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Marlene doesn’t really touch her. Ellie doesn’t notice it right away. She’s distracted at first by the not turning thing, and then Riley… and then Riley, and sneaking back into the QZ knowing getting caught is a death sentence. Wondering if maybe that would be better. When she finds the Fireflies again, Marlene almost shoots her. After, they immediately lock her up and she’s just alone and aching for Riley.
No one comes near her for a week. They slide her food a few times a day, and twice a day they let her out of the room to use the bathroom. There’s always a gun pointed at her head during those times.
They don’t talk to her like she’s human. They barely talk to her at all, and they look at her like she’s a feral animal waiting to attack them. And it’s not like she doesn’t get it, but it’s a week where her only human contact is a rotation of Fireflies who won’t even tell her their names. They lock her in a room for a week and they take all her shit away and the first time Marlene visits her, Ellie threatens to bite someone if they don’t fucking give her something to do.
Marlene smiles, just a little, and gets her a handful of worn novels and a deck of cards. It’s not much, but it’s better than pacing the room – fifteen steps one way, twenty steps the other – and staring at the water-stained ceiling wondering if this is all just delaying the inevitable.
But Marlene still keeps her distance. She doesn’t seem nervous the way the others do, but Ellie thinks she just hides things better. Marlene’s… hard to read.
When they all realize no, Ellie’s actually not turning, she isn’t locked in anymore, but Marlene says it’s not safe for her to leave the apartment. It’s better, but the Fireflies are still anxious around her and mostly avoid her. Marlene comes in one day, and there’s more emotion in her eyes than Ellie has ever seen. She says Ellie could be the key for a cure, a vaccine maybe. She says if they can get her to their lab out west, she could fix things.
She’s too busy to come around much while she’s arranging Ellie’s escape from Boston, but then it’s time to go and she smuggles Ellie out of the apartment building herself. Almost before she even knows what’s happening, the others with them are shot by soldiers, and Marlene is rushing Ellie into a room in an old restaurant and telling her to stay there until she can come back with help.
Alone with only a Firefly guard outside her room was bad. Alone in an abandoned restaurant where she knows someone could find her at any moment, wondering if Marlene is even going to make it back, is worse. What the hell is Ellie supposed to do if she doesn’t?
When Marlene does come back, she’s hurt and Ellie acts without thinking.
The first time Tess touches Ellie is to grab her arm and stop her from trying to stab Joel. Part of her realizes it’s the first time she’s touched anyone since Riley, but she brushes the thought away.
Marlene makes her let go, and Ellie uselessly grabs Marlene’s arm, trying to help. This is all her fault.
They don’t say goodbye. Not really.
“You’ll be fine,” Marlene says, and, “Now go with him.”
Ellie hesitates for a second, expecting – she doesn’t know what. A hug? Unlikely. A fucking pat on the shoulder? That’s just pathetic.
Well, it’s fine. They’ll see each other again soon, right?
It’s interesting, Ellie thinks. Joel definitely doesn’t like her. He ignores her whenever possible, only occasionally tossing an order at her. Tess is nicer than Joel, at least, but she doesn’t think Tess actually likes her, either. Or, more, she doesn’t think Tess really cares about her. She’s doing this for the guns, and maybe a little for the hope for a cure. Ellie is a job to her, a mission.
She’s okay with that, though. Tess has only known her for a few hours. Ellie isn’t expecting more. Honestly, Tess remind her of Marlene a bit.
Tess tells Ellie things about the infected, asks her questions. It’s nice having someone talk to her like a person again. She’s been alone a lot the last three weeks. She’s not very good at being alone. And Tess doesn’t seem scared to touch her, either, even after they find out about the whole bite thing. She doesn’t hesitate to grab Ellie’s hand to pull her onto places she can’t reach on her own, or to shove her out of the way of an infected.
The last time Tess touches Ellie is to grab her arm and drag her over to Joel, yanking her sleeve up to expose the bite. Ellie pulls away as soon as she can, pulls her sleeve back down over her knuckles, pulls away from the two of them as they fight. She understands Tess is just making a point, but it makes her feel gross inside. Like her body isn’t her body anymore.
Joel doesn’t touch her at all, and she’s glad for that. Marlene said to trust him and that his brother was a good man, but does that make him a good man? Ellie doesn’t know that, and until she does, she’d prefer he kept his distance.
Realizing someone is willing to die for you is weird.
She knew the Fireflies were ready to – and did – but leaving Tess to die, to die for her, is really fucking different. But, then, it’s not for her, is it? It’s for a cure. And people are willing to die for a cure. Ellie guesses she’ll have to get used to that. She’s not sure how.
The first time Joel touches her is an accident.
She’s half-convinced he’s going to abandon her the first chance he can, so when he tells her to stay close upstairs in the Capitol building, she practically glues herself to his side. They crouch behind some crates in a hallway as soldiers shoot at them and she follows when he moves from one to another, darting in so fast she accidentally slides between him and the crate.
He reaches up and catches his balance on the edge, and his arm brushes her back.
They’re close enough she can feel him shift away, just slightly, to give her room.
When they’re in the subway, he pauses going around a corner to put a mask on and she doesn’t bother. The spores don’t affect her any. But it means she sees the soldiers before he does, and she doesn’t hesitate to grab his arm and yank him down behind cover.
He goes easier than she expects him to, considering she doesn’t think he trusts her at all. Instinct, she supposes.
They make it to Bill’s town and she looks at the gate they need to go through. It’s jammed on one side, but it looks easy to fix, and there’s no barbed wire on this part.
“Here – boost me up,” she says. She saw him do it for Tess a few times, so she knows he can. Hell, she shoved Riley through that window in the mall, and she’s not exactly the strongest person there is.
“No, that’s not such a good idea.”
“Well, I can’t boost you up. How else are we gonna open it?”
“Alright,” Joel sighs after a moment. “Gimme your foot.”
She grabs his shoulder for balance, and is a little surprised how solid it is. He’s like a fucking brick wall.
He kind of flings her towards the top of the fence, and, shit, she was not expecting that. She grabs on fine, but that was a lot higher than she was expecting to go all at once and she feels it in her stomach. It reminds her a little of the rusty old swing one of her old schools had, and the weightless feeling at the top of the arc.
“Good job,” Joel says when she unjams the door and she knows he’s not exactly sincere, but she’ll take it.
When he gets caught in one of Bill’s traps, hanging from the roof by one ankle, she’s a little surprised that when she grabs him to stop the wild swinging, his hands briefly land on her shoulders, but she guesses he kinda has to and then she’s too distracted by the infected to think about it.
Joel doesn’t touch her more than necessary, and she knows that’s on purpose. And she appreciates that. It would be weird if some old guy she had only known for a couple days started touching her a bunch. She’d definitely think he was a total creep and probably stab him in the dick.
But then she shoots someone to save him.
And she kind of wishes for a minute someone would hug her.
She’s never killed anyone. Infected, yeah, but they’re not people anymore. They’re just bodies that don’t know to stop moving around. And she always knew she was going to have to kill people. When she aged out of school, she would have joined the military. She wanted to join the Fireflies and they definitely kill people.
But knowing and doing are two different things.
She feels all wobbly inside, and has to sit on a crate while Joel searches the body.
She really doesn’t get why he’s so angry, and it makes her feel even worse. It makes her feel like she did something wrong.
When he asks what’s wrong a few minutes later, she tries to explain. “I wasn’t trying to disobey you back there. You were taking a really long time and I thought, maybe he’s gotten into trouble.”
“It don’t matter what you thought. I need you to listen to me.”
“I do,” she protests. “It’s just that…”
Doesn’t he get it? He’s all she has. If anything happens to him, she’s alone and she’s absolutely fucked. She has no way of getting out of Pittsburgh without him. She’d be lucky if all the hunters did was kill her. And the cure dies with her.
She sighs. “Whatever, Joel.”
Which is why she’s so surprised when he hands her a rifle and asks her to have his back.
“Alright now,” he says. “You're gonna wanna lean right into that stock, 'cause that is gonna kick a hell of a lot more than any BB rifle.”
He puts his hand on her shoulder and presses gently to show her what he means. Objectively she realizes how big Joel is, when he’s boosting her onto something high or when she’s watching him take down an infected or a hunter with his bare hands. But that’s different from his hand on her shoulder, completely covering it. It makes her feel small.
It makes her feel safe.
Henry is careful not to get too close to her, in that way Joel was at first, especially when they get stuck alone together. Adult man, teenaged girl. She can tell he’s trying not to make her uncomfortable. She trusts him a little more because of that. He pushes her out of the way of a clicker when one gets too close, boosts her and Sam through the window coming out of the sewers, shoves her and Sam down at the same time when a hunter throws a Molotov at them. He treats her a lot like Sam, she realizes after a while.
She wonders if this is what being part of a family feels like.
Sam bumps her once with his shoulder when they’re talking, and then immediately looks embarrassed.
They spend the night in the radio tower. Joel looks a little worried when she wakes up, but that’s just his face. He even says, “Good morning.”
She wonders, a little, if he’s teasing her about sleeping so long, but it’s hard to tell with him. She’s never actually heard him make a joke before.
It’s a beautiful sunny morning, there’s actual food cooking that smells amazing, and Henry seems like he’s in a great mood. It’s going to be a good day, Ellie thinks, as she goes to wake Sam up.
It’s not a good day.
Sam – what’s left of Sam – knocks her through the door into the main room. He’s smaller than her, but his body is strong, stronger than he was before, and she’s barely managing to keep him from ripping her face off. She can hear Henry and Joel shouting, but all she can see is Sam’s face, covered in fungus, and eyes gone dead.
She keeps saying his name like it’ll do something, like it’ll bring him back.
And then there’s a gunshot, and another, and he stops fighting.
She shoves him off her, and scrambles back from his body. “Oh, shit...”
“Ellie?” Joel crouches next to her and his hand is on her shoulder. “Ellie, are you alright?”
“Uh-huh,” she says, but she’s not, and she can’t stop looking at Sam’s body. “Oh my god.”
She can feel Joel’s hand on her back, the way he nudges her backwards, very gently, like he’s afraid she’ll break as much as Henry has as he puts himself between her and the gun Henry points at him.
And then Henry is gone too.
“Why is it so hot?” Ellie whines. She’s so damn sweaty. It’s running down her back, because of course she’s wearing long sleeves, even though they’re in the middle of fucking nowhere. Her fucking hair is sweaty because Joel keeps talking about sunburn and making her wear a hat. Her fucking feet are fucking sweaty.
“Global warning.”
“Huh?”
“It’s just – it’s just somethin’ people used to say. Look.” Joel points off at something in the distance. “See that bridge over there? We’ll cross it, and then find a spot we can refill our canteen, and you can cool down a bit there.”
She nods. “Okay. So. Air conditioning. Was that real or just a book thing?”
“It was real.” Joel sighs. “And it was good.”
“And you could just have that in your house? Did you have it?”
Joel actually snorts. “Yeah, it was Texas. It was pretty bad, though.”
“How could air conditioning be bad? It sounds amazing.”
“Cheap. Didn’t work great. Durin’ really bad heatwaves, we’d go to the movies or the mall to try and cool down.”
“You and your brother?”
His face tightens. “Yeah. Sometimes. C’mon, hurry up now.”
There’s nothing to actually hurry up to or for. She’s just once again stepped over the invisible line of things she’s allowed to ask Joel. Usually questions about the world are okay. But questions about his life are usually off-limits. Sometimes she can ask about his brother, but sometimes he won’t answer and he’ll get all closed off.
They reach the bridge a few moments later. It’s one of those old wooden ones, and Ellie goes over to the side to look down at the water. It looks clean and it’s a lot smaller than the one in Pittsburgh. This place is really pretty. She never realized how beautiful the world was outside of the QZ.
“Ellie,” Joel says.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m moving.”
So of course that’s when she takes a step, one of the boards breaks under her foot, and her leg goes right through. Only the dozen or more times she’s jumped onto a wobbly pallet has her reacting quick enough to grab at the bridge while simultaneously pitching her weight forward.
“Fuck!”
She can feel a fat lot of nothing under her foot and this awkward half-crouch isn’t going to last long. Shit.
“Ellie!”
A second later, Joel grabs her arms and pulls her free. She stumbles forward, almost crashing into him when her leg gives out. He has to steady her on her feet.
“Are you alright?”
She takes a cautious step and her leg throbs, but holds. “Sorta.”
They see the blood at the same time.
“Goddamnit,” Joel sighs. “You better lean on me.”
He holds his arm out. He looks so damn uncomfortable, and if her leg didn’t hurt so much, she’d probably let him off the hook and limp her own way off the bridge. But it does, and so she leans on his arm and lets him guide her over to a big flat rock a few feet from the bridge.
“Alright,” he says, crouching in front of her. “Let’s see.”
She pulls her jean leg up, wincing as the rough fabric scrapes over the wound. “Oh, man.”
“That’s a good one,” Joel says mildly, taking his backpack off.
There’s a big chunk gouged out of her shin. It’s not as deep as she thought it was, luckily, but it’s bleeding like a bitch and it hurts.
She’s not a baby or anything. Normally when she gets hurt, like scrapes or little cuts, she just deals with them. And that’s if she even notices them. She’s constantly finding bruises she doesn’t remember getting. That’s just the reality of travelling like this. She wasn’t particularly precious about them back in school, either.
But Joel’s already getting out the first aid supplies and she can tell cleaning it out is going to hurt and maybe for once she just doesn’t want to deal with it herself.
She expects him to be rougher. She’s used to overworked nurses with barely enough time to slap a bandage on. He’s not, and she studies his face to keep from looking at her leg.
Joel has a lot of scars. Like, a lot. On his face, on his hands, on his arms. He has an old bullet wound on his shoulder that bothers him sometimes, but she only knows that because once she leaned on it when he was boosting her onto something and he hadn’t been able to hide his wince. He wouldn’t say much about it, just that he was shot a long time ago, but she’s been careful where she puts her hand since.
It was strange, realizing she could hurt him, and realizing at the same time she didn’t want to.
“You ever break a bone?”
“Your leg ain’t broken,” Joel snaps, weirdly intense about it.
“I… know?” She winces. “I’m just trying to – ow – distract myself. Sooo… have you?”
He rolls his shoulders. “A few.”
She lifts her left hand, giving a half-hearted wave. “I broke this wrist a couple years ago. They had to reset the bone and shit. It hurt.”
“They don’t numb you for that?”
She shrugs. “Not unless it’s real bad. Like if the bone comes out of the skin or something.”
“Christ,” he mutters, almost too low for her to hear. “How’d you break it?”
“There was this kid at school. He liked to pick on the little kids, take their snacks and stuff. Like who does that? I caught him doing it once so I beat the shit out of him.”
“You broke your wrist beatin’ some boy up?”
Even though it hurts, she grins. “No, like a week later he pushed me off the bleachers and pretended it was an accident. And then I kicked him in the balls till he puked.”
“Before or after you got the cast put on?” Joel asks, and she’s pretty sure he’s being sarcastic, but…
“Before. Soon as I got up.”
“Well, near as I can figure, that serves him right,” he says, and sits back on his heels. “There, you’re all set. Think you can walk on it?”
She nods.
And she can. But it hurts and she’s limping. She can tell Joel is slowing down so it’s easier for her to keep up, and that makes it worse. She’s trying so hard not to let him down, to show him he can trust her and she’s not just some helpless little kid, and then she goes and puts her leg through a bridge.
And she’s still fucking hot.
And then she splits off from Joel for a minute for a bathroom break and gets her period.
The only reason she doesn’t scream is because Joel would come running and her pants are still around her ankles, and that’d just be awkward.
She limps back to where he’s waiting a couple minutes later.
“I’m done,” she announces, taking her backpack off and throwing it on the ground. “I’m just going to curl up in a ball and die here. Tell the Fireflies I’m sorry.”
Joel rubs his face. He sighs, then leans down to pick up her backpack. “C’mon, Ellie. Just a bit more.”
“You say that constantly and then a bit more is like five miles.”
“C’mon.”
She almost ignores him. She’s tired, her leg hurts, she’s hot, and she can feel the cramps starting. But he starts walking, and, well, they stick together.
Also he has all her stuff.
This time, though, “a bit more” is only a few minutes. Right as she’s debating bitching some more, the trees thin out again and she sees what he means. There’s a patch of shallow, gentle river, still shaded by the trees on the bank. It’s immediately cooler than she’s been in days.
“We’ll stay here tonight,” Joel says, setting her backpack against the base of a tree. “And how about you turn in early and we’ll leave right at dawn tomorrow? Get most of the walkin’ done by noon that way, before it gets so hot.”
“Okay. Yeah.”
Joel pauses next to her, gives her shoulder a quick squeeze, and goes off to do Joel-stuff.
It makes the feeling of needing to scream calm down.
She’s not exactly sure when she realizes it. Not by Illinois. Somewhere in Iowa, probably. She’s walking backwards partly out of boredom, partly for the ease of annoying Joel while they walk. It’s Iowa. There is absolutely nothing else to do besides annoy Joel.
“You’re gonna break an ankle,” Joel says, not for the first time.
“On what?”
He ignores that, catching her by the handle of her backpack and turning her to face forward. “You could at least pretend to be payin’ attention.”
“Why?” she asks, gesturing around them at all the nothing. It’s bigger than she means it to be and she smacks him in the shoulder by accident, but she rolls with it and pretends she did it on purpose. “Did you not notice it’s kind of fucking flat? I think if something shows up we’ll see it coming, Joel!”
It’s not a great joke. It’s not even really a joke.
But Joel chuckles.
And Ellie can’t stop herself from grinning. He almost never laughs at her jokes, even the ones she’s pretty sure he secretly thinks are funny, not even the ones he very occasionally even admits he thinks are funny.
He’s always worried. Worried about infected, worried about hunters, worried about them having enough food or somewhere safe to sleep. And he’s sad. She doesn’t know why – that’s firmly in the area of things she can’t ask about without him shutting down – but it’s pretty damn obvious.
Like, look at him. Dude’s sad.
So making Joel laugh, even just a chuckle, is kind of her new favourite thing.
And then he catches her grinning, and he tenses and walks past her.
Shit, she realizes.
He’s scared.
Joel high-fives her after they figure out how to cross the river, and she has to hide how pleased she is.
Teamwork indeed.
Tommy hugs him, and she’s never seen Joel’s face look like that. He looks surprised, like he expected Tommy to punch him more than he expected a hug, and his eyes go soft. He also looks like no one has hugged him a very long time and he’s not entirely sure what to do with himself.
Ellie gets that. The last person she hugged was Riley, when they thought they were both dying. Before that, she couldn’t tell you. The military schools aren’t exactly hugging environments.
With everything that happens with the bandits, she doesn’t even really notice it in the moment. She’s too worked up and it’s only looking back when things are quieter that she thinks about it.
The way, as she babbled about what had happened, Joel put his hand on her shoulder, like he had to check to make sure she was really there. The way she was too busy gesturing and talking to see his hands between them, how he held them like he didn’t know what to do with them. The way he caught her by both shoulders to ask if she was hurt.
Oh, she realizes, sitting in that silly pink bedroom. Joel is scared of her getting hurt, really hurt. Like his daughter.
And it makes it worse that he’s pawning her off on Tommy.
She never took Joel for a fucking coward.
“What are you so afraid of?” she asks because God, she at least wants him to say it. “That I'm gonna end up like Sam?” She almost says Sarah, but backs off at the last second. “I can't get infected. I can take care of myself.”
Joel scoffs. “How many close calls have we had?”
“Well, we seem to be doing alright so far.”
And then he’s shouting at her and she’s shocked into silence. “And now you'll be doing even better with Tommy!”
Coward, she thinks again.
“I'm not her, you know.”
He doesn’t get it at first. “What?”
“Maria told me about Sarah. And I—”
“Ellie.” He cuts her off, and for a second she can tell she hurt him. Good, she thinks, selfishly, and then regrets it. That isn’t what she wants at all. “You are treading on some mighty thin ice here.”
“I'm sorry about your daughter, Joel, but I have lost people too.”
“You have no idea what loss is.”
She kind of wishes he’d just hit her instead. He would never, but it’d probably hurt less. She hasn’t told him about Riley, but he knows she’s an orphan. Marlene promised once to tell her more about her mom, but the only time Ellie worked up the courage to ask, Marlene had brushed her off, promised later, always later. And now, if Joel’s right, Marlene might be dead and she’ll never know anything more about her mom. All she’ll ever have is a letter and a knife.
And he knows about Sam. Sam died still touching her. She felt his body die.
“Everyone I have cared for has either died or left me. Everyone—” She shoves him. “Fucking except for you!”
Then she’s crying like a total baby, and Joel’s just staring at her.
“So don't tell me that I would be safer with someone else because the truth is I'd just be more scared.”
And there it is, laid out in front of them. The thing she’s spent fourteen years trying to hide. She admitted it to Sam, a little, how scared she is all the time. The only time she’s ever felt safe is with Joel. And he’s just been waiting to make her someone else’s problem the first chance he could.
“You're right,” he says, quiet and cold. “You're not my daughter, and I sure as hell ain't your dad. And we are going our separate ways.”
When Tommy bursts in talking about bandits outside, it’s almost a relief. She knows what to do now, at least. If something hadn’t happened there, she’s pretty sure she would have just spent the rest of her life with her feet glued to that bedroom floor, frozen in place.
She doesn’t understand at first when Joel tells her to get off her horse. Looks at him for the first time since the ranch house, until he tells her again.
He grabs her hand to help her onto the back of the horse, and there’s no hesitation in it.
She really wishes Joel would wake up.
When he wanted to leave her back in Jackson, she knew she would miss him. But she didn’t know how much she would miss him.
She barely sleeps. There’s always so much to do, and she’s always so fucking scared. She’s constantly melting buckets of snow for water, hauling wood back to the house for fires. She hasn’t found an axe or anything, so she’s stuck using dead tree branches and whatever furniture she can find already broken or break herself. Tables, chairs, sometimes even cupboard doors that have been ripped off the hinges.
She has to be careful with the fires, too. Needs them to cook, and to keep them from freezing to death, but they’re risky. She finds an old washing machine drum to burn them in, and the basement floor is solid concrete, but she’s still terrified of burning the house down. Worse, even though she hasn’t seen another person, she has heard infected screaming in the distance and she worries constantly about the fire attracting them.
There’s never enough food for any of them. She works her way through the neighbourhood house by house, bringing anything she can back to the one they’re hiding in. She usually takes Callus with her so she can load up the sled with whatever she finds and so he can try to graze on the grass under the snow. She doesn’t like leaving Joel, but she ventures out until she finds a farm and almost cries when she finds a barn still loaded with hay. It’s a lucky break, one of the only ones she’s been given.
It won’t last forever, she knows, and it’s a long trip to bring it back, but it’ll help keep Callus going a little longer.
And that’s basically her mantra about everything. She finds a bottle of acetaminophen and she wishes it was something stronger, but maybe it’ll help Joel a little. She shoots squirrels and rabbits and there’s hardly any meat on them, but it’s enough to keep them alive a little longer. If she just keeps Joel hanging on a little longer, maybe things will be okay.
When she’s not looking for food or collecting water or firewood or checking for signs of infected nearby or doing the million other things she has to do, when she’s exhausted and it’s too dark to do anything more, she still doesn’t sleep well. When she closes her eyes, she keeps seeing Joel on the ground surrounded by all that blood.
She wakes up panicked that he’s not breathing. Constantly.
Eventually, she starts sleeping with her hand on his chest so she can feel it rising and falling, feel the still solid beat of his heart.
Joel’s a sleep mumbler. He’s never loud – he’s been surviving too long to be loud – but when he has nightmares, he mumbles. And Joel has a lot of nightmares. About Sarah, probably, she realizes now, but she’s never asked. When they were travelling, she’d sometimes not be able to sleep or wake up and she’d hear him. If it lasted too long, she’d get up and get water or go off to pee, even if she didn’t really need to. He’s a light sleeper, so it always woke him when she moved around.
She hasn’t heard him say anything in weeks. Just pain noises.
“Okay,” she says when she finishes packing her bag. Her supplies are low, especially her ammo. “I’m going to try and get some food.”
She touches Joel’s forehead. He’s burning up, but still shivering. She knows what that means. She’s trying not to think about it.
She grinds up the last of the acetaminophen into a powder and mixes into a little water. Hopefully she can find more while she’s out, but she wants him to be as comfortable as possible while she’s gone. Maybe it’ll lower his fever a little, too.
Not that she believes it’s helping much, but she has to tell herself that it’s doing something.
David gets too close.
She’s not even sure why it feels that way at first. But she remembers how Joel was with her in those early days, how careful he was to give her space. She remembers Henry doing the same, then shoving her out of the way of a runner, a quick, sharp push that he apologized for afterwards. Not that she’d minded.
When a clicker grabs her through the broken window, David grabs her and she expects a shove. He pushes her down away from the clicker, but he doesn’t actually let her go until she stumbles away.
But probably the clicker was just too strong, she tries to rationalize. It doesn’t mean anything.
Or when they’re running through the stairs and he grabs her arm to pull her through the door like she wasn’t getting there fine on her own. Or when he touches her back while he passes behind her, his hand staying on her arm a second too long. Or, after the infected are dead, when he smacks her shoulder like they’re old friends.
She’s overreacting.
When she wakes up in a cage, she wishes she’d been overreacting.
He tries to feed her a bunch of bullshit alongside the deer, and she throws the plate at him.
“You're so full of shit,” she scoffs, standing. She grabs onto the bar of the cage door to keep herself from fiddling with her fingers. She doesn’t want to look nervous in front of him.
“On the contrary, I've been, ah…” David stands up. “Been quite honest with you. Now I think it's your turn. It's the only way I'm gonna be able to convince the others.”
She doesn’t get it. “Convince them of what?”
“That you can come around,” he says, moving closer to the gate. “You have heart. You're loyal. And you're special.”
He puts his hand on hers.
“Oh...”
She gets it now.
So she breaks his fucking finger.
It doesn’t exactly work, or at least trying to get his keys doesn’t work, and she gets a bloody nose for her efforts, but she’s glad she hurt him. Maybe it’ll make him think twice about touching her again.
“He tried to—” she says and then she’s crying too hard to say anything else.
Joel pulls her into a hug. “Oh, baby girl... It's okay. It's okay.”
“Joel.” She half doesn’t believe he’s real.
“It's okay now,” he says, and she’s never heard his voice sound like this, this soft. His hand is cradling the back of her head, and his arm is around her back and she’s never, ever been held like this. He sways gently and she realizes he’s rocking her, just a little.
“Hey, you,” she says, her voice thick.
He pulls back, but his hands are still on her face, gently lifting it so she looks at him. “Look at me. I’m never leaving you again, do you understand?”
She nods, and he pulls her to her feet. She really doesn’t want to stay here any longer, and the place is burning fast. He wraps his arm around her back and she lets herself lean on him. She lets him shield her, just a little, from the storm.
They don’t get as far as either of them would like, but she can tell Joel is hurting and she keeps stumbling and almost falling until he catches her. He looks worried.
The house is tiny. Maybe it’s a cabin? Ellie isn’t sure how long they walked, or where they are now. But the windows are mostly intact and it has a fireplace, and she starts making a fire while Joel looks around the place.
Joel brings in a pot of snow to melt, and eventually she gets the blood cleaned off and changed into clean, dry clothes that he finds in a closet in the other room. They don’t fit perfectly, but she’s warmer and she’s not wearing those jeans anymore.
There are blankets, too, and Joel cocoons her in them. She thinks about arguing, but the next thing she knows, she’s asleep.
She wakes up because she can’t hear Joel breathing. Like she has for weeks, she reaches out to put her hand on his chest to reassure herself.
And he’s not there.
Ellie jerks up. “Joel?”
“Right here,” he says. “I’m right here.”
He’s fine. She’s fine. They’re fine.
She bursts into tears.
“Oh, Ellie.” Joel is there a moment later, and he pulls her into his arms again. “I know, baby girl. I know.”
She clenches her fingers in the front of his shirt, the worn fabric soft against her fingers. She knows his wound is right there, a few inches away, and she knows it’s sensitive but she just needs to hold onto something or she’s going to fall apart. She needs to hold onto him.
She isn’t sure how long she cries for, but she cries until she’s wrung out and exhausted and the front of Joel’s shirt is wet.
Eventually, it stops and she knows she should probably move away. It’s probably hurting him to sit like this and, anyways, she’s fine. She keeps telling herself she’s fine.
But Joel doesn’t seem to be moving, besides rubbing her back in long, slow strokes.
She leans her head on his shoulder. She hasn’t slept well in weeks, and she’s so tired.
“You’re safe with me,” Joel says, soft and low.
She knows. For the first time in too long, she knows.
The giraffe’s fur is rougher than she expects, coarser than a horse’s. She’s never seen anything like this, let alone touched it. She has so many questions she wants to ask Joel later, but for now she’s content to stand on this roof with him in the warm spring sun and watch the giraffes.
He tries to give her an out, and she’s too guilty to take it.
Later, she wonders what if she had.
Maybe things would be okay now.
She gets dressed in an old gas station bathroom and takes stock of things that are different about her body than they were before she woke up in the back of that truck. There’s… a decent amount. She doesn’t like it.
Her ribs are bruised and sore. Nothing broken, probably – she remembers all too well how that felt last winter, after David – but she’s black and blue and they hurt when she presses on them. There’s a bruised mark inside her elbow, from a needle maybe?
Oddest to her is the patch of skin that’s just missing from her arm. Right on the edge of the bite, where the small white fungal spots spread out from it, is a square of skin that looks as though it’d been cut out of her.
Things have been done to her body while she wasn’t there for it.
The truck breaks down outside of Jackson a couple days later. It’s been a slow trip. Joel’s been being extra careful with the roads he takes.
The scab on her arm pulls when he pulls her up onto the ledge and she can’t ignore this anymore.
“Hey, wait,” she says.
When Joel touches her, it makes her want to scream. He puts a hand on her shoulder or her back and all she can think is, Liar. She pulls away, and it makes him worry and he reaches out and it feels like he’s suffocating her and she hates herself and him in equal measures. He talks more about Sarah and she can tell how hard it still is for him. Last autumn she would have done anything for this, and now she can’t stand it.
That’s what they call irony, she thinks.
The Joel that exists in Jackson is weird. He’s nervous around people, awkward in conversation. He seems most like himself when something happens, when he goes out to patrol or deals with the occasional infected that wander up to the town walls. It confuses her at first, watching him, because she’s never seen him be hesitant like this. But then she realizes.
Joel forgot how to be a person.
She wonders how long that took. How many years in this world – or if it was just losing Sarah? She looks at the picture of Joel and his daughter, in the simple frame she found for him so it wouldn’t get beat up more, and she wonders what it takes to change a man that played guitar and went to his daughter’s soccer games and took her to stupid teen movies into someone who only exists to survive.
Early in autumn, Ellie wakes up and Joel isn’t there. That’s immediately weird. He’s become a creature of habit and he’s always up already when she gets up. He makes her breakfast every day.
There’s a sad excuse for a note, just two words scrawled across a scrap of paper. Gone out.
She eats an apple and tries not to feel lost as she heads off to her early morning shift at the stables.
Tommy’s there already, like he usually is. He’s good with horses and she’s been learning a lot from him.
He’s also in an absolutely foul mood today. He doesn’t snap at her or anything, but he’s short with her and he’s enough like Joel that she finds him easy to read. Neither of them will admit to it, though, how similar they are.
“Okay, dude, what is your fucking problem?” she finally asks. “Did I do something to piss you off?”
Tommy curses under his breath. “No. Goddammit, no, sweetheart, it’s not you.”
He calls her things like that a lot. Sweetheart, honey. It made her nervous at first, until Joel noticed and explained, a little awkwardly, that it was mostly just a southern thing and he’d ask Tommy to stop if she wanted him to.
She didn’t, she’d realized.
“Did I miss something? You’re in a mood, Joel’s just fucked off somewhere - what’s going on?”
He rubs his face. He looks tired. “Do you know what day it is?”
“Uh… Tuesday?” She doesn’t have school so it’s either Tuesday or Thursday and she’s pretty sure it’s Tuesday.
“No, I mean the date. Did they teach you in Boston what September twenty-sixth is?”
“Oh. Outbreak Day. Right.”
“Also happens to be Joel’s birthday.”
Oh, Jesus.
“Wait,” she realizes. “I thought – I thought Sarah died on Outbreak Day.”
Joel’s daughter died on his birthday? That’s just fucking tragic.
Tommy nods, very slightly. “It’s just not a great day for us. Sorry for takin’ it out on you.”
One of the things she likes about Tommy is he’s easy to talk to. Joel is… complicated, to say the least. It’s easy for her to stumble onto something that hurts him, and he’s gotten better at saying when it’s too much instead of just shutting her out, but she knows it can still be hard for him.
“Does it get easier?” she asks.
“Does what get easier?”
“I…” She doesn’t know how to say it. “I know it’s not the same, but my, um. My best friend died a year ago. A year and almost five months ago. She was bit, too. I stayed with her until it was almost too late. Then she made me leave, but I… heard it.”
Forty-eight hours max, people said. Two days. She’d thought they’d have two days together. Lose our minds together, Riley said, but then she was sick and Ellie wasn’t. And then it became, I’m not going to make you have to kill me.
They got thirty-four hours.
Ellie heard the bullet that took Riley away. She was too much of a coward to go back for the gun.
“You learn to live with it,” Tommy says, which isn’t really what she asked. “You find reasons to learn to live with it.”
Joel said the same thing. She had though. Forty-eight hours turned into seventy-two and then ninety-six and then it had been a week and nothing was happening and Marlene said she could be the key to a cure. Then Marlene and Tess died for it, and Joel got so hurt, and Ellie killed for it, and it was all for nothing.
So what is she supposed to do now?
“What is it for you?” she asks.
“This,” Tommy says simply.
“Horses?”
He snorts. “No, smartass. Jackson. My family. Maria and Joel and you.”
“Oh,” she says, surprised.
“Why don’t you finish up and head out?” Tommy says, reaching over to give her shoulder a squeeze. “Take the day off and I’ll keep my mood to myself.”
“Nah, I’m good. You’re not nearly as bad as Joel. Especially how he used to be.”
“Alright,” he says. “Well, how about you tell me about that?”
Joel doesn’t come home until dinner. He’s covered in blood and her heart leaps into her throat until he reassures her it’s just from infected, not his. He showers, eats the dinner she made without saying much, and goes out to sit on the porch with a glass of liquor.
She hangs around the kitchen feeling utterly useless, and then goes outside.
“I’ll wash ‘em in the mornin’,” he says when he hears her open the back door. “Don’t worry about it.”
“That’s not – sure, whatever. I just wanted to say I’m going to bed.”
“Alright,” Joel says. “G’night.”
“Night.”
She wants to say something, but she doesn’t know how. She kind of wants to hug him, but she’s been so mad at him and so much of a dick and she’s not even sure he’d want her to right now.
So she just goes to her room instead.
It takes her hours to fall asleep, and she doesn’t sleep long. She dreams about Riley and she wakes up crying at two in the morning.
She can’t hear Joel in his room across the hall, the way she usually can. He sleeps with his door cracked even though she knows he’d sleep better behind a locked door, because she still gets panicky when she wakes up and doesn’t know where he is. She doesn’t remember hearing him come in, either, and when she creeps downstairs, she finds him in the same spot as she left him.
He turns when she opens the door. “Hey, what are you doin’ up?”
“Bad dream,” she says and sits on the porch swing next to him, pulling her feet up under her.
“It’s cold,” Joel says, reaching up to pull the blanket they leave on the back down over her. “You shoulda put a jacket on.”
“I’m fine,” she says, but lets him tuck the blanket around her. He worries.
He lied, she thinks but she can’t force herself to be angry at him in this moment. He’s tired and he’s been drinking and he’s just… sad. And maybe this day has been shitty enough for him without her yelling at him, too.
She’s not even sure she wants to yell at him.
The thing is… she thought she didn’t remember anything from the hospital. Joel told her she was on a lot of drugs. She thought it was all a blank, until just a couple days ago.
It was just a flash. Just the feeling of Joel carrying her, and his voice. She doesn’t remember what he was saying, just how scared he sounded. She’s never heard him sound afraid like that.
Before the hospital, he’d promised to teach her how to play guitar and how to swim. Both are works in progress, but she’d recognized them at the time for what they were. A promise that the hospital wasn’t the end of them being together, that they would have a life together after.
He promised once never to leave her again, and she’d believed him.
She still believes him.
“Sorry about the bad dream, kiddo,” Joel says.
So. He lied to her about the Fireflies. And she doesn’t know why, exactly, but she knows that everything Joel has ever done has been to protect her. He wouldn’t lie to her just to keep her from getting mad at him, only if he thought it was the best thing for her.
She just… misses Riley. And she’s so tired of everything being her fault.
Would it be so bad to let herself believe him?
Ellie leans in against Joel’s side, resting her head against his shoulder. A moment later, his arm settles around her. Her hair’s down, and he strokes it gently.
“You wanna do somethin’ tomorrow?”
“Don’t I have school?”
“Not if you stop remindin’ me,” he drawls. “It’s deer season. Saw a real fat buck earlier today.”
“Yeah. I’d like that.”
“Look,” Joel says, nudging her. “You can see the Big Dipper there.”
“Do you know any of the others?”
“Hm. Maybe a few. Let me see what I remember.”
It’s a good life they have here in Jackson. She has a home and a family for the first time in her life.
She sits on the porch as Joel points out constellations, half-convinced he’s making most of them up, and lets herself remember how to be happy.