NO LIGHT. ✹ E.W.

v.

𝖲𝖤𝖠𝖳𝖳𝖫𝖤 𝖣𝖠𝖸 𝖮𝖭𝖤.

Seattle was not making your list of favorite places to visit. After weeks of traveling you'd finally made it to the outskirts of the city, navigating through a patch of wooded area in search of the highway into the city. You listened quietly as Dina chattered about her first time killing someone, Ellie had shared hers prior. You'd heard that story before, a guy had pinned Joel down in some water where he couldn't breathe, Ellie picked up the gun with no second thoughts and shot him. That was that. Dina's was a bit frightening for a ten year old, stabbing a man in defense of her mother.

Yours was painful, truthfully. Sometimes you tried to pretend the event never occurred in your mind, it took up too much pain in your head to be something you wanted to remember. And yet, here you were explaining the ordeal when Ellie glanced over her shoulder to you expectant to hear yours.

"It's not my favorite memory but okay." You began, trying to figure out where to start with the tale. Your brows furrowed in thought, sifting through your memory in search of the right words. "I was twelve at the time, my dad got bit and my mom was like 'just let me handle it, go wait in the other room.'" You recall, bitterness settling in your tone.

"I never hear a shot until twenty minutes after he's dead, he turned and bit her. So y'know twelve year old me goes walking in to say goodbye to my dad one last time and my mom is there, hiding her bite from me. Asked me to shoot her later on when the fever set in."

Dina sighs at the recalling, understanding why you didn't like the memory now. Ellie reaches a hand around to pat your leg in a comforting sort of way. At least you could remember your parents, she couldn't. All she had left of her mother was a note and her switchblade. But it wasn't something you compared and contrasted with her, the outbreak wasn't a world of competition in who could remember their parents. A good percentage of outbreak kids probably couldn't. And if they did, they probably had plenty of terrible memories to mask the good.

Meanwhile, Dina, bless her, had begun trying to put some pieces together on who the group of people you were after could be. She'd theorized a pack of hunters and now some cannibalistic psychopaths that Ellie and Joel slaughtered back in the day. "What about the crazy cannibals you guys ran into? Maybe they tracked you down?" She suggested, trying to make sense of it.

Ellie shook her head in disagreement, sighing. "No." She furrowed her brows in thought, she had a particular group in mind. "They were different. Joel crossed a lot of people, no point in guessing. They fucked up, either way."

You agreed with her words, whoever they were they'd made a mistake coming to Jackson. You were more than happy to pay them a visit; with every passing day you itched to return the bullet to the man who shot you. It was obvious which member would be prioritized, the woman with the braid, she killed Joel, but you needed to find the man too. If only for an explanation and to let him be swarmed by clickers, you needed to do it.