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Joel’s not sure when he first starts picking up Savage Starlight comics for Ellie, or when he first starts finding her little books or pamphlets about space travel or astronauts in the abandoned places and stores they come across.
It just kind of… happens, he supposes. He’ll find out she likes a thing, and then subconsciously tuck it away for future reference.
Sometimes, she’s already read whatever information is in the space travel books and pamphlets, but he tries to keep track of what issues of the Savage Starlight comics she has so he can be on the lookout for the issues that she doesn’t have.
He doesn’t tell her that, exactly—of course he doesn’t. He just gives her the comic book or the small book or the pamphlet, and her face lights up like it’s Christmas day. There’s a pull at his heart every single time her face lights up like that, and it’s part happy and part bittersweet and part remembrance of something—someone—that he can’t help but see in her, even if he tries not to.
Joel picking up things he knows she’ll like begins slowly, like a slippery slope that he’s not even sure he’s fallen down until he’s already at the bottom. He’s afraid of it—afraid of loving someone like he loved Sarah, and he’s afraid of the risks that come with caring for someone like that.
Maybe Joel picking up comics and pamphlets and books for Ellie doesn’t mean anything—maybe it doesn’t mean he sees her like a surrogate daughter. It doesn’t have to mean that, at least, right?
But it does. It does mean that, and oh, he’s just fooling himself, and he knows it.
He’s so scared of it, but it is inevitable, and he might as well fall all the way down that slippery slope with love in his heart that couples with the fear so terrifyingly perfectly.
Once, she says, “I don’t think there would be any Infected on the moon, or on fucking Mars, or, like—well, probably no aliens or anything either, maybe, I dunno. But no Infected, and no people trying to—trying to hurt anyone or raid anything or whatever. It’d be… nice, I think. I know I’ll never see outer space, but when I look up at the stars or when I think about it, it’s… nice. It’s nice to think about, at least.”
Joel looks at her and Ellie looks at him, and she looks so damn sad, in a heartbreakingly innocent, nearly childlike way. Like she wishes she could live her life out on the moon or on Mars, and Joel knows and hates that he can’t give her that or anything like it. He can’t give her a life free of premature death or Infected or raiders. He couldn’t give Sarah that, either—
Goddamn it.
He tries to snap himself out of it—tries to make himself focus on her and what she’s telling him and not on himself—and then he looks at her, into her eyes, and nods. “Yeah. Yeah, I can see that,” he says, then looks up at the stars. “They’re nice to look at and—and think about, at least. They’re nice.”
“Yeah,” Ellie says, looking up at the stars, too. She looks up there at the stars in the sky like they could teleport her to them and get her out of this hellish apocalypse, and maybe, just maybe, Joel wishes they could.
Later, he hands her a Savage Starlight comic, and it isn’t the first time. She says, “Nice, dude! I don’t have this one, sweet,” and she smiles so bright, and Joel can’t help the slight smile he gives back, even as his brain is telling him to pull away, stay away, all this will give you is fear and pain and loss and grief, but his heart tells him no. Tells him that he cares about Ellie and all the fear and all the pain is worth it.
She tells him that everyone has either died or left her, and he can’t promise that he won’t die—no one can promise that, not in this world or any world, but… even though he sometimes thinks that since he’s so certain he will lose her and that he will hurt her by just being around her, he might as well leave first before he gets her hurt—he can promise that he will try. That he will try so, so damn hard to be with her and to keep her safe and to care for her.
He wants to leave to spare her the pain and to spare himself the pain, sometimes, but he looks at her smiling at those comic books and he looks at her face when she’s so scared and she’s barely even showing it, but he just knows because he’s somehow come to know her, and he can’t leave. He can’t leave even if he just knows all he’ll do is hurt her, because some part of his mind can see that leaving her will hurt her more now than staying will.
Ellie sometimes will get scrapes from a passing tree branch in the woods, or she’ll trip and fall on some debris or some rock on the ground, and Joel looks at the wound as she sits down on a rotted tree stump or on the ground or on some dilapidated folding chair beside an equally dilapidated building. Every time, he wishes he had a band aid, like he did for Sarah. He thinks it every fucking time, even though he knows it just hurts and it certainly doesn’t help anything.
He cleans even the small wounds for her, and he bandages them when they actually have bandages, even if it means using bandages they really should save. She so often rolls her eyes and says, “It’s not a big fucking deal, Joel, so… just calm down, old man.” He won’t admit how endearing it is that she says all that like she’s annoyed, but then still lets him use water from a stream or lets him use what scarce, little rubbing alcohol they have to clean her wound, even if it’s just a tiny injury.
She’s supposed to be just cargo, and he still can’t exactly pinpoint when she became not just cargo, but maybe there doesn’t have to be an exact date and time assigned to it. Maybe he can know that what she is, what term he assigns to her, has changed—know that she has become much more like family and so much less like cargo, and still yet not know the exact moment that it changed.
Ellie is different from Sarah. She has her own personality and her own wishes and her own wants, and Joel knows, he knows, that he shouldn’t just think of her as Sarah, and he doesn’t. Most of the time, at least, but… sometimes, he’ll look at Ellie and his eyes and his brain trick him, and he flashes back to his baby girl dying in his arms, and he feels like he can’t breathe.
But, but—Joel looks at Ellie and sometimes, he does see Sarah, but other times, he only sees his Ellie. His Ellie, who is not just cargo anymore—no, somewhere along the way, she became his daughter—his surrogate, adopted, beloved daughter—and even though it scares the shit out of him, he wouldn’t have it any other way.