This is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?

[notathreat]

WHO: Ellie + OPEN (Grab me if you want a custom starter, even if they haven't interacted yet!)
WHERE: Dreamscape!
WHEN: September 22-25 2512
WHAT: Ellie's managed to keep y'all out of her head until now, but everything's got a breaking point.
NOTES OR WARNINGS: Violence, death, torture, body horror (zombie-type), violence towards a teenager.

Radio Nowhere

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[armd]

She loses Ellie as she takes the stairs, but she keeps walking down, and down, and down anyway. Her steps are thudding on concrete, sometimes on wet moss; the toe of her boot slips. She clutches the guard rail to stop herself from falling all the way down. Ellie is at her side again.

The one from her nightmares, this time.

Abby keeps walking. She holds her head up and ignores her.

"An exit."

She has to be close to the bottom of the stairs. The dream is warping around her, shifting into greyscale. Ellie is like a angry ghost at her elbow, and Abby makes the mistake of looking at her out of the corner of her eye and she regrets it. Regrets staring into that endless black hole of her gaze for even a second. Her skin prickles over, a wash of goosebumps up the bare of her bare neck. "Let me out."

[notathreat]

Ellie snorts under her breath, something that sounds human, almost touchable, for all that she's a shade in her own mind. Like Abby's cracked some kind of bad joke.

"I've been looking for that for a long fucking time," she says bitterly, as they continue to descend. It smells like seawater and rot. The next breath it's the piercing emptiness of a desolate snowstorm, overlaid with the scent of blood.

It paints down the back of Abby's throat, familiar -- chased with the scent of leather and wood shavings. Something that should be comforting but no longer is.

Ellie becomes more solid as she walks, and by the time they reach the door, she puts a hand to it before Abby can.

She's dressed in flannel, her hair choppy but clean, her eyes sleepless. She's wearing a leather coat that's much too big for her. Chapped lips.

Her eyes are just eyes, but they're fixed on Abby's face.

"You're not acting like you usually do."

[armd]

The onslaught of smells and sounds makes Abby want to stop but she can't seem to do it. It isn't her dream to control any more. Ellie is making her do it, taking her down step by step in what feels like a never ending spiral. Trying to slow down only makes it worse anyway, until that leather-wood scent lingers at the back of her throat like she's just thrown it up, so she speeds up. Boots thudding on the concrete, now bloody wet tile, now rotting wood.

They reach the bottom simultaneously. Ellie is faster to the doorknob than she is and Abby nearly grabs her fucking hand before she curbs it just in time.

It's so dim down here.

She can see the outline of Ellie in the gloom, unmoving, almost unnaturally still. Her attention rivets Abby to the spot.

"Yeah?" Abby's mouth is dry. She wants to back up, and go up the stairs, but when she turns around they aren't there any more. That bit of the dream has fallen away, too. It's just her and Ellie and the door. Nowhere else for her to go. She hangs onto the silent for a long, aching moment. "I don't feel like I usually do."

She's tired. She hurts, from her forehead to her teeth to her ankles and her toes. Being trapped in that storeroom isn't doing anything good for her but she's mad at herself for the way her body reacts to that without her permission, how it wakes her up at night and makes her heart beat too hard against her ribs, blood roaring dully in both ears. She stares at Ellie, makes herself do it, with a gaze that's hard and unwavering.

[notathreat]

Dim, trapped. Sleepless and painful. Dulled and yet desperate, like an injury just painful enough to make it impossible to sleep.

Ellie's eyes burn into her, and the scent of seawater grows stronger, aching with each heartbeat.

"... it's actually you this time, isn't it?" she asks, echoing in the darkness. "Not just me remembering."

Her fingers close on the handle, knuckles going white. The two smallest of them are completely missing, and as she squeezes, they actively bleed down her wrist, streaking down the edge of the door.

[armd]

Everything around Abby is cold, and dull, and there's the stink of salt in her nose. Like being underwater. She half expects bubbles to come trailing out of her mouth when opens it to exhale, sucking air back in as if it's the last breath she'll get to take.

Ellie's gaze is scalding by contrast. Abby glances away, uncomfortable, and watches her fingers bend and bleed down her skinny wrist instead.

"Yeah. It's actually me."

She knows she looks different, but it's– still her. Whatever the fuck is left of her, anyway. As if Ellie of all people is owed a proper explanation.

"Can I go now." She wants to go. She doesn't want to stand here and get stared at any more. Abby wants to wake up in a cold sweat already, she wants to get up out of bed and go and stare at the closed hatch of the safehouse in silence until she feels tired enough to try again. "I told him already. I'm done. With both of you."

cw: gore/death, abuse

[notathreat]

It hurts. The way she looks away. Because it tugs at her, calls to her, threatens to pull Ellie out of focus on her feelings. It was so easy to hate her for so long, to picture her how she was in the lodge. Bloodstained and horrible. To picture her with a knife to Dina's neck and bleeding in half dozen places, filled with rage and contempt. To picture her brutal efficiency in the way she shot out Jesse's life, the way she tried to execute Tommy on the ground.

Instead it makes her remember that horrible moment on the beach, with Abby tied up, injured and starving and a faded shade of her former self. The way she'd fallen to the ground and still gotten to her feet, still made herself move, to get to that kid.

The way she'd told Ellie where the boats were. Almost like she was inviting her along.

Ellie feels cold and wrecked, and her eyes swim with what she won't let become tears. Her feet are cold -- even in the bottom of this stairwell, the cold salty tide laps at their feet. Her fingers throb.

"You told who?" she asks, and it's not angry. It's just lost, and it sounds like it's coming from a long way away.

cw violence, gore mention

[armd]

"Joel," she says, even though she doesn't want to. Abby doesn't want his name in her mouth any more. She held it there for years, for far too long and all its even done is make her tongue taste like blood. It's why she whispers it now, as if quieting the word will make it cut her less.

Ellie's hand is a slender white claw on the doorknob, blocking the only exit. Abby wants to pry her fingers off one by one but she doesn't want to touch her, for fear that she could be warm underneath the cold front, the icy ocean water. It's sucking at their shins, now.

"I don't understand what you want from me."

It's more than just that. She doesn't understand why Ellie stopped killing her on the beach either, why the blood-slick noose of her fingers loosened from Abby's throat at the last second to let her up out of the water. She doesn't know why Ellie let her and Lev go, or why she sat on the beach in the water after she did and cried like it was all she had the energy left to do. Why she didn't immediately make for a boat to try to save herself.

Maybe she hadn't cared to. Maybe she's still there, curled up like a dead thing over her crossed legs, stuck in the surf. Bleeding, and crying, and shaking. Abby wants to hate her for that, but she can't. The thought only makes her feel hollow, and wrong.

[notathreat]

... she saw Joel.

The knowledge is staggering, sparks fear and anger and... everything. Everything else in between. Ellie wants to be sick, and the urge makes her head spin, too hot and too cold. Abby saw Joel.

And she told him she was done.

It rears up, all the anger and all the hurt and all the helpless grief, and she wants to fling it at her. You can't decide that. You don't get to be done. You can't just walk away. I know I can't.

But the hollow, awful, empty feeling of the beach rushes in around them, and the tears flood her eyes. Water up to their knees. Salt water. Maybe it's not the ocean at all. Maybe this is some version of Alice Through the Looking Glass, and she's going to drown them both.

... but they were done. They were both done there, on that sand and in that fog. With Abby throwing up seawater and Ellie crying her heart out, because it wasn't enough, and nothing would ever be enough.

"I don't know either," she admits, her voice soft, and wrecked.

She wants to keep her here. Imprisoned with her. Until she knows what she wants. Until Abby coughs up some magical fucking answer that'll make it all okay again. Until something clicks, and fixes her.

But if she keeps them here, they'll both drown.

Ellie looks down at the door, pulls it, and her fingers slip on the bloody metal. The pressure of the water keeps it shut.

Her heart gives an awful ache, and she parts her lips, and tugs harder. With all of her strength. It tries to come, but the pressure of the water keeps it shut. She can't break the seal. Not alone. Her fingers are slipping on her own blood, and the water's coming fast. Up to their thighs.

[armd]

Ellie a tempest, wild and desperate, the pitch and shift in her expression making Abby want to duck and brace against the expected tidal wave of violence to follow. This is why she doesn't want to fucking ask why Ellie stopped, because the reminder of it might make her start again. She has reason to want Abby dead, and Abby has reason to want her the same and she can see this stretching out ahead of them and into the distance and the notion makes her want to run away. It's not who she wants to be any more, but what if that's all she knows how to do? What if all she ever amounts to is carrying this bloody weight around with her, until she sinks to her knees and can't move it any further?

That's not true. Lev would tell her otherwise. Abby knows he would, but he's not here with her right now to confirm it. She misses him. She needs him. She's scared to think of him being on Catalina, carrying on without her, because that would be better for him in the long run but it isn't what she wants. She's too selfish, too alone, and too heavy with grief.

"Ellie." Her voice is a low, slow warning. The water is moving up her thighs, to her hips. To her stomach, fast, and so cold. "Ellie."

It isn't working. The door won't move.

Abby surges forward, making her decision, and Ellie is warm when she grabs the back of her hand to help her try and push it open. She puts her shoulder to the wood, and shoves with the water at her waist. Lapping at the bottoms of her elbows, even higher on Ellie, who is shorter, smaller. Sharper.

Alone she wouldn't be able to do it, but together–

[notathreat]

Together they might.

Abby's hand curling over hers feels like a shot of adrenaline directly to the hard. Sadness and anger and exhaustion, soul-deep exhaustion, and fear. The fear is what hits hardest, the desperation of let me go that strikes and sinks deep, because it so thoroughly mirrors her own.

All of it does, in fact.

Ellie immediately wants to pull her hand away, as if she's been burned. It's disgusting, this is disgusting, and seeing Abby so clearly as not just a person, but one she can fully understand, makes her want to be sick.

But she swallows it back, feeling frantic and blurred, desperate and angry and grieving not just Joel, but all the parts of herself she burned on the way here. The door creaks and cracks and she wonders if it's going to give, but then it finally moves.

The water rushes in a wave, pushing them both, shoving through the door as it tries to equalize. They are swept away.