[The quiet acknowledgment aches, but it's good to hear. Ellie stares out into the city, gathering herself, ordering it in her mind. What she wants to say. How to explain. It's not something she's ever told anyone- Jesse and Dina and Tommy were there for that, to explain things. She wraps her fingers around the railing and leans back until it puts weight on her shoulders.
She pushes her breath out, and starts.]
Joel wasn't... y'know. A good guy. He was good to me, but- he did a lot of things after the outbreak to stay alive. He was a smuggler. And he knew how to hurt people. How to make them talk. How to get somewhere and not let anyone stop him.
He taught me how to survive. I wasn't- his daughter or anything, but after a while it didn't exactly matter, because all we had was each other. We traveled all over the country together. We kept each other alive. The first time I ever killed somebody, it was because he was going to kill Joel. I was fourteen.
People tried to kill us a lot.
[Ellie pauses here, the simple words carrying so much more than she'll ever say. What it's important for Nathan to know. There's obviously a lot she's skipping over. A lot that happened.]
We found a safe place in a good town, eventually, but...
When I was nineteen, there was a group of people who caught up with us.
[Ellie pauses here, taking a deeper breath, her eyes a little unfocused until she manages to re-center herself. It's just a flicker, but it's clearly difficult to talk about.]
He and his partner missed a checkpoint on patrol. So I broke with my group and we split up to find them. I tracked them, and...
They'd- had him there for hours. Just fucking-
[Ellie's voice breaks. She sucks in a breath, draws her hands into fists, squeezing hard. Her voice goes very soft, very cold.]
[ Far be it from Nate to ever criticize somebody for smuggling goods given his own history, but the rest of it hits like a relentless punch in the gut. There are things you look past when someone is the only person you have. Flaws you justify, or ignore, because the circumstances are dire and maybe a decision was stupid or selfish and the worst part is not knowing how to feel angry. When someone is your provider, your protector, it's easy to bury the bad.
All you see is the good.
Nate is no stranger to making enemies and knows the dangers - Hell, Rafe got what he wanted in the end, didn't he? - so it is with growing horror that he sees exactly which direction this story is taking before Ellie even mentions that Joel went missing.
He watches her intently, impassive, the way her hands clench and the implication that she saw the drawn-out consequences firsthand. It's a miracle they didn't kill her, too.
But it's the tension in the thin string of her voice that says she either acted, or intended to do so. ]
[Ellie pauses, her mouth tight and a furrow coming to her brow. This wasn't something she wanted to tell him, hadn't banked on getting into it, but Nathan knew a thing or two about how to world worked, and more than that, seemed like he knew how people worked.
She worries her hands together, pulling at the prosthetics, struggling to relieve the phantom ache. It doesn't occur to her to lie. Instead the response that tries to jump out is almost too honest.
Worse.
Looking out at the city, Ellie presses all of the breath from her lungs. She doesn't want to be watching his eyes when she tell him this, but he deserves to know.]
I hunted them down. One by one. And I did what Joel would've done if it had been me.
[There's no pleasure in the words. No satisfaction. Her fingers ache like hell.]
[ It's not at all what he expected, though maybe it should have been. Her world is vicious and brutal and ruthless, she lost someone important to her, but it doesn't entirely escape him that in leaving her alive the people who killed her loved one were setting themselves up for a perpetuation of the same fucking path they followed. Nate knows, to an extent, what he would do in her shoes. When Sully got kidnapped Nate followed, dutifully, a red herring trail through tetanus Hell only to learn he was elsewhere. Crossed the world's largest desert, entered the ancient city, found him again only to hallucinate the look on Victor Sullivan's face when a bullet took him in the lung and he collapsed.
Nate likes to think he could manage to keep his cool, could very easily chalk up the murderous fervor he felt as nothing more than the effects of some seriously toxic water that brought down an entire civilization, but he knows that isn't entirely true.
He was angry. Afraid. If something horrific happened to Elena - no psychotropic influence, in his right mind - he doesn't know he wouldn't make a similar decision. He doesn't know if it would help, either, or just leave him hollow.
Looking at Ellie, it's hard to think it would turn out any other way. ]
...yeah. [ How do you feel? is a little too psychoanalytical for his tastes. Nate shifts, jaw tensing. ] I honestly don't know if I wouldn't have done the same.
[The silence between them falls like a numbing blanket, and Ellie rubs at her fingers. Presses her nails into the knuckles, finding the seam, the edge where flesh turns into prosthetic, like she can find the point where it hurts and just tear it out of herself. It's impossible, she knows- that pain might always be there, aching like phantom limbs.
You just get better at tolerating it.
Nate's admission doesn't make her feel better. If anything, it's sadder; Dina had admitted to feeling the same. Nobody can know what they'd do in that position. Nobody ever knows what kind of person they'll be until they're staring into the face of that choice. Nobody ever weighs who they'll be after they've had to make it.
Ellie stares into the skyline, the wind ruffling her hair, her eyes far away.
Nate's a good person. Maybe all of them were, once.]
[ It's commiseration, not advice, and he'd never be so arrogant as to suggest someone just accept that something is supposed to be hard, or ignore the difficulties in favor of pretending it's easy. Everyone is different. ]
It's just- sometimes saying it is- is all you can do, you know? And even that's hard.
[ Pratt once asked him if it got any easier, and Nate didn't have a satisfactory response for him outside of "you get used to it." After a while, you stop seeing it. You look past it. The edges are in the periphery, the burden is always there, but it doesn't become lighter so much as it becomes the norm. Acting the part of Sisyphus is routine, like having coffee in the morning, like making dinner. ]
I was...pretty messed up, after I lost my brother. Blocked it out. Worked. Nearly got myself killed on more occasions than I can count. Didn't wanna make connections, or know people. Opens you up for losing them. So you start...pushing 'em away. [ He stops rubbing his fingers together, bracing his hands on the parapet. ] Self-fulfilling prophecy.
[ Nate's gaze tracks across the cerulean blue glow of a neon light pinning some advertisement to the building next to them, over to Ellie's face. She's so young. ]
[Staring out at the shifting lights of the city, these constant signs of life and movement, gives her a strange sense of peace and detachment. Like watching an ant farm, or even Jackson from one of the lookout points.
It gives her mind enough room to write Nathan's words on her heart. They hit harder than she expects, because it's so obvious that he knows this hurt, even if he didn't go exactly the same way about it.
Ellie's been throwing herself into danger constantly, pushing people away left and right. Saying she didn't plan on dying didn't mean anything when it came to how she acted. She remembers Dina's face, the devastated soft darkness of her eyes in that pre-dawn kitchen, the break in her voice as Ellie had pushed her hands away, thinking it was better, that she'd be safer, that they'd be better off.
No.
Tears come suddenly to her eyes, burning hot, a tightness to her throat and across the bridge of her nose, then lights of the city blurring. She tastes the salt and breathes through it, reaching up to swipe them away.
She mourns the loss, yes- but the tears are for the release. Nathan's words feel like permission. It's okay to want things. To be close to people. And she can, if she'd stop getting in her own damn way.
It's not enough to fix everything, but it's a start.]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
She pushes her breath out, and starts.]
Joel wasn't... y'know. A good guy. He was good to me, but- he did a lot of things after the outbreak to stay alive. He was a smuggler. And he knew how to hurt people. How to make them talk. How to get somewhere and not let anyone stop him.
He taught me how to survive. I wasn't- his daughter or anything, but after a while it didn't exactly matter, because all we had was each other. We traveled all over the country together. We kept each other alive. The first time I ever killed somebody, it was because he was going to kill Joel. I was fourteen.
People tried to kill us a lot.
[Ellie pauses here, the simple words carrying so much more than she'll ever say. What it's important for Nathan to know. There's obviously a lot she's skipping over. A lot that happened.]
We found a safe place in a good town, eventually, but...
When I was nineteen, there was a group of people who caught up with us.
[Ellie pauses here, taking a deeper breath, her eyes a little unfocused until she manages to re-center herself. It's just a flicker, but it's clearly difficult to talk about.]
He and his partner missed a checkpoint on patrol. So I broke with my group and we split up to find them. I tracked them, and...
They'd- had him there for hours. Just fucking-
[Ellie's voice breaks. She sucks in a breath, draws her hands into fists, squeezing hard. Her voice goes very soft, very cold.]
I remember every single one of their faces.
no subject
All you see is the good.
Nate is no stranger to making enemies and knows the dangers - Hell, Rafe got what he wanted in the end, didn't he? - so it is with growing horror that he sees exactly which direction this story is taking before Ellie even mentions that Joel went missing.
He watches her intently, impassive, the way her hands clench and the implication that she saw the drawn-out consequences firsthand. It's a miracle they didn't kill her, too.
But it's the tension in the thin string of her voice that says she either acted, or intended to do so. ]
...what did you do, Ellie?
no subject
She worries her hands together, pulling at the prosthetics, struggling to relieve the phantom ache. It doesn't occur to her to lie. Instead the response that tries to jump out is almost too honest.
Worse.
Looking out at the city, Ellie presses all of the breath from her lungs. She doesn't want to be watching his eyes when she tell him this, but he deserves to know.]
I hunted them down. One by one. And I did what Joel would've done if it had been me.
[There's no pleasure in the words. No satisfaction. Her fingers ache like hell.]
no subject
Nate likes to think he could manage to keep his cool, could very easily chalk up the murderous fervor he felt as nothing more than the effects of some seriously toxic water that brought down an entire civilization, but he knows that isn't entirely true.
He was angry. Afraid. If something horrific happened to Elena - no psychotropic influence, in his right mind - he doesn't know he wouldn't make a similar decision. He doesn't know if it would help, either, or just leave him hollow.
Looking at Ellie, it's hard to think it would turn out any other way. ]
...yeah. [ How do you feel? is a little too psychoanalytical for his tastes. Nate shifts, jaw tensing. ] I honestly don't know if I wouldn't have done the same.
no subject
You just get better at tolerating it.
Nate's admission doesn't make her feel better. If anything, it's sadder; Dina had admitted to feeling the same. Nobody can know what they'd do in that position. Nobody ever knows what kind of person they'll be until they're staring into the face of that choice. Nobody ever weighs who they'll be after they've had to make it.
Ellie stares into the skyline, the wind ruffling her hair, her eyes far away.
Nate's a good person. Maybe all of them were, once.]
... it doesn't help.
no subject
[ It's commiseration, not advice, and he'd never be so arrogant as to suggest someone just accept that something is supposed to be hard, or ignore the difficulties in favor of pretending it's easy. Everyone is different. ]
It's just- sometimes saying it is- is all you can do, you know? And even that's hard.
[ Pratt once asked him if it got any easier, and Nate didn't have a satisfactory response for him outside of "you get used to it." After a while, you stop seeing it. You look past it. The edges are in the periphery, the burden is always there, but it doesn't become lighter so much as it becomes the norm. Acting the part of Sisyphus is routine, like having coffee in the morning, like making dinner. ]
I was...pretty messed up, after I lost my brother. Blocked it out. Worked. Nearly got myself killed on more occasions than I can count. Didn't wanna make connections, or know people. Opens you up for losing them. So you start...pushing 'em away. [ He stops rubbing his fingers together, bracing his hands on the parapet. ] Self-fulfilling prophecy.
[ Nate's gaze tracks across the cerulean blue glow of a neon light pinning some advertisement to the building next to them, over to Ellie's face. She's so young. ]
It's not worth it.
no subject
It gives her mind enough room to write Nathan's words on her heart. They hit harder than she expects, because it's so obvious that he knows this hurt, even if he didn't go exactly the same way about it.
Ellie's been throwing herself into danger constantly, pushing people away left and right. Saying she didn't plan on dying didn't mean anything when it came to how she acted. She remembers Dina's face, the devastated soft darkness of her eyes in that pre-dawn kitchen, the break in her voice as Ellie had pushed her hands away, thinking it was better, that she'd be safer, that they'd be better off.
No.
Tears come suddenly to her eyes, burning hot, a tightness to her throat and across the bridge of her nose, then lights of the city blurring. She tastes the salt and breathes through it, reaching up to swipe them away.
She mourns the loss, yes- but the tears are for the release. Nathan's words feel like permission. It's okay to want things. To be close to people. And she can, if she'd stop getting in her own damn way.
It's not enough to fix everything, but it's a start.]
Yeah.