Chapter Text
8. Colorado
If this is death, he must have gone to hell. Which isn’t surprising, really, after everything he’s done. His hands are so bloody he couldn’t scrub them clean even if he tried for the rest of his life.
He alternates between moments of unrestful darkness and strange hallucinations. He sees Ellie hovering over him, sleeping next to him, disappearing up and down the stairs. Sometimes, he feels her tap something wet to his lips, and hears her voice. He can never decipher what she’s saying, but he can identify the desperation in her voice, the fear. This must be some kind of special afterlife torture, to have her so close, to have her needing him, and yet be so fucking helpless.
And of course, there’s pain, too, in every moment -- a throbbing, burning pain centered on his lower right abdomen. He goes through vicious cycles of freezing cold, his body shaking uncontrollably, and an unbearable heat that makes him dizzy.
Well. What a way to spend fucking eternity. He supposes he deserves it.
At one point, he registers a sharp, stabbing pain right in his right abdomen. Then he thinks he feels something soft nestling in the crook of his neck, hair tickling his jaw, and is almost comforted by the sensation despite himself. But that must be another hallucination, because Joel knows there’s no peace for him in death after all the pain, violence, and suffering he’s caused.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
It’s not until the next time he wakes up that he realizes: He’s not fucking dead. Somehow, some way, Ellie had kept him alive.
He can still feel the burning ache in his lower abdomen, but it’s lessened, albeit slightly. He looks around as best he can without moving his head too much and realizes that none of it was a hallucination -- he’s inside (a basement by the looks of the windows) laying on something soft, with a blanket covering his legs. Ellie must have done that.
Ellie. Where is she?
He looks around again, this time seeing the empty wrapper from their last pack of jerky, his canteen half-full of water, his shoes taken off and stored neatly next to the wall, and something shiny on the floor he can’t quite make out.
No sign of that stubborn, annoying, sarcastic 14-year-old. No sign of his baby girl.
He opens his mouth to try to call for her, but his throat is drier than the fucking Sahara, and nothing comes out. The ice trickles down into his chest, squeezing around his ribs, because he has to protect her, he swore he would keep her safe. He takes a shuddering breath, and everything goes dark again.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
He wakes to footsteps pounding down the stairs.
Ellie. Thank fucking God. The relief floods his chest, followed by confusion. Ellie isn’t supposed to be here -- she was supposed to leave, supposed to go find Tommy.
But he doesn’t have time to linger on that thought, because Ellie is running towards him, throwing herself onto her knees next to him.
“Joel, wake up. Joel, wake the fuck up!” Ellie begs, scrabbling around on the floor for something.
The terror in her voice has him more alert than he’d been in days despite his eyelids drooping. He does his best to focus on her, tries to move towards her, but his limbs are like concrete blocks.
“Okay, look at me.” She whispers, and he does, focusing on her face, her eyes dark and wide, tendrils of brown hair wisping across her cheeks. “There are men coming, okay?”
His mind struggles to put together what she’s saying. All he can tell is that Ellie’s more than scared, she’s panicked , and that sets his heart thundering in a way that has nothing to do with the stab wound in his stomach.
“I’m going to lead them away from you. But if anyone makes it down here, you fucking kill them. You got it?” She snaps her fingers in Joel’s face, but Joel’s mind hasn’t caught up yet. All he can process is that Ellie is fucking terrified, and that she said something about men coming.
He tries to get up because he needs to fix it, needs to keep them safe from whatever is coming, but his stomach burns, and he chokes on a groan.
Ellie isn’t paying attention. “ Joel. Joel, do not fall asleep.” She presses something long and thin onto his chest and wraps his fingers around it. He curls his hand loosely, and he realizes it’s a knife.
The room tilts, and his head goes fuzzy again. He can hear Ellie moving around the room, hear sounds of something heavy being dragged across the floor, and urges himself to stay awake , like Ellie asked. Men are coming. Ellie needs him .
Everything goes dark again.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Joel wakes again to the sound of footsteps. He immediately turns his head slowly from left to right, looking for Ellie, until he registers the weight on his chest.
It’s a knife. Joel, there are men coming.
The footsteps are slow and careful, nothing like Ellie’s frantic dash down the stairs earlier. He closes his fist around the knife.
If there are men here, that means Ellie has failed to lead them away. If Ellie’s failed, then the men might have her. Might hurt her. Might kill --
He can’t finish that thought. Won’t. He lifts himself off the mattress on the floor, and lets the cool mask of adrenaline settle over him, washing the pain in his stomach into a dull ache, and prepares himself.
He’s done horrible, awful things to keep himself alive over the past two decades. But this time around, there’s a 14-year-old kid out there who needs him.
To protect Ellie, to keep her alive, he’ll do the unspeakable.
The viciousness comes easy to him. It lives inside him, right underneath that little container that holds all his grief and rage. The wound Sarah’s death left never healed -- it just festered to the point that he was a dead man walking for the last 20 years. Wounds like that produce different things in different people, but in Joel, it produced a cool, icy rage that came with an utter detachment.
That rage has curled inside him, growing fangs and claws over the years, and that’s how Joel does what he does. When the going gets tough, he lets the rage take over, and the emotion drains out of him. It’s like a release, in a way, an outlet for all the retribution the world deserves for taking Sarah from him. And though he may feel guilty later on, the power the rage gives him -- the power to do anything , to do what others can’t and won’t -- is a little heady to him. It’s like a threat to the world, a way to say, go ahead, try and hurt me again. I’ll hurt someone else more.
He’s never admitted that to anyone, because he knows it’s a little fucked up, and it scares even him sometimes. But he can never deny just how good it feels to know that he can do whatever it takes, and that he will.
He thinks of the look people get sometimes -- Tess, even Tommy, when he lets the beast out and wreaks havoc. Tess had never known him before, so it wasn’t anything to new to her. She coached him the way a mother would sometimes -- Joel, take a breath. Joel, I would love nothing more than for you to go after these guys, but we have to wait. She kept him leashed like an attack dog, and was always sure to never keep him chained up too long. And when he’d done what he came to do, she never judged him. Just surveyed the damage dispassionately and followed him home, rinsed off with him in the shower, and curled up next to him in their little double bed.
Tommy, on the other hand, was horrified the first time he saw what Joel was capable of. Joel remembers the look on his face -- a look of shock, disbelief, a look of who are you and what have you done with my big brother ? Tommy never said a word to him about it (at least, not until Jackson) but as the shock faded, there was a deep sadness in his eyes after Joel was done. A mourning.
The only other person who had gotten close to him and seen him lose control was Ellie. He remembers that night vividly, how good it felt to unleash the rage and feel the FEDRA officer’s skull crunch underneath his hands. He turned around, expecting to see her crying, or cowering, but she was just watching him with that gleam in her eyes.
At the time, he’d just dismissed her as a weird-ass kid. But now that he knows her, he knows Ellie’s got rage inside her too. Thinks that maybe she was seeing someone else with that kind of rage for the first time.
And while Joel’s rage is absolutely vicious, foaming at the mouth whenever he unleashes it, it’s particularly brutal when it’s produced on behalf of someone else. Someone he cares about.
It’s easy for him to watch as the first intruder chokes on his own blood. After the light has faded from his eyes, Joel takes a breath, leaning against the old walls of the basement. He takes the opportunity to lift his shirt and examine his wound, since he hasn’t actually looked at it since it was a gaping hole gushing blood.
Neat, black stitches connect his torn flesh together. The wound is clean, but an angry red. He brushes his fingers over it, hot to the touch and tender.
This should have killed him. But somehow Ellie found the supplies to stitch him up, and must have also found some sort of medicine to give him, because it was definitely infected. Despite his anger with her for not leaving and heading to safety, he can’t help but be impressed with her resourcefulness.
There’s another emotion there, too, one that pricks tears in his eyes and makes his chest hurt, but he doesn’t have time to examine it, because there’s sudden shouting from outside. He grabs the dead man’s rifle and is pleased to see that it’s almost fully loaded, stepping carefully over the growing pool of blood on the floor.
He creeps upstairs and outside, slowly, strategically. It’s an odd sensation, one he hasn’t felt since he was sniping out anyone who came for Ellie in that old house in Kansas City. He registers that he’s panicked -- his stomach is churning in a way that has nothing to do with his injury, and everything to do with thoughts of Ellie, taken by these men , alone, hurt, and scared. But the rage allows him to focus, allows him to slow his heartbeat, allows him to ignore the pain from his wound and zero in on getting this job done so he can get his girl and get them the hell out of here.
It’s almost funny how easy it is for him to pistol-whip these two guys and drag their unconscious bodies inside. There’s a drawer on the floor of the kitchen, and it’s full of old supplies -- dusty band-aid tins and boxes of matches, and he spies a roll of duct tape that’s tumbled across the floor.
He makes quick work of the men, and once they’re secured, he unleashes the beast. Sometimes he relishes a slow torture -- making people break is an art form, and he’s perfected it -- but he doesn’t have time. Ellie doesn’t have time.
So when the first man says “ Please , I don’t know any girl ,” he jams his knife into the man’s knee, angling the blade just right. The man lets out a choked yell, and Joel almost smiles.
He ignores the pathetic yells of the other man, and grabs the first man’s hair, forcing him to look right into Joel’s eyes. “He can’t help you.” Joel tells the man softly, intimately. “You focus right here, or I’ll pop your fucking kneecap off.” His words are full of promise, full of the brutal rage that’s made him a killer, but also kept him alive.
The man pauses, and Joel knows he’s got him, leaning forward in anticipation. “She’s alive.” He whimpers out, and the words threaten to knock Joel over with sheer relief.
Ellie’s alive. He can still find her, still save her.
Five minutes later, the bodies of the two men are cooling and Joel’s on his way, blood still drying under his fingernails.
He heads to the garage first, thinking Callus might be stashed there, but realizes Ellie must have taken him after seeing the discarded buckets of snow and dried up grass that Ellie must have dug up somewhere.
So he heads out on foot. Silver Lake only takes him about an hour to walk to, and he’s going as fast as he can without injuring himself further. He’s still got that cool focus, but it’s eroding away under the consistency of his panic; he swears every heartbeat is saying El-lie. El-lie.
When he finally arrives about an hour later, he finds a slew of buildings, all made from the same matching stone. A resort , the first guy had said, and Joel has vague memories of ads for vacations he could never afford, all spas and skiing and glamor. There’s no one walking around, probably because it’s brutally cold and the wind is blowing ice and snow everywhere despite the lack of an actual storm.
He takes stock of the buildings, trying to decipher a place where it would make sense to take a kidnapped girl. It doesn’t take long for him to spy a sickening stretch of snow, flattened and coated in red that’s bright against the rest of the bleak ground.
His heart leaps into his throat, and he follows the trail, praying to God that the stain isn’t going to lead him to the corpse of another dead little girl.
He knows immediately once he enters the building what it is. Slaughterhouses used to be something far away, something you never had to think about when you picked up your ground beef from the grocery store, but now they were an intimate part of life. He used to work shifts there for extra cards in the Boston QZ, dressing animals and preparing the meat to be sold. The smell is something he’ll never forget -- metallic, cloying, and lingering.
He waits a moment to make sure he doesn’t hear anyone else, then clicks on his flashlight. There are shelves full of random shit -- plywood, rusted shovels, work gloves. He scans over it quickly, but doubles back when something catches his attention.
A green backpack. With a familiar dirty pink keychain.
He grabs the backpack, thumbs over the keychain, simultaneously relieved because he’s one step closer to finding her and horrified because he’s not sure what it means that her stuff is here, in a fucking slaughterhouse .
He grabs the backpack, slings it over his shoulder, and tells himself that Ellie will be relieved to have her stuff when he finds her, because she’s here somewhere, alive.
But he finds himself creeping towards the double doors that lead to the kill room, where meat is carved and preserved. She’s not in there, she’s not in there , he tells himself, but an image of Ellie flashes in front of his eyes, laying pale and still on the ground just beyond those doors, blood still trickling from a bullet hole between her eyes.
He doesn’t want to know, but he can’t not know. Trying to reign in his panic, he opens the door.
The smell hits him a hundred times harder than it did in the first room, and it takes all his strength not to gag, his wound burning with the effort. He sees a mass laying on the floor to his right, and quickly realizes that Callus has met his end.
He can hear the tell-tale creaking of something hanging from the ceiling though, something in the process of being dressed. He rounds a corner, heart drumming in his chest, expecting to see pigs, or cows.
He doesn’t see either. Bile rises in his throat as he takes in the human corpses hanging, headless, blood dripping gently onto the floor. One is missing an entire section of ribs, carefully plastic-wrapped to avoid rot.
His mind spins, his gut twists, and he wants to wretch with panic and disgust, but there’s no time for that. He holds his breath and takes a closer look at the bodies. It’s readily apparent that they’re all full-sized adults -- all of them longer than 5 feet even without their heads.
Ellie’s not here. She’s not dead, hanging in this old barn, waiting to be someone’s next meal.
The thought spurs him on, and turns on his heel, leaving the slaughterhouse behind.
As he rounds a corner, the familiar scent of smoke hits his nose, and he looks around for the source. It’s unlikely that someone is out here starting a bonfire on a day as fucking freezing as today, but he can’t be seen.
He scans the sky and realizes that the smoke is coming from a building several hundred feet away. He inches closer, clinging to walls and corners for stealth, and tries to get a hint at what’s going on, because the flames are licking the walls, and in his experience, fire usually means fighting.
Then he hears the screaming. A man is yelling, and there’s a female scream coming from that direction, and before he knows it he’s running, ignoring the white-hot pain in his abdomen. Something, some long-slumbering instinct has awakened in him, and he just knows that Ellie is in that building, that Ellie is in trouble. He makes it to the back of the building then moves around the side, looking for an entrance. The screaming and yelling has stopped, and the silence terrifies him more than anything.
Just as Joel comes around to the front of the building, the door opens, and a small girl stumbles out, panting and slipping on the snow, her hair a tangled mess barely held together in a ponytail.
His brain short-circuits and his body moves, all he can think is Ellie, Ellie, Ellie. She’s alive. His girl is alive.
Ellie hasn’t noticed he’s there, because she’s still moving in tilted strides away from him, from the building. He races forward and grabs her arm, pulling her back towards him.
And this is the moment Joel realizes: Ellie is alive, but she’s not okay.
The second his fingers touch her, she starts screaming in this awful way that he’s never heard before, her voice ragged with desperation and terror. She’s pleading, no, get off me, no , and his heart falls into his stomach.
He gets his other arm around her, and she starts to fight him, pulling weakly away from his grasp, but he holds on to her for dear life.
“It’s me.” He tells her, trying to stay calm. He turns her around in his arms and she’s still fighting, this time raising her fists to pound against his chest.
“It’s me. ” He says again, and finally gets a good look at her face.
His chest contracts, and the ice trickles down his spine, flooding his veins. Her face is covered in blood, and she’s sobbing, semi-hysterical in his arms. “Hey.” He says, in a voice so gentle he forgot it existed, “It’s me. Look. It’s me.” He’s got a hand gently cupped around the side of her head, his thumb on her cheekbone, and it fucking hurts to look at her face, so young, so small, so bloody.
And Ellie is staring at him, pupils blown wide, blinking as if she can’t quite believe he’s real. She’s got a death grip on the collar of his coat. “It’s me.” He whispers again, and her sobs die in her throat.
She tries to speak, but it’s incoherent. He strokes her cheek with his thumb, and then she’s throwing herself into his arms. He takes her gladly, wraps her up in his embrace, murmuring “it’s okay” to her even though he knows it’s not.
She buries her face in his neck, and he can hear her whimpering, the sound rousing something inside him he thought was long dead. “It’s okay, baby girl.” The nickname slips out of his mouth before he can even think about it, but he doesn’t really give a fuck. Ellie’s here, alive and breathing in his arms, and he relishes in the feel of it, anchors a hand in her hair as she sniffles against him, closes his eyes as the relief finally washes over him.
“I’ve got you.” He whispers, and he’s not sure if he’s talking to her, or himself. “I’ve got you.”
She burrows herself closer to him, and the motion almost sends Joel to his knees, not because of his injury, but because of how deeply and immediately she left her fight or flight mode the second she recognized him. She trusts him, trusts him to protect her and keep her safe, to take care of her.
And as she shakes in his arms, he vows that he will never, ever let anyone hurt her ever again. He’ll fucking kill anyone who even approaches her without her permission, and he’ll enjoy it. He’ll prove to Ellie that her trust is not misplaced, that she didn’t choose wrong when she chose Joel to take her to Utah. Because after everything they’ve been through together, she’s his baby girl.
She pulls away from him, and he looks at her once more. She’s in a sweatshirt that he doesn’t recognize, and the observation makes his stomach drop. She’s staring at him unwaveringly, but her gaze is eerily empty, like a house with the lights on but no one home.
He remembers a similar look on Tommy’s face after he got back from Desert Storm, clutching Joel’s arm as they both sat on the rickety old pull-out couch, cool summer air drifting through the open living room window.
Ellie’s not okay. She needs him, and the thought springs him into action. He shucks off his coat and wraps it around her shoulders, slinging the rifle back onto his shoulder and grabbing her pack before tucking her underneath his shoulder. He can feel her trembling even through the thick leather and lining of his coat, and he’s not sure if she’s cold, or if she’s going into shock.
He doesn’t have a destination in mind, doesn’t know where he’s going. All he knows is that he has to get Ellie the fuck away from Silver Lake, away from the houses that they’ve already been found in, and into a shelter, where he can warm her up and evaluate her more thoroughly for injuries.
They start walking into the trees, both of them haggard. Ellie is silent beside him. He’s only seen her be quiet like this twice before -- after Tess, and after Henry and Sam. As much as her silence scares him, because he knows it means something truly terrible has happened to her, he doesn’t push it. Her quietness allows him to focus: Focus on keeping Ellie upright, keeping himself upright through the burning pain and the pounding headache that has set into his own body, focus on staying alert for anyone following them, and focus on keeping an eye out for shelter.
About an hour later, Ellie suddenly stops walking, and it jolts Joel so painfully he has to bite back a groan. He’s quickly distracted, however, by Ellie ripping herself away from his side and collapsing onto her knees. He follows her, crouching down. “Ellie? Are you okay?”
She starts to heave, and that’s answer enough. He rubs her back gently as she gasps, choking up only bile. He wonders how long it’s been since she last ate, and kicks himself, because they don’t have anything either of them could eat right now.
Ellie takes a deep breath, trembling under his hands. “Are you okay?” He asks again, but she fails to answer, instead dropping onto her side into the snow.
He thinks she’s passed out at first, and it sends him spiraling -- what if she has an injury he doesn’t know about, what if she’s been losing blood this entire time -- but she squints open an eye and looks at him, her face pale.
“Ellie. What’s wrong?” His hands flutter uselessly around her body, laying in the snow. He can carry her if she really needs it, but he’d rather not right now, because he’s 99% sure it’s going to rip Ellie’s careful stitches.
She’s still silent, but she moves slowly to sit up and rests her head between her knees, breathing shallowly. He has no idea what’s wrong, no idea what could be hurting her and it makes him want to scream, but he knows he has to stay calm, because if he freaks out, Ellie’s going to freak out too.
He changes tactic, since it’s clear she won’t be talking to him. “It’s okay.” He says instead. He moves so he’s sitting next to her, ignoring the cold dampness of the snow, and puts an arm around her gently. She leans closer into him, and huffs out a shaky breath. He holds her like that for a moment, but only a moment. The sun is dipping dangerously low in the sky, and he needs to find them a place to stay where they won’t wake up with their toes frozen off.
“I know it hurts.” He says softly. Ellie lets out a barely audible whimper, and his heart cracks. “I know, baby. But we can’t stay here, okay? We have to get up, find somewhere safe. I know it hurts, but we have to go a little further.”
Ellie raises her head to look at him, and he cups her cheek. The sadness in her eyes guts him, and his eyes burn. Keep your shit together, Joel. “A little further, okay?” She gives another shaky breath, and then moves to get up.
“Wait.” He insists, hauling himself up first and clenching a fist at how the movement stretches his wound. He grits his teeth and leans back down, putting his hands around Ellie’s upper arms and pulling her slowly to a standing position.
To his alarm, she immediately pitches sideways, and he yanks her back towards his body to steady her. He wraps an arm more firmly around her shoulders, peering at her face. She’s blinking fast in a somewhat dazed way, and he realizes that she’s dizzy.
A new concern blooms, heavy in his chest. “Did you hit your head?” He asks her.
She doesn’t answer him, doesn’t even seem to have registered what he said. He looks at the bile she’s left behind them, looks at her bloodied nose. Fuck. She’s probably got a concussion.
He’s about to spiral, to panic, because he doesn’t know much about concussions, just that they can be really, really bad, but a cold wind whips against their faces, and he’s reminded to prioritize. First things first: find shelter.
He hauls Ellie against him again, and they keep moving.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
For once in their fucking lives, Ellie and Joel get lucky. Just as the sun had sunk below the horizon, and just as snow had started falling from the sky at a torrential pace, Joel spots a structure hidden between an alcove of trees.
He and Ellie get closer, and it seems like it was someone’s old vacation cabin -- small and secluded. He leads Ellie up the rickety porch steps, and winces when they groan. He unhooks his arm from around Ellie’s shoulders and turns to face her, bending down so that he’s at eye level with her.
She looks so small, drowning in his coat, and so distant, brown eyes vacant. “Ellie.” He says to her softly, bringing up a hand to cup her face to get her attention. She blinks at him, and he’s not sure if that means she’s listening, but he powers on.
“Stay here, all right? I’m going to check out the house real quick, and then I’ll be right back for you.” She blinks at him again, and he figures that that’s as much as he’ll get from her. He brings his hand down to squeeze her shoulder softly, then drops it, shouldering the rifle and getting ready to kick open the door.
A sudden pull on the back of his jacket startles him, tugging him back a step. He looks over his shoulder to see that Ellie has a grip like a vise on the back of his coat. She’s panting a little, her brows furrowed and her eyes wide with fear.
This is the most emotion he’s gotten out of her since that first moment that he found her, and it’s fucking fear. Fear that she’ll be alone out here. Fear of being left without him. His eyes burn.
He won’t leave her alone when she doesn’t want him to, won’t make her endure anything else today. So he allows her to follow him through the house as he clears it, her hand anchored to the back of his coat.
Luckily, no one is there, and it’s apparent no one has been there for a while from the thick layer of dust settling on everything. The cabin is small and square, an open-floor plan with a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. In the corner, there’s an old wooden spiral staircase leading up to a tiny loft area. There’s an old queen bed up there, from the looks of it, and it’s set in the back of the house, overlooking the rest of it.
Once he’s satisfied that no one else is there, he leads Ellie to the dusty old flannel couch sitting in the front of the fireplace. Miraculously, there’s a stack of firewood leaned neatly against the wall, and he’d snagged the matches from that house near Silver Lake. Within a few minutes, a small fire has started, and he relishes the warmth that it brings.
He leaves Ellie on the couch, the flames dancing across her blank face, and searches for supplies. He finds a few old rags that are dusty but clean, a sealed bag of jerky and a few cans of food with the labels ripped off, and most conveniently, several blankets. He looks high and low for some sort of medical supplies for Ellie -- bandages, antiseptic, or even old Advil, but no luck.
He returns to Ellie, only to see that she’s moved no closer to the fire. He grabs an old steel pot from the kitchen (only the handle was rusted) and fills it with snow from the porch, setting it near the fire to melt.
Then he sits down next to her. Ellie is still silent. She doesn’t even acknowledge that he’s here, a foot away from her. She’s just staring at the flames with hollow eyes.
The guilt and the self-loathing punches him in the gut again. In their hours of silent walking, he’s come to realize that none of this would have happened if he just hadn’t gotten his sorry ass stabbed at the University of Eastern Colorado. He could have been there to lead Ellie through Silver Lake and kill anyone who tried to get their hands on her, keep her safe and warm and happy.
But that’s not how it happened. And if Joel has learned anything in his life, it’s that you can’t change the past.
So he does his best to lock away his own feelings and focus on Ellie, on bringing her back into herself and checking out her wounds. He wasn’t there for her at Silver Lake, but he’s here now, and he’s going to do his damnedest to take care of her.
He leans forward slowly, putting himself in her line of vision. “Ellie.”
She doesn’t respond, so he says a little louder: “Ellie.”
She startles, looking at him like a deer in headlights, and he instinctively makes a soothing noise in the back of his throat.
He tilts his head at her. “Are you with me, baby?”
She blinks at the sound of the nickname, and her lip wobbles. Then she nods at him, once, slowly, and he exhales a silent sigh of relief. With her concussion, he’d been worrying that she would never be able to talk again, or that she would lose her memory and forget who he was.
He wonders if anyone has ever called Ellie a nickname in her entire life, ever been gentle and affectionate with her. He realizes he doesn’t know how long she’s been in FEDRA military school, if she knew her parents, how they died. But she seems to respond when he calls her baby girl , so he resolves to use it more often. He thinks of Sarah, wonders what she would think of him using that nickname for someone else, but he tucks that thought away for later.
“Can you tell me where you’re hurt?”
Ellie blinks at him, her gaze unsteady, and he resists the urge to haul her into his arms again. “Where does it hurt the most?” He prompts her.
She lifts an arm and points a trembling finger at her ribcage, on the right side.
He has a sudden flash of the body in the slaughterhouse, harvested down to the ribs, and a chill spreads down his spine.
“Okay. I’m going to take this off for a minute, alright?” He grasps gently at the zipper of his coat, still wrapped around her.
She nods again, her eyes glassy and never leaving his face. He tugs the jacket off of her, and his heart skips a beat.
Her neck is covered in bruises, a grotesque constellation of purple and blue. He leans forward to get a better look, holding his breath, and he realizes that the bruises are in the distinctive shape of two hands.
Rage pools in his stomach and his heart pounds. Joel’s hurt a lot of people, in a lot of very painful ways. But he’s never hurt someone who didn’t hurt someone else first, and he’s never, ever, hurt a kid. And someone’s fucking choked her . Choked Ellie, who despite her recklessness and attitude, is a 5’1” 14-year-old kid.
He tries to exhale as calmly as possible and keep his hands steady, tries to at least appear calm to Ellie. He’s already absolutely furious, inches away from losing it, and he hasn’t even gotten to the injury she indicated hurt the most.
He promises himself that someday he’ll return to Silver Lake, and that he won’t leave until the entire town is nothing but bits of blood and bone and ash, until everyone there has suffered ten times the amount Ellie has. That thought is enough to calm him, for now, and he exhales, focusing on Ellie.
He carefully guides the rest of the jacket off her arms, and lays it next to them on the couch. Then he looks at her, wanting to get her permission before he does anything else.
“Your ribs?” He clarifies, wishing his voice wasn’t so damn gruff.
She nods once, slowly. He gently grasps at the hem of her shirt. “I’m gonna take a quick look, okay?”
She nods again, and he slowly lifts her shirt until he can see the band of her sports bra.
He freezes, everything flashing white for a moment. He tries to comprehend what he’s seeing, but it’s like his brain isn’t cooperating, because Ellie can’t be this black and blue. She simply can’t.
Her skin is horrifically discolored, black in some places, swollen in others. The expanse of her abdomen from above her belly button all the way up into her chest is marked with color and pain. He looks closer in the flickering light, and realizes that one of the bruises -- the one right on her solar plexus -- resembles shoe tread .
He’s going to fucking kill them all.
He blinks, forcing himself to take a breath again. He will have plenty of time to unpack this rage and unleash it, but now is not the time , because Ellie is black and blue and breathing in front of him.
“I need to see if your ribs are broken.” He chokes out, and slowly moves his hand up to her ribcage, giving her plenty of time to realize that he was going to touch her. She doesn’t object, but she does flinch the second his palm brushes her skin, and it makes his chest hurt.
He quickly inspects for broken ribs and finds that one on her right side is probably fractured. But there’s nothing he can do, other than maybe try to rip up one of these blankets and wrap it up. Finally done with his inspection, he begins to lower her shirt gently.
And that’s when he notices it.
The button of her jeans is undone, but not because she wasn’t paying attention -- it’s because the button has been torn clean off.
The ice trickles down his spine, into his lungs, and creeps dutifully into his veins. He feels like he’s frozen, like he can’t move, caught in time by the realization of just how badly Ellie has been hurt. Because injuries -- broken ribs and bruised faces -- he can deal with that. He can fix that, press cold snow on her skin to help the swelling and wipe away her tears when the pain becomes too much. But this -- he can’t fix this.
Ellie doesn’t say anything, and he tries to glance up at her face as surreptitiously as he can. He doesn’t want her to know he’s upset, and doesn't want to add something else to her plate. But as soon as he gets a look at her eyes, he realizes that she’s drifted off again, that the lights are on but nobody's home.
Maybe that’s for the best, for now. He gently lowers her shirt and then grabs a cloth, dipping it in the snowmelt that’s now warmed. He wrings it out, then gently settles himself next to Ellie again, getting to work on cleaning the blood off her face.
In that moment, he realizes that the way the blood is splattered on her face doesn’t come from someone hurting her -- it comes from her hurting someone else. The blood isn’t hers.
He remembers her words outside the burning building. Stop, get off me, no. His throat grows tight, and his eyes burn. He knows better than most that hurting people can leave a scar almost as bad as one left by being hurt yourself. And even though he knows Elllie’s no stranger to hurting people, he still aches for her, for the innocence she didn’t get to enjoy, for the childhood she probably never had.
Stop, get off me, no. He’s going to be haunted by those words for the rest of his life.
He dutifully keeps wiping the blood off her face, wincing when he has to scrub a little to get it all off. Ellie, however, has almost no reaction other than flinching when he gets too close to her nose. Her eyes are still empty, and he’s almost relieved by it. Let her zone out and get some rest now -- he would take care of her.
He scrubs the last of the blood off of her mouth -- from the way it was caked in the corners of her lips, it seems like she bit someone. He’s not quite sure what that means, but it does produce a small kernel of pride for her in his chest. She fought like hell, that’s clear.
Once she’s clean, he tries to coax her to take a few sips of the water in the pot, but she refuses, turning her head away. Deciding not to push it, he carefully guides her up the old wooden staircase and onto the bed. He lets her take the side against the wall and tucks some of the blankets around her, making sure her feet and hands are covered. After ensuring that the rifle was loaded and within reaching distance, he heaves himself onto the bed, propping himself up with an old dusty pillow.
This is one of his favorite places they’ve stayed in, because the loft area gives him the perfect vantage point to watch the rest of the house -- there’s no way for anyone to sneak in without him noticing.
He grabs an extra blanket and tosses it over his own legs, finally leaning back and taking a breath. His wound burns like hell.
He can’t fucking believe he’s not dead, honestly. He lifts his shirt again and peers at the stitches, pleased to see that they’ve held despite everything. He can’t believe Ellie refused to leave, stuck by him and somehow nursed him off of Death’s door.
The girl in question shifts on the bed a little, curling her body next to his and resting her head on his hip. He looks down at her, her eyes shut and her breathing even, if a little sharp. He brushes stray hair off her face and off the back of her neck, smoothing it down onto her pillow. She looks so tired, so small, so young , and he’s suddenly overwhelmed.
He takes a deep, shuddering breath, hand still stroking her hair, and the tears start to drip down his face. It’s a catharsis of all the fear, all the panic, the anger and the self-loathing and the sadness, and the relief that Ellie is here, alive and breathing, curled up next to him. She saved him. She still trusts him.
He smooths his hand over her cheekbone, watching her eyelids flutter in sleep. And as he finally drifts off to sleep, as the fire burns low in the grate, her head never leaves his hip, and his hand never leaves her hair.