My first fic up on this site in years (and with a new account) – I'd like to think that I've grown as a writer, so I'm giving it another go. Anyway, Nick/Ellis is pretty much my beloved at this point in time so even though I normally hate fanfics I wrote one anyway. Some parts are a little sloppy and I really should edit them. Also, no beta. Still, I actually like this, it's just upon reading other Nick/Ellis fanfics on this site I feel like it's a little derivative of some other ones.

I don't own anything, Valve does.

The kid never shuts up. That's not an opinion, either. That's a straight up fact. A tried and true theory. You could say his words were like the tides, skidding out before crawling back in, then slamming straight into your eardrums with triple the force, much like stormy waves on innocently beached slabs of rock. Fading in and out of consciousness, quiet, then loud, then in your face and just oh-so-punchable, as if that would solve anything. You can flail around in the ocean all you want, but bloodless splashes aren't going to put a stop to gravity's pull.

Glancing at the back of Ellis' greasy tail of hair slipping out from under his cap, Nick was forced to reconsider. Comparing Ellis to gravity was like comparing sharks to lions; this of course means that they were two different beasts altogether. The hick continued with his ramblings, the topic of which had no real significant value to the welled dressed lowlife. Ellis' hair was certainly gross. His face would always be worse, though. It was so very punchable.

When Ellis shooed a Charger away with his shotgun, diverting it for a second time from Nick's incapacitated form (where he'd been screaming for pretty much the past five hours, by the way), Nick owed the boy a favor. Ellis took great pride in looking out for Nick, though the feeling wasn't mutual by any stretch of the imagination. Hearing that moron's voice made Nick contemplate whether or not the infected accepted applications.

When he shot a Boomer right in Nick's fuming face, Ellis knew he lost the favor the moment he saw zombie vomit on Nick's pretty white getup. What sealed the deal, though, was when said suit was permanently died in the shade of its wearer's blood. Red did not look good on him, thank you very fucking much.

The boy would (or maybe could) not stop apologizing when he came limping up to Nick that night, tail between his legs. Nick's response was a middle finger and three tiny shards of pain relief, followed by sleep facing the wall.

Rochelle's voice, though less heard from than the others, was immediately recognizable. In this rare case study, the word that came out of the female's mouth oozing like yawning lava was, "Asshole."

That was the only goodnight Nick received before he passed out. To his knowledge, anyway.

Screw gravity – Ellis ran his mouth faster than the horde came hopping out of miscellaneous locales, such as, but not limited to, dumpsters. If the infected were proud of anything (which Nick had a sneaking suspicion they were), it was their bizarre and unsettling knack for teamwork.

A determined spray of machine gun fire from Coach left a road of entrails that acted as a macabre yellow brick road to freedom.

If Coach was proud of one thing, it would be his name. Before he'd even introduced himself in that burning elevator, they'd known what he was, who he was, and where he'd been. Coach's name represented only the purest compromise in the face of adversity, and, as Coach had said many a time before, he'd be damned if he could turn back time now, since after all, he was a different person then.

A good little slice of the machete she was holding and Rochelle literally sent heads rolling, which Nick skillfully (read: with no grace whatsoever) avoided.

If Rochelle was proud of one thing, it was her independence. Rochelle had, in an out of character show of sincerity, revealed to Nick the trials she faced in the workplace based on her race and gender one night while the both of them were switching watch. She deserved where she was and she knew it. "Not this zombie apocalypse," she'd said, noticing Nick's stubby eyebrows rising slightly. "My job. I worked for that. I deserve that. So I guess I deserve this." He'd felt like slapping her, but he just smiled and hugged the woman's bony shoulders instead. She'd practically had a heart attack.

Chucking the enchanted gray cylinder from behind an overturned Mercedes, Ellis licked his lips, and then let out a whoop and holler of satisfaction, skin and intestines raining down not unlike confetti and streamers. Pipe bombs do make the loveliest of noises, don't they?

If Ellis was proud of one thing, it was his friends, whom he let sit in the center of his entire life. This one didn't even need a story; just talk to the guy for a few minutes (and you will, Nick thought with a sneer), he'll say nothing about himself. You could almost consider Ellis mysterious, he realized suddenly, but to Nick this just seemed like such a misnomer that it wasn't even funny.

With a well timed flick of the wrist, Nick was once again reminded of how truly effective a paint brush a shotgun could be, the gory avant-garde masterpiece he'd created on the parish walls constituting fine art (Ellis thought so, too).

If Nick was proud of any one thing, any one thing in particular, it was a grounding in reality. It was street smarts and book smarts alike, fast talking and smooth talking altogether jumbled and tossed and turned. It was, in its basic form, gravity.

Backed against the wall in a sudden change of plans, Nick bitterly realized the ineffectiveness of a frying pan in zombie warfare. Oh, damn it, he thought, the last button of his blue collared shirt flying out from an infected's charming embrace. There goes society.

A brain exploded like projectile vomit into Nick's face; the body splashed to the pavement below and Ellis stood with a cocky little grin in its place, firearm propped up against this scrawny shoulder blade.

With a stupid grin only a retarded puppy could procure, Ellis chirped, "Looks like another favor for yours truly!" Rochelle took one look at Nick and puked. As bits of cerebrum fell like rain drops made of Jell-O onto his shoes, Nick felt like slapping the both of them.

"So about that there favor…"

Nick sent Ellis a heartfelt death glare. He was still picking cerebral matter out of his ears. In a way, Nick was grateful for the gore surprise – zombie brain made excellent ear plugs. They did not, however, make excellent ear warmers, for which he would have been most grateful.

The Southern pup continued to smile complacently at the conman. Nick could have said, "Not now, Ellis" or "fuck off", but because Ellis didn't even bother to hide his unadulterated glee drew him in something fierce. There was suddenly a pull, a ball and chain tangled around his heart. It dragged him to Ellis' joy like a big, beautiful black hole. This feeling was not at all unfamiliar to Nick, and that was disturbing to think about. Obviously (not), he stopped thinking about it.

It was freezing. Who the fuck knew that it could get below fifty in the fucking south? Of course the kid just had to be getting frostbite or something, too. He was cold to the touch. To the touch meaning that Ellis was now nestled up against Nick's matured chest, hands kneading skin in a surprisingly brutal manner. The favor was to act as a heater, not a sex doll, but Nick assumed that Ellis was so cold that all these homoerotic movements were just to make heat. Friction, per se. Nick almost face palmed at that thought.

"Overalls…" Nick's attempts to protest failed miserably.

"You're so warm…" Ellis stupidly muttered with a tired little sigh. He seemed content to just stay sandwiched up against Nick's body for the entire night. As Ellis began to drift in and out of consciousness, his scurrying hands, smooth and callous in really strange places, were accompanied by full on dry humps that were more than a little awkward. Ellis' raging boner against his inner thigh wasn't helping anything, either.

"Ellis, man, stop…"

With a grimace, Nick let a weathered arm wrap around the kid's scrawny but well muscled build. The minute Ellis' dick touched his own, and the boy, in his sleeping naivety, began to home his thrusts in on just that very place, he knew the pull of gravity was just too strong for one man to win against. So he thrust back, his hands having found their way to Ellis' ass anyway.

His excuse was that he was fucking exhausted and just had to be getting frostbite, or something. His excuse was that he had something real to be proud of. His excuse was that he hadn't gotten laid in weeks. His excuse was that it just felt good. His excuse was that he was fucking lonely.

In the end, Nick's excuse didn't matter, because as he tugged the hick's sweaty figure onto the helicopter in one final statement of intent, there were no excuses. There was freedom, there was pride, and there was love. Ellis, in his own stupid way, smiled. And Nick smiled back.

"We made it, Overalls."

"Sometimes I wanna punch you, Nick," Ellis said with a smile full of more laughter, joy, and sincerity then Nick thought were humanly possible. There was a look of shock, then admiration, then true blue, sappy ass love. When Nick answered with a sweaty kiss to the hick's blood caked forehead, pulling Ellis' face into his neck and hugging him with burning intensity, the conman had given Ellis his own version of utter absolution.

The more I read over the opening paragraph and the ending little segment the more I worry over this piece's overall quality, but whatevs. I'm just glad I'm getting this thing out there and done with, even if it's not all it could be. This fic just seems a little bit all over the place and not in a good way.