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Ellie’s skin feels too tight for her body.
Her clothes are too loose– they make her feel skeletal and impossibly small, and the featherlight touch of fabric startles her with every kiss of the icy wind. But her skin hugs her flesh like a shrink wrap, compressing uncomfortably upon every unsteady step. A part of her worries that it’ll stiffen and seize and she’ll be on the ground again, immobile, helpless–
She presses into Joel’s side.
He smells awful, like sweat and mold and sickness, and walks with a gait twice as uneven as any infected Ellie’s ever met. She doesn’t think he should be walking. Shit, the stitches could break, the blood could rush out: he could die in these woods. She could be alone again.
Ellie doesn’t realize she’s whimpering until it reaches her own ears. Joel halts.
“Ellie?”
She can’t speak. The ashes of the diner burned a hole through her tongue, and it’s all she can do to push out pathetic noises where words should be. She expects a gruff response from Joel– craves it, in a way, if only for the sense of normalcy it might provide –but he only strengthens his grip, flexing the muscles in his arm that haven’t yet deteriorated.
“ Ellie .” He says it like an apology.
Gently, the man urges her forward, pressing a palm against her vertebrae and mumbling something she chooses not to hear. Ellie pushes through the snow, wishing she had the capacity to care about the biting cold or the dampness that seeps into her socks. She hates wet socks, somewhere in the midst of her muffled consciousness.
Her stomach turns as they cross onto the street.
Ellie perks up, lightless eyes frantically scoping the site of her capture, hyperactive and entirely unaware. Joel’s reaction is immediate.
“Hey,” he says quickly, and her attention snaps to him instantly. “Hey, eyes on me. You’re alright.”
Ellie nods halfheartedly, wrapping her arms tightly around herself and trying to focus on his scent. Somewhere under the grime and the pain, she knows he’s still there: Ellie clings to his tattered spirit like it’s all that she has.
The house that Ellie has understood as a sanctuary for so long feels imposing, now. Her eyes drift to the garage door, and she panics: she left the door open, and Callus is gone, and she has to find him, and–
Callus is dead. Right. She’d forgotten.
Joel approaches the front door with urgency, picking up his pace as he arrives. He reaches out for the doorknob, prepared to wrap his fingers around the cold metal…
But he doesn’t.
With a hairline gap between the knob and his palm, Joel stops. He retracts, gently ushering Ellie away from it. Under any other circumstances, Ellie might have worried. Now, she only mimics the man still shielding her form.
They end up at a house down the street, which feels significantly more homely than their prior abode. Peeling pink wallpaper dresses the living room, which is furnished by a single weathered couch. Ellie wonders if it looked different before the outbreak, or if it had always been this impressively ugly.
“Here, here, sit down.” Joel eases her down onto the couch, refusing to remove his arm until he’s certain that she won’t slump over. Ellie shivers as he retracts his arm, watching carefully as it snakes off of her shoulders and comes to rest at his side. Joel kneels in front of her, tilting his head, silently processing the pattern of blood splattered across her face.
His expression pinches. He knows.
He knows the way her hands wrapped around that cleaver, the sound it made upon impact, the way it was perfectly sharpened to split through bone but it still seemed to shrug when it struck David’s–
“Ellie, hey, look at me.”
Wordlessly, the girl obeys.
Joel sighs. He’s uncomfortable: Ellie can tell that much. So many months together in the wild, but he’d still had yet to see her silent like this. In all honesty, Ellie herself can’t remember the last time she was this quiet. She’d screamed over Riley, at least.
“Are you hurt?”
He doesn’t waste any time. Ellie appreciates that.
She shakes her head, and Joel’s expression grows a little more nervous.
“You’re sure? I, ah–” he looks down “–I’m not just talking about wounds, Ellie.”
She shakes her head again, slower this time. A part of her wonders how he knows. The rest of her knows it’s not all that difficult to put together.
Joel puffs out a sigh somewhere between relief and uncertainty.
“Alright.” With slow, careful movements, the man reaches over for the tattered blanket slung over the side of the couch. His movements are furtive as he raises a corner of the fabric up to Ellie’s cheeks. He pauses a few inches before her skin, making sure to lock eyes with her as he does so.
“May I?”
Ellie ogles.
He asked.
No one’s ever asked.
Shoves and pushes during training, firm grips on her chin after fights, harsh squeezes on her arm upon even the most well-meaning inspections– no one’s ever asked.
Ellie nods, and Joel presses the cloth to her face.
The coolness of the cloth is an almost welcome shock to her system, and she leans into his touch as he gently rubs the blood off of her ghostly skin. It doesn’t make her feel cleaner, really. She’s still fighting to imagine what David looked like as a person: the construction of his face, the curvature of his nose, the shape of his eyes, or any other feature that offered him even the slightest bit of humanity. She can’t remember, though. There’s a gaping ravine where his face is supposed to be.
“Okay.” The word comes out through Joel’s teeth, quiet and uncertain. “Better?”
“...yeah.” Ellie doesn’t know what else to say. Joel sighs again.
“Are you okay?”
It’s a stupid question, and they both know it. Ellie aches where she hasn’t been hurt, her stomach rolls where it hasn’t been fed, and her mind still spins at a frightening velocity.
Ellie should answer Joel’s question. She should open her mouth and tell him that she’s fine, she’s seen worse, her legs still work and they should start walking. But she can’t. She can lie to Joel about plenty of things, but this one just won’t come out.
She’s crying before she can even think to stop it. Hot tears lacerate the layer of frost upon her cheeks, and her vision blurs with watery blockage. Every hiccup hurts more than the last, fuck, her throat is so sore…
“Oh, baby girl.” Joel’s hugging her.
Joel is hugging her.
Back in the town, in the immediate aftermath of her escape, Ellie had been the one to throw her arms around him. Joel isn’t exactly the touchy-feely type, after all: he’s never one to initiate, favoring to stand back and let others seek comfort on their own. And yet, here he is, encapsulating Ellie in a snug embrace that overwhelms her with warmth and reassurance. She wants to die like this, tenderly held between a pair of arms she’s sure will never let her go.
However, Ellie immediately goes rigid when his weight begins to press down on her. He’s pushing her, slowly, into a prone position against the ratty couch cushions.
“Hey, stop, stop, hey!” Ellie writhes, tearing herself out of Joel’s arms. She presses tightly into the corner of the couch, eyes wide, heart threatening to burst.
She’s a little shaken to realize that Joel’s face displays an equal amount of terror.
“Sorry, shit, I’m so sorry,” he says hurriedly. “I was just tryin’ to get you to lie down.” Defeatedly, Joel raises his free arm and opens up the blanket that had been sitting on the couch, and gestures it toward Ellie.
The girl takes a nervous breath.
“Oh.”
Joel seems almost timid in the way that he hands Ellie the blanket to drape over herself. She cocoons herself immediately, bundling up until only her head peeks out. It’s not much– there are holes in the fabric and tears along the seams, but it makes her feel just a little safer. Less exposed, she thinks.
“Here.” Ellie tenses as Joel stands up. “There’re probably some more blankets upstairs, I’m just gonna–”
“Joel.”
Her eyes drift up towards his, wider than he’s ever seen them, desperate in a way he knows too well.
“Listen to me, kid.” He knelt before her again, steadying himself with one hand on the couch. “I am never leaving you. I don’t care what the hell happens from here on out, I am not losing you, and you sure as hell ain’t losing me. You’ve got me. Alright?”
Ellie’s nod is steady and more certain than it’s been all night.
“Alright.”
There are three blankets upstairs, all at varying levels of density and warmth. Ellie is just happy to have them in the first place.
“We’re probably going to need to leave tomorrow.” Joel’s voice is grim, but Ellie understands. She wants to get out of this place as much as he does, if not more.
“I know.”
“You’re okay to walk?”
“Yeah. I’m fine.”
That much isn’t a lie. Ellie hopes that Joel knows that.
He sighs, pressing his back against the foot of the couch below her.
“You should get some sleep.”
“Yeah.”
Ellie flips over, trying to nestle herself further into the blankets and bury herself in their insulation. However, somehow, she still doesn’t feel warm.
“Hey, Joel?”
“Yeah?”
“Could you come up here?”
In his hesitation, it’s all Ellie can do not to writhe under the weight of her own stupidity. Jesus, the hugs were already pushing it, and the last time he touched her she’d screamed, and–
“Sure, Ellie.”
The girl stills.
Joel takes his place on the cushions carefully, lowering his hips first, then the rest of his torso. Silently, Ellie unravels her nest of blankets and flings them off to the side, wrapping Joel under them as well. The more rational parts of her consciousness remind her that she should be alert and afraid, that there is danger in this area, that nothing about this is safe.
Ellie can’t compel herself to care. Joel’s warmth runs through her body and settles under her skin, and Ellie herself is more than happy to revel in it.
“Hey, Joel?”
He rolls over.
“Yeah?”
“Thank you. For not leaving.”
Ellie feels just a little sick to her stomach when she hears his response. His voice is shaking in a way that indicates tears, that references emotions Joel shouldn’t feel and that Ellie shouldn’t be worth feeling.
“Of course, Ellie.”
She presses tightly against his back, resting her face between his shoulder blades. She can feel the vibrations in his ribcage when he speaks again.
“Hey, Ellie?”
“Yeah?”
“What’s red and bad for your teeth?”
She pauses, stunned. Her mind runs in every direction, desperately trying to assure herself that she’s heard him right. She has, hasn’t she? What kind of question…
“I…I don’t know.”
“A brick.”
Silence.
Joel clears his throat.
“I– um– I’m sorry, that felt a little inappropriate– it was Sarah’s favorite, I thought–
A hot breath pushes against his back. Then another, and another one after that.
She’s giggling. Jesus Christ, Ellie’s giggling against him. It isn’t the full-bodied laugh he knows she’s capable of, or the disbelieving chuckle earned only by the worst of puns, but it’s something. Breathy giggles flee her chapped lips, and she wiggles a little closer to the man she’s come to so dearly rely on.
Ellie always manages to forget that somewhere under the callouses and scars of Joel’s palms is a layer of soft skin that had once cradled a newborn. She always has to remind herself that his mind– the same one that holds so many awful memories, that caused so many brutal acts –is the same one that had once supplied shitty jokes like that one.
It was Sarah’s favorite.
Ellie smiles.