Defenseless

CHAPTER 1: BOXED IN

"Dammit!" wailed Ellie, holding the side of her leg as if that would help stop the bleeding from the gash on her shin, "That hurts way more than I thought it would!"

She had been running from those things for what seemed like an eternity, and it was clear now that she needed somewhere to hide since outrunning them was not getting her anywhere except deeper into the woods surrounding the town she had been attempting to loot. As she shouted even more repulsive expletives, she stopped running to kneel down and take a better look at her wound. The glass from that shop window had already been cracked and broken in a few spaces, but it did not stop it from cutting up her foreleg any more when she decided to jump through it. She had known it was a bad idea to begin in the town by going into the comic shop instead of the supermarket or the hardware store, and now she was paying for it. At least a pharmacist's might have had some medical supplies to stop the bleeding or protect from infection.

The sound of gnarly groans and growls from behind her broke her concentration and sent her back into flight mode. Gasping as she hobbled through the trees as fast as she could. She scanned for any buildings, sheds, or even larger rocks where she could possibly hide. It was getting later into the afternoon, and the overcast from the dark clouds above her was not helping. She could barely see anything, and was about to settle for a larger tree stump when she spotted a gas station in an upcoming clearing.

"Alright Ellie, time to haul ass," she swore to herself as she picked up the pace, almost sprinting towards the back door. Thunder shook overhead as she slammed into the side of the building and fumbled for the door handle. She met her mark, and was relieved to find that the door was unlocked. She swung it open, and slammed it behind her, making more noise than was probably safe. Sliding down her salvation, panting to regain her breath, she listened for any indication that the horde of monsters chasing her had heard the sound of the door. She glanced around, seeing if there was anything of use around to block the door, or help with her leg. The space was dark and looming. The shelves were nearly all cleaned off, and the floor littered with empty cans and torn fabric. As usual.

She chanced a peek through the boarded window to her side and was dismayed to find the pack of flesh-eaters she had been fleeting from shuffle closer towards the abandoned shop. Her heart sank into a deep abyss before shooting straight back up into her throat as she heard the click of a safety switch and a soft voice from behind her.

"Don't move," said the voice.

CHAPTER 2: STOOD APART

"Drop any weapons you have, and throw your backpack to the side," demanded Clementine, holding her handgun as steadily as she could towards the stranger crouched in front of her. She was dressed in a greenish heavy jacket, a pair of jeans, and what looked like combat boots. She was smaller and thin looking, even in her jacket, and had her red hair tied in a ponytail. Clementine was never very good with strangers, and that was not likely to change, but as long as they had the gun in their face rather than the other way around, she was satisfied and could go either way.

It also didn't help that she was only twelve years old.

"Wow, ok. Take it easy, man. I was just trying to get away from the horde out there," the stranger said, throwing her pack to the side as she had been told. Clementine nudged it back behind her with her foot, keeping the girl in her sights. Moving to the far side of her, she quickly stole a glance out the boarded window. The intruder could not help but peek over to her and stare in awe. "Whoa, you're just a kid."

Clementine looked her back over before responding, "Look who's talking."

"I'm hardly a kid, I'm fifteen. Name's Ellie, what's yours?"

Clementine wasn't too eager on making friends now, but she didn't see much of a threat in this stranger. By the way things looked; the two of them were going to be stuck in this gas station for at least the next morning.

"Clementine," she admitted.

"Clementine, huh?" the stranger thought that over before shooting her hand forward suddenly, "Nice to meet you, Clementine."

Clem caught Ellie's gesture before it reached halfway to her and threw herself back, putting her other hand back on her pistol cautiously.

Ellie gave her a sad, resigned look and dropped her arm. "So that's how this is going to be? You pointing your stupid gun at me this entire time? Look at my leg, dude. Look at the mass of idiots out there. I obviously didn't come in here to rob you, so chill the hell out. I guess I've already figured out how you've lasted so long out here by yourself. You are by yourself, right?"

Clem stared her up and down, trying to see as much into her soul as she possibly could. She never trusted anybody older than her, even if it was only by a couple of years. She had come across a lot of strangers and bandits through her ways and had always had a slight advantage over them with the surprise of her age. Well, most of them anyways. The others she just about always shot on sight. However, this girl didn't seem like a bad person, just somebody who had gotten herself into a bad situation just as everyone else tended to do nowadays.

Clem lowered her gun and gestured towards Ellie's pack, "Do you have any guns in there?"

Ellie looked over to her bag blankly before answering, "Uh, yeah. I got a hunting rifle and a couple handguns." She paused for a moment and looked back up at Clem with an eager expression, "And food, and a couple meds I think."

Clem wasn't interested in taking any of her supplies. She walked over to the backpack, picked it up, walked over to a couch that sat on the far side of the room, set the bag against it, laid down on the couch, and tilted the hat that her father gave her over her eyes.

CHAPTER 3: APPEARENCES

Ellie couldn't believe her eyes. A kid was ripping her off. A kid who didn't even look above ten. Clementine had taken her stuff with her over to a couch before promptly falling into it. It looked like she had lost consciousness as soon as she hit the cushions, but a few moments later, she tucked her dark blue baseball cap over her face. She had a small pink hoodie on over a cream-colored dress that made a sort-of skirt covering the top of a pair of black stockings. Her curly black hair cut short with two pigtails tied together at the back with some purple scrunches, and her right ear pierced. The pistol she had held up Ellie with had been tucked into the front pocket of her hoodie, and while her hand rested inside, she did not seem keen on pointing it at her anymore.

Ellie stood there, clueless, until she heard the moans of the undead outside. She looked back over her shoulder outside the window and caught a glimpse of one shuffling by. They were too stupid to realize she would come in here, but they somehow seemed to know that she was still in the area. As they walked circles around the building, Ellie turned back to Clementine, still relaxing on the sofa as if it were a typical Sunday afternoon for her.

"So, what do we do now?" Ellie asked her.

Clem shifted her legs around more comfortably before answering back, "Wait."

"Uh, ok. I mean what do I do now?"

"I don't really care as long as you're not trying to kill me in my sleep."

Ellie doubted the probability that Clementine would even fall asleep to give her the opportunity. "Ok, well I'm gonna check around then."

"I already did. There's nothing here."

"Oh," Ellie replied. She looked around the room; the awkward silence drowned out by the ghastly sounds surrounding the gas station, and spotted a table with a few chairs around it. She cautiously walked over and sat down, pulling up her pants leg to inspect the growing cut on her shin. The area around it looked swollen, and it stung with excruciating pain when she touched it. There weren't any glass shards that she could see, and it didn't look like it would need stitches, but she needed to get it wrapped up quickly before it was infected. She glanced at her bag sitting at the foot of the couch Clem was resting on. It had a first aid pack inside of it that she could use. She chose her words carefully.

"Can I get in my bag for a second? I need to get some stuff to fix up my leg."

Clementine peeked out from under her hat at Ellie, then down at the bag.

"Just don't take out anything loud or sharp." She finally answered.

Ellie was fine with that; all she wanted was her medicine. Besides, she still had her switchblade she always kept in her left boot in case things got hairy. She walked over to her pack and kneeled down to unzip it. Clem stared at her carefully as she rummaged through the contents of her bag. She finally found the kit, but also brushed by the issue of Savage Starlight she had not gotten around to reading yet, and her joke book. She thought the idea over before quickly snatching the two and returning over to her operating table.

At least she wasn't going to be bored while they waited.

CHAPTER 4: LIGHT DRIZZLE

Clementine watched as Ellie inched her way towards her and opened the bag full of weapons, food, and medical supplies that she had taken from Ellie. She was beginning to trust the slightly older stranger, but she had been taught to never be too careful. That, and to always keep her hair short. She didn't care about taking any of Ellie's things, Clem already had a bag of her own stashed in a safe place inside the gas station, and she just did not want her new roommate to have access to anything dangerous in case her judge of character was off base.

Ellie quickly found what she was looking for returned back to the table she had claimed. Clem was watching her intently when she heard one of the loudest cracks of thunder she had ever heard in her life. She had jumped, and even though she thought she saw Ellie give the same reaction, at least Ellie wasn't thrown from her seat, as Clem was. She hit the ground with a shriek and a thud.

She was vulnerable.

She looked up expecting to see Ellie rushing for her bag and pulling out a rifle with which she would end Clementine's life with; but all she saw when she looked up at Ellie was the first aid in her hand and an obvious, intensely repressed grin on the teenager's face. She looked as though she would burst out laughing at any point, but to Clem's surprise, she managed to stifle her amusement in an instant and give Clem an almost apologetic look.

Clem accepted the non-verbal apology, got up from her embarrassing tumble, and went back to sit on the couch, taking out her handgun to clean it and perhaps to show that she still held the cards. She glanced up shyly to find Ellie tending to the scrape on her shin she had mentioned, while another set of thunder rolled through. The storm that had been brewing appeared to be right on top of them now, and with another flash of lightning came a light that filled the room just long enough for Clem to spot what seemed to be a magazine and a tiny book lying on the table Ellie sat next to.

Now that the tension had been somewhat broken, she couldn't help but ask. "What's that?"

Ellie paused from tending to her injury to see to what Clem was referring. She followed her gaze to the reading material in front of her before responding, "Oh, just some stuff to read while we waited out the storm, I guess."

Clem frowned a bit, "You didn't say you would take that out."

All Ellie did was shrug before explaining, "You just said not to take anything sharp."

As she tried to remember her exact words, Ellie clarified, "It's just an issue of Savage Starlight. Do you read any comics?"

Clem shook her head, "My dad's friend owned a comic store, but I never read anything in there whenever we visited."

"Oh, well it's about some space-doctor who invents a space ship to travel faster than light and how she fights a bunch of aliens. It's pretty cool. It's hard to find any copies of it though."

Clem looked at the other book, "What's that?"

"What? Oh, that's a little joke book a friend gave to me a long time ago. You wanna hear one?"

Clementine looked at the book, and then back to her newly found acquaintance before answering with a resounding, "Uh, maybe?"

CHAPTER 5: BUTTERFLIES

"That was awful," Clementine reacted as Ellie finished yet another pun from her little purple book of puns.

"Oh come on! Don't you get it? It's the apocalypse, and people are freaking out like there's no tomorrow. It's funny because there really is no tomorrow," she explained.

"Yeah, I got it," Clementine defended, "I just don't think it's very appropriate because," she paused, "y'know."

Ellie smiled abashedly, "Yeah, I didn't think it was very funny when I first read it either. It'll grow on you."

Clem seemed to take her word for it, and gestured towards the lower half of the page Ellie was on.

"I like this one a lot more: What did the cannibal get when he showed up to the party late? A cold shoulder."

They both snickered before Ellie pressed, "Ha-ha, why is that one any better, you sicko?"

Clem's laughter died down a bit, followed quickly by Ellie's after a louder than usual moan came from outside their sanctum of humor. They both grew grimly quiet and listened, perfectly still for more than a minute or so. The sound of Clem's voice almost startled Ellie when she finally spoke up.

"I can't believe they're still out there," she whispered.

"Yeah," Ellie replied, "it's almost like they think we're in here, but they're not entirely sure."

She thought to herself a bit, as the two sat there in even more silence, before she had an epiphany. "Or maybe something's keeping them from splitting off. Something they're afraid of."

Clem shot her view back to Ellie, "You mean like a Fungus-Face?" she almost whimpered.

Ellie read such an expression of fear and loathing on Clem's face, that she found it almost impossible not to try to change the subject from the idea.

"Is that what you call them?" she asked.

"No. Well, I mean. I call them that, but I didn't come up with it. There was this guy who called them that, and I guess that's the only thing I heard them called," she clarified, "What do you call them?"

"Clickers," Ellie said in her most professor-like voice, "The ones that run really fast and whose heads look like really dirty seashells. I thought that's what everyone called them."

Clem looked quizzical for a moment, "No, I don't think I ever heard anyone call them that from where I've been."

"Where are you from, anyways?" Ellie pried.

Clem put on a long, reflective face. "Well, I lived in a small town just outside of Atlanta called Macon. I'd lived there my whole life with my parents. A few days before everything happened they'd gone on a vacation to Savannah and left me with my babysitter, Sandra. She got bit when she thought someone was trying to break into the house. I hid up in my treehouse until a man found me, named Lee. I," she breathed in, as if it were painful to talk, "He saved me from Sandra, and a bunch of other Walkers. He taught me how to shoot, and cut my hair so it couldn't be grabbed as easy. He taught me not to be afraid, and that I was stronger and smarter than all of the monsters in the world. Even though I was little, he said I could do anything," Ellie saw a tear roll down Clem's cheek as she continued her story, and almost felt like letting go a bit herself, "I got dumb, and tried to go find my parents on my own while we were in Savannah. He died saving me. He's the reason I'm still here."

Clem sat there, crying, as Ellie hesitated before acting on pure instinct, shuffling her chair next to her friend and putting an arm around her shoulder.

Clementine smiled at her, sniffed, and continued her long, terrible, and heart wrenching story.

CHAPTER 6: CHARTER

"So after all of that, you still had to leave Wellington?" Ellie now looked worse than Clementine did when she had started recalling her traumatizing past, "Wow. That really really sucks."

"Yeah, I kinda know. I've lost so many friends, it almost feels worth it to be alone now," Clem admitted.

"How long have you been out here? On your own, I mean," Ellie asked.

Clem had to think hard, the days seemed to blend too easily now that she didn't travel with anybody. She recounted the days since she had left North Carolina, "I guess almost a year now? I know I'm still twelve. One of the people I traveled with made me realize how much remembering your birthdays matter," she spotted her own blank stare and turned back to Ellie, "What about you? What's the worst you've got?"

Ellie seemed caught off guard by the question, "Oh. I don't have anywhere near as much crap to measure up to your record, I don't think. I was holed up in a larger settlement up near Boston for a year or so. Really boring stuff. Then my friend got bit while we had snuck out of camp and I met some old guy named Joel. We traveled through pretty much the entire country together, and now here I am, I guess."

Clem wasn't expecting such an abridged history. Something did not add up, "You traveled the entire country? What happened to Joel?" she asked. A distasteful look grew on Ellie's face.

"I don't know, and I don't care. Dude was a lying asshole. He gets whatever he deserves," she almost spat.

Clem saw that she had hit a bad note in her new friend and decided to change the subject, "It's a big place, where were you guys going?"

"Ever heard of the Fireflies?" Clem shook her head, "Well, they were this group of people who were looking for a cure for the infection once the government had stopped. They helped a lot of people in need. Or as much as they could. We were heading to their main headquarters over in Utah, but my partner had different ideas and he took me to a camp his brother was in charge of. He said they weren't at the base in Salt Lake, and as soon as I found out he was lying to me, I booked it. I've been heading up towards Niagara since. I hear they have a huge town there with electricity from the falls and everything. Think about it, an actual town!"

Clem did think about it. It sounded almost too good to be true. She had been heading with her old group to another paradise in Ohio, called Wellington. "How do you know it's really there?"

Ellie just shrugged and told her, "I don't, but you just gotta take a leap of faith these days, right?"

"I feel like I would take that leap more often if things tended to work out better whenever I got there."

"This one will work, trust me. It's so high up north that in the winter, walkers actually freeze trying to get all the way up the mountains."

Clem sat there, weighing her options. She had survived not because of how well she shoot, but because she knew how to keep people from shooting her.

"It's not the walkers I'm worried about," she finally responded as a rotted arm punched its way through one of the boarded windows, followed by one of the loudest, most terrifying shrieks either of the girls had ever heard.

CHAPTER 7: SIEGE

"What the hell!" Ellie screamed over the wind blowing through the now open window. Clementine pulled the pistol out of her jacket's pocket and ran for Ellie's pack. Ellie rushed to the window with a two-by-four she had found lying in front of her and started smashing the dripping discolored arm as hard as she could, "Clem, get my rifle!"

Clem scoured the bag for a clip with which to load the empty rifle. She found purchase on a rectangular box-like piece of plastic, and held it up only to realize it was only some kind of old music player, "I can't find any mags," she yelled back.

"There's a round in the chamber, toss it over!"

Clem grabbed the heavier of Ellie's two handguns and brought it along with her to aid her friend. She fired two bursts into the opening, doing the trick, as she tossed the assortment of weapons into Ellie's arms. She checked the chamber before pushing back the bolt and letting off a round into the murk. She seemed dissatisfied and cursed before running back to the couch and kneeling into her pack.

"There's too many out there, they heard the shot. I've got some stuff to make a nail-bomb, keep me covered."

"A nail-what?"

"Just make sure none of them make it in here!"

Ellie scrambled through her belongings frantically for the can of gunpowder and the few blades she had found back in the town. Making the jury-rigged explosive would not take more than a minute.

Clem rushed to the nearest window two find two more undead shuffling closer to the building. She aimed for the slightly closer one on the left, in a red jersey, and held her breath for a split-second before taking a shot at the monster's head. She took aim for the next one and dispatched it as cleanly as the first. Looking around for any more, she found none, and moved to the next window over. She peered out of the crack in between the two boards and gasped as she saw a cluster of five or six walkers near her window.

"Ellie?" she cried.

"Got it!" came the response. Ellie ran to the window Clem was standing at and aimed her homemade grenade towards the head of the cluster. Suddenly an arm burst through the window over and grabbed Ellie's arm before she could react. She shrieked as the bomb fell from her hands onto the floor. Clementine pushed her gun as close to where she thought the walker's head would be and pulled the trigger. The arm went limp, and Ellie was free to shout "Look out!" before grabbing Clem and pulling her with her behind a covered chair, hearing the sound of a *click* noise and the sound of an immense explosion soon afterwards.

Ellie, groaning from her injuries, slowly rose up to inspect the damage she had caused. "Holy crap," she exclaimed. The bomb had blown a truck-sized hole in the wall, but it at least seemed to have taken out the remaining of the walkers that had been looming in the area. "I think that's all of them," she said to Clem, who was still pulling herself back together from the shockwave. She looked up just in time to see a figure rise up from the debris and warn her friend.

"Watch out!"

Ellie's smile faded into a frown as she turned around to witness her one-armed assailant tackle her to the ground.

CHAPTER 8: TORN

"Agh, get off! Get off me, you asshole!" Ellie shrieked, attempting to push the animated corpse off her. The walker was unrelenting, flailing its arms wildly in hopes of an opening in its victim's defense. Clementine panicked. Looking around her, all she could find was a brick on the shelf next to her and a bottled that had fallen out of Ellie's backpack. She chose the bottle, scooping it up as she ran to aid her friend, smashing the bottle against the fiend's head and knocking it off Ellie and onto the ground. Ellie reached over her head, picking up her dropped handgun, and straddled the walker before pumping five rounds and four empty clicks into its emotionless face.

Clem kneeled down next to her, "I thought he'd gotten you."

Ellie was out of breath, and covered in the blood of fallen foe. She looked over her empty pistol before putting it back into her holster.

"Yeah, so did I," she said, stepping over the glass shards covering the floor now, "I wish you didn't hit him with that, I was saving it for a molotov. Bricks or always better for bashing creeps' skulls in anyways. Thanks."

"No problem," Clem replied, "Any bites?"

Ellie didn't even look herself over before answering, "Nope. I think I reopened my cut, though."

"I've got some stuff in my bag for it."

Ellie looked out through the new door she had made in the side of the gas station, and noticed the lack of thunder and the receding of the rain. "Storm's starting to clear up; we should be able to move tomorrow morning. Until then, we should probably get this hole blocked off with something. Help me move this vending machine over."

The both of them took to either side of the machine and pushed as hard as they could. Clem almost fell over but managed to keep her balance, while Ellie positioned the monolith parallel to the hole.

"I don't know why they would suddenly attack like that, I've never seen that sort of thing from a walker before, have you?" Ellie pondered.

Clem thought hard about their behavior and any motive behind it. Could it have been the storm, or were they making more noise than they had thought? She did not even want to consider the other possibility Ellie had mentioned before. She settled on the former theory, "Maybe they were getting mad rom the storm or something."

Ellie wasn't buying it, "I dunno, maybe. I think we should keep a close eye on this wall for tonight. I can watch it for a bit, you can go get some rest if you want. I need to patch myself up anyways."

The vending machine slid in front of the gaping opening acceptably, and the two girls backed up to inspect their handiwork. Ellie was satisfied enough and started her march back over to her table before Clem stopped her to give her the medical supplies she had, "Here, I guess as an apology for holding you up earlier. And to bribe you from telling anymore jokes."

Ellie grinned and swiped the materials from Clem's hands, "Ha-ha. I'm not the one telling jokes around here," she replied, continuing towards her table.

Clementine smiled back and walked over to the couch before setting her bag down next to Ellie's and pulling her hat back over eyes. She fell asleep almost instantly, as Ellie looked at her fondly and tended to the other pain in her side.

CHAPTER 9: SILENT

Clementine woke in a trembling sweat. She had fallen asleep on her watch, and stumbled into one of her recurring nightmares again. The one where Lee is consumed by darkness while trying to get to her in an endless abyss as she reaches back out into the abyss after him. It had haunted her for as long she could remember after what happened to them in Savannah, and it never got any less agonizing.

She needed to get her mind off it. Clem got up from the chair she had been sleeping in and walked over to the blockade they had formed the night before. It looked no worse for wear, and by the looks of the sky easing into a lighter blue, she could tell it was almost dawn. The rain had completely cleared up, but there was still an overcast and a quiet breeze sprawling through the night. There weren't any undead in sight either, which was a nice change of pace. They could leave right now if they wanted to, or at least Clem could, but the idea of leaving Ellie now was far out of consideration. She looked back over to her friend, sleeping peacefully on the couch with her heavy coat folded on the armrest above her head. Although they had only known each other for less than a day, Clem felt a stronger bond with her than she had with anyone since Lee. Maybe it was the fact that she had always wanted a bigger sister, or the more likely reason of Ellie being one of the few people that was not trying to kill her. Either way, she would no sooner leave her than walk into the empty woods without her supplies.

Clem yawned and decided she was rested enough to wait for her friend to awaken before they headed off. She walked over to Ellie's pack, interested in beginning an issue of Savage Starlight. As she bent down to rummage through the bag, she noticed the right arm of Ellie's jacket had a tear.

"Must have gotten ripped in the fight," she softly spoke to herself, rolling up the sleeve to get a better look for any injuries. "I'm surprised she was lucky enough not to get-"she stopped. Clem's eyes grew wide as she stood up and slowly backed away from the sofa. "Oh my god…" she gasped.

There, on her friend's exposed forearm, were the unmistakable marks of a human bite.

Without hesitation, Clementine drew her sidearm and trained it directly on Ellie. How could this have happened? Why had she lied to her? Clem's mind raced as she recounted the events of last night, trying to make sense of her discovery. Was that really the bite of the walker that had tackled her? Clem had once been bitten by a dog once, and had been mistaken of being the victim of a walker bite, but this was different. It was undebatable. It was no animal bite.

She flicked off the safety, and she focused on her friend's head, following it as it shifted softly deeper into the couch cushions. Clem's eyes started to swell up, and she looked away before lowering her gun and realizing she couldn't do it. Too many times had she needed to end the misery of one of her friends before they joined the ranks of the monsters that haunted the remainder of the world. This time seemed different to her. It was too much. She wiped the tears from her eyes and shoved her pistol back into her pocket.

What now?

She was not going to stick around for when Ellie turned, that was for certain. Lee's words rang through her head, "Never let yourself get trapped, okay?" They seemed harsher now than before. Nevertheless, she picked up her bag, picked something from Ellie's bag, and walked out the back door of the gas station, but not before giving one last look behind her at her doomed friend.

Dawn was just on the cusp of breaking as she looked through the trees to see if she could find the edge of the road. Her eyes were still a bit watered, making it hard to see, but it did not affect her ability to hear a sound that sent a deathly chill down her spine. A sound that makes even walkers seek refuge. A sound that had been drowned out by the storm and the chirping of the morning doves until it was too late.

[Click-Click-Tikatika-Criiiiiick]

She turned around just in time to see the angered Clicker pounce on her, and the ground meet her face.

CHAPTER 10: STANDOFF

The foul stench of a face that had been rotting for no less than a year swept over Clementine as the Clicker that had pounced her swiped ferociously over and over again at her head. She could not help but yell into the terrifying thing's fungus-covered face as she reached for her handgun. Gagging, she successfully retrieved the weapon from her jacket pocket, only to have it batted away as the infected assailant swung its arms wildly, looking for an opening to bite at. The pistol landed a foot or two away from her, perhaps still in her reach. She struck an arm out and nearly touched the grip before the Clicker's weight seemed to shift and Clem had to put all of her effort back into keeping herself distant. She had to push it off so she could get to her gun, but it leaned in so heavily, she could feel herself getting weaker and weaker. It would have her in seconds.

The sound of the Clicker's angry ticks and Clem's hoarse screaming was enough to deafen the forest itself, until a blade pierced itself straight through the monster's head and out of its "face". Clementine pushed it off and it fell to the side with a heavy thump.

"Man, this thing stinks," Ellie said pulling on her nail-bat still embedded in the Clicker's head, "Next time, don't try to get a head start on me."

Clementine replied by shooting her arm out to grab her pistol and pointing it straight up at Ellie's head. Her arms were locked, the safety was off, and Ellie's smile faded.

"Clem?"

"Why didn't you tell me?" Clementine shouted angrily, causing Ellie to jump.

"T-tell you what?"

"You KNOW what! That walker last night bit you! The bite is right on your arm there. Why would you hide it from me? Why would you lie to me?" she demanded.

Ellie looked down at the bite on her arm and looked almost as surprised as Clem had been. "Oh god, Clem. I'm sorry I didn't tell you," she looked at her friend with sad eyes and an expression of pure anguish, "I've had this ever since I met Joel. I can explain…."

"Explain what? That walker bites don't affect you? That you're immune?" she barked.

"You say that like it's not possible…"

"That's because it isn't!" Clem cried out, tears lashing from her eyes, "STOP! Just stop. I don't want to hear anymore lies. Not from you," her gun dropped down from Ellie, "I trusted you, okay? I was naïve and I thought this would actually work out for once. But it never does. It's always the same thing, over and over and over again. You put your faith in someone, in yourself, that you can protect them. And they always wind up gone. It happened with Lee, Molly, Kenny, Jane, Luke, my parents, and everyone else I ever cared about," water streamed down her cheeks, "I'm just so tired of losing everyone I care about. I can't lose you too. Not you."

The weapon left her hands as she sat there crying uncontrollably, until Ellie kneeled down and two arms reached across Clem's back and pulled the two together.

"I thought the same way once. That it wasn't worth it. To find someone special, worth living for, only to inevitably lose them. I spent so much time in that place, it would have torn me apart, but I had to choose. And when I finally did, it hurt so much I could barely stand it," Ellie pressed herself as hard as she could against Clementine, "I wouldn't give up the time I spent with them for anything, and I'm especially not going give up now. This is why Joel and I were looking for the Fireflies. I'm immune, and I'm not going to leave you alone, Clementine. I promise."

Ellie stroked Clem's hair as she cried into her shoulder, and the two sat there in perfect silence for what seemed like hours. Eventually the sunrise broke them from their spell and they talked with each other. Ellie explained how she had gotten the bite years ago, and Clementine even showed her the bite scar she had gotten from a dog. They laughed, they cried, and eventually they left, making their way towards a chance at paradise. A new beginning. And together, they never looked back.