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(they're my favorite found family relationship ever actually so you will be seeing more of them )
no one parted the smoke when the rumbling passed. it was called a death fog for a reason, stuck to its name like everyone was stuck to their respective
purposes.
fog was just another cloud, to ells. they didn't know what clouds were like before the lonesome hit, anyways, but lee says they were brighter. whiter, and
he says it with such punctuation and calculation as if ells had never seen the color white, before. which, he isn't necessarily wrong. ells hadn't seen
a lot of things, and white clouds had been one of them. gray was the brightest the clouds ever got here, even if they didn't cry as a result of it.
the whitest thing they've seen was the blanket they hid under.
but lee didn't hold it against them, as annoying as ells thought it was. how blissfully unaware ells was of everything they did and didn't know. lee was an old, wise man, who didn't really act like the title on his forehead. people say he knows everything, but he doesn't talk about any of it. even when ells
manages to sneak a view into his journals, they don't talk about the past, the white clouds and blue oceans and clear skies. like it was some forbidden
fever dream, or something. all he talks about is the present and whats around them now, as if what's happening now was so much more precious than what was
there before. ells doesn't understand. maybe it's an 'elderly' thing, as max had told them once before, the grumpy and stubborn insistence to stick to the
present so they don't dwell on the past.
but ells wants to stick to the past, they've decided. they've decided it a long time ago, but it only really took it's ambition the more they saw the world
around them. everything the cult did and didn't lie about, and unsurprisingly enough, they lied about a lot. the world had lied about a lot. and the world
was so big to them at the time, so it felt like betrayal that so much could lie to someone so little. ells had known nothing but the world had known everything
and kept it from them.
it was impossible to believe, at the time, so they kept their definition of 'world' onto lee, sticking another label to his forehead. lee was the world, to them,
and he wouldn't lie. if there was anything lee didn't do, it would be lying. lee was a lot of things, like the world was; broken and run down and old and on the
brink of death, but neither of them were liars. lee and therefore, the world, was not a liar. ells wouldn't allow him to be.
it wasn't like ells could rely on anyone else, really. they were stuck with him the moment walls were in crumbs around their feet, and they guessed they would
