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He gets them as far as they can manage, Ellie staggering silent and nearly unblinking at his side.
He tries to keep up some stream of conversation, but it peters out as they stumble along. As much as he wants to ground her, he needs to keep them going more.
He doesn't think either of them sleeps that first night when they take shelter in an old shed, even though he tries to get her to rest.
She just curls up at his side, trembling, and horribly, achingly silent.
*
Ellie’s the one who sees the old cabin the next day near sunset, hidden behind a wall of trees with branches he’s too tall to see under until she tugs him still.
“What, baby?” He asks, not sure what she’s looking at until she tugs him forward. He grunts slightly with pain as he stoops, but then he sees what’s got her attention. It looks solid enough, and a younger pair of trees shows where there might have once been a path to it, but as shelter goes, it looks secure and is hidden from anyone taller than Ellie, which is all they need right now.
It’s harder for him than for her to get under the branches, and it aches, a bit, the way she stays right by his side even in her catatonia, offering herself up as a crutch for him to lean on.
Like he hasn’t had to lean on her so hard he’s almost crushed her already.
*
The cabin has skeletons in it, just two, and he imagines it’s more than a little disrespectful to the dead when they work together to roll them up in an old rug and shove them to a side of the cabin’s main room.
Sorry, he thinks, but I promise we need this place more than you right now.
Ellie just sort of hovers after that, until he guides her to a chair and pushes at her gently until she sits. He wants to take a look around, and he’d rather she didn’t wander.
“Stay here, okay?” He tells her, brushing her hair back. It’s fallen completely out of its ponytail at this point, but he’d left it down in the hopes of keeping her warmer since her beanie is gone. He’ll put it up for her later, he decides, knowing she hates it touching her neck when she’s in a place to actually be present in her body.
Please God let her be back with him enough to be annoyed by her hair soon.
*
He finds an old chest with clothes in it, packed with cedar so nothing’s got into it. The skeletons were both women, he gathers from the selection available, which isn’t helpful for him but is a blessing given that Ellie’s in need of clothes. He’d usually give her the whole lot and let her choose, but for now he just needs her in something warm and not covered in gore. He holds up the clothes to get a sense of the size, and predictably, they’re going to be too big on her, but he can roll up the sleeves for her, and given how much she’s burrowed into his jacket, he thinks oversized might be her preference right now.
He can’t let himself examine why that might be.
He knows from watching her pick through finds before that she never wears purple if she can help it, so he leaves the purple sweater behind and grabs the green, along with a dark blue flannel and a black t-shirt. Another chest produces a down jacket with mittens and a wool hat stuffed in the pockets, and he has a moment of gratitude that fucking finally they’ve had a stroke of luck.
God knows they’re damn well overdue.
She’s still on the chair where he left her, although her head turns to him when he enters, which he hopes is a good sign. He gives her a small smile and shows her the clothes.
“These should fit you,” he says, tossing them down lightly in the chair beside her. She doesn’t even look at them. “Should probably get you cleaned up first though.”
Still no reaction, and he’s aware he’s mainly talking to himself, filling the space between them with noise so he won’t have to sit in silence. There’s an old wood stove in the corner of the main room, and a quick search through a cabinet reveals some pots and pans. She makes a distressed noise when he opens the door, so he returns to collect her and tug her along with an arm around her shoulders. It’ll likely be slow progress, dragging her along, but he can’t stand the idea of her alone and frightened in the cabin without him.
Their next stroke of luck comes with the discovery of an old shed out back. There’s a rusted old padlock he imagines might have once held it shut, but it’s been discarded on the ground nearby.
“Here, help me,” he says to Ellie, guiding her hand up to the door. He partially wants to give her something concrete to do.
He partially isn’t sure he’s going to be able to yank it open on his own just yet.
Together, they manage to get it open, and he breathes through the pain in his side as they do. Inside shows stacks of seasoned wood, and after a couple of times of repeating the instruction, he gets Ellie to hold her arms out. He doesn’t stack nearly as much as he knows she can actually carry, but the last thing he needs is her getting hurt dropping wood on her feet. She trails him back to the house with his own armload, and she hovers at his side as he starts a fire in the stove.
Once he’s got it crackling, he grabs the largest pot in the cabinet, going outside to fill it with snow. He gives Ellie her own smaller pot to carry, and she follows along in the same obedient silence.
He never knew he could miss smartass remarks and backtalk so much.
*
Once the snow is melted and the water warm, he digs out an old washcloth from a closet. It smells a bit musty, but it’ll soon be bloodstained, so it’s not like it’ll matter for long. He hands her the cloth at first, but she just blinks at it before tapping at her skin ineffectually with a hand that shakes the longer she looks at the blood caked onto her skin.
"Hey," he says, catching her attention before he touches. "It's okay, baby. Let me help."
It's less helping and more just doing it for her, but she's tended him like a goddamn baby for several days, so she's more than due for a turn. He talks to her while he cleans her off, nonsense words he forgets the moment they leave his mouth.
He pauses for a long, long moment over a dark bruise like a hand over her throat.
"S'okay," she says, voice cracking, and he looks to her face then. Her voice is rough, and her face still not totally emotive again, but he can see how hard she's trying to reassure him.
And God, if that doesn't make it hurt worse.
He gives her a smile as best he can and gently cups her cheek. He doesn't know that he's capable of noise beyond growling at the moment, but he won't do anything to scare her, won't be one more thing for her to fear.
Not for anything.
She winces when he gets to her nose, and he lightens his touch immediately.
"Sorry," he says at once. "You hit it?"
Wrong question, he knows, as her face drops back to total blankness. His instinct is to apologize, even if he doesn’t know what for, but he doubts she’s in a place to hear him if he did, and his own guilt isn’t a burden she needs to know about or try to carry. Instead he just lightens his touch so he won’t hurt her, swiping gently until he can see the full extent of the bruising across her nose and temple. He gently touches her nose and doesn’t find a break–thank God–but investigating the bruising at her forehead leads him to card his fingers gently through her hair, finding a bump.
“You dizzy?” He asks, trying to gauge the damage. He imagines she’s probably some degree of concussed at this point, but he doesn’t know enough to tell how badly. Her eyes seem focused enough when they’re not completely blank, but it’s a hell of a bump.
She doesn’t respond, and he doesn’t push.
He hesitates when it comes to her sweatshirt. He gently guides his jacket off of her shoulders, which doesn’t prompt a response, but when he hesitantly reaches for the edge of her sweatshirt, one little hand comes down to grip his with bruising force, even as her face doesn’t lose its distant fuzziness. He really needs to get it off of her. With the tissue and blood on it it’s going to start smelling sooner rather than later, and practicality aside, he doesn’t really want to see it on her any longer than he has to.
In the end, though, what she wants, what will make her feel better, has to come first.
“Got you a new sweater,” he reminds her, reaching to pick it up. Slowly, her eyes slide to it. “Should probably check your ribs, too.” The tension in her posture says she’s hurting somewhere on her abdomen, but he kept it for last for a reason.
He would never hurt her, not for anything, and it’s something he wants to think she knows, but he’s not ignorant of the fact that he’s a large man and she’s a small girl who’s just learned firsthand what men are capable of doing to her.
“Okay,” she says at last, voice a rasp, and he makes a mental note to get her to drink some water the moment they’ve finished.
“Stop me if you need,” he tells her, lifting the hem just enough to confirm that she does have an undershirt on before he gently works the sweatshirt over her head, pulling the collar towards him to keep it from pressing on her face. She watches his hands while he works, and he moves slowly enough that she can guess what he’s doing next as he pulls it over her head and then guides her arms through. Her hands flex when the fabric moves over them, some small, functionally useless attempt at helping, and something about it makes his chest feel tight. “Can I take a look at your ribs?” He asks, waiting. He doesn’t actually know what he’s going to do if she says no. He won’t ever let her think he won’t respect a no from her, but if she’s racked up some damage to her body, he needs to know sooner and not later, has already probably waited longer than he should have to check.
After a moment, though, she just nods jerkily, moving to pull her undershirt up until the bottom hem of her sports bra is showing.
He very carefully keeps his face blank as he breathes through the gut-deep rage that fills him when he gets a look at the damage, dark purple-black marks all across her stomach and ribs, the latter far too prominent. He narrates his actions while he works, trying to be gentle enough to limit the flinching, and the examination shows only one soft spot indicating a break. She twitches like a horse when he checks the bruising on her belly, but it doesn’t feel like internal bleeding, and he finishes as soon as he can, reassuring her that he’s done and she’s done well when he’s finished.
Her face has gone so blank he’s not actually sure she hears him.
He dresses her in the new clothes as carefully as he took off the sweatshirt, and she looks so young when her head pops through the sweater that he can’t help but pause and touch her cheek gently, overcome by the fact that he almost never saw this little face again. That town could have been it. He could have been finished off in that basement, she could have been-
No. He can’t think about what she could have been, not if he’s going to stay present enough to help her in the now.
*
He watched a documentary about wolves with Sarah once, about how they curl up in a den with their pups in winter to keep them safe, to keep them warm and protected from a world that could hurt them.
It's how this limbo feels, both of them in this cabin.
He’s exhausted, down to his fucking bones, residual illness still draining him, and he does his best to keep it from Ellie, made easier by the way she still doesn’t seem totally present, even if she talks a bit now at least. She’s conscious enough to perform the basic functions of living on her own, but even then he has to prompt her for things like taking a drink of water or continuing to eat after the first few bites from the deer he’d managed to shoot, cutting off what he could and leaving the rest in the woods, still too goddamn weak to pull it back on his own and unwilling to wake Ellie from her nap to help.
For now, she’s pressed against him, not dozing but not seeming entirely awake either. There's no space between them, not an inch. Ellie is careful to stay on his left, but she curls up right next to him, head on his shoulder in a way that scratches at the fuzzy place where his memories from Silver Lake live.
She hands him the bottles and needles when it’s time for another dose of antibiotics before curling up next to the wood stove, poking at the fresh logs. Of all of the things she could be keeping track of, of course it’s this, one more thing she shouldn’t be responsible for. He imagines it isn’t best practice, reusing needles, but it’s that or sepsis, frankly.
“Where’d you even get this?” He asks before he even thinks about it.
She hesitates for a moment before she responds.
“Traded for it.” She reads the question on his face and tilts her head. “Killed a deer. Fuckers wandered close. Traded ‘em the deer for medicine. Made them separate, kept one as a hostage and made the other go back, made ‘em put their guns down and everything.”
She’s looking for approval, he realizes, for him to tell her she did the right thing, that it wasn’t a mistake on her part that led to everything that came after.
“Smart,” he tells her, and he doesn’t miss the way her shoulders go just a bit looser. It makes him hurt for her, this childish seeking of approval, but he wants to make sure that she knows other people’s evil isn’t her failing. It isn’t her fault, after all. Sometimes you do all the right things and the worst still happens. That’s just life.
But Jesus he wishes it wasn’t a lesson she’d had to learn like this.
“Don’t know why they even wanted the stupid deer,” she says, poking at the fire with the same viciousness that colors her voice. “They were goddamn cannibals.” A look to him from the corner of her eye, checking if he knew this already.
“Saw the bodies when I got your backpack,” he says. He doesn’t tell her about the moment of frozen terror when he wondered if one of them was hers, torn between the need to look away to respect her body if it was and the need to work out if she was a headless slab of meat hanging from a hook. That’s a burden he’ll carry, a weight he will never, ever put on her.
“He-he didn’t want to eat me,” she says, and there’s a shame to her voice that makes him want to go back and kill the fucker all over again. “Not at-not at first. He wanted…”
She doesn’t finish the sentence.
He doesn’t need her to.
He opens his arms in an offer, and with a shaky breath, she crawls over to him, curling up against him, a tiny little shivering ball.
“They shot Callus,” she says softly. “I was trying to ride him away, and they just…”
It’s something they need to talk about, her little stunt at playing decoy.
“Next time, you stay with me,” he tells her, trying to keep his voice gentle despite the way an anger fueled by fear makes him want to shake her. “You can’t-”
"I'm not sorry," she says, and it's the most force he's heard from her in days. She pushes away and sets her shoulders, chin raised defiantly. "I would-I would do it again."
He's not sure if it's all bravado, not knowing her like he does.
Not when he understands that same need to protect what's yours.
And she is his, he knows, down to his bones. He had a good run at denying it, but there are some things that strip artifice right away.
Apparently your kid almost getting fucking eaten is one of those things.
“It’s not your job to protect me,” he tells her firmly.
“You’re all I’ve got,” she says, and he doesn’t miss the way her lip wobbles despite how hard she’s trying to look defiant. “You-I don’t have anyone else. Just you. I couldn’t-couldn’t let them take you away.”
It’s the phrasing that makes him give up the fight, more than anything else, her residual inability to use the word die in reference to him. He sighs and pulls her gently against him again. He could keep arguing with her, could try to get it into that thick head that he’s the adult and she’s the kid.
But he knows a battle he can’t win when he sees it.
“We’re a mess,” he tells her conversationally, winding one strand of her hair–loose from its ponytail because it was hurting her head–around a finger.
“Yeah,” she agrees, “but we’re still a we.”
And what is there to say to that?
*
She gets sick, because of course she does with their luck, her health declining when he’s finally on the mend, like they’re keeping some fucking balance going.
She’s running a fever despite the way she shivers with chills, and he finds himself pressing a hand to her forehead, her cheek, six or seven times an hour, tracking the heat as best he can. He thinks wistfully of the old days, when there was always a thermometer and some Tylenol in the bathroom cabinet, ready for service for a sick kid.
He certainly has neither now.
She says her body aches, too, but whether that’s the fever or the beating she took is anyone’s guess. He has nothing to offer her to help it other than letting her lean against him, the softest surface in a relatively bare cabin. The fever drains what little remaining energy she had, and she rests against him pliant and loose-limbed. Her sweat leaves a damp spot on his shoulder from where she’s laying against him, but he’s been far grosser and for far worse reasons before.
(And after the Great Stomach Flu of ‘99, he thinks Sarah officially broke him off any lingering sense of gross, really.)
“We could be back to Jackson in a week," he tells her.
"What?" She asks, not moving from against him. He moves one hand up to stroke over her hair, careful not to tug. Her head’s still tender from the bumps, and he has no wish to add to the lingering pain.
"That's what I figure. Might be less." Less would be ideal. He wants to have her safely tucked away in a bed with some kind of medicine yesterday.
"We can't do that," she says, and she does sit up now, brows furrowed. "Why would we do that?"
He just stares at her for a moment.
"Ellie," he starts, with no plan on how to finish the thought.
She speaks before he even gets to try.
"No," she says, sounding so guttingly young, especially with violence written on almost every inch of her visible skin, from the bruises on her head to the abraded skin of her knuckles. "No," she says again, shaking her head until she makes herself dizzy, reaching out for him to steady herself. "We can't go back. Not now."
They very much can and should, especially now.
“Ellie,” he says, holding her face gently in his hands, “you don’t owe the world shit. No one could have tried harder than you, kiddo. But we don’t have to keep doing this.”
“Yes we do,” she says, and her eyes beg him to understand.
And he does.
He just understands that he wants her safe more.
“Joel,” she says, “Riley and Tess and Sam all died because of something I could stop.”
He’s shaking his head before she even finishes speaking.
“They died because of something that happened before you were even a thought,” he tells her. “It’s a broken world, baby girl. It’s not your responsibility to fix it.”
“So what,” she demands, pushing his hands down in a display of frustration. She still doesn’t let go of them, though. “We just fucking quit? We go back to Jackson and live in that house and-and I don’t fucking know, do whatever people in Jackson do, and every single time someone else dies because they’re infected, I just sit there and know I let them?”
“You’re not-”
“No!” She says, and she sits up on her knees, her hands going to his shoulders. “What if it’s you?” She asks, and her voice breaks as her eyes go shiny. “That’s what I dreamed last night.” She woke up screaming last night, and the knowledge that it wasn’t even fucking Silver Lake is more than slightly gutting. “I dreamed you got bitten, and I had to kill you.”
He imagines it wouldn’t be helpful to tell her that he would never make her do that.
He’d get her somewhere safe and then go off to finish it himself.
“I lose everyone,” she says, and her voice breaks as tears spill. “It started with my mom, and it just keeps happening. I can stop that, Joel. And it’s-” She shakes her head, looks away, chest heaving. He pulls her gently into a hug, and she goes, pressing her forehead–still too warm with her fever–to his neck.
He wants to tell her he will never leave her, that he’ll be by her side no matter what.
But that’s a promise she’d know is a lie.
“I thought you were gonna die,” she tells him, “and I couldn’t do anything to stop it. I can help make a vaccine. I can do that.”
“It’s not your job to save me,” he tells her, rocking her gently. “That is not your responsibility, not ever.”
“And if it were reversed?” She asks, in a tone that very clearly says she knows the answer already and just wants to make a point. “If you knew you could help make a vaccine that could keep me safe, would you turn around and go back to Jackson? Would you just give up?”
The answer is fuck no, and he knows she knows that.
“It’s different,” he tells her softly.
“How?”
He’s not ready to answer that honestly, not yet. He isn’t quite ready to tell her exactly what she is to him, mainly because he doesn’t want one more burden on those thin shoulders.
“For one thing, I’m a better shot than you.”
She slaps his arm lightly, and he smiles, bending to kiss her hair.
“The kissing stuff is new,” she observes, and he freezes.
“I’m sorry,” he starts. Of course she wouldn’t want something like that, especially not now, not after Silver Lake and not when he’s spent so much time shoving down every urge to-
“No,” she says, and she tilts her face to look at him. “It’s-it’s nice. I just…” She tucks her face back down. “No one’s ever done it before, is all.”
He kisses her hair again.
*
They stay for another few days to allow both of them to heal more, her fever lingering and him unwilling to drag an injured and sick kid back out into the snow. Safe in the cabin, he feels secure enough for both of them to sleep at the same time, her curled up tight against him. It’s been years since he’s slept right next to anyone but Tess, and he spends more than a few hours just breathing slowly in and out, soaking in the sensation of a small, trusting body against his. He and Sarah used to have lazy Sundays when they could, days when she would crawl into his bed and just talk and doze until they finally peeled themselves up to get a very late breakfast. An early riser by nature, it had been a concession to him on her part, and one he’d treasured, especially as she’d grown ever more independent.
It’s what it feels like now, a little bubble of peace, albeit a bubble frequently popped by Ellie gasping herself awake, eyes wild. He always backs away from her at once when this happens, waiting until she’s oriented herself in the moment and looked back to him, like she’s looking for reassurance.
“You’re okay,” he always tells her softly. “We’re safe.”
“We’re safe,” she echoes slowly, turning back to rest against him once more, still shivering slightly from her dreams. “We’re safe.”
*
Her fever breaks eventually, and she wrinkles her nose as she pulls her sweat-soaked hair off of her face.
“I feel fucking gross,” she tells him.
“You look the same to me,” he says, just to make her wrinkle her nose and sneer at him.
It’s small, as progress grows, but animated enough to sass him is a damn sight better than the Ellie-maton he had for the first few days.
He stokes the fire to warm the room and they melt enough snow to fill a bucket so she can properly sponge off, him leaving to sit in the bedroom while she does so. He could probably use a rinse himself, but at least the only real blood on him is his own.
He won’t begrudge her the chance to go first.
*
When she’s done, hair damp, she looks steadier than she did before. She’s raided the chest again, but the only thing she’s changed from what he grabbed before is to add a long sleeve shirt under her t-shirt, another layer to cover her.
“Huh,” he says, with mock-surprise, “turns out there was a kid under that grime after all.”
It’s possible he deserves the damp towel to the face he gets for that.
“Your turn,” she says, taking his spot on the floor of the bedroom. “Otherwise people won’t need fire to track us down.”
Snorting, he tosses the towel over her head.
*
He still stops her briefly, on the day they set out, a hand on her shoulder. They could still turn left, could make their way to Jackson and find whatever version of peace waits for them there.
“We can still go back,” he reminds her. “We don’t have to keep on.”
She gives him a smile and grabs his hand, her mitten and his glove meaning it doesn’t really feel like touching, but her grip firm even through the multiple layers.
“I know,” she says, tugging lightly to get him in motion, “but we go on for family.”