Silver ||Joel Miller||

tangerine

LAURA

Laura settled into a corner of the motel room they'd found after walking for a couple of hours to get away from Kansas City.

Her heartbeat drummed in her ears the entire hike. She didn't let anyone know she was beyond terrified another flood of infected would find them, instead she'd shoved her hands in her pockets and hoped that neither Ellie nor Joel looked at her too long. They would notice the pallor on her face, would ask her if she was okay.

And she didn't have the energy left to lie.

"You think they'll be okay?" Henry asked. Sam and Ellie were in the double bedroom through the door, reading from one of those comics they'd found back in the underground community.

"Yeah, I think... it's easier when you're a kid anyway," Joel said as Laura wrapped her sleeping pack around her. "You don't have anyone else relying on you. That's the hard part." Even with the sleeping pack on her body, she was still too fucking cold.

What had they done? If she closed her eyes, she saw the wave of infected that flowed to the city, could hear their screeches echo away. They'd sent the entirety of Kansas City to their deaths, and just the thought of it made her body shake again.

"Well... I guess we're doing a good job then," Henry said with a positive tone. She wasn't sure if she agreed.

"What's that comic book say? Endure and survive?" Joel asked, his eyes focused on the kids.

"Endure and survive." Henry repeated the words. Endure and survive... it was probably easier to do that when you hadn't condemned an entire city to death. "That shit's redundant."

"Yeah, it's... it's not great," Joel agreed. Laura only snapped out of her stupor when she heard Henry laugh, albeit quietly and strained. Joel didn't so much as smile... maybe the weight of what they'd done was falling on him too, and he was just holding it better than she was.

"Look, I don't know exactly how I'm getting to Wyoming. I'm probably walking. But... you know, if you want to." Joel was offering a place for Henry and Sam with them without a single prompt. Maybe there was hope for them yet.

"Yeah. Yeah. Um... Yeah, I think it'd be nice for Sam to have a friend. I'll tell him in the morning. New day, new start," Henry said.

New day, new start... maybe she could follow the same idea. She wasn't sure if it was possible.

"You okay?" Joel asked, settling on the floor next to her.

"I'm cold..." she trailed off, staring at the floor in front of her. "I'm so cold."

"It's not cold in here..." he trailed off. "Oh shit, Laura-"

"Kansas City is fucked. We helped destroy it." She whispered. There wasn't any point keeping it to herself, because he already knew.

"It's not on us." It sounded like Joel was saying it more for himself than for her. Either way, it wasn't working.

"It wouldn't have happened if we hadn't turned up." Laura said, still focused on a stain on the carpet. "Those people..." a hand was on her back, rubbing small circles between her shoulders.

"That wasn't on us. We don't know how far underground the infected went, if they were underneath the actual city or not. Keeping infected beneath the ground was a ticking time bomb, we were just there when it went off."

"And when it did I abandoned Ellie, what if she'd been torn apart out there?" Maybe that's what she was truly feeling guilty over. When things got hard she ran, and it didn't matter that she'd told Ellie to do the same, she should have grabbed her kid by the shirt and dragged her.