video

[shivving]

public

[ When Joel's face appears on the screen, he's not screaming. He's not stalking the room in rage or setting the library on fire.

He is calm. Eerily so. He glares unblinking into the camera, brow furrowed, silent just long enough to become unsettling.

He has the look of a man who hasn't slept in the last twenty-four hours. ]

I know it's probably the mansion what took Ellie. That more'n likely, none of you had anything to do with it.

If I find out otherwise, I will kill whoever's responsible.

[ end feed. ]


private to tess

Tess.

Comments

[shivving]

[ Whether anyone would ever believe it or not, Joel honestly hadn't been trying to be a jackass. He actually respects Evie, maybe even likes her, and he knows she's trying to help - despite the fact that he'd never given her much reason to so much as give him the time of day.

Now he's fucked up again. He knows it as soon as the words leave his mouth and he sees the change in her expression, warmth and concern vanished behind a mask as airtight as his. The realization doesn't stem from any kind of personal awareness of what he'd done or instant regret of his thoughtlessness so much as it is merely that her own reaction is so obvious, so impossible to deny. He'd hurt her, though she does an admirable job of hiding it.

But it's not quite enough to drive him to apologize, dissociated from his own emotions as he is. What Evie interprets as apathy and boredom is in fact a wall that Joel's been building up for decades, his way of protecting himself from his own grief. He can hardly string three words together right now. He couldn't begin to take back what he'd said.

Instead he nods haltingly, grunting out something that may be an acknowledgement before - with relief - turning off the camera and withdrawing into desperate solitude. ]