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When Ellie wakes, she is sweat-damp and gasping for breath, phantom ringing of the gunshot still echoing in her ears.
Sometimes, she wakes up screaming. Usually, she’s not even aware of it until she has to stop and breathe, until she registers the ache in her throat as Joel rushes into her room. Most often, it’s like this: paralyzed, silent. A habit learned early on in military school, where any disruption at night was likely to earn her a punishment, a black eye or a split lip instead of the hugs or soft words Joel's gotten her used to.
Squeezing her eyes shut, she tries to force herself to breathe, but all she knows is pins-and-needles in her trigger finger, the way the blood had splattered onto her face. The sound Riley’s body made when she hit the floor. That immediate, debilitating regret.
Don’t let me hurt you, Riley’s last words play over and over in her head like the tapes they used to listen to together. The oath she’d made Ellie take when it became clear that losing their minds together was no longer an option. Ellie thinks she would have let her, otherwise. Wouldn’t have put up a fight when the girl she loved ripped her to pieces if that was how it was meant to play out.
Maybe then it would have been poetic.
As much as she hadn’t wanted to do it, she kept that promise, put a bullet in Riley’s skull to keep herself unharmed.
It hurts to think about. A real, physical pain, like inhaling broken glass. Like drowning, kind of. Ellie knows how it feels to drown. That burning ache in her chest, near-frantic need to breathe, but it’s not air her body's searching for, it’s Riley.
And Riley, she knows, is never, ever coming back.
Ellie’s out of her bed before she knows what she’s doing. She’s never done this before, sought Joel out in the middle of the night after a bad dream. It makes her feel like a little kid, like she’s doing something she should have outgrown years ago. She feels… guilty, almost. Like she’s overstepping. But right now it’s the only thing she can think to do.
She pointedly steps on the creaky floorboard just outside Joel’s cracked-open doorway, and he’s awake and sitting up before she even makes it across the threshold; he must’ve been sleeping with his good ear up tonight.
His immediately alert expression dissipates when he sees her, melting into the soft, worried face he reserves only for her. Eyes filled with some emotion she can’t name, won’t name, because she doesn’t know if she can accept the weight of it.
“Bad dream?” Joel asks, voice rough with sleep. She nods slowly. It’s been a while since her last one. She’d had nightmares with varying frequency while they were on the road, most often at first in the days after Kansas City.
They’d been the worst after Silver Lake. Almost every night she’d woken up screaming from dreams of meat cleavers and burning buildings, groping hands and Joel bleeding out on a dirty mattress. She hadn’t been able to fall asleep if Joel wasn’t there, and by the time he finally went to his own bed, she’d wake him up again. The both of them had had matching dark circles for over a year.
“C’mere,” Joel says, pulls the blanket down so she can sit next to him, pulling the covers over her lap. She didn’t realize how cold she is until she’s stealing his body heat.
A parent’s bed always feels safer than your own.
They haven’t talked about it, not beyond the awful argument that first night in Jackson, but she thinks at this point that that’s close enough to what he is. Tommy and Maria call her their niece. She knows what that implies, even if it’s not something either of them acknowledge.
Joel hesitates before gently brushing a hand over her forehead, smoothing down the stubborn pieces in the front that always refuse to lay flat. He’s always so careful with her, when the nightmares or the panic attacks or the bad days leave her disoriented and unsure of herself and anything else. Sometimes, the idea of anyone—even him—touching her makes Ellie's skin crawl.
Now, though, she leans into it like a flower to the sun.
“S’okay,” he says softly, rubbing her shoulder through the fabric of her shirt. His shirt, one she’d stolen to sleep in.
It’s only now that she lets the tears come. It’s not the way she usually cries, when she bottles everything up until she feels on the verge of implosion, when her tears escape through gasping, ragged sobs that take her breath away until she feels like she’s about to pass out.
This is quiet, mournful, and when Joel hugs her close, she burrows her face into his chest. She wishes this is something he could fix for her.
She just misses her best friend.
When she tells him this, she knows he understands. Knows he’s mourned Sarah longer than she’s known him, longer than she’s even been alive.
“When I lost Sarah,” Joel starts, voice cracking on her name. It’s gotten easier for him to talk about her, but he usually only brings up the happy things; the cheesy movies she’d dragged him to, the time she accidentally broke a girl’s nose at a soccer game, that she was tall, curly-haired, with a killer smile and a good sense of humor. It’s hard for him to talk about the time after she died but before he met Ellie.
Ellie thinks she understands. She remembers those three weeks the fireflies had left her locked alone in a room with nothing but her own thoughts and what was left of Riley’s blood stuck under her fingernails. She doesn't want to talk about that either.
“When I lost Sarah,” he tries again. “I dreamed about her all the time. Every night I had to watch as she… I dreamed about it every night.”
“What did you do?” Ellie closes her eyes. She can hear his heartbeat where her ear presses against his chest.
“Well… drank too much, for one. Took pills I shouldn’t’ve,” he grips her a little tighter for a second. “You do that, you’ll be grounded ‘till you’re eighty.”
“Damn,” she says, “there goes my plans.” She doesn’t have to see him to know what expression he’s wearing. “It just feels like I’ll never stop missing her,”she admits.
“I know,” Joel sighs, stroking her hair. “You can always tell me about her. Whenever you want to remember.”
Ellie hums noncommittally, lets him pull the blankets up over her, thinking about what to say. It seems like there’s too much; looking back, Riley is almost larger-than-life. There are too many memories, both the good and bad. The achingly sweet and strikingly cruel, all of them starting to slip away from her as the months tick by. Even so, there are too many feelings to be complied in a handful of sentences, not enough words in the English language or letters in the alphabet to sum her up. Ellie doesn't even know where to begin.
“I loved her,” Ellie says finally, as the first rays of daylight filter in through the curtains. It feels like a good enough place to start. “I never loved anyone before, but... I loved her so much.”