# Arthur's Legacy
## The Early Years (2021-2023)
Arthur's first memories were fragments—the smell of gunpowder and whiskey, his mother's calloused hands cradling his face, and hushed conversations in the dead of night. Born in 2021, eight years after the Cordyceps outbreak changed humanity forever, Arthur came into a world already broken.
Tess never meant to get pregnant. In a world where each day was a battle for survival, a child was both a miracle and a burden. She kept Arthur hidden from Joel—her partner in smuggling and in life—not out of malice, but fear. Fear that Joel, still haunted by the loss of his daughter Sarah, would either reject this new child or become too attached, making them all vulnerable in a world that punished weakness.
"Your father is a good man who's done bad things," she would whisper to Arthur when she thought he was asleep. "Just like me. Just like everyone who's survived this long."
For two years, Arthur existed in the shadows of the Boston QZ. Tess would leave him with trusted allies—old women who remembered raising children before the world fell apart—while she and Joel ran smuggling operations. The arrangement worked, precariously balanced on secrecy and necessity.
Until it didn't.
## The Fireflies (2023-2034)
"You'll be safe here," Tess had promised, her voice breaking as she handed her two-year-old son to Marlene, the leader of the Fireflies. "I'll come back for you when I can."
Arthur remembered her scent—sweat and leather and the rare luxury of soap—as she held him close one last time. He remembered reaching for her as she walked away, the Firefly soldiers leading him deeper into their compound.
She never came back.
Years later, he would learn from hushed conversations among the Fireflies that Tess had died on a mission with Joel. That Joel had survived. That Joel had taken a girl named Ellie west, to the Fireflies in Salt Lake City, only to massacre them all and flee with the girl—humanity's potential cure.
But as a child, Arthur only knew abandonment. The Fireflies raised him with clinical efficiency—not cruelty, but not love either. He was an investment, a potential soldier for their cause. They taught him to read from old military manuals, to calculate from ammunition inventories, to fight from necessity.
By eight, he could field strip and reassemble a rifle blindfolded.
By twelve, he could move through the ruins of the city without making a sound.
By fifteen, he had killed his first Infected, a Runner that had broken through the perimeter during a supply run.
Through it all, Arthur clung to fragments of memory—his mother's voice, her stories of a man named Joel who was tough but fair, dangerous but loyal. A man who had once been a father, who had lost everything to the new world.
"He doesn't know about you," one of the older Fireflies told Arthur on his sixteenth birthday, after finding the boy studying an old photograph of Tess that he'd managed to keep hidden. "But he's the reason your mother is dead. Him and that immune girl."
## The Lone Survivor (2034-2036)
When the news reached their outpost that Joel had massacred the Firefly lab in Salt Lake City, killing Marlene and the doctors to save Ellie, the remaining Fireflies splintered. Some wanted revenge. Others wanted to rebuild. Most simply scattered to the winds, their hope for a cure shattered.
Arthur, now fifteen, found himself alone. The only family he'd known—dysfunctional as it was—dissolved around him. With nothing but his skills, his rage, and the fading photograph of his mother, he began to track the whispers of a man and a teenage girl who had settled somewhere in Wyoming.
He survived by doing what the Fireflies had taught him—scavenging, hunting, killing when necessary. He worked as a hired gun for trader caravans, developed a reputation for efficiency and discretion, and always, always kept moving west.
The world tried to break him, as it broke everyone. He saw the worst of what humanity had become—hunters who trapped and ate other survivors, religious zealots who saw the Infected as divine punishment, territorial warlords who built small kingdoms on the backs of the desperate.
Yet sometimes, rarely, he also saw kindness. An old couple who shared their food despite having barely enough for themselves. A group of children who had formed their own family after losing their parents. A woman who risked her life to save him from a Clicker despite not knowing his name.
These moments kept him from surrendering completely to the darkness inside him—the voice that whispered that Joel deserved to die for abandoning him, for killing his mother's allies, for denying the world a cure.
## The Revelation (2036-2038)
As Arthur neared Jackson County, Wyoming, rumors solidified into facts. Joel and Ellie had indeed settled there, in a thriving community protected by walls and patrols. A place that almost resembled the old world, with electricity, regular meals, and even occasional celebrations.
Arthur observed from afar, studying patrol routes and faces. He saw Joel—older, grayer, but unmistakably the man from his mother's stories—teaching guitar to a teenage girl on a porch. Ellie. The immune girl. The potential cure.
He could have killed Joel then, from a distance, with the rifle he'd carried across half the country. One shot to avenge his mother and the Fireflies who had raised him.
But he hesitated. Something in the way Joel looked at Ellie reminded Arthur of how Tess had once looked at him—with fierce protection, with love. A love worth destroying the world for.
And as Arthur watched Joel and the community around him, a new, uncomfortable truth began to emerge. Joel wasn't a monster—he was just a man who had found something worth living for in a world determined to take everything away. Just as Tess had found in Arthur himself, for those brief years they had together.
His revenge mission transformed into something else—a need to understand, to connect, perhaps even to be acknowledged. He began to leave small tokens where Joel would find them during patrols—ammunition, med kits, once even a coffee mug similar to one Tess had owned.
Joel noticed. Arthur watched him grow increasingly alert, scanning surroundings with the wariness of someone who knew they were being watched. But Arthur remained elusive, still uncertain of his own intentions.
Until the day he overheard a conversation between a group of strangers newly arrived in the area.
## The Rescue (2038)
"We finally found him," a muscular woman said to her companions as they made camp a few miles from Jackson. "Joel Miller. The smuggler from Boston who killed the Firefly doctors."
Arthur froze in his hiding spot, listening as the woman—Abby—detailed her plan to capture Joel and make him suffer for killing her father, the lead surgeon in Salt Lake City.
For years, Arthur had fantasized about confronting Joel, demanding answers about Tess, about why he had left his son behind. But hearing this woman's cold determination to torture and kill Joel awakened something unexpected in Arthur—a fierce protectiveness for the father he had never known.
The next morning, Arthur trailed Joel and his brother Tommy as they left on patrol. He watched as a snowstorm separated them from their horses, forcing them to seek shelter. He saw them rescue Abby from Infected, bringing her back to her group at the lodge.
And he knew what would happen next.
Moving with all the stealth the Fireflies had taught him, Arthur positioned himself outside the windows of the lodge, watching as the scene unfolded inside. Joel and Tommy, surrounded and disarmed. The realization dawning on Joel's face as Abby revealed who she was and why she had come.
As Abby raised a golf club, preparing to shatter Joel's knee, Arthur made his decision.
The first shot came through the window with a thunderous crack, shattering glass and striking the bearded man restraining Tommy directly in the temple. Before anyone could process what had happened, a second shot punched through Abby's shoulder, sending her stumbling backward, the golf club clattering to the wooden floor.
"What the fuck?!" someone shouted as the room erupted into chaos.
Arthur crashed through the broken window in a shower of glass, landing in a roll and coming up with his pistol in one hand and a serrated combat knife in the other—weapons that had kept him alive crossing half the continent. His movements were fluid, practiced, a deadly dance the Fireflies had drilled into him since childhood.
A woman with a scar across her face rushed him with a machete. Arthur ducked under her wild swing, slashed his knife across the back of her knee, and as she fell, put a bullet through her head. No hesitation. No mercy.
"Get the intruder!" A burly man with a beard charged, but Arthur sidestepped, using the man's momentum against him. He drove his knife between the man's ribs with a practiced twist, then used the dying man as a shield when another of Abby's group opened fire.
Joel had managed to kick free in the confusion, despite his leg injury. He grabbed a nearby piece of broken chair and smashed it into the face of a man trying to restrain him again. Tommy too had broken loose, wrestling for control of a shotgun.
Arthur vaulted over an overturned table, firing twice more. One shot caught a tall, thin man in the throat. The other missed as a woman with short hair dove for cover. Arthur rolled behind a couch as return fire splintered the wood above him.
"Nora, behind you!" Abby shouted, clutching her bleeding shoulder.
Arthur burst from cover, tackling the woman named Nora before she could swing her weapon around. They crashed into a bookshelf, old volumes raining down around them as they grappled for control. She was strong, trained—possibly ex-military like many Fireflies—but Arthur had been fighting for survival his entire life. He headbutted her, breaking her nose, then slipped his knife between her ribs when her guard dropped for a split second.
The room stank of gunpowder and blood. Three of Abby's people lay dead or dying. Tommy had gained control of the shotgun and blasted a hole through another attacker.
Arthur spun to face a muscular man charging him with an axe. The swing came dangerously close, shearing through his jacket but missing flesh. Arthur dropped to one knee, fired his last pistol round into the man's stomach, then surged upward, driving his knife up under the chin and into the brain.
Across the room, Joel had managed to get a pistol from one of the fallen and was struggling with another man for control of it when the lodge door burst open.
"Joel!" A female voice rang out, followed immediately by the crack of a rifle shot.
Ellie stood in the doorway, her rifle raised, face twisted in a mixture of rage and fear. The bullet she'd fired hit the man wrestling with Joel in the back, and he collapsed.
Abby, seeing her group decimated, lunged for a fallen weapon. Arthur's reaction was instantaneous—crossing the distance in two strides and kicking the gun away before putting his boot on her wounded shoulder, forcing a cry of pain from her lips.
"Don't," he warned, knife poised.
Ellie swung her rifle toward Arthur, eyes wild with protective fury. "Get away from Joel!"
"Ellie, wait!" Joel called out, his voice ragged. "He... he saved us."
The room fell silent except for the labored breathing of the survivors. Bodies lay scattered across the once-cozy lodge. Blood painted the walls and floor in crimson splatters.
Arthur stood over Abby, knife still ready, but his attention had shifted to the fierce young woman at the door. Ellie. The immune girl. The one Joel had destroyed the Fireflies to protect. She was smaller than he'd expected from the legends, but her eyes burned with an intensity that matched every story.
Their gazes locked—suspicious green eyes meeting steady hazel ones—a moment of unspoken assessment passing between them.
"Who the hell is he?" Ellie demanded, rifle still aimed at Arthur's chest, unwilling to trust despite Joel's words. Her loyalty to Joel was palpable, her protective stance mirroring what Arthur himself had just demonstrated.
Arthur lowered his hood then, revealing his face—the sharp features inherited from Tess, the determined eyes and set jaw that echoed Joel's own.
"Who the hell are you?" Tommy demanded, grabbing a dropped weapon and aiming it at Arthur.
Arthur looked directly at Joel, who stared back with confusion and the wariness of a survivor who had seen too much to trust coincidences.
"My name is Arthur," he said, his voice steady despite the storm of emotions inside him. "Tess was my mother."
Joel's face drained of color, recognition and disbelief warring in his eyes.
"That's not possible," he whispered, but Arthur could see that Joel knew it was—the timing, the features, the fighting style that echoed Tess's efficiency and Joel's ruthlessness.
"She never told you," Arthur continued, keeping his gun trained on Abby, who watched with calculating eyes despite her injury. "She gave me to the Fireflies when I was two. Said she'd come back for me." His voice hitched slightly. "She never did."
Tommy slowly lowered his weapon, looking between Joel and this young man who had appeared like a ghost from the past to save them.
"How did you find us?" Joel asked, his voice rougher than usual.
Arthur's laugh was hollow. "I've been tracking you for years. Was going to kill you myself, for abandoning me, for getting my mother killed." He nodded toward Abby. "Then I heard what she was planning."
Joel took a hesitant step forward. "I never knew. About you. Tess never said..."
"Would it have changed anything?" Arthur asked, the question that had haunted him for years finally spoken aloud.
Before Joel could answer, Abby made her move, lunging for a nearby weapon. Arthur's reaction was instantaneous—a bullet that grazed her arm, forcing her back down.
Ellie's eyes widened slightly at the sight of Arthur's face, a flicker of confusion crossing her features as she unconsciously lowered her rifle a few inches. There was something hauntingly familiar in his appearance that she couldn't quite place.
"We need to move," Tommy said urgently, checking the windows. "Those gunshots will attract Infected, and she might have more friends nearby."
Joel limped toward Arthur, his eyes never leaving the young man's face, drinking in features that somehow seemed both foreign and achingly familiar.
"Ellie," Joel said, his voice rough with emotion, "this is Arthur."
"Okay?" Ellie replied, confused by the weight in Joel's voice. "And who exactly is Arthur to us?"
Joel swallowed hard. "He's... he's Tess's son."
Ellie's rifle lowered completely, shock replacing suspicion. "Tess? Your partner from Boston? The one who..." She didn't finish the sentence, remembering the woman who had died helping them escape the QZ years ago.
"My mother," Arthur confirmed, his knife still hovering near Abby's throat. "And apparently," he added with a hint of bitterness, "his son." He nodded toward Joel.
Ellie's mouth fell open as she looked between them, seeing the resemblance now that it had been pointed out. "Holy shit," she whispered.
"Come with us," Joel said to Arthur, the words an offer and a plea rolled into one. "Back to Jackson."
Arthur hesitated, years of anger and loneliness warring with the desperate need for connection that had driven him across the country. His eyes briefly met Ellie's—curious, cautious, but no longer hostile.
"Why should I?" he asked Joel, though his resolve was already weakening.
"Because," Joel said quietly, "your mother would want you safe. And because..." He struggled with the words. "Because I want to know my son."
Ellie stepped forward, lowering her weapon completely. "Look, there's a lot happening here that I don't understand, but if you just saved Joel and Tommy, then you're good in my book." She glanced at Abby with undisguised hatred. "Unlike some people."
In the distance, they could hear the sound of approaching horses—likely a patrol from Jackson responding to the gunshots. Time was running out for decisions.
Arthur looked at Abby, at the path of vengeance she represented—a path he himself had nearly taken. Then he looked at Joel, the father he had never known, offering a chance at something else.
"What about her?" Arthur nodded toward Abby.
Joel's expression hardened. "She came to kill me. By rights, we should kill her."
"No," Arthur said, surprising himself. "That's not who I want to be anymore." He addressed Abby directly. "Go back to your people. Tell them Joel Miller died today. If I ever see you near Jackson again, you won't get a warning shot."
Tommy looked like he wanted to protest, but Joel nodded slowly, understanding something fundamental about the young man standing before them—that he was trying to break the cycle of violence that had defined their world for too long.
"What do we do with her?" Arthur asked, nodding toward Abby, who glared up at them with hatred burning in her eyes despite her injuries.
"Kill her," Tommy said without hesitation. "She came here to torture and murder Joel."
Ellie nodded in agreement, her hand tightening on her rifle. "She doesn't deserve mercy."
Arthur looked between them, then to Joel, whose expression was unreadable. "Your call," Arthur said to his father. "She came for you."
Joel studied Abby for a long moment, then looked at his son—this unexpected gift from a past he'd thought long buried. "What would you do?" he asked Arthur.
Arthur considered the question. "The old me would have put a bullet in her head without a second thought. It's what the Fireflies taught me." He lowered his knife slightly. "But I've been tracking you for months. Watching you in Jackson. Seeing how you've built something different there."
Ellie watched Arthur with newfound interest as he continued.
"Killing her solves the immediate problem," Arthur said, "but her friends will come looking. More violence, more revenge. It never ends." He shook his head. "I'm tired of that cycle. Been living it my whole life."
The approaching horses were closer now. Decisions needed to be made.
"Go," Arthur finally said to Abby, removing his foot from her wounded shoulder. "Take your dead, go back to your people, and tell them Joel Miller died here today. If I ever see you near Jackson again, there won't be a warning shot."
Abby looked between them, calculating her odds, then focused on Arthur. "Why should I believe you'll let me walk out of here?"
"Because killing you would be easy," Arthur replied. "And I'm trying to be better than what this world made me."
Joel stepped forward, placing a hand on Arthur's shoulder—the first contact between father and son. "Let's go home," he said quietly.
Arthur glanced at Ellie, who was still watching him with a mix of suspicion and curiosity. Their eyes met briefly, an unspoken acknowledgment passing between them—two people whose lives had been irrevocably shaped by their connection to Joel.
As the sounds of the approaching patrol grew closer, Arthur made his choice. He lowered his weapon completely and turned toward the father he had never known.
"We have a lot to talk about," he said.
Joel nodded, his eyes reflecting a mixture of grief for the years lost and hope for what might still be possible. "Yes," he agreed, "we do."
Ellie stepped forward, offering Arthur a tentative nod of respect. "I want to hear how you learned to fight like that," she said, the ghost of a smile touching her lips for the first time.
Together, they walked toward the sound of approaching horses, toward Jackson, leaving Abby behind with her dead and her thwarted vengeance. They walked toward a future where neither revenge nor regret would have the final word—a future where Arthur's legacy might be something other than violence and loss.
A future where, against all odds, he had found not just a father, but perhaps somet