Ellie took a moment to catch her breath, still recovering from the punch to her face. She had to apply healing to her own nose. She couldn't spend too much time. She had to move before more people came looking for a fight. She picked up T'balt's unconscious body and dragged it to a small house a block away from the church.
No one was home, and the door was wide open. She locked the door behind her and deposited T'balt in the bedroom. She then worked to heal him with the gift that he had given her. "Please," she said. "Please."
Much to her relief, he came alive again. His body was in a panic as if he'd just been shocked back from the dead. "Ellie… Where are we?"
"Safe…"
"What?.. Did you…"
"We're safe," she said, pushing him gently back to the bed. "We're safe." It didn't hit her until the second time she said it, and she finally felt like she could breathe.
T'balt laid back on the soft pillows, a feeling of absolute comfort he hadn't felt in weeks. It was like pressing his body against a cloud after falling off a bed of nails. He groaned in his body's own relief. Ellie couldn't help but laugh, seeing that brief bit of happiness on him. It was the closest thing to joy she'd seen in a while.
She wanted some of it for herself. So she laid next to him. "Ahhh.." Like a glass of ice-cold water on a sweltering summer day.
Despite everything, T'balt's face ripened to red when he felt Ellie's shoulder on his. She couldn't pay any mind to personal space. The bed felt too good to move. Hardly able to move, T'balt forced himself to stop minding and just thought about how glad he was to see her face. He felt better, for a guy who was held captive in the equivalent of a straitjacket for a week. He supposed the healing loot really was a miracle.
"Why did you save me?" he asked as bluntly as he could. Ellie looked back at him, noses inches from each other.
"That isn't exactly the first thing I wanted you to say…"
"Sorry… What did you want me to say?"
"I don't know… Maybe I just don't know why yet, and I was hoping you could answer that for me. Things have been tough. Everyone's scared. Monan's a monster, and there's nothing any of us can do. At first, I thought maybe if anyone, you could be the one to stand up to him. Because of how strong you are."
"I'm not strong. I'm nothing compared to him."
She seemed surprised. But decided rather than dwell on that, she would stare at the ceiling fan, picturing it in rotation and following the wings with her eyes.
"You should've run."
"I'm… homeless," she said.
"What?"
"I've been living in the basement of the church for half a year." Her eyes locked harder on the imaginary turning of the fan. "When I was an EMT, I saw… how bad humanity can get. I thought I was prepared to see anything and… I wasn't. Men beat their wives. People killed their children. Bodies rotting in an empty house. I quit."
T'balt followed her eyes and started watching the fan along with her, wondering if in her mind it was spinning clockwise or counterclockwise.
"Maybe I was spoiled as a kid. My parents never told me how the world could be. But I thought the only way I could wash away all that I saw was to live away for a while. That's how I found the church, and Abbot Kilgrove allowed me to sleep in the basement as I… figured out my life."
"And did you figure out anything?"
"People are still shitty." She laughed and kicked her shoes off. "But not you… I think that's why. I knew you wouldn't abandon the believers… or me."
T'balt filled with red again as her piercing blue eyes locked with his. But she felt his unease as he shifted away. He turned from her, Chosa still fresh on his mind. The image of her dead in Monan's bed when he could so clearly remember her alive in his own. Ellie wasn't the same, but he couldn't let himself get close to someone else like that. Not when Monan was around.
"Your neck," she said. She was on her knees getting a closer look at the loot he held. His spine tingled with the feeling of her soft, supple fingers lingering on his skin. "You're the same as him."
T'balt moved to cover the symbol, knowing exactly what she meant.
"The women at the church say Monan has that same tattoo on the back of his neck. The ouroboros, I think it's called. What is that?"
"It's the source of our power. You have one too." T'balt avoided what she truly meant. Because it reminded him of what he had tried to do. Why Monan had locked him away in the first place.
"I know that. But what does that one do?"
"It doesn't matter. Forget about it." He got up from the bed, still struggling as his body hadn't yet reacclimated to moving. Ellie got up to help him, but he didn't know where he was going. Eventually, he sat back on the bed, unable to escape.
"It's okay," she said. "Let's just rest for now."
A few minutes later, Ellie started fiddling with the water in the bathroom and was elated when she got it to spray from the showerhead. "T'balt, look… the water works." She was near leaping for joy.
"Yeah?"
"Well, in all the apocalypse movies, there's never any working water or electricity without a generator. I always thought about how bad people have to smell when the world ends."
T'balt laughed. A good hearty chuckle. "Well, we're only about a month into it. Not everything's gone to hell yet. Besides, isn't there working water at the church?"
"We have a separate water supply. I think Abbot Kilgrove prepared for everything," she said with a twinkle in her eye.
"I always thought it was strange that the church was so prepared. He didn't get some sort of vision from god, did he?" It was a half-joke at this point.
"No. He just doesn't trust the government. I think he used to be in the military."
"I guess that makes sense…" T'balt wondered but didn't picture the old abbot as a doomsday prepper. "Interesting."
"I'm sure you're dying to shower. I'll let you hop in first. Think you can walk on your own?"
"Yeah. Thanks." His body had recovered a bit more, and he could walk on his own, even if he did have to lean on the wall a little.
The warm water was glorious on his skin. It's like it washed a major weight off of him, along with the dirt and grime of the boiler room. He needed the shower, the refresh he desperately needed. But as he felt the scars on his body, he remembered that was another refresh that everyone else needed.
This could be his only opportunity. If he could end things, then those people would be alive, and Chosa, and those families, and he could stop any harm from ever coming to Ellie. It was all on him. He searched the cabinets for something he could do the deed with, pills, a razor blade, anything. Nothing. He left the shower running, peaking out the door.
It sounded like Ellie had found a second bathroom to take her own shower. In nothing but a tower, T'balt made his way to the kitchen, where he knew he'd have better luck. The silverware drawer was it. He found a knife large enough to cut through a watermelon.
"Ok…" he said. "A distant memory, huh?" He pointed it at himself, trying to work up the courage. Even still, there was a hard mental roadblock that stopped the knife from coming any closer to him. Even though he knew for a fact that everything would be okay. He would just wake back up in his room, completely clean. It was like his body still didn't know, and it fought his mind not to go through with it.
"Come on," he said to himself. "It's the only way. You can do this." His fingers twitched on the handle of the knife, and he reared to aim at his heart. But he stopped it, exhaling away the tension within him. "Oh god." He dropped the knife and buried his face in his hands.
But when he closed his eyes, he saw Chosa again. Eyes dead on the bed, but her mouth was still moving. "You're a coward. A pushover. You'll just leave me dead."
He yelled like a bear growling before combat. He went to the knife, and without giving it another thought, he pushed it into himself.
"T'balt!" Ellie sprinted from the bathroom. But the knife was deep within his chest, and he crumbled to the floor. Blood was gushing everywhere, and he was gasping for air. He must've gotten a lung. He felt the world starting to go cold around him, but there was that brief moment of warmth.
He was in Ellie's arms. He tried to tell her it was okay. That this was the way things had to be. But the words didn't come across. Either she didn't hear them, or he couldn't muster the strength to say them.
He watched his blood pour to the floor. The pain was far more than he could bear, and so he let himself drift into unconsciousness. But every time he would go away, he felt himself being pulled back. Again and again.
"What the hell are you doing? You're not doing this." Ellie was healing him. That's what was happening. He wasn't dying. She removed the knife and started healing the gash in his chest, and his breath started coming back to him.
"No.. stop," he said.
"I'm not."
"It's the only way."
"No. It isn't. You're not leaving me."
T'balt tasted his blood as it seared the inside of his throat. But he was thrown off guard by something else. Ellie was stark naked. She must've sprinted out of the shower when she heard him yell. Now T'balt was just embarrassed and forced himself quiet and closed his eyes as she finished.
"Ok.. I think you're okay now," she said after a while.
T'balt nodded, almost feeling ashamed of himself. Ellie, in a fit of frustration, slapped him on the back of the head. Hard.
"Ow."
"What the hell's the matter with you? I just saved your life, and you're going to ruin that by offing yourself!?"
T'balt couldn't look her in the eye, for multiple reasons now. "Sorry."
"Was there… was there really no other way forward?"
"No… I.." He just realized what everything probably looked like to her. She didn't know he was a Redeemer. She didn't know how the power worked. So all she knew was that she came out, and T'balt was trying to end things for himself. "That's not how it is."
"Then what is it, pray tell?"
T'balt turned his head again. "Can you… put on some clothes first?" She groaned as if that were the least of her problems.
"Don't be childish. I'm not taking my eyes off you for a second."
"But aren't you like a nun… or something?"
"I'm a Christian. That doesn't make me a nun, T'balt. Fine…. Is this better?" She wrapped herself with a shower towel, shielding her nakedness.
"Yeah." He looked at his own towel. Still covering him, but sprinkled with the blood from his chest. Though the wound was gone, the blood didn't disappear.
"Well, I'm waiting."
He tried to think of the right words to say so that she would understand without making him seem like a whack job. But at the very least, he wanted her to know that he wasn't trying to hurt himself for no reason.
"So I am like Monan. I'm a Redeemer. It's not a gift from god. It's just another loot. Like I told you before. It can be taken off a monster. This particular one makes it so that whenever we die, we reset to Zero Day. The day everything started, and we remember everything that happened."
He could see the gears turn in her head as she started pairing all the puzzle pieces together. "That actually makes a lot of sense," she said.
"Really?" T'balt didn't think she'd take it that easily, but maybe he was just scarred from all the times he tried to tell Chosa.
"I mean, yeah. That explains why Monan claims he can see the future. Why he's so freakishly strong, and why you just tried to ruin my hard work without warning?"
"Heh... I guess you're right."
"But I've got a lot more questions."
"I don't know if I'll be able to answer them. I'm still new to this power. Really, the only thing that I know is that if I die, everything goes back to normal, and I can change what's happened."
Ellie thought to herself for a moment. "Dying still hurts, doesn't it?"
"Yeah."
"And I'm guessing people like me won't remember what happened here before you reset?"
"Right. Only Monan and I remember."
"Oh…"
"What's the matter…"
"Would it be selfish if I said I still don't want you to do it?"
"Ellie?"
"It… feels wrong. Like I'll lose an important piece of me. And I don't want to lose that… I don't want you to die." She clutched his hand, and they stood together for a moment.
"But… If I don't."
"Then what happens to me and the people here?"
"I.."
"So many have already died. Please let me keep what I have left." She caressed his cheek, and before he could protest, she had kissed him. She smelled like a fresh shower, and the warmth of her body on his was undeniable. He wrapped around her, squeezing her like a long-lost love returned to him. And she squeezed back with the same passion and excitement.
Then he followed her back to the bedroom, and they closed the door, lips still locked in endless passion, turned to lust.