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Every step feels like driving glass into her side. She’d know- she’s done that before too. Her side is burning. Her fingers have been suffering through a dull ache for days. All three wounds are infected- not the kind of infection she's used to, either. They're gonna have to be dealt with soon, or it'll kill her.
Maybe she kind of hopes they do.
After hours of walking on shaky legs, she ducks into the first house she sees. She gets lucky with the infected; they ignore her, mostly. Good. She's not in the mood to fight anymore, anyways.
She ducks down to the basement and finds her makeshift supplies- someone’s old first aid kit, some scrap metal and a mini camp stove- and sets to work. It takes maybe twice as long as it usually would, but soon enough Ellie’s tending the fire with shaking hands, watching this little piece of scrap blaze brighter until it’s red and waving like a mirage through the flames.
The feeling in her side reminds her of the first time she was bitten- the fever, the bone-deep ache. The pain is… it’s worse than any physical pain she’s ever felt. She wants to curl up and cry, she wants someone to tell her it’ll be okay, she wants-
She wants a comfort she threw away.
Expressionless, Ellie takes the metal off the flame with a pair of metal tongs. She briefly considers trying to get some food in her before she goes forward. Honestly, though, she isn’t hungry now and she won’t be after this.
It’s been days since she’s eaten a meal and months since she’s really wanted food.
Adjusting her grip on the tongs in her good hand, she raises her trembling, mutilated one. She stretches her palm out flat in the air.
And takes a breath.
And presses the ragged, red, weeping end of her pinky onto the metal.
She’s only able to hold it there for a second or two, gritting her teeth and breathing quick and shallow through her nose. She registers weakly that she’s making the same whining sound as a trapped animal, a sound she is intimately familiar with.
She pulls her hand away, tears streaming from her eyes, and gives herself a short rest before doing the same to her ring finger. She accidentally hits the side of her middle finger and pulls back with a hiss, making her need to try for a second go to ensure she’s fully closed the wound. This time, she lets herself sob openly and drops the tongs, still holding the sizzling metal.
It smells, disgustingly, almost like pork.
Sleep never comes easy to her, but tonight it is impossible, which makes no goddamn fucking sense. She should, by all logic, pass out from exhaustion or starvation or dehydration or any one of the other things she’s done to run herself ragged. She lies awake on the bed of someone who's probably been dead for years, her whole body racked by aching pains. Once or twice she falls into a fitful sleep, always woken by a new scream in her mind.
Joel. Dina. Herself. Abby.
The blood trail goes back pretty far.
Sometimes she wonders where she’d be in the world before. She’s read about what was normal for someone her age back then- university, a job. Being twenty was about finding your place in the world, apparently, and finding the people you wanted to spend your life with.
Maybe she would’ve been on her way to being an astronaut. She laughs under her breath, and her side stabs with pain. It was always a dumb dream.
She lets herself imagine it, though. Studying hard, learning things she’s interested in, having goals and dreams and something to look forward to every day. Parties, if she’d wanted to do that. She never liked school, but she feels like university might’ve been nice.
As always, she’s incapable of thinking about a life without Dina. Sharing an apartment with her, watching movies every night. It bleeds into a life closer and closer to what she had until it is what she had, until it’s real memories of Dina lying next to her in bed, Dina smiling at her from across the sunlit living room, Dina holding JJ and bouncing him on her hip as he babbles at her, Dina, Dina, Dina in every way Ellie had been lucky enough to see her, to touch her, even be close to her.
Ellie is crying, weeping openly, pressing a hand to her throbbing side.
JJ was gonna be speaking any day now, Dina had told her with a smile. Someday soon he was going to be asking for things and yelling real words as he played with his toys. She’d decided with Dina when he was born that he’d call her Mom and Dina Mama. What would his little voice sound like, tugging on the tail of her shirt, telling her he was hungry, asking to be sung to, complaining that he’s bored?
Would he even remember her? Does she even remember him, really?
In a frantic moment of fear, she turns on her side and scrabbles desperately for her journal and a pencil. She sits up, her wounds screaming at her to stop, and before she can even think he’s forming under her pencil again. His pudgy little hands that she’d held minutes after his birth, his chubby cheeks. This is the only version of her son that she can keep now, this paper memory, fragile and intangible.
Maybe she can’t hurt him like this, she thinks. It’s a thought she’s had before, but she knows how weak it is. The look on Dina’s face when she had left her crying in the kitchen had solidified it. She couldn’t hurt them any more than she did by leaving.
She doesn’t draw Dina as much. Those pages always end up marred by tears or abandoned halfway through.
Would Dina… could she ever love her again?
Ellie had read a comic once where a man trapped in a life he hated had found a time machine. He’d turned it back and back and back to all the worst moments in his life and undone them, made his life new again, but when he’d returned he found that his alternate self was poor, miserable and alone, sadder than he had ever been before.
“How could this have happened?” he asked. “I made everything right.”
“Sometimes,” the machine had told him, “metal needs to be melted to form a blade.”
She’d really hated that issue.
If she had a time machine, she’d go back and beat herself bloody for trying to leave. She’d make herself stay inside that house if she had to demonstrate every inch of fucking despair it would cause to everyone she loved. She would live with the girl she loved and try for the rest of her life to heal in a way that wouldn’t do all of this .
It went back further, though, and she knew it. If she wanted to make any kind of difference, she’d have to at least go back to the second of March almost two years ago. She would throw herself at Joel and apologize a million times, tell him that her anger didn’t matter, tell him-
What? That he was something to her?
She knows exactly what he was. She’s too scared to admit it most days.
Today is not like most days.
Through a haze of tears and delirious fever, she could swear she hears her name being called.
Ellie blacks out.
“Ellie.”
Then again, more insistent.
“ Ellie .”
Ellie opens her eyes.
This is not the bed she fell asleep in. It’s warm and comfortable, and when she rolls over her side no longer sends fire up her torso.
And she is completely, one-hundred-percent sure that Dina wasn’t in it.
She shoots up in bed, staring wide-eyed at her girlfriend. She’s just as beautiful as she remembers with messy hair and creased lines on her cheek from the pillow, sitting cross-legged under the blankets and so, so close to Ellie. Ellie stretches out a shaking hand and carefully, gently lays it on her knee as if she’s scared she’ll break her.
Dina feels soft and warm under her touch, and… god, she’s real. This is real.
“Is everything okay, baby?” Dina asks, reaching out to touch her shoulder. The second she makes contact, Ellie gasps out a sob and grabs onto her, pulling her into a vice-grip hug, hands flying over her as if to make sure she’s not going to disappear.
“I love you, oh my god, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she repeats over and over, sobbing.
“Ellie- Ellie, what? What’s happened?” Dina carefully pulls back, cupping Ellie’s face in her hands. Ellie takes her in for a second, eyes flicking over every part- terrified, relieved- before leaning forward and kissing her gently for a long moment.
Dina responds, her hands trailing to her shoulders in a way that makes Ellie shiver, and then Ellie takes Dina’s face in her hands, rests her forehead against hers and tells her firmly, “I am never, ever going to fucking leave you again.”
“Again?” Dina looks completely lost, but smiles at Ellie at the same time. Ellie catches a glimpse of her own hand briefly and holds it to the light in shock- no wound. Five fingers. No infection, no ache.
For a moment she wonders if she dreamed it all, that it was all another nightmare. It had been so detailed, though- the sounds, the smells, the feelings, it all still lingers with her as clearly as Seattle or Jackson or Boston. She can still remember the sensation of her fingers snapping under Abby’s teeth, she can taste the sea salt and ash that had permeated the air… it’s too real. There’s no way it was a dream.
Somehow, some way, the universe has given Ellie another second chance. She’d thought it would’ve run out of those after surviving a bite, but apparently not.
“Ellie, you’re scaring me,” Dina starts, but she’s interrupted by a cry from the end of the room. “Oh, buddy…”
“I’ll get him,” Ellie volunteers eagerly, already half out of bed. She rushes to the crib, and there he is. Clinging to the bars, his little face worked up in fear, dressed in the dinosaur onesie Ellie had picked out for him before he was born. Her son . The second he sees her, his cries turn to little sniffles and he starts bouncing, eager to be picked up. It takes everything in her not to burst into tears again when he calms in her arms.
“It’s okay, buddy,” she whispers. “It’s okay, I’m here. I love you.” JJ makes a happy gurgling noise, tugging on the collar of her shirt. “You wanna sleep with us, huh?”
“Ellie,” Dina laughs, “he’s never gonna sleep on his own if-”
“Please?” She sounds maybe a little more desperate than she had intended. “Just tonight.”
As usual, Dina relents, opening her arms. Somewhat reluctantly, Ellie passes the baby to her, and she lays him down between where Ellie and Dina usually sleep. He waves his arms and grabs a piece of Dina’s hair, which she has to extricate from his fist with a laugh. “Be nice, JJ.”
Ellie can’t quite relax yet, though. “I’m gonna go get some water, do you want some too?”
“That would be nice, thanks.” Dina leans over their son, tickling his belly, and he squeals and kicks in delight.
Ellie walks back over to them and leans in for another kiss, which Dina gives to her. She can’t remember the last time someone had been gentle with her like this- she’d been on the road for months, never speaking to anyone who hadn't bothered her first. She wants to break down under her hands again, but she takes a deep breath, gives her girlfriend a genuine, teary smile, and heads downstairs.
Before she does, though… she has to check. Careful that Dina isn’t watching, she slips into her studio, pulling a dusty box from under her desk and searching through it.
She pulls her journal out easily- she’d kept it on the top of the pile, just in case… in case she’d ever planned on leaving again. In case she needed a final word. A final will.
She flips to the back.
Her drawings from California are still there. The beaches, the signs, every tear-stained page of her family. Her head is spinning, trying to make sense of it all, before she decides she doesn’t care. She's here, and it's the only thing that matters to her. She puts her journal back, closes the box and leaves.
She returns to her room with water to find Dina lying on her side, watching their son sleep. She smiles when she sees her, extending her hand for her glass, which Ellie gives her.
Ellie sits down on the bed, pulling the covers up around her again and reveling in the warmth and softness she’s been given. There’s a minute where she and Dina sip their water in silence before her girlfriend speaks.
“Ellie, are you… are you really okay?” Dina looks concerned, a little nervous to ask, and Ellie knows that look is her fault- she’d blown up at Dina more than once for asking over and over. She didn’t deserve it, and Ellie silently vows never to do that to her again. “Listen, if anything Tommy said today got to you-”
She doesn’t fully hear the rest of Dina’s sentence. Her ears are ringing, she’s gone numb in her fingers and toes. Today ?
This is the day she left.
Would have left.
She won’t make that mistake again.
She opens her mouth to tell Dina she’s fine, to go back to bed, that she loves her, but… that’s not entirely true either. Dina’s been telling her for nearly a year that she needs to be honest, and she finally feels ready to listen.
“... Not really. I feel pretty bad, actually.” Dina frowns and reaches for her hand. “I had… it was a nightmare. I left you guys.” It’s not a total lie. For one last time, she thinks it’s okay to keep this truth to herself. “I feel… sad, and, uh, really angry with myself.”
“It wasn’t real, though, baby,” Dina assures her, rubbing her hand. “It’s okay.”
“I really, really miss Joel tonight,” she breathes, her eyes filling with tears. Dina looks surprised at his name- she had never been able to talk about him, and even now it feels like her lungs are full of nails, but she pushes through it. She has to.
Sometimes , she thinks, metal has to be melted to form a blade .
“You don’t have to, but… would you like to tell me about it?-”
“Yes. Please.”
And she does. She spills her guts about every memory and grievance she had with him, talks for nearly an hour until her throat is scratchy again and she’s cried herself into a headache with JJ sleeping peacefully between them. The whole story of how she’d come from Boston. Every stupid birthday gift and fight. The pancakes he used to make in the morning sometimes. Everything , everything she can remember and feel. Dina listens, and Ellie tells her over and over how thankful she is for that, that she knows how lucky she is to have her.
At the end, she hesitates. Dina waits patiently as she opens and closes her mouth, trying to force it out. “Dina, I just- I miss him so much.”
“I know, El.”
“I miss my dad.”
Dina silently stands and walks over to her side of the bed, engulfing Ellie in a tight hug. “Ellie, I am so proud of you,” she whispers into her hair. Ellie just cries into her shirt, holding on as if this, too could be taken away from her.
After a minute, she feels okay enough to let go slowly. Dina sits down beside her, stroking her back.
“You know,” she starts tentatively, “I heard recently that there’s a doctor in Jackson, someone new. He’s supposed to know some stuff about this- how to deal with losing someone, and I heard he’s dealt with some… some problems like yours before. The nightmares, whatever happened in the barn. Do you maybe want to try working with him sometime?” She looks so worried , so scared she'll say no. “Only if you want,” she adds quickly.
Ellie wants to resist, wants to say no and keep pretending like she’s dealing with this on her own, but… she isn’t. It had almost destroyed her more than once, and if she let this wound fester any longer it was ultimately going to kill her.
“Yeah,” she breathes. “Yeah, okay.”
“Okay.” Dina nods. She cups Ellie’s face in one hand again, and she leans into it. “I think you’re making the right choice. I love you, okay? It’s gonna be better someday.”
“I love you too. So much.” Ellie presses a kiss to her palm. “Thank you.”
“I’m not accepting that,” Dina grins. “You don’t need to thank me. Come on, go back to sleep with us.” She climbs over Ellie somewhat awkwardly, ignoring her quiet laughter as she does, slides back under the covers, and snuggles herself warmly up to her neck in the blankets. Ellie follows suit, content to watch Dina’s face until she finally slips into sleep.
When she does, she turns her attention to her son between them. He’s so small, so calm, so good. His little chest rises and falls in an exact rhythm, and Ellie starts to hum very quietly to him along with it, stroking his hair.
“Love you, Potato,” she tells him. “Mom loves you so, so much.”
She knows the song she’s humming too well, knows it under broken hands and inside an abandoned theatre and sung in a low, drawling voice.
She wishes so badly that he could meet his grandfather. She bets Joel would’ve loved him just as much as she does.
Tonight, though, is as close as she’ll get, and it’s pretty good if you ask her. Her living family is here, safe and whole, in one bed, and somehow she knows that if Joel could see them, he’d be proud.
Tonight, she gets to the end of the song.