Rated T+ for gore and language along the lines of what you'd see in the game. This goes for all chapters - please let me know if you think the rating should change to M for any reason.

Sometimes, in the darkest part of the night, when the air was still and silent but for the light breathing of his "cargo," Joel's mind would wander through dangerous territory. Thoughts he shoved into the corner and buried alive came scratching and clawing their way up to the surface, unbidden and unwanted.

Kid seems so small when she sleeps.

She ain't been eating nearly enough.

Sarah would've liked her.

God, but this job was making him all kinds of soft.

Is that such a bad thing?

Funny how he could hear that last thought so clearly in Sarah's voice.

Sometimes, he wondered what she would have been like in this world.

Would she still have been kind? Funny? Always ready to laugh? Would she be tough and yet still warm and caring, like Ellie?

Or would she be cold and ruthless, like him?

He looked at the mutated corpse at his feet, its skull smashed and brain matter splattered across the floor, eyes still somehow glowing with Cordyceps spores.

Maybe it was best she went so early, he thought.

It was quick. Not painless, God it wasn't painless, but it was quick. She wasn't in agony for long, which was more than he could say for most people he knew (and some he'd killed himself).

She'd only known terror for the last hour of her life.

He glanced at Ellie, who was holding her small knife in a death grip, half crouched, pressed against a wall as she listened for more infected. Or, just as bad, hunters.

Yes, Joel finally decided, after twenty years of pondering it: Sarah's death had been a blessing for them both.