borderline - the last of us.

38. the universe.

SHOTS ECHOED, distant and from a few floors beneath him, as Ralph left the break room, a gun tight in his grasp, a hand on the barrel and the other over the pistol grip. He hoped that the gunfire under his feet wasn't intended for him, although he wasn't hesitant about raising his gun and firing a handful of shots at a man that was rounding the corner.

Terrified, he staggered back behind the wall. Hurried footsteps echoed down the hallway, getting farther and farther. Ralph gave him to the count of ten before marching around the corner and putting him out of his fear.

He headed the way that the guy ran, perhaps he was going to run to safety.

'Try to run to safety,' Ralph murmured in the silence, correcting himself out loud and chuckling at the absurd amount of anger in his voice.

He rarely got angry. And even when he was, never to this extent. But, the people he worked for were trying to cut up his daughter's brain, so... Desperate times called for desperate measures, didn't they?

It was silent as he walked to the end of the ward. The guns had stopped, and he had no reason to use the one he was holding in shaky hands. Sighing through his nose and looking around for any enemies or signs of Ellie and Lou, Ralph drummed his fingers against the barrel and made a rhythm out of the dull thumping.

The guns beneath him started again, quicker yet louder this time. The sound reminded him of Joel. He wondered if he had woken up yet. If he was with Lou or Ellie, taking care of them. He missed Joel, although they were only separated for only an hour or two.

He got to the end of the hallway and found three doors. One set was the metal doors of an elevator. The other two led to staircases, one leading up and one leading down.

He came across a board that read all of the floors and their uses. In English.

There were numbers, but those were useless without the descriptions. The descriptions that were otherwise unreadable to him, completely useless and only slowing him down. He pushed off on his heel, making an estimated guess for the downward staircase, and glanced over his shoulder just in time to witness the elevator ding open and three men emerge from it.

He made eye contact with the green-eyed one within a millisecond, and opted to duck into the doorway and hide out of sight until the bullets stopped and the door was shot straight off its hinges, falling to the floor in front of him. He couldn't help but feel that the amount of bullets was unnecessary.

'Ralph!' One of them shouted, and although he insisted that everyone was to call him Ralph, he didn't like that. Felt rather redundant to use a nickname on someone you didn't know, more relevantly someone you were trying to kill. 'Come on, we can talk!'

Ralph didn't not believe him. In fact, he believed him fully. It was no surprise that Marlene was trying to cling onto the one Firefly who actually knew what he was doing, had experience, and wasn't an arrogant little ass-kisser all of the time. Ralph did believe him, he just didn't care.

The green-eyed one rounded the corner on his tiptoes, gun aimed down the stairs naively, expecting Ralph to have hurried down them the second he had seen the group of men coming.

Of course, he was wrong, and Ralph had an arm around his neck and a gun to his face in the blink of an eye. He dug his nails into the side of the man's neck, a silent order for him to not try anything as he spoke to his coworkers. Or former coworkers now.

'Where are they?' He demanded, eyes darting from one man to the other as they both stood frozen, watching their friend as he stayed as still as possible.