paradisa | First Shot

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tess

First Shot

[Everything changes with the bat of an eye.

While she registers the change immediately, it takes a moment to truly sink in. Tess finds herself in what could only be a dream –– she hasn't seen a bedroom so immaculate and new and utterly inviting outside of old magazines in decades, and she's certainly never slept in one. She's never even stayed in a hotel this nice, never had her own place with such crisp, perfect white linens. The very act of being in a well-kept bedroom is jarring and discomforting and panic-inducing.

The only thing that keeps her from outright panicking is the fact that she still has her handgun in her hands, her arms outstretched to point it at some invisible intruders, her finger laid against the side of the gun, ready to move to the trigger at a heartbeat's notice––

Seconds ago, there had been bullets, and Joel and Ellie's retreating footsteps––

There's an assortment of things on the dresser, a hairbrush that had likely never even approached anyone's scalp, a comb with all its teeth, a jewelry box that looks freshly polished––

There had been a throbbing in her chest and collarbone and neck, and––

No, no, the throbbing is still there, the collar of her shirt half-stuck to the mess that is her throat, and Tess could (and can) feel it almost thrumming under her skin, almost moving––

Tess backs up into a wall, her support hand leaving the base of the gun in favour of splaying against the immaculate paint. Purple. The walls are rich, warm purple, without so much as a hairline crack, and Tess is pressing the grime of her skin and clothes against it. She feels like she needs to apologize, even when there is no one around to apologize to.

She's alone here, almost. Alone as any host is.

She's not sure if she can "feel" the infection crawling under her skin because she knows it's working its way towards her brain so that it might kill her, or if there really are cordyceps tendrils spawning in her veins, winding through her muscle tissue and up her neck to her skull. Have they reached her brain yet? Will it hurt when they do?

Of course it's going to hurt, she tells herself, almost angrily. But Joel and Ellie are gone, and oh thank god, Joel is gone, Joel doesn't have to see this, and there are no soldiers to shoot her like a fucking rabid dog, and it's just her and the gun and this immaculate not-quite-afterlife hotel room.

It was easy to maintain her composure when she had work to do and Joel to protect –– she couldn't let him see her die or turn or suffer, she had her pride and her obligations to her goddamn partner –– but now she's alone and she is going to become a monster if she doesn't put herself out of her own misery.

Tess fits the barrel of the gun to her chin.

Don't be such a fucking coward, Tess.

She pulls it away, takes a hard breath, and closes her eyes for a beat.

It's only been a few hours. You've got hours. Maybe twelve hours, or twenty-four, or maybe even forty-eight––

When she opens her eyes, they settle immediately on the window across from "her" bedroom wall. More importantly, they settle on what appears to be a distant city basking under a summer sun, and for an instant she thinks of being a teenager again, when she dreamed of backpacking across Europe. There were lots of pictures of little French cities all over the Internet, back then, cities that could still feel like quaint little towns despite their sprawl.

For a moment, she just stares in silence, and then she says:]

Couldn't pick a nicer fucking place to die, huh...

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[Tess flinches when he touches her, but it's just as easy to melt into as it always is. God, it's been less than twenty-four hours since he last held her face, and even if the whole damn world is different now, there's the same old concern. She drops her eyes for a moment, then looks back up at him, her hands rising to wrap around his wrist.

Her own voice feels small.]

You know how us girls need to feel appreciated.

[It isn't even that, she thinks, but it sounds better. It sounds worlds better than flinging all the other reasons in his face: every time he brushed her off, every time he locked her out and then got mad when she didn't go chasing after him, every time he took out his hurt and anger on her. Of course she matters –– she knows Joel would never suffer people he loathed.

But there isn't time for the full story, and now there never will be. Not ever.

She leans her cheek into his hand and sighs, closing her eyes.]

You're always telling me how reckless I am.

That's because you goddamn are.

[And he knows there's more to it than that, but after a second she relaxes into his touch and Joel feels comfortable dealing out a very weak scolding. Reckless is one of his top ten descriptors for Tess. Used to be, because she was dead and she was gone. It feels like he's talking to a ghost, this all happened so fast. He figures he might as well be talking to a ghost with the way this was gonna play out.

And of course she'd want some closure about her deathwish. Who wouldn't? Sorry, Tess, we're still shitty people.

He doesn't even know how to start. Joel heaves another sigh when she does and pulls her into a cautious hug. She's so worried about it traveling, but he doesn't see any sign that she's anywhere close to turning. And they don't do this that often, but it's not every day the dead come back after you've regretted every single time you didn't.]

If you'd listened to me more often, we mighta been on vacation while this all went down.

[When he pulls her in, she turns just a bit –– just to keep that shoulder the fuck away from him, like any contact with it is a death sentence. Of course, all of her will be poisoned soon enough, but for now, it's just that ugly patch of flesh, oozing between growing bubbles and ridges.

His shirt smells nice. Musky, dirty, sweaty nice. This is all she has left.]

Where would we even go on vacation? Boston hasn't had nice seafood restaurants on the harbour and a Red Sox game in ages.

[But who was she kidding? She'd never even stepped foot in Boston before those things had come crashing down. It just sounds like a nice impossibility, just like vacation.]

[Can't believe she's real. Holding her in his arms feels no different from any other time he's done it, except for the careful way they're avoiding direct contact with the infected bite. He remembers his utter disbelief when he'd first learned she was hiding it, demanding to see it the way he'd done, and then everything happening much too fast.

I can fight.

The small laugh that escapes from his mouth when she speaks is hollow, kind of shaky. He used to argue with Tess all the time about taking it easy. He'd get brushed off, just about every single time. Nice impossibilities. Joel had been old enough when the outbreak began that he could remember things like vacation from too much work in a normal context; Tess was younger, her edges a little sharper from spending her young adult life in complete chaos.

Joel holds her a little tighter.]

Yeah, vacation for us would just be taking a break, wouldn't it? Something else you never wanted to do.

[She sighs, and then laughs under his breath, cheek against his chest. She doesn't need to explain this, but...]

Taking a break would have let someone else step in to try to corner our market. That's how Roberts happen. You really wanna risk losing everything we worked so hard to build? I didn't bust my ass for decades just to sit on my ass for a week. You know that.

[Want to? Wanted to? Tess isn't sure, but if she's dead and her body hauled off to an incinerator somewhere, and Joel trekking across the country with Ellie, well... Boston didn't have a Tess anymore, or it had a new Tess. Maybe Bill was wondering why no one ever came back for new merchandise –– an absence without answers, and he would eventually go, too, leaving Boston with an extremely diminished black market of pills, booze, guns and explosives.

And the saddest thing was that most people would never even realize who went missing, even if they felt the absence of contraband sorely.

It was mere hours ago for Tess, and yet it still felt like distant past. She was reeling.]

You gonna go back to Boston?

Yeah, I know that.

[It's the same yes ma'am tone he always takes with her, not quite flippant but almost, if you squint. It's not that he doesn't appreciate the gravitas of their reality. It's not that he doesn't understand how hard Tess works -- worked, because lord, he does. It's just that he gets tired, feels old and he gets to thinking maybe he could treat this like any other job, like one that would include coffee breaks back in 2013.

But it's not like any other job and the reality is that Tess has to be hypervigilant. Joel has to be at her side and answer to her when he's needed, disappear when he's not. That was how they'd played it out for what felt like ages. Until Ellie. He leans back a little and stares down at Tess, not quite breaking the embrace.

The surprised look on his face speaks volumes about how little he's thought about that. Joel shifts his gaze away again when he decides too much is written in it, shaking his head. It feels almost like a betrayal. There should be someone picking up the slack and looking after Tess' empire.

And he's sure somebody is, but that's not the point.]

Ain't nothin' left for me in Boston.

Edited 2013-09-05 22:15 (UTC)

[She dreads that answer, in a way; it would stand to reason that Joel taking Ellie across the damn continent and her being figuratively six-feet-under would leave her empire crashing down like bombed buildings. That is just how it works.

That was always going to be the inevitable end of it. She couldn't live forever, Joel wasn't in it without her, and she had no one to leave a legacy for.

Past tense.

Or soon to be past-tense.

She winds her fingers into his shirt for a second but then lets go. There's a measure of security in knowing she's going to die and Joel is going to see her through it, but the vulnerability of it is discomforting.

Tess looks up at him.]

I figured. Or should have figured.

[Is he going to leave her behind with Boston? With smuggling?]

And with Ellie, did you... did you find the Fireflies?

[Shit. Joel exhales and thinks not this again. He watches her fingers curl into the material of his shirt and relax again. Anything but her eyes.

He shouldn't have gotten this close.]

Most of them were dead, Tess. [A careful pause, during which he finds the strength to meet her gaze. He doesn't want to have to lie to her too. It's different than it was with Ellie, but he still feels like he shouldn't speak about the truth to anyone. Like it'll give life to what he tried so hard to make go away.] I can't tell you how many close calls we had trying to track 'em down.

[Another sigh.]

Anyway, ah... we found something at the end of the trail in Salt Lake City. A hospital they were holdin' up in.

[When he looks away, she frowns, tilting her head to see if she can follow his gaze... but no, he avoids her, and that's never comforting. He's not exactly being specific, here. Pressing:]

And...?

[Come on. Don't let me down.]

[She was a dead woman, anyway. Joel surprises himself with a thought as cold as that one, but he feels tenser as the seconds tick by. Trapped by a sense of obligation he never wanted in the first place when it came to this crazy mission and which he knows, for a fact, he would never choose over Ellie.

The question is what Ellie would have done, really, if she'd had the chance to choose. That's all that's left of it that means anything to him. The fucking Fireflies, they'd been a pain in his ass for as long as he could remember.

Joel backs up now, his defenses on the rise. He puts the right amount of steel in his eyes for what he's about to say, jaw firming up.]

I killed every last one.

[Maybe he was a dead man.]

Edited 2013-09-06 00:35 (UTC)

[Tess wasn't sure to expect, but it certainly wasn't this. She freezes when he moves away, and opens her mouth to say something but nothing comes out. Maybe that's better than spilling out anger, or letting out a cry or gasp of shock.

But she has to say something. She can't let the canyon of silence after his confession consume them.

All she can do is take one threatening step back into his space and utter in a stunned, almost offended tone:]

Excuse me? You killed them?

Edited 2013-09-06 01:05 (UTC)

[After it's said, he almost feels better. There's nobody else in the world, in any world, who knows about what he's done. Joel stares her down with his chin held high, because needless to say it's not a decision he's willing to back down on. Despite his initial unease speaking about it.]

A Cordyceps mutation. That's what her immunity comes down to in the end. Marlene told me everything.

[He's amazed by how calm he sounds. Just run it by her, step by step. See how she takes it.]

Ellie was out when they first found us. They took her straight to surgery and they were gonna kill her right there, on the hope that they could whip up a vaccine from it.

[And there's that dark, quiet fury creeping over his words. Like he could snap necks all over again. There's a million reasons he could give as to why he thinks the Fireflies have always been short-sighted, but those excuses don't apply when he knows damn well what the most important reason behind his actions had been.]

And no, I didn't exactly cooperate.

[Tess bristles, steps back, steps forward again, like she doesn't know what to do or how to process this. He killed them. He wholesale slaughtered humanity's last chance –– what good is a girl without a surgeon? What good is immunity with no way to share it? She knows Joel's anger, his brutality, his precision better than anyone, and she doesn't even need to picture it to know how it all went down.

And then she's yelling, not furious but wounded. What was any of this for, then? What did they do this for? Guns they'd never receive? A savior they'd never raise up? Redemption they'd never claim? Or all along, was that just her, only what she wanted?

Questions abound. Tess can't even think with logic, it's just a panic washing over her, as real as the throbbing in her shoulder reminding her that this has all gone so very, very wrong.]

Just... just an hour ago, less than that, I was fucking frantic to find them so maybe we could end this shit, so... so we could make it so no one would ever become Infected again! Did you not see that? Did that not matter?

Fucking Christ, Joel, whatever happened to just cargo?!

[And then she swings to hit him with a flat hand, just smack him across the face at full-force.]

[A blink in time where he can either let that incoming hand hit him, take the slap that he knows he deserves, or stop it from connecting by yanking at Tess' wrist and yanking her hand away from his face. He chooses option two at the last second, shaking her so she can feel the anger behind that decision. I don't regret it. I won't.]

It wasn't just an hour ago for me, Tess!

[A reminder. Her pain and her frustration makes sense to him, but she has no way to grasp his. And there's no way to make her grasp it. Joel tries to find the words that will fit around a decent explanation to someone who's been dead for a year, killed by the infection he refused to try and cure.]

It has nothing to do with any of that. I just couldn't do it. I just couldn't do it.

[His body is tense, his grip on her hard just in case she tries to keep fighting him, but lord, if he doesn't start to sound helpless.]

Ellie -- she didn't have any choice at all. I told her they would take a blood sample from her, Tess. I told her it wouldn't hurt.

[Tess reels in his grip, pushing forward until it's clear that his resistance will overpower her forward momentum, and then she's giving up and pulling away again, snapping:]

Of all the things I've seen you do, you draw the line there?! I just––

[And then the exhaustion is digging in hard and fast. It's too much, and this is the grain that tips the scale. She's been awake for twenty-four hours now, maybe even thirty-six. She made the drop alone, she fought off an assassination attempt, she dealt with Robert, she dealt with Marlene, she trekked across Clicker-infested, bombed-out ruins, she got mauled and infected and now kidnapped by a magic castle, and here she is being walked to her death and being told none of it would matter.

No contraband empire in Boston's underground.

No cure for humanity, of which she would play a small part in.

No future for her at all, life ended by a reckless mistake and too-slow reflexes when once-human teeth drove into her skin.

She swings with her free hand to pound a fist against Joel's chest, some grown-up attempt at a temper tantrum, but it comes up weak.

Tess feels her eyes well up and her face contort in some effort to maintain her composure, but it doesn't work. It's not going to work anymore. She held it together well enough with guns trained on her from the other side of the Firefly meeting place, she held it together well enough to agree to die at Joel's hands, but that's all gone. The tears are rolling and her throat's closing up and her shoulder has a pulse and a life of its own, beating so hard in her shoulder that she can feel it reverberating through the rest of her.

And all she can do is choke in a breath and plead:]

Joel. Please. This hurts.

Edited 2013-09-06 05:30 (UTC)

[Yes, there.

He knows how absurd it has to sound, that should would not be able to understand his choices. Tess is as furious as he's ever seen her; he really has to struggle to keep from getting smashed in the face. Joel thinks he should've taken it, should've let her have at least that much, that little bit of fleeting satisfaction. He doesn't bother to stop her from pounding against his front with her fist, because she's not just furious. She's breaking. Oh, shit.

It was horrible to hear, horrible to watch. Why did he decide to tell her and add more weight to the end of her life? He's regretting it now, but he'd had some instinct that he wouldn't be able to squirm his way into a lie with her after she kept returning to the topic. She wouldn't nod and accept, the way Ellie had.

And yet she seems small now, the tears in her eyes and the sheer ache in her voice. Shit. God, he makes a sound like her pain is traveling, all breathless and stifled.]

I know, I know it does -- [His own voice startles him, reminds him of his last words to Sarah. All these dead people begging him to make it stop. His answer always seems to be the same: I know, c'mere. I know. Joel tries once again to close his arms around Tess after loosening his angry, defensive hold, at a loss of what else to do, but he's prepared in case all she wants to do is shove him the fuck away right now.]

I know.

[Tess makes an ugly noise half-way between anger and despair, and his outstretched arms make her resist weakly. No. Hell no, she isn't crying in his arms, not over him, not for herself, not at all. She doesn't want to be a wreck, but there she is, fighting off his arms as if they were spider webs, weak and without much strength at all. What's the point? She has no strength left to do it, and the exhaustion hits her like a sack of bricks.

It's die alone –– again, she's told –– or die with him, and this is what he wants. She wouldn't have either right now, but this is what he wants.

In that moment she hates him just about as much as she loves him, the cold-hearted son of a bitch. She's always thought she was the worse person.]

You fucking bastard.

[She slumps against him, teeth grit and hot tears rolling down her cheeks. She doesn't want to look at him, so she keeps her eyes shut and her chin tucked down and she's just gone. Twenty years gone, and if she had been able to accept this inevitability on the first night Infection reached her life, she would have put a gun to her head right then.]

God. I can't do this anymore. Just fucking take me outside and shoot–– and shoot me too.

[She inhales, sharply, as if that could keep her voice steady. She's sure her heart hurts more than the bite right now.]

Come on.

[Joel doesn't fight her resistance, no matter how weak. He lets her slump against him and waits, tension settling all through his body in the most exhausting ways. In the back of his mind he's on guard for some sort of attack and it's in that moment that he realizes what Tess meant by what do you know about us? This clumsy attempt to stay close, over something he'd done that she would probably always hate him for, all mixed up with a precise plan to bolt if he needed to.

Shitty people. Fucking bastard. But if she'd known what he'd been through, maybe she'd see his side easier. He has no idea if that's true or if he even deserves that chance. The words to explain it to her aren't coming easy, so he lets her cry against him with his body as still as a statue and-- and then she says shoot me too and he feels his first twinge of doubt. If Tess had lived, all the way to the end, if she woke up in that room with him, would he have shot her too?

Now there's a nightmare he doesn't need. It'd probably be visiting him in his sleep tomorrow night. Joel swallows and puts a hand on her shoulder, and then he slowly turns away to restart his descent towards the exit. Let's get on with it, then.

He almost expects her to pull a gun on him instead. He's on guard for it.]

It was a year. We'd been through all kinds of hell.

[He feels a little pissed off, anger rattling away somewhere inside him like distant thunder. Not really at Tess, not when he knew the wound was fresh-- just an incomprehensible and overwhelming anger that gnaws at him all the while. They'd fought so fucking hard to serve these demands, these needs that other people had, just to give them a chance to steal everything away without asking if that was what either of them wanted. Fucking people. They could always be counted on to screw you over first.]

[She's just quiet for a moment, stuck making ugly little noises and trying to re-establish some sort of control over herself. What a partner, huh? She'll get mad, she'll throw around names, and then still carry on crying in your arms when it's too much to deal with.

When he starts moving, she goes with him, one hand over her face again to wipe away tears. Composure, Tess. You're better than this, you fucking coward. And still, she snipes at him:]

But apparently not hell enough to want to end it. Fucking explain that.

[Every footstep is hard, but she does it.]

What the fuck happened to make ending this nightmare less important than some little girl dying? "Just cargo," huh?

[Tess is younger than him. Sometimes he forgets they've got a good ten year gap in between them. He'd never believed in the Fireflies, and even without all the baggage that came with giving Ellie up, he has more faith in them fucking it up than he does in them ever figuring out a way to save the whole damn world. Even with a vaccine.

That was neither here nor there. This wasn't about how he was never all the way on board with their fucking crusade, this was about Ellie. That was why he'd done it. The other reasons were convenient. Joel frowns and takes steadier steps, all of him so tense that he feels like he might snap if she says one more word.

Still, if Tess was gonna snipe at him and call Ellie "some little girl" and harp on how she was always meant to be cargo, he was gonna start using a convenient reason or two.]

The nightmare was never gonna end, Tess.

[It's been a long time since she even came close to putting herself under the Fireflies banner, and a longer time still since she said it proudly. She's far from an idealistic teenager, but adulthood had hit her too fast, too hard. Unlike Joel's childhood slowly burning away as he raised Tommy himself, Tess had gotten a rude awakening at nineteen and there was no chance to go back, even if she liked to think about it sometimes.

She used to think about it a lot, especially in those days where it seemed infection was a passing crisis, something that would eventually fizzle out without much fanfare. Like the war in Afghanistan, or the obsession with global warming, or the latest indigenous "superfood" fad. Infection was supposed to go away.

And sure, she had thought about it less and less over the years, but it was always at the back of her mind, haunting her. She knew her teenaged self would loathe what she had become, someone who profited off of all the suffering and even smiled from time to time doing it.

Joel didn't understand that. Joel had never fallen in with the Fireflies, and sometimes Tess imagined him too pessimistic to ever consider the future. Too ground up by suffering to strive for a life all that far beyond it. Too in love with his own demons –– god knows Tess loathes hers.

Is there even a case to make?]

Why isn't a chance better than nothing at all?

[No, he'd never fallen in with that crowd. That had been the cause of some of his biggest fights with Tommy over the years and now it was showing up again, in the form of Tess coming back from the dead just so he could disappoint her and crush her hopes. And then shoot her.

Just keep moving. He was glad they were walking again. It helps. Not much, but it helps. Joel sighs hard at her question. She's right, after all. He would rather stick close to a dark place that he knows than venture out into a new one that's unfamiliar to him.]

Don't you think it's fucked up to put all that on a fourteen year old girl?

[God, it sounds weird coming out of his mouth. Saying this to his partner, one of the few people who knew everything he was capable of. Tess was probably gonna look at him like he'd grown an extra head for that one. It's more than just an ethical musing, though-- there's real bite to that counter-question, real anger and frustration. It was what he'd been thinking about when he'd asked Ellie if she wanted to just turn around and forget the whole thing.]

And for what? A chance for the Fireflies to screw around and try to play hero? They were so damn destroyed after just a year that one person finished them off.

[True that he was a very decent murderer when he wanted to be, but still.]

Edited 2013-09-07 09:36 (UTC)

[All the Fireflies, all gone. Tess looks at Joel not like he's grown a second head but rather as if he's lost his only head. There's a kind of whiplash in going from Joel wanting nothing to do with Ellie to this kind of determined, fatherly protectiveness. Putting the weight of the world on a fourteen year old girl? Fuck, hadn't she been pinned under that since the moment Marlene decided to send her to the eastern branch of the Fireflies?

Tess squeezes her eyes shut for a moment, trying to process this.]

And did you give Ellie a choice in that, either? She didn't fuss about you putting a bullet in Marlene?

[Assuming Marlene was still alive at that point, anyhow. She hadn't been in the best of shape when Tess had crossed districts to the gun cache with her.]

I told you, Ellie was out.

[Clipped and defensive. Here's where he becomes less certain. There's a part of Joel that knows she would've struggled with giving up her life and might've chosen to do so, but she was saddled with so much survivor's guilt that he's not sure that's fair either. Real easy to guilt a teenager whose lost everyone and everything into being your sacrificial lamb.

What he'd done was on him. Irrationally, he didn't want it to even touch her. He just wanted it to go away.]

She doesn't know about any of this.

[I lied to her face.]

[Details, details.]

So she would have gone in her sleep and never known the difference.

[Tess tries to make that sound less accusatory than it comes out, but there's really no way of avoiding that. Joel had still stripped Ellie of a choice, regardless of what it would have been, but how would she even know the difference? Tess stopped entertaining the thought of any higher power a long time ago, and as far as she's concerned, dead people don't know the difference.

Other than me, she supposes. Here she is, in Paradisa, alive when she's not supposed to be.

Tess changes her mind on a dime right there.]

... Providing she didn't end up here, anyhow. Never mind. But you can't have it both ways, Joel, get angry that they didn't give her a choice and then do the same fucking thing.

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