Author's Note: I don't claim to own any part of The Last of Us, this work is strictly for entertainment!

Vanishing Grace

Joel doesn't take the photograph of Sarah because he doesn't need to.

His Sarah. Beautiful, dead, Sarah.

Her image, in its varying forms, had been burnt into his mind since the day she was taken from him. He looks at clouds in the sky and sees her when she was just six years old and chasing the neighbors cat around the garden. When he searches abandoned houses for supplies and stumbles into a nursery it takes all that is left of Joel not to crumble like the decimated cities around him. The crib, the toys, the little tiny shoes, they all make him think of Sarah. Seems like just yesterday she was born and he was holding her in his arms for the first time. He looks at the broken watch on his wrist and remembers the night that she died. He is filled with contempt for himself and the whole goddamned broken world. His baby girl…

Joel doesn't take the photograph of Sarah because his every waking moment is like staring at a photograph of her. He hadn't even grieved, all these years and he couldn't bring himself to do it. It was as if the very second the life had left Sarah's eyes; Joel's life was gone too. He had become a statue. Sure, he had human form and walked and talked and survived like everybody else, but within himself Joel was frozen in time.

He's so eager to pass Ellie onto his brother because even the sight of her shakes him.

No, he doesn't trust his ability to separate himself from her, to keep up the wall he has so effortlessly constructed around his heart these last twenty years. He can feel her tearing it down brick-by-fucking-brick and he can't let her do that to herself or to him.

Ellie stands before him with anger in her eyes. Joel notices that if he looks hard enough the light from the window behind her illuminates her hair in such a way that it looks blonde. One second Ellie is there, the next it's Sarah. Joel wonders if he's going mad.

"Yes, Ellie," he thinks to himself, "I did want rid of you the whole fucking time, and I still do."

He hears himself lying to her instead and knows immediately that she sees right through him. He turns away from her and that's when she mentions Sarah. It's like she's using a sledgehammer to try and break down his wall, and there he is on the inside trying to hold it all together, trying to hold himself together. He lashes out against her with the only defense he has left:

"You're not my daughter, and I sure as hell ain't your dad."

Joel knows he's really only trying to convince himself.