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With stiff, trembling fingers, Ellie unzips the sleeping bag with as much care as she can manage while shivering violently. She kneels beside Joel’s makeshift bed, the bag of dwindling medical supplies balanced on her thighs, and moves the zipper so slowly it is barely audible. Not that much is audible over the snowstorm raging outside and Joel’s pained, shuddering breaths.
Finally, Ellie releases the zipper and pulls back the top half of the sleeping bag, exposing Joel’s upper body. The rush of cold air sends a shiver through Joel’s frame, but even that doesn’t wake him up.
“Shit, sorry, Joel,” Ellie mutters, as though he can hear her. As though he hasn’t been in this almost-comatose state for three fucking days.
For ease of changing his bandages, Joel doesn’t wear anything from the waist up, just covered in shirts and sweaters like blankets, which means that, even with the bitter cold stiffening her fingers and her fear of hurting Joel further, Ellie strips him down to the bandages in seconds. Thankfully, no blood has soaked through the top dressing, but Ellie doesn’t relax. After all, the stitches still might not be working and have bled through the lower bandage, or he might have an infection threatening to kill him, and she wouldn’t know if she stops now.
“Fuck!” Ellie hisses, shaking her head.
No matter how hard she tries, her brain always comes back around to imagining the worst-case scenarios leading to Joel’s death. In her dreams, Joel bleeds to death because her stitches failed, and she awakes crying and scrabbling to check Joel’s pulse. When she heads out to hunt, she barely catches any prey, unable to focus on anything other than the fact she would be screwed if Joel got an infection. She worries so much she almost pukes, trying to think of places she might find antibiotics, or what will happen if Joel gets worse when she’s away, or just what if Joel never wakes up again. She needs to be strong to keep Joel safe, but it is so fucking hard and she just wants to—
Ellie opens her eyes, finding herself hunched forwards, shivering worse than ever and clutching Joel’s sweater so hard her knuckles have gone white. How long has she been sat here, lost in her own mind?
Wanting to slap herself, Ellie looks down at Joel, a surge of relief crashing over her to see nothing has changed (because what if she spaced out for so long he got hypothermia without the sleeping bag and fucking died right before her eyes?). She heaves in the deepest breath she can manage, her chest tight and the cold air burning her lungs, and hovers her hands over Joel’s bandages, ready to peel them away from his skin and check the wound for any changes.
But she hesitates, that horrible, intense fear creeping back into her mind. And it’s totally pathetic, but Ellie finds herself frozen, too scared by ‘what-if’s’ to find the truth.