Epilogue

Fall

"Jackson County. Means we're close to Jackson City, right?"

Joel glanced at the sign, green with peeling white letters. "Shouldn't be more than a few miles."

They stood on a steep embankment overlooking a river, the sound of rushing water beneath them and a dampness in the air. An old wooden fence was crumbling over the side of the embankment. Everything was green, from the towering evergreen trees and long wild grasses on either side of the river to the vines and bushes that had crept around the rotting sign for Jackson County, Snake River Trail.

"You ready to see dear old brother?"

Joel shook his head lightly, brushing the question aside. "I'm just ready to get there."

"You nervous?" She was persistent, if nothing else.

"I don't know what I'm feelin'," he muttered.

She shrugged and struck out ahead of him, sticking her thumbs beneath the straps of her backpack and letting her elbows hang out to the sides. She did that a lot, let her elbows stick out as she took light, lanky strides. It was a small reminder of what a kid she still was, though Joel had stopped really thinking of her as a child after Pittsburgh. Children needed protecting. Ellie did not.

He took a deep breath as he followed after her, eyes absently trailing towards the river and the gray stone boulders that overlooked it. A few miles. He fought the urge to slow his pace, trying to ignore the unpleasant unease that twisted in his stomach. At first he had put it down to hunger, but at the sight of the sign for Jackson County, the twisting had grown tighter and a lump had begun to form at the back of his throat.

Joel had made a habit of crossing bridges only when he came to them. In the four months since Boston, he had deliberately avoided thinking about what the future held. Whether they would be able to find Tommy, or if Tommy was alive, or if he would help them even if he was. What it would mean to hand Ellie off to another and be on his way. Where he would go afterward.

The answer to all those questions was now just a few miles away, and Joel did not know what to feel.

Ellie bobbed ahead of him, her hair pulled back as usual and long red strands sticking to her forehead in the damp atmosphere. She was a good kid. Persistent, annoying, but able to handle herself. She'd be alright, with Tommy, with someone else. If Joel had thought about it, he might have said he would miss her, but he did not think about it.

There was no going back to Boston. The trip itself might well kill him, but even if it did not, there was nothing there anymore. It had long ago ceased to be anything more than a convenient set of walls, with Tess his only companion. And Tess was gone. Joel swallowed, feeling a muscle twitch involuntarily in his cheek.

He would go south. Somewhere where the land was just as vast and isolated as here, but where winters were gentler, where a man could live for years with no one finding him. Or perhaps he would go west. Find some small town on the coast that no one had picked over, maybe find a quarantine zone that was still standing nearby and set himself up as the guy that could find things. Like Bill had been. Hell, he could even start talking to himself like Bill – that would make Ellie roll her eyes.

Or it would have made her roll her eyes, at least.

A long bridge crossed the river ahead of them, wooden cross struts surprisingly intact. But as they neared it, the dirt road they were on disappeared suddenly over the lip of a snarl of earth and rock, the washed-out remnants of the road having spilled to the riverbed below. Rocks and dislodged soil were already overgrown with new green, suggesting the washout had happened many years prior.

"Well," Ellie said. "So much for this road."

"We just follow the river," Joel said, glancing back the way they had come. "It'll lead us straight to Tommy's. C'mon."

He waved at her and moved to the edge of the embankment overlooking the waterway. A rough path descended towards the river, amidst the boulders and jagged ledges with sheer sides carved by millennia of rising and falling waters. The path was faint, little more than patches where the grass hadn't grown so long, but evidence enough that someone had found a way to follow the river ever since the road had washed away.

Joel crouched and jumped down to the ledge below the embankment, ignoring the creak in one of his knees. The path felt solid enough. He glanced back and Ellie was quickly following, scooting to the edge before hoping down to join him. He nodded in approval and turned to follow the path.

"What happened between you two?" Ellie asked suddenly as they started down towards the river.

"What do you mean?" Joel said.

"You and Tommy…You're not together, so clearly something went down."

"We just had a bit of a disagreement, that's all."

"Ah, here we go," Ellie said, warming to the subject just as she sensed Joel skirting it. "So what was it about?"

Joel sighed lightly, biting back the urge to say nothing at all. He jumped down to a lower ledge, then ducked around a huge gray boulder that overhung the pathway. "Tommy saw the world one way," he said simply. "I saw it the other."

"And that's why he joined the Fireflies," she said.

And that's why he joined the Fireflies, Joel nodded to himself. The damned Fireflies. His lips pressed together, unable to keep a touch of bitterness from his voice.

"Yeah," he snorted lightly. "Your friend Marlene promised him hope. That kept him busy for a while, but just like Tommy, he eventually quit that too."

He didn't know if that was a fair assessment, if he blamed Tommy more or the Fireflies, or if he even cared anymore to make the distinction. It had been a relief when Tommy had left. Joel should have been grateful, had told himself as much at the time. Except the bitterness remained.

It should have been the two of them against the world, and it hadn't been.

A great gray slab of rock rose before Joel and he grunted as he placed two hands on it and hefted up a leg to scramble over. The mist from the rushing river was more than damp now, close as they were to the water, and the rock was slick with wet and moss. He pulled himself up to the top of it and wiped his hands on his jeans, glancing back at Ellie as she readied to followed suit.

"How was it," she said, "the last time you saw him?"

Joel opened his lips and looked away, grimacing a smile that was both ironic and humorless. He could see Tommy's face plain as day, an angry red in places that would soon purple into bruises, his fingers bloody from the discarded chunk of green bottle he had tossed to the floor. Joel could even feel what he had felt that day, staring up at his brother as his nose had throbbed and swelled with blood. Wanting Tommy to just leave.

Joel licked his bottom lip. "I believe his last words to me were, 'I don't ever wanna see your goddamn face again.'"

"Jeez," Ellie breathed in disbelief, as she hauled herself up onto the rock slab. "But he's gonna help us?"

"I suppose we're gonna find out." Joel shook his head. The Tommy that had come to Boston with Joel would have helped them. But that had been, what, ten years ago? More? Joel had lost track. Ten years and a lot of things that could never be taken back. If Tommy was even alive, his help was by no means guaranteed.

"Well," Ellie said, clapping her hands together to brush away the moss. "With or without his help, we'll get there."

Joel looked down at Ellie. Her face was red with the cold and exertion, but she was giving him a crooked smile that she probably thought was comforting. Them against the world, her expression seemed to say. Them against the world.

Joel looked away.

"Let's just keep goin'."

Tommy glanced up, watching the tattered American flag that waved limply with the breeze. The power plant was remarkably intact, all things considered, but it still stank of wet and damp thanks in part to the gaping broken window on the plant's east side. The railing that Tommy leaned against groaned impatiently, waiting for just the right amount of applied weight before it snapped free from the walkway that circled above the plant's ground floor.

Three giant turbines occupied most of the floor. They were of an old-fashioned design, shaped like huge water wheels rather than the squat propeller-driven turbines housed in more modern dams. But they ran. Despite rust and damp and general decay, they somehow kept turning over and over, day after day.

At least, most of the time.

"You know, even if this works," Steve said beside him, "it's the hydroelectric equivalent of duct tape."

Tommy looked away from the tattered flag and back towards the turbine below him. "Yeah, I know," he replied quietly, pressing his lips together.

"Eventually, baling wire and chewing gum ain't gonna cut it anymore, Tommy."

"I know," Tommy repeated.

The shield had been removed from the turbine directly beneath them, exposing dark metal blades flecked with rust and a center joint lathered in grease. Men and women were moving about. Some were scrambling up to the top of the shield to attach a heavy-duty hook that hung from a chain on the plant's ceiling. Others watched with arms crossed, waiting until they were needed to hoist the massive shield.

"Those boxes in Building C," Tommy said, glancing at Steve. "They've got a Washington state address on them?"

Steve nodded. "Mmhmm. So somebody was making turbine parts out there. Don't know if they're all the parts we need. But it's a start, at least, I reckon. I mean, we're probably okay for now. Can keep cannibalizing the turbines in Building A for awhile yet, just…not forever."

"Yep," Tommy sighed, pushing away from the metal railing and straightening. He clapped Steve gently on the back. "Well, we'll cross that bridge when we get there, right? You just get this up and runnin' for now." He smiled in what he hoped was a reassuring way.

Steve returned the smile with a grin and an elbow to Tommy's side. "Aye aye, boss man. We got this."

Tommy left the engineer squinting down at the turbine below and mounted the metal steps towards the outside, where a wide bridge crossed the river to the western side of the dam complex. In another life, Steve had built houses and office buildings, structural engineering that bore little resemblance to the tinkering and welding and micro motor adjustments it took to keep a hydroelectric dam running. But like everyone in Jackson had learned, old skills could be retrained. The town had cannibalized the older turbines in Building A just to give a former engineer like Steve the opportunity to take something apart and learn how to put it back together. Jackson had sacrificed perfectly good radios and flashlights and circuit boards, all in the name of learning how to repair – and perhaps even replace – such items in the future.

Not that it didn't come with a price. As Tommy opened one of the doors out of the turbine room, he entered a large control chamber where several men and women were pouring over blueprints for the turbines, stabbing at points on the wafer-thin paper and arguing in pinched voices. At least one of them would have to go – to Washington or wherever else turbine parts had once been manufactured. They would be gone for months, assuming they ever even returned. With the dam as the virtual lifeblood of Jackson, sending away one of the town's engineers to a fate uncertain felt as foolhardy as sending away their only physician.

Tommy nodded to those in the control room as he slipped past them. As usual, he carried his old hunting rifle slung over one shoulder. The wood stock had splintered in places and the strap had been replaced three times, but the long gun was as familiar and comfortable as an old friend. And here, away from the walls and watch towers of Jackson proper, he was rarely without it.

Suddenly his radio squawked.

"Tommy. Come in."

Maria's voice. Urgent.

He unclipped the radio from his belt, ignoring the abrupt inquiring looks of the men and women he had just slipped past.

"This is Tommy," he said, keying the mic. "What's up?"

"We've got strangers approaching. Below the dam."

"Shit," he muttered. Then, glancing back at those gathered around the blueprints, he pointed towards the turbine room. He could hear the distant rattle of heavy chains. "Tell 'em to knock it off in there. No noise until they hear from me. Guns ready." He turned without waiting for an acknowledgement, knowing the others were already in motion. He lifted the radio to his mouth again.

"How many?"

"Two. Man and woman."

"I'm on my way. Cover and quiet."

Out of habit, Tommy swung the rifle off his shoulder and checked the safety, sliding it off as he opened the door out on the bridge. He started jogging, keeping to the upstream side of the bridge as he started to cross, where the angle of the bridge would block him from view below the dam. A couple of men with rifles were peering out over the bridge, alerted to the approach of strangers by the same radio transmission that had called Tommy's attention.

"Get back from the edge!" Tommy called out to them in a hushed voice, low enough not to carry over distance. "Nobody shows themselves until we figure out what they want. Keep outta sight!"

The men did as they were bid, retreating back from the edge of the bridge and into the cover afforded by the turbine building behind them.

Tommy quickly crossed the bridge, keeping his head low and his rifle close to his chest.

Maria was waiting for him. She was crouched in the shadow of another control building on the other side of the river, her form small and almost invisible as she looked out over the water below the dam. Her face was sober and the lines around her jaw tight. Rain drops flecked the shoulders of her leather jacket.

"Where are they?" Tommy said, ignoring the light drizzle just starting to fall from the sky.

Without speaking, Maria turned and pointed over the edge of the bridge railing. "On the edge of the tailwater. The man's in the water."

Tommy crouched beside her, squinting. "What? Why?"

Maria shifted and unlooped a pair of small binoculars from around her neck. "He took the woman across the water on a piece of wood or something, maybe a pallet. It might actually be a kid. Pretty small for a grown woman."

Lifting the binoculars, Tommy rubbed his eyes and peered through. The lenses were not strong and provided little in the way of real detail, but Tommy could see a head in the water, a man with a beard and a red flannel shirt. On the other side of the calm tailwaters beneath the dam, a girl kneeled at the water's edge. She wore a white and pink wind breaker.

Tommy dropped the binoculars and frowned, pressing the back of his hand against his mouth in thought. "Don't seem like bandits," he said after a moment. "At least not the ones we've had here before. They know we're here. They wouldn't just saunter up like these two are."

"Unless it's a trick."

Tommy glanced at his wife, his expression grave.

Maria gave him a pointed look. "Even if they aren't bandits, they keep on up this way, eventually they're going to hit the clearing in front of the gate. Realize there's nowhere to go but through the plant."

"So we keep our heads down 'til then," Tommy muttered, rising and backing away from the edge. Maria followed. "Maybe they get up to the clearing and decide to turn around. Never know we're here. If they don't, well…then we tell 'em to turn the hell around."

Maria nodded. "Okay. I'll take lead."

"Fine by me."

They both left the bridge to enter the second control building, quickly descending the metal steps to the ground floor below.

"Tommy here," Tommy said, lifting his radio to his lips again and keying the mic. "Okay, people. Everyone keeps to cover. We got one man, one woman, might be a kid. They're on route to hit the front gate. If we're lucky, they turn around and go away none the wiser. If they come knockin', we deal with 'em. In the meantime, stay alert. They could be bandits and this could be a trick. I want eyes in all directions. Tommy out."

The control building exited into a wide dirt compound surrounded by cement walls and barbed wire. Long ago, during a brief occupation of the dam and hydroelectric plant, FEDRA had constructed watch towers and scaffolding around the edges of the walls to permit lookouts to patrol the perimeter. Like everything else in the complex, the structures were growing rickety with age and exposure, but a handful of sentries still stood peering out over the wall. As Tommy and Maria entered the compound, those up on the wall each began dropping to their knees to avoid detection from the outside.

"You take right, I'll take left," Maria said tersely, nodding at each side of the large main gate that led into the compound.

Tommy did not argue. Maria had inherited her father's sense of confidence and command, and was the undisputed leader of Jackson. She had less experience than Tommy with infected and the infected world in general, having spent most of the last 20 years living in the vast isolated wilderness of Wyoming, but she had a certain no-nonsense charisma that Tommy lacked. That had drawn him to her. She dealt in people and ideas – rather like Marlene had, in fact – but without Marlene's anger or bitterness. Maria and her father had built a community based on a pragmatic, get-shit-done kind of hope. It was less lofty and ambitious than the hope the Fireflies had aspired to, but it was more lasting.

They fanned out on either side of the main gate, each mounting ladders up to the scaffolding that afforded them a view beyond the gate. Sonya was waiting at the top of the wall on Tommy's side of the gate, her long black hair pulled back beneath a purple ball cap. She cradled a hunting rifle in the crook of one arm.

"You think it's a kid?" she said quietly as Tommy crouched beside her.

He rested his head against the cool concrete wall. It was damp against his brow. "Maybe," he answered.

"Maybe it's a father-daughter. Could just be lookin' for a place to hunker down."

Tommy glanced at her and shrugged. "Reckon we'll know soon enough."

They waited. The compound was silent, only the sound of crashing water drifting over the air. The place felt alone and empty. Neither sad nor abandoned, simply folded into the wild and reclaimed by nature. When the turbines were churning and the electric lights buzzed above them, the plant almost felt human again, in the same way that a single gunshot could make the endless wilderness feel jarringly, disturbingly human, if only for an instant.

Tommy could never tell if he longed more for the quiet or for the noise.

Voices drifted over the wall. Tommy felt his body stiffen and he straightened. He let his eyes un-focus as he strained to hear individual words from the two sets of voices in the clearing below the gate. Their tone was casual – curious, but not fearful.

"—onna have to cut through the plant," a man's voice was saying.

Something pricked at the back of Tommy's mind.

He frowned.

Suddenly the gate clattered, strong hands pulling at it from outside, jerking the gate's handles and making the old metal whine and shudder.

That was it. Tommy nodded at Sonya and the two rose in unison, rifles swinging to bear on the two people at the base of the gate.

Tommy saw the girl first – definitely a girl, now that he could see her up close. Maybe fourteen, fifteen. Dirty red hair pulled back in a tail, a small caliber pistol in one hand. She stood back from the gate, watching the man in front of her haul at the metal handles. As soon as Tommy and Sonya rose and trained rifles on her, however, the girl's eyes lit up. There was fear there, but also defiance.

In the same instant, the man stepped back from the gate, just as suddenly keenly aware of the firepower trained on him. He held his hands out in front of him and glanced up at Tommy and Sonya, mouth open in unspoken acquiescence. He was turned in their direction just for a second. Black hair, black beard, eyes sunk into a face growing gray and angular with age.

Something ticked at the back of Tommy's mind again.

"Don't even think about reaching for your weapon," Maria said suddenly from the other side of the gate, pointing a rifle down at the man and girl. The man looked away from Tommy, towards Maria instead, while the girl lifted her pistol with both hands.

"Tell the girl to drop hers, now!" Maria barked.

"Ellie," the man said, spreading his hands with fingers open in a show of non-violence. "Do as the lady says."

The breath left Tommy's chest, his disbelief expelling so quickly that his lips parted without his even realizing. The face, the voice, all the pieces fell into place and recognition swept over Tommy so unexpectedly that he could not even muster the breath to whisper an explicative in surprise.

Below, the red-haired girl held up her hands, finger coming off the trigger of her pistol. "Okay," she said uncertainly.

Tommy pulled back from the wall abruptly. Sonya gave him a questioning look. "Stay here," he murmured, pushing past her towards the ladder to the ground.

"Tommy?" Sonya whispered, still eyeing him quizzically.

"Stay here," he repeated.

Trepidation now mixed with the disbelief. Tommy could feel it twisting in his gut, urging caution, even suspicion. Why would he be here? What did he want? Don't let him ruin this. Don't let it be him.

Yet as he scrambled down the ladder, Tommy also felt his arms beginning to tingle and his chest growing tight. He wasn't dead. He wasn't lost. He was here. He had a kid with him. A kid.

He wasn't dead.

Maria had said something and Tommy could hear the man answering beyond the gate. "Alright, we didn't know the place was occupied. We're just tryin' to make our way through."

"Through to where?" Maria demanded.

"They're alright," Tommy called up to her, finding his voice and feeling it grate with the well of emotions warring within him.

His wife glanced down at him, frowning in alarm. "What, you know these people?"

Tommy grabbed the iron bolt holding the gate shut and yanked it back.

"Know him," he answered.

With one arm cradling his rifle, he hauled on the gate and grimaced at the screech of metal as one of the doors slid back a fraction of an inch. Tommy hauled again, steeling himself for the man who waited outside. The man whose face Tommy had last seen ten years ago, slouched on the floor of a booze den, nose bloody and bleeding.

The door slid open to reveal a sliver of Joel's face.

"He's my goddamn brother."

If I could start again
A million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way

- Johnny Cash, Hurt

And so, my friends, we come to the end. It has been quite the journey writing Dirt. Quite literally, it has been years and, for me at least, has seen many major life events. If you have followed since the beginning, then you are incredibly patient! Looking at you, seraphiel1, without whom this story would have ended at Chapter 2. If you have come in somewhere along the way and waited (patiently or otherwise!) for my increasingly long-time-coming updates, then thank you also for sticking it out. Let me know you're out there, give me a holler in the reviews, even if you've never commented through the last thirty-some chapters. Each and every one of you readers have been a true joy for me, and I thank you!

I hope Dirt has become for you, as it has for me, at least one version of the backstory for Joel and Tommy that we only see hinted at during The Last of Us. My favorite fanfiction has always ever been those stories that fill the gaps we long to know about in our favorite movies or shows or books or games. Fanfiction oftentimes get a bad rap, but I love it for its capacity to tell the stories that would never otherwise see the light of day.

Thank you, everyone. I hope to continue writing stories for The Last of Us in the future, particularly these same kinds of gap-filling stories. I've a few ideas of my own, but I'm always open to suggestions as well. It won't be too very long until we have a whole new slew of material to work with from The Last of Us 2.

Until then, keep reading and best wishes to you all!

Astern