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Awareness crashes into her like a wave breaking. She rolls onto her side, coughing up water, lungs burning and hands shaking. Joel is right there, hovering over her protectively, in that way that always makes her feel safe. His face is torn between wrecked relief and panic, but she’s too exhausted to do much more than reach a tired hand up to rest on his arm.
I’m here, it says. I’m okay.
The way he looks at her, she has never felt so loved.
Then the butt of a rifle connects with his skull and he goes limp, collapsing beside her. Before she can fully process what’s going on, she’s being dragged away from him. She screams, thrashing around and fighting to get back to Joel, but she’s so fucking exhausted, it makes no difference.
Pain explodes on the back of her head and darkness takes her again before they even make it onto the street.
She jerks awake to Marlene watching her. The once familiar face is so unexpected, Ellie stalls.
“Hi,” Marlene says, as friendly and warm as the queen can be, leaning forward to rest her elbows on her knees.
“Where’s Joel?” Ellie demands, voice rough but steady. There’s distrust souring in her stomach, which doesn’t make sense because she knows Marlene, but there’s a voice that sounds a lot like Joel’s in her head telling her to watch the shifts in her expression. She does and what she finds makes her heart sink. “Is he okay? Your people fucking knocked him out after he saved me. Where is he? I wanna see him.”
“Ellie,” Marlene says, a tired hand held out to silence her. Ellie goes quiet, but not without irritation flashing through her. Marlene drops the hand and sighs deeply. “We’ve run some tests, and we think we have a way to make a cure.”
And Ellie knows she’s supposed to care about that before anything else. It was the whole reason she came all this way in the first place. But, honestly, all she can think about is Joel. “I just… need to know that he’s okay,” she presses.
Her eyes narrow, but her face is otherwise unreadable. Then Marlene sighs again. “He’s fine. Still out. Our people didn’t know who you two were, so they brought you in. Once they realized, they sent for me and the doctor immediately. You understand caution, I’m sure.”
Ellie nods. She does. It’s why she’s so guarded in front of a woman she once trusted with her life.
She smiles, but Ellie sees through it in a way she doesn’t think she ever could before. “So,” she says, and her eyes look a little too sharp, a little too desperate, “the cure.”
“Right,” Ellie says slowly. “You said you found a way to make one?” When Marlene nods, Ellie continues. “Okay, so go ahead. Take whatever blood or shit you need, so we can leave.” Marlene’s expression shifts again, and Ellie’s heart just fucking plummets. “What?”
“To make a vaccine,” Marlene says slowly, “we’d have to remove the cordyceps.”
Sinking, sinking, sinking. She half wonders if she’s drowning again, or maybe still. She wants Joel. “But it grows on the brain.”
“Yes,” Marlene says, and there’s something like regret there, but there’s not enough. Not nearly fucking enough if she’s being asked to die for a world that’s already irreparably broken.
“So I have to- to fucking die,” Ellie says, voice cracking, all the bravado gone, replaced by a scared little girl.
She’s never gonna leave this hospital alive. The thought comes unbidden and unwanted, but she feels the truth of it like a stone in her stomach.
“We wanted to give you the choice.”
Bullshit, she thinks. You wish you’d never had to look me in the eye. You wish Joel had never saved me.
But she doesn’t say any of it. “Okay,” she says instead. “I need… I gotta think about this. I need to see Joel.”
Marlene frowns. “I understand you two are close after—”
“You don’t. You don’t understand. I need to see him, please.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?”
She sighs and leans in, like Ellie is still a child who doesn’t understand the world. “Joel Miller is a violent, dangerous man.”
“I know,” Ellie scoffs. “How do you think we made it?” She shakes her head. “But he’s good too. He cares about me. And I care about him. I’m not just gonna leave him.”
“Ellie,” she starts, but Ellie doesn’t allow it.
“If I’m gonna die for your cause, for your vaccine, the least you can do is let me see him.”
“The vaccine is for the whole world. To help it heal,” Marlene says, and maybe before Joel, Ellie would’ve believed her.
She shakes her head. “Don’t bullshit me, the first people to get the vaccine will be the Fireflies. But you better make sure that the first group outside of your people to have access is Jackson. Tommy’s group, I know you know him.”
“Okay, deal. Does that mean you’ll do it?”
“I said I want to see Joel first.”
“We ought to get the cure done as quickly as possible, Ellie.”
She glares. “The world has waited twenty years. I’m sure it can wait another few hours.”
There’s a flicker of something in Marlene’s expression, but Ellie can’t quite name it before it’s gone. “Fine,” she says. “I’ll go see if he’s awake.”
“Thank you,” Ellie breathes. Relief tries to overtake her, but as soon as she’s left alone in the hospital room, dread starts to fill her. Something’s wrong and she knows it.
There’s about thirty seconds between that and the men with guns filling the room.
“Please,” she starts, but then one of them moves forward and grabs her arm, dragging her off the bed. She starts screaming, fighting, trying to break his grip. For a second, she manages it. The feeling of freedom, of hope, rushing over her, and she bolts for the door, but someone else grabs her. She’s swept off the ground and she screams again.
Maybe if she’s loud enough, Joel will hear her. If he’s even in the building. If he’s even still alive.
She should’ve taken the offer to turn around. She should’ve gone back to Jackson with him. Disappeared. Let Marlene assume she died somewhere outside of Boston.
The sound of his name echoes down the mostly empty hallways.
Marlene watches and Ellie tries to reason with her, tries to beg, tries to plead.
“You don’t have to do this,” she sobs. “My mother asked you to protect me,” she spits. “Don’t hurt him, please, just don’t hurt Joel,” she cries.
“I’m sorry,” Marlene says to the second and nothing else. And Ellie knows, knows the shape of hopelessness. Knows when she’s backed into a corner, knows the taste of blood, the smell of rot and of death.
“Please,” Ellie fucking begs, like she did when Joel was dying, like David wanted her to.
Marlene lets them drag her away, so Ellie screams until her throat hurts. She fights until there are aching places on her arms, aches she knows will lead to purple and green bruises, if she even lives that long.
Mostly she calls for Joel, choking on sobs as she asks him to save her. More than one of the Fireflies who aren’t holding her step away (“Oh god, I can’t do this, I can’t do this.”). One younger woman doubles over and is sick all over her stupid fucking boots. Her hair is coming loose from her short braid.
“What,” Ellie taunts, voice full of venom, “too much of a little bitch to face the kid you’re about to fucking murder?!”
The woman—girl, really—looks at her wide eyed and shaken. Ellie bares her teeth, spits a “fuck you”.
Then she’s forced into an elevator and she just fucking screams, kicking out and fighting with everything she has. It does nothing but bloody one woman’s nose.
They go to the sixth floor.
They strap Ellie down on an operating table. And no matter how hard she fights, no matter how loud she screams, no one comes to save her. No one breaks, no one bends. They just tie her down and then leave as quickly as they can.
Cowards. She locks her eyes on the surgeon, ignoring the nurses hovering at the edges of the room.
“I wanna talk to Marlene,” Ellie says, voice a little hoarse and shaking, but strong. Demanding. Joel might call her a force of nature. God, she hopes he’s alive. “I’ve got last words and shit,” she says and the man looks vaguely surprised. “You fucking owe me that much.”
There’s a moment where she thinks he’ll ignore her. Deny her even this. Knock her out and cut up her brain. She might be sick. She hopes she pukes on his perfectly clean scrubs. She hopes her blood stains everything in the room, his hands and the insides of his eyelids most of all.
Fuck all of you for thinking you can do this to me. Fuck all of you for thinking I won’t haunt the shit out of you.
Then again, if she’s gonna stick around anyone in this shitty ass world, it would be Joel. She almost laughs at that thought. Almost got rid of me, old man, but I’m back and I’m fucking impossible to lose now.
“Okay,” the doctor says and Ellie breathes a massive sigh of relief. “I’ll pass them on,” he offers, but she laughs.
“No. No, fuck you. I wanna tell her my fucking self. And they’re for Joel, not any of you assholes.” She glares and he looks almost like he regrets this. It’s not fucking enough. She hopes they all fucking burn.
“Right,” he says. Then he motions to one of the nurses and she ducks out of the room, returning a moment later with Marlene behind her.
Who else is watching? she wonders. Like this is some fucked up soap opera. Not that she actually really knows what a soap opera is beyond Joel’s shitty explanation, but that doesn’t matter. Not now.
“What is it?” Marlene asks, impatient. Like she has the fucking right .
Ellie takes a breath. One shot, don’t fuck it up. “When Joel wakes up without me, he’s gonna be pissed. He won’t listen to you, he won’t care. You said it yourself, he’s violent. Dangerous. He won’t leave me unless he knows it’s what I wanted. So if you don’t all wanna fucking die for hurting me, you gotta tell him this. Tell him I loved him.” She stumbles here, her voice breaking like glass. “Tell him it’s just like winter all over again. That it’ll all be okay, it’s just like winter.”
“What happened in winter?” the surgeon asks. Morbid curiosity. Killed the cat, doesn’t he know?
Ellie turns her head to face him, eyes sad, but smiling at the memory. “I saved his ass,” she answers, exhaling something like a laugh. Then her face crumples, and more tears streak silently down her temples, burying themselves in her hair. She sucks in a terrified breath, blows it out slowly, trying not to sob.
Marlene’s gone when she opens her eyes, and the doctor follows her out. Ellie’s alone with a nurse that’s hunched away from her. Like if she doesn’t look at the little girl on the table, the sin won’t stain her forever.
Ellie cries. There’s nothing else left to do.
The nurse doesn’t ever meet her eyes as she inserts an IV full of god knows what. But Ellie knows why. It’ll take her away, make her float off to sleep. Then she’ll be gone.
She feels the drugs working, but she fights it. Starts talking to the nurse, to the air, to the empty room. To Joel even.
(“I’m sorry. God, I’m so sorry. I know you still dream of Sarah. I know that still breaks you. I hope this doesn’t hurt you as much. I hope you don’t eat a fucking bullet the second you leave. I hope you find a way to be happy. I’m so fucking sorry it couldn’t be with me.”)
The doctor comes back when she knows she’s losing the fight. Maybe this was all fucking meant to be. But what God would be this fucking cruel?
“Do you have any kids? Or did you?” she asks and the doctor looks so fucking sad. Good, she thinks, he can choke on it.
“One. A daughter, but she’s almost grown now,” he says like he’s proud. The expression dies when he meets her eyes. They offer nothing like forgiveness.
“Does she remember? The world… before the outbreak?” She can feel herself blurring at the edges, but she fights.
“No, she’s- she was born after. She’s seventeen,” he says. “But I do, I remember. It was a better life. She deserves a better life.”
Ellie smiles, but it’s sad. She thinks that she deserved better too. Why is everything always so fucking sad? “It must’ve been really good for you all… to want, to want to bring it back so bad.” There’s a beat of silence and sleep tugs at her. No, she thinks, not yet. “I hope you get… what you want. I hope it works.” Tears spill over again, but she’s too tired to sob. “I almost… almost had it, y’know? Almost had everything . I just wanted a family—just wanted somebody to give a shit about me. Someone who would… would teach me how to swim. To play guitar.” She smiles, and she looks at the surgeon, who just looks so tired. She bets he’ll never sleep again. She almost laughs, but she doesn’t remember why.
Make sure you aim it like this… No, no, she’s still here. Doctor, drugs, cure. Dying, she’s dying. That’s important. This is important, she has to say this, even if it’s not to Joel. It matters, still matters.
“I think if… if I coulda picked… picked anyone. If I coulda picked anyone. To be my… my dad. It woulda been Joel.” She nods. “Yeah. Yeah, it woulda been Joel. He’d be. He’d be a good dad. And we were a good team.”
Oh, baby girl. It’s okay, it’s okay.
We stick together.
Endure… Endure and something. Fuck, shit, damnit, this was fucking important.
“Survive,” she mumbles. “It’s survive.”
Joel wakes up slowly, then all at once. He knows he’s being watched in the same second as he remembers what happened.
Marlene is there, fake relaxed in a hospital chair. She tracks every shift in his expression, and he knows what she probably sees. He can’t hide his worry though, he doesn’t know how. Not now, not after everything, not after coming so close to losing her.
She apologizes for her people knocking him out, but he doesn’t care. Doesn’t have it in him to care.
“And Ellie?” he asks, and, god, he knows he sounds desperate, but he is. He is. He’s been there before, he’s seen his little girl die in his arms, and he can’t- he can’t do that again.
“She’s fine. You saved her. You saved all of us.”
He breathes. It’s like breaking the surface after nearly drowning. It’s like he hasn’t taken a breath in years until right this moment, knowing she’s okay, she’s alive, she’s safe.
“You came all this way,” Marlene says, impressed, like she can’t quite believe it. “How’d you do it?”
“It was her. She fought like hell to get here.” He closes his eyes, briefly. “Maybe it was meant to be.”
Marlene sighs, stands, walks around. “I lost most my crew getting across the country. I pretty much lost… everything. And then you show up and somehow we find you just in time. Maybe it was meant to be.”
He exhales, shakily. “Take me to her,” he says as he sits up, putting his feet on the floor.
“You don’t have to worry about her anymore.” A stone in his stomach, sinking. “We’ll take care of—”
“I worry.” He puts a hand up to stop her. “Just… let me see her, please.”
“You can’t.” And his heart just fucking drops. “She’s being prepped for surgery.”
“The hell you mean ‘surgery’?” he asks, low and dangerous, as he stands.
She raises a hand to stop him, but he’s putting the pieces together, and the picture isn't something he wants to see. “The doctors tell me the cordyceps, the growth inside her, has somehow mutated. It’s why she’s immune. Once they remove it, they’ll be able to reverse engineer a vaccine.” Something dark unfurls in his chest as the cold seeps through him. “A vaccine.” She says it like a miracle, like she’s not condemning a kid to die. Not just a kid, Ellie. Ellie, who pulled down his walls and made herself a home inside, bringing light and fresh air with her.
“But it grows all over the brain.”
“It does.” And she sounds like she’s mourning, like this loss would be hers to carry. But he knows the weight of it, knows this is not a choice anyone with that burden could make.
Sinking. Rage burns slowly in his chest, and his lips curl up like a wild dog’s. “Find someone else.”
“There is no one else.”
“Listen, you are gonna show me where she is—” he starts, stalking towards her, but then the guard comes up behind him, putting him on the ground. His knees and palms sting.
“Stop,” Marlene commands, and oh there’s the high and mighty queen. Everything perfectly under her control. She’s a spider sitting pretty in the center of her web. “I get it,” she says and she sounds almost wrecked, but that’s not enough. Not nearly fucking enough. “But she was given the choice—she chose this.”
And that knocks the wind out of him. He feels like breaking. “Bullshit,” he says, but it feels empty. “She wouldn’t,” he starts, but she would. She would, wouldn’t she? “No,” he says instead, because he can’t. He can’t.
“It’s what she wanted,” Marlene insists, but something is off, something is wrong. “She made a deal. For Jackson. And for you. To make sure your brother’s group is the first to have access to the vaccine.” He shakes his head, but Marlene presses on. “She wanted me to tell you she loves you,” (and god, doesn’t that shatter him?), “and that it’ll all be okay, that it’s just like winter.”
He feels his whole body go rigid because that- that doesn’t make sense. Because winter was… it was David. It was him, waking up to her gone and needing him. Yes, she saved him. Yes, that could be it, that could be the message, but why not just say that? Why the secrecy?
In the midst of devastation, there is a lifeline and, of course, Ellie threw it.
He’s not listening anymore, and Marlene must take the silence as surrender. She tells the grunt to escort him out, and then he’s got a gun in his face and he feels that kind of icy calm that comes when there’s shit that needs to be done. He lets himself be cold and calculating. He lets himself be ruthless.
Joel stops as soon as he passes his backpack. The Firefly speaks, but he isn’t listening. He doesn’t care.
There’s a flash of movement and then the gun is in his hands now, the tables have turned. Joel gets his answer and then the man is dead.
If someone asks him later, how many Fireflies died in that hospital, he wouldn’t be able to answer. They were nothing but in between so he tore through them all.
He lets himself be the monster he knows he’s been called. He lets himself be nothing but Ellie is in danger. Maybe he lets himself be a father.
He finds two voice recorders. He listens carefully, and all he sees is red.
Whatever he is, it is violent, it is unforgiving, it is a force of nature.
Please, God, be okay. Please, God, don’t let me be too late.
The streak of violence ends when a girl who can’t be more than twenty drops her gun and puts her hands up.
“You’re after the kid?” she asks.
He doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t kill her. Maybe that’s something. Maybe that matters. He’s not sure he really cares. God forgot him a long time ago. Heaven is a long way out of reach.
When he doesn’t shoot, she grabs the strap of her bag except it’s not her bag. When she tosses it to him, he catches it, slings it over his shoulder. The stupid purple keychain clinks against a zipper.
“Sixth floor,” she says. “My father is the surgeon. I’m coming with you. I can talk him out of it.”
And Joel allows it with a gruff, “Where’s the stairs?”
“This way,” the girl says, taking off.
She leads him through all the best ways to stay hidden. One man sees them, and Joel has a knife in his throat before the girl can react. She looks stricken, like she’s done something terrible and only just realized it. But she doesn’t challenge him, she doesn’t call out to the others just a few feet away.
When they get to the operating room, he bursts in before the Firefly kid can stop him. He needs to see her. He has to know if his beautiful brilliant little girl is cut open like some sick science experiment. He is reminded vividly of the time in highschool when he dissected a frog and he tastes the bile rising up the back of his throat.
And then the door is open. And she’s right there. She’s alive, she’s alive, she’s alive.
The surgeon says something and darts to a tray to grab a scalpel. Joel damn near growls, and something dark and twisted and cruel in him wants to laugh. This is the last threat? This is all there is standing between him and his child?
He raises his gun.
But then the girl is in front of him, hands raised and pleading.
“Abby, don’t!” the surgeon says and he sounds so afraid. That, at least, is familiar.
The girl, Abby, forces eye contact with Joel. “Listen to me, he’s not gonna do anything. You gotta go. Take her and go .”
Her father protests, pissed off and desperate, the last thread of hope he had of pulling the world back together, slipping through his fingers.
Joel doesn’t listen. He lowers the gun. Abby exhales.
Then, his world narrows to Ellie, with only enough attention left to his surroundings to make sure there are no more threats to her .
He takes the IV out of her arm with a sort of tenderness that is stark against the brutality from just moments before. Then he scoops her up in his arms and, god , she’s so small it might shatter him.
The doctor dodges around Abby in one last attempt at being a hero, but Joel shoots in the kneecap without hesitation. He hits the ground hard . Abby is at his side in a second, but she’s looking Joel in the eyes as he backs out of the room. The expression is grateful, it is understanding.
“If he comes after her,” Joel growls.
“You’ll kill him. I know. He won’t.”
He nods. Then he’s gone.
Then Marlene is in the basement, but there’s no question. There is no other choice but this. There is no other way he leaves this place.
“It’s what she would’ve wanted,” she says, but Joel just sneers.
“Wanna know what happened last winter?” he asks, tightening his grip on Ellie a little more. “I woke up and she was gone. Trapped by some fucking hunters. And the whole time she was holdin’ on, waiting for me to come save her.” He fires the gun and the queen spider falls. She crawls. He steps around her.
He lays Ellie carefully across the backseat of the car, brushing a strand of hair out of her face.
“Please,” Marlene begs, but Ellie is so much smaller than she has any right to be. Ellie is so much better than anything else in this godforsaken world.
“You’d just come after her.” And it’s a death sentence.
Sleeping during a car ride is not something that existed in her life before Joel. There’s a different kind of peace to it, falling asleep in one city and waking up in another, miles apart.
Of course, there hadn’t been a lot of driving on their trip, since the hunters totaled their last car.
She had missed it.
He keeps glancing at her in the rearview, like any second she might disappear. Every time she’s still breathing. Every time she’s still there.
When she finally really wakes, she wakes slowly, with the world coming back pieces at a time. The movement of the car, the warmth of the air around her, the sunlight on her face.
She opens her eyes, squinting a little.
Even her bones feel heavy. Even her eyelids.
She turns her head, and relief courses through her as everything comes rushing back. Emotion wells up in her chest, so she closes her eyes briefly, ignoring the stray tears that slip down her face into her hair. She inhales slowly, then blows out a silent breath.
When she doesn’t feel like she’s about to fall apart, she looks back at him.
“I knew you’d get it,” she says softly. And he whips his head around, reaching one hand back to her.
She takes his hand, pulling herself into a sitting position, but not letting go.
“Ellie,” he says and he sounds wrecked. He takes a breath, looks back at the road, then back at her through the mirror. “Hey,” he tries again, with a little more control over the emotion in his voice. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” she replies, trying to smile. It comes out watery, but it’s the best she can do. “Yeah, I think so. Probably gonna add a couple new nightmares to the rotation, but… yeah.”
Quiet settles over them. She can tell he’s trying to figure out how to say something, so she waits patiently, playing absently with his hand.
Finally, he blows out a breath and meets her eyes in the mirror. “Marlene said—”
“Marlene’s a fucking liar,” she hisses. “Except for what I said about winter. And loving you. Unless she said they dragged me kicking and screaming, she’s full of shit.”
“Okay,” he says easily. Then, “She’s dead.”
“Good,” Ellie snarls.
Silence falls again, but it's easy because it’s them. He gets it and she knows there will never be any judgement. He looks back at the road for a few minutes.
“I love you, too.” He glances at her again in the mirror, and she beams. He smiles back, and, god, isn’t that a rare sight? It makes her grin even more.
She lets go of his hand to climb into the front seat. “I can’t wait to burn this stupid fucking gown- wait fuck my backpack—”
“It’s in the floor in the back,” he says, amusement plain in his voice.
Her eyes widen a little and she whips around, twisting to see before plopping back into the seat beside him. “Thank you,” she says, and it’s a little too much, a little too genuine, to be just about the bag.
“Hey, look at me,” he says gently, and she does. “You ain’t ever gotta thank me. Not for this, not for any of it.” He puts a hand on her shoulder, gives her one of those almost smiles that stay mostly in his eyes. “We stick together, right? That’s what family does.”
“Yeah,” she agrees softly, smiling back. “Yeah, okay. Family.”