Chapter Text
Alone.
Other people around but the hole is lonely, scrapped knees and a crimson golf club, get up Joel and a man spitting on her almost-father’s open carcass.
Then the girl.
Eyes like extinguished coals. No hesitation as she gave the final blow, because it must be done. Because she’s gone this far, now. Because what else. What else is there to break?
There was more enthusiasm at the start—Ellie could tell by the blood. It arced in beautiful fanning sprays on the wooden floor, telling a story: a swing this way, then that, enjoying the wet crunch of bone. Organized violence, efficient and hungry.
By the end, when they held her down and made her watch, it was different. The swings dragged, and the blood—most of it out by now—congealed in thick oozes. The violence felt slower, more tired. Bodies like Joel’s don’t break easy, these things take time, take work. Repeated blunt force. Patient violence.
Ellie won’t use a golf club when it’s Abby’s turn. The distribution of weight wouldn’t be in her favor, her strength isn’t in her shoulders like Abby’s. Hers is in her teeth. In her knees. In the coiled fury of her spine. She has agility on her side.
She could wrap her legs around Abby’s neck, lock her ankles, hands on either side of the ears and twist, feel the wet pop of vertebrae before the body even knows it’s dead. She could dig her teeth into the meat of Abby’s neck and tear. She could nick the femoral artery on her thigh and count how long it takes for a body to bleed out. Faster than Joel’s did, certainly.
Things might have been different, had Abby shot Joel in the head.
A clean death.
It’s the suffering Ellie cannot forgive. The half-lidded eye tracking her, nonverbal and a ruined body trying, still trying, to rise for her. That he had to hear her beg. That his last moments were not peace. Jesse’s was quick at least. No suffering.
Joel didn’t even get the mercy humans grant animals. A bullet between the eyes or a blade across the throat. Clean. Honorable.
Joel’s was none of those things. Pathetic, too soon, too slow. Pieces of him left behind like trash on the blood-soaked wooden floor.
It’s fascinating, the way grief digs a moat around a person, calloused hands digging deep, forcing anyone and everyone out. Fascinating, how a scream for help can ring like a cathedral bell inside the skull, how it can lead the ones hearing it to their own demise. Fascinating, how sharp grief’s talons are.
One year. Three hundred and sixty-five days, and Ellie’s blood is still at a boiling temperature, revenge hot on her breath.
Shouldn’t the rage have dulled by now? Shouldn’t it yawn and tuck itself in some dark corner of her mind, exhausted, and let her live? A normal life in a normal community, with a woman who believed in her enough to follow her into a hellquest. A happy ending, finally.
It was an empty quest though, wasn’t it? Just a trail of corpses leading nowhere, and Abby still lives…
‘I've struggled a long time with survivin’, but no matter what, you keep finding something to fight for.’
Ellie tries.
Going through the motions, laughing when it’s required, struggling but seeking joy in the little things, learning how to carve wood, making toys for JJ, following Dina in the kitchen, trapping her against the counter, and it all feels performative. She is doing all of this because it’s what everyone else is doing, moving forward.
Time moves on, dragging her with it, but Ellie is stuck in the past, moving nowhere. People around her grow roots but she atrophies.
She doesn’t ask ‘everyone else’ whether they experience the same launches through the past at night, catapulted to a place where all they can see is Joel’s shattered skull, Jesse’s surprised gasp, the black eye of Abby’s gun swallowing everything. Do you see the strange expression on Abby’s face, too? The moth-eaten revenge? Do I wear the same expression? Is this expression the reason Jesse died? The reason I did?
Ellie hasn't slept through the night since—
Insomnia is more peaceful than people make it seem. Better than the horrors of her nightmares, anyway. At least the silence is hers.
She circles the town like a sentinel, drinks with Seth on his bench until the bottle empties, carves and carves and carves.
She learns the best types of wood to form toys and weapons, spends nights after night looking down the sharp point of arrows. When her calluses start to hurt, she paints. Only one color, a collection she has aptly named When Blood Runs. Drips of red on wood, she imagines what Abby’s brains would look like, splattered from this angle. That angle. What a long line down the slope of her throat would achieve. She hallucinates murder in the dark, and when dawn breaks she goes to the kitchen and prepares JJ’s and Dina’s food. Lies through her teeth when Dina lies through hers and asks if she slept well.
Ellie didn’t know play pretends games could last into adulthood, but they’ve perfected this dance. Then again, she doesn’t much feel like an adult. Most of who she is is bits and bobs of a young kid forced to grow up too fast and see too much; twenty years old and lots of ghosts in her pockets. She has lost almost everyone, and still her grief digs around and alienates more and more and more and more and more and—
Dina asks her to let it go. Ellie can’t. Letting go isn’t in her blood the way revenge is. She was forged in this world, where death is a currency more powerful than money, and Abby’s balance remains unsettled.
She makes the decision while watching JJ sleep.
His chubby cheeks rise and fall innocently, untouched by the rot festering inside her. He doesn’t deserve an absentee mother, only there in the flesh. Dina doesn’t deserve a half-person either, she hasn’t for a while. Everything tense, everyone trying to pretend the opposite of the truth, which is that happiness cannot exist in the same room as revenge. One of them is heavier, more potent, it infiltrates everything else—including happiness, turning joy sour.
She tells Dina, “I’m going after Abby,” and Dina nods, eyes hollow. The lack of surprise cuts deeper than anger ever could. There’s relief there, too, and it’s a fascinating realization, that Ellie isn’t the only one who’s been distracting herself with empty actions to ignore the elephant in the room. Protecting herself, Dina is as gone from this is as Ellie is. Two castles looking at each other with their drawbridges up.
Ellie doesn’t ask how long Dina has known. Their communication has been broken down for longer than either of them would like to admit. Ellie doesn’t blame her; it’s not easy, living with a pantomime ghost.
Packing feels like a purposeful action, something good, that makes sense, for the first time in months. If only Ellie had known earlier that purpose could be found again only by listening to the temperature of her anger, she might have started packing sooner.
The motions are methodical, Joel’s voice in her eat the entire time, double-check your ammo, pack the medkit tight, count your bullets and keep track, tell your loved one goodbye.
All of the words she could say to Dina ring empty.
I’m sorry.
I have to do this.
I will come back.
Wait for me.
The truth is, she isn’t sorry, and she doesn’t have to do this; she wants to.
She could let it go and move on the way everyone else seems to be able to do, but her grip on revenge is sclerotic.
She might not come back, either. And. She doesn’t want Dina to wait for her. They’ve been ghosts to each other for too long, haunting a relationship that died the day Ellie chose vengeance over healing. They haven’t made each other happy in a long while, two tombstones marking where something good once stood. A legacy statement, an overinflated sense of importance for both of them to each other.
Dina was happy, once. Ellie, too. But no one tells a PTSD patient to separate from their only remaining support system. Perhaps no one’s ever had the balls to.
She used to see the town therapist but stopped when it started to feel too much like looking into a mirror, this is what I’m hurtling towards. She doesn’t know what to say.
Be happy
the note reads as Ellie closes the door a few minutes before dawn, backpack heavy but the lightest she has felt in over a year. Purpose, again. Looking down the barrel of revenge with a single-minded focus.
Be happy.
The only truth that doesn’t sound like a lie.
Her horse’t hooves crack the dawn quiet as they ride out.
She doesn’t look back.