Fanfiction: Who We Were (The Last of Us)
I... I thought I was planning to write more Community fanfiction. How did I end up with time-travel fic for The Last of Us?
Well, I suppose I did want to write something in which Ellie interacted with Sarah. Here it is!
Title: Who We Were
Fandom: The Last of Us
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 5,200
Summary: In which Ellie goes back in time and meets a girl named Sarah.
Ellie doesn’t know how the hell she got here.
She dodges into the space between two houses and looks around for Joel. She can’t see him. Where is he?
There are people here. They don’t look infected. Her first thought is hunters, but they don’t really look like they’re working as a team; they’re mostly just walking along, ignoring each other.
Ellie tries to stay out of their sight anyway, just in case.
What is this, some kind of quarantine zone? They were looking for Joel’s brother, right? Did they finally reach wherever he’s living? Why can’t she remember?
Where’s Joel?
-
Something is bothering Ellie as she creeps along between buildings - you know, something more than the fact that she just found herself in this place with no memory of how she got here - and gradually she’s able to add more and more weird things to her mental list.
First off: the houses here aren’t boarded up. The windows are just windows, nothing covering them. There’s even still glass. Not just some of the time, either; there’s glass in all the windows she can see.
Second: there are cars. Not just by the side of the road. People are actually driving cars. And not just one or two; there are a lot of cars. It seems like there are cars going past every time she catches a glimpse of the road. Where are they getting the gas from? Where are they even going? You don’t waste gas just driving around a QZ.
Third: she can’t see any guards. How do they run a quarantine zone this big without armed guards? It makes her think of hunters again - maybe they got rid of the people in charge - but one guy’s caught sight of her already, and he didn’t seem all that interested in killing her. Maybe he figured a kid wouldn’t be carrying enough supplies to be worth his time.
Fourth: there are kids everywhere. Her age, and even younger. If you got pregnant back in the Boston QZ, people looked at you like you were infected. You give birth, there’s less food for everyone else. Does this place just... not have that stigma? Is this some magical place where there’s enough food to go around and people drive like it’s nothing?
Ellie tries stepping out onto the street, cautiously, hand on her concealed knife. A couple of people glance in her direction, smile, keep walking.
Where the hell is she?
-
There’s a guy selling newspapers on a street corner. Actual newspapers. And he’s asking for old money, not ration cards. This has to be a joke.
The papers look new. Ellie edges closer, trying to see what they say, and he notices her.
“Interested in a paper?” he asks. “You look like a young lady who likes to keep up with the news.”
A very weird possibility has just occurred to her. Although maybe ‘possibility’ isn’t the right word.
“Is this supposed to be today?” she asks, pointing at the date on one of the newspapers.
He laughs. “Yeah, that’s today.”
So apparently it’s 2013. And August, but Ellie’s a lot more interested in the ‘2013’ part. It explains a lot, she guesses, but it also makes literally no sense.
August 2013. Was that before the infection broke out? It must have been; there are still newspapers, and they have headlines like ‘Cleveland Kidnapper Sentenced’. She’s willing to bet that nobody was interested in stories like that once their neighbours started trying to eat them.
Is she dreaming? It feels so real, and there’s so much detail when she looks around - in the buildings, in the people, in the birds flying overhead - but she has to be dreaming. Right?
-
Ellie asks a few other people what the date is, and she always gets the same answer. She tries asking about the infection, but they just look at her like they have no idea what she’s talking about.
Did someone set all this up as a really elaborate joke? It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing Joel would do. And who the hell has so much gasoline they can waste it on something like this? Who cleaned up the cars and made them look new?
Not that travelling back in time is any more likely. It all comes back to the same explanation: a dream, a hallucination. This has to be happening in her head. There’s no other possibility.
She sits down on a low wall, watching the cars go by, and tries to wake herself up. She focuses as hard as she can. She tells herself this isn’t real. She has to wake up. She has to wake up. She has to get to the Fireflies.
Nothing happens.
“Joel,” she says aloud, just in case she’s saying it in real life, just in case he can hear her. “I know I’m asleep, or in a coma or something. I’m trying to wake up. Okay?” She hesitates. “Don’t... don’t leave me alone.”
She stays there for a while, waiting for... she doesn’t know what. Some kind of reply from Joel. But there’s nothing.
Well, whether she’s dreaming or not, she’s going to take advantage of living in a world without infected in it. Might as well, right?
-
Everything’s so easy when there’s no infection. Everyone’s so much less aware. She watches people buy stuff until she’s figured out where most people keep their money, and then it’s simple enough to lift some when people leave their bags alone for a moment.
Once she’s got money, she can actually go and buy food. There’s no rationing and nobody asks questions, and it seems like the restaurants and cafés and stores never run out. She has no idea how that works when there are so many more people to feed, but she’s not planning to complain. It’s just more evidence that this is a dream, she tells herself.
Most of the food on the menus is stuff she’s never heard of. She mostly points to something someone else is eating and asks for that. It’s pretty much all amazing. Is this what life was like for everyone before the outbreak? People could just eat whenever they felt like it? They could have different meals every day if they wanted to? It’s so weird to imagine, even when she’s standing right in the middle of it.
The place she’s in is apparently Austin, Texas, and it’s warm pretty much all the time. Ellie sleeps in clothes stores sometimes, until security finds her, but most nights she’s on a bench in a park. It’s weird, sleeping somewhere so exposed; it takes her a while to really push it into her head that the infected aren’t going to get her. There are still people around, of course, and they can’t always be trusted, but she’s such a light sleeper she wakes up if anyone so much as looks at her, and she has her knife.
Of course, she can’t just stab everyone who ticks her off. That’d probably make life a lot simpler.
-
It’s a warm afternoon, not that this place ever seems to have heard of a non-warm afternoon, and Ellie is reading a book on her bench. It’s pretty good. She’d probably enjoy it more if she’d read the first two books in the trilogy, but she can’t exactly ask the guy she stole it from whether he has the others.
“Are you okay?”
Ellie barely glances up. It’s a girl about her age, blonde, short-haired. Looks like she couldn’t fight off a Runner if you gave her a magical self-reloading shotgun, but a lot of people would probably say that about Ellie. “I’m fine.”
“I see you here a lot,” the girl says.
“I like this park,” Ellie says. “What’s your point?”
“You sleep here, right?”
Ellie looks flatly at her. “I asked what your point was.”
“I don’t know,” the girl says. “I guess I’m worried.”
“I can take care of myself.”
The girl shrugs and walks away.
-
“My name’s Sarah.”
It’s the girl from yesterday, the one who can’t take a hint. Is she going to be back here every day? Maybe Ellie should look for a new bench. “I’m still fine.”
The girl - Sarah - shifts on her feet. “I was just thinking... do you need clothes? I mean, I always see you wearing that same shirt. I have some stuff that’d probably fit you.”
Ellie frowns, looks down at her red sunset shirt. “I like this shirt.”
“Yeah, I can tell. You’re wearing it over another shirt. It’s ninety degrees. You can’t wear the same thing all the time, though.”
She got it from the mall. It makes her think of Riley. She can’t say that. “Blood doesn’t show on it. What’s the problem?”
Sarah laughs. “Okay, are you a serial killer? Because in that case I’m pretty sure my dad won’t want me talking to you.”
“Will you leave me alone if I say yes?” Technically, she’s not sure she’d even be lying.
“C’mon, let me give you some clothes. Then I can take those home and wash them for you. You’ll just have to hold off on the murders until I bring them back.”
“I can wash them myself,” Ellie says. “There’s a pond right over there.”
“Okay,” Sarah says, “you need help. There’s a washer at home. Do not put your clothes in the pond.”
Ellie crosses her arms over her chest. “Thanks for the offer, but I’m not gonna let some stranger just take my shirt and go.”
“I’m not gonna steal your shirt,” Sarah says, laughing. “Why would I steal your shirt?”
Ellie hesitates.
Everything got stolen in the quarantine zone. It’s easy to forget there used to be a time when people could just buy whatever they wanted. When Sarah wants to go to the mall for clothes that aren’t military-issue, she probably doesn’t have to sneak past armed guards.
“Tell you what,” Sarah says. “You can come with me to the house, and then you’ll know where to send the police if I don’t give your clothes back. And you can have a shower, if you want, ’cause I kind of have a feeling you’ve been washing in the pond as well.”
Oh, man. A shower. Showers were strictly rationed at the school. Feeling clean was a serious luxury. Ellie isn’t sure she can turn that down.
“Fine,” she says. “Don’t try anything weird.”
Sarah holds up her hands. “I swear I’m just trying to help. It’s this way.”
-
It’s weird, stepping into a house from before the infection. She can look around and think, Oh, so this is what it’s meant to look like. There’s furniture and books and stuff everywhere. Nothing’s been looted; nothing’s been broken up for firewood. It’s just a place where people live.
It looks nice.
Ellie’s staring at the floor, picturing weeds growing up between the floorboards, and it takes her a moment to realise Sarah’s holding something out to her. She looks up.
“Towel and some clothes,” Sarah says, dumping a load of fabric into Ellie’s arms. “You can pick out something once you’ve had your shower. Just yell if nothing fits.” She waves a hand. “Bathroom’s through there. Leave your clothes outside the door.”
“Thanks,” Ellie says. “Uh, how long do I get in the shower?”
Sarah frowns slightly. “Long as you like, I guess. I mean, other people will need the bathroom eventually, so probably not, like, hours.”
“Five minutes?”
“Or longer. It’s fine.”
Is this real? “Do you have hot water? Can I use it?”
Sarah gives her a strange look. “Yeah, go ahead.”
-
Ellie stays in the shower for about ten minutes. Maybe even longer. It is incredible. They were only allowed two-minute showers at the school, five minutes at Christmas. And the water is hot, really hot, not just lukewarm. And it doesn’t run out. She stays in there for ten minutes and it doesn’t run out.
How did anyone get anything done before the infection? If she owned a shower like this, she’d just stay in there all day.
The towel is soft, too, not worn-out and scratchy like the ones she knows. She stays wrapped up in it until long after she’s dry.
Eventually, though, she starts looking through the clothes Sarah gave her. Most of the tops are short-sleeved, so they’re no use to her, but she finds a grey top with sleeves long enough to cover up her bite. She throws that on with a pair of jeans.
She doesn’t really want to admit it, after all her resistance to Sarah’s offer, but it does feel good to be wearing clean clothes again. She’d almost forgotten what it was like.
Ellie ties back her hair, and only then realises she can hear voices through the door. Sarah is talking to someone. It sounds like a guy.
This... isn’t a trap, right? Sarah inviting her back here, it wasn’t a trap? Sarah’s basically her favourite person in the world after that shower, so Ellie really wants to trust her.
She slips her knife into the pocket of her new jeans.
-
Sarah and the new guy look around when Ellie walks cautiously into the living room.
“Oh, hey,” Sarah says. Her body language is totally relaxed, which makes Ellie feel a little less uneasy, although she still keeps her hand near her knife. “Sorry, Dad came home early. I’d have warned you if I knew.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” her dad asks.
And then Sarah asks a question, whether Ellie had a good shower or something, but Ellie isn’t listening. This situation is bugging her, and she can’t work out why.
This guy looks a little young to be Sarah’s dad, although it feels like everyone here looks younger than the people from her time, so it’s hard to be sure. He’s dark-haired, pretty tall. Something about him seems kind of familiar.
Kind of really familiar.
She doesn’t really think about what she’s saying; it just spills out the instant she realises. “Holy shit, Joel!”
Joel looks a little taken aback.
Young, handsome Joel. This is ten times weirder than finding that old photograph of young, handsome Winston in the mall. Ellie wants to burst out laughing.
“Uh,” Sarah says, frowning slightly, “do you... know my dad?”
That kills Ellie’s laughter pretty fast. Because she knows Joel, of course she does, but Joel doesn’t know her. He has no idea who she is. To him, she’s just some kid his daughter brought home.
Ellie shakes her head. “I guess not. Sorry. You kind of look like someone I know.”
His daughter.
“You called him Joel.”
“Yeah, that’s the guy I know. You’re not telling me your dad’s called Joel as well, right? That is a weird, weird coincidence.”
She’s been travelling with Joel for months now, and he’s never mentioned a daughter. What happens to Sarah?
Joel seems to shake off the confusion of Ellie’s greeting. “Sarah, you gonna introduce me to your friend?”
“Oh, right,” Sarah says, with a slightly sheepish grin. “Dad, this is-”
“I’m Ellie,” Ellie blurts, because she’s seen Sarah’s eyes go wide and suddenly remembered that she never gave her name. Probably best if Joel doesn’t find out his kid brought back some total stranger who lives in a park.
Joel gives Ellie a nod. “I’d say ‘call me Joel’, but it looks like you’re ahead of me on that one. What was it you said before that, again? Holy...?”
Now it’s Ellie’s turn to grin sheepishly.
“I’m just saying,” Joel says, “I hope you’re not corrupting my girl.” But he’s smiling.
A joke. Young, handsome Joel can make jokes. The world really was a different place before the infection.
-
Sarah comes by Ellie’s bench a couple of days later with her clothes. Ellie changes behind a tree and then tries to give Sarah’s clothes back.
“You can keep them,” Sarah says. “But I’ll wash them if you want them clean.”
“That’d be good,” Ellie says. “Thanks.”
And yeah, part of it is just because clean clothes feel nice, but there’s another reason. This is Joel’s daughter, and like hell Ellie’s going to pass up the chance to get to know more about her. If Sarah keeps washing Ellie’s clothes, she’s going to have to keep coming back to visit Ellie. It’s the perfect plan.
Sarah holds the grey top out in front of her and frowns at it. “I can’t believe you went for the long sleeves. Do you just not feel temperature?”
Ellie puts a hand over her bite instinctively, although it’s hidden beneath her clothes. “I, uh, grew up in...” It’s no use. She doesn’t know anywhere hotter than here. Geography was not a big concern at any of her schools. “I grew up in the sun.”
“I kind of believe you,” Sarah says. “Okay, I’ll bring these back soon.”
-
Sarah only visits to deliver clothes the first few times, but after a while she starts dropping by just to talk. It quickly turns out that she’s into a lot of different sports with rules Ellie can barely understand, but her enthusiasm when she talks about them is enough to keep Ellie from getting bored.
Eventually, Sarah calls Ellie out on never saying anything about herself. Ellie’s been mentally preparing for this; she can’t exactly explain that she’s a possible time-traveller who hangs out with Sarah’s dad in the infection-ravaged future, but she can throw something together. Sarah seems fascinated by her not-entirely-bullshit story about how she ran away from military school to find a new life out on the streets, although Ellie isn’t sure whether she really buys it.
They talk about Joel sometimes. He and Sarah seem to get along well, although apparently he’s away a lot. Ellie tries once to ask about Sarah’s mom, but Sarah’s obviously reluctant to talk about her, so Ellie drops the subject pretty quickly. It’s something she can understand, even if she’s dying with curiosity about who Joel had a kid with.
-
“Two tickets to Dawn of the Wolf, Part Two,” Sarah says, waving them in Ellie’s face. “It’s on Saturday. Wanna go?”
Dawn of the Wolf? That’s the thing there were posters for everywhere in her time, right?
“Is that a movie?” Ellie asks, to make sure.
“Okay, I’ll guess you haven’t seen the first one,” Sarah says, “and also you’ve been walking around with your eyes closed for three years, but you should come anyway.”
Ellie’s only seen a movie once before: one Christmas, when she was ten, her school hooked a generator up to a DVD player and they watched this thing about talking lions. It was kind of amazing.
“C’mon,” Sarah says. “I’ll have to drag my dad along if you won’t go, and I’m pretty sure he won’t like it. Are you gonna rescue him?”
Ellie’s just about ready to grab the ticket out of Sarah’s hand, but something stops her.
She asked Joel about those posters, back when they were travelling together. He said he’d seen the movie. Sarah must have taken him to it. And, yeah, maybe he didn’t enjoy Dawn of the Wolf much, but... it was time he spent with his daughter. Ellie doesn’t know how much of that he has left.
“You should go with your dad,” she says.
Sarah laughs.
“No, I’m serious,” Ellie says. “You said he’s always at work, right? This is your chance to do something together.” She takes a breath. “You don’t give that up.”
Sarah hesitates. Looks down at the tickets in her hands. Seems about to speak for a moment. Hesitates again.
“You sure?” she asks. “I’m gonna need someone to talk to about how hot the werewolf guy is, and I don’t think my dad’ll be all that helpful.”
Ellie shrugs and attempts a smile. “I probably wouldn’t be much better. I don’t think the werewolf guy’s really my type.”
When Sarah looks back up, she’s smiling. “My dad’s never gonna forgive you for this, y’know.”
“He’ll get over it. Promise you’ll let me be there when you’re telling him how hot the werewolf guy is.”
-
Ellie isn’t sure why Sarah asks her to help pick out a birthday present for Joel, but she’s not about to pass on an opportunity to hang out, especially after the Dawn of the Wolf sacrifice she made. Plus it might be nice to get something for Joel, even if he doesn’t really know who she is yet.
It turns out Sarah wants to look at watches, though, and Ellie doesn’t really know anything about those. Not that she’d be great at birthday gifts anyway. Most people in her time just gave food, if they could spare it.
So she ends up just wandering around the store, pretending to know what she’s doing, while Sarah looks intently at every display and mutters to herself.
There’s one watch Ellie keeps going back to, for some reason. She doesn’t know why; it’s nothing special, but something about it pulls at her.
“What’re you looking at?” Sarah wanders up beside her, peers through the glass at the display. “Oh, these look pretty good,” she says, and suddenly Ellie realises why the watch is bugging her.
“How about that one?” Sarah asks, and Ellie doesn’t have to look to know which watch she’s pointing at.
“He’ll love it,” Ellie says. Her voice probably isn’t meant to sound this flat, but she can’t bring herself to fake enthusiasm right now. “It’s a gift from you, right? He’ll never take it off.”
-
They go back to Sarah’s house together, because it’s a movie night; Ellie told Sarah a few days ago about the lion thing she saw at military school, and Sarah has apparently made it a project to show Ellie every Disney movie ever made. Tonight it’s Mulan. It seems like the kind of thing Ellie should love, but she’s having trouble concentrating.
When does the infection break out?
Dates were never that important in the QZ. Some people celebrated their birthdays, but a lot of kids Ellie’s age didn’t know when theirs were. And they never really had any reason to think about when things happened in the past. What difference did it make? Knowing dates wasn’t going to keep them alive.
It’s 2013 now, she knows. September. Does the outbreak happen this year? Next year? Should she try to warn people? Will they just think she’s crazy?
This probably isn’t even real, she tells himself, but as time goes on it gets harder and harder to believe it.
It’s the watch that’s got her thinking. She never even knew that Joel got it before the infection, but now that she knows... it’s like Joel getting the watch is an event that somehow moves the infection closer. When Joel doesn’t have the watch, they’re safe, because the infection didn’t start when Joel didn’t have the watch. When he has it, the infection could break out at any moment.
Well, Sarah hasn’t given him the watch yet. Maybe she actually gives it to him after the infection breaks out. Maybe it’s going to happen in the week between now and his birthday. That’s not exactly a comforting thought.
-
When the movie is over, they stay next to each other on the sofa for a while, watching the blank screen.
“You should stay here,” Sarah says. “Just for a few days. It’ll be fun. And you can’t sleep in that park forever.”
Ellie shakes her head. It’s an offer that’s come up before, and she always wants to stay, but... she feels like she’d be getting in the way of Joel and Sarah spending time with each other. And it’d be a little weird if Joel got to know her too well before they actually met. “Maybe when it’s winter.”
Sarah gives her a little shove. “Will you stop being so stubborn?”
Just for an instant Ellie feels a flash of something warm and familiar and scary as hell in her chest, and she has to look away. “Not planning to any time soon.”
-
She keeps track of the days until Joel’s birthday. She stays away from his house on the day itself - it’s a day for him and Sarah - but maybe she’ll pay him a visit the next day. Give him a card or something.
That night a distant explosion cuts through Ellie’s dreams, and she knows what’s happening before she knows she’s awake.
-
The kitchen door’s been smashed, and there’s an infected corpse lying just inside. Ellie runs through the house, but there’s no one there, and she gets out the front just in time to see the car pulling away, and fuck fuck fuck.
She won’t be left alone. She can’t let that happen.
She manages to wave down the next car that comes along the road. It’s a young husband and wife, anxious and confused. They ask her questions at first - why’s she out on her own? are her parents okay? does she know what’s going on? - but she doesn’t answer, staring through the windshield at the car ahead of them, and pretty soon they stop asking.
She doesn’t think anyone’s exactly going to listen to her if she tells them to follow that car, but they seem to be heading in the same direction for now, at least. It seems like good news until they find that literally everyone else is going in this direction as well. The road is clogged with cars, and they have to stop. They can’t get through.
They’re close enough to the car in front for Ellie to be able to see who’s inside: Joel and Sarah and someone else, who’s driving.
She opens the door and gets out, planning to go up and knock on Joel’s window and hope it doesn’t startle him into shooting her, but that’s when the unknown driver pulls back, starts to turn the car around.
Shit.
The car drives off, and Ellie just fucking runs after it. She doesn’t know what else to do.
-
It’s hard for the car to get any speed up at first, all the people on foot in the road. Ellie loses track of it for a while, and she thinks that’s it, she’s never going to see Joel or Sarah again, but then she comes across it again.
Comes across its wreckage. She can see before she’s close that a truck’s ploughed into the side, and she feels sick. Is this how Sarah dies?
But then she thinks she sees Joel in the mass of fleeing people ahead, and she thinks that might be Sarah in his arms.
Maybe Ellie’s immunity can still help. Maybe Joel can get her to a doctor. Maybe they can make a vaccine before the infection spreads too far.
Maybe none of this is even real, but she has to try.
Ellie’s chest is burning and her legs feel like they’re about to give out, but Joel and Sarah are ahead of her and there are only infected behind. She keeps running.
-
Ellie manages to keep Joel and Sarah in sight most of the way, but then they cut through a building and when she tries to open the door it won’t budge, they must have blocked it off behind them, and she has to find another way around.
She ends up scrambling up a grassy slope, and she knows something’s gone wrong before she sees it. There’s a sound like quiet, choked sobbing, and her heart stops the second she hears it because she thinks that’s Joel, and what the hell could make Joel cry?
And then she reaches the crest and freezes when she sees the scene below her. Joel is shaking, some guy trying to calm him down, and Sarah... Sarah is...
Ellie’s legs buckle at last, and she collapses onto the grass. When the infected grab her, she doesn’t even have the energy to cry out.
-
Ellie regains consciousness in the back of a burnt-out SUV, and she barely has time to roll onto her side before she throws up.
Fuck.
She knew it was coming. She could tell herself all she wanted that maybe Sarah was alive somewhere twenty years later, that maybe Joel and his kid had just been separated, but she knew it was coming.
That doesn’t mean she can deal with it.
Fuck, she liked Sarah, she really liked her, and why the fuck couldn’t she just not fucking get attached to someone she fucking knew was going to die?
It takes her a moment to realise that she should be dead as well. Where is she?
“Ellie?”
She looks up, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Joel is looking back at her from the front seat, frowning and bleary-eyed.
It’s her Joel, older Joel, and Ellie has to stamp hard on the part of herself that wants to start crying.
“You all right?” Joel asks.
There’s rain pattering on the roof, and all she can see when she looks out the window are pine trees. She remembers this place. This is where they settled down to sleep, just before she woke up in the past.
It can’t have been a dream. It can’t have been a dream, right? It felt too real. It went on for too long.
“Ellie?” Joel asks. “You okay?”
She could ask him about Sarah, but she’s not sure she’s ready to do that yet.
Ellie nods, a little shakily. “Nightmares.”
Joel nods slightly in return. He doesn’t ask about it. “Tommy shouldn’t be too far from here, if he’s still around. You ready to get going?”
-
Ellie freezes when she first sees Tommy. Is this... is he the guy who was with Joel and Sarah on the night it happened?
She can’t be sure. It was dark, and she never got a good look at his face.
She doesn’t speak much when Maria is showing her around the dam. If that really was Tommy she saw back there, before meeting him in her own time... maybe it was real. Waking up in 2013, meeting Sarah and young Joel, all of it.
She doesn’t know if she wants that or not. She doesn’t want it to be real that Sarah died, of course she doesn’t, but did Sarah ever exist at all? Joel’s never mentioned her. Maybe he never had a kid. Maybe Sarah’s just someone Ellie made up.
Ellie isn’t sure she’d be okay with that.
“Ellie?” Maria asks.
It’s only when she says it that Ellie realises she’s shaking. It’s a moment later that she really registers what she’s looking at. She’s been wandering around, staring at things in the dam without really taking them in, and...
Maria comes up beside her. “Oh,” she says, softly, “I thought Tommy was going to give that to Joel.”
Ellie feels dizzy and sick.
It’s a photograph of Joel. Younger Joel, from a long time ago. He has his arm around Sarah.
Sarah.
She’s real.
“Ellie?” Maria asks. “Are you okay?”
Ellie takes a breath. “I’m fine. You said something about food, right?”
“Yeah, this way.”
Maria turns away, and in one motion Ellie lifts the photograph and turns to follow her.
Well, I suppose I did want to write something in which Ellie interacted with Sarah. Here it is!
Title: Who We Were
Fandom: The Last of Us
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 5,200
Summary: In which Ellie goes back in time and meets a girl named Sarah.
Ellie doesn’t know how the hell she got here.
She dodges into the space between two houses and looks around for Joel. She can’t see him. Where is he?
There are people here. They don’t look infected. Her first thought is hunters, but they don’t really look like they’re working as a team; they’re mostly just walking along, ignoring each other.
Ellie tries to stay out of their sight anyway, just in case.
What is this, some kind of quarantine zone? They were looking for Joel’s brother, right? Did they finally reach wherever he’s living? Why can’t she remember?
Where’s Joel?
-
Something is bothering Ellie as she creeps along between buildings - you know, something more than the fact that she just found herself in this place with no memory of how she got here - and gradually she’s able to add more and more weird things to her mental list.
First off: the houses here aren’t boarded up. The windows are just windows, nothing covering them. There’s even still glass. Not just some of the time, either; there’s glass in all the windows she can see.
Second: there are cars. Not just by the side of the road. People are actually driving cars. And not just one or two; there are a lot of cars. It seems like there are cars going past every time she catches a glimpse of the road. Where are they getting the gas from? Where are they even going? You don’t waste gas just driving around a QZ.
Third: she can’t see any guards. How do they run a quarantine zone this big without armed guards? It makes her think of hunters again - maybe they got rid of the people in charge - but one guy’s caught sight of her already, and he didn’t seem all that interested in killing her. Maybe he figured a kid wouldn’t be carrying enough supplies to be worth his time.
Fourth: there are kids everywhere. Her age, and even younger. If you got pregnant back in the Boston QZ, people looked at you like you were infected. You give birth, there’s less food for everyone else. Does this place just... not have that stigma? Is this some magical place where there’s enough food to go around and people drive like it’s nothing?
Ellie tries stepping out onto the street, cautiously, hand on her concealed knife. A couple of people glance in her direction, smile, keep walking.
Where the hell is she?
-
There’s a guy selling newspapers on a street corner. Actual newspapers. And he’s asking for old money, not ration cards. This has to be a joke.
The papers look new. Ellie edges closer, trying to see what they say, and he notices her.
“Interested in a paper?” he asks. “You look like a young lady who likes to keep up with the news.”
A very weird possibility has just occurred to her. Although maybe ‘possibility’ isn’t the right word.
“Is this supposed to be today?” she asks, pointing at the date on one of the newspapers.
He laughs. “Yeah, that’s today.”
So apparently it’s 2013. And August, but Ellie’s a lot more interested in the ‘2013’ part. It explains a lot, she guesses, but it also makes literally no sense.
August 2013. Was that before the infection broke out? It must have been; there are still newspapers, and they have headlines like ‘Cleveland Kidnapper Sentenced’. She’s willing to bet that nobody was interested in stories like that once their neighbours started trying to eat them.
Is she dreaming? It feels so real, and there’s so much detail when she looks around - in the buildings, in the people, in the birds flying overhead - but she has to be dreaming. Right?
-
Ellie asks a few other people what the date is, and she always gets the same answer. She tries asking about the infection, but they just look at her like they have no idea what she’s talking about.
Did someone set all this up as a really elaborate joke? It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing Joel would do. And who the hell has so much gasoline they can waste it on something like this? Who cleaned up the cars and made them look new?
Not that travelling back in time is any more likely. It all comes back to the same explanation: a dream, a hallucination. This has to be happening in her head. There’s no other possibility.
She sits down on a low wall, watching the cars go by, and tries to wake herself up. She focuses as hard as she can. She tells herself this isn’t real. She has to wake up. She has to wake up. She has to get to the Fireflies.
Nothing happens.
“Joel,” she says aloud, just in case she’s saying it in real life, just in case he can hear her. “I know I’m asleep, or in a coma or something. I’m trying to wake up. Okay?” She hesitates. “Don’t... don’t leave me alone.”
She stays there for a while, waiting for... she doesn’t know what. Some kind of reply from Joel. But there’s nothing.
Well, whether she’s dreaming or not, she’s going to take advantage of living in a world without infected in it. Might as well, right?
-
Everything’s so easy when there’s no infection. Everyone’s so much less aware. She watches people buy stuff until she’s figured out where most people keep their money, and then it’s simple enough to lift some when people leave their bags alone for a moment.
Once she’s got money, she can actually go and buy food. There’s no rationing and nobody asks questions, and it seems like the restaurants and cafés and stores never run out. She has no idea how that works when there are so many more people to feed, but she’s not planning to complain. It’s just more evidence that this is a dream, she tells herself.
Most of the food on the menus is stuff she’s never heard of. She mostly points to something someone else is eating and asks for that. It’s pretty much all amazing. Is this what life was like for everyone before the outbreak? People could just eat whenever they felt like it? They could have different meals every day if they wanted to? It’s so weird to imagine, even when she’s standing right in the middle of it.
The place she’s in is apparently Austin, Texas, and it’s warm pretty much all the time. Ellie sleeps in clothes stores sometimes, until security finds her, but most nights she’s on a bench in a park. It’s weird, sleeping somewhere so exposed; it takes her a while to really push it into her head that the infected aren’t going to get her. There are still people around, of course, and they can’t always be trusted, but she’s such a light sleeper she wakes up if anyone so much as looks at her, and she has her knife.
Of course, she can’t just stab everyone who ticks her off. That’d probably make life a lot simpler.
-
It’s a warm afternoon, not that this place ever seems to have heard of a non-warm afternoon, and Ellie is reading a book on her bench. It’s pretty good. She’d probably enjoy it more if she’d read the first two books in the trilogy, but she can’t exactly ask the guy she stole it from whether he has the others.
“Are you okay?”
Ellie barely glances up. It’s a girl about her age, blonde, short-haired. Looks like she couldn’t fight off a Runner if you gave her a magical self-reloading shotgun, but a lot of people would probably say that about Ellie. “I’m fine.”
“I see you here a lot,” the girl says.
“I like this park,” Ellie says. “What’s your point?”
“You sleep here, right?”
Ellie looks flatly at her. “I asked what your point was.”
“I don’t know,” the girl says. “I guess I’m worried.”
“I can take care of myself.”
The girl shrugs and walks away.
-
“My name’s Sarah.”
It’s the girl from yesterday, the one who can’t take a hint. Is she going to be back here every day? Maybe Ellie should look for a new bench. “I’m still fine.”
The girl - Sarah - shifts on her feet. “I was just thinking... do you need clothes? I mean, I always see you wearing that same shirt. I have some stuff that’d probably fit you.”
Ellie frowns, looks down at her red sunset shirt. “I like this shirt.”
“Yeah, I can tell. You’re wearing it over another shirt. It’s ninety degrees. You can’t wear the same thing all the time, though.”
She got it from the mall. It makes her think of Riley. She can’t say that. “Blood doesn’t show on it. What’s the problem?”
Sarah laughs. “Okay, are you a serial killer? Because in that case I’m pretty sure my dad won’t want me talking to you.”
“Will you leave me alone if I say yes?” Technically, she’s not sure she’d even be lying.
“C’mon, let me give you some clothes. Then I can take those home and wash them for you. You’ll just have to hold off on the murders until I bring them back.”
“I can wash them myself,” Ellie says. “There’s a pond right over there.”
“Okay,” Sarah says, “you need help. There’s a washer at home. Do not put your clothes in the pond.”
Ellie crosses her arms over her chest. “Thanks for the offer, but I’m not gonna let some stranger just take my shirt and go.”
“I’m not gonna steal your shirt,” Sarah says, laughing. “Why would I steal your shirt?”
Ellie hesitates.
Everything got stolen in the quarantine zone. It’s easy to forget there used to be a time when people could just buy whatever they wanted. When Sarah wants to go to the mall for clothes that aren’t military-issue, she probably doesn’t have to sneak past armed guards.
“Tell you what,” Sarah says. “You can come with me to the house, and then you’ll know where to send the police if I don’t give your clothes back. And you can have a shower, if you want, ’cause I kind of have a feeling you’ve been washing in the pond as well.”
Oh, man. A shower. Showers were strictly rationed at the school. Feeling clean was a serious luxury. Ellie isn’t sure she can turn that down.
“Fine,” she says. “Don’t try anything weird.”
Sarah holds up her hands. “I swear I’m just trying to help. It’s this way.”
-
It’s weird, stepping into a house from before the infection. She can look around and think, Oh, so this is what it’s meant to look like. There’s furniture and books and stuff everywhere. Nothing’s been looted; nothing’s been broken up for firewood. It’s just a place where people live.
It looks nice.
Ellie’s staring at the floor, picturing weeds growing up between the floorboards, and it takes her a moment to realise Sarah’s holding something out to her. She looks up.
“Towel and some clothes,” Sarah says, dumping a load of fabric into Ellie’s arms. “You can pick out something once you’ve had your shower. Just yell if nothing fits.” She waves a hand. “Bathroom’s through there. Leave your clothes outside the door.”
“Thanks,” Ellie says. “Uh, how long do I get in the shower?”
Sarah frowns slightly. “Long as you like, I guess. I mean, other people will need the bathroom eventually, so probably not, like, hours.”
“Five minutes?”
“Or longer. It’s fine.”
Is this real? “Do you have hot water? Can I use it?”
Sarah gives her a strange look. “Yeah, go ahead.”
-
Ellie stays in the shower for about ten minutes. Maybe even longer. It is incredible. They were only allowed two-minute showers at the school, five minutes at Christmas. And the water is hot, really hot, not just lukewarm. And it doesn’t run out. She stays in there for ten minutes and it doesn’t run out.
How did anyone get anything done before the infection? If she owned a shower like this, she’d just stay in there all day.
The towel is soft, too, not worn-out and scratchy like the ones she knows. She stays wrapped up in it until long after she’s dry.
Eventually, though, she starts looking through the clothes Sarah gave her. Most of the tops are short-sleeved, so they’re no use to her, but she finds a grey top with sleeves long enough to cover up her bite. She throws that on with a pair of jeans.
She doesn’t really want to admit it, after all her resistance to Sarah’s offer, but it does feel good to be wearing clean clothes again. She’d almost forgotten what it was like.
Ellie ties back her hair, and only then realises she can hear voices through the door. Sarah is talking to someone. It sounds like a guy.
This... isn’t a trap, right? Sarah inviting her back here, it wasn’t a trap? Sarah’s basically her favourite person in the world after that shower, so Ellie really wants to trust her.
She slips her knife into the pocket of her new jeans.
-
Sarah and the new guy look around when Ellie walks cautiously into the living room.
“Oh, hey,” Sarah says. Her body language is totally relaxed, which makes Ellie feel a little less uneasy, although she still keeps her hand near her knife. “Sorry, Dad came home early. I’d have warned you if I knew.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” her dad asks.
And then Sarah asks a question, whether Ellie had a good shower or something, but Ellie isn’t listening. This situation is bugging her, and she can’t work out why.
This guy looks a little young to be Sarah’s dad, although it feels like everyone here looks younger than the people from her time, so it’s hard to be sure. He’s dark-haired, pretty tall. Something about him seems kind of familiar.
Kind of really familiar.
She doesn’t really think about what she’s saying; it just spills out the instant she realises. “Holy shit, Joel!”
Joel looks a little taken aback.
Young, handsome Joel. This is ten times weirder than finding that old photograph of young, handsome Winston in the mall. Ellie wants to burst out laughing.
“Uh,” Sarah says, frowning slightly, “do you... know my dad?”
That kills Ellie’s laughter pretty fast. Because she knows Joel, of course she does, but Joel doesn’t know her. He has no idea who she is. To him, she’s just some kid his daughter brought home.
Ellie shakes her head. “I guess not. Sorry. You kind of look like someone I know.”
His daughter.
“You called him Joel.”
“Yeah, that’s the guy I know. You’re not telling me your dad’s called Joel as well, right? That is a weird, weird coincidence.”
She’s been travelling with Joel for months now, and he’s never mentioned a daughter. What happens to Sarah?
Joel seems to shake off the confusion of Ellie’s greeting. “Sarah, you gonna introduce me to your friend?”
“Oh, right,” Sarah says, with a slightly sheepish grin. “Dad, this is-”
“I’m Ellie,” Ellie blurts, because she’s seen Sarah’s eyes go wide and suddenly remembered that she never gave her name. Probably best if Joel doesn’t find out his kid brought back some total stranger who lives in a park.
Joel gives Ellie a nod. “I’d say ‘call me Joel’, but it looks like you’re ahead of me on that one. What was it you said before that, again? Holy...?”
Now it’s Ellie’s turn to grin sheepishly.
“I’m just saying,” Joel says, “I hope you’re not corrupting my girl.” But he’s smiling.
A joke. Young, handsome Joel can make jokes. The world really was a different place before the infection.
-
Sarah comes by Ellie’s bench a couple of days later with her clothes. Ellie changes behind a tree and then tries to give Sarah’s clothes back.
“You can keep them,” Sarah says. “But I’ll wash them if you want them clean.”
“That’d be good,” Ellie says. “Thanks.”
And yeah, part of it is just because clean clothes feel nice, but there’s another reason. This is Joel’s daughter, and like hell Ellie’s going to pass up the chance to get to know more about her. If Sarah keeps washing Ellie’s clothes, she’s going to have to keep coming back to visit Ellie. It’s the perfect plan.
Sarah holds the grey top out in front of her and frowns at it. “I can’t believe you went for the long sleeves. Do you just not feel temperature?”
Ellie puts a hand over her bite instinctively, although it’s hidden beneath her clothes. “I, uh, grew up in...” It’s no use. She doesn’t know anywhere hotter than here. Geography was not a big concern at any of her schools. “I grew up in the sun.”
“I kind of believe you,” Sarah says. “Okay, I’ll bring these back soon.”
-
Sarah only visits to deliver clothes the first few times, but after a while she starts dropping by just to talk. It quickly turns out that she’s into a lot of different sports with rules Ellie can barely understand, but her enthusiasm when she talks about them is enough to keep Ellie from getting bored.
Eventually, Sarah calls Ellie out on never saying anything about herself. Ellie’s been mentally preparing for this; she can’t exactly explain that she’s a possible time-traveller who hangs out with Sarah’s dad in the infection-ravaged future, but she can throw something together. Sarah seems fascinated by her not-entirely-bullshit story about how she ran away from military school to find a new life out on the streets, although Ellie isn’t sure whether she really buys it.
They talk about Joel sometimes. He and Sarah seem to get along well, although apparently he’s away a lot. Ellie tries once to ask about Sarah’s mom, but Sarah’s obviously reluctant to talk about her, so Ellie drops the subject pretty quickly. It’s something she can understand, even if she’s dying with curiosity about who Joel had a kid with.
-
“Two tickets to Dawn of the Wolf, Part Two,” Sarah says, waving them in Ellie’s face. “It’s on Saturday. Wanna go?”
Dawn of the Wolf? That’s the thing there were posters for everywhere in her time, right?
“Is that a movie?” Ellie asks, to make sure.
“Okay, I’ll guess you haven’t seen the first one,” Sarah says, “and also you’ve been walking around with your eyes closed for three years, but you should come anyway.”
Ellie’s only seen a movie once before: one Christmas, when she was ten, her school hooked a generator up to a DVD player and they watched this thing about talking lions. It was kind of amazing.
“C’mon,” Sarah says. “I’ll have to drag my dad along if you won’t go, and I’m pretty sure he won’t like it. Are you gonna rescue him?”
Ellie’s just about ready to grab the ticket out of Sarah’s hand, but something stops her.
She asked Joel about those posters, back when they were travelling together. He said he’d seen the movie. Sarah must have taken him to it. And, yeah, maybe he didn’t enjoy Dawn of the Wolf much, but... it was time he spent with his daughter. Ellie doesn’t know how much of that he has left.
“You should go with your dad,” she says.
Sarah laughs.
“No, I’m serious,” Ellie says. “You said he’s always at work, right? This is your chance to do something together.” She takes a breath. “You don’t give that up.”
Sarah hesitates. Looks down at the tickets in her hands. Seems about to speak for a moment. Hesitates again.
“You sure?” she asks. “I’m gonna need someone to talk to about how hot the werewolf guy is, and I don’t think my dad’ll be all that helpful.”
Ellie shrugs and attempts a smile. “I probably wouldn’t be much better. I don’t think the werewolf guy’s really my type.”
When Sarah looks back up, she’s smiling. “My dad’s never gonna forgive you for this, y’know.”
“He’ll get over it. Promise you’ll let me be there when you’re telling him how hot the werewolf guy is.”
-
Ellie isn’t sure why Sarah asks her to help pick out a birthday present for Joel, but she’s not about to pass on an opportunity to hang out, especially after the Dawn of the Wolf sacrifice she made. Plus it might be nice to get something for Joel, even if he doesn’t really know who she is yet.
It turns out Sarah wants to look at watches, though, and Ellie doesn’t really know anything about those. Not that she’d be great at birthday gifts anyway. Most people in her time just gave food, if they could spare it.
So she ends up just wandering around the store, pretending to know what she’s doing, while Sarah looks intently at every display and mutters to herself.
There’s one watch Ellie keeps going back to, for some reason. She doesn’t know why; it’s nothing special, but something about it pulls at her.
“What’re you looking at?” Sarah wanders up beside her, peers through the glass at the display. “Oh, these look pretty good,” she says, and suddenly Ellie realises why the watch is bugging her.
“How about that one?” Sarah asks, and Ellie doesn’t have to look to know which watch she’s pointing at.
“He’ll love it,” Ellie says. Her voice probably isn’t meant to sound this flat, but she can’t bring herself to fake enthusiasm right now. “It’s a gift from you, right? He’ll never take it off.”
-
They go back to Sarah’s house together, because it’s a movie night; Ellie told Sarah a few days ago about the lion thing she saw at military school, and Sarah has apparently made it a project to show Ellie every Disney movie ever made. Tonight it’s Mulan. It seems like the kind of thing Ellie should love, but she’s having trouble concentrating.
When does the infection break out?
Dates were never that important in the QZ. Some people celebrated their birthdays, but a lot of kids Ellie’s age didn’t know when theirs were. And they never really had any reason to think about when things happened in the past. What difference did it make? Knowing dates wasn’t going to keep them alive.
It’s 2013 now, she knows. September. Does the outbreak happen this year? Next year? Should she try to warn people? Will they just think she’s crazy?
This probably isn’t even real, she tells himself, but as time goes on it gets harder and harder to believe it.
It’s the watch that’s got her thinking. She never even knew that Joel got it before the infection, but now that she knows... it’s like Joel getting the watch is an event that somehow moves the infection closer. When Joel doesn’t have the watch, they’re safe, because the infection didn’t start when Joel didn’t have the watch. When he has it, the infection could break out at any moment.
Well, Sarah hasn’t given him the watch yet. Maybe she actually gives it to him after the infection breaks out. Maybe it’s going to happen in the week between now and his birthday. That’s not exactly a comforting thought.
-
When the movie is over, they stay next to each other on the sofa for a while, watching the blank screen.
“You should stay here,” Sarah says. “Just for a few days. It’ll be fun. And you can’t sleep in that park forever.”
Ellie shakes her head. It’s an offer that’s come up before, and she always wants to stay, but... she feels like she’d be getting in the way of Joel and Sarah spending time with each other. And it’d be a little weird if Joel got to know her too well before they actually met. “Maybe when it’s winter.”
Sarah gives her a little shove. “Will you stop being so stubborn?”
Just for an instant Ellie feels a flash of something warm and familiar and scary as hell in her chest, and she has to look away. “Not planning to any time soon.”
-
She keeps track of the days until Joel’s birthday. She stays away from his house on the day itself - it’s a day for him and Sarah - but maybe she’ll pay him a visit the next day. Give him a card or something.
That night a distant explosion cuts through Ellie’s dreams, and she knows what’s happening before she knows she’s awake.
-
The kitchen door’s been smashed, and there’s an infected corpse lying just inside. Ellie runs through the house, but there’s no one there, and she gets out the front just in time to see the car pulling away, and fuck fuck fuck.
She won’t be left alone. She can’t let that happen.
She manages to wave down the next car that comes along the road. It’s a young husband and wife, anxious and confused. They ask her questions at first - why’s she out on her own? are her parents okay? does she know what’s going on? - but she doesn’t answer, staring through the windshield at the car ahead of them, and pretty soon they stop asking.
She doesn’t think anyone’s exactly going to listen to her if she tells them to follow that car, but they seem to be heading in the same direction for now, at least. It seems like good news until they find that literally everyone else is going in this direction as well. The road is clogged with cars, and they have to stop. They can’t get through.
They’re close enough to the car in front for Ellie to be able to see who’s inside: Joel and Sarah and someone else, who’s driving.
She opens the door and gets out, planning to go up and knock on Joel’s window and hope it doesn’t startle him into shooting her, but that’s when the unknown driver pulls back, starts to turn the car around.
Shit.
The car drives off, and Ellie just fucking runs after it. She doesn’t know what else to do.
-
It’s hard for the car to get any speed up at first, all the people on foot in the road. Ellie loses track of it for a while, and she thinks that’s it, she’s never going to see Joel or Sarah again, but then she comes across it again.
Comes across its wreckage. She can see before she’s close that a truck’s ploughed into the side, and she feels sick. Is this how Sarah dies?
But then she thinks she sees Joel in the mass of fleeing people ahead, and she thinks that might be Sarah in his arms.
Maybe Ellie’s immunity can still help. Maybe Joel can get her to a doctor. Maybe they can make a vaccine before the infection spreads too far.
Maybe none of this is even real, but she has to try.
Ellie’s chest is burning and her legs feel like they’re about to give out, but Joel and Sarah are ahead of her and there are only infected behind. She keeps running.
-
Ellie manages to keep Joel and Sarah in sight most of the way, but then they cut through a building and when she tries to open the door it won’t budge, they must have blocked it off behind them, and she has to find another way around.
She ends up scrambling up a grassy slope, and she knows something’s gone wrong before she sees it. There’s a sound like quiet, choked sobbing, and her heart stops the second she hears it because she thinks that’s Joel, and what the hell could make Joel cry?
And then she reaches the crest and freezes when she sees the scene below her. Joel is shaking, some guy trying to calm him down, and Sarah... Sarah is...
Ellie’s legs buckle at last, and she collapses onto the grass. When the infected grab her, she doesn’t even have the energy to cry out.
-
Ellie regains consciousness in the back of a burnt-out SUV, and she barely has time to roll onto her side before she throws up.
Fuck.
She knew it was coming. She could tell herself all she wanted that maybe Sarah was alive somewhere twenty years later, that maybe Joel and his kid had just been separated, but she knew it was coming.
That doesn’t mean she can deal with it.
Fuck, she liked Sarah, she really liked her, and why the fuck couldn’t she just not fucking get attached to someone she fucking knew was going to die?
It takes her a moment to realise that she should be dead as well. Where is she?
“Ellie?”
She looks up, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Joel is looking back at her from the front seat, frowning and bleary-eyed.
It’s her Joel, older Joel, and Ellie has to stamp hard on the part of herself that wants to start crying.
“You all right?” Joel asks.
There’s rain pattering on the roof, and all she can see when she looks out the window are pine trees. She remembers this place. This is where they settled down to sleep, just before she woke up in the past.
It can’t have been a dream. It can’t have been a dream, right? It felt too real. It went on for too long.
“Ellie?” Joel asks. “You okay?”
She could ask him about Sarah, but she’s not sure she’s ready to do that yet.
Ellie nods, a little shakily. “Nightmares.”
Joel nods slightly in return. He doesn’t ask about it. “Tommy shouldn’t be too far from here, if he’s still around. You ready to get going?”
-
Ellie freezes when she first sees Tommy. Is this... is he the guy who was with Joel and Sarah on the night it happened?
She can’t be sure. It was dark, and she never got a good look at his face.
She doesn’t speak much when Maria is showing her around the dam. If that really was Tommy she saw back there, before meeting him in her own time... maybe it was real. Waking up in 2013, meeting Sarah and young Joel, all of it.
She doesn’t know if she wants that or not. She doesn’t want it to be real that Sarah died, of course she doesn’t, but did Sarah ever exist at all? Joel’s never mentioned her. Maybe he never had a kid. Maybe Sarah’s just someone Ellie made up.
Ellie isn’t sure she’d be okay with that.
“Ellie?” Maria asks.
It’s only when she says it that Ellie realises she’s shaking. It’s a moment later that she really registers what she’s looking at. She’s been wandering around, staring at things in the dam without really taking them in, and...
Maria comes up beside her. “Oh,” she says, softly, “I thought Tommy was going to give that to Joel.”
Ellie feels dizzy and sick.
It’s a photograph of Joel. Younger Joel, from a long time ago. He has his arm around Sarah.
Sarah.
She’s real.
“Ellie?” Maria asks. “Are you okay?”
Ellie takes a breath. “I’m fine. You said something about food, right?”
“Yeah, this way.”
Maria turns away, and in one motion Ellie lifts the photograph and turns to follow her.