hbo © the last of us
season 1, episode 2

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
LATE JULY ✷ 2023

━━ LENA WALKED AHEAD of the group, incapable of thinking about anything else but her daughter and her ex-husband. Her stride had become so intense that even Ellie had long before given up trying to accompany the woman, choosing to remain behind with Joel and Tess instead.

The fear of something bad — whatever "bad" even meant anymore — happening to Cess gnawed at Lena's chest like a knife that was carving its way to her heart with each step she took. She despised how much the pain in her body made her look weak in front of those people, but not only that; how much it slowed her down, too. How could Cess ever learn to be strong if her own mother wasn't?

At least when her daughter was in school, Lena knew she was safe. Firefly or not, she hated FEDRA and the atrocities they committed all the same — but that did not mean they would not take care of Chelsea. Between her and her daughter's concealed identities, and the loads of merchandise that Lena donated to the school every time she visited, they ought to have watched over her carefully.

How could they have let her escape like that?

But most importantly; how could Cess have betrayed her trust?

Lena would be the first to admit that her daughter's teenage years had not been kind to their straining relationship, yet the woman would've never imagined Chelsea capable of running away without a goodbye or a simple note. But of one thing, Lena was sure. She would rather die than let her daughter join the Fireflies — and she would kill them all if she had to.

━━━━━━━━━━

The woman smelled the sulfur of gunpowder before she noticed the dead bodies strewn all over the ground.

The group had reached the Old State House within half an hour, and Lena had advised them it was better to hide before trying to announce their presence. There were some Fireflies who would open fire on anyone who dared cross into their territory, regardless if they were expecting visitors or not.

From where they had sought coverage, crouched behind a yellow taxi car covered in overgrown weeds, she couldn't see anyone at first. There were a few old FEDRA vehicles parked outside of the building, with all of their military symbols crossed out by red fireflies and profanities painted with graffiti spray.

The first thing Lena noticed was the silence. Sure, the Fireflies knew how to hole out when they needed to, but this wasn't just a simple attack against FEDRA. There were at least a hundred of them, with children and families, migrating from their homes to the other side of the country. Lena expected to hear the sound of kids, and the laughter of people, expected to smell the scent of sizzling barbecue meat in the air. Instead, there was just quiet.

These are Fireflies, Lena thought, her mind filling with somber thoughts, They are not supposed to be quiet.

The woman unstrapped the pack she carried around her back, slamming it on the ground as she dove her hand in, looking for the Firefly pendant that had once belonged to her. She gripped the small necklace between her fingers, coupling the fastener around her throat and letting the pendant fall over her chest. It had been so long since she had tried it on, — years, probably — but it gave her an eerie feeling of familiarity.

"I'll go first." she murmured to the man and the woman at her left. "If they have snipers, they'll see I'm one of them. Joel, you got the rifle. Come with."

He looked at Tess, — clearly discontented with his circumstances — but she plainly jutted her chin forward, ordering her companion to follow Lena.

The latter treaded over the sidewalk and into the asphalt, walking with light steps toward the repurposed HEMT truck that had been left parked in the middle of the street. She took a deep breath in, knocking twice on the flaming-hot metal door. She expected to see a face or a gun staring back at her, but the response never came.

"I'll open the door. You shoot." Lena instructed Joel. She wished she would've taken Marlene's AK-47 with her, but with the rush of the confrontation with Robert's men and the two strangers, the weapon had been forgotten in the same room she had met Ellie for the first time.

Joel nodded. Lena wrapped her fingers against the handle, pushing it swiftly and jumping backward as Joel stuck his rifle inside the driver compartment of the truck.

He sighed as he realized it was empty.

"Something's wrong." Lena muttered, and the man was quick to nod at her comment. "These aren't the Fireflies. They wouldn't leave a truck like this, unguarded."

Joel turned back to Tess and Ellie. Stay back, he mouthed.

Lena hopped in the truck. The boxes and compartments had been cleared out, with all that remained of clues being a trail of fresh blood that began in the driver's side seat and extended to the opposite door — that had been left cracked open.

Lena looked around for a few seconds, trying to find any sort of map or shipping paper that could tell her exactly where the Fireflies were going. She searched between the stuffing of the seats and below the mats, but she soon got bored and jumped back to the ground through the other exit.

Joel joined her, and the two walked around the corner of the vehicle, studying the bloodied corpse of a Firefly whose head had been smashed in by a dislodged truck pipe.

He looked at her, waiting for an answer that never arrived. The woman shrugged her shoulders, moving her attention to the sound of flies swarming over dead bodies nearby. Three of them, Lena counted, laying in pools of blood that came from bullet wounds that pierced through their riot gear.

Lena crouched by them and searched for their Firefly pendants. Terri Addams, Allen Sothersby, and Martin Dallas — none of them people Lena knew, all of them young enough to be her own children.

In the meanwhile, Joel walked to the back of the truck and opened the latch that held the two doors of the cargo trunk. It was empty, just as he'd expected it to be.

"Joel?" Tess asked, emerging from her hiding spot with Ellie following closely behind her. "What the fuck is goin' on?"

"I don't know." the man shook his head.

"The chambers of their rifles are empty." Lena said, passing two of the weapons to Joel for inspection. "There was some sort of shooting. Maybe— maybe FEDRA got to them."

Lena remembered the broken face of the soldier after Joel was finished with him. Whether he was dead or not, it did not matter. The CCTV cameras had already caught glimpses of the man and Tess, and of the mysterious woman and girl they had harbored inside the QZ. If they hadn't already, the feds would get on the group's tail sooner or later.

"Can't be FEDRA." Tess said. "We'd be dead by now if they caught us lurking around."

Ellie looked down, eyes following a pattern of cracks in the pavement. After a few seconds, she nudged Lena in the elbow and pointed her finger at a stream of blood that ran from the base of the steps to the entrance of the building. "They went inside."

Tess looked up at the massive construction that was hallowed in front of her eyes. She seemed different since leaving the museum, but Lena could not quite understand why. She was frantic, feverish, out of breath. And not only because of her sprained ankle, the other woman suspected.

Before either Joel or Lena had time for a reaction, Tess took Ellie by the hand, violently yanking her toward the entrance of the Capitol.

"Come on." she spoke low, between gritted teeth, half-dragging the girl behind her. Lena was surprised by her gesture but unlike Joel, she did not wait for an invitation to follow.

"Tess." the man called out, remaining in place while the two women made their way up the stairs.

"Come on!" she repeated, this time louder and harsher.

Tess approached the entrance, shoving Ellie forward as Lena helped her open the wooden double doors. The former raised her gun as a greeting to any Firefly that might have been waiting for them.

Before she entered, Lena tried to calm the unsteady beats of her heart by slowly breathing in and out. No matter what she would find inside, she wouldn't give Marlene or any of her lackeys the satisfaction of seeing her pain. Not after all of the shit she'd gone through to protect their skin for over six goddamned years.

Lena expected to come face-to-face with Marlene or Philip, even with FEDRA soldiers that might have taken over the building, but none of the options that had been fabricated by her mind could even come close to the carnage waiting for her inside the main hall.

As Lena stepped over the threshold, — with one hand over the pistol hanging from her belt and the other gripped around her sickle — her eyes wandered over the dead bodies permeating the marble floor, the trails of blood, sprayed all over the walls and the immaculate pillars that sustained the weight of the golden dome above their heads.

It had been a long time since Lena had seen something as bloody as that. The sight brought back memories of her days as a Firefly — back when sleeping in makeshift beds with loaded rifles beneath her pillow and seeing her friends slowly die out was something as casual as drinking a cup of coffee or reading a newspaper had been in the old world.

The same memories that her brain locked out of her mind, afraid of what she would do if she remembered the butcher's work she had done for so many years.

"Fuck." she said, in a sound that resembled a sob more than anything else. "Chelsea? Chelsea? Cess? Are you there, baby? Mom's here."

She was met with nothing else but the sound of her own voice echoing through the empty hall.

Lena called out her daughter's name, again and again, until the words leaving her lips had lost all of their meaning. She locked her hands behind her head, straining to swallow back the lump that had formed in her throat.

Joel looked at her as she ran around the room, up the stairs, and back down, looking for any known faces. He wanted to say something, yell out that they did not have the time to wait until FEDRA or the infected found them — but he found familiarity in her agony. She was a mother, just like he had been a father all of those years ago.

"Fuck, fuck." Lena muttered as her eyes caught the sight of a man, not much younger than her. With his head drooped to the side and his mouth half-open in a serene expression, he seemed to be peacefully sleeping.

Her breath hitched at the sight of Philip. Despite the heavy pain in her ribcage, she ignored Joel's calls and ran to the unconscious man, kneeling in front of him. His hands were still warm, almost as if he had been sitting the entire day like that, dozing off. Maybe, just maybe, there was still a trace of life in the man's body.

Lena brought two fingers against his neck, digging them into his skin so hard that his limp body almost fell to the side. She waited and waited, anticipating to feel the beat of his heart pumping blood through his veins — but it never came.

He's gone, the voice inside her head said. You have to let him go.

Lena blinked away once or twice, attempting to swat away the tears that stung at the corner of her eyes. If Philip was dead — after twenty years of commanding the Fireflies alongside Marlene, nonetheless — where was Cess?

"Lip is not cold, but he's dead. And my daughter is not here." Lena murmured, more to herself than the others. She wiped the tears off of her face, looking up from the man's body to glance at the blurb of light that glistened at the corner of her eye.

With Lip's name and case number engraved on it, there was no mistaking it for what it wasn't: his new Firefly pendant, drenched in his own blood.

But why waste the last moments of his life hanging it on the doorknob? Unless . . . he had put it there so she could find it. So she would know that Cess got away.

Suddenly, the absence of the other Fireflies hit Lena like a wall of bricks. If all of them were moving out of Boston as Marlene had said, where had all of the survivors gone to? Why were there only a few vehicles parked outside of the building?

"They ran away." Lena thought out loud.

"What?" Joel asked.

"Marlene and the others, they're not here anymore." Lena explained.

"So she just expects us to guess where she's gone to?"

"I mean, there's gotta be a fuckin' radio or something, right?" Tess intervened.

Lena pressed her hands against Lip's uniform, groping his pockets for anything of use. If anyone in that room had a map or an important document on them, that person was Philip.

"No. Lip's clear." the woman shook her head in defeat after her search had warranted nothing more than candy wrappers and notes from dates long gone.

"Who killed them?" Ellie asked, walking toward one of the tables at the center of the room, where cleared-out boxes of guns and ammunition lay. "FEDRA?"

"No." Joel answered. He used his foot to turn around one of the dead bodies, revealing the marks of infection that ran along the man's face. "One of them got bit. The healthy ones fought the sick ones. Everyone lost."

Tess had begun sprinting around the room, turning over crates and containers, muttering curses to herself every time her searches came back empty.

"Tess? What are you doin'?" Joel questioned.

The woman ignored his question with a scowl. "Where did Marlene say that she was taking you?" she asked, turning to the girl with a furious expression on her face. "Ellie!"

"Uh . . . I don't know. Just West."

"Just West. Fuck, okay." Tess sighed. It was almost like she was trying to breathe, but she couldn't get the air in and out of her body. "Lena, I know I might've asked you before. But you really need to think. Do you have any idea of where they might've gone? If the Fireflies had a lab, back then."

Lena groaned in defeat. She crossed her arms over her chest and looked down at her shoes as she tried to recall all of the times she and Marlene had talked about their plans for the cure, about labs and hospitals that had allied themselves with the cause of the Fireflies.

She hated it. She hated it so much. Not being able to remember what had happened during all of those years, with the only remaining memories of that time coming from torn photos and scribbled notes in old agendas. No matter how much she tried, she couldn't recall what was out West.

States, cities, and rivers, yes, but not what she'd done there. Her mind was playing tricks on her — fogging the images and voices that danced around in Lena's memory. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't do it.

"No, no. Fuck if I know." Lena shook her head.

"Well, one of them is gotta have a map on them, right?" Tess asked, moving about the room as she searched once more. She grunted in frustration. "Joel! Can you help me?"

"No!" the man yelled. He looked at Lena for a few moments, then back to his partner. "Tess, it's over! We are going home!"

"That's not my fucking home!" Tess finally erupted. She turned around, and that was when Lena noticed the tears that were beginning to roll down from her eyes.

The room fell into silence.

"I'm stayin'." Tess announced, standing up from her crouching position. Her lips were closed into a tight line and her eyes stared at Joel, but she wasn't looking at him. She was lost in the void of her own thoughts, trying to formulate her words as best as she could. "I mean, our luck had to run out sooner or later."

Lena remained in place, forgetting about Cess and Lip and the Fireflies for a mere second. She didn't understand why Tess was acting as rashly as she was, why she had become so solemn in a matter of a couple of hours. It was almost like she had become another person when they'd walked out of the museum . . .

"Fuck." Ellie breathed out. Joel and Lena both turned around to look at her, trying to understand the source of her surprise. "She's infected."

Lena's mouth dropped open. She took a step back, almost as if she'd been punched in the gut. It was her fault, how could it not have been? Back at the museum, — the only place where Tess could've gotten infected — when fighting those clickers . . .

If she'd just been quicker, maybe she wouldn't have been bitten. Another person was going to die, and Lena could do nothing but watch as Tess turned into an infected creature, a shell of her former self that couldn't drink or eat or sleep or love like she'd once had.

Tess laughed sardonically. The tears were now flowing freely down her face, but if she was afraid of dying, she was doing one hell of a job to keep herself together.

Joel turned back to his companion. With his brows furrowed and the corners of his mouth downturned, his expression hardened in a matter of moments. "Show me." he demanded, coldly.

"Joel." Tess called out, the soft tone of her voice contrasting with the roughness in his. She tried to take a step toward him, but Joel took another back — as if he'd walked on blazing coals. The rejection in his eyes slowly sunk into Tess, who soon gave up trying to come closer to her friend.

She rolled her eyes with a sigh and gripped the collar of her shirt, pulling it to the side to reveal a bite mark on her neck. The infection was starting to spread, with thin translucent tendrils extending from the collarbone to the shoulder blade.

Lena remained in place, observing the bite mark that looked so similar to all of the others she'd seen before. Even if she wanted to, she could not bring herself to move out of her spot. Cess was gone. Philip was dead, and soon Tess would be, too. How did it even happen? How did everything in her life come tumbling down in little over a day?

"Oops, right?" Tess chortled. She went back to covering the mark on her neck, turning to face Ellie afterward. "Take your bandage off."

The girl was at a loss for words. She did as she was told, showing the adults the three-week-old scar once more.

"Look." Tess said in a whisper. The woman approached Ellie with careful steps, taking the girl's arm into her hands and lifting the patch of skin to where her friend could see. "Joel? This is real. Joel, she's fucking real."

Tess was beginning to choke on her sobs. Her hands were shaking, her breaths irregular, and her eyes wide as saucers.

How could Lena not have noticed the early signs of infection before?

"I need you to get her to Bill and Frank's."

"No." Joel quickly replied, shaking his head.

"They'll handle it from here." Tess explained

"No, no, no, I can't. They won't take her." Joel insisted. He then looked at Lena. "You're gonna take the kid. I'm gonna give you a map, and you'll find Bill and Frank—"

"Joel, listen to me!" Tess pleaded. "They will take her because you will convince them to. Yes, you will. I never ask you for anything, not to feel the way I felt. Not to—"

"No—"

"Shut the fuck up 'cause I don't have time." she interrupted. "This is your chance. You get her there, you keep her alive, and you set everything right."

She slowly spun toward Lena.

"I know I got not right asking you to do anything for me. We barely know each other. But you gotta do this, for your girl and for every kid that's gonna come into this world. If my dying words have anything on you, then I want you to know that Joel is a good man, no matter what he says." Tess sobbed. "He'll help you find your kid, and you'll help him deliver Ellie to the Fireflies. Please say yes, Joel. For all of the shit we did."

Neither Joel nor Lena had the time for a response. One of the infected corpses began groaning, extending its bony hands from the ground as it tried to grip Ellie. The girl cursed out, running to hide behind Lena.

Joel cocked his gun, shooting the creature — once a kid, not much older than Chelsea was — in the head before it had time to come to its feet.

The group went silent for mere seconds, watching in terror as thin branches of fungus began rising from the cracks in the marble, covering the fingers and feet of the recently deceased infected.

Lena opened her mouth to speak for the first time in what felt like an eternity. "Holy shit. We gotta move, they're coming."

She remembered all of the writhing bodies she'd seen from the balcony at the Huntington Hotel. At least a hundred of them — that were now violently making their way to the Capitol.

Joel didn't waste a moment. He passed by Tess, sprinting to the door from which they'd entered, cracking it open just enough so that everyone could hear the commotion coming from the outside. The sounds of growls and feet marching against the pavement were growing louder and louder by the moment, sending a shock through Lena's body.

"How many?" Tess asked as calmly as she could after Joel closed the door with a hard thump.

"All of them. Maybe a minute." he answered.

Without thinking twice, Tess grabbed a stray rifle from the ground and began smashing its butt into a nearby gasoline barrel. When the hole was big enough for the liquid to spill through, she turned the container over and watched as the fuel soaked the floor.

"What are you doing?" Ellie looked at the woman, a puzzled expression on her face.

"Makin' sure they don't follow you." Tess answered.

Lena understood what the other woman wanted to do right away. She was going to bait the infected into the building and then, using the weapons the Fireflies had forgotten to take, she would blow them up. She wanted to kill herself, die on her own terms — before she could turn into one of those things.

With a kick, she turned over a crate filled with grenades.

She approached her companion, locking eyes with him one last time. "Joel." she whispered, her moist eyes glistening with all of the human strength left in her. "Save who you can save."

Joel took a step back, and then another. Before the girl had the time to fight him off, he grabbed Ellie by the arm and began dragging her behind him.

Before Lena followed the two, she looked at Tess one last time. She pursed her lips together, wiping a tear with the sleeve of her shirt as she nodded. The other woman mirrored her gesture with tenderness, and the former was walking toward Joel and Ellie before she could think twice about what she was doing.

"No!" Ellie yelled out in protest, smashing her hand against Joel's hard grip as her feet slipped over the floor. "We're not leaving her!"

"We have to go, Ellie." Lena muttered, trying her best to sound reassuring to the girl — but in truth, only attempting to disguise the pain in her voice. She put a hand over the girl's back, pushing her to the exit despite her cries.

"Get off me, you fuckers! I'm not going with you."

Lena walked out of the building with tears in her eyes, not even sparing a glance in Lip's direction.

She didn't want to remember him as a blood-soaked corpse. She wanted to remember him as a man full of life, a man who despite having broken her heart, had gifted Lena the biggest blessing — her daughter, Cess. The little girl who now roamed the Earth without a mother or a father.

Some things were better forgotten.

hello, everyone! xx

if you follow me, then you probably know the backstory behind this chapter: i didn't feel like writing because i had a shitty week and then friday i broke two fingers and injured another in PE class so now i have to wear a cast covering half of my hand for a month and some weeks which makes typing hard asf 👍

but i'm pulling through since i genuinely enjoy writing for this book even though my writing is nowhere as good as my peers' lol.

hope you enjoyed this chapter, even though i hated it (mirrored heart chapter 6 hate gang 💪💪💯)

i PROMISE that chapter 7 will be much more fun than this one.

love, livi 💌

word count: 4187 words

date started: february fifteenth

date finished: february twentieth

date published: february twenty-first