IT WAS SNOWY IN THE MOUNTAINS, but this cabin was nice. The woman who owned it was, surprisingly, even nicer, and she was very humble about Joel banging down her door and shoving his gun in her face. She made them soup, and Lou and Ellie had devoured it all within a second. It turned out her mom was Korean as well, which led to a very excited conversation between the two of them in Ralph's native language, a big smile on his face as he spoke to her. They had been walking for ages prior to finding the house in the middle of the open land, so this was very much needed.

None of them wanted to speak about the motel, about Sam or Henry. Joel had noticed that Ralph began to care for Lou a little bit more after everything had gone down, not that he had ever stopped. He just noticed that they would walk closer together now, arms around each other more frequently, and he would take her pleadings for breaks more seriously, often stopping the second she requested one and talking Joel down from continuing. It was sweet.

Their dishes clattered as Ralph brought them over to the sink, assuring Florence that he would clean them for her, acting like this was a friend he had had for his whole, entire life. Joel was leaning on a wooden pillar and listening to the conversation, not making any sense of it. He had ordered the girls to stay upstairs in the loft above him and not to come down until he told them to.

Ralph was halfway through talking about a "nappeun appa" when the door opened and Florence's husband, Marlon, entered the house. He shook off his jacket and then stared at the two men in his house with his jaw agape, looking at his wife as if to question her about it. She shrugged her shoulders.

'Who the hell are you two?' He demanded, but he didn't sound like he was going to fight back if one were to occur. After all, they were already in his house and sweet talking his wife. And he was also outnumbered, to add insult to two pre-existing injuries.

'We're just some folks passing through.' Joel stepped forward, holding a pistol and pointing it at the man. He stopped next to Florence and then barked out a demand. 'Take the gun out, two fingers only, put it outta reach.'

Slowly, Marlon did as he was told and placed the gun on the table next to him, looking at Florence. 'Why didn't you shoot him?'

'The gun's all the way over there.' She nodded to a far corner of the kitchen, which led Marlon to stare at the stranger that was doing chores for them. He scrunched his face up. 'They didn't hurt me, by the way.'

'Yeah, I got eyes.' He bit back, walking forward to stand in front of his armchair and pointing at Ralph. 'What's he doing?'

'I made them soup.' Florence told him.

'You made them soup?' Marlon repeated.

'Yeah, I did.' She nodded. 'It's cold out!'

'We're looking for my brother.' Joel informed them, cutting off the adorable old people bickering with the grim reminder that he had a gun in his hands and he would probably use it if he wanted to.

'Well, I ain't seen him.' Marlon sat down.

'I haven't told you what he looks like.' Joel retorted.

'He look anything like you?'

'A bit.'

'Then I ain't seen him.'

'They've got girls with them.' Florence interrupted, nodding her head up to the loft where Lou and Ellie were peering over the railing and down onto the boring conversation on the ground floor.

'Can we come down?' Ellie asked excitedly, revolver in her fist.

'No.' Joel said, sighing in defeat when she was already racing for the staircase and hopping down it two steps at a time, Lou following suit. Huffing, Joel turned to the only person that could help him. 'Al!'

'Girls!' Ralph chided, not invested in any of the drama unravelling behind him as he wiped his damp hands off with a tea towel and spun around, revealing his bloodied face and shirt to Marlon, who promptly grimaced. Even though Joel had tried his best to clean him up, the majority of the blood had already dried in by the time he had entered the bathroom to help Ralph all those nights ago. It was certainly dried up now, and Ralph kind of began to suit the blood that was streaked unevenly across his face.

'Who's that psycho?' Marlon pointed at the man that was now standing next to Joel.

'He's from Seoul.' Florence told her husband.

'Never mind him.' Joel stepped forward, shoving a map to the end of the coffee table and pointing at it, gun still clenched tightly. 'I need you to tell us where we are.'

'If you got a map, why are you lost?'

'Must've missed all the street signs in the enormous fucking forest!' Ellie said sarcastically, making the woman in the chair laugh and Ralph look at her with his mouth dropped.

'We're somewhere here. Exactly where?' Joel ignored their antics and gestured to the map on the desk. Then, he raised his gun and pointed to Ralph as he leaned on the pillar Joel was once occupying, his arms crossed over his chest. 'And your answer better be the same as your wife's, 'cause he'll know.'

Marlon looked over at Florence. 'Did you tell him the truth?'

'Yeah.'

'Are you telling me the truth?'

'Yeah.'

Marlon looked at her and hesitantly leaned forward, pointing to a spot on the map. After a moment, Joel seemed satisfied and planted his gun back into his holster. 'Well, you found a great place to hide, I guess.'

'Hide? Came here before either of you were born, sonny. Get the hell away from everybody.' Marlon grumbled as Joel sat on the couch and Ellie plopped down next to him. Lou sat next to Ellie on the arm of the sofa, and Ralph did the same, next to Joel on the far side. Joel scooted closer to him and hoped that nobody noticed it. Nobody did, apart from Ralph, who smiled to himself. 'Listen, I didn't mean to upset you about your brother, but if you've come this far, then you know what's out there- At least one of you does. You seen Cody?'

'Close enough.' Ralph nodded, his arms crossed. 'Covered with Infected.'

'Yeah, Laramie and Wind River Reservation. Anywhere people used to be, you can't go there no more.'

'So, you haven't heard the name Tommy?' Joel questioned. Marlon shook his head once, and then Lou spoke up.

'What about the fireflies?'

'We get those in the summer.' Florence replied.

'No, not the bugs. The people.' Lou corrected her.

'There's firefly people?' Florence repeated with a big grin, looking at her husband a moment before they both burst out into laughter. Even though the others weren't having it, Ralph smirked at them. He always thought old couples were the cutest. The idea of loving someone so much for so long and never getting tired of it always made his heart ache but in a good way. Of course, being halfway to one hundred, he didn't really think of himself as having that opportunity anymore.

He had been married once, and that had turned out well, judging by the fact that his wife was dead and he was gay and they technically never even loved each other in the first place. Woohoo, marriage!

'You got any advice on the best way west?' Joel interrupted, cutting the happy moment short.

'Yeah. Go east.'

...

'AW, A COTTON TAIL.' Ralph frowned, coming face to face with a dead rabbit as he left the cabin after Joel, looking at the white bunny for a moment. Ellie shoved in front of him and plucked it off the hook, ordering for Lou to grab another while she spoke to Joel.

'You don't seriously believe them.' Ellie scoffed, marching after him with the rabbit slung over her shoulder. Inside, the couple had sold Joel some fairytale about The River of Death, and how if Tommy was west of it, he was dead. In hindsight, it was a stupid thing to believe, but Ralph couldn't imagine he would've been laughing if he was in Joel's position.

'They've lived here a long time.' Joel huffed, stomping up the small hill and back to the broken gate the four of them had climbed over.

'They were kidding, Joel.' Lou insisted, holding the rabbit at arm's length. Regardless of her dad's love for them, Lou had always sort of hated animals, apart from her aforementioned love of Moose. She especially didn't like the dead ones. 'They've never even heard of the fireflies, they don't know anything.'

'I doubt that there's much government out here.' Ralph shrugged, turning around and walking backwards so he could involve himself in the conversation. 'No reason for fireflies if there's no reason for FEDRA.'

'Fair. But, they're bound to have heard, like, stories or something.' Ellie shrugged back at him. 'Urban legends or something- Joel?'

Ralph turned around when Ellie called out to the man ahead of them, finding Joel glued to the spot with his hand over his heart. Ralph hurried up to him, placing a hand on the top of his back and staring at him in confusion, unsure of what to say or do.

'Joel? Joel? Dad, what the fuck is he doing?' Lou looked up at Ralph as if he was meant to have all the answers in the world.

'Holy shit, holy shit! Joel, are you dying?' Ellie wasn't really helping to calm him down with her excessive questions and downright yelling.

'Shut up, I'm fine.' Joel insisted quietly, blinking a little and moving his hand away, still leaning back into Ralph's palm.

'Are you sure? 'Cause, just a reminder, if you're dead, we're fucked!' Ellie said worriedly.

'Don't put pressure on him, you gremlin.' Ralph ordered, the rare insult making Ellie shut her mouth and think for a moment, enough time for Ralph to check in on him. He lowered his voice and furrowed his eyebrows. 'You sure you're okay?'

'Yeah... Yeah, I'm okay, I'm fine.' Joel sighed, nodding his head uneasily. 'Just the... Cold air all of a sudden.'

Ralph believed him and gave him a quick nod, dropping his hand and watching as Ellie barreled past the two of them like she was on a mission.

'Uh... Alright, then! Let's go and find Tommy and the Fireflies. It's gonna be easy.' Ironically, Ellie stumbled and caught herself just before she fell flat on her face, pushing herself back up with pride and ease. 'All we have to do is cross the River of Death. Onwards, Zhenya-Miller-Williams clan! Onwards!'

...

NIGHTFALL CAME SOONER THAN EXPECTED, and the since-named Zhenya-Miller-Williams clan had sent up camp just a little south of The River of Death, in a cave with plenty of shelter surrounding them.

Ralph and Joel sat side by side in front of the fire they had built. Ralph was watching it spark and crackle in front of them, enjoying the heat for a change, while Joel was taping his boots together with a spare roll of duct tape that he had to dig through Ralph's bag to find.

The calm silence of the night was broken by Joel whistling, getting the attention of Ellie and Lou as they stood on the ledge of a high-up rock, watching the stars. 'Can you two get down from there? You'll break your necks.'

Ellie's head darted back to the sky the second he was done talking, prepared to fully ignore him and continue to stare up into the universe above her until Ralph's voice ordered for the same exact thing and she found herself obeying it within an instant. Lou was already on her way back down to their campsite when Joel had originally ordered them, which was a pleasant change.

The girls waltzed over to them, sitting around the fire, and they were greeted with the sight of Joel drinking some kind of beverage from a flask, the one that all the alcoholics in the movies used. Ralph took it off of him almost instantly.

'Not in front of them, are you crazy? Now they'll want some.' Ralph hissed, swatting Joel on the bicep with the back of his hand and pulling the flask away from him.

'Can we?' Ellie smiled mischievously, though it was all a cover so she could get away with wiggling her eyebrows at Joel after the two men shared that brief interaction. Joel rolled his eyes.

'No.' Ralph said, and his answer wasn't surprising to either of them. 'Only for adults.'

'Fourteen plus fifteen is, like, thirty-something.' Lou defended herself even though she didn't really want a drink in the first place. Ralph shook his head but gave her a smile for trying, and took a sip for himself.

'What, you're allowed it, but I'm not?' Joel should've been angry, but he couldn't help but smile.

'Pretty much.' Ralph cleared his throat into the back of his hand, the liquor not going down without a fight, and then screwed the cap on and passed the flask back to Joel. Ralph smiled back at Joel. He looked nice in this lighting. (Correction, he looked nice all the time.)

'You know what?' Ellie said, speaking to the group as a whole. 'I've been thinking. Let's say we find the Fireflies, it all works, they draw my blood and put it through some of their fancy machines to make a cure... Then what? Like, what do we do?'

'It's "we"?' Joel dulled the moment with his questioning.

'Yeah, dummy, of course, it's "we."' Ellie nodded, gesturing between her and Lou. 'It's me and her at least. You two can get, like, divorced or whatever, I dunno.'

Joel narrowed his eyes at her, not enjoying the fact that she was dangling that small bit of info that he had shared with her in front of his face in such a way. Ellie sighed.

'Okay, fine. Just you. Then Lou and Ralph. What are you doing?' Ellie questioned. 'You can do anything you want. Where are you going, what are you doing?'

'...Maybe an old farmhouse, some land, a ranch.' Joel proposed off the top of his head. 'Sheep. I would raise sheep... They're quiet. They do what they're told.'

'Yeah, yeah, okay, okay.' Ellie sighed when Joel spoke those last lines directly to her. 'So, just you and a bunch of sheep? What if you get lonely?'

'I won't.' Joel turned his head to look at Ralph, but any hope that it was a romantic action regarding his answer was flushed down the drain. 'What about you two assbags?'

Ralph knocked one of his feet against the other and shrugged, looking past the fire and over to his daughter. 'You pick. Where are we going?'

'I think that...' Lou sighed through her nose, staring at the flames in front of her. It went silent, everyone giving her time to think of her answer, and then she settled on something. 'We're gonna go see a fuckin' Moose!'

Ralph laughed and Ellie did too, the reaction garnering a smile from Joel as well. After a minute or two of giggling, the two of them calmed down and Ralph went on to question her. 'So Canada, then?'

'Yup.' She nodded confidently. 'Besides, Canada's got cool animals, beavers, and shit. It's nice up there. You could go back to being a little animal nerd, and I could... I could be, like, a scientist or something.'

'Why a scientist?' Joel asked quietly.

'Are you kidding? The world would've never got fucked up if they had me on board.' She replied confidently, getting another round of laughs before she answered him with a bit more seriosity. 'It's horrible what happened. I mean, obviously. And, we've lost people to it. We lost Sam and Henry. We lost Tess. I lost my parents, and then I also lost Ren. ...I don't want anyone to go through what we had to. I don't want any kid, or adult, in the world, to have to do what we have to do.'

'Ren?' Joel repeated.

'Lou's mom.' Ralph explained, clearly upset by the mention of the woman, and he shifted against the rock he was leaning on. 'My wife.'

The mood in the cave shifted a bit, but that didn't stop Ralph from keeping the conversation going. 'What about you, Ellie? Where are you going?'

She felt bad about following such a sad story up with such a silly, childish one, but Ellie couldn't help it. She tilted her head back, staring up into the sky, watching the moon. 'It's probably because I grew up in the QZ. Behind you, there's ocean, and ahead of you, there's a wall. Nowhere else to look but up. I read everything I could in the school library. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Jim Lovell. But you know who my favorite is?'

'Sally Ride.' Joel smirked.

'Sally fucking Ride!' Ellie nodded, clapping her hands against her knees for emphasis. 'Best astronaut name ever.'

Ralph smiled at her. He remembered what that was like, having all the imagination in the world. He remembered when Lou was like that too. He would come home from work every day and find her dressed in some crazy outfit and announce that she was either a fairy, a farmer, a doctor, a chef, or, of course, an astronaut. And then, for the rest of the day, she would only do activities that related to that specific job.

If she was a doctor, she would demand to check Ralph's heartbeat every single minute. If she was a chef, she would make something entirely unedible from what she had found in the kitchen cabinets and try to force him to eat it. One time, she was a painter, and although he had no idea where she even got the paint from, he had to spend the rest of the weekend painting over her "work."

Ralph smiled to himself, brought his hand up over his mouth to cover it because he knew that if someone asked him about it, he would tell them the truth and Lou would crucify him for it.

'It'll work, right?' Ellie asked suddenly. 'The vaccine?'

'It's a little late to start wondering.' Mumbled Joel, probably the least assuring thing he could've said.

'...Yeah, I know. But, I was just thinking... What if I had tried it with Sam?' Ellie asked, looking up from her fidgeting hands to stare at Joel.

'Tried what?'

'I mean, if I knew he was Infected, I could've... I could've helped. Maybe. I dunno.' Her voice faded as she spoke, realizing how ridiculous that sounded as she continued to speak. 'Like, what if I could've saved him?'

'It's bound to be a lot more complicated than that, Ellie.' Ralph offered her a sympathetic frown.

'Yeah. Marlene, she's a lotta things, but she's no fool.' Joel conceded with a nod. 'If she says they can do it, they can do it.'

Ellie nodded a little bit, sighing through her nose and looking back to the fire in front of her, trusting them even though it was a hard thing for her to do. She thought about it for a while. Being the person who saved the whole wide world would be a big responsibility. She wondered if she would become rich and famous, maybe then she could go to the moon. She wondered if her and Lou would still be friends after everything, if she could move with them to Canada if she decided that space wasn't for her. Ellie sighed. 'You two wanna take first watch or second?'

'Both. You two go and get some sleep.' Joel said, nodding his head towards their sleeping bags that were further in the cave, a good distance away from the fire and the men. 'Dream of sheep and moose ranches on the moon.'

'I will.' Ellie nodded with a small smile, shuffling off and drifting into a conversation with Lou about how she could help manufacture the vaccine if she wanted to. Lou liked that idea, and they spoke about it until Ellie passed out in the middle of their conversation, exhausted. Lou fell asleep shortly after that, out like a light.

There was silence for a moment, and then the clinking of Joel's metal flask.

'Oh, come on!' Ralph laughed at him, trying to act like he was surprised as Joel took another drink from it, smiling around the lid of the flask. He brought it down from his lips only for Ralph to intercept it instantly, getting a laugh out of Joel because of his double standards. Ralph lifted it away from his lips and passed it back to Joel without the need for a request, then cleared his throat.

'Do you seriously think that you won't get tired of all those sheep?' Ralph tilted his head with a smile, looking at Joel. He knew that Joel was bluffing. It was the badass answer to say no, and Ralph knew that there was no truth behind it. He just wanted to hear Joel admit it.

'Maybe I will. Maybe I won't.' Joel handed it to Ralph with a shrug.

'What happens if you do?' Ralph asked quickly. Joel puffed his cheeks out and shrugged to himself again, thinking for a while. He took long enough that Ralph was able to take two sips and Joel was left to wrestle it off of him.

Joel took a drink before he answered. 'I'd probably catch a plane to Canada. Y'know, find some... Cool zoologist and his crazy, scientist daughter. Maybe hang out with them for a while.'

'And how exactly do you expect to contribute to their family, Mister Miller?' Ralph furrowed his eyebrows. Joel looked surprised to be asked that. 'What? You can't expect them to do all the work, now, can you? It's polite to help.'

'I could... Help around the house.' He seemed pretty confident with that answer, nodding his head up and down to justify it. 'Yeah, I could! Don't laugh! Come on, times have changed. It's totally normal for guys to do stuff like that. I think that I would make a superb house-husband.'

'Husband, you say?' Ralph repeated with a grin, watching as Joel rolled his eyes and shook his head and tried to correct himself and take it back and make a joke out of it all at once. 'You wouldn't be caught dead being a house-husband.'

'Says who?'

'Says me.' Ralph smirked. 'You've got too much pride, Joel. Wouldn't let yourself do it, even if you really wanted to.'

'...Shut up, I do not.'

Ralph looked at Joel and raised his eyebrows, keeping that stupid, gorgeous smile on his face while he did so. They stared at each other for a while, and then Ralph continued.

'All I'm saying is that if you want something, you should go for it.'

There was a pause as Joel studied him. And then Ralph stood up before Joel even had the chance to lean in, shuffling over to his sleeping bag and leaving him by the fire with his now empty flask of whiskey and sea of thoughts.

'You can have first watch, dipshit.'

...

NOTES!

i can hear yall screaming at me thru the screen and i PROOOMMISE they're gonna kiss soon
i dont know WHEN but SOON
(update: chapter 22....................)

peepooppooppee i have no notes for this okay bye