( Three years is simultaneously a whole other lifetime and hardly any time at all.
Everything's changed. Every single thing. There's Before and Now, and the Before feels like looking back on some alien planet. Earth is something else, something that's only proceeded to crumble further and further these past three years. Nothing's gotten better — initial attempts to save what's left, to find cures, to rescue humanity.... none of it's done a goddamn thing. Everything's gotten worse and worse, and people have gotten worse right along with it.
Joel's found his own ways to keep going, but only by the skin of his teeth. Only with certain things carried with him forever, never letting him forget. (There's a scar on his temple from the graze of a bullet, and he's only alive now because his hands shuddered at the wrong moment when he held the gun to his head. There's a watch strapped to his wrist, its face busted, its hands forever frozen in time. He carries these things with him wherever he goes.)
And he's got his younger brother. It's enough to hold onto. It's enough to keep Joel fighting day after day after day to stay alive — and oh, he fights. He fights like hell. It's funny how quickly concepts like morals and ethics and fairness and basic human empathy go down the drain when one's life is perpetually on the line. Joel fights, and he kills, and he does worse things than that to people, to get what he needs or to protect what's left to protect. People crumble exceptionally fast when you hurt them enough, tell you what you need to know, do what you want. Pain's an amazing motivator, and one he's learned how to utilise lately. He has to.
And yet.... memory stays so fresh in his mind that some days it feels like it all just happened yesterday, and three years feels like hardly anything. Joel remembers exactly what it was like when the world ended, precisely how his daughter felt, shuddering under his hands. He can count each soft, pained gasp. The way her voice sounded as she spoke her final words and bled out against his chest wakes him up most nights, as though Sarah's right there whispering against the shell of his ear. It's getting harder and harder these days to find things to melt against your tongue or gulp down into your gut to silence the ghosts with.
Harder to find supplies at all. He and Tommy drift in and out of little groups, never staying in one place for particularly long, dividing up only to come back together, always, and a lack of supplies have driven Joel searching. Usually Tommy'd be with him, but his brother's been off on a supply exchange, there's been a delay in his return, and Joel can't wait. Most cities have been scoured by now as people have been forming various factions these past years, collecting supplies to trade with, but sometimes in the smaller towns you can still find stuff. So Joel heads off on his own to spend a couple nights there, load up what he can.
He's poking carefully through one of the abandoned houses when he hears an engine coming down the road and freezes. Shrinking back into shadow, Joel finds the nearest window facing the street to peer out through dusty blinds, eyes locking onto the source of the sound as it cuts off. It's not so usual to see bikes like that around here; any kind of vehicle is a rarity. There's the threat of what people will do to get their hands on something like that, or the parts that make it up.
But out here where it's quiet is another danger. No people around, but there's other things to worry about. Joel hasn't checked all the houses yet, there's too many to secure them all from the infected, and he wouldn't want to waste the ammo anyway. But the noise from that engine has him tensing, waiting, eyes narrowed as he watches the woman sit there in silence.
Then he hears it. The snarl and wheeze of something coming, something that's no doubt been sitting in that house and now tears itself off of a vine and comes peeling down a staircase to burst through the front door, with so much unchecked force that it sends the thing reeling to the ground.
Joel hisses a soft Shit and quickly lifts the window he's standing at, aims his rifle with a jolt of his heart, tries to lock onto the quick flailing movements (the infected person is a man, young-looking, mouth wide open to expose the sifting tendrils that creep up from his throat. His head's splitting open, the mutation deforming half his face, a fleshy stalk reaching upwards from where one eye should be.) He's getting back up, moving towards the woman.
Joel fires. He's not a bad shot, but he still trembles sometimes. He's learning how not to. The shot misses by a hair or two, and the thing's lunging. Quickly, Joel aims again, fires, and this time it catches the infected in the leg, sends him falling.
Joel feels a staticy buzz in his ears, a sort of detachment, and his hands stop trembling at the edges. (The boy flailing on the ground likely couldn't be more than twenty. This is a fact he processes, cooly. The infected won't stay down long, maybe a second or two.) Joel lines up his shot, squeezes the trigger, and there's a spatter of brain against pavement. The infected boy stops wailing, stops moving, and Joel's heart starts working again with a hard thud. )
You okay?
( He barks down from the window he's standing at, rifle still aimed outwards. He shouldn't care — the woman's a stranger, a stranger he just spent three bullets on, but there's still some part of him that couldn't just stand there. (It's been three years, and he's two men, one who's learned exactly how hard and deep to cut a jugular, and one who remembers the gentleness of his daughter's hand in his own.) )
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Everything's changed. Every single thing. There's Before and Now, and the Before feels like looking back on some alien planet. Earth is something else, something that's only proceeded to crumble further and further these past three years. Nothing's gotten better — initial attempts to save what's left, to find cures, to rescue humanity.... none of it's done a goddamn thing. Everything's gotten worse and worse, and people have gotten worse right along with it.
Joel's found his own ways to keep going, but only by the skin of his teeth. Only with certain things carried with him forever, never letting him forget. (There's a scar on his temple from the graze of a bullet, and he's only alive now because his hands shuddered at the wrong moment when he held the gun to his head. There's a watch strapped to his wrist, its face busted, its hands forever frozen in time. He carries these things with him wherever he goes.)
And he's got his younger brother. It's enough to hold onto. It's enough to keep Joel fighting day after day after day to stay alive — and oh, he fights. He fights like hell. It's funny how quickly concepts like morals and ethics and fairness and basic human empathy go down the drain when one's life is perpetually on the line. Joel fights, and he kills, and he does worse things than that to people, to get what he needs or to protect what's left to protect. People crumble exceptionally fast when you hurt them enough, tell you what you need to know, do what you want. Pain's an amazing motivator, and one he's learned how to utilise lately. He has to.
And yet.... memory stays so fresh in his mind that some days it feels like it all just happened yesterday, and three years feels like hardly anything. Joel remembers exactly what it was like when the world ended, precisely how his daughter felt, shuddering under his hands. He can count each soft, pained gasp. The way her voice sounded as she spoke her final words and bled out against his chest wakes him up most nights, as though Sarah's right there whispering against the shell of his ear. It's getting harder and harder these days to find things to melt against your tongue or gulp down into your gut to silence the ghosts with.
Harder to find supplies at all. He and Tommy drift in and out of little groups, never staying in one place for particularly long, dividing up only to come back together, always, and a lack of supplies have driven Joel searching. Usually Tommy'd be with him, but his brother's been off on a supply exchange, there's been a delay in his return, and Joel can't wait. Most cities have been scoured by now as people have been forming various factions these past years, collecting supplies to trade with, but sometimes in the smaller towns you can still find stuff. So Joel heads off on his own to spend a couple nights there, load up what he can.
He's poking carefully through one of the abandoned houses when he hears an engine coming down the road and freezes. Shrinking back into shadow, Joel finds the nearest window facing the street to peer out through dusty blinds, eyes locking onto the source of the sound as it cuts off. It's not so usual to see bikes like that around here; any kind of vehicle is a rarity. There's the threat of what people will do to get their hands on something like that, or the parts that make it up.
But out here where it's quiet is another danger. No people around, but there's other things to worry about. Joel hasn't checked all the houses yet, there's too many to secure them all from the infected, and he wouldn't want to waste the ammo anyway. But the noise from that engine has him tensing, waiting, eyes narrowed as he watches the woman sit there in silence.
Then he hears it. The snarl and wheeze of something coming, something that's no doubt been sitting in that house and now tears itself off of a vine and comes peeling down a staircase to burst through the front door, with so much unchecked force that it sends the thing reeling to the ground.
Joel hisses a soft Shit and quickly lifts the window he's standing at, aims his rifle with a jolt of his heart, tries to lock onto the quick flailing movements (the infected person is a man, young-looking, mouth wide open to expose the sifting tendrils that creep up from his throat. His head's splitting open, the mutation deforming half his face, a fleshy stalk reaching upwards from where one eye should be.) He's getting back up, moving towards the woman.
Joel fires. He's not a bad shot, but he still trembles sometimes. He's learning how not to. The shot misses by a hair or two, and the thing's lunging. Quickly, Joel aims again, fires, and this time it catches the infected in the leg, sends him falling.
Joel feels a staticy buzz in his ears, a sort of detachment, and his hands stop trembling at the edges. (The boy flailing on the ground likely couldn't be more than twenty. This is a fact he processes, cooly. The infected won't stay down long, maybe a second or two.) Joel lines up his shot, squeezes the trigger, and there's a spatter of brain against pavement. The infected boy stops wailing, stops moving, and Joel's heart starts working again with a hard thud. )
You okay?
( He barks down from the window he's standing at, rifle still aimed outwards. He shouldn't care — the woman's a stranger, a stranger he just spent three bullets on, but there's still some part of him that couldn't just stand there. (It's been three years, and he's two men, one who's learned exactly how hard and deep to cut a jugular, and one who remembers the gentleness of his daughter's hand in his own.) )