CANDOR

"You don't bring up Tess...ever."

The first time Ellie sees constellations, she can't understand how people had the time to name all the stars in the sky.

"Each and every one of them has a name?"

"No, just some groups of stars," Joel traces a curious pattern in the sky, "Orion."

"Never heard of that. Any others?"

"Ursa minor, there. And Cassiopeia, there."

"Nope. Anything else?"

"There are eighty five others, baby girl, we'll be living in hell before I can find them all."

Joel rolls over onto his back and he and Ellie lay side by side on the grass. They spend most nights like this, murmuring thoughtless comments back and forth until one of them nods off, usually Ellie first. But Joel notices tonight, she seems too restless to be tired.

Gunshots at midnight are normal. Usually she's tough; she hides all fear. But morbid sounds ricochet through the hills and they can tell there's something like a war-zone less than a few miles away. It's unsettling her.

"Ellie, ignore it. Try and get some rest," he murmurs softly. Ellie doesn't close her eyes like he does.

"They sound real close tonight, Joel."

Joel opens his eyes again.

"They're coming from across the river. two, three miles away," he glances at her and notices her sombre expression, and sighs, "if it helps you sleep, we'll leave at five instead of six."

"Yeah. Alright."

A silence settles before it's interrupted by another few shots. Joel hears Ellie fidgeting in the grass next to him.

"Ellie—"

"—sorry."

There's another silence before another gunshot, seven or eight in a row this time. Ellie moves again, but then is still. Joel doesn't hear any more movement until sunrise.

The next night is worse. Once they get back from hunting Ellie insists they move locations again, just in case. They pack all their supplies and put out the fire, and walk long into the evening until the daylight is out and they have no choice but to make camp.

The gunshots appear to be louder and not even Joel can deny they must be closer this time.

"What's happening, Joel?" Ellie whispers, quivering.

"Hunters, maybe."

"Or clickers?"

"Yeah. Maybe," Joel turns to look at her, "take your mind off it. Sleep."

"I can't." Ellie pulls the blanket tighter around her. It's not warm at all, but she feels safer. Safer, but not safe.

She hasn't felt safe since Marlene and the Fireflies. Now they're way out of the picture and she misses the security that came with bigger numbers. If it's only her and Joel out in the wild, it's her and Joel against the entire world as well.

"Hey, Joel."

"Mm."

"Do you ever regret this?"

"This?"

"Us."

"Don't understand you, Ellie."

Ellie stares into the sky. Second night in a row it's laden with bright lights. She should feel less scared because of them.

"Do you ever wish that you could take it all back? Not done that favor for Marlene?"

He's quiet. Ellie doesn't know if that's good or bad yet.

"Even if I wanted to, I don't think I could. It became more than a favor."

"A favor to a friend?"

"More than that," his voice becomes dark, "this — us, and what has brought us here — is much more than just a favor now, alright?"

"More of a journey, right?" Ellie murmurs.

Joel turns his head to look at her. His expression softens.

"Baby girl, what's on your mind?"

Ellie exhales.

"I don't...I don't know. I'm just thinking about some stuff."

"Some stuff like what?"

"We've done a lot of stuff. Like, bad stuff."

"We did what we had to, Ellie."

"I know, I know. But we did a lot of moving," she watches him carefully when she says, "and we left a lot of people behind."

"I know." Joel replies shortly.

"A lot of important people, Joel."

"Yeah."

"And I know it was surviving."

"But?"

She thinks of all the people who had made sacrifices for her. There had been so many of them who had died in sake of a shitty little fourteen year old.

Some of them wouldn't even be dead if it weren't for her. She probably won't ever forget that.

"I think that still makes us shitty people, Joel. It's been that way for a long time."

Joel reacts slowly but acutely. He turns his head back to face the stars but his face registers with harrowing recognition at her words.

She's only been mentioned once or twice in the past year, always met with a passive reaction. They might as well not have mentioned her at all.

It would be a stupid move to keep talking.

The next morning Joel is distant. They wake up to natural sounds for once, but he's still in the dark.

"Hey, Joel."

"Hm."

"We should get moving, remember?"

"Yeah. Let's go."

They trek up north, where it's drier and the lush forest smell is replaced by an incessantly barren wind. After a while it starts to rain and they're forced to make camp under a small rock face.

Joel had spoken little. It was limited to just grunts and occasionally, "keep moving" or "head up". That wasn't much.

She still feels as if there is something more that needed to be said last night. She still feels as if Joel is just running scared from it, too.

That night, Ellie points up at the stars. One of them flutters across the sky. Impossible that they weren't just things of stories.

"That's a star shooting, isn't it?"

"Shooting star."

"Yeah. That."

"You gotta wish on it. Tradition."

It surprises her that he says something like that. He's not the type.

"Okay. You...should too." She replies.

She closes her eyes and it's all blackness. Then she starts seeing them in her head - the people she's seen die before her eyes - and she knows what her wish will be.

"Alright. I have it."

"Wish."

"I wish they're all in a better place. All of them," she takes a breath, "especially her."

Joel stiffens in her peripheral.

"I hope that she's in a better place than this fucked-up hellhole. I hope she's safe watching us from the sky."

She thinks she hears Joel mutter something but she ignores it.

"I hope everything she did served a purpose. And I know she—"

"Ellie...stop talking."

She does, hesitantly.

"I just—"

"Stop."

The first thing Joel had said after they left her there to die was to never bring her up, ever.

Neither of them had. They acted along their way as if she had never existed in the first place, as if they had been living in this apocalyptic age for centuries with only each other. She was never there but always here are be same time.

Ellie's concern lies with her companion though. She's sure he had been grieving somewhere along the course of time they'd known each other.

He's just been hiding it really fucking well.

"You've been quiet for pretty long, Joel, haven't you?" She murmurs.

It comes out harsher than she expects.

"You need to let it out, say goodbye to her. You can't just let her disappear."

She speaks in almost a whisper, but Joel noticeably and immediately stiffens where he lies. Ellie hears an excruciating silence, then she hears Joel mutter, "fuck."

She keeps talking. She probably shouldn't have. She was right the night before; stupid to keep talking.

"She doesn't deserve to be forgotten."

When Joel rolls slowly to face her, his face is almost translucent enough that she can see every ounce of pain and grief and pure melancholy sadness that he's been every day she's ever known him.

"We're not talking about this. We're not going to fucking talk about her." his voice is thin as ice and laced with poisoned grief.

"Joel—"

He turns abruptly to the other side, facing away from her.

"Just fucking—don't."

She murmurs indistinctly to him for a few minutes. It's to no avail. She lets the gunfire lull her to sleep.

The fourth night is painful, and there isn't even any gunfire tonight - the hunters must have moved. It's painful because Joel has been distinctively distant and silent. After the day's hunt they settle in camp and eat their rabbits wordlessly around the fire.

Ellie tries offering some uninteresting conversation.

"We should make it back to the Boston Zone in a few weeks, right?"

He nods stiffly. Ellie takes another bite into her meat and chews a little louder to fill the awful pregnant pauses. The rabbits are plain and tasteless in her mouth.

"The rabbits aren't bad."

He doesn't react. He silently bites into his rabbit and the mouthful takes eternity to swallow.

Ellie puts her half-finished meal down.

"Joel, please talk to me. I'm sorry."

She's dismayed when he doesn't seem to hear.

"Joel."

Still silence.

"Joel, you can't ignore me forever. Tell me what's on your mind."

He grinds his rabbit harshly between his teeth, tossing the uneaten portion into the woodlands. The rustle of grass fills the uncomfortable silence.

"Not her. We're not talking about her. I made it clear from that day. You don't bring her up."

He savagely juts one end of a branch into the fire. Ellie throws her rabbit bones in. It's not effective.

"You told me we'd keep our histories to ourselves. But now I know about Tommy, about Sarah, and you know about my mother and the Fireflies."

"This...this is different." Joel says, tapping at his broken watch.

"How?"

"Tommy is still alive. And Sarah..." He trails off, and looks at her long and hard, "I still miss her every day. And that's twenty years I've been missing Sarah."

He gazes out. Ellie knows he's still hurting from Sarah, but that's an older wound. On the other hand, he had just split open a fresh one.

"But her, her..." He shakes his head, "just don't bring her up again, Ellie."

Ellie shakes her head too. She's disappointed in his reaction. He didn't seem to want to confront directly, he wanted to run away and never look back.

"She wouldn't want to be forgotten by you like this, you know."

He tosses the burning stick into the flames. It erupts and crackles but it doesn't faze him.

"You didn't know her like I did." His voice is soft but scathing with rage, "so you don't talk about her like you knew her. You don't ask me about her. You just let the past be the past. It's over, she's gone."

"It's not over, Joel—"

"Yes, it is, Ellie!" He shouts then a grim sort of finality settles over his face, "It's done. It's finished."

"We didn't deal with it, Joel. We fucking left her."

"We did deal with it. If we had sat around crying about it we would have had our asses in the fucking inferno."

Joel growls and stands up.

"We are here, and we are alive, Ellie. We're not lucky enough to keep these things on our minds."

He steps out into the bush.

"Where are you going?" Ellie shouts after him.

"A walk. I'm clearing my head." Ellie moves to stand up but he jerks around to force her back down, "Don't fucking follow me."

So she doesn't. She stays seated at fireside until a rustling of grass tells her he's back. It must be early morning by now.

When he sees her, he shakes his head, "fuck, Ellie, we leave in a few hours. You look like shit, you didn't sleep at all."

"I know. But hear me out, Joel."

"No."

She stands.

"Hear me out," she shakes her head, "you can't ignore this. You can't just forget about her, Joel, she deserves so much more than that."

Joel turns slowly, his expression seething.

"You think I don't know that?"

He scares the shit out of her when he's like this, but Ellie stands her ground.

"No, I don't think you do. Because you didn't grieve, you didn't mourn or anything. I know where we're at, and I know times are shit but come on, Joel. It doesn't mean we can't be human and cry about things we love that we've lost."

Joel raises a hand and gestures to the open woods.

"Mourning is behind us. I mourned her when we left. Then we had to get back to fucking real life, the real world, Ellie. We had a job to complete."

"Yeah, and the job was her fucking death wish, Joel!"

Silence immediately swallows them both at her words and she regrets how hard and careless they were. But they were true.

"It was your obligation. To her."

Joel doesn't look at her but his hands begin to quiver. Not out if pain or grief but a bottled kind of rage.

Ellie takes a cautious step backwards.

"Why, Ellie?" He definitively mutters it, cursing under his breath, "tell me why it is so fucking important that I need to remember and commemorate the fact that I left someone I cared about to die. Tell me why I need to reiterate that I may as well have killed her myself."

"Because you just act like she never existed! You act like she was just another infected monster that was killed - forgotten. Done. Nothing. I feel like there should be a fucking shrine in her name or something but obviously you don't feel the same way."

Joel seethes.

"She died human. She had humanity to the depths of her soul, I could see it in her."

"Then why block her out?"

"Because it should have been me!" Joel's voice fills the landscape. "Because it should have been me infected instead of her. It should have been me who died, and she should be here on this godforsaken earth in my place. Because she deserves to live so much more than I do."

Joel breathes heavily. He runs a palm over his mouth and coughs a broken cry. Then he straightens himself and continues gravely.

"Because at the end of the day, Tess is still dead. And no amount of ignorance can ever make me forget that."

The fifth night is sombre and starless. They've moved to a new camp, and according to Joel, it's a few days left until they reach Boston Quarantine. Then they'll either stay or go somewhere else depending on the state of the place.

The camp is simpler, riverside. Not enough kindling to make a fire, but enough moonlight to survey the landscape. Rabbits tell them they won't go hungry for a few days, and simple talk tells them they're going to be okay after the previous night.

Ellie disappears for a few hours, then returns a little before Joel nods off.

"Ellie, where've you been?"

Ellie has something.

"Hey Joel...I want to do something. You don't have to say a thing, but if you're not going to, please let me do it anyway," he turns to him, "okay?"

Joel sits up.

"Okay."

She has a clump of wildflowers in her outstretched palm. They're not yet dead, but they're wilting in the approaching cold.

She sits on her knees by the river, and beckons him to join her. He does with some reluctance.

"I just want to remember Tess. Just for a little while."

Joel's expression darkens visibly under the light of the moon.

"I want to say thank you to her. She saved my life. I don't think I'll ever know how to thank someone enough for that in a lifetime."

Ellie then releases half the wildflowers into the steadily moving river. She lets the other half fall into Joel's hand.

She turns to him expectantly.

Joel breathes slowly, and gets down on his knees with her.

"Tess..."

Just her name brings back a rush of nostalgia, especially when he doesn't say it in denial. It feels as if he has to force ever word out from the bottom of his soul.

"You were my partner. We spent so much of our lives together, I can't even imagine how many days we spent out in the darkness just praying that, dear God, this nightmare of life would end soon—"

"But I know your nightmare ended too soon. Because we couldn't finish it together, like we wanted to, Tess."

"You were a tough gal. Strong and didn't take shit from nobody. A gun-wielding, hard-hitting, motherfucking street warrior, you were, Tess."

He lets the wildflowers fall into the river and they both watch them float along with the current.

"But I know you were more."

They fall asleep riverside, and when they awaken the wildflowers have drifted downstream. Only a few petals dot the surface of the river.

"I guess we better get going, then." Ellie murmurs, pulling her knapsack over her shoulders and her bow in hand, "those rabbits won't shoot themselves—"

"Ellie."

She turns to see Joel standing on the bank, distant but still close.

"For that, last night —thank you."

It's all he really needs to say. And with this, he cracks a rare smile. She returns it easily and sadly.

"Hey, Joel."

"Mm."

"I know you think it should have been you instead of Tess. And I still think Tess is a badass motherfucker, honestly—"

"Heh."

"—but I'm glad I was stuck with you, too."

a/n: so, hey. thanks for reading. this game is sad as hell, and tell me what you think (please). we can deliberate or grieve about the ending together or something.