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Who| Joel, Ellie, anyone else!
What| Joel shows up and gets tossed into the ring. Let's see how he does!
Where| I can put him just about anywhere in the museum you need - he'll be scoping the place out.
When| Mid-Week 1
Warnings/Notes| Joel is a highly suspicious dude and may assume anyone he meets is hostile until proven otherwise. This means he might punch first and ask questions later! I'll update this if anything else comes up.

Finally, please specify if you would like to meet Joel before he finds Ellie or after - if before, he'll be on his own, really worried about his baby girl, and slightly more prone to violence. If AFTER, you will probably get Joel and Ellie (two for the price of one!), and a lower chance of Joel trying to throttle you immediately.

"Put your hands in the air!" "She's not breathin'."

He woke with a start, phantom pain in his head and surrounded by - military? They were clearly military, but not any military he was familiar with. When they grabbed him, all sense went out of his head - normally, Joel would go quietly, because struggling tended to get people shot, but all he could think, all he could remember, was Ellie, her body so still. She's not breathin'.

"Where is she?" he demanded, over and over, landing a few punches but never able to break free. The pajamas they made him wear, the explanation given, all barely registered as he had only one thought in his head - find Ellie now. "What the hell did you bastards do to her?" he demanded yet again, attempting to yank his arm free when they came at him with a needle. Still, nothing. His shouts and struggles were in vain, and the next thing he knew, he was... in a parking garage?

With no one around to confront, and the knowledge that he was here to kill, or be killed, Joel quickly shoved his feelings to one side, dropping low and seeking a stairwell to climb to higher ground - it would take him a bit to realize the only way up was via elevators that actually still worked. They were far too slow and noisy for Joel's taste, but it became obvious that they were his only option, and he needed to get to higher ground, if he was going to find anything. Especially Ellie.

Joel moved quickly, quietly, and with one singular purpose: find the girl, and get the hell out of here.

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"Okay." It was a resigned okay, a heavy okay. Knowing that the caveat of 'if I can help it' was more key than anything else in that sentence.

No one could ever really help it.

They all just died anyway.

Or worse. Died for her.

She fell silent for a long moment, picking almost absentmindedly at her bow, before slowly, almost reluctantly, she shuffled closer until she could lean in to his side and rest her head against his shoulder.

Joel hadn't really felt whole for twenty years - losing so much, it was like pieces of him were missing, probably forever. Nothing would change that for him, but Ellie, in a way, had glued a few of the pieces back together, maybe. Maybe.

If nothing else, her presence was, well. Comforting. She'd become familiar, trusted. He felt bad that she'd had to do without him for months and months. He never intended for that to happen. But a lot of things happened that he didn't intend.

When she leaned against him, his arm went around her shoulders to keep her close. She'd been without him for a while, but she didn't have to go without him anymore. He was here now, and he intended to stay here, with her.

She didn't shift away, just let the silence deepen as she leaned there, content to get used to him just being there. It was still weird, like she was dreaming and was going to wake up at any moment and he'd be gone again. A part of her was terrified that the Capitol had just figured out a way to mess with their minds, that he was never actually there at all, just a figment of her imagination.

The personification of her desperate need to belong somewhere, anywhere. To not be alone.

But she could hear his breath, even and calm, and she could feel the gentle rise and fall of his shoulder, and she somehow managed to convince herself that he was there. You'd think the yelling would have done it, but no. She needed time to process, and she took it, with that small but pointed amount of physical affection, and the heavy arm around her shoulders.

She let out a long breath after a few minutes had passed, and began to speak, without moving.

"So," She murmured, "... They say you should never invest in funerals." She paused, completely seriously, and let it hang there. "... It's a dying industry."

It was good - a comfortable kind of silence, of the sort they shared pretty often back home. Joel could almost forget this was some different place, away from everything they were familiar with.

It didn't really matter all that much where they were, anyway. As long as they were together.

Her words shook him out of his reverie, a bit, and for a moment he wondered what the hell she was talking about... until she delivered the punchline. His shoulders relaxed and he huffed faintly - in disgust, of course, most definitely not laughter.

"That's the worst one yet."

She snorted, chuckling lowly, head still on his shoulder.

"Yeah," She agreed easily. "Thought it might lighten the mood a bit." But her smile faded.

"... Something's been bugging me," She said quietly. "I uh... I'm sorry. For back there. With the water, and the bus and... Well. I just really hope that I didn't fuck over the whole world by nearly drowning and getting myself kidnapped," She said mildly. Even with the relatively relaxed tone, it was obvious that this had been praying on her mind for a while.

He didn't like that she had all that weight on her shoulders - that she'd taken on so much responsibility, immunity or not. She wasn't, in Joel's opinion, responsible for the whole world's survival. No matter what Marlene wanted to think. Wanting to help, that was one thing, but this sense that everything depended on one kid?

He shook his head faintly. "You didn't. You know the odds were always stacked against us. Gettin' kidnapped, well. That ain't your fault." He paused a moment, thinking. "You put some more gray in my hair, though. So don't do it again, okay?"

"Heh. Yeah. Trust me, not on my list of things I'd like to repeat," She said mildly. But she did feel better, a bit. Joel wasn't exactly the entirety of her world, but it was all that she had of it here. He was biased, of course, she knew he was. And naive, in a way, about what probably actually waited for them at the end of the line. And yet, it still reassured her, that at least one person from their world wouldn't blame her for this. Wouldn't blame her for disappearing.

Even if she blamed herself.

She sighed, and leaned more heavily into him.

"Giraffes? Definitely on my list. Kidnapping? Not so much. I think I'll pass on dinosaurs, too."

Maybe less naive and more in denial, but Joel was mostly just along for the ride from the beginning, anyway. And, perhaps, still a little disbelieving that a cure could happen in the first place. Sure, the kid was immune, he got that, but he still didn't see how that could translate into a cure for everyone.

Not that it mattered here. Ellie was, essentially, his whole world. Tommy had Maria, and their little group - they would be fine, with or without him. He had Ellie - Ellie needed him, and he needed her.

"Dinosaurs?" Joel had a sneaking suspicion she didn't mean the skeletons in the museum.

"... Yeah. Dinosaurs." She finally pulled back off his shoulder so she could look up at him. She didn't pull any further away, though.

"It's a long story. There's uh... there's a lot of long stories. Not really sure where I should start."

He fought his natural inclination to call bullshit on that - but he knew better than to think she would go pulling his leg in a place like this. His eyes met hers, and he nodded.

"'s all right. We got time. Whatever you feel like tellin'."

He knew sometimes she wanted to talk about things, more than he was often comfortable with. But he also knew the value of silence, of leaving some things unsaid. Sometimes, it was better to just leave things where they were. Like a burning building in an old resort town in Colorado.

She did like to talk, well more than Joel did.

But some things would never come to her lips, ever again.

Even here, there were things she didn't think she could tell him about. Watching Hawkeye get ripped apart. Watching Wyatt follow. Struggling in the mud as she was stabbed again, and again, and again.

"Well uh... I'll start from the beginning, I guess. You kind of know it. Lots of water. Was pretty sure I was dying, wake up on a cot. Get told I have to fight in a death match. Seem familiar?"

Edited 2014-01-26 23:36 (UTC)

"Uh-huh," he said easily. "And this was a few months back, for you?" He still couldn't quite get his head around that - her being here for months. He couldn't have been knocked out that long.

"Yeah. I mean it's.. It's hard, you know, figuring out time and shit here. They mess with your head in the arena. Make the days longer, keep you up for what seems like forever, or make them so short that you're barely up before the sun's going down again. But yeah, I... It's been a while." She shifted uncomfortably.

"Anyway, I didn't go to the arena first. They took us to the capitol, first, and well... you weren't there, and I had no idea where the fuck I was-- yeah. It was bad."

He gave her shoulder what he hoped was a comforting squeeze. He felt incredibly guilty over leaving her here all alone for months - no matter that it wasn't his fault, they hadn't been apart for any significant length of time since - well, pretty much since Boston.

He'd almost left her behind in Jackson, but he hadn't been able to do it then, and now? After all they'd been through? He wouldn't even consider the idea. And he knew how frantic with worry he would've been, if the situations had been reversed.

"Sorry, kiddo," he said after a moment. "At least nobody was tryin' to kill you? Out there, I mean."

It was comforting. It was incredibly comforting, to the point of almost being painful just from how much she hadn't even realised that she'd missed him.

"Well uh..." She couldn't help it, almost laughing. "Not quite? They had this... monster thing, get loose. So they were taking volunteers to kill it-- It's a long story. I stayed out of that one. Not really in doing their dirty work, if you know what I mean."

She let out another half laugh and shook her head. "But no. Other than that, no one in the Capitol is out to kill you. In fact it's kind of... It's weird, you know, people are different in the arena than they are out of it. Even people that--" She cut herself off, took another tack-- "That you fought. Sometimes. Sometimes they are just fuckers through and through."

Doing their dirty work. Sounded about right - Joel had spent years dodging drafts and work duty for exactly the same reason. She was a girl after his own heart. "Yeah, I know what you mean," he murmured.

Her last words sent a pang through him, though, because he understood that, too. He wondered if it would be like playing through the outbreak again and again - life in the Capitol being like the world he knew before, and then getting tossed into the arena to survive.

He had firsthand experience of that, of how adversity, how the need to keep living no matter what, could change people. It had changed him. He wondered, briefly, if Ellie would even recognize Joel Miller of Austin, Texas. Or if Sarah would recognize Joel the smuggler of the Boston QZ. Probably not.

"Most people aren't good or bad," he pointed out - hilariously, perhaps, given his track record. "They just have different priorities."

She went quiet for a second. Still. A dark look flashing over her face before she managed to get it under control.

"Yeah," She agreed, in a low voice. "Most."

But not all.

Not all.

She drew in a breath and let it out again and tried to chase those demons away, far away, back into the shadows where they belonged. They didn't matter. She was safe, with Joel, and everything was going to be okay.

She had to believe it was going to be okay.

"Anyway it was just- yeah. The arena was in a jungle. Everything was poisonous. Everything. That's where the uh, the dinosaurs came in."

Not all. Joel wouldn't pretend to be any kind of a good man, not anymore. Not for a long, long time. But he didn't think of himself as evil, either. Evil was a whole different class. He'd seen evil, here and there, real evil, not the sort of indifference of the infection, or even the mundane brutality of a bored soldier - real evil, like in that resort town in Colorado.

He'd very nearly failed Ellie, then. Whatever he'd seen, had been only a tiny glimpse. She'd likely received the brunt of it, the kind of things that only humanity could come up with, that made his skin crawl just thinking about them.

If he held her a little tighter, it was obviously because of the dinosaur thing. Obviously.

"I take it they weren't the nice plant-eating sort, either," he said mildly.

She let out a soft snort. "Yeah. No. Not really, no. I have no idea how they do it, Joel, they just... make things. It's kind of weird that this arena is so... well, tame, compared." She went quiet for a second, her brows furrowing.

"... But the last arena started that way too, you know. Quiet. And then the things that eat you come, and the water rises, and the world just starts going a bit nuts."

Joel thought about that for a moment, letting it roll around in his mind like a dog gnawing on an old bone, trying to figure out the ins and outs of it.

He wondered - but didn't ask - if that was how she'd died in the last one. Eaten by a dinosaur. Christ.

"We'll have to keep our eyes and ears open, then," he finally said, because it was all he could think of to say. "And... maybe avoid that wax museum room." That was one of the creepier places he'd seen so far, anyway.

Ellie let out a gentle snort and nodded. "... Yeah. That place is just a bit fucked up, and I can totally imagine manikins suddenly coming to life and trying to kill us all, so- yeah."

She drew in a breath and let it out again before offering Joel a lopsided smile.

"Look I-- I think I need to do something to keep my mind off it, so I'm going to see what I can salvage in here. Why don't you get some shut-eye? I'll watch your back."

It wasn't that he didn't trust her - he did, pretty much completely. But after having just found her again, the thought of going to sleep and waking up only to find her gone again -

Like a cold cabin in Colorado, the last vestiges of fever wearing off, and she's gone, gone, he can't find her -

But he was exhausted, he had no idea how long it had been since he actually slept, and sometimes, he did just need to trust her. Let her do what she needed to do. So he nodded, though he looked somewhat hesitant.

"If you're sure you'll be all right."

"Yeah," She said, standing up and smoothing out her onesie.

"I'll be fine." She just needed some time to process him being there, and somehow talking to him wasn't completely helping.

"I'll wake you in a few hours, alright?"

He knew she would be. Logically, he knew it. She was smart, had good instincts, had all the skills she needed - some of which she'd learned from him. But when it came to Ellie, his brain and his heart were often at odds with each other.

Still, though, he was exhausted, quickly running out of steam, and he would need to sleep soon, no matter what.

"All right," he said, with a sigh, leaning back against the display case. If nothing else, he would sleep better knowing she was okay. As well as he ever did, anyway.

She watched him lean back before turning away, making her way over to the display cases that were still untouched and forcing her mind to think about doing something that was actually useful instead of just spiraling over the last few months and Joel's sudden appearance.

It didn't make sense to her, him being her, despite wishing for it. Despite wanting it. Had they brought him here for her...? Was it her fault he was here? (Did she really care if it was?)

Eventually, though, she managed to lose herself in her work - breaking up a bunch of rods to make a few more new arrows, scavenging some cloth for bandages and an axe that would come in handy later.

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