Ellie's sleep is never dreamless.

Most of the time, it's her walking through a dark forest, trying to run away from the click click click that only seems to get louder the further she gets. She never knows where it comes from. Once, it's too close, the other time, she's too loud. A snap of a branch, the crunch of gravel. No matter how hard she tries, it always gets her.

This time, she sees Joel. She would've taken the nightmare of being torn apart by a pack of clickers over another one of the memories.

The first time Joel tried to teach her how to swim, Ellie had cried. The journey to the lake had been long and treacherous. They'd spent close to two hours, scouring the sparse woods for the barest sign of spores or a campfire. When they'd come up with nothing, Joel had allowed her to step into the cold, parting the bouts of algae covering the surface of the water.

Her legs had felt as heavy as lead. As she'd kicked and kicked, she'd distinctly remembered gravity - a lesson she hadn't paid much attention to, busy twirling pieces of Riley's hair around her index finger. Ellie can feel the gravity working against her, pulling her down and she's thinking of Riley, Riley, the way her eyes lit up with the morning sun.

She hears Joel saying words that she's barely registering. Keep going, kiddo. You've almost got it, kiddo. He keeps calling her that word and her legs are shackled and suddenly, she's taking water in through her nose.

It burns. All of it burns. When Joel pulls her out of the water, she doesn't notice the salt in her mouth, the panic etched all of Joel's face. She's just thinking of Riley, the swollen bite on her arm and she's thinking of Marlene.

Her fierce protector. Her mother's best friend. Leader of the Fireflies. Dead.

"Are you okay, Ellie?" Joel asks and he's concerned. So concerned she almost believes him.

What a joke.

Ellie barely makes it back to Jackson in one piece.

Her body hasn't healed much, having grown used to the soft pleasures of antibiotics, syringes filled with penicillin and cotton swabs dabbed with dressing alcohol that it struggles with the septic needle that Ellie uses to stitch her wounds.

She especially feels the wounds when she's trying to escape two clickers in an abandoned house. She's hunched over, hidden behind the bed. All it takes is a twist of her body and she's grunting, nearly getting her torn apart by the clickers.

In one of Joel's favorite movie series, the protagonist's mentor got killed. The mentor was still everywhere as a transparent ghost, giving the protagonist advice, motivation when he was beaten.

Ellie tries so hard, looks everywhere but Joel is never there.

Fucking Abby. Ellie is missing her two fingers a lot more than she's missing anything. And she is missing a lot of things. A warm shower and a hot meal, for starters.

It's hard to believe that she'd considered not to return Jackson. It was hard to think of it as home when all Jackson did was remind her of everything she lost.

Dina. JJ. Jesse. Tommy.

And…

"Joel!"

"Would you keep it down?" Joel grumbles, but the light of the campfire has given his face a golden cast.

Joel has been smiling a lot these days. It's hard to remember a time when he wouldn't meet her eyes, answer her questions or tell her stories about Sarah. Then again, it's hard to remember a time when they haven't been on their feet, running for their lives. This time, it's different.

The night sky is dotted with stars brighter than the next. Despite the dangers, despite being surrounded by a thick forest, Joel allows Ellie to light a fire and cook the rabbit they caught in the trap she built. Rabbits, rare these days. Joel's smile? Rarer.

"I didn't know you were an artist."

"Artist. That's, uh, one word for it."

His Southern drawl is especially worse when he's drunk (Joel insists he didn't find a bottle of whiskey in that mall, but Ellie wasn't born yesterday), but Ellie knows what he's saying. She always knows what he's saying.

Joel thinks it's stupid, but Ellie is having a tough time wiping that smile off her face. All she'd done was give Joel a pencil and paper and asked to draw her. Joel had done better.

"Yeah, yeah, you totally would've gotten into art school." Ellie says. "But I'm not that skinny."

"You're skinnier."

"Am not!"

"I'm telling you," Joel says, coughing into his fist as he tends to the fire. "When we get to Jackson, you're going to have so much to eat. I swear."

Ellie hasn't eaten in four days.

She's dragging her feet, but even the barest snap of a twig sets off her heart rate. That's how Joel trained her to be. Sharp, vigilant. Scrappy.

It's nearing dawn when she stumbles into an office building. The water cooler is drained and the kitchen is crawling with rats, but Ellie finds half a granola bar wedged between two desks. She eats it hungrily, tries to imagine it being one of Jackson's meals. She's halfway through licking the granola wrapper when she sees it.

Pinned to the green board. A poster. The Fireflies. Ellie's heart stops.

She slowly gets up, heart pounding in her chest and she grabs at it. It tears, leaving a rip through the Firefly logo done in black paint. Ellie stares, numb to her core.

Catalina Island, it says. California.

She makes it back to Jackson.

Everywhere she goes, she has people staring. The lack of meat on her bones, the two fingers that are lying somewhere in the bottom of the sea. It makes her a spectacle, a circus clown. A testament of what loss can do to you.

So, Ellie does what she came to do.

She goes to see Joel's grave before she leaves again.

The flowers are fresh, blue. With a start, Ellie realizes she never knew Joel's favorite color. He seemed like someone who would love forest green. The tears don't come. Ellie steps over the small fence and she sits down by his gravestone, folding her legs under her. It's a cold night, but that chill crawling up her spine has nothing to do with it.

She runs her hand over the cold headstone.

Joel Miller.

Father. Brother. Survivor.

The weight of what she's done, it's pressing upon her ribcage. You've almost got it, kiddo, she hears him say and she breathes out the words that have been haunting her since she left Santa Barbara.

"I couldn't do it."

Ellie never thinks of Abby. It's always the kid, the broken, skinny, scarred child and she shakes. Thinking of what she would've done if the kid wasn't there. If she'd taken Abby's life, would she have cried?

She doesn't apologize. She's not sorry for letting Abby live. If Ellie would've killed her, she would've taken two lives. Joel wouldn't have wanted that for her. He would've understood. He would've told her it's okay because that's what Jackson had done to him.

Made him vulnerable, made him soft. And that's what had gotten him killed.

Ellie can't bring herself to resent Joel for his mistake, his one tiny slipup. In the end, he knew. That's all that matters.

They're giving Joel's house to a new family that recently turned up in Jackson. Kids are rare. Two kids, rarer. Three, well, it's a miracle. Maria apologizes profusely, but Ellie knows Joel wouldn't have minded so she agrees.

She takes up the task of clearing out his house. One last time. Ellie packs his books, his mugs, his chisels. She hasn't decided what she's going to do with any of these things, but that's a worry for another time. Ellie keeps upstairs for the last.

California. What the fuck are they doing all the way out in California? Was it real or just another ploy of slavers like the Rattlers, hungry for more victims to sink their teeth into? Giving people a ray of hope only to snuff it out with chains.

She's turning and turning. She's putting away Joel's clothes - his winter jackets, his plaid shirts, his shirt depicting an astronaut jumping into a pool of stars - when she realizes, with a start.

She needs to know.

Ellie walks upstairs with a sense of purpose. She takes Joel's and Sarah's photo frame, putting it alongside Joel's incomplete woodworks. It's the box she's going to leave Tommy. Even though Joel might've forgiven her choice, Tommy wouldn't have. He never will. That's something she'll have to learn to live with.

When she crawls into Joel's bed, it's covered with a layer of dust so thick, it makes her cough, like a bout of spores. Like Maria promised, nothing has been touched since she's left.

It smells like nothing, tastes like dust, but when Ellie falls asleep, it's dreamless.