The sun was glinting off of the calm water, and every time Joel wiggled his toes, ripples shot across the stream. His shoes and socks were sitting on the river bank beside him, and the makeshift fishing rod dangled from his hands almost unimportantly. He sighed. There was peace at this stream, in the middle of the woods just outside of one of the quarantine zones in North Carolina.
He and Ellie had been at the river for just under an hour. The sun was starting to warm the land around them as it got closer to noon, and Joel had shed the sweater he usually wore during the mornings and evenings of spring. The temperature was growing the closer they got to summer, but even in the mid- April afternoon, the sun was still packing a punch.
Ellie was another story. She was still in her own heavy sweater, still with her shoes on, and sitting cross legged a ways away from Joel. Her skin was more pale than usual, and when she actually looked at Joel, the green eyes were missing the spark they'd held not months before. He'd noticed something was wrong, he'd been aware for weeks. Joel just was not entirely sure of how to successfully approach the situation. He pulled back on the fishing rod gently, having had no success all morning in catching any fish.
"Ellie," He waited until she'd gone about two minutes without answering him, "Ellie. Ellie!"
She brought her eyes – the lifeless, cold eyes – up to see his face. She seemed unbothered by her lack of attention, and rather chose to keep her attention occupied by counting the number of ripples in the water.
"Huh?" Ellie's answer came almost minutes after Joel had called her last.
The breeze rustled through the leaves of the forest around the stream. Joel watched Ellie closely. The fishing rod was sitting beside him, tangled on the ground from having tossed it in frustration seconds earlier.
Joel sighed, "Dammit, Ellie. I was talkin' to you."
Her hair flew around her head with the next gust of wind, and she looked up then, almost startled. Ellie was used Joel's attitude; she'd become accustomed to the gruffness of his tone and the simple 'do it now' of his instructions, and she enjoyed those things, because they came as a comfort to her. Ellie blinked, met the ripples of the river with her eyes again, and then spared a glance at Joel.
"I, uh," She started, searching for the words to say. What could she say? "'M sorry, Joel."
And unlike how Ellie was used to his attitude, Joel was not used to the young girl being so quiet. Maybe it was something he could understand when there was reason to be quiet, like at night or in unknown territory, but she was sitting out in the open with him, at a river where there was supposed to be peace, and she was entirely too quiet for his liking.
And he was worried because he did not know how to deal with it, because Sarah had never gotten to the point where she was quiet at times where she would always be full of questions, and Sarah had not had a full enough life to be troubled by the things that were clearly troubling Ellie.
"What's the matter with you?" He asked, his attempt to keep his voice soft and gentle failing with a certain degree of misery, "You've been sittin' here for an hour all quiet. Somethin's up."
Ellie uncrossed her legs, then, and crawled towards the river bank. She was oddly unafraid of the water, a stark opposite to her usual reaction. She dipped the tips of her fingers into the coldness, feeling the sensation and the shivers tingle all the way up her arm.
There were birds singing, and the sun was shining, and she was genuinely at a loss as to why she was so unhappy. But she could feel it in her stomach, a tense ball of anxiety and fear, and if she knew one thing for certain, it was that it had something to do with the burning restaurant she could not displace from her mind.
"I keep thinkin'," Ellie stopped for a minute, moving her eyes from the water and looking Joel in the eyes. There was a comforting warmth there, and she took a large gulp of air and spoke again, "I keep thinkin' I'm gonna turn around and he's gonna be there. I know it's fuckin' stupid, because I know he's gone, but I can't help it."
There was something about Ellie's face, about the way she looked at him and the expressionless eyes that now suddenly held a strange sort of fear that made Joel squint. What could he say?
"He's, uh," Joel started, reaching out to put a hand on Ellie's shoulder, "He's gone, you know. He ain't comin' back, Ellie. Ever."
Her eyes drifted from him to across the riverbed, studying the leaves on the trees and the way they moved in the sunlight. She closed her lids and inhaled, rather sharply, before she answered him.
"Yeah. I know."
Silence settled between them, spiralling in like the wintertime does when it comes to relieve the fall. It was a silence that smothered them, that made Joel shift uncomfortably on the riverbank, and made Ellie lean back on her heels.
And the birds were still singing, without a care in the world.
Joel picked up the makeshift fishing rod, the one he'd thrown to the ground in exasperation, and nudged Ellie in the shoulder with it. She looked up, clearly snapped out of some sort of horrific reverie, a place in her mind where David, the man she had hacked to death with a machete, was still looking for her.
"Huh?"
He held the rod out to her, and she took it from him, balancing it gingerly in her palm. Ellie looked a question at Joel, unsure of his intentions. He nudged her with his elbow.
"Go on, now," He murmured, "Catch somethin' for lunch."
She cast out the line, then looked back to Joel. The corner of his lip twitched.
"You okay?" He asked.
And Ellie smiled, her first real smile in a very long time.
"I'm okay."
[an] I'm a gigantic asshole for a lot of reasons, and I'll tell you them here now.
This was a prize for a tumblr friend for being one of the first five to reblog my post. Back in August. Augsut. I'm so sorry friend. College happened and one thing led to another.
Also, wow. I haven't updated anything since August, and now I feel like a super huge asshole. But Supernatural happened that time. And now college. But I'm back for the foreseeable future, I think. Maybe.
Essentially this author's note is a gigantic apology. If you still love me enough to stick around and review, I will be in your eternal debt. I love all of you so so much and I'm so sorry to have disappeared for so long. [an]