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Ellie wasn't expecting it.
She wasn't expecting a damn speck of it.
After she failed, she went home. She went back to that empty house. She tried to play guitar. She tried to say hello to Tommy - he screamed at her and told her he wished she were dead when she told him she let Abby go. She tried to go back to Dina and JJ - Dina walked away with tears in her eyes, Ellie’s spud looking at her over her shoulder. JJ had gotten so much bigger while she was gone.
She visited Joel’s grave.
She went back home. It wasn’t home anymore - it was empty, everyone she loved gone because of her.
So Ellie did something that felt almost sacred, wandering in a daze.
She dressed in her favorite flannel, the one she’d worn dancing that night with Dina, and her most comfortable jeans and her old Converse. She put on Joel’s jacket, put his watch on her wrist.
And then she got her gun, and she played guitar one last time - it didn’t sound right - before leaning back in the chair, putting it in her mouth, and pulling the trigger.
She was expecting quiet. Nothingness. Just darkness, the void.
But that’s not what she gets.
When Ellie opens her eyes, she’s looking up at a blue sky, treetops in the way. Upon further inspection, she’s in a new world, wooded and infinite and misty, and she’s alone.
She has to wander for a bit, but eventually, she finds a sign. It’s a directory.
She memorizes the directions to a few names. Riley Abel. Tess Servopolous. Henry and Sam (listed as a joint item). Jesse Wong. Anna Williams.
But she goes to Joel first.
He looks younger. His hair is all dark brown, the liver spots and wrinkles mostly gone, and he’s wearing a T-shirt. He looks confused as hell, but Ellie doesn’t care - she lunges at him, hugging him tight as she sobs.
“I’m so sorry.” she says. “I’m so sorry, Dad.”
He lets her, he holds her, and eventually, he pulls back and cups her cheek. Ellie realizes she’s in fourteen-year-old her’s body - it was the only time her face fit like that in his hands.
“Ellie, baby girl,” he whispers, eyes darting over her face, “the fuck you doin’ here?”
And she tells him. She tells him that after he died, she tried to kill Abby, that she failed twice, and when she came back after she ruined her life, she shot herself.
And then Joel turns his back on her.
He walks away.
Ellie follows like a kicked dog, pleading for him to yell at her or tell her he’s disappointed or hit her or do something, but he doesn’t. He just keeps walking, occasionally looking back over his shoulder to make sure she’s still there, but otherwise staying silent.
After a while, Ellie snaps.
“Please don’t be mad.” she says, voice cracking. “I didn’t want to orphan Abby’s kid too. I tried to make it right, Joel. Please don’t be mad. I tried to kill her.”
Joel whips around, grabbing her face so fast that she flinches as he crouches slightly in front of her, eyes darting between hers. “You think that’s why I’m mad at you?”
Ellie nods, honestly startled.
He grabs her, and she’s frozen in shock as he grabs her shoulders tight and physically shakes her.
“Ellie, I’m fuckin’ pissed because you destroyed your life an’ then killed yourself!” Joel shouts, tears in his eyes. “Mija, you were supposed to live! Everythin’ I did was to make sure you lived! I didn’t want this! I didn’t want you to destroy everythin’ for revenge for me an’ then hurt yourself! I didn’t want that! I wanted you to be happy! You stupid fuckin’ girl! What were you thinkin’?!”
Tears are falling down his cheeks now, and he doesn’t look angry - he looks shattered. “Baby, I didn’t want you to-”
He sobs, and he yanks her into his chest, and she shatters too, sobbing into his chest and gripping his shirt like her life depends on it as they melt, the two of them falling to the floor, Ellie winding up half in his lap as he rocks her, pressing kisses to the top of her head.
“I’m sorry- I’m sorry-” Ellie sobs. “I just wanted to feel better-”
Joel cries harder, hugging her so tight her back pops. “You can’t take it back, baby. You can’t go back. Why would you do that to yourself?”
Ellie doesn’t know any of the answers, but she does know that the emptiness that she’s felt since he died is stitching itself closed, and if she doesn’t feel so hollow, she’s more than willing to stay.
-
Maria vomits when she finds her.
She doesn’t know Ellie’s back until four days after she’s returned, when she goes to drop Ben off with Tommy for his week and finds him drunk off his ass, at which point he slurs that Ellie let Abby go, that he’ll forgive her eventually and make it right but that right now he needs to grieve.
When Maria learns what Tommy said, she’s passing off her son to one of the other Council members and going out to the farmhouse, a weighted blanket in her bag that she hopes will be enough to scare off the nightmares she knows are happening. She’ll stay with her for a bit, make sure Ellie’s okay, try to help her find her way, make sure she knows that she's still so very loved. She knows Ellie’s always struggled with that, from fourteen to her current twenty-one, but now that she’s alone, Dina not ready to forgive her yet (she's talked about forgiving Ellie soon, she just needs to process first) and Tommy turning his back on her (Maria's pissed at her husband), she’s worried that Ellie'll be so lonely she'll get depressed, she'll shut down like she did after Joel died, and…
Well, Maria doesn't want her to be alone during the impending depressive episode. Hell, she can come back to Jackson and stay with Maria for a bit - her house has enough room, and Ellie’s always loved Ben, ever since the moment he was born.
She knocks on the door. It’s strange - the house looks deserted, all the lights off and all the curtains drawn. She knocks again. Nothing.
When she tries the door handle, it's unlocked, and an uneasy feeling immediately settles in her gut. Ellie's pretty good about security.
“Ellie, it's Maria.” she calls. The house is dead silent. Maybe she's out hunting or tending the animals? No, the animals are back in Jackson-
“Hello?” she calls, louder this time. “It's me, kiddo. Just came to check on you.”
Still silent. Maybe she's asleep?
Maria starts methodically checking every room. The bedrooms are empty. JJ's nursery is empty. She’s not in the kitchen or living room.
She smells Ellie before she sees her.
Ellie's sitting in a chair in what used to be her little art studio, a guitar against her legs and a gun on the floor, fallen from her limp fingers. Maria's in denial for a second - tells herself that she's fallen asleep - but then she recognizes the splatters of blood and brain dried onto the wall.
She doesn't know why she rushes to check. Ellie is unquestionably dead. Maria can see what’s left of her brain. Still, she presses her fingers into a cold, stiff throat trying to find a pulse, and then when she doesn't find one she listens for breathing, and when that's gone too, Maria calls for backup on the radio, calls in a medical emergency.
She's about to start CPR when she realizes three things:
- Ellie's brain is on the wall and impossible to save.
- Rigor mortis is completely set in and Maria can smell the decomposition - she's been dead for days.
- Ellie Williams-Miller is dead at twenty years old by her own hand.
And that's when she barely makes it to the bathroom before vomiting.
-
Ellie doesn’t go far even when Joel stops crying, getting to his feet and helping her up before rubbing his eyes. Hell, after he helps her up, she’s still holding onto his hand - but he doesn’t let go or tell her to, so she assumes it’s fine. Actually, he squeezes her hand, like she’ll vanish if he lets go.
They walk for a while like that - Joel leading with slow steps, Ellie still clinging to him, quiet except for leaves crunching underfoot. The place is far too sensory to be a dream - Ellie can feel the warmth of Joel’s hand, the cold dampness of the air, the smell of recent rain - and after a long few minutes, she asks.
“Where are we?” Ellie asks. “Is this heaven?”
Joel scoffs. “If this is heaven, shit, they got low standards.”
“Where do you think we are?”
He goes quiet for a second, mouths scrunching in that way it would when he was trying to think of the answer to one of Will Livingston’s puns.
“Dunno. Seems more like purgatory, what with the woods an’ everythin’.” Joel says after a long time. “But I don’t think it matters. It’s good.”
“What’s it like here? Like, what were you doin’ when I found you? Why-”
“You always ask this many goddamn questions?” he says, but he smiles back at her affectionately before sighing and talking. “I was goin’ to check on Bill and Frank. They live ‘bout eight miles from my house.”
“Is that where we’re going?”
Joel nods.
“What’s your house like? Is it just you? Is it-”
“Easy, baby girl, you'll get to see it.” he says, almost chuckling.
Ellie wants to know, but she shuts her mouth with a huff.
“I live on a ranch.” Joel finally says after another minute. “And no, it ain't just me. I live with my wife an’ a bunch of loudmouth kids.”
She can’t help but wilt a little. He’s taking her back to visit, then she'll be tossed out-
“You see,” Joel says, “I got Sarah, an’ Tess has her little boy Charlie. An’ on top of them, Henry an’ Sam were here, so I talked Tess into takin’ them too. Plus, Jesse was pretty lonely since his parents are still alive, so he's been livin’ on the property but not the main house-”
“But Jesse and Henry are adults.” Ellie says, brain shutting off most of her higher thought as she tries to process that Joel and Tess got married and are now taking care of pretty much every kid Ellie knows who died.
“Most of the time. People tend to shift ages here dependin’ on the day an’ their mood an’ needs. I'm usually ‘round this age, same as Tess. Sarah's usually fourteen, Sam's usually eight - but Henry an’ Jesse, they tend to shift around a lot. Some days they're when they died, some little kids - guessin’ you'll be that way too. Think you just change to whatever you need.”
Ellie nods slowly. “That’s why I'm back to being a teenager?”
Joel squeezes her hand. “You’re twenty, kiddo. You pretty much died a teenager.”
Ellie shrinks a little bit. “Sorry.”
Joel takes a deep breath, glancing back at her. “I am glad to see you. Been waitin’ for you, you know. Had a room in the house for you since I got here an’ the place shifted for my wants. But you coulda waited.”
“I know.” Ellie says, and tears start to prick the back of her eyes. “But I didn’t want to stay.”
Joel uses her hand to yank her forward, and nervousness twists in her gut - is he still gonna be mad at her? - but he just puts an arm around her shoulders and crushes her against his side instead. (He’s way more affectionate here-)
“Wish you had.” he says. “You had a lot more time. But I really am glad you’re here, baby.”
-
The town isn’t sure what to do with her body. They weren’t expecting it, after all. In Jackson, people either die of a health problem like a heart attack or organ failure or from an attack by Infected or raiders (very unusual). Most people who die, Jackson knows it’s coming.
Nobody had any idea Ellie was going to die.
Maria does the best she can. Ellie is buried right next to Joel, her headstone stating ‘Ellie Williams-Miller / 2009-2029 / Braver than most, loved more than she knew.’ The funeral is a small thing - Tommy digs the grave despite his leg, eyes empty, and he, Maria, and Dina, holding JJ, all stand over the disturbed soil in silence.
Few come to the funeral, but people leave things. Flowers, guitar picks, comic books, switchblades - things it seems like she would have liked.
Maria isn’t the only one who mourns Ellie, but she’s the one to grieve her loudly. She doesn’t let Jackson sugarcoat it. She doesn’t let anyone lie to themselves. Ellie killed herself. She died by suicide. She took her own life. She was in pain, and she’d suffered alone.
Tommy shuts down at first. Cries until there’s nothing left, drinks, becomes an absolute mess. Maria shuts that down fast, grabbing him and shaking him by the shoulders and telling him that he has his son to worry about. After she snaps him out of it, he becomes better - he drinks less, though he still has rough nights, and he visits Joel and Ellie regularly. Dina shuts down in a much more direct way - she becomes silent and empty for long enough that Jesse’s mother has to look after JJ - but eventually comes back, though she has an empty, haunted look in her eyes.
Ben doesn’t understand where his cousin went, just like JJ doesn’t understand where his mother went. Maria tells them both that Ellie was hurting a lot and that she’s not hurting anymore. She hopes it’s true.
-
Ellie cries more in the first few weeks of being in whatever the fuck the afterlife is than she did in the past few years of her life.
She moves into the farmhouse, a big thing with wood on the outside and a porch swing and a creek behind it, with Joel and Tess and the other kids. Her room is upstairs, and it has dinosaur sheets and posters and bookshelves filled with things she likes. Even though she rolls her eyes at it when on days when she’s seventeen and feels like she’s being treated like a little kid, she does love it, and on days when she’s little, she goes absolutely apeshit over it.
Unfortunately, the door is constantly open - living with two adults and five other kids coming in-and-out means there is absolutely no privacy and the odds of someone bursting in the second her door is even partially closed immediately become not-in-her-favor - but she doesn’t mind. It feels silly to. This is the least lonely she’s ever felt, even if everyone immediately gets pissed off or sad when they learn how she died.
Every time she meets someone else, she starts crying, to be honest.
As soon as they got to the farmhouse, Tess had turned around to look at her, far younger than Ellie remembered her. She hadn’t rushed in for a hug or anything, simply walked over and grabbed Ellie’s chin, turning her every which way in silence. “Did you ignore me telling you that you aren’t immune to getting ripped apart?” she asked, and Ellie had to tell her no, she didn’t ever forget that, she put a gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger. Tess immediately had her whole face darken, and she just stared at Ellie for a minute before letting her go and saying to wash up for dinner. Tess gets more comfortable over time, slowly being more and more affectionate as Ellie settles in and gets used to waking up six years old on some days and twenty on others.
Sarah, a teenage girl with curly brown hair and wide eyes, had immediately welcomed her, hugging her tightly and saying that she had always wanted a sister and that Dad hadn’t stopped talking about her, and she cries when Ellie ends up admitting to her that she killed herself, but Sarah still announces them best friends and sisters now and refuses to let go of the titles, radiant and cheerful and persistent in a way that ends up meaning she rarely asks for permission to do anything, including love people, and just does.
Speaking of her best friend, Ellie tracked Riley down on her third day. Riley had actually cried more, telling Ellie that when she’d first arrived, she’d waited for days for Ellie to die too but she hadn’t ever shown up, and that she’s glad Ellie’s here. She lives with her parents here, has the family she missed so much, but she’s still in Ellie’s room half the time.
Jesse forgave her the second Ellie saw him at that dinner on her first day. She’d immediately started crying and apologizing to the boy who was fourteen, the same age as when she’d met him, and he’d hugged her and told her it was okay because he chose to follow her into danger and that he’d missed her. He threw a comic at her head when she told him that she’d killed herself, but he’s another person who’s almost always in her room.
Henry and Sam made her cry too, but they weren’t actually that emotional. Henry immediately started treating her like a little sister, as she’s almost always younger than him by at least a year or two. Neither talks about how they died, but they both recognize that pain in each other. Ellie always hangs out with Sam on days when she’s around his age.
Charlie, Tess’s son, is strange. Ellie doesn’t know how to be around him. He’s five, and he follows her around like she’s his hero, constantly trying to draw her things, asking if she wants to play. It throws her. Nobody’s ever looked at her like that, like she’s someone to admire and safe and good. It makes her feel awkward and warm and panicked all at once.
Even stranger is Anna, her mom. They don’t know how to exist around each other, but they try, Anna going on walks with her. Ellie knows they’ll figure it out eventually. They’ve got time now.
Ellie’s age is different every day. Some days, she’s eight, and her hair gets braided by Joel and she plays in the creek with Sam and Jesse and Riley, who usually shift to that age too, something in the universe deciding it’s a day that’s meant to play like kids who don’t know how horrible the world is. Most days, she’s fourteen or fifteen, and she hangs out with her friends on the roof or porch and plays guitar and sketches and reads. Some days, she’s twenty, and she can’t get out of bed. Nobody pushes her on those days aside from Joel coaxing her to the porch where they sit in silence.
Ellie thinks he likes days when she’s young the best. On those days, her brain gets confused and thinks she’s young too, and she calls Joel dad and giggles when he picks her up and swings her around and falls asleep in his lap, and he looks at her with big soft eyes and braids her hair and acts like she’s the best thing in the world. (He acts like she’s the best thing in the world when she’s fourteen, too, but he doesn’t look like his heart’s turning to mush when he looks at her unless she’s little.)
Ellie has a dad in Joel. She has a mom in Tess (if nothing else, proven by how, when Ellie’s little, she calls Tess ‘mom’ and she accepts it and calls her petnames back) and is working on getting one in Anna. She has siblings in Sarah, Charlie, Sam, and Henry. She has best friends in Riley and Jesse. Hell, she even has weird relatives, as whenever Joel takes her to Frank and Bill’s, Frank treats her like the best thing ever and she and Bill argue like there’s no tomorrow.
She misses people sometimes. JJ, Dina, Tommy, Maria - they all make her feel a little bit empty when she thinks too long about them. But she knows they'll come eventually, and she feels a lot less empty here anyway - it's a very manageable grief, and Ellie elects to ignore it, instead living a happy life she never got to have.
-
About three months after they bury Ellie, Maria finds a lump in the shower.
She already knows when she goes into the clinic. She’s been getting headaches, she’s been exhausted, she’s been feeling nauseous and losing weight - it’s honestly not a surprise when they tell her. Metastatic breast cancer. Less than six months.
She handles it quietly and with grace. There’s no way to fight it, chemotherapy nonexistent since the Outbreak, and it’s late-stage anyway, so she just silently redistributes her Council duties, makes sure all her debts and final words are settled and said, repairs her relationship with Tommy as best she can, spends a lot of time with Ben, and when the time comes after four and a half months of illness, she falls asleep reading with her son under her arm and wakes up flat on her back in the middle of the woods, hands strong and steady and the aches in her joints gone.
When she finds the directory, she goes to her husband and Kevin first. Both look the same as the day she lost them - she spends a few days there, mostly to be around her son, the romantic spark with Jeremiah, she learns, having faded, but the love as two people who understand each other still there.
Eventually, she goes back to the directory, leaving the little cabin that her family’s been living in for the past twenty-five years in search of other people.
Her breath catches when she finds Joel Miller and Ellie Williams-Miller, listed next to each other along with some names she’s heard in passing but of people she’s never met. She starts off towards them, careful to follow the directions exactly.
The woods slowly thin over time, her joints not even twinging even though she walks for what must be miles, and eventually, she comes to a mostly-open field, the center of which is taken up by a big farmhouse with a chimney and a wrap-around porch.
Maria almost goes to knock on the door, but before she can, she hears children’s loud laughter and splashing from the creek running along the edge of the field.
She follows the sound instead, and when she finally comes to the bank and finds the source of the voices, she feels paralyzed.
Playing in the creek are three young-elementary-school-aged children, two boys and a girl. The boys both have dark hair, one straight black, the other natural hair, but the little girl-
Her mouse-brown hair is in a braid, and her overalls are rolled up to pale, knobby knees as she wades in the creek, pausing and looking down at her feet before turning around and squatting, staring at something in the water.
Maria recognizes those freckles, those eyes, and her heart leaps into her throat.
“Ellie?” she calls.
Ellie looks up, and when she sees Maria, she lights up, immediately grinning so wide that her eyes squish up and Maria can see that she’s missing a tooth. “Maria!”
She’s immediately trying and failing to run over to the bank, stumbling several times, and she shouts a ‘Bye, Jesse! Bye, Sam!’ before hopping up onto the shore and running to Maria on muddy, tiny feet, arms wrapping around Maria’s hips and squeezing tight as the little girl looks up at her, face practically luminous with how happy she looks.
She’s chubbier than she was in life. Maybe it’s just the baby fat on her face, maybe it’s because she’s better-fed, but it still puts a lump in Maria’s throat, looking at this little girl who’s clearly been eating far better than she was in all the time Maria had known her.
“I fuckin’ missed you!” she beams, and it’s downright jarring to hear such language coming from such a little girl, but then again, it is Ellie.
“I missed you too.” Maria breathes, gently resting a hand on the little girl’s head. “Look at you. You’re so little.”
“I’m usually older.” Ellie says, face transforming into a pout that’s honestly nothing less than adorable. “And bigger. But today I’m seven! Joel says it was ‘cause I needed to play today. Come on, you gotta say hi to him, I think he missed you-”
Ellie lets go to grab Maria’s hand, dragging her impatiently. “Come on!”
Maria doesn’t even mind that her hand is getting muddy thanks to the little girl, simply following as she runs back to the house on short legs, excitedly chattering about nonsense as she goes.
When they emerge from the woods into the clearing again, this time, Maria realizes that on the back porch are two people - a man she recognizes and a teenage girl she doesn’t - on a swing.
“DAD!” Ellie practically screeches, dropping Maria’s hands to break out into a sprint over to the porch. Joel - yes, it’s Joel, even though he looks much younger, much less weighted-down - sets aside the guitar in his lap, leaning forward and extending his arms.
“Hey there, baby!” he beams, scooping her up with a wide smile.
Ellie squirms excitedly in his arms, pointing back over her shoulder at Maria. “Maria died!”
Maria can’t help but flinch at how bluntly she says it - out of the mouths of babes, she supposes - but Ellie looks like this is the best news ever. “How’d you die? I shot myself. My dad was really mad.”
“Ellie,” Joel says, voice firm but warm.
Maria swallows hard. “Cancer. Pretty quick, all things considered.”
“That sucks. I’m sorry.” the girl next to Joel says. “I’m Sarah. They’ve told me about you. I guess you’re my… aunt?”
“I guess so.” Maria says, offering what must be a terribly shaky smile at the girl on the memorial board, from all the stories, looking so alive in front of her. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“How did Uncle Tommy get you?” Sarah says, giving a joking smile. “Dad always said you were out of his league.”
Maria laughs, the sound almost foreign in her throat after months of grief combined with the knowledge that she wasn’t long for the world. “He was a charmer when we first met.”
Joel snorts. “My brother ain’t ever been a charmer.”
“Says the one who got Tess.” Sarah says, elbowing him lightly. Ellie giggles from where she’s settled half-on Joel.
“Tess?” Maria says. She’d never met the woman, but Tommy had told her stories-
“Yeah, she’s my wife.” Joel says, hugging Ellie tightly. She giggles and squirms. “It’s her, me, an’ the six hellions.”
“Fuckin’ hellions!” Ellie pipes up.
“Ellie!” Joel glares at her. “No swearin’ unless you’re at home an’ you’re at least ten.”
“I’m technically twenty-one! And I am at home!” she beams.
Joel sighs. “This one don’t listen, even as a baby.”
“Six?” Maria asks over Ellie’s protest of ‘not a baby,’ stepping up onto the porch steps.
“Tess had a son, I had Sarah an’ Ellie, then there were three other kids - Henry, Sam, an’ Jesse - that needed a place, so next thing you know, we got far more kids than we probably should have.” Joel says. “But we’re livin’ good, ain’t we, baby girl?”
“I like it.” Sarah says, smiling at Maria. “A lot better since my dad showed up. Before that, it was pretty much just me and my grandma, and I love her, but I like my old man.”
“I’m in my thirties here, young lady.”
“Same difference.”
Maria’s head is spinning, so she goes back to what she had told herself she would say to Joel and Ellie if she ever saw them again.
“Ellie, you were so loved.” she starts.
Joel shakes his head, even as Ellie shifts to look at her, big brown eyes fully focused, and mouths, ‘not now.’
“I’m happy to see you.” Maria says instead of her planned speech of ‘you were so loved, I’m so sorry you felt like you had to do that, Tommy and Dina regret what they said every single day just like I regret not checking on you earlier,’ and Ellie nods like it’s settled.
“How ‘bout you go inside, check on your mama?” Joel says to Ellie, squeezing her again. “Make sure to wash your feet with the hose first.”
“I’ll help her.” Sarah says, getting up and stretching before allowing Ellie to take her hand and lead her away towards the front of the house.
As soon as they’re out of sight, Joel sighs, shoulders slumping. “She theoretically knows how she died, I just- I don’t want any of ‘em thinkin’ too hard on it. ‘Specially not Ellie. She don’t remember much unless she’s a teenager, an’ I don’t want her thinkin’ about it when she’s so little an’ happy.”
“I can see why.” Maria agrees, stepping the rest of the way onto the porch. “It’s good to see you.”
Joel gives a half-smile, but he looks much more tired without the two girls here. “Good to see you too. Wish it were later.”
“Me too.” Maria says, and then, after some hesitation, she says, “I wish Ellie were later.”
Joel goes still, eyes going dead for a split second as he stares out over the porch railing at the treeline.
“I know,” he says after a long minute. “Me too.”
There’s a long time of the air being silent and thick before Maria comes closer, sitting on the other side of the swing that Joel’s on. “I went to check on her after she got back. Found her body. I’m so sorr-”
“It don’t matter anymore.” Joel interrupts. “She’s happy an’ with family. That’s enough for me.”
Maria watches him for a minute. He looks sad for a minute, the light hitting him just right for a second before he looks young again. “You stayin’ for dinner?”
“Sure.” she says, taking a deep breath. “I have to see if your six kids are as horrible as you say.”
“Oh, much worse.” Joel says, but he smiles again, and Maria knows he doesn’t mean it. “God help you.”
It’s quiet again before he reaches down, picks up his guitar, and starts to play again as the two little boys come up the creek, one of them waving. Joel smiles at them as he starts to hum along with the guitar.
Maria recognizes ‘Future Days.’
‘If I ever were to lose you, I’d surely lose myself…
So persistent in my ways, hey angel, I am here to stay…
No resistance, no alarms, please, this is just too good to be gone…’