireflies? I knew that there was more that I could do. That I had to do.”
Maria is patient, nodding her head and leaving her lips set in a firm line. She straightens her stance and sets her eyes on Ellie’s. “So?” she asks. “What did you do?”
Shakily, Ellie reaches into the side pocket of the backpack at her feet, pulling out one of the small vials and sliding it across the table at Maria. “This. I did this.”
Maria settles her gaze on the small bottle sitting in the space between them, eyes softening with realization. She reaches forward, curling her fingers around the bottle. “Ellie…” she drifts off. She shakes her head, mouth opening and closing. Her eyes lift again, brimming with tears. “And you’re okay?”
"I’m okay,” she nods. “It’s… it’s a really long story, and I’d love to tell it to you someday, but. I’m okay. And it never was just me. When Joel told me that, it was bullshit. But it wasn’t. It was never just me.” She gestures to the bottle in Maria’s shaking hands. “They’re still working on replicating it and figuring out a way to distribute it, but I wanted to make sure that you got one. If you don’t want to take it, you don’t have to. You can hold onto it, you can do whatever you want with it.” She reaches back down to the bag and pulls out a second tube, sliding it across the table to her. “For Tommy.”
Maria takes it, but gives her a knowing look. “You know, he’d probably really appreciate getting it directly from you.”
Every time she thinks of Tommy Miller, she sees him sitting across from her in the farmhouse. She hears his words, his judgement. His hatred. She sat across from him, watching every fond memory of him burn away in ripples and waves until nothing was left but frayed edges and ashes.
“I can’t do that,” she admits. “I’m sorry.”
Maria closes her fingers around the two bottles of hope in her hand, nodding somberly back at her. “Don’t carry your anger forever, Ellie,” she tells her gently. “It’s okay to put things down when they get too heavy.”
She appreciates the sentiment, appreciates that no matter what, Maria never seems to feel like a stranger to her. It doesn’t mean she’s going to talk to Tommy Miller.
The last time she’d seen Dina, she’d been standing on the porch of Jesse’s family home. Dina had been present, but a million miles away at the same time.
“I need you to figure out what you want. What’s going to bring you back. You deserve peace, Ellie. But so do I.”
That had been well over a year ago. She doesn’t even know if Dina is still here. If either of them are.
She finds herself with her heart somewhere between her throat and her stomach, fidgeting from foot to foot as she hesitates from where she stands on the front pavers.
This is why you’re here, kiddo, Joel’s voice presses in her mind. She knows she doesn’t imagine it quite right, that she’ll never get his rasp just right, the depth. Despite this, it brings her comfort – the ghost who sits on her shoulder.
A deep breath, and she steps forward. Again. Again.
Again.
Until her knuckles are curled and she’s rapping at the wooden door. Softer, and then firmer. More certain.
It takes a moment. She hears rustling from behind the door, a familiar laugh bouncing off the walls and a deeper voice that she doesn’t quite recognize. The door creaks open and, out of reflex, she’s holding her breath.
On the other side of the door is not Dina. It’s Astrid, Jesse’s old patrol partner. Her blonde hair is shorter than the last time Ellie had seen her, but her round cheeks are as annoyingly rosy as ever. Once upon a time, she was convinced that Cat had a crush on Astrid – and, frankly, most people did, so it wouldn’t have been that much of a stretch.
“Ellie?” Astrid’s voice solves the mystery of who she’d heard from behind the door. Her eyebrows raise, her lips part in surprise. “Oh, my god.”
“Uh, yeah,” Ellie shuffles on her feet again, looking down. Looking anywhere but ahead of her. “Hey.” She curls a strand of unruly hair behind her ears. “Is, uh… is Dina here?”
Astrid’s cheeks flush and it takes her a beat before she nods. “Yeah, let me… let me go get her.” She backs up into the house a few steps before pausing. “Do you want to come in?”
It’s asked with such familiarity that Ellie knows that this house is not only one that Dina still calls home, but one that Astrid does, as well. Copper bites at her tongue before she can swallow it down.
“No, that’s okay.”
Astrid doesn’t have to go much further into the house before she sees her. Dina. Her hair is in a loose braid that hangs over her shoulder, and she looks…
Beautiful. Healthier and happier than the last time she’d seen her.
This Dina is the one from the farmhouse. Glowing and warm and comfortable in her environment. Someone who was able to see horrible things and come back from them.
Her eyes lock with Astrid’s for a moment before they turn, landing on Ellie.
Everything softens and everything stills.
“Ellie,” she breathes out.
Every breath that Ellie’s been holding seems to catch one on top of the other. She doesn’t know who moves first, her or Dina, but she imagines it has to be Dina because her feet are glued down in the space between the porch and the foyer. Dina crosses over, folding her arms tightly around her and pulling her in close. Ellie smells daisies, bonfire smoke, baby powder, and something she can’t quite place. Something that’s new, but entirely Dina ever the same.
She wills her arms to raise, to hug her back, to pull her in tightly. The room spins on its axis, and she keeps hold. She tries to remember what it feels like to come home, but can’t place the puzzle pieces in the way she wants them to go. She closes her eyes, trying harder, and Dina pulls away. Not far, but enough.
“You’re okay,” Dina murmurs.
“You’re okay,” is all that Ellie can echo.
Dina takes another step back, folding her hands together in front of her stomach before swinging them back out to the sides. In a way, it almost gives Ellie comfort that Dina feels just as uncomfortable as she does.
“Mama!” a voice breaks through the white noise between them and nearly knocks Ellie to her knees in the process. She turns her head and sees him. JJ. Her little potato.
“Oh shit,” Ellie whispers before she can stop herself.
He’s the perfect combination of Dina and Jesse, feet clad in brown boots and rocking a pair of overalls with a T-Rex across the chest. A too-big cowboy hat tips off his head, and Ellie gets the faintest glimpse of Lev in the back of her mind before she can tuck him back away.
“Hey, buddy,” Dina exhales, turning quickly to scoop the toddler up in her arms. She swings him around for a minute, pressing a kiss to his forehead.
JJ’s eyes focus on Ellie, two chocolate brown pools staring back at her. “Friend?”
“Friend,” Dina agrees. “JJ, this is Ellie.”
The reintroduction stings more than Ellie had thought it would. Actually, Ellie hadn’t thought about the reintroduction at all. She doesn’t know if she just didn’t fathom seeing JJ in the first place, but she knows that she definitely didn’t anticipate having to meet him again.
“Hey there,” Ellie says quietly, giving him the best smile she can muster. She sees him at the old farmhouse, giggling at Dina and Ellie as they danced around the kitchen. The smile he would get on his face when Ellie would do voices during his bedtime stories. The way he would always reach for the sheep with his chubby hands and bright smile.
Dina looks between Ellie and JJ before her eyes turn to Astrid, who is hovering near the stairs. They exchange a look wordlessly, and Astrid quickly steps into action.
“J-Man!” she cheers, snagging him from Dina’s arms and giving him a small spin. “Let’s go play with the puppies in the backyard, okay?”
“The puppies!” JJ exclaims. He looks at Ellie with a big smile. “We have puppies! Eugene is brown and Dolly is white.”
“Puppies are awesome, dude,” Ellie gives him a nod of agreement. “I know one named Harry.”
“Puppies are hairy!” JJ smiles brightly back at her. He gives Ellie a wave over Astrid’s shoulder before they head further into the recesses of the house. They round a corner, and JJ is gone.
Ellie swallows the lump that has managed to form in her throat, sniffing and looking down at her feet.
“Do you want to come in?” Dina asks quietly, repeating Astrid’s question from earlier.
Ellie finds herself shaking her head, taking a step further back onto the porch. “No, I’m… I think I’m better out here.”
She doesn’t belong in that house.
Dina follows her out to the porch, quietly clicking the door shut behind her. “I didn’t know if I’d ever see you again,” she says after a moment. “I hoped I would.”
“He’s beautiful, D,” is what Ellie musters in response. “He’s so big.”
“You’re telling me,” Dina replies with a weak laugh. “I think I’ve gotten less tired chasing after infected than I have chasing after him.”
The weight of watching her old world move on without her feels like a knife jutting between her ribs.
"You seem happy,” Ellie says after a moment. “You look happy.”
Dina doesn’t reply, but she doesn’t have to. That’s the thing about Dina – she wears her feelings, and her heart, on her sleeve. It was one of the first reasons Ellie fell so hard for her.
It’s a moment that stretches for a year between the two of them, particles of unsaid words and broken promises lingering in the space that separates Ellie from Dina. And finally, Dina speaks. “Astrid just… She came by a lot after we got back. She was really torn up about Jesse, and—”
“—it’s okay,” Ellie cuts her off. “You don’t owe me any kind of explanation, Dina. You don’t owe me anything after… fuck. After everything.” She looks down at her feet, closes her eyes for a moment to focus on the sound of the windchimes hanging off the porch railing. She inhales. She lets herself be for a moment. “I’m happy that you’re happy,” she says once she opens her eyes to look back at Dina. “You and JJ deserve everything good in this world.”
Dina’s fingers spread, hand reaching out for her. She stops before she can grab hold, curls her fingers back into her palm and pulls back. It doesn’t hurt as much as it once had, and it manages to fuel Ellie to keep going.
“I think… I think that we were at the right place at the wrong time, and I don’t know if we can ever fix that,” she says, treading carefully over her words. “But I know that I wouldn’t have made it out of Seattle alive without you. I don’t know if I would have survived much of anything without you.” Dina opens her mouth to speak, but the dam that Ellie had been so carefully construction has burst, and she can’t stop. Not yet. “I mean it when I say you deserve everything, because you do. You deserve so much better than I could give you. I don’t even know where I am most of the time, I don’t know who I am. But… But, I’m working on it. Like, every day, I’m trying to figure it out, and I’m trying to be okay with who I am and where I am. But you need something good, and something solid, and something that you can count on. You finally look like you remember how to breathe, and I know that time is a big part of that, but I think she is, too. JJ is. Astrid is. And you deserve anything that gives you that kind of peace.”
“Ellie…”
Ellie shakes her head, trying her hardest to keep herself grounded. To keep her feet planted. To not start pacing, to not fiddle with her hands or find another way to distract herself from the words she’s needed to say for so damn long.
“I didn’t know what was going to happen when I came back here,” she admits. “I didn’t know what it would feel like to come home again, and… and I don’t think this is my home anymore. I know it’s not. I don’t think it ever could be again.” A shaky inhale, and she shrugs her backpack off her shoulder, reaching into the front pocket of her backpack and pulling out the small vial. She reaches forward, taking Dina’s hand and curling her fingers around the tube. “This is for you,” she says softly.
Dina looks down at the tube, her eyes widening. When she looks back up at Ellie, her eyes are swimming with tears. “Ellie… how…?”
"I always told Joel that I wanted my life to matter, and I… I really hated him for taking that away from me. I hated him so fucking much, and that anger hadn’t even gone away when I lost him. I kept thinking that if I could just finish what I’d started that maybe… maybe some of that anger would go away. Maybe all of it would go away.” She hasn’t given it much thought, but if she did, she would be able to admit that the tightness in her chest gets less and less constricting with each day that passes. She could confess that her jaw isn’t so clenched. Her shoulders don’t ache like they used to. “And I found this whole… this whole group of people who were like me.” Dina is mesmerized, looking between the cure and Ellie.
“This is just the beginning,” Ellie tells her. “They’re working on making more and making replicants and getting it out. I don’t know how long that will take, but I wanted you to have this. You deserve this, D. JJ deserves this.”
Dina wipes the tears away with the back of her hand, closing the gap between them and holding her tightly to her chest. Ellie thinks back to every moment before this – the dance in the barn, the Seattle theater, the farmhouse kitchen. A million different versions of Ellie and Dina between then and now.
"Thank you,” Dina whispers. “Thank you, Ellie.”
“I should be the one thanking you,” Ellie counters, trying to blink the tears away before they run free. “You brought me back. Over and over again, even when I didn’t deserve it. You brought me back. Every time.”
They pull away, and Dina gives her a quiet, shaky smile. “You’re a fucking rockstar. You did it.” She looks back at the vial, holding it tightly in her hand like it’s the most precious thing she’s ever touched. She glances over her shoulder, back toward the house, before turning back to look at Ellie. “If you don’t have anywhere else to be… we’ll probably make something to eat soon. Would you like to stay? J would probably love to show you his dinosaur collection. I know it doesn’t work like that, but I really feel like he had to have gotten it from you.”
She knows that she doesn’t really mean it. She doesn’t really want her to stay, nor does she expect Ellie to actually take her up on the offer. If Dina let herself think about it for more than a few seconds, if she let herself think about it without the rose-glow of the cure curled around her fingers, she will realize how terrible of an idea that really would be. How awkward. How uncomfortable for each person involved, probably including JJ.
“That’s okay,” Ellie tells her softly, giving her one final, parting smile. “I’ve got one more place to go.”
Joel Miller’s gravestone has a bouquet of wilted tulips, some yellowing cards in tattered envelopes, and a few dinosaur figurines scattered around the base. Ellie imagines Dina bringing JJ here, imagines them sitting in front of the gravestone and paying their respects. Dina explaining to her son that Joel is one-half of his namesake, that he is somebody very important to somebody who was once very important to her.
“Hey, old man,” Ellie says softly, voice shaking as she takes a seat on the grass in front of his tombstone. She hadn’t paid a visit to his grave the last time she’d been in Jackson, too humiliated from her final goodbye with Dina, too terrified of running into Tommy and having to stare down the barrel of her own failures one last time.
She brushes away a couple leaves that have landed on top of the stone, knowing that more than anything else, she’s just stalling for time.
“I wanted to talk to you,” she carries on after a moment. “I mean… I feel like I talk to you all the time, or at least I think about talking to you all the time. I write you letters sometimes, and I curse you out other times. We talk a lot, you and I.” She sniffs, bringing one knee up to her chest just to give her arm a place to rest. “I just wanted to tell you that… I did it. We-we did it. The cure. The whole thing. I finished what I started. I…” She swallows the lump that is threatening to form in the hollow of her throat. “I met a girl named Hanna, and she… fuck, you’d care about her so much. She’s so good, and kind, and gentle, and she looks at the world in a way that a lot of people can’t anymore. In a way that I sure as fuck can’t.”
She can’t help but wonder if this is how Joel felt every time he was away from her. Like there was an appendage missing, like the inside of his head and heart wouldn’t quiet down until he knew she was safe and where she belonged. She thinks about Hanna, about Lev, and it gives her a stomachache.
“She’s immune,” she continues. “Like. Immune. And… and it’s not just her, and it’s not just me. You were lying when you said that there were dozens, but you weren’t actually that far off. Because there are. There are so many that they were actually able to…” The lump returns. “We were able to make a sample, Joel. A cure, or the beginnings of a cure, I don’t know. But it’s something. It’s big.”
“And I met Lydia, who you never fucking told me about, by the way, and she kind of scares the shit out of me, but I really like her. She has this whole town set-up in Texas. I know you had all your own shit going on after you lost Sarah, but did you ever wonder what it would have been like to stick around?”
She keeps talking. She talks until the sun is beginning to set, casting the makeshift graveyard that is far too full in shades of ambers and golds. She tells him about going back to Lincoln, about finding Bill. She tells him about Ish and his bright-eyed daughter (“And I’m not losing my mind, right? The sewers in Pittsburgh had all those letters from some dude named Ish?”). She tells him about Zoe and Dean and Pete, and how Dean and Pete keep her awake at night sometimes with how much they remind her of Sam and Henry and the future they deserved to have.
And Lev.
“He’s so fucking smart, and I think you would have loved him so damn much. I keep trying to teach him guitar and he’s really fucking bad at it.” She laughs to herself, thinking back to the chords that Lev can never seem to tune just right and how they’re maybe some of the best songs she’s ever heard. “He’s a better shot than I ever was, and…”
Her mind drifts, and the image of Lev that is being painted in her mind expands, zooming out on the canvas until the figure behind him comes into view. Broad shoulders and dishwater blonde hair that falls just past them. A scar on her cheek, and one side of her smile that always seems to quirk higher than the other. “He and Abby are inseparable. She loves him the same way you loved me. In the would-shoot-down-a-hospital-to-save-him kind of way.” She worries her thumbnail between her teeth for a moment, a sober clarity lapping at her heels like the tide. “I was furious at you. Sometimes, I still am. Because it wasn’t your decision to make. But, I understand. Now more than ever, I get it. I get what it means to care about someone so much that nothing else comes close.”
She thinks about holding the knife to Lev’s throat on the beach that night so long ago, knowing that it was the only way she would get Abby to fight her back. She remembers her eyes rolling back to her head every time she was held under the water and silently screaming, begging, for Abby to just put her out of her misery and kill her.
Go. Just take him, Ellie had cried, the boat pulling away and leaving her with the tide.
She hadn’t known what she wanted from Abby that night – to kill her or let Abby kill her.
“It’s fucked up,” Ellie continues after a moment. “It’s fucked up, but I think I needed her. I think she’s my best friend, which I will never fucking understand, and I don’t expect you to understand, and I don’t expect you to forgive me. But, I think that you would love her.” The tears spill and she doesn’t try to stop them. She lets them fall, let’s them soak into her skin. “She likes to read, and she sings along to the radio when she doesn’t think anyone is listening. She does everything for the people that she cares about and she always burns the first thing she cooks, but makes up for it with the next batch. She’s…”
Home.
Abby is home. Lev is home. Hanna is home. Because home isn’t a place, and home has never been a place. It’s a feeling, it’s a community. It’s a person, and it’s people. It’s them.
"You were my home,” Ellie says through a trembling breath. “This was my home. But I think it’s time for me to go. And I just wanted to say thank you. I wish I’d said that more when you could actually hear it and respond to it. But thank you, Joel. I don’t know if I’ll be back here, I don’t know if I’ll see you again, or when I’ll see you again. But I don’t think you can ever really be too far from me, you know? So, I don’t want to say goodbye.”
She stands on shaky legs, flexing her fingers out in front of her. The sun has set, leaving her illuminated by a few streetlamps, the moon, and nothing more.
“See you around.”
The foothills of South Dakota keep her company the first night, pushing the back seats of the Bronco down and falling asleep with a jacket that smells like pine trees and earth and something very specifically Abby rolled up underneath her head.
At her feet is an atlas that must have been tucked into her bag before she’d pulled out of Lago Vista, a note scrawled into the front cover reads:
So that you can find your way back home. -Lev
She drives on. Drives as summer shifts, from the afternoon sun burning high and hot to the nights starting to run cool. The way back doesn’t seem as fast, and she can’t tell if it’s because suddenly she feels like she has a purpose.
A finish line.
She knows it likely won’t be her final journey. She knows there’s a world to see, a country to explore, and one day she’s going to want to keep going. But not now. Not anytime soon.
For the first time in a long time, she’s excited to rest. She’s seeking out lazy mornings and quiet evenings surrounded by the people she was never, ever supposed to give two shits about.
At some point, it occurs to her that maybe she has this all wrong. Maybe, maybe, because there’s always a slim chance, Abby and Lev and Hanna didn’t go back to Lincoln, back to Bill’s Town. Maybe something happened to the horses. Maybe they changed their mind.
Maybe…
Her stomach can’t handle creating any more hypotheticals.
There’s a small part of her that feels a pinch of guilt when she thinks back to her time in Jackson. When she thinks back to Dina and Maria and the half-truths she gave them, the full story never to be disclosed.
They wouldn’t understand, that’s the thing. Nobody would. Ellie wouldn’t if it wasn’t happening to her, if she hadn’t been living it, if she wasn’t still living it right now. Nobody could look at what had happened those years ago – what had happened to Joel, what she and Dina and Tommy had endured in Seattle, what Ellie had done. When she sees the color red, she finds herself in the basement of a hospital. Any time Abby says the name Owen, it makes her knees shake like the floor is going to be knocked out from right under her.
The only person who can feel the gravity, the weight, of everything she’s done is the person she did everything to. It’s a painfully mutual and pathetically isolating feeling.
So, yeah. She can’t think about something derailing them from making it back to Lincoln. She can’t picture them anywhere else but in that stupid town with all its stupid booby traps. Safe. Home.
When you’re looking for the light, keep going.
She’s siphoning for gas on a gridlocked street in Erie, Pennsylvania when she hears them. The familiar grunts and clicks. Every gas tank is empty from those who came before her, but she’s studied Lev’s map to the point that she sees red and blue lines when she closes her eyes. She knows she’s too close now to stop. Even if she has to go to every vehicle on this damn road, she’s going to fill her tank.
Ellie tugs the hose out as the sounds grow nearer, ducking around the bumper of the truck and moving quietly across the road to the next vehicle. Joel had taught her years ago to always go for the oldest looking vehicles first, because newer models would make it “damn near impossible” to get the gas out, so she goes for a rusted pick-up truck and pulls open the fuel door with her heart in her throat.
They’re staggering closer, the echoes of the clicker sending a wave of goosepimples across her skin.
Her fingers shake as she flexes them in and out before she curls them into her fist to stop the tremors. “Not today,” she whispers to herself.
From overhead, she sees the leaves slowly scattering down in shades of gold and red.
Endure and survive.
In Lincoln, Massachusetts, watchtowers line each corner of the city. The first time Hanna Bradley saw them, she asked Ellie if something horrible had happened to Bill’s Town, leaving him as the only survivor.
“No,” Ellie had told her. “He wanted it that way. He did this himself.”
It was equal parts terrifying and fascinating how much you could accomplish when you were all you had left with all the time in an expired world.
Bill was grumpy, but nowhere near as much so as Ellie had always described him. He was crotchety and set in his ways and had some very confusing takes on events from the old world’s history, but he was also gentle. He was kind to Molly and considerate of Lev. He built a crib for Zoe and kept talking about “safety-ing up the place” at dinner.
“Because that kid’s gonna get into all my shit,” was his explanation, but Hanna suspected it was more than that.
Right now, Bill is out with Ish and Pete. He’d heard word over his radio that there were some survivors spotted outside of a town called Peabody. That is something else that Lev and Hanna have discovered about Bill – he keeps watch. He has a small community of other ‘bunker bros,’ as Abby calls them, who all send one another updates over their ham radios about strangers they see, leads they can follow. A community of loners trying to help one another, despite everything.
Hanna, meanwhile, is keeping watch. She’s brought a copy of some vampire romance novel that she’d snagged at the bookstore up on the watchtower with her and was perched in a lawn chair, her feet propped up on the railing surrounding her. At this point, ‘intruders’ to Bill’s Town are few and far between, and she’s not sure how much purpose her keeping watch is really serving in the grand scheme of things. But the newly autumn weather is peaceful, and it gives her time to read – and these days, she’ll take the wins.
She didn’t like to spend time thinking about her dad. It made her chest tight to think about what she had lost, to swallow down the guilt that she could have stayed, and she could have had those last few months with her dad. But she knows. She knows that she did what she had to do. What she was meant to do.
“Hey,” a voice calls out from below. Not a voice. His voice.
A smile blooms across the apples of her cheeks, and she glances down through the cracks in the railing to see him, a microscopic Lev and an even tinier Harry at his feet. “Hey yourself!”
“You know when Bill said to ‘keep a lookout,’ he didn’t mean you had to be up there all day, right? I think that’s just something he says.”
Hanna’s reply is a shrug. “I could be saving our lives up here, you never know.” She makes a finger gun and points it at him, pushing her thumb down to pull the trigger and making a quiet, “Pew!” sound by blowing her lips together.
Before Lev can interject, there’s a rumble from the other side of the gate. The familiar hum of an engine as it rolls across the gravel in the road, the tires crunching. She looks away from Lev, looks out in front of her.
A sky-blue Ford Bronco that at one point in time had absolutely seen better days comes to a stop in front of the gate, and everything inside Hanna’s body is in freefall. The tears are burning her eyes before she can even stand up, knocking her book to the floor and clutching onto the railing. “Oh, my god.”
“Hanna, what is it?” Lev’s voice asks, alarmed. He’s already moving like he’s ready to run up the steps after her.
“ELLIE!” Hanna cries out, her smile so wide it could split her face apart. She looks down at Lev, tears streaming. “It’s Ellie.”
The driver’s door opens, and Hanna watches as Ellie’s feet land on the soft tufts of earth beneath her feet. Her eyes look up, searching, and when her gaze finds Hanna’s, it’s like they both remember, all at once, what it feels like to come home.
Ellie’s heart is heavy in her chest, her mind a flurry of nothing more than faces and voices that all blur together until it’s one drone buzzing through her mind. She’s made peace, or maybe she’s just trying to make peace, but it feels like a start, and that’s more than she’s used to.
She thinks about everything that could happen, how those small vials could change the world as they’ve always known it. If this could be the flap of the butterfly’s wings that causes the tsunami that sweeps everything and everyone off its axis.
I was supposed to die in that hospital, she’d told Joel. My life would’ve fucking mattered. She hears those words when she tries to fall asleep at night, chases them through nightmares and half-assed promises. Maybe someday in the future she won’t feel haunted by the What Ifs? anymore.
It’s Hanna she sees first. She’s sitting in the post that’s normally occupied by Pete or Dean, and her feet are propped up on the railing. She’s smiling, which is good. It’s good, because she wasn’t sure the next time she’d see that girl smile. She’s looking off to the side, and Ellie can only imagine that it’s toward Lev.
They’re all here. Everybody is accounted for. Everybody made it back. The stone between her ribs gets a little lighter.
Hanna’s gaze shifts, and then her eyes land on the Bronco. She sees the way her face shifts, can read her lips as she exhales her name.
Her eyes close for a moment, gripping the steering wheel until her knuckles are white. She can see the farmhouse beyond her lids, can feel the hope that had vibrated in her chest that maybe Dina hadn’t kept her word. Maybe, maybe, Dina and JJ hadn’t really taken off when Ellie had left in the night.
And yet, she’d walked across the field to approach the house, everything looking just as she’d left it from the outside, and she still knew. She felt it. She knew she was going to open up the front door and find an empty house staring back at her. And she’d been right.
The idea of that happening again had been enough to make her debate turning the truck around more than a few times over the past couple weeks.
But. But. Much like that morning at the farmhouse, much like all that she had sensed, she knew this story was going to end differently. History didn’t always have to repeat itself.
It’s okay to put things down when they get too heavy.
She thought about Maria’s words a lot, wrote them into her journal, doodled them in the margins, mouthed them to herself. She felt like everything she had ever held onto was left with bruises and claw marks. She didn’t know the last time she had put anything down.
But maybe she could. Maybe she could try.
Ellie kills the engine and breathes out at the same time. She pushes the door open and hops out. The familiar creak and rumble of the gates pulling open brings her attention forward, brings her attention to the here and the now.
To Lev, who is bolting for her.
There is a golden retriever-shaped blur at his heels, jumping up on his hindlegs and placing his paws to her stomach. “It’s you,” Ellie says, ruffling her hands over his ears. He’s grown since the last time she saw him. She supposes that’s the thing about time. It keeps going.
Harry hops down, running circles around her, and she doesn’t have a chance to react before Lev is tackling her into a hug with his arms locked around her. “I didn’t know if I was going to see you again,” he speaks, muffled and teary, into her neck. “I hoped I would.” He corrects himself a moment later. “I think I knew I would.”
“I think you did, too,” Ellie whispers, hugging him back and pressing a kiss to the top of his head.
Her eyes open, looking over his shoulder, and seeing Hanna’s willowy frame darting toward them. She’s crying freely, smiling so wide it’s practically blinding. Lev can barely step away before Hanna is sweeping her into a hug. “You’re home,” she cries.
“I’m home,” Ellie murmurs back, and it feels good.
The first time Ellie arrived in Lincoln – in Bill’s Town – she could have never amount the drastic directions everything would have shifted for her, for everyone and everything, in such a short amount of time. She finds herself taking a similar path to the one that she had taken her very first time as she makes her way across the high street of town. Hanna and Lev are walking alongside her, talking a mile a minute on top of one another, and Ellie can barely hear them. She can’t hear anything louder than the thrumming of her heartbeat in her ears.
She sees the garden center with the goofy looking gnomes and bird baths. They seem more organized than they used to be, a little more picked together – as if one of the old residents of this community garden had come back to take care of it. She sees the arcade with the Angel Knives game that she closed her eyes and imagined playing, the one she talked Joel’s ear off about even though she knew he really didn’t give a shit. He’d let her talk about it anyway – he was always good like that.
She’d called this place her makeshift home just a few months ago, and it seems brand new. Like somebody has gone through all these old, decaying places and given them the love they’d long been deprived of.
They round the corner, seeing the road where Bill’s house and their house stand. There is an easel with a few pots of paint sitting on the front porch, and the gate that leads to the backyard has been left open.
Her heart stutters.
Lev and Hanna share a look between one another before Hanna takes a few steps back. “I’m going to go check on Zoe and Molly,” she says, and she can barely say it and maintain any sort of neutral expression on her face, the smile ready to boomerang off her cheeks at any second. Ellie hardly notices, is hardly aware of anything beyond her two feet moving her forward, walking her forward.
She sees the farmhouse again in the back of her mind but knows that this is different. Knows that she is different.
As she approaches the backyard, the world a gossamer vignette around her, she thinks back to a conversation that she and Abby had had not all that long ago. But, long enough.
“I’d grow grains, vegetables, fruit. Nothing big, but sustainable. My dad and I used to rehabilitate animals, and I think if I was able to leave this behind and do that, I’d go. Take Lev and Hanna and…”
“Sick of surviving?” Ellie had asked her.
"We shouldn’t have to survive like this,” Abby said. “Nobody should have to keep fucking surviving like this. If this is surviving, then, yeah, I’m sick of surviving. I don’t want to survive. I want to live.”
She sees a woman with her back to her, crouched in front of a baby tree. There is a hand-painted sign stuck into the ground beside it with a small red apple painted on it. And just like that, Ellie knows. She knows that she did it. She found her very own way to live, not merely survive. Abby had said that she was tired of surviving, and Ellie is finally exhausted enough that she’s able to admit that she is, too.
Abby’s hair has grown out a little more, a familiar braid loose and hanging between her shoulder blades. Ellie takes a moment to look around, noticing all the small wooden signs adorned with various painted fruits and vegetables. There are small plots with baby leaves and young saplings near the fence line. Sustainable living, or the beginnings of it, at least.
“Looks like Harvest Moon out here.”
All that time driving across state lines and staring out into the open sky, and that was the best line she could muster.
The hand that’s patting soil freezes, and Ellie watches as Abby’s shoulders rise just a little. She doesn’t turn around to face her – not yet.
“What the fuck is Harvest Moon?”
“It’s, like. It’s this old video game, or something. I heard it was good. But Eugene kinda had shitty taste, so maybe not.” She doesn’t remember if she’s ever told Abby about Eugene and realizes it really doesn’t matter.
None of this really matters.
Abby stands, and Ellie’s breath hangs in the balance of her chest.
When she turns, Ellie isn’t sure who steps closer first. She was right, this isn’t the farmhouse. This isn’t anything like walking into the unknown and being terrified of what’s waiting for you on the other side.
Abby smiles, unsteadily and crooked and wary. Her eyes are wide and crinkle right at the corners. This suits her – this backyard, the dirt on her knees, the sweat between her brows. Standing in a garden grove with the autumn sun shining down on her. This feels like exactly what it’s supposed to be.
“What are you doing here?” she asks.
This time, the response comes a little more naturally.
“You told me to go home.”
Abby’s head tilts just a little, unsaid words and questions flickering in her eyes like she’s waiting for the punchline, for the other shoe to drop in between them. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Ellie says, closing the gap between them. “So, that’s what I did.”
She hesitates, the question in her eyes like she isn’t sure she’s supposed to know the answer. Like it’s a gotcha! and the floor is going to drop out. “So, you’re home?”
“Pretty sure that’s what I’m getting at, yeah.”
The dam breaks, the smile blooming until Abby’s dimples pop. Dimples.
She doesn’t know who kisses who first, who takes the final step and brings them together. It’s teeth and tongue and a mess of arms and knees and a fucking laugh that’s swallowed down. What she does know is that when they pull away, it’s Abby’s words against her lips.
“Welcome home, Ellie.”
THE END