Work Text:
Survival instincts, he had told Tommy – long, long ago – when he had asked him why they did the things they did. It was survival instinct that led them to scheme and harm innocent people. It was survival instinct that made them take what they needed, no matter who they were taking from. Barring kids. Never hurt a kid became Joel’s mantra as he pushed his way through the apocalypse.
It was survival instinct that his and Tess’s relationship was built on. And now, it’s survival instinct that pushes him through layers of heavy snow with a teenager on one side, a screaming wound on the other.
Ellie doesn’t breathe a single word after her initial meltdown that Joel found her in. She’s so silent, and if she hadn’t been walking like it’s the only thing her brain knows to do, he would have feared that she just simply wasn’t breathing. She had screamed and cried and fought, weakly whimpering about a man, something he had done, and something she had done.
He wants to make the pain and fear go away. But he knows that’s an impossible feat, and instead, he can bring her away to safety.
So, that’s what he does.
They’re slow, in their synchronized limp. Joel has one arm over her shoulder as she stares at the horizon, unblinking. Catatonic. She might be going into shock, he has to get her to safety faster, if that’s the case.
“Ellie?” he grunts, hoping that she’ll respond. Give him something to work with, give him any semblance of the girl he’s grown so fond of. She pauses in motion, standing still. She says nothing. Her face is unchanging.
The resort is about an hour and a half away, now. They’re close to shelter, but not close enough. Joel sighs and tugs gently on her shoulders. Ellie starts moving again, like a machine with an on and off switch.
He misses his girl already.
As they walk, he tries to look at her closer, he tries to understand. He’s horrified, thinking about what those monsters could have done to her. She’s alive, he tries to remind himself. They didn’t kill her, they didn’t eat her. But with another look at her void expression, they might as well have.
She’s hunched over ever so slightly, one arm wrapped around her stomach and her other gripping onto her backpack like a lifeline. Joel worries that something’s wrong with her ribs, the way she’s clutching herself. Congealed blood sits on her face and hands. He doesn’t know if it’s better or worse that it doesn’t belong to her.
If the stitches in his side weren’t burning, Joel would scoop her up in a heartbeat. Maybe, before Colorado, she would have made fun of him for it. She would have called him soft and stupid, would have insisted that she could walk herself.
Now, he has no idea what she’d say, what she’d do. It scares him, this uncertainty. He’s become so dependent on her, he’s realizing.
Lost in his thoughts, Joel doesn’t realize how much time has passed until the cul-de-sac is just a mere mile or so away, visible just as they finally exit the seemingly endless forest. He pulls Ellie along, not that she makes any effort to push back or complain.
In ten minutes, they’re back in the neighborhood, and Joel’s guiding her into a different house. In her state, Ellie probably won’t notice (and if she does, then question) the corpses in the previous one, but his mind still screams at him to keep her as far away from it as possible.
(In this case, ‘as far away from it as possible’ ends up just being two houses down, but it’ll do.)
He doubts Ellie even recognizes that they’re in the same area as before. He helps her sit down on the moth-eaten couch, and she just continues staring. He holds the back of his hand to her forehead – she’s cold, which is unsurprising, considering that they just came from outdoor’s cruel winter bite.
Joel tries to remember the other ways he’s learned how to check for shock, from medical VHS tapes all the way back in ‘90, eventually getting his shit together and remembering to check her damn pulse. It’s not running too fast, it feels normal.
He sighs a breath of relief.
“Can I check your ribs?” he asks her, he makes his voice as gentle as he can manage – it’s more gentle than he thought himself capable. Ellie’s gaze is looking straight through him, like he’s invisible. “Baby girl, please.”
That brings the barest pinprick of life back into her eyes. She moves slightly, and now she meets his eyes. They’re still empty, but she seems vaguely aware now.
“Ellie,” he says, crouching down in front of her. Joel takes Ellie’s cold hands in his own, she’s so small. She doesn’t deserve this cruel world, and in return, this cruel world does not deserve her. “You’re hurt. I need to make sure your ribs aren’t broken.”
Her lip twitches, pulling into a straight line. Weakly, she nods, and that action alone washes away so much of Joel’s fear in an instant.
“Okay. Thank you, baby girl,” he tells her. She seems to melt into that, the praise. His jacket has already slipped off of her shoulders, leaving her in her coffee colored sweater, caked in dark blood and bits of other matter. “I’m gonna pull your shirt up a bit. Tell me to stop if you need me to, I promise I’m only checking your ribs, nothing higher than that, okay?”
She says absolutely nothing. He hates that he has to promise, but the way she bucked and shrieked when he found her made a heavy weight settle deep in his stomach, and he’d always rather be safe than sorry. Joel prays it’s simply being safe.
He doesn’t want to think about Ellie being hurt in that way.
Slowly, he lifts the hem. He sucks in a sharp breath at the myriad of dark red and forming bruises that mottles her skin, and his grip tightens when he notices the bruises on her waist – in the shape of fingers, somebody had held his girl down hard.
Ellie whimpers but doesn’t move as he checks her ribs for fractures. He doesn’t find any breaks, but her discomfort leads him to believe that she’s probably got some deeper bruising that’ll bother her for a while. Joel carefully lowers her shirt.
As soon as he does, her arms cross over her stomach, holding herself tightly. His heart is breaking all over again, she’s too young for this bullshit.
“Are you hurt anywhere else?” Joel prods, hoping to get a single word out of her. She’s giving him nothing in return. “Baby girl…”
She nods her head. His breath catches in his throat.
“Can you tell me where?” He feels like his throat is closing. She doesn’t move. “Can you show me? I just want to help you feel better.”
Ellie shakes her head, weaker than her nod.
“Okay,” Joel swallows thickly. “I’m gonna help clean you up a bit, and then we can get some rest. You’ll be sore in the morning, but it’ll get better. I’ll make sure it does.”
Again, she says and does nothing. He steps back, grabbing his canteen and flask out of his satchel, and ripping a cloth off of one of his shirts – one unfit for Winter. Joel pours water, first, bringing it to Ellie’s face and slowly rubbing at the frozen blood.
It comes off easily, until he gets to her nose. He finds that it’s badly bruised, and miraculously not broken. With a little of his alcohol, he cleans up a cut on the bridge of it. She hisses lightly as he disinfects.
The time passes in silence. Eventually, her face and hands are free of blood, and her hair will be a problem for tomorrow. He helps her by taking out her hair tie – it’s barely holding up her ponytail, in another hour or two it would have fallen out on its own. He combs it out with his fingers, and leaves it at that. He’ll wash it tomorrow, he promises her.
She doesn’t reply. Her low hum is his only confirmation that she’s heard him.
In the closet, he finds a plastic bag with two blankets inside. They’re in good condition. He brings them back into the living room, and eases Ellie into a more comfortable position for sleep. With the grace of a practiced father, he drapes one of the blankets over her, kissing her forehead with a soft, “good night, baby girl.”
Joel sets himself up right in front of the couch, wrapping the lighter of the two blankets around himself. His energy for the day is depleted, it takes no time for the weight of sleep to pull him under.
He still fails her in his dreams.
Wind whistles sharply in the night, and Joel finds himself awakened by heart-wrenching sobs. He checks behind him, Ellie’s blanket is pushed to the side, and her bag is open with some of her belongings pouring onto the wooden floor.
The sobbing continues, it’s in a room to his right. It’s a miracle he heard it. Pushing himself up, he’s nearly running into the room. Joel fears that Ellie’s hurt, that somebody’s found them, that there was an Infected they missed.
But no. The only threat to Ellie in the room was herself. Joel swears he could never run fast enough, crossing the floor just in time to wrestle a gun out of her hands right as she goes to pull the trigger, a scream in her throat as the bullet narrowly misses and merely grazes her temple.
A sharp bang, it hits the wall. She’s crying harder, now, with blood dripping down from her forehead.
“Fuck, shit, Ellie-” he swears, pulling the gun away from her and chucking it across the room. Joel thinks he might join her in tears. “Baby girl. Please, talk to me, please, why–”
“I– I’m sorry,” she croaks hoarsely, the first words from her he’s heard in what feels like ages. Her voice is too small. It’s not right, it’s not Ellie. “I just wanna make it stop.”
There’s so much fear, too much of it. There’s no way that so much fear should exist in such a small girl, it’s unfair. He needs to make it fair, he has to make it just.
“I keep… his hands,” she wails. Without warning, Ellie dives into his chest, wrapping her arms around his torso and squeezing as if he’ll disappear if she lets go. She might believe that to be the case. “They’re everywhere. They… fuck, I need it to stop, make it stop—”
“Baby girl,” Joel tries to shush her. He holds her tighter. She sinks into his touch. “Baby girl, what did he—”
He’s cut off by another one of her screams. Somehow, that’s answer enough. She buried her head into the crook of his neck.
There’s only one thing he can think of, one thing that a man could do to a little girl, that’ll have her trying to pull the trigger in the middle of the night.
“I feel dirty,” she whispers, her voice so broken. “I feel so dirty and I’m never gonna be clean again. I—I wanna go, I wanna go, Joel.”
The tears in his own eyes start welling. He hates this. He hates this world. He hates that they’re only here because Ellie wanted to save it, he wishes she would just accept that it wasn’t worth saving. But she wouldn’t, she’s too good.
“I don’t want you to go, baby girl,” he tells her. “You’re not dirty. The scum that hurt you is. You’re so precious, I promise you, baby.”
“But—” she sniffles. Her grip never loosens.
“But nothing. I…” Joel’s at a loss for words, he has so many things he needs Ellie to know; how much he loves her, how nothing is her fault, how he’d be right behind her if she was gone. He has no idea how to say them. “I can’t tell you I understand. I don’t. But I can tell you that the way he hurt you, what he did, it’s wrong. He’s a monster.”
“Am I a monster?” she whimpers. “He said I was just like him. That I have a violent heart. He said… he—”
Ellie breaks off into another fit of sobs and Joel can only hold her and give her empty promises. He wants so desperately to go back and set the rest of that town ablaze, to kill any person who had any part in hurting his kid.
“No,” he says firmly. “No. You’re not a monster. I’m so sorry, baby.”
His nightmare had come true. He failed her, he failed his girl. Again and again and again, all he does is fail her.
“I wanna go home,” she squeezes out. The blood on her temple has dried, he notes. That’s good. That means she hasn’t hurt herself too badly. She’ll heal, she will.
“Then we will,” he responds to her. In Jackson, she’ll never have to hold a gun again. The thought is comforting. She deserves the world, not the other way around. “We’ll go home.”
“Okay.”