Work Text:
He watches her turn away from him in the backseat of the car, a slip of a girl in a thin hospital gown and he wonders how his heart can possibly splinter apart further, how there is anything left in his chest cavity at all.
But somehow, there is. Somehow, the girl there in the backseat of the car has marked her territory on the floundering pieces. It’s an ache that’s impossible to breathe around sometimes. And Joel is smarter than this, he knows better than to let momentary weakness rewrite his resolve, but the unfortunate reality is that this is no momentary thing.
Because he’s looking at his girl in the rearview mirror, watching Ellie’s breaths wrack her small body and he is unlucky, he knows this. His fingers itch on the steering wheel wondering if she'll ever be able to sleep through the night again.
Ellie asked if anyone was hurt at the hospital, whether Marlene made it, and Joel had swallowed down dripping poison, a weight like death on his ribcage because he had done what he wished he could've done when Sarah was taken from him all those years ago. He finally saved his daughter, and because of that, he feels an unsettling lack of guilt over it all.
Still, his body hurts seeing how withdrawn Ellie has become.
They stop at an abandoned village for the night. Joel raids a few houses in search of clothes for Ellie, and all he comes up with are men’s, but she was never a girly girl anyway. He thinks he can see the look of relief on her face when he hands them to her.
She doesn’t say anything, just heads into the next room to change while Joel settles on the ripped leather couch of the house Joel deemed safest.
He already apologized to her in the car, so he doesn’t feel capable of saying it again, but when Ellie returns to the room, she sits down on the floor even though there’s plenty of space on the couch. It’s tangible, the sadness he feels but he tamps it all down, because that’s what he does.
He effectively cheered her up before, but this might be a harder thing to fix.
“I found some soup while I was looking for your clothes,” Joel says, pushing through the immense discomfort that’s taken place in his body. The silent treatment from her is decidedly the worst thing he’s experienced in a while.
Ellie doesn’t look at him, just crosses her arms over her chest and leans back against the wall. "I'm not hungry." A lie if he's ever heard one, but he nods anyway, figures she'll sleep off her sour mood.
Joel is about to stand and lay out some clothes to sit on so she can get some sleep on the couch, when she speaks again. Her voice is so quiet, it stops him dead in his tracks.
“You were the first person to ever offer me a choice in what happened to me,” and it’s a knife twist in his gut, this worn-down version of the wild girl that stole guns behind his back and made him laugh for the first time in years with her godawful bedtime puns.
He remembers how he tossed and turned that whole night at Tommy’s, knowing the right thing to do but also knowing that if he left the choice up to her, she’d stay by his side, so selfishly, he had left it up to her. It was a torrent of overwhelming relief and a newfound sense of fear that flooded his bloodstream when Ellie’d shoved her bag at him and said let’s go .
“But one of the reasons I left with you was so I could try to save the world,” Ellie continues and Joel sits there, listening to her and feeling as helpless as the day the dog went up to her to smell if she was infected. He worried he'd lose her then, he's worried he may lose her now, but this time it would be his own goddamn fault. “You took that from me, Joel.”
“Ellie-”
“After everything, all your promises, all we went through to get here, you just…” and she’s not crying but she’s not not crying and it’s deserved, the sharp pains ringing through his heart because what she’s saying is true, it’s all true, but he knows that he’d make the same decision time and time again if it meant she was alive and breathing, so he’s not sure how to reconcile with this all now. He knows she would never want to hear that because the truth is ugly, all the death and pain he inflicted to save one person, but love is ugly—the way it eclipses morality and reason, the way it sits heavy on his tongue in the form of unsaid words, the way his body longs to hold hers and take away the ways in which the world has failed her, the ways in which he has failed her.
"I'm sorry, Ellie, I..." couldn't lose you too, is what he wants to finish the sentence with, but the longer Joel leaves his words unfinished, the more impatient Ellie grows. She rolls her eyes and Joel goes to sit on the floor. He's an idiot who is still unused to voicing affection and truth, so all he can do is watch her back while she settles on the couch, listens to her breathing as she inevitably drifts off to sleep.
When Ellie wakes, the room is still dark, moonlight bleeding through the unshuttered windows, and she turns over on her side to be met with Joel’s gaze as he sits against the wall opposite the couch. She can’t help it, the way she still seeks him out, needing the reassurance that he’s alive and didn’t die down in that basement, that he still will keep watch over her sleeping body even if she won’t speak to him.
He doesn’t look away from her face, and the weight of his stare is full of something that makes Ellie swallow and forget that she’s the one angry at him. She looks to the messed up leather against her cheek. She won’t offer to switch places but he looks tired.
“Go back to sleep,” Joel says softly, too fucking softly for her liking. She wants back the gruff old man who threw her against the wall and would say pass at any personal question she threw his way, it would make it all so much easier to hate him.
Ellie rolls her eyes and then turns her back toward him like she did in the car. She wants to cry, but the tears are caught somewhere in her body and won’t surface, too accustomed to disuse for them to come up like this.
After a while, she’s on the border of sleep again when she hears Joel’s voice, a mere whisper in her ears so she doesn’t know whether she’s dreamt it when she wakes the next morning, but more desperate and pleading than he’s ever sounded, he’d said I’m sorry, I didn’t plan for this, it’s not fair to you.
She’s cautious with him now, like a stray kitten that’s been picked up by the roadside, jumpy when he walks back into the room with the open can of soup extended to her, scared to look him in the eye.
I didn’t plan for this.
Neither did I , Ellie wants to say to him, whether it was a dream or not. I was scared, too, but I needed this, a purpose, a reason for-
And Ellie can't really complete the thought, but she doesn’t know how to cope with the emptiness left in her soul after David, the sickness of knowing the girl she once was is no longer. She still can't look at her own body too closely without something like dread coating her throat and making it hard to get air into her lungs.
It isn't fair, she just wanted a choice.
What stopped her from throwing up every time she remembered was what came after. The solace of Joel's solid body pressed against her own, grounding her with his familiar scent, his arms around her so tightly she could bury her face in his neck and hide from everything that transpired mere minutes before, his voice in her ear with a litany of "it's okay, baby girl, I got you". And he did have her, she realizes, just not in the way she asked of him. The memory is all tainted now, smeared by Joel's obvious lies. She has no fallback, nothing to make the reality of David any less bitter and devastating now. She hates him for that the most.
"C'mon, you gotta eat something," Joel urges because Ellie still hasn't taken the soup from his hand. Her stomach growls, betraying her little hunger strike she hadn't really planned on taking, she just wants him to feel bad for it all. She never told him what happened, and he never asked. She doesn't know if she would've told him if he did. But still, he never asked.
Silently, with shaking hands, Ellie snatches the soup and greedily drinks down over half her share before pushing the can into Joel's stomach. He catches it before any can spill, eyeing her but doesn't say anything before he finishes it off.
They stay an extra day because they both desperately need rest before they reach Tommy's. Ellie still refuses to speak.
The flames consume her, fire licking at her very soul and she’s back there in the wooden space with David on top of her, pinning her to the linoleum floor and she can’t breathe, she can’t shake his weight off her, she’s drowning underneath him and this isn’t supposed to be how she goes, this can’t be it but then she starts when the sound of his voice is replaced with Joel's. He seems to be begging her with words like “Ellie, you’re okay, sweetheart, please, come back to me, please."
Joel doesn't know what happened to her while he was too sick to protect her, but he can guess based on the mere fact that she's a girl and men have always been sick bastards, even more so now that there are no laws to fucking abide by. His thoughts are somewhat confirmed when his fingers accidentally touch the skin left bare on her abdomen by her squirming around and she screams and tries to flinch away from him. His stomach turns, rage as strong as sin bubbling in his body at whoever did this to her, at himself for being too late to rescue her.
"Ellie, please baby, wake up," he's pleading, and he doesn't realize he's crying until his tears drop onto Ellie. He violently wipes them away, gritting his teeth.
Her body finally goes still in his arms, but she doesn't open her eyes. "Please, let me go," she says it so quietly, so weakly that he doesn't know whether or not she's awake, whether or not it's meant for him. Joel feels so nauseous, it disorients him and causes him to loosen his grip on Ellie.
"Ellie, please."
He doesn't know what he's asking for anymore, he just wants his girl to be whole again. Wholly his, wholly real, wholly fine and happy and safe.
"Joel?" Ellie's eyes finally open, and his relief is visceral and all-consuming, as premature as it may be.
"Yeah, baby girl, it's me," he whispers, studying every minute change in her facial expression. Her own relief is obvious and he takes that as a small victory. "I'm here."
"H-he..." she trails off, moving her eyes away from Joel's face, looking once again shut down and hollow. He realizes, in a stray moment of clarity, that she had been trying to tell him what the man had done to her when Joel had found her with blood all over her face. He didn't—doesn't want to know, selfishly, because the truth is no doubt uglier than whatever Joel's done in his life, and he's not sure he can handle knowing for sure that someone did something like that to Ellie. But, realistically, he knows this isn't about him and if Ellie feels safe telling Joel, he'll do whatever is in his earthly power to comfort her through it—even though he knows she'll never fully get through it—and spend the rest of his days protecting her.
"You can talk to me," Joel says, trying to sound reassuring without sounding like he's pressuring her to speak. Ellie hasn't moved from his embrace, he's noted.
"What's the worst thing you've ever done?" Ellie's still not looking at him, she's instead looking off into the distance like she wants to be somewhere else, and he doesn't necessarily blame her. He freezes at the question, because he thinks she probably has put two and two together and knows the answer. He thinks that's not really what she's getting at, though, so he cautiously brings his hand to her face, barely resting his fingertips on her skin to cup her cheek. She won't make eye contact, but he thinks she might lean a bit into his touch.
"I don't know." Joel squeezes his eyes shut. He's not a psychopath, the guilt of taking human life has never lessened for him. "I've killed a lot of people."
"Have you ever raped someone?"
And fuck, there it is, isn't it?
"God, Ellie, never," he says sternly, seriously, needs her to know, knows she already knows what kind of person he is, that he genuinely is sick at the simple suggestion. There's a constricting feeling around his heart when he thinks about the unfairness of the world. Little girls that never stand a chance at being innocent and happy, at least as happy and innocent as they can be in the world now. And Ellie was those things before. She laughed with abandon and was shocked that girls used to be so concerned about boys before the world went to shit. And now... "Ellie, what happened back there?"
Joel wants to hold her tighter, but he doesn't know if that would make her feel even more anxious, doesn't want her to feel worse or more scared or uncomfortable. So he just continues to hold her face lightly in his hand, the other one wrapped loosely around her shoulder as she continues to look anywhere but his face. "Nothing happened." He won't press her. As the seconds stretch out to minutes, she sits up finally and faces him, and he realizes he won't have to press her. "I killed him before he could."
He wishes he had gotten to him first, that he personally had bashed that motherfucker's head in with his own two hands, but the sentiment doesn't matter now. All that matters is being here for the girl sitting in front of him, looking so vulnerable it makes his teeth ache in his skull. "But he tried?" Joel asks, holding his breath, digging his nails into his palm so he doesn't do something drastic like start punching the walls.
Ellie laughs humorlessly. "He said 'don't be afraid, there's no fear in love', and when he reached for his belt..." she sniffs, absolute pain radiating through her voice despite her clear attempt at trying to appear strong. My brave girl, you shouldn't have had to go through that either, he wants to say but can't seem to find his own voice.
She's looking at the floor, biting her lip to keep from crying, he knows. Joel watches her and he can't shake the thought that none of this would have happened if she'd never left Tommy's. He should've never given her the choice, even if it meant that his heart was going to be ripped out all over again. "It's not your fault, it was never your fault, Ellie."
"Then why do I keep feeling like this?" and her voice breaks, she breaks finally, sobbing in such an open way that ruins him right where he's sat on the disgusting old couch. Her hands are shaking as she reaches to grab onto his arms, gripping the fabric of his jacket in her small fists and he pulls her all the way into him. She goes willingly, her body fitting so perfectly in the crook of his own. Daughter, my daughter, the mantra keeps saying in his head. "Why does my body feel so gross, why do I feel so gross, Joel?" Ellie's voice is hardly intelligible against his chest and through her own cries, but Joel understands.
"I don't know, baby, I don't know why the world is so fucking cruel," he answers her honestly, and he thinks he's crying too, knows it when he tastes the salt of his own tears in his mouth. Ellie clings to him harder, wraps her arms around his neck, and after a while, Joel doesn't know who's holding on to who, he can no longer recognize who is comforting who.
He can feel how wet his shirt is where her cheek is pressed, and he knows he's probably bruising her with how tightly he's holding onto her, but neither of them are willing to let go.
Ellie falls asleep with tear-stained cheeks in the shelter of Joel's frame. His arms are so big, they can cover her whole body when he bends forward, hollowing himself out for her. She's no longer red with anger when she drifts off, but she won't let him get off easily, either. She thinks that's okay, he'll have all the time in the world to make amends to her when they get to Tommy's.
In the in-between state of sleep and consciousness, she can feel Joel's lips against her temple and this is good and safe. She can hear him say "I'm so sorry, Ellie, for everything. But it's you and me, baby, and we're gonna be okay. I have you, I swear it."
I never had someone who fought for me like you, she wants to say to him as she unsuccessfully fights off sleep. Thank you.