Work Text:
✧✧✧
“My hands…”
Ellie’s voice is such a shy and delicate thing now, so far removed from the once tough and tenacious exterior that presently lays folded at her feet like Japanese tissue—a substance with so much inherent strength and resiliency, yet gossamer and transparent when you really get up close and peel apart its folds.
And Joel finds himself kneeling there in front of her, unpeeling her spare words through their twin dialect: a native tongue woven by two. Over their months together, they’ve mapped each other’s terrain down to the bone, know the sound of each other’s footfalls, the cadence of their slumbering breaths, and can read the unspoken nuance in a shared nod or glance—a library of looks, a codex of cues.
“Show me, baby girl.” He hopes the care in his voice will cleave her battered ribs and pour its sincerity deep down inside.
With a choked back sob, Ellie lays her small hands in Joel’s large, weathered palms. For the barest moment, time stands still as he marvels at the trust and vulnerability trembling beneath her ivory skin. He gently strokes the back of her hands with his thumbs, projecting his tenderness into her veins.
Her hands… Joel closes his eyes as he holds them, remembering how she saved his life by unexpectedly brandishing Frank’s gun on their first day in Kansas City, her amateur grip and sylph-like arms able to debilitate his attacker as Joel came close to dying by the young man’s lethal intent.
Her hands… palms raised and pale when Henry held her at gunpoint after Joel had imperiled her by failing to awaken to the tell-tale “crunch crunch” of his field of shattered glass; the same delicate hands that pressed her own blood into Sam’s infected bite, willing it to heal him and make him whole again. Hands that later held the grasping, assailing young boy at bay after he’d turned, and that had finally helped to bury the bodies of their one time companions shortly thereafter.
Her hands… equal parts capable and tremulous, ferociously loyal and wildly out of their depths, sewing the tatters of Joel’s stab wound with as much tenacious determination as she’d sowed the fallow fields within him, making lush the soil of his heart as she’d stitched herself into his soiled sinew and flesh.
“Tell me.” His eyes hold the question. Her lips unfurl the key.
“What I had to do to him, to David.” Ellie gulps air like she’s drowning, her eyes filling with tears.
“I can still feel the fucking cleaver like it’s burned into my fingers. His blood all over the blade, all over my hands, everywhere. And the way his… when he tried to…”
Her words stumble and stammer as she gazes down the length of her torso, and all at once her final, fragile vestiges of strength collapse. Joel catches her as her knees buckle, brings her to his lap, and cradles her bruised body tenderly as she keens in bone-wracking sorrow.
For all the sensitivity he pours into his care for her, a feral wildfire rages within him so intensely that he fears he’ll immolate in its flames. Joel wants to inflict every torturous cruelty upon David that his mind can muster. Not only had the monster tried to reap and harrow the last of this precious girl’s worldly innocence, but he’d had to die by Ellie’s hand, because Joel had failed to protect her yet again in the most unthinkable way possible.
But he’ll never let her know how black and violent his heart can seethe and rage… he’ll never let her know.
“I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so sorry—for what he put you through, for what he took from you. I should have been there to protect you and keep you safe. Please forgive me, Ellie…”
✧✧✧
Ellie’s eyes widen in her peaked face as Joel gently releases his embrace around her back and once more takes both of her hands into his own. He cradles her palms like it’s his sacred religion. Then he bows his head and brings her hands to his lips, his quiet pleas pressing reverently like petals between fingers and pages.
A spark of remembrance flickers deep within her.
For a moment, Joel lifts her thoughts from her anguish, and sets her softly back into her FEDRA school bed. Ellie can almost feel the warmth of the flashlight cradled between her shoulder and neck as she reads the passage from Shakespeare again and again—the one that burrowed into her memory waiting in quiet repose for seemingly this exact moment in time.
“If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss”
She whimpers softly, unselfconsciously, at Joel’s delicate touch: a sound on the cusp between feral and broken.
“Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much
Which mannerly devotion shows in this
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss”
Ellie’s mind floats in the in-between, a silver thread of clarity connecting her to Joel’s comforting touch and his supplicating lips. The bard’s memorized words bare her to the bones, smoothing her like seaglass washed by the tide.
“O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair”
Her breath catches and quivers as she feels him murmuring softly against her knuckles in words not meant for her ears; private as a confessional, sacred as a benediction.
“Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take
Thus from my lips, by thine my sin is purged”
✧✧✧
Joel gazes at Ellie's delicate hands—hands he had achingly memorized days earlier after her ordeal with David, when he had gently cleansed away their patina of blood, and ash, and bone.
And the instinct comes to him whole yet hazy, inspired from a film Joel had seen long ago in the before times, though he can’t quite place the who, the where, or the when.
All he knows is that it feels as natural as caring for her, to gently slide her fingers inside of his mouth.
In this unholy landscape where people sin for survival—where only the tightly cloistered can ever aspire to remain “clean”, and the wildlings and wanderers prize selfishness over civility and family over morality—Joel mourns his mounting failures that have led Ellie to suffer so deeply. As he gently bares her skin of unseen transgressions, he vows to carry them for her whenever she’s in need.
A wordless ache catches in his throat, a primal sound he manages to wrangle into a raw and ragged sigh. This girl… this impish firebrand, this elfin punk, with a heart an ocean wide and a thousand leagues deep… she will never again be the hunted quarry of a ravenous predator’s appetite, or relegated to the concept of “cargo”—a word he now wishes to spit upon as an unthinkable offense.
Joel closes his eyes and feels his belly tremor with recognition. Ellie isn’t Sarah. That little girl left a hole in my heart that ain’t never gonna be filled in. But wounds scar over and the universe expands. Sarah’s star went supernova way before her time, and she burns within me, always.
He feels Ellie's wondering yet unquestioning trust flutter through him like a tremulous wild dove. But there’s room in that scar-woven heart for a Northern Star; some bright light to fuck up the endless misery of darkness and solitude, to show me there’s more to life than just the will to endure and survive. Someone to remind me there’s a reason—a purpose—to really, truly live.
Ellie isn’t destined to be another Sarah, and she’s already burrowed in past the barriers that had kept women like Tess tightly tethered to Joel's borders.
It wasn’t time that did it.
✧✧✧
Ellie draws a quivering breath, as taut as an arrow, as Joel opens his eyes and meets her wondering gaze.
Her hands fold and unfold in his consuming fire: unsullied, unblemished, no more unclean.
And for the first time since the early days, she feels uncertain about the message she finds in his eyes.
So she wanders again in the labyrinthine library in her mind, letting the tattered memories of her own “before times” be her interpreter and her guide. And it’s a song that serenades her, from one of the last recordings released before the fall—before the world was left ragged in ruins, when bombs felled the major cities from such great heights…
“I am thinking it’s a sign
that the freckles in our eyes
are mirror images
and when we kiss, they’re perfectly alignedand I have to speculate
that God himself did make us
into corresponding shapes
like puzzle pieces from the clay…”
After all she’s witnessed and experienced since leaving Boston—and especially after David tried to consummate his twisted vision of two likeminded souls hungering for communion—Ellie knows she can’t put her faith in the God of men like David. Maybe not even in the God they spoke of back in Jackson, who talked to the townsfolk in all the different dialects they longed to hear.
But she knows that Joel will never ask her to pray for salvation and repent for her sins. He would sooner siphon them from her soul himself, liberate them from her marrow and her memory. He’ll hold her burdens like a holy fire, but he’ll never let her burn.
And her eyes never leave his as he holds her like a prayer in his mouth, and cleans away everything her heart is too fragile to carry.
✧✧✧
Joel gently cradles her fingertips then, and presses them to his chest; a man made stoic and lost for articulate words in times like these, he aches for Ellie to feel the devoted drumming, to translate the Morse Code rhythms and to trail a Braille cipher on his skin in response.
But she bends like a waterfall and travels him lower, slowly lifting his shirt’s hem until his wound is uncovered. Her hands gently make a map of the lifesaving stitches, checking and reassuring herself with every fingertip pass.
Joel breathes in deeply as Ellie's quiet devotion breaks his dam wide open and circumnavigates his heart. I’d take any bullet or broken bone on offer. I’ll surrender every last scrap of my world-weary armor. If only she’ll—
✧✧✧
“—love you.”
Ellie hadn’t intended to speak the words so directly, though she knows immediately that she means them with the whole of her heart.
She’d learned to toughen herself over the years to protect her sensitivity and vulnerability in unguarded moments. Riley had been the only one to strip her armaments down—and then, right away, Ellie lost her to the infection. Two complementary pearls in a sea of circumstance and sorrow, they were supposed to lose their fucking minds together—make it all poetic and shit. But when Riley’s mind had surrendered, Ellie’s had somehow been spared.
Maybe the cordyceps inside her were still growing by the day, climbing her like vines and taking up residence in all the spaces left to root out and roam.
But it can never touch her there, not in the hidden garden where Joel has been planting seeds of hope, til some days her chest feels like a wild thicket of foliage and flowers. He's become her compass and her lighthouse, her guidance and her harbor. She stopped being hungry when she supped from his shadow. But still… did the world-weary, heart-hardened Joel Miller somehow need her, too?
Ellie doesn’t know what she can possibly give him, except everything, anything, and what little she can scrape together of value in between. She’s an immune anomaly and an unwanted orphan who has lost everyone she’s ever cared about, ever trusted, ever... loved.
But she’ll surrender to a thousand David-shaped demons if it means, if only, that Joel will be there to hold her on the other side.
Ellie moves without thinking, her mind enfolded in a different kind of daze. Joel is her immovable object and she the unstoppable force, straddling his lap—gently mindful of their bruised bodies and injuries—and unwilling to live without belonging to him for even a moment longer.
She softly brushes his lips with her two blushing pilgrims, and all at once becomes his holy shrine.
Four eyes sparkle with brimming tears. Perfectly aligned.
✧✧✧
Joel breathes in for what feels like the first time since he drowned alive when Sarah died; since his soul formed a hollow-made husk hewn from gunpowder, detachment, and endless regret. All at once, he feels at peace with flinching at the fateful bullet. But he needs her to know… he won’t leave it unsaid, not now or ever again.
Joel takes Ellie’s arm and gently, reverently, kisses her there—at the scar that had once wounded her with its wild, and daily holds her captive to fears of detection and distrust; of being unwanted and abandoned; forever left behind.
He raises his eyes to meet hers once more, and has never felt more assured and alive.
“Darlin, you don’t ever have to be scared of ending up alone.”
Ellie's arms encircle his neck and consume him. Joel buries his face in her hair and breathes, just breathes.
“I love you too,” he whispers into her ear. “You're my purpose, baby girl. Let me be your home.”