Chapter Text
There’s more blood than she expects, when she’s bit.
Riley tears up one of her spare t-shirts so Ellie can wrap her arm up, but they have to change it twice before it stops soaking through. Weirdly, Riley’s hand doesn’t bleed as much. There’s a bit of blood, because, well, in teeth versus skin, teeth win, but she just dabs it away with a scrap of cloth and some water and it stops pretty quick.
Worried about making it bleed again, Ellie leaves the wrapping on hers for so long that neither of them notice that the whorls of infection on her arm don’t match the infection creeping up Riley’s arm.
There’s more blood than she expects, when Riley’s gone.
The Fireflies give her real bandages and water and stuff to get cleaned up with, but none of them get close enough to touch her so she has to struggle through it alone.
She ends up washing out the piece of torn cloth that was wrapped around her arm. She remembers Riley wearing the shirt it came from. The blood doesn’t all come out, but the Fireflies took all her shit and right now this is the only thing she has of Riley’s. Even torn and bloodstained, Ellie isn’t ready to let it go.
It feels like a betrayal when the first thing she thinks is the Fireflies are idiots. Or maybe they just think she’s an idiot. She can’t think of any other reason they’d immediately forget they took her by fucking force.
She’s going to die. It might be taking a little longer or something, but she’s going to die and it looked — it seems like it’ll hurt, the longer it takes. She thinks after fourteen years of the exceptionally shitty life FEDRA has provided her, she should be allowed to die alone, seeing as she managed not to get herself executed.
They took the gun away, but… well, there are other ways, if she wants to cut things short.
Or maybe she’ll just lose her mind alone.
But she’s going to be alone.
Honestly, when she stops screaming and cursing at the door, she gets a little judgemental. Escaping from the Fireflies probably shouldn’t be as easy as sneaking out of FEDRA school. By which she means, she opens the window and climbs out.
It’s not exactly an easy climb, which is probably why they didn’t expect it. The window she’s on doesn’t connect to the fire escape, so she has to climb out onto the ledge and then very, very carefully lean over to grab the drainpipe. From there, she shimmies down it until she can lean over again and grab onto the fire escape.
A vague part of her knows she would have been scared before. Historically, she hates heights. Riley always makes fun of her for it.
Made. Made fun of her.
If she falls, what does it matter at this point?
She pulls herself up onto the fire escape and spends a moment catching her breath — and deciding. She could go up. It’s a tall building, and she wasn’t in one of the highest floors. Fourth, maybe. She’s not sure if she’d die right away from falling from the fourth floor, but she definitely would if she kept going up.
It takes a bit for her to decide to go down the fire escape instead. In the end, it’s probably what gets her caught before she’s even a block away.
She wakes up in a different room this time, chained to a radiator. When she pulls as hard as she can on the chain, the bite on her arm opens up again.
There’s more blood than she expects.
The rain washes away a lot of the blood from the the man Joel kills. She’s a little surprised there isn’t more on Joel, especially his hands. She’s seen bodies that were beaten to death before. Rebels, or Fireflies, maybe. It’s never really clear which or what the difference is. Usually there’s more blood, but it’s raining hard and most of it is gone in a few moment
It’s raining hard enough, in fact, that she’s glad when Joel and Tess decide they’re going to stop for the night. The ground is soft and she keeps slipping and almost eating shit. Plus it’s starting to get really fucking cold.
The building they choose isn’t exactly warm — there’s a big hole in the roof — but there’s enough shelter that she isn’t getting soaked anymore.
She wipes water off her face, catching her breath. “What now?”
They exchange looks.
“You sit over there,” Tess eventually says. “We’re going to secure this place. You don’t move a muscle.”
“Ooo-kay,” she says and finds a reasonably dry spot to sit. The whole place is full of grass and shit and it’s not exactly comfortable, but she’s slept in worse places.
Tess and Joel go through the building, which apparently isn’t very big because it only takes them a couple minutes. Then Joel shoves a big shelf thing in front of the door, which weirdly makes her feel better. They’re outside the QZ now, officially. Fourteen years of stories about everything outside the quarantine zone waiting to kill anyone who stepped foot outside of FEDRA’s protection are playing in her head.
Eventually, Tess pulls two chairs over and turns them to face her. She takes one, and Joel settles into the other.
And they just sit there.
Watching her.
Ellie raises her eyebrows. “That’s not weird or anything.”
“You don’t need to talk,” Joel says.
Ellie snorts. “Yeah, that’s never worked on me before. How long are you two gonna stare at me?”
“As long as we need to,” Tess says.
She rolls her eyes.
Eventually, she ends up with her arms wrapped around her knees, chin resting on them. She’s cold, damp all over, and tired. As much as she knows she has a greater purpose or whatever it was Marlene said, she wishes that greater purpose came with a bed right now.
She doesn’t realize she’s dozing off until she jolts awake, nearly knocking herself over.
“Ellie?” Tess says. She sounds… tense. Ellie would call it tense.
“What?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” She yawns and turns enough to grab her backpack. “I’m going to sleep. Wake me up when something happens.”
“No sleepin’,” Joel says immediately.
“What? That’s bullshit! Just because you took an old man nap—”
“Enough,” Tess interrupts. “Let her sleep.”
“If she’s asleep, we won’t be able to tell if she turns.”
“Just leave her be, Joel,” she says. “We’ll watch her.”
Ellie pulls her backpack close enough to use as a pillow and lies down, taking her knife out of her pocket. It’s not much, but it makes her feel better to hold it after it being taken away for so long. “If you’re that scared, just throw a fucking rock at me to wake me up or something.”
Seems simple enough to her.
The ground isn’t exactly comfortable, but she’s exhausted after being awake for two days straight and she’s nearly asleep when she hears them talking just a couple minutes later.
“Why don’t you get some sleep, too?” she hears Tess say.
“I’m alright. I’ll take first watch over the kid.”
“If I let you take first watch, you won’t wake me up for second watch,” Tess says. She sounds amused.
“That’s ’cause I’m alright.”
Oh, gross. They’re old people flirting.
Ellie tries to fall asleep faster.
Infected have more blood in them than Ellie thinks they should. Mushrooms don’t bleed. Sometimes the dorm rooms have them growing out of the carpets or walls. It freaks people out, but it’s really not that big of a deal. They don’t even burn them, just use some kind of spray that gives everyone a headache for a couple days.
Dead bodies don’t really bleed either, she’s pretty sure. Not after a while.
The clickers Joel and Tess kill bleed a lot. It’s dark and thick and it smells a little funny. It’s kind of…. funky. She knows what fresh blood smells like and that’s not what infected blood smells like. There’s something strange about it, like an old building where the wood has gone bad.
It takes her a minute to realize she’s bleeding, too. It’s not as bad as the first bite, but she’s been bitten by two out of three infected she’s ever seen and that just pisses her off.
Joel gives her a scrap of cloth to tie around it, which is unexpected but weirdly nice. It doesn’t bleed very long, not like the first one. Thank God, because she couldn’t handle dealing with that shit again.
Tess’s bite isn’t bleeding when she sees it, but the infection is already spreading.
In Kansas City, there are four people she makes bleed. The first is the guy who attacks Joel — there’s a puddle of blood slowly spreading around him as she climbs back through the hole in the wall. She suspects there’s a lot more blood after Joel deals with him, but she doesn’t see it.
She thinks about it a lot though.
The second is herself when she cuts her hand open and presses it against Sam’s bite.
Third and fourth are Henry and Sam.
She can’t stop staring at the blood on the floor. She can’t quite look at Henry — there are parts of his head missing and if she looks too much at them she’s pretty sure she’s going to throw up — but she can’t take her eyes off the blood pooling across the carpet.
“—lie. Ellie,” Joel says and she realizes he’s said it a few times. “C’mon, get up.”
He takes her arm and helps her up.
“Are you — are you hurt?” he asks.
She exhales, still staring at the floor. “Uh-uh.”
“Alright,” Joel says, his voice softer than she’s used to. “You wait outside and I’ll get your things.”
That finally breaks her staring. She turns to him. “No! We can’t just leave them.”
Last night, she joked about asking and asking him to do something until he gave in. Last night seems so long ago now. Last night she still thought things would be okay. She believed it when she made the joke then, but for a moment Ellie is half-convinced Joel might just grab her and drag her outside like he did with Tess.
He pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and finger, letting a slow exhale out. “Ellie…”
“Please,” she whispers.
“Okay,” he says finally. “Fine. Wait outside for me for a minute and we’ll go look for somethin’ to dig with.”
He takes a couple minutes. It gives her time to get her crying under control, at least.
By the time he finds her, she’s shut it down. It doesn’t help anyone if she gets emotional. Get it together, Williams, she tells herself, an echo of the refrain she heard endlessly as a kid, before she started punching instead of crying. She figured it out quick. She can get through this.
“There’s a shed around back,” he says. He and Henry went through the motel making sure there weren’t any surprises in the other rooms. She stayed in the room with Sam. She said she could keep him safe while they did that.
She nods, because the lump in her throat is too big to speak.
The shed’s been broken into, but there’s some old gardening stuff and they manage to find two shovels. Joel tests them both, standing them each on end next to her. He seems unhappy with both, but eventually hands her one.
“Pick a spot,” Joel says.
“I don’t care.”
“Yeah, you do.”
She picks a spot across the street from the motel. It’s far — she can see Joel eyeing the distance. But there are trees there. They’re orange and pretty and… there’s not a lot of pretty things here, around this broken down motel on a highway in Kansas. It doesn’t help, but it feels like what she should choose.
“Alright,” he says and starts digging.
He makes her search the other rooms while he moves them. Seems silly, considering how much she’s already seen. But when she goes back into the room to get their things and she sees the bloodstains on the floor, she thinks maybe he was right and she’s getting enough nightmares out of this.
They don’t stop walking until they reach the next town. It’s smaller than Kansas City, fully out of the old QZ, and it seems abandoned. Joel still tells her they should keep quiet and be careful, but he doesn’t seem more worried than usual.
For some reason, though, he leaves her waiting by the door of like four different houses before finally settling on one. She can’t see a difference in any of them. They find some food in a couple of them, but not in the one he settles on.
Joel puts his bag on the kitchen counter and rummages through it. “You ever use one of these?” he asks, and pulls some weird looking thing out of his bag.
She shakes her head.
“It’s a water filter. There’s a creek out back. Either filter or boil, those are your options these days. You never drink water without doing one of those days. It’ll kill ya faster than ‘bout anythin’ else. You understood?”
She nods.
“Alright.” He shrugs his bag back on. “See if you can find a big pot in one of those cupboards.”
She digs around until she finds something that he deems suitable, and then they head back out of the house.
“These days?” she asks as they walk towards the water.
“Hm?”
She speaks a little louder. She’s on his right side since they’re outside and she’s not sure if he didn’t hear her or didn’t understand what she was asking. “You said filter or boil are the options these days. What were the options before?”
“They used to sell these little tabs that you could just drop in a jug of water,” he says. “Looked like little pills. For when you went camping. In a pinch, you used to be able to use bleach.”
“You can’t anymore?”
“Nah, it degrades. Ain’t effective anymore unless it’s FEDRA made and even then, I wouldn’t trust it.”
He shows her how to use the water filter, and gets her to fill up the pot she’s been carrying. Back in the house, he hangs the bag from a cupboard and runs the tube down into her water bottle.
“What do I do with this?” she asks, lifting the pot of water.
“Take it upstairs,” Joel says. “There’s a bathroom, end of the hall. Maybe check the bedrooms up there and see if you can find some clean socks, too.”
She doesn’t really get it until she puts the water in the bathroom and looks at other rooms. It’s the second one she checks that makes it click — there are posters all over the wall. Movie posters, boy bands. It’s a girl bedroom, probably, and it’s confirmed when she checks the closet, which means girl clothes.
Clean ones and water. It’s not exactly the hot shower she enjoyed at Bill and Frank’s, but it gets the blood off her and some of the grime.
There’s even some first aid stuff under the bathroom sink. She uses a couple strips of gauze to wrap her hand so Joel won’t see, and takes the rest down to him.
“Thanks,” she says.
The first time she gets her period since leaving school, she’s sort of surprised by how bad it is. Her old gym teacher used to say that exercise would make cramps better, and she’s been walking more these last couple weeks than she ever has in her life.
Turns out that’s bullshit.
She wakes up early, when the sun is barely peeking over the horizon, because she’s already cramping, and things feel… weird.
God, she hopes she didn’t bleed onto her sleeping bag. She eases her way out of it, trying really hard not to move too fast. If she gets a gush now, she’s screwed. She ends up just dragging her whole backpack into the trees, which turns out to be a good idea when she actually gets a look at what the situation is and realizes she needs to change her pants, too. That’s a lot more blood than there usually is. Fucking hell.
Officially the worst fucking time to get her period, she thinks, as she uses some of the water in her water bottle to clean up.
By the time she gets back to their camp, she’s cramping badly enough that she can barely walk.
Joel’s passed out, which he’s going to be annoyed at himself about later. She thinks he’s too hard on himself. It’s not like he can stay awake forever. If he’d let her take watch, he wouldn’t have to push himself so hard.
Thankfully, she didn’t bleed on her sleeping bag, so she lays down for a little bit more so she can curl into the fetal position. Her back has started to ache too so that’s fucking fun. She doesn’t fall asleep again, but she doesn’t move until Joel starts getting up and that’s sort of the same thing.
“C’mon, Ellie,” Joel says, lightly nudging her feet with his boot as he passes her. “Time to get up.”
Joel’s weirdly good at reading her. When she sits up on her sleeping bag but doesn’t stand to move, he doesn’t push her to do anything just yet. Probably thinks she stayed up too late reading again and is tired. He’s also weirdly not mean about that, even when she slows them down.
Breakfast is an apple each from the tree they came across a few days ago, and some really stale protein bars. They’re gross, but they’re edible and Joel constantly thinks she needs more protein. She’s not hungry anyways, but if she doesn’t eat, she knows she’ll end up with a headache at best and dizzy at worse.
She packs everything into her bag and rolls her sleeping bag up, attaching it to her backpack.
Then she has to get up.
Great.
There’s a tree stump next to where she slept that she used as a chair and then a table last night, and she uses it now to brace herself. Halfway up, a cramp seizes her so hard she can’t move. Fuck.
“Ellie?”
She resists the urge to groan. “Just — just give me a minute. I’m fine.”
She just needs to breathe through it.
“Are you sick?”
This time she can’t help the groan. “It’s just fucking cramps, Joel.”
She manages to get to her feet, and then immediately has to sit on the stump when her legs are unsteady under her. God, she didn’t know she could feel cramps in her legs. That’s new. And shitty.
“Jesus, kid, you had me thinkin’ somethin’ was really wrong,” Joel says, which she thinks is rich coming from someone with a distinct lack of uterus. “I still got ‘bout half a bottle of Advil in my bag. Lemme get you some.”
“I don’t remember that that is,” she says tightly.
“Ibuprofen. Medicine.”
She shakes her head. “No, it’s fine. It’ll go away. Don’t waste them.”
To her surprise, a moment later Joel is crouching down in front of where she’s sitting. It throws her a little, both how close he suddenly is and the strange experience of looking down at him.
“We’ve got plenty,” he says. “You don’t need to walk around in pain.”
“It’s just cramps.”
“Which is why it’s stupid to let them slow you down,” Joel says. He holds the bottle out to her and gives it a little shake. “Go on.”
She really shouldn’t. They might need them, and it’s cramps. Nothing is actually wrong with her.
But, well.
It really fucking hurts.
She takes the bottle, swallowing two of the pills at Joel’s insistence. She would have only taken one, to try to make it last, but he says two is how many she should take.
He packs it away in his bag, and then takes stuff out and pretends he needs to repack it. She’d call him out on it, this time wasting, but it gives her a few minutes and by the time he’s done, she stands up more easily. It still hurts, but it’s better than before.
“Hey, uh, thanks,” she says as they get going.
He just nods.
Once they get out of the woods they’ve been camping in, it’s a couple hours of walking to the next town. It’s a scavenging day, which she doesn’t think it was supposed to be. They’re easier, though, so she’s not complaining. Plus she manages to find half a box of tampons under a bathroom sink.
They’ve stocked up pretty well by the time they make camp for the night. Joel even makes a fire, which surprises her because it’s not even that cold and they didn’t catch some fish or shoot something or anything where they’d need to actually cook their dinner. They’re just splitting a couple cans today.
She watches, curious, but she’s quickly distracted by dinner. They don’t always eat hot food, which she’s used to — food at school was usually lukewarm at best — but it’s nice when they do. Makes her feel warmer, somehow.
After dinner, he puts a pot of water over the fire. They have water filters, so she’s not sure why. He doesn’t even boil it all the way. It has to be boiled for two minutes, he said, and he takes it off the fire as soon as the first bubbles start.
She’s even more intrigued when he pours the water into some kind of weird rubber thing.
And then he passes it over to her.
“What is it?” she asks.
“Put it against your stomach.”
It’s warm. She exhales as soon as she feels it, the tense cramp there immediately easing some.
“Oh, shit.”
Joel actually smiles the tiniest bit at that. “Thought that might help. Just keep it off your skin so you don’t get burned.”
Yeah, she’s definitely keeping this thing.
She curls up in her sleeping bag with the water thing laying across her stomach. The heat sinks in deep, getting right down to that achy spot low in her stomach. It’s even enough to make the tightness in her hips ease.
This thing is pretty sweet. She’s never had anything like this. Periods are just things you have to deal with how they come at school. Some of the older girls sometimes get their hands on medicine, but that seemed… not great to her. And any who were willing to trade wanted too much. She could get her hands on enough stuff to trade for tapes and occasionally decent tampons instead of the awful FEDRA pads, but not medicine.
It’s a little crazy Joel’s just willing to give her medicine because her stomach hurts, or that he gave them an easy day because she was feeling shitty, or that he specifically found something to make her feel better.
She tries to tell herself it’s because if she’s in pain, she’s going to slow them down, but FEDRA never cared about that. They just made her keep going anyways and punished her for being slow. Joel’s never punished her for anything. She isn’t even sure how that would work. She knows he wouldn’t hit her, and there’s not really much else he can make her do. She already washes dishes when it’s her turn and there’s not much else to make her wash. He can’t really make her run laps, and there’s nowhere he can put her for solitary.
Besides, he doesn’t even really yell at her, not even when she’s annoying.
It’s weird.
The strange thing about winter is that she thinks she might be warmer now than she was at school in the winter. The thing is that she doesn’t think she’s ever had clothes this warm. She’s had her mom’s jacket as long as she can remember, but it’s not that warm in winter. Joel managed to find her a thick winter jacket and she’s wearing a ridiculous amount of layers. Plus since it started getting really cold, he lets them have a fire almost every night. He usually boils water, too, and lets her tuck her hot water bottle into her sleeping bag. Every night, she gets warm. Really, all things considered, they’re doing okay.
Which is why she’s confused when Joel suddenly seems worried.
“Storm’s comin’ in, I think,” he says finally.
It’s been snowing a little, enough that the world is white.
“For real? You can tell that?”
“Got a feelin’. C’mon, we’re gonna have to walk pretty far today to find somewhere we can stay for a while.”
Ellie starts to believe him when the day goes from cold to fucking cold and the wind kicks up, biting at her cheeks no matter how she tries to burrow her face into the scarf under her collar. He’s right, too, about it being a long walk until they reach somewhere he deems safe.
They get lucky with a good house, at least. The town they land in is tiny, and the door isn’t even kicked in or anything — or locked. Joel says some people just didn’t back then. She doesn’t get it. Even though locked doors wouldn’t stop much of anything, she feels better behind one.
Besides a thick layer of dust, the house looks basically untouched.
“How long are we staying?” she asks.
“A week, maybe,” Joel says. He takes his bag off, but keeps his gun out, so she does the same. “Gotta wait the storm out. If I’m wrong, we’ll leave sooner, but…”
Joel isn’t often wrong about weather things.
They clear the house to be safe, but there’s nothing — and the rest of the town has been like that, too. Weirdly, it makes Joel nervous, but she thinks she gets it. A couple months ago, she saw him looking at a map and he sort of jokingly asked if she knew where the QZs were in Iowa — because despite starting going west, they’d hit a snarl of infected that had them going north for a while, long enough to end up in Iowa — or Nebraska.
And, the thing is, she does. She had to memorize them for school. She doesn’t know about all the fallen ones, because FEDRA doesn’t talk about that and she only hears it in rumours, but she knows where all the QZs originally were. So once Joel showed her where those places actually were on the map, she knows that the nearest one is far from where they are. No QZs, no big cities. They veered off the direct route to avoid a bigger city a few weeks back. This place isn’t convenient to get to or close to anything. There’s just not a lot of reason for anyone to come here.
Ellie’s not an expert, but she thinks they’re probably safe for a little bit. Or as safe as they ever get.
“What do we need to do now?” Joel asks.
This is his new thing, making her talk through what they’re doing.
She thinks for a second. They’ve cleared the house, which is always the first thing.
“Water?” she says. “And then… are we making a fire tonight?”
“Gotta, yeah. The way the temp’s dropping, we’ll need it to not freeze even inside.”
“And it’s safe because of the storm?” When Joel nods, she grins. The living room had a woodstove, she noticed, which she’s pretty sure is why Joel picked this particular house. “So we need firewood.”
“Now where do you think will be the best place to find it?”
Trick question. There’s a lot of answers for that. Most things burn, after all. It’s just a matter of how much work you need to put into it. In the forest, Joel will usually find a couple small dead trees and burn them in half instead of sawing them up. It takes a while to do and he doesn’t trust her with the saw.
But they’re in a house, pretty far from any woods. There are trees around, but mostly big ones, the ones that she’s noticed in towns that look like they were put there on purpose, all spaced apart evenly. The ones they burn in the woods are smaller, easier for two people to move.
Wait, they’re in a house. A house with a woodstove.
Ellie walks into the living room and checks around it — there. There’s a little door next to it, almost hidden, and when she opens it, she finds a pile of wood.
“Some here,” she calls. She stands up, walking back towards Joel. “Do you think there’s more outside?”
He gives this to her and nods. “There’s a woodshed outside. Saw it on the way in. If there’s any, we’re gonna bring in as much as we can.”
This part she isn’t so sure on. They haven’t stayed anywhere longer than a day or two.
“How come?” she asks as they head outside.
Joel gestures at the sky. “The way those clouds look, I think this is gonna be a nasty storm. If it gets really bad, I don’t want either of us outside. That’s a recipe for gettin’ hurt — or lost.”
“Lost? We’re not that bad at directions.”
He shoves her, lightly, but enough to make her stumble and laugh. “Smartass. You grew up in Boston. You know how bad the wind and snow can get. Imagine that out here.”
She looks around automatically. Right. This is the very, very flat part of the country. Absolutely nothing to stop the wind.
“That’d be bad,” she agrees.
The shed is full.
“Shit,” she says quietly.
“Gonna be a lot of trips,” Joel warns.
She holds her arms out. “Load me up.” A moment later, her arms are filled, but she waits for him before they go back. “This is lucky.”
“Very,” he agrees.
“What if we weren’t lucky?”
He glances at her. “Wood furniture would be the best thing. The dining room table and chairs, to start. You’d need a good amount of it.”
“And how much of this do we need?”
Joel nudges the back door open with his foot, holding it so she can go in first. She dumps the first pile onto the floor next to the door.
“Hm.” He sets his armful of logs down, too. “Maybe ten a day? It’ll depend on how cold it gets and how good that wood is.”
Ten a day for a week. That’s… a lot of logs.
There’s gotta be a better way to do this.
“Can I look around for a minute?”
“Alright,” Joel agrees. “Just don’t wander off.”
Ellie would really be more insulted by the fact that he’s constantly telling her not to wander off if she didn’t have a bad habit of wandering off when he’s not looking. She’s not trying to get into trouble. She just gets bored. And curious.
In this case, though, she just checks out the other little shed on the property. Old tools, a whole lot of spiderwebs, and — jackpot.
“Joel!” she shouts. “I found something!”
He comes over almost immediately, because sometimes when she finds things it’s duct tape and sometimes it’s a very angry raccoon and she thinks it’s fun to keep him on his toes by not telling him which right away.
“Can we use that?”
“Sure can, kid,” Joel says. “Good job.”
He touches the top of her head as he passes her to grab the wheelbarrow. She freezes in place. He’s never done that before. He grabs her arm to help her up, tugs on the back of her hood to make her move, sometimes lightly shoves her. Never to hurt her, but definitely meant to annoy her or sometimes to make her laugh, she thinks. But the way he palmed her head just now, it’s… different.
She manages to unfreeze in time to help pull the wheelbarrow out of the shed. It’s a little rusty and not in the best shape, but it’ll definitely make this faster.
“Watch for rotten ones,” Joel says. “Or anythin’ that looks like it might have bugs or animals chewin’ on it.”
She counts the logs as they load the wheelbarrow. She loses track around sixty, but Joel makes them do a couple more loads before he seems satisfied. Ellie doesn’t argue too much, even when her arms start to ache. He’s worried about this and not just in the way he normally worries about everything.
When he finally seems satisfied, they go over to check out the houses next door. Those have more broken windows and are in worse shape, but there’s some stuff. Joel finds a duffel bag in one of the closets upstairs and gives it to her to fill. She knows what to look for now, so she checks out the kitchen. She manages to get a pretty good haul of food. Cans, mostly, but a few packs of those instant pastas and potatoes where they’re already seasoned. Those are nice — they usually still taste pretty good, especially the cheesy scalloped potato one, and they hardly weigh anything.
Joel comes downstairs with a stack of blankets over his arms.
“Here, take these,” he says when he sees how much she’s filled the bag.
“I can handle it,” she says, but does what he says. She does that sometimes. When she thinks it’s important.
The other houses go the same, with trips back to the one they’re staying in to drop things off.
“You planning on building a fort?” she asks when Joel hands her yet another stack of blankets.
He snorts. “You’re not far off. C’mon, it’s gettin’ dark faster than I like.”
The wind is picking up, too, and Ellie’s glad to be inside. It’s not much warmer than inside, but there’s no wind, at least.
They leave everything in the living room, and then she follows him upstairs to look there.
He opens the first bedroom, then immediately closes it. “Not that one.”
Ah. Bodies. Well, that explains part of why this house is so untouched.
She listens, at least for now. She’s seen enough bodies by now that she doesn’t really want to see more if she doesn’t have to. It’s silly how much Joel tries to protect her from them, in her opinion, but it’s still not exactly pleasant.
“Ah, damn.”
“What?” She leans around him, curious now. “Oh.”
The other bedroom has a hole in the roof they couldn’t see from outside. The bed is covered in a thick pile of snow, and it’s colder, too.
Joel closes the door. “Well, keep this one shut, too, I guess.”
There’s not much else upstairs. It’s not a very big house, which Joel prefers, she’s noticed. She takes a few things out of the bathroom, and Joel cleans out the linen closet in the hallway, but that’s about it.
Back downstairs, she looks at the pile of blankets on the floor. “Seriously, what are we doing here?”
“Heatin’ this whole place would take a lot of wood,” Joel says. He goes into one of the bags they brought back and finds a jar of nails and a hammer. “C’mere and hold these for me.”
He nails two layers of blankets over the doorway from the kitchen to the living room.
“This’ll keep the room warmer, and we only need to heat this one,” he says. “Better to keep the heat in as much as possible. We’ll do the window next.”
It makes the room dark, so Ellie gets out their lanterns and winds them up.
Joel doesn’t start to relax until there’s a fire gently crackling in the stove. When it’s going steadily, he sits back and she drops into the big chair next to the couch. It rocks a little and she grins. Fucking cool.
“Dibs on the comfy chair,” she says.
He glances back at her. “You wanna sleep there?”
“Hell yeah.”
“Alright.”
He turns away, but not before she sees a flash of relief on his face. The couch is one of those ones that looks like an L, and they could technically both fit if she slept on the shorter end, but Joel wouldn’t be able to stretch out fully without kicking her in the head or something. She can tell his bad knee is bothering him. It hurts a lot, she thinks, but he limps more when it’s damp or when bad weather is coming.
It probably won’t be the most comfortable place she’s ever slept, since she’ll be sleeping kinda curled up across the arms, but it certainly won’t be the worst.
She gives a wiggle in the chair. “You wouldn’t even fit anyways, I bet. Too fucking tall.”
His shoulders relax in the moment before he turns around, leans back, and does something to the side of her comfy chair that sends her falling back so quickly she almost has a heart attack.
“Recliner,” is all he says.
She flips him off, but this is actually pretty great. She can make this work for sure. Now that she can stretch out, it might even be more comfortable than her old FEDRA bed.
After a moment, she gets up and starts organizing their supplies. She doesn’t particularly care how tidy it is, but it makes Joel feel better and she has enough experience cleaning that it’s short work. She organizes their cans so he can take stock looking at them, but puts the dried stuff away in their bags. Hopefully they’ll be able to take those with them.
“Ellie, here,” Joel says and tosses a small ball of fabric at her. “Found that for you in one of the houses.”
She unballs it to find a thin shirt. “Thanks.”
“It’s wool,” he says. “Keep you warm.”
“But it’s so thin.” And soft. She doesn’t have a lot of experience with wool clothes, but she thought they were supposed to be thick and scratchy.
“It’s merino. The expensive shit,” he explains without her having to ask. “Warm, but thin.”
Now that’s fucking useful. The room is slowly starting to warm up, so she takes off her jacket and her other layers down to the long sleeved t-shirt she’s been using as a base layer. She adds the sweater, then her sweatshirt over that, and can leave her jacket off.
Nice. It helps to have her jacket off while they’re inside and she’s helping make dinner and everything. It’s easier to move around that way. She might even be able to ditch the sweatshirt after a while, depending on how warm the fire gets the room.
The kinda cool thing is that since they’re going to be here for a while and they have the stove, it’s a lot easier to cook. Joel’s been teaching her to set traps, and before it snowed, he showed her things in the woods like when it was okay to eat certain roots, but it’s hard with the snow. The cold makes everything harder. And since it’s easier to cook here and they found a lot of canned stuff, it means they’re doing one of her favourite things for dinner, where they don’t just split a can of corn or beans or whatever, but where Joel actually combines a couple into something new.
Once they have a pot of snow on the back of the stove to melt, she opens and drains the cans Joel gave her into the kitchen sink. It’s colder in the kitchen, and she tries to duck around the blanket door as fast as she can.
“What’s that?” she asks as he opens another can. This one has something thick and off-white in it.
“Soup.” He puts it in the pot along with the vegetables she drained, then a small can of meat.
“And that?”
“Chicken.”
She nods. “Cool.”
He adds some spices — it’s one of the very few frivolous things Joel keeps in his bag. She likes to collect things, picking up keychains and pins and things, but Joel’s not like her. He’s practical. But he has a handful of spices they found in a store. They don’t use them all the time, like when they’re just eating a random can for dinner, but it’s cool when they do. He says they’re stale and they used to taste better, but she thinks it makes food taste better than anything she ever ate at school.
When everything has been gently bubbling for a while, Joel scoops it into two bowls she cleaned with melted snow earlier and passes her one.
“It’s hot,” he warns. “Don’t make me take it away.”
Ellie rolls her eyes. She burned the shit out of her tongue one time and he still hasn’t let it go. Keeps threatening to take her plate away if she isn’t more careful.
The worst thing is it isn’t an empty threat and they both know it.
She waits precisely long enough that she won’t burn her mouth before she starts shovelling it in.
“S’good,” she says through a mouthful. “Really fucking good. Is it a thing or a made up thing?”
It’s not really a sentence that makes sense, but Joel knows what she means.
“Close,” he says. “Chicken pot pie, you ever had that?”
“You know I haven’t.”
He nudges her hip lazily with his foot. It’s barely a bump, let alone a kick, and she doesn’t bother to react. “Before if I made somethin’ like this, I’d put it in a casserole dish and put a crust on it, or maybe some biscuits.”
“Biscuits?”
“It’s a kind of bread. It ain’t exactly the same.”
She shrugs. “Still good, though.”
“Well. Thanks, I guess.”
She cleans up because Joel cooked. Okay, mostly because his knee is bugging him. It’s not too hard, anyways, just getting rid of the empty cans and giving the pot a quick rinse with some melted snow.
“The wind is getting so fucking loud,” she says as she ducks quickly under the blankets over the living room doorway, trying not to let any of the warm air out or the cold kitchen air in.
“I hear it.”
Joel’s sitting by the fire, tearing a sheet into strips. Probably for cleaning rags or molotovs or something.
“Make up your bed,” he suggests. “You got up pretty early this mornin’.”
She generously decides not to point out he woke her up early this morning because he was worried about the storm coming. Considering how much it’s snowing and how windy it is, though, she’ll admit she’s glad to be inside right now.
While she’s unhooking her sleeping bag from her backpack, she notices him shifting in place, carefully stretching his leg in front of him. It cracks, louder than the fire, and she doesn’t even feel like making fun of him because he can’t help wincing. His joints crack and pop a lot, but it doesn’t usually sound painful like that.
“You want my hot water bottle?”
He shakes his head. “Not right now.”
When he’s not looking, she sets it next to him anyways.
Even with blankets over the windows and doors, there’s a lot left in the pile on the floor. She sorts them into two piles, then pulls a sheet from the sheet pile.
“Do you need all of these?” she asks Joel.
“Not those.”
She’s been sleeping mostly on the ground or in a sleeping bag for months. The idea of something like a real bed just sounds… kinda nice. So she spreads a sheet over the recliner — and decides to do the same thing for the couch. Then each of them gets half the blankets. There’s two thick quilts that she puts on top and she unrolls both their sleeping bags. She puts Joel’s down by his feet so he can pull it over him if he gets cold and hooks hers over the arm of the recliner.
It’s practically fucking cozy, when she’s done.
She drops down on the floor next to Joel in an empty patch of floor. He’s surrounded by strips of fabric.
“Whatcha doing?”
He hands her three pieces knotted together. “Here, hold these.”
When she does, he twists each strip of cloth and braids them together.
“It’s just a safety net,” he says. “If I have to go outside for more firewood, I’ll tie this to somethin’ and make sure I make it back. Couldn’t find any rope.”
Makes sense.
She also knows that if this is worrying him, he won’t be able to sleep until he’s got it finished. So she holds the makeshift rope as he braids it together, periodically moving her hands to keep the tension up.
“You’re pretty good at that,” she says idly. “Can you do hair too?”
It’s a joke, but Joel’s hands go still for a second.
“No,” he says, his voice tight.
“O-okay.”
She leaves it alone.
When there’s a good length of rope, he coils it up and sets it to the side.
“Go on and settle down,” he says.
She stops by her backpack and grabs a book out of it first. She’s not quite ready to sleep, and she’s been slowly working her way through a new novel. She could read it faster, but she wants it to last.
Her penlight is almost dead though. The battery in it charges in the sun and it hasn’t been very sunny.
“I’m using this,” she says and picks the lantern up.
Joel turns automatically when the light moves, then catches sight of the couch. “That for me?”
“Yep.” She sets it down on the little table between the couch and the recliner and kicks her boots off. “Are we safe here?”
“Yeah, you’re fine.”
Nice. That means she can lose the jeans and sleep in just the leggings she’s wearing under them. She’s used to sleeping in jeans now, which is just kinda sad, but getting a break from them is fucking amazing.
She settles into her nest with her book and it’s as comfortable as it looks. When she’s distracted by that, Joel eases his way off the floor, his first step almost a stumble. She watches very carefully out of the corner of her eye while he uses the hot water on the stove to fill her water bottle.
Good, she thinks as he settles on the couch.
She reads a few chapters, but before long she’s starting to doze off. She marks her place with a scrap of paper — an old takeout menu, Joel called it — and puts the book on the table.
“Night,” she says on a yawn.
Joel reaches over and turns off the lantern. “Goodnight.”
Warm and full, it doesn’t take her long to fall asleep.
She wakes up a while later and the first thing she becomes aware of is the room is cold. She’s still under her blankets, but it’s cold around her nest.
Joel’s up, she realizes after a moment. She can hear him rustling around, and then the soft clink of the stove door. Must be putting more wood on the fire. And he must have his boots off, because he barely makes any noise moving around.
To her surprise, he lifts up the edge of her blanket. When the cold air rushes in, she instinctively curls into herself tighter.
But then something warm settles onto the recliner next to her and Joel settles the blankets around her again. He pulls them up around her shoulders, too, making sure she’s completely covered.
He must have refilled her hot water bottle. It radiates heat that stays trapped under the blankets and she’s definitely no longer cold.
“Sleep well,” Joel says, so soft she can barely hear him.
Maybe she’s dreaming already, she thinks sleepily.
Ellie wakes up the next morning warm enough that she’s pushed half her blankets off in her sleep. When she looks over at the stove, Joel’s got something cooking on it. The fire has to be higher to cook, so that explains it.
She kicks down the footrest of her recliner, making him glance over at her.
“Mornin’,” he says, annoyingly alert this early like he usually is.
Though — she’s starting to get the feeling it’s not that early. Joel’s got the blankets over one of the windows pulled back and the sun looks like it’s been up for a while already.
“How long did I sleep?” she asks. It’s a carefully worded question. She asked him once what time it was, and he glanced at his broken watch automatically and then flinched and she didn’t ever want to make his face look like that again.
“A good while,” he answers, which means it’s definitely later than she usually wakes up. “Seems like you needed it.”
She does feel good. A little fuzzy, a little blurry, but not unpleasantly so. She doesn’t actually remember being this well-rested in… maybe ever, actually. Sleeping outside is uncomfortable and a little scary, even though she trusts Joel to keep her safe. That and bugs. There were a lot of bugs before it got cold. Even when they’re somewhere sheltered like a building, there’s risk and it keeps her from sleeping too deeply.
And before that, she was a military brat. She’s woken up at six in the morning as long as she can remember. She only remembers sleeping later than that a couple times, when she was so sick she ended up in the infirmary.
She gives a long stretch, and then goes to deal with the usual morning business. It’s fucking cold outside of the little bubble of the living room and by the time she gets back, she’s glad to drop down next to where Joel’s sitting by the stove. She sits close, the way she usually does these days. The stove is warm but she’s half-convinced Joel is warmer.
“Whatcha making?”
They don’t always have hot breakfasts. If Joel shoots sometimes too big for them to eat in one meal, they usually eat the leftovers for breakfast. Otherwise a lot of the time it’s fruit they’ve found or chalky protein bars, sometimes a cold can of something that makes Joel grimace from heartburn all day. It just takes too much time to build a fire in the morning and they need their daylight hours to get shit done.
“Oatmeal,” Joel says.
She makes a face.
“Not a fan?” he asks, looking amused.
She waves her hand. “It’s fucking whatever.”
Ellie’s not going to turn down perfectly good food. Oatmeal isn’t great, but it’s food. It’s better than the ration bars they sometimes got stuck with when the food deliveries got delayed because of bombings or if there were shortages. Or hardtack. Hardtack sucks.
But when he hands over a bowl, it looks different.
“That’s not oatmeal,” she says, confused, and almost takes a bite until she sees Joel give her a look. She stirs it to cool it instead.
“Pretty sure it is, kiddo.”
“Doesn’t look like it,” she says and deems it cool enough to take a bite. It tastes like oatmeal, kind of, but barely. “Oatmeal isn’t normally like this. I’d know.”
They ate a lot of oatmeal at school.
“What’s it normally like?” Joel asks.
She thinks for a moment. It’s normally watery, but kinda congealed from sitting around at the same time. It’s always so mushy that it’s not even really chewing to eat it. And it’s bland — it reminds her of the glue they used to use when she was younger. Not that she ever ate that.
The bowl Joel gave her is thicker and creamy, with little bits of fruit through it. Peaches, she thinks. Not dehydrated ones like she had in a granola bar once — more like Joel cut up some canned ones. They make it a little bit sweet and it actually tastes like food.
“Not sweet,” she decides on after a few more mouthfuls.
“Got condensed milk in it,” is all Joel says. “It ain’t worth takin’ with us, so we might as well use it.”
She thinks there’s probably more to it, but she doesn’t know enough about cooking to say. Either way, she eats her whole bowl. Joel almost immediately scrapes the rest of the pot into her bowl. He’s got a good amount in his own, but the amount he gives her is almost enough they could put it outside and save it for another meal. Or enough that Joel might actually feel full, a rare thing, she knows, even though he doesn’t let on.
“Go on,” he says when she hesitates and for once, she doesn’t argue.
She only feels a little bit guilty about it.
After breakfast, Ellie curls up with a notebook on the end of the couch Joel’s not sleeping on, stealing his quilt to keep warm. The notebook only had writing in the first few pages, and she found a whole brand-new pack of pencils. Joel says there used to be books just for drawing and she thinks it would be so fucking cool to find one of those, but this is good, too.
Despite what he says, she is actually good at entertaining herself if given a chance. It’s just that when they’re walking so much, there isn’t much to do to entertain herself besides annoy him.
He’s a fucking hypocrite, anyways, because since he steadfastly refuses to actually carry a book or anything for himself, and he has no interest in any of her comics or books, when he runs out of things to do, it takes maybe twenty minutes for him to get restless.
Eventually, he throws his jacket on. “I’m gonna go check out the attic.”
She used to know a guy back in FEDRA. Decent guy, didn’t get slappy or anything. He had a dog that was trained to sniff out infected and when it wasn’t working, it almost never relaxed. He’d pick one of them sometimes to take it out into the yard and play with it for exercise.
One day, it was gone. When she asked where it was, the guy stood up and she ducked automatically, expecting to get knocked on her ass from the way he looked at her. He just walked away, though.
She never saw him again after that.
Joel sometimes reminds her of that dog. She doesn’t know if he knows how to relax either.
She gets up, tossing back the quilt and trying to hide her shiver. They’re not letting the fire die out completely, but it’s not nearly as hot as earlier. “I wanna come.”
“Put your jacket on,” is all he says.
He makes her wait until he’s stomped all over the attic before letting her go up, which she thinks is stupid. If she falls through the floor, he could pull her back up. If he falls through the floor, they’re fucked.
“What about these?” she asks, nudging a box with her foot.
Joel turns and looks at it. “You got a sudden hankerin’ for old Christmas lights?”
Hankering. If she didn’t actually want an answer, she’d make fun of him for that.
“No, the box. If I couldn’t find firewood or old furniture, could I burn it?”
“Yeah, but it ain’t gonna keep you that warm and you need a lot of it,” Joel says. “You’re better off looking for somethin’ else. Good for a starter, though.”
She nods, mentally rearranging her mental list of best things to burn. Firewood, of course, since that’s the easiest. Then dead trees and wood furniture are about equal, since they’d both take some work to use. She puts cardboard way down on the list, but doesn’t kick it off entirely.
It’s good to know these things.
There’s nothing really good up there. She doesn’t think they’re actually looking for anything in particular anyways. She thinks Joel’s just restless. He hates being trapped like this. She digs idly through a box of junk, just to kill time — and something sharp slices across her palm.
“Motherfucker!” she hisses and jerks her hand back, grasping her other over it in a futile attempt to keep from dripping everywhere.
“What happened?” Joel asks, suddenly at her side.
“Something’s broken in there,” she says.
He shakes the box, looking. “Vase.”
“Who the fuck cares?”
Joel slips an honest to god handkerchief out of his jacket pocket and wraps it around her hand. “Means there might be glass in it. C’mon, let’s go downstairs where the light is better.”
There is fucking glass in her palm which means she gets to sit there while Joel picks it out with tweezers. She twitches the first time he gets one and he glances up at her, his face strange.
“Sorry,” he says, going back to the cut. “You’re doin’ good.”
She’s so surprised by that she doesn’t know what to say. It’s not even that painful. Sure, it doesn’t feel great having something digging around in her cut, but she’s had worse.
But she’s never had anyone say something reassuring to her when she’s getting patched up. It’s weird.
“Almost done,” Joel says a moment later. “Couple more pieces.”
It’s weird enough she doesn’t have anything sarcastic to say. She just watches as he finishes getting all the glass out, washes the cut, and then carefully wraps it up in some gauze. He works efficiently but carefully, doesn’t linger but doesn’t rush either. He’s trying to not make it hurt more than it has to, she realizes almost belatedly. No one’s ever done that for her before.
“Try to keep it dry,” he says when her hand is all bandaged up.
He washes his hands in one of the bowls from the kitchen with some melted snow.
They’re shaking.
Ellie doesn’t say anything. She hasn’t quite figured out what’s going on here.
When Joel pulls out the broken baseball bat, she wants to yell at him, but she’s too frozen. She knows he shouldn’t fucking do that — she had to do the mandatory FEDRA first aid training like everyone else. She was good at it, even. The trainer said her hands were small and that was useful.
It doesn’t feel useful when they’re covered in Joel’s blood. There’s so much. It gets everywhere. Her hands, her face, soaked into the sleeping bag she ties to Callus to drag Joel. Even her jeans, because Joel’s still out when she has to move him and he’s so fucking heavy that she needs to use her legs as much as her arms.
He doesn’t wake up until they get to a bunch of houses. She picks one at random and climbs through the broken window, clearing it as quickly as she can. She gets Joel inside through the garage and then grabs a handful of snow, shoving it down the back of his shirt.
That wakes him enough that she can get him inside the house proper. She’s aiming for a bedroom, but he redirects them when he sees the basement door, mumbling something about visibility.
They almost fall down the stairs. Joel’s arm is around her shoulder, tighter than she thinks he means it to be, but his foot misses a step and he stumbles, only stopped by her shoving her entire body in front of him — and him grabbing the railings with both hands.
“Don’t — don’t do that,” he manages to gasp.
“Shut up,” she says, giving him a shove to get him back upright. He grunts and she knows it hurt, but she also knows falling down the stairs would hurt more.
“You—”
“Shut up,” she repeats. She knows what he’s worried about. If he hadn’t caught himself, too, she wouldn’t have been able to stop him from falling and he would have taken them both down. She just doesn’t care.
He’s hurting too much to argue. She can feel him shaking where they’re touching.
“Okay, okay,” she says, propping him against a wall. “Stay there for a minute.”
There’s a mattress leaning against one of the walls. It’s stained and the springs are sagging, but it’s better than him being on the floor. He says keeping a layer between you and the ground is the best way to stay warm.
Despite her haste, by the time she’s gotten it on the floor, Joel’s started to slowly slump down the wall. She rushes over and shoves her shoulder under his arm again.
“Over here.”
He hits the mattress hard, nearly falling.
“Okay,” she says. The basement has a washing machine and dryer and next to it is a basket of towels. She tries to dig one out from the bottom so it won’t be so dusty, but they’re all pretty musty.
Better than nothing, she has to tell herself, and brings them back to Joel. She bunches one up and shoves it under his head, then cuts the edge of another with her knife and rips it in half, shoving up his shirt so she can press it against his side. Joel groans and grabs her arm, hard.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” she mutters. “Come on, you gotta help me. Come on.”
“Leave,” he says, so barely audible she doesn’t think she heard him right until he repeats it. “Leave.”
“Shut up, Joel.”
“Take the gun.”
“Joel, shut the fuck up!”
His hands are covered in almost as much blood as hers when he grabs her jacket, pulling her down until she’s so close to his face she can’t look away. He looks like shit, sweaty and pale.
“You go,” he says, his breath shuddering on the words. “You go. You go north.” He shakes her. “You go to Tommy. You go.”
Then he shoves her, weaker than she knows he could, but harder than he’s ever touched her knowing it was her. She hits her ass and she’s not sure if she’s more surprised by how rough he’s being or by the fact that he thinks she’s going to abandon him to die in a basement.
She stands up and covers him with his jacket. Partly because he’s shivering from the cold and from blood loss, and partly so she doesn’t have to see how quickly the blood is soaking through the towel on his stomach.
The entire time, he looks at her like he believes she’s leaving.
Fucking idiot, she thinks.
She stops for just a second at the top of the stairs, just to shake for a second. She stares at her hand on the doorknob, coated in Joel’s blood.
This is not how this ends.
And then she fucking runs. She bolts through the living room and up more stairs, nearly falling on them, to the bathroom at the top. The medicine cabinet is empty, nothing but useless crap in the drawers by the sink.
She digs into the kitchen drawers, searching for — she doesn’t even know what. Her mind is a whirl and she can’t stop moving, grabbing for a drawer that sticks.
“You motherfucker!” It spills across the floor when she gets it open and she drops to her knees to dig through it and — there.
A needle and thread.
Okay. Okay.
She throws open the basement door and runs back down the stairs, falling to her knees next to Joel.
He mumbles something when she throws his jacket back, not even really a word. He looks at her like…
She stops, just for a second, to catch her breath and presses her hand over his. He has to fight. He has to fight if this has a chance of working.
Don’t make me leave, she thinks. And, Don’t leave me.
His fingers curl around hers.
Okay. They can do this.
She squeezes his hand back, and then gets to work. The towel is soaked and he’s still bleeding sluggishly. She tries to dab it away as gently as she can, like that’s really the part that’s going to hurt here.
He passes out halfway through her stitching. She’s terrified for a moment that she’s killed him, and presses her ear against his chest to make sure he’s still breathing. He is, thank God.
When she’s finished stitching, she sits with him as long as she dares, her hand on his chest to feel the rise and fall of his breathing and the beat of his heart. It’s a little fast, and she thinks that’s from the blood loss, but she can’t remember for sure. She isn’t even sure that’s something she knows or if she’s just making it up.
When she’s sure her stitches are holding, she has to go back upstairs. She left all their stuff in the garage, but probably more importantly, she left Callus in the garage. She closed the door, at least, but she didn’t go a good job of taking care of him at all.
He snorts when she gets close, shuffling on the spot.
It takes her a moment to realize he’s reacting to her. To the blood she’s covered in.
“Sorry,” she says, and goes into her bag to find a rag. She dumps some water onto it and tries to clean as much of the blood — Joel’s blood — off as she can. She’s not sure if she’s done a good job of it, but Callus doesn’t freak out the second time she gets close.
She takes him out onto the street to walks around a little. She keeps her gun out at her side and doesn’t go farther than the house on either side, making it a really stupid cool-down walk, but it works. It’s fine. After, she gets him back into the garage and closes the door again, then goes down to check on Joel.
He’s still out. She checks, again, to make sure he’s still breathing.
Then she goes back to Callus. She takes off his saddle and brushes him down the way Joel taught her. She digs around until she finds a bucket and goes to fill it with snow so it can melt for him. She should find more for herself and Joel too, but… holy gods she needs a minute.
Joel is… Joel is alive. She can’t do anything else. Callus is taken care of, at least for now. She doesn’t know how she’s going to feed him but she can’t fix that right now.
She needs just a minute to sit down, so she does, on the step leading from the house to the garage.
There’s still blood on her hands. In her nail beds, under her nails, in the creases of her skin.
Joel’s sleeping bag is bunched up in the corner. It’s useless now, with how much blood is on it. That’s never coming out.
She clasps her shaking hands together and leans her head against them. With no one watching but the horse, she finally lets herself cry.
Ellie has seen people die before. She watched — well, she’s seen how much blood there is in a person. Still, in the second before she runs, she has the briefest moment of surprise from just how much blood pours out when she slams the cleaver into James’ neck.
She presses herself under a counter, clutching an unfamiliar knife. She wishes it was hers, for a moment, her knife that she knows ever groove and nick and curve of, that fits into her hand like it was made to be there. This one is unfamiliar and she turns it a couple times, trying to figure out how best to make it fit. If she loses her grip…
“You don’t know how good I am!” David screams.
She flinches, pressing herself deeper under it. She’s so scared that it twists in her stomach like nausea, like a physical illness infecting her the way cordyceps never did.
He doesn’t want to kill her anymore. At least not right away. Doesn’t even want to eat her now. He wants more. Worse.
She needs to kill him. If she doesn’t… she knows what happens if she doesn’t and she’s so scared she has to clench her fingers around the knife to keep them from trembling.
She’s scared of how much it’s going to hurt if he catches her.
Blood sprays in her face when she lands the cleaver into his arm. She doesn’t notice it after that until her arms hurt from slamming it down over and over again and she can’t physically do it anymore. His face is gone and, oh, that’s a lot of blood on the ground.
Huh.
Something creaking ominously over her head is what finally gets her to stop staring at the blood and get outside before the whole building comes down on her.
When Joel finds her, she screams her fucking head off and then collapses into him, his arms coming around her.
It’s like a switch in her head is flicked. Everything is just… static, like the spot between two radio stations. She takes in vague flashes of things and tries to focus on the ones that aren’t awful. Joel’s arm around her shoulder, probably heavier than he means it to be, but reassuring in its warm pressure. His voice, though she can’t make out the exact words most of the time. It’s soft, and in the seconds when she manages to catch a snippet of them, they’re reassuring. When she stumbles, he steadies her and makes sure she doesn’t fall, even though she can still feel how unsteady he is.
She loses track of how long they walk. She isn’t crying anymore, but it’s not calm. It’s… empty. Her body is moving, walking when Joel gently prompts her to walk. Breathing, apparently. But she’s gone. She’s floating somewhere in the static.
She wants to land somewhere nicer. She wants a memory, something good, but every good memory she thinks of ends badly. The glow of the mall turns into pain and blood. Playing in the tunnels with Sam, giggling over comic books together, ends with his blood spreading across the floor. Joel teaching her to shoot the rifle turns into him bleeding out into her hands. Everywhere she tries to look, there’s blood.
Something hurts and she’s abruptly yanked back to her body.
She cries out and cringes away and only then realizes Joel is looking at her with regret on his face.
“Sorry, baby, I’m sorry,” he says, his hands hovering near her face. “Just tryin’ to see if it’s broken.”
She doesn’t understand what he means.
“I gotta touch your nose again, but I’ll be careful,” he says.
They’re inside, she notices. She doesn’t remember that happening. She’s sitting on something — something soft and Joel is kneeling in front of her. His jacket is still around her shoulders. Her backpack isn’t in her hands anymore.
She hears a noise like a whimper and realizes it’s coming from her.
Where is her backpack? She had it. Joel put it in her hands. Right?
“Easy, easy,” Joel says, his voice too soft. He’s not supposed to sound like that when he talks to her. She’s not his daughter and he’s not supposed to care about her like that. “What is it?”
Finally — finally — she sees her backpack on the floor next to Joel. She grabs it and pulls it close, dragging it into her lap.
“Okay,” he says. “If that’s all you want, honey, you can have your bag. Anythin’ you want.”
She wraps her arms around her backpack.
Joel touches her face. Cradles it, so gently, the way he did when he found her and she was so scared she couldn’t even tell it was him.
“You lookin’ at me?” he murmurs. “Eyes on me.”
She doesn’t remember seeing anything for a while, but she thinks she can handle that for a bit, looking at him.
He nods, more to himself than to her, she thinks, and then touches her face with something soft. A piece of cloth, she sees when it pulls it away and rinses it in a bowl. The water isn’t hot, but it’s warm when it touches her skin and he’s careful wiping her forehead, her cheeks. It hurts a little when he lets it touch her nose, but he just holds it there for a second before gently wiping.
“There we go,” he says, and rinses the cloth out again. The water comes out pink.
Because she’s fucking covered in David’s blood.
When she looks down, all she can see is her sweatshirt, the light brown showing every single drop of blood. It smells, too, like copper and smoke and something unfamiliar that she recognizes anyways.
Him.
She smells like him.
Oh god.
“No no no no no no—”
“Ellie — Ellie!”
She jolts, her eyes flying to Joel’s face as she pants.
“Careful, baby, careful.” His hands are on hers, holding them still. “Can I help?”
Her ribs hurt and something’s wrong with her shoulder. She’s not sure she can get the sweatshirt off by herself, but she needs it gone. She wants to beg Joel to get rid of it, but she can’t force the words out and she thinks if she tries, she’ll just scream and maybe never stop screaming.
“I’ll help,” he says when she doesn’t say anything. He touches her shoulder for a second, gently tugging at the neck of her shirt. That’s weird, something she can’t figure out, until his hands return to her hem and he starts to tug it up.
Oh, she realizes. He was making sure she has still a bra on under her shirt. That’s good. She’s wearing a thermal top under the sweatshirt, but the sleeves of that are soaked in blood and it’s probably stuck to the sweatshirt. And being half-naked in front of Joel would probably be weird.
As soon as the sweatshirt is off, Joel makes it disappear. It’s gone and she breathes. Not deep, not steady, but she breathes. He pulls his jacket back around her shoulders, holding it there and rubbing her arms through it.
When he deems her warm enough, he gently tugs her arms out one at a time and wipes the blood from her hands. He even uses a little bit of soap, lathering it up on the cloth, to get it out from under her nails. He isn’t rough, but he’s thorough and when he tucks her hands back into the warmth of his jacket, they’re actually clean.
A very, very small part of her that is actually capable of thought is grateful for that.
So carefully, he wipes away the blood on her neck and the spots on her collarbones where it ran under her shirt. He moves his jacket carefully, just a little at a time, so she can keep it wrapped around the rest of her as tight as she wants.
It takes longer to get her hair clean. The first time she sees him pull a piece of something white and hard from her hair, her brain decides nope, that’s enough and the static gets thick again.
Eventually she can hear the low, soft murmur of Joel’s voice.
“—doin’ so good, honey. Almost done here.”
His fingers are in her hair. Not pulling, not rough. He’s not even picking anything out anymore. They’re just sort of combing through it, stopping when they reach a tangle to gently work through it. She has a brush in her bag somewhere. He probably knows that — he’s seen her pull it out and deal with her hair. Made jokes about it being a rat’s nest. She doesn’t seem to have the ability to even attempt to find it, though, and, well, this seems to be working.
She should probably find it weird the way Joel keeps moving her head. It should feel like… like a medical exam, maybe, or like when she’s had to get stitches and the doctor kept moving her so it was easier for him to stitch. She didn’t like it then, but she also didn’t like the idea of having her face sewn up without numbing and she knew they were willing to do that. This, though, this is different. It’s Joel. It’s Joel turning her head so he can use a cloth to carefully clean the shell of her ear. She doesn’t even remember being young enough to have someone wash her face, let alone anyone who would care enough to wash her ears.
Suddenly it feels like she might actually die if she isn’t touching him, more than the light touches on her chin and jaw to move her face. She pitches forward, nearly knocking the bowl of water over and caring not in the fucking slightest as long as she can come to rest against him.
Joel catches her.
“Hey, kiddo,” he says, his voice a little rough. “I’ve got you. I got you.”
She slips into the static again, but it’s quieter this time. The inside of Joel’s jacket is soft against her bare arms and with her face pressed into his shirt, she can’t smell the blood or the smoke or anything else.
Stars, she thinks out of nowhere. Once, somewhere in Nebraska, they camped out in a field in the middle of fucking nowhere. Joel didn’t sleep that night, worried about people sneaking up on them no matter how much she pointed out that they could see for fucking days with how flat it was.
She woke up and she couldn’t sleep. She doesn’t even remember why. Just one of those nights, maybe. She ended up scooting her sleeping bag over next to him and pointing out a constellation. The sky was so fucking big there and with no lights, every star was so visible, more than she’d ever seen it.
After a moment, Joel moved her hand and named one she didn’t even remember the name of. They switched back and forth, pointing out things they knew. Constellations, distant planets.
She fell asleep eventually and she doesn’t remember the day after that, all blended together with identical days.
It’s a good memory. A safe one.
“Ellie,” Joel says eventually. She likes the way he says her name, soft, nothing like the way he said it. “Don’t fall asleep on me just yet.”
She’s nowhere near sleep, but she’s still. She’s safe in the stars. There’s no bad ending there.
She sits up when he gently prompts her, but keeps her hand fisted in his shirt.
“Okay,” is all he says, then, “Lift up a little.”
She doesn’t quite get what he means, until his arm is under her legs and then she gets it, and the two of them get her on her knees enough that Joel can pull whatever it is she’s been sitting on back under her. She’s not really sure why he cares that much about it. It isn’t like she can even feel the floor.
But he’s rearranging them, sitting cross-legged in front of her now, and his hand wraps around one of her boots.
“Feet must be freezin’,” he murmurs and slips it off.
She tenses. He notices immediately.
“Hey, hey, we’re not goin’ anywhere. You don’t need ‘em right now. Here, how about I take mine off, too? Probably gettin’ snow all over you anyways.”
She wouldn’t have noticed, but this seems to be something he’s worried about now, and she feels him moving around, the thunk of his boots on the ground, and then his hand on her other foot.
“Can I take this off now?”
She breathes.
Joel takes her other boot off.
“Good. No more sittin’ in a puddle now,” he says.
He’s talking a lot. More than usual. That’s weird.
But part of her wants to crawl under his skin right now so she’ll start feeling safe again so maybe they’re both a little weird right now.
Without shoes, though, it’s easier to get closer, a fact she realizes when she realizes her legs are on top of his, so close she’s practically sitting on him. He doesn’t seem to mind, just tucks her feet down against the backs of his knees.
When he pushes his jacket off her shoulders, she whines. Having previously been unaware she was capable of making sounds anymore, it’s a surprise for her as much as him.
“Shh,” Joel soothes. “Just for a moment. I just…”
Then he goes quiet.
They’re close enough that she can feel his breath on her forehead, which is different but not exactly bad, and close enough that it only takes moving her head a little to see his face. Takes longer to focus on it, and when she finally does, he’s not even looking at her. He’s looking down, at…
She follows the path of his gaze and realize he’s looking down, at where her jeans are showing now that she isn’t wrapped in his jacket.
More specifically, he’s probably looking at the way the zipper is open.
She tried to close it, after, but the button is gone and either the zipper is broken or her fingers weren’t working well enough to do it up.
“Fuck,” Joel says and she jumps. Immediately, his hand is on the back of her head. “No, no, that wasn’t at you. Sorry, honey.”
He’s not mad at her.
She wants her backpack.
This time, at least, Joel gets what she’s doing when she looks around and immediately puts her hand on the strap. She pulls it close and fumbles at the zipper, losing her hold on it and just shoving her hand into the gap when it’s big enough to push it apart. Joel helps when he realizes what she’s doing and gets it unzipped.
There’s clothes in there. There were more in their other bags, the ones they lost along with their sleeping bags, but when Joel repacked the bags originally packed for her and Tommy, he’d insisted she have a change of clean clothes in her bag, along with several pairs of socks. He always does that, always makes sure she has what she needs.
Her fingers find a pair of jeans and she throws them to the side. She wants — there.
A clean pair of thermal leggings.
“Okay,” Joel says. “I’ll go out and get some more snow while you change.”
Great plan, except her hand is still in his shirt and she doesn’t know how to make it not be. Hm. That might be why it was hard to open her backpack.
Joel eventually gets it, though it takes him a couple minutes. “Alright,” he says. “What if I stood over at the sink and looked out that window for a bit?”
Too far, still.
He nods like she’s said something. “If I turn around?”
Her fingers unlock from his shirt.
So that’s what they do. It’s a little awkward. Or it should be? Ellie’s feelings are somewhere else right now. She’s made of static and there’s no room for her feelings in the static.
She was wearing a pair of leggings under her jeans, too, and the layers have kept the blood off her skin. It takes her a moment to make sure, a moment to stare at her skin until she knows that there isn’t any of David on her anymore.
When she has pants on again, she nudges Joel’s back with her knee.
“Turning around,” he says, but gives her a second before he does.
As soon as he does, though, she’s scooting back to where she was, more sitting on him than not.
“Hi,” he says nonsensically. “Now, I was tryin’ to get a shirt on you. Think we could do that before you get pneumonia?”
His tone is light, in a forced way. He’s trying to tease her. He does that, sometimes, and she doesn’t always catch it until later. She isn’t used to adults teasing her in a way that isn’t meant to hurt.
For a moment, his eyes catch on her ribs.
She looks down, too. There’s no blood, just bruising, so she doesn’t know what he’s looking at.
“Those broken?” he asks and she doesn’t know how she’s supposed to know that. After a long moment, Joel takes her hand and touches it to her side. She remembers something from earlier, from one of the staticky moments, and she thinks maybe she hit him when he tried to touch her ribs before. It’s better when her hand is between them, because it’s okay for Joel to touch her hands, and it — well, it hurts when she touches her ribs, but it’s just her hand.
Even on her stomach, where there’s a big dark bruise that he frowns at, it’s just her hand pressing there.
“Okay,” he says eventually and lets her go. Then he picks something up on the floor next to him. “Arms.”
She doesn’t actually know what he means, but he’s already lifting her arm so he can work the sleeve of the shirt up her arms. She doesn’t remember that, either, having anyone dress her. They must have, when she was small, but she remembers very little of when she was in nursery, before she turned five and went to her first preparatory school.
She raises the other one to meet him and when he lifts the shirt over her head, she realizes it must be his, because it’s big enough that she doesn’t have to do anything that hurts her ribs or her shoulder to get it on, and because it smells like Joel.
After that, there’s another of his shirts, one of his favourite flannel ones, that he carefully buttons. His hands are a little clumsier than usual, even still, and she realizes there’s blood on his knuckles.
He even changes her socks.
It’s better, when everything touching her skin is something David never touched.
Joel tucks his jacket around her shoulders again, and then seems to run out of things to fuss about. He keeps touching her back and her arms, like he’s making sure she’s still in one piece. Eventually, he holds her face in both of his hands and just looks at her for a long couple minutes.
“Honey,” he says, and she actually hears him swallow. “Are you hurt… are you hurt anywhere else?”
She wishes she didn’t know what he’s asking.
“It ain’t your fault,” he says, his hands still so gentle on her face. “I just — I just need to know if I need to… get you anythin’.”
More memories surface. Old FEDRA classes. Old rumours about who to ask to make certain things not happen if certain other things had happened.
She thinks about blood and she shakes her head.
“Okay,” Joel breathes. He lets go of her face, which she misses in a way, but less when it means she gets to settle against him again, her nose tucked against his neck. He’s a little bloody himself, and smells kinda terrible, like sweat and dirt and a little bit still like the infection in his stomach, but it’s not the kind of terrible that wants to hurt her.
Especially not like that. Joel literally took her clothes off earlier and she knows he would never hurt her like that. It just isn’t possible. Joel Miller isn’t made like that. It’s not even just because it’s her, he’s just not like that. She asked, once, right outside of Boston, if he’d smuggled a lot of people and he’d cut her a sharp look and said, never, no people. He didn’t have to say that then — he wasn’t trying to make her feel better. He didn’t even like her then. It was just a fact.
She stopped worrying about that the first day she met him, when he laid down on the couch in his and Tess’s apartment and basically told her to fuck off and leave him alone while he took a nap.
“Ellie,” he says, a while later. She isn’t sure how long. She’s been in the stars. “I gotta get up.”
She presses closer to him.
“I know. Just for a minute. You’ll be able to see me the whole time, I promise. Just keep your eyes on me.”
She hugs her knees even though it hurts and watches.
He only goes as far as a sink she didn’t notice, on the other side of the room next to a short fridge and some counters. He dumps the rusty pink water down the sink, but not before wiping the blood off his hands with some of it and a scrap of cloth.
Then he crosses, staying in front of her, to the fireplace she’s only now seeing next to her, even though she should feel the heat from the fire, and the pot of melted snow steaming gently next to it, and pours some into a mug.
It’s warm when he presses it into her hands. He has to pick up her hands and wrap her fingers around it, but she feels it, the warmth from his hands and from the mug, her own pressed between the two.
The first sip tastes like blood and she’s already leaning away when Joel shoves a bowl under her face. She spits and then gags when she sees it’s pink-tinged, and keeps heaving until tears and snot are running down her face but nothing comes up except thin, watery bile.
When she’s stopped everything but shuddering, Joel wipes her face again.
“I’m sorry,” he says as he does. “I didn’t realize — are your teeth okay? Does your jaw hurt?”
He touches her face even more carefully, gently turning it so he can check for bruising.
It’s not hers, she wants to tell him, but all she can do is stare at him.
He goes quiet after a moment. “You bite someone?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Good job. You did so good. Wanna rinse again?”
Joel has to hold the cup because her hands are shaking too much but after rinsing it twice, the taste of blood is gone from her mouth. He gets rid of the bowl and then tries to convince her to actually drink some water.
“Just a couple sips,” he says. “Just try, for me.”
She has never in her life been asked to do something so gently.
She sips. She gags, but keeps it down. She sips again. After the third time, she pushes him away. It’s not enough. She knows it’s not enough with how dehydrated she’s pretty sure she is, but it’s already sloshing unpleasantly in her empty stomach. It reminds her of the way it feels after eating cold soup too fast on an empty stomach and thinking about soup makes her think about ear soup and…
She presses her hand against her mouth.
“Alright,” Joel says and gets the mug out of her face. “How about we move now?”
Move? Like… leave? But neither of them have shoes on and that means they’re done for the day, usually.
She looks around, trying to figure out what he means, and then sees the couch. One of the cushions is missing — she’s sitting on it, apparently — and he probably wants her to lie down on it.
For a second that sounds nice. But then she feels it, the floor under her back and the weight on her hips and fingers on her stomach under her jeans and it isn’t static anymore. It’s fire, crackling so loud she can hear it over the sound of herself screaming.
“Ellie! Baby, look at me. Look, it’s me. Look.”
Joel’s hands are on her face again.
They’re both on their knees. Her hands are on his shoulders and they sting like she’s hit him and she wants to apologize for that because the way he’s swaying them, a gentle rock she doesn’t even know if he’s aware he’s doing, is the softest way anyone has ever touched her.
“Hey, now,” he says. “You back with me? I’d really like to know what happened there, if you could tell me. So I don’t do it again.”
She doesn’t know if she can.
Just try, for me.
“Not — not lying down,” she whispers, her voice cracking.
Joel nods, slow. “Okay. You don’t gotta. Look.”
He pulls the other cushion off the couch. He doesn’t let go of her. Takes his hands off her face, but holds her hand in his. It’s different from the way he’s done that before, grabbing her wrist so they won’t get separated if they run. His fingers are wrapped around hers, thumb rubbing her knuckles.
“See, we’ll put ‘em both here,” he says. “I’ll take this one, you take that one. We’ll just sit.”
He’s in pain, she realizes. Of course he is. He’s probably still barely fucking alive.
She gets off the couch cushion, pushes it over next to his. She doesn’t let go of his hand, not until they’re both sitting against the couch and she can press against his side.
He groans, just a little, when he leans back against the couch. “Gettin’ old,” he mutters. “Alright, little bit more.”
More what?
It’s not until he picks one of her hands up that she understands — the goddamn mug again.
She makes a noise of protest. Not words. That’s not happening again right now. But noise. It’s progress.
“I know, grumpy,” Joel says, which is pretty fucking hypocritical of him. “Three sips.”
He fucking counts them and she wonders for a moment if Joel’s plan here is just to annoy her back into being okay.
Probably doesn’t work like that.
“Good job,” he says when she’s done. Then he cups his hand carefully around the back of her head and guides it down to his shoulder. “Now I ain’t gonna push it yet, but you’re gonna have to eat soon.”
Apparently she’s remembered how to shake her head.
“I know, I know, but—”
He doesn’t.
“They were eating people,” she chokes out.
Joel exhales, his breath ruffling the hair against her temple. “I know.”
She freezes.
“I saw,” he says. “I’m sorry you had to.”
She rubs her cheek against his shoulder. It’s wet and it’s annoying. “He said — he was going chop me up so they could eat me, and then I distracted him and I got away but he followed me and he pinned me and he tried to — he wanted to hurt me.”
She says hurt because the other word feels wrong when she thinks it. It’s what he tried to do, what he was going to do, so it’s not wrong like it’s inaccurate, but it’s wrong that she has to say it.
“Oh, baby girl…” Joel says, the same thing he said when he found her.
“I don’t want to talk,” she whispers. “I don’t wanna talk or eat or…”
She stops before she says something she can’t take back.
“Okay,” he says. “You don’t have to. You don’t gotta do anythin’ you don’t want to. I won’t make you, I promise.”
She knows that. He’s really bad at making her do things, honestly. She never really has a problem with doing what he asks. He lets her do cool shit like start their fires and climb trees so she can pick fruit or help him set snares for food, so she doesn’t really mind if he also tells her to change her socks or wear a hat or drink more water.
Okay, maybe she’s a little pissy about the water right now. But normally it’s not an issue.
Besides, that’s not what he really means.
“Can you rest for me?” Joel asks. “Not sleep, if you don’t want. Just sit here with me and rest?”
Maybe.
She reaches down, across him, and pulls his shirt up the way she’s been doing for days now.
It looks better. Less puffy, not so red anymore. It looks like the edges are starting to knit together under her messy stitches, which have miraculously survived everything.
He’s not bleeding.
“I’m fine,” he promises, gently pushing her hand away and fixing his shirt. “Don’t fuss about that now.”
Hypocrite, she thinks again. But she’s so tired and she’s been so scared for so long. She wants him to be the grown up again, to take care of her. They’re a team, but she doesn’t want to be in charge anymore. She’s spent months bristling against it, his refusal to let her act like an adult, but she wants nothing more than for him to treat her like a child again.
When she presses closer against him, Joel nods, his beard brushing the top of her head. He shifts just enough to grab his jacket and pull it over her like a blanket. She’s curled up right enough that it covers her almost completely, and when he adds an actual blanket from god knows where, she actually starts to feel warm again. It’s been a long time since she felt warm.
She grabs the edge and tugs until he’s covered, too. It’s just sensible. With how close they’re pressed, if he gets cold, she’ll get cold too. This way, they both stay warm.
“Thanks, baby,” he murmurs.
The nicknames are new. Well, not completely. She’s been kiddo a while and smartass longer, which doesn’t feel the way an insult does. But the soft ones are new. The baby and honey and baby girl are soft and new and she aches every time he says one, the way new skin aches when you peel off a scab.
She falls asleep even though she tries not to.
She dreams about blood.
Her mouth tastes like blood, is the problem.
Sleep helped, some, with the whole “concussed to hell” thing but then she woke up with the taste of blood in her mouth and she was already gagging the second her eyes opened. She very nearly threw up on Joel until he shoved a bowl under her face.
“I know you don’t feel hungry,” Joel says, his voice soft. “But you haven’t eaten a lot lately.”
She shakes her head.
“Ellie, how long?”
She shrugs. She doesn’t really remember, and it doesn’t really matter. A couple bites of jerky doesn’t exactly put her into not-starving condition, not the way she was rationing it.
“I can’t let you get sick,” he says, still soft.
She wishes he would stop. She wants him to yell at her, to tell her she’s being stupid and ungrateful. He’s never this soft with her and it’s wrong. She doesn’t recognize a Joel this soft. Sarah’s dad was soft like this, she bets, but Joel isn’t her father and she’s not his daughter and him being like this with her just means something is broken, like she’s a wounded animal he’s trying not to spook.
She doesn’t want him to stop.
There’s a stack of cans next to them. He told her, when she could actually hear it, that they were in a group of old cabins, somewhere rich people went for ski trips. Not a resort, he said, and then said it about a dozen more times while she shook. Just cabins. The one they’re in had a few cans, and they’ve checked the ones on either side. Only those two, because she refused to be left alone and he wasn’t willing to drag her out into the cold any longer than that.
She swallows, thick. “How am I supposed to know they’re safe?”
“They’re old,” Joel says. “From before.”
It doesn’t help.
“Come here, look.” He picks one up and she scoots closer. She still hasn’t quite gotten over that thing where she thinks maybe if she burrowed in between Joel’s bones she’d feel safe again, so she’s happy with any excuse to get close to him. He puts his arm around her shoulders and holds the can so they can both read the faded label. “Everythin’ in it is listed here.”
“But people lie.”
“They couldn’t.” He puts the can down and picks up another, turning it so she can read it, too. “Have you ever seen an old factory? Not a FEDRA one.”
She shakes her head.
“There were so many people working in them,” he says. “Every step of the way, someone was inspectin’ things and makin’ sure they were okay. They had to wear all kinds of special gear so they wouldn’t even get hair in the food. If somethin’ went wrong, things got recalled. Means they’d get taken off the shelves and destroyed.”
She looks up at him.
“Sarah — Sarah used to watch this show about how things got made,” he says. “Lots of factory episodes.”
She nods.
“We can’t leave until you heal,” he says. “And you won’t heal til you eat.”
It’s the meanest thing he’s ever said to her.
She cries, silent, and he lets her.
“I can tell you more about factories if you want.” He wipes her cheeks even though she refuses to look at him, pulling his sleeve down over his thumb and dabbing gently at them because he knows her eyes are raw. “And we can wait as long as you need. But you have to eat. And I really don’t want to force it down your throat when you pass out.”
She shudders. She trusts Joel more than anyone else in the world but that — that makes her sick to imagine.
He lets her examine every can they have, reading the list of ingredients on each.
Eventually, she holds up a can of peaches.
He wants her to eat something more filling, she knows. One of the cans of stew or beans. It makes his eyes go tight at the corner and she wants to tell him to open one, that she’ll be able to do it, but she doesn’t know if she can and she doesn’t want to waste food.
“Alright,” is all he says, though. “You want ‘em warm?”
She wrinkles her nose. “Gross. Who wants hot peaches?”
Joel snorts as he opens the can. “Lotta people. Maybe when we’re in Jackson, I’ll figure out how to make cobbler for you. You take peaches and put a — a type of dough over them and bake it all together. It’s sorta like a cake.” He shifts, putting the can in front of her with one of their forks in it. “I think I remember Tommy sayin’ somethin’ ‘bout orchards. Maybe they’ll have fresh ones. You can put those on the grill and they come out real damn good.”
When we’re in Jackson.
Ellie picks the can up. The peaches are still orange and they don’t give right away when she pokes the fork into it.
She takes a bite of the slice on her fork. Barely a bite. It’s too sweet, a little metallic. She can’t chew.
“Gimme one of those,” Joel says and snatches the fork from her hand.
“Hey!” she protests automatically, despite not actually wanting it.
“Too slow,” he says and eats the slice.
The same one she bit. She watches him chew and swallow like it’s nothing. It is nothing. It’s just fruit.
She manages to swallow the bite of peach. She’s not entirely sure she chewed it, but it goes down.
“Good job,” Joel says, like she actually did something.
She pokes another peach slice, but isn’t quite ready to eat it. “Were they all food?”
“Hm?”
“The — the factory show? That Sarah liked?”
It’s only the second time she’s ever said his daughter’s name. It feels heavy in her mouth, worse than the syrupy remnants of canned fruit in her teeth. It’s heavy the way Joel’s rifle was in her hands, like it could do just as much damage.
He doesn’t flinch like it hurts, though. He settles back against the couch, his arm still around her shoulders. “No, not all of them. You know what one I really remember? Fake eyes.”
She twists to look at him. “You’re shitting me. Like for dolls or something?”
“No, for people. People who lost eyes. They’d make ‘em new ones.”
“And they worked?”
“I don’t think so. More for looks, I guess.”
“Huh.” She nudges him. “Tell me?”
So he does. He tells her what he remembers about the eyes and he takes the peach slices she holds out to him without a word, taking a bite and then handing the rest back to her.
She chews and ignores the taste of metal on her tongue.