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When Joel sees Ellie, his heart lifts a little. He’s still fucking scared, but slightly less so.
She’s running as fast as her little legs will carry her, which isn’t very fast. She’s stumbling, and whimpering, and the way her frame shakes he knows it’s not just from the cold. He knows she’s crying.
He runs towards her as she almost falls over, not the first time, and grabs for her shoulder.
“No!” She screams. “Get off of me! Get off!”
“Ellie,” he says, trying to turn her to face him. She’s kicking, screaming, wailing and crying.
“Get off!” She screams again, and he can hear how broken her voice is. She’s barely fighting, just begging. Begging to be spared. Begging not to fall victim.
“It’s me!” He tells her, finally picking her up and turning her towards him.
She starts punching Joel’s chest, over and over again, screaming words of nonsense. She finally looks up as Joel cups her face.
“It’s me,” he says again. “Hey, look. It’s me. It’s me. It’s me.”
She’s silent for a moment, taking in his features before throwing her arms around him and shoving her head against his chest, hiding her face. She keeps babbling as she does so, not saying a coherent word.
“It’s okay,” He tells her, like his heart isn’t shattering into a million tiny pieces as she sobs. Like she’s not covered in blood that may or may not be her own. Like her knees aren’t caved underneath her, her entire weight in Joel’s arms to keep her from falling into the snow.
“He…” She mumbles. She doesn’t finish the thought.
“It’s okay, baby girl,” He says it without thinking, the adornment slipping out instead of her name. “It’s okay.”
She tries to speak again, but Joel hushes her. “Don’t worry. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”
He pulls away to look at her face, both to check if she’s actively bleeding and to make sure she hasn’t melted away. She looks fucking terrified. “Okay?” He adds, as much for her sake as his, and she nods. “Okay.”
He drops his bag and shrugs his coat across her shoulders. She immediately leans back against him, her knees buckling again. He throws an arm around her, tight, and tries to guide her, tries to walk her as far away from this hell as possible.
—
He ends up having to carry her, not that he minds. Her knees keep giving out and she keeps either almost or actually falling into the snow or a tree. So he scoops her up and lets her wiggle around until she’s more comfortable, and keeps trekking on.
She’s half asleep in his arms, and he’s praying she hasn’t passed out or fainted from God knows what. He finds a little shack far, far from the settlement he found her at (they’d passed a few, but Joel was scared they were too close) and blows on her head gently to wake her up fully.
“I’m gonna set you down right here so I can check inside, okay?” Ellie digs her nails into his back, so deep he’ll know it’ll leave marks. He doesn’t care.
“I know it’s scary, but I’ll just be a second. I’ll give you your knife.” He feels her take three deep breaths before loosening her grip wordlessly, and he sets her gently on the front step and hands her her knife, opening it for her. “I want you to shank anyone you see, okay? I don’t care who. Stab them. Got that?”
She nods slowly, staring straight ahead. He ruffles her hair before slinging his shotgun over his shoulder and going inside.
It’s real small, two rooms, so it doesn’t take long. Nobody’s been here in years. They’re safe here. Ellie’s safe here.
“All safe, kiddo,” He says, dropping his shotgun and stepping back outside. She holds her knife out at that, instantly alarmed, but makes eye contact with him and remembers what he was doing. She closes her knife.
She lets him scoop her back up in his arms and places her gently inside, on her feet this time, to see if she can stand now.
Well, she can. And she immediately starts pulling off her sweater. Joel doesn’t know what to do but to turn away, so he does. He finally sees the beige fabric hit the floor, and he turns back to her. She’s struggling with the zipper on his coat, trying to cover her torso back up, so he steps over and helps her. She smacks his hand away.
“Ellie—” She shoots him a cold glare. “Okay, okay. Nevermind.”
She manages to zip it up herself after trying a few times and sits herself down with a dull thud. She scoots a little closer to Joel and wraps an arm around his leg.
“You’re all over the place,” He says, placing a hand on her head. She rests her cheek against the outside of his thigh, looking up at him. Her eyes are big and broken. “I’m sorry, honey, that was rude. What can I do to help?”
She tugs on his leg, silently asking him to sit. He does, and holds out both arms (he doesn’t want to set off an alarm in her mind by touching her without asking). She buries her face in his chest again.
He doesn’t know what to say to her, what he can say to make this all a bit better, so he bites his tongue. Caresses her hair, kisses her scalp.
He thinks about how he hasn’t been this gentle with someone in 20 years, quite literally. How he hasn’t held a child in his arms since Sarah. How he’d hold her and kiss her head every time she got hurt, even just a scratch. How one day he had to pick her up early from school because her teacher called and said she wouldn’t stop crying. The class was making Mother’s Day cards, and one little shit made fun of her on the playground for writing “I love you daddy!” instead of mommy. Then all the kids joined it, and she ran off in tears. Joel held her all day and all night as she cried, and considered never sending her to school again. He held her when she got hurt in his truck, and he held her through her whimpers of “I’m not ready to die, daddy,” as she faded away in his arms.
He squeezes Ellie extra tight subconsciously when he remembers that, making sure she’s still there and breathing. He thinks about how he called her baby girl so easily, without even thinking about it, like it was second nature. It just came out of his mouth, the same way her name does. He didn’t think about it, didn’t wake up that morning and say to himself “Today I’m gonna call Ellie baby girl” . He just said it. Like she was, in fact, his baby girl.
He subconsciously knew Ellie never stopped crying, but it seemed to get harder. Her whole body is shaking in his arms and his heart breaks.
“I’m right here, baby. Right here,” He whispers, rubbing circles on her back. “Tell me what I can make better.”
“I’m scared,” He hears her whispers, muffled and faint against his chest. He knows she’s been scared before, he’s seen it on her face, but she’s never said it. Saying it makes it real. He knew she wasn’t as tough as she was pretending to be, that everything still got to her more than she let off. But she’s yet to say it out loud. Everything feels more real now.
“I know, I know,” he says. “I know everything is scary. Nobody can hurt you. I’ll kill them a thousand times, over and over.”
“I killed him a thousand times,” Ellie says, her voice shaking. “David. I chopped his face into a million tiny pieces and then a million more. Until he was just a body with a pool of blood for a head.”
Her voice is both monotone and absolutely shattered at the same time, and it tugs— no, yanks —at Joel’s heartstrings. David might have lost the physical fight, but Joel’s scared he won the mental one. He shakes the thought.
“You protected yourself. It’s better him than you.” His mind flashes back to the headless bodies hanging like hunted animals, and panic floods him as he thinks that could have been Ellie. He holds her a bit tighter.
“I’ll kill every fucker in that place before another one comes within a hundred feet of you, sweetie.” She whimpers at that, squeezing his chest as tight as she can. “I’m never gonna let anyone hurt you again.”
She cries even harder, slouching down in his arms with her nails scratching at his back, tugging the fabric of his flannel. She’s tired, defeated, and Joel knows he should check for injuries but… he can do that in the morning. Right now she needs him just like this. He doesn’t want to scare her anymore.
Slowly, she stops shaking from crying and more from cold. He tries to offer her her sweater back, but she slaps his hand again.
“Burn it,” She mumbles. “Burn it until it’s dust. And sprinkle on David’s ashes.”
Joel opens his mouth, but she continues. “Burn his blood off my face. Burn all of him off of me.”
It’s morbid, extremely so, but he doesn’t scold her. “I’ll wash your face and we’ll bury that sweater, how about that?”
She frowns at the compromise but nods anyway.
He pours the leftover water from his thermos onto a washcloth shoved at the bottom of his bag and dabs at her face, trying to be gentle. She winces a few times at open cuts, and he apologizes over and over again when she does.
“There you go, sweetie,” He whispers, kissing right between her eyebrows. She exhales in relief.
“Thank you,” She murmurs, closing her eyes.
He manages to get her to sit on her own for a minute so he can roll out their sleeping bags, open a lantern, and a can of chicken noodle soup.
Ellie immediately stands up when he’s done and silently picks up the lantern in between their sleeping bags and moves them so they’re right next to each other, the hem of them touching. Joel doesn’t say a thing.
He has to feed the soup to her, and quickly learns not to include the bits of chicken (she spits out a whole bite as soon as the chicken touches her tongue. At one point, she grabs the can and fork and holds some of the noodles up to his mouth, feeding him a few bites. He doesn’t say anything about this, either.
Eventually, she’s too tired to sit up or even keep her eyes open anymore. Joel takes out her falling ponytail, slides her into her sleeping bag, and slips into his too. She scoots up even closer to him, and he wraps an arm around her.
“Thank you,” She whispers, muffled by his chest. He strokes her hair gently.
“For what, baby girl?”
“For everything,” She wiggles around, adjusting herself under his arm until she’s comfortable. “Night.”
“Night, sweetheart,”