Silver ||Joel Miller||

I'll cross that bridge if I come to it

LAURA

"You really think they can make a cure?" Joel asked quietly. It made Laura's fingers twitch—made her eyes flick towards Ellie to make sure the kid wasn't listening. They'd walked through the destroyed city for a while now, down the path that was supposed to take them to the State House but instead lead to a mass of infected. That had pushed them onto their current trail to the Boston Museum.

Tess had gotten along well with Ellie, and Joel had been fairly open, relatively speaking. The way the other two had accepted Ellie made Laura feel completely outcast, but she guessed it wouldn't matter in the long run.

"I don't know if it's possible anymore. The world is..." she trailed off, playing with her bow. If Nolan were here, he would know, but he was long gone. "If they think it's possible, then it has to be, but I'm not thinking it will happen."

"Then why are you doing this?" He asked, and she shook her head.

"I'm not doing it for a cure. I'm doing it because I've watched over that kid for fourteen years and I have some concerns about this so-called doctor they have," she answered. Once again, she was at the back of the group, but this time it was with Joel who had miraculously decided to speak to her again—to act like she was a person. What spurred it, she didn't know, but she would savour every second.

"What do you mean?"

"He's apparently a neurosurgeon, but he's younger than what Nolan would have been by now. Someone needs to be there for Ellie, to know what's right and what's wrong. All the other Fireflies are going to be focused on a cure, they'll do anything for it. I'm going to protect her. I have to make sure everything that happens is in her best interests," Laura said, realising that she'd said too much, far too late.

"What will you do if they don't care?" That was a tough question for her to answer, only because she didn't have a plan yet.

"I'll cross that bridge if I come to it." Her fingers tightened on the bow, a false hope in her system that Joel wouldn't ask anything else. But of course, he had more questions. He was nothing, if not thorough.

"And who's Nolan?" And there it was. The one question she was hoping he wouldn't ask her.

He was the one that opened up to her four years ago, and she had started, but... he didn't know much. All he knew was that she'd had a fiancé, and that she'd had to kill him when he became infected. That and some other random pieces that felt necessary to add into conversation, to give the facade that she was opening up. Or what was important given the circumstances.

"Nolan was my fiancé," she answered simply, which seemed to fill that piece of information for him sufficiently.

"Was he a doctor or something?" Joel asked as he crossed his arms over his chest.

"Yes." That was all she managed to say. What did it matter to him, anyway? In a couple of hours, they would reach the State House and part ways. He didn't need to know anything new about her before they said their goodbyes. And if she didn't give anymore information, it meant she could keep that wound closed.

"Did he specialise in anything or..." he was going to be a paediatric neurosurgeon. That's what she wanted to say, but she couldn't find her voice. Instead, she just rubbed the back of her neck and stared at the ground ahead. "Right, pushed too far. Got it." As he walked towards the museum doors, she wanted to stop him, wanted to catch his wrist and force him to look at her. She wanted to say everything that she hadn't...

But she couldn't.

It was best to keep the distance between them.

Fungus surrounded the museum doors, the reach of it high and wide. If she didn't know the connotations of it, she might have described it as something beautiful. The soft shapes and colours of it... but she knew what it meant—what that much meant.

Joel walked towards it all without a care in the world, with no form of self-worth, and investigated the fungus. It looked dead, but that wasn't an assumption she wanted to act on in case she was wrong. Instead, she stood next to Ellie, placing a hand on the girl's shoulder as Joel broke through a trail of fungus.

"Bone dry," he said, looking over his shoulder at them. "Whatever was in there's long gone."

"Theoretically," Laura added, walking towards the doors. "What if there's something still in there?"

"We kill them before they kill us." Tess replied, to which Laura raised her eyebrows.

"Oh, silly me. I thought we'd let them tear us to shreds." Laura joked, smiling as she put her hand on the door.

"You said your bow was proven to work against the blind infected. We should be fine if that wasn't a lie," Joel replied, his voice blunt. Her smile fell, but not because she'd lied about her skills being used against the blind infected. She hadn't. But she didn't enjoy the way he spoke to her.

Instead of dwelling on his tone, she turned her attention back to the door. Well, it was either they open said door and maybe get killed by infected or stay out here and definitely killed by infected. They were not good options.

"Okay, if we think there might be infected in there... can I please have a gun?" Ellie asked, and Laura contemplated it for a minute. Maybe with the potential consequences it wasn't a bad idea... but giving an inexperienced person a gun before entering a high-stress situation was definitely a horrible idea.

"No gun, but get your knife ready and keep quiet," Laura replied, pushing open the door just enough for them all to squeeze through.

Inside the museum was quiet, maybe a little too quiet for Laura's level of comfort. The fungus present was all definitely dry, which was a good thing, but it didn't stop the sense of foreboding that made her stomach twist into knots.

"Something's not right," she whispered. The others either didn't hear her or didn't care that she'd said something. Honestly, she expected it to be the latter. If the sense that something was off was that strong with her, the others surely felt it as well and her words were unnecessary.

She figured out why she had that feeling when they came across a dead body... a fresh one that had been torn to pieces. They were walking into a god-damned death trap.

"What do you think-" Laura's hand slapping onto Ellie's mouth cut the kid off. There were a few seconds where Laura just held her hand there, staring into the kids' eyes. Only after she was sure that Ellie wouldn't say another word did she remove her hand, and a creak echoed through the building from the upper floors.

Fuck.

"Okay, from this point forward, we are completely silent. Not quiet, silent," Joel whispered, and Laura couldn't agree more. She nodded to the others as a way of telling them to move first, and she readied an arrow in her bow.

Once again, she was at the back of the group, with Joel at the front, followed by Ellie and Tess. She was sure that everyone else could hear her heart hammer in her chest—was sure it was loud enough to draw the blind infected towards them. But it wasn't.

Nor was it enough when Ellie accidentally stepped on the dried remains of an infected, sending a crack through the building. Just because her bow had been proven to work against the blind infected didn't mean she wanted to prove it again. It didn't mean she wanted to face them and have nightmares for the following weeks and months again. But she guessed she would just have to deal with it if it happened.

They reached the top floor, and the feeling that something was wrong absolutely punched her in the gut.

She didn't understand why until the stairwell and the ceiling above her collapsed.