Endure and survive.

Her first tattoo, she'd gotten alone. Or, not really alone, since the tattoo artist had been great and they were still friendly. But it had been her and the person with the needle, essentially. She was kind of thrilled to be doing it this time with Rapunzel. Both of their designs were personal, were about them, but getting them together meant there was that little point of connection, that memory that went with it. That was pretty good, she thought. It went with the spirit of her giraffe.

Of course, Rapunzel had designed hers, so there was that, too. It was almost kind of backwards, like Rapunzel had given her Ellie a gift for Rapunzel's birthday. (Which was why Ellie was going to insist on paying, because birthdays worked the other way.)

They were meeting there, so Ellie lingered in the waiting area, looking at the flash on the walls (for people who didn't have cool artist friends to do their tattoo designs, poor saps) and listening to a particularly squeamish customer make a pained noise every few moments. She wasn't especially concerned about Rapunzel having that issue. Punz was tough. If anything, given what Ellie had heard about ribcage tattoos, she might be the one that needed a hand to squeeze.

As she hopped into the driver's seat, Ellie wondered if she was under-prepared; her hand had automatically gone for the row of tapes, and then drummed over them as she waited for Blue to get in the other side. She didn't know if she had the right mix for this, which was especially difficult as who knew what precisely this was. They were ditching the party, and they were... well, she could think of more than a few things, and none of them were specific to a location. But then, should she have something in mind? Her place, not her place -- Hywel was right out -- somewhere. She remembered Blue noting her front seat's lack of scandal, and thought about scandal.

Should she have made a mix? Was that weird, or presumptuous, or presumptuous and weird? Making a mix for doing... well, she didn't know how much. But looking at Blue getting in, at the piecemeal ensemble she had on, she knew the answer was, at the very least, a lot.

"So," she said, trying for lightness, not sure how close she got. "Where to?"

Maybe it was weird, to be heading out to explore an abandoned, overgrown amusement park, when that had been the state of much of her world. But that had never been the bad part. It had been the result of the bad parts, sure, but in itself there'd always been a kind of beauty to it, and a kind of fascination. Imagining what things had been like. It wasn't the same as finding out, as knowing. Discovering that sort of thing in the bustling city was nice, but still, she liked the idea of poking around the amusement park.

There was far less chance of hunters or infected turning it into a desperate struggle for survival, too. That was a point of difference to how it would have been.

Plus, there was the company. The company would be nice. You needed good company to really make exploration worth doing. She figured Blue for a good partner-in-crime.

The last benefit was that she didn't have to walk across the whole damned country. She had the pickup, now, which was well underway to having sufficient random little knick-knacks on the dash and hanging from the roof to satisfy her. She perched herself on the bonnet, sent Blue a text to let her know she was there, and waited to go adventuring.

She'd been in Darrow some two and a half years now, and she was still discovering parts of it. She wondered if it was like that for people who'd grown up with the world like this, or if they just naturally knew all the parts of their city. Or maybe they didn't, and just didn't have the drive to note every part of it. In Ellie, this urge was part curiosity, fascination with the functioning of a city that wasn't ruins and remnants, and part preparation for the day when it might be.

Today, though, the former was winning out. She didn't know why she hadn't spotted this one before, but even today she'd initially thought that Darrow Ice & Aquatics would be some sort of industrial business. But the building's shape and location was wrong, and there were kids in and out, and so she'd followed.

She'd found the pool first, and stared at it for a long time. Some kids had been having a swimming lesson. She'd stared at that, too.

Then she'd gone and looked at the other part of the building and anything she might have been feeling with regards to the idea of swimming had been driven clear out of her head by the fact that they had a fucking frozen lake in here.

She knew about ice skating from seeing people do it in the winter. But that had been in the winter, outside. But this was spring, and inside. They'd built a building and filled it with water and somehow frozen the whole thing and kept it frozen, just to have somewhere to skate around. She almost couldn't conceive of what she was looking at.

"Holy shit," she said, heedless of the fact she was standing directly on an entrance to the ice, blocking the way.

She'd been tracking the deer for an hour, and she didn't know why, exactly.

She must have had some idea this is what she meant to do when she found herself leaving the city that morning, because she'd stopped at her storage unit and collected her weapons, loading the backpack that now usually held school books with the tools of survival that had always sat beside her comics and her joke books.

Somehow, it sat better on her back like that. That was probably messed up.

But then, so was everything in this place. Messed up in how it was unmessed up, like someone had rolled back the clock on disaster. Made civilization come back. And Riley. Riley was back now, too, and Ellie... it wasn't accurate to say she didn't know how she felt. She felt everything, all at once, and that was the problem. She wanted to do nothing but be with Riley; she couldn't bear to be around Riley. She wanted nothing more than to talk endlessly with her, do everything in the city with her; she couldn't look at Riley without seeing everything that had happened, everything that Riley didn't know about.

It got so the noise in her head was as loud as the city and suddenly the city was driving her out of her mind, like the two noises were combining, and so she'd skipped school and came out... here. The countryside.

And it was better. It was quiet. It didn't seem to expect anything from her except that she be in it. She'd shot a rabbit, and tied it to her bag for lunch.

And then she'd found the deer tracks, and even though she didn't need the food, had no way of getting it back or doing anything with it if she brought it down, she'd stalked it through the forest, slowly and persistently following it. A glimpse here, a cautious step, a startle, another pursuit, until she had it fully in her sights, bow drawn taut.

She didn't fire. She stared at the deer until her arm ached with the strain of holding the bow at full draw, until there was no way she'd hit it anyway, she was shaking and wavering so. Hunting the deer had calmed her, but what would killing her do? Was this her now, killing when no killing needed to be done?

She relaxed the string without firing, and stood deliberately on a twig. "See you later, girl," she said, watching the deer startle and run and jump. Scared, but graceful, like being scared was the most natural thing in the world.

Probably it was.

She walked to a log by the stream the deer had been drinking from and sat down, bow across her knees, and watched the water go past.