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it’s the coldest time of winter / and i shiver when i see the falling snow / if we make it through december / got plans to be in a warmer town, come summertime
❄
Ellie normally dreams that she’s drowning in cordyceps.
When she sleeps, she’s surrounded by the deep grooves and ridges of a clicker’s face, flowered fungus blooms jutting out like tributaries, pinkish white and gleaming like the underbelly of a fish. Rot and decay, blood and tendrils surrounding her, squeezing the air out of her lungs. That unmistakable smell of mold and earth overtaking her. Ruining her.
Ellie normally dreams that she’s drowning in cordyceps. But as she stares into the pile of blood and bone and brain that used to be David’s head, she wonders if this is what she’ll dream about from now on.
❄
She can’t remember how she got inside this house. It’s a split level, blue carpeted stairs darkened with rot and age. Joel sat her down there, on the steps, while he went to clear the space, check for danger. It’s quiet, and the amount of crap scattered around is a clear indication that no one lives here, but Joel always checks anyway.
Snow is still coming down outside in thick white sheets. Ellie runs her palms against the nylon carpet underneath her. It’s rough, and the odd feeling of it very nearly brings her careening back into her own body. Nearly. It passes quickly, and she’s back to feeling abstractly, barely connected to her own limbs, like her brain is hovering just above her, just out of reach.
Everything hurts. She’s not so crazy that she doesn’t register that she feels like shit. It’s quietly unbearable, the pain that’s curling through her like smoke. It’s everywhere.
“Ellie?”
She opens her eyes. She didn’t realize she’d closed them in the first place.
There are legs in front of her; thick boots on big feet, jeans dampened by snow. Joel’s bearing all of his weight on his left side, leaning, his torso hunched. If Ellie felt like she could move, she’d grab the hem of his shirt and get eyes on his wound. As it is, every time she attempts to reach out in front of her, all she feels is a dull tingle in her arm.
Ellie can move, in theory. Christ, she moved the whole way here, somehow. She still can’t quite remember.
Flicking her eyes up to meet Joel’s, she crunches her fingers up, raking her nails through the carpet again. He’s looking at her like it wasn’t the first time he called her name. Ellie hopes he’ll take her eye contact as a response. She can’t move, so talking is definitely out of the picture.
Joel shifts, tries to stand on both feet evenly but ends up with his weight back on his left side again. He clears his throat.
“House is safe.”
Ellie blinks. He stares at her. The snow keeps beating down outside.
“Don’t think there’s much here as far as supplies go, though I didn’t really look” he continues. “We still have food left from Jackson.”
Right. It hadn’t been that long since they’d left. Ellie thinks about Jackson, its string lights making the town glow each night, the kids throwing snowballs in the street. She thinks about fighting with Joel in that stupid teenage girl’s bedroom. The furniture, the diary, all of it frozen twenty years in time.
It doesn’t seem real. She doesn’t find it plausible that her right now and the girl Joel left Jackson with are the same person. She finds it hard to reconcile these two versions of herself, like maybe batshit Silver Lake and batshit David created a fissure in her life too wide to jump over.
At the mere thought of his name, a shudder racks through Ellie. She curls in on herself in one violent jerk, body all crook and curve. It surprises her to find out that she can move, and she tries to figure out how to do it again.
Joel jumps at the sudden movement, hand coming up as if to clutch his chest, but it doesn’t quite make it there.
“You okay?” he says softly, and then frowns, like he realizes what a stupid thing that is to say. Crouching down on one knee with a low grunt, he knits his fingers together into a big fist that he rests in front of his mouth, thumbnails pressed against his lips. They’re eye-to-eye now.
The wind rushes against the house in a big gust, making the front door creak. There’s a small crack of space between the door and the hinge, and a cold draft howls through it, blowing against them.
The longer Ellie doesn’t respond, the more thinly veiled Joel’s panic becomes. He starts breathing heavier, and he squeezes his hands together harder to ebb the shaking. She can’t blame him. He has no idea what happened while he was sick. While she was gone.
I wish you knew already, she finds herself thinking. I wish you knew so I don’t have to tell you.
That’s not quite right, though. She doesn’t wish he knew. She wishes he was there, even though it makes her feel a little bit sick, the way she relies on him now—even in her if-onlys. If only he were there, she wouldn’t be like this right now. Immobile. Mute. Fucking crazy.
The old Ellie, the one from a couple days ago, would probably be mad at Joel for it, even if it’s irrational. The injury, the infection, the absence. His fault. But anger costs her too much right now.
“Kiddo,” Joel says, voice lined with desperation. He pushes his palms against her cheeks, just slow enough that it doesn’t make her flinch. “Where does it hurt?”
Ellie casts her eyes down, just enough that she still sees his frown deepen, the lines on his face looking more profound than ever. His lower lip is trembling, ever so slightly. The sight pushes words out of her mouth without her even having to think too hard about it.
“Everywhere.”
It comes out scratchy and whispered, quiet enough that she can barely hear herself over the din outside, which means Joel definitely didn’t catch it. She still can’t look at him.
It’s like she can only handle one thing at a time. Talk, look at Joel, move, don’t freak out. If she’s doing one, she can’t do the others.
“Hm?” he asks. He sounds so quiet, so balmy, it’s all wrong. Missing are the gruff, exasperated tones he’s been using with her for months. Ellie can’t decide if she likes it, or if it scares her. A nagging feeling coming from somewhere in her abdomen tries to convince her that a soft Joel is a weak Joel, one that can’t protect her anymore.
All this time under his guardianship, his companionship, some primordial part of her had been sated knowing that, as long as she was with Joel, she was safe. But after the responsibility of taking care of him, after being taken by David—feeling alone for the first time in so long—something cracked in that foundation her and Joel have been building together on the road.
She can feel it, the wobbling between them.
Her head lists downward until her forehead hits her knee, the hands Joel had on her cheeks sliding away, one coming to the nape of her neck and one bracketing her wrist.
“Everywhere,” she says again, pushing her voice until it projects just loud enough for him to hear.
Joel lets out a shaky breath. The hand on the back of her neck runs up and down her back. He squeezes her wrist.
“What’s bothering you the most?” he asks.
Ellie really tries to think about it, because she wants to answer him, but all she feels right now is a pounding. Everywhere is pounding, like her body is one giant heartbeat. She can’t distinguish one hurt from another.
She shrugs listlessly, her head still pressed against her knee.
Joel moves his hands to the side of her face again, palms against her ears, and picks her head up. His hair looks grayer, and she realizes for the first time how long it’s gotten since they first met. It’s grown out into thick waves that stick out everywhere, making him look younger despite the color.
“Alright,” he says, a newfound quiet determination in his voice. “Head to toe, then.”
Head to toe was something Joel did with her on the road when she got hurt. When she fell from a tree, when she got scraped up in a bush, after Sam and Henry—head to toe was their game. Any time Ellie was bad at articulating where she was hurting, Joel would make her focus on each part of her body, head to toe, until they found the problem.
She’s always wondered where he picked it up from. Now that she’s been to Jackson, seen the memorial for Sarah, it isn’t hard to guess. The whole idea of it makes her ache in ways she can’t even begin to puzzle out.
“Um,” she begins, her voice hushed, raspy. “My head hurts.”
Not only is that true, but it’s also an understatement. Her entire head feels tight and heavy, like her brain is stuck to the inside walls of her skull. It hurts worst behind her eyes, sharp pangs of pain shooting through her every time she glances out the window, squinting into the gleaming bright of the snowbanks.
“Okay.” Joel sounds gruff, like he’s trying not to show his worry. “You feel sick? Dizzy?”
Ellie nods. She won’t say so, but she’s felt sick and dizzy for days, ever since she watched him pull half a baseball bat out of his abdomen. It’s hard to tell where that worry ends and the concussion begins.
“Concussion,” she whispers, sounding a little matter-of-fact despite her near-catatonia. Ellie’s had them plenty of times; she knows what they feel like.
Joel nods, eyes squinted like he’s in pain. He’s not looking her in the eyes; his gaze is stuck right below her face.
“Neck?” he asks, voice tight.
“Neck?” Ellie repeats. Normally, when they do Head to Toe, Joel skips from head to chest.
He blinks once, twice, clears his throat again.
“You’ve got bruises, kiddo.” His voice is hushed now, too, matching hers.
He shifts from one knee to the other, exhaling hard through his nose. Ellie’s itching to see what his wound looks like. If the medicine is working. If her stitches look okay.
She lifts a hand up to her neck and finds that it’s hard to probe around because her hand is shaking so badly. She doesn’t remember when that started. Still, she tries to be gentle on her skin. She finds sore spots scattered all the way around the circumference and shrugs.
“Just bruises.”
“You can breathe okay?”
Ellie takes a deep breath, as if testing his question. Her chest stutters at the very top of her inhale, and there’s an intense soreness around her upper torso. She nods, still not meeting Joel’s eye.
“Ribs,” she whispers, curling her arms around her middle on instinct. The gesture, though gentle, sends a burning pain into her center.
Joel sucks in a breath.
“Broken?” he questions. Ellie shrugs. He rubs a hand up and down her bicep. “Can I check?”
Her eyes fill with tears almost instantly. Oh shit, she thinks. I can cry again. Joel’s face turns down in apology, and he rubs both her arms now, like he’s trying to warm her up.
“I don’t know,” she mumbles miserably, her voice thick and watery. Joel places his hands on the ends of her knees.
“Do you know how to check? Think I could talk you through it?” he asks, clearly desperate to find a solution.
Ellie doesn’t know why he’s so worried. If she punctured a lung, she’d be dead by now. Behind her eyes, she sees David’s chest, covered by his stupid collared sweater, drenched in blood. She watches his breathing stop, quick as a wink, as soon as the knife comes down the first time.
Blinking slow, Ellie sits and feels the tears escape, rolling in big thick drops down her cheeks. They taste like salt and metal in her mouth.
“I can’t do it,” she cries, moving her palms to the front of her ribs, the tips of her fingers knotting together.
She bruised a rib once in school after an older kid picked a fight with her, knocked her around before Riley could intervene. The school’s medic checked to make sure they weren’t broken, then. Ellie was still fuming as she laid on the dirty cot, certainly not picking up any spare medical training along the way.
A particularly strong draft blows through the crack in the door, making Ellie shiver, gooseflesh appearing on her skin.
“Can I do it then?” Joel asks gently. He pats his hands on her knees. “If it hurts, you tell me, and I’ll stop. Promise.”
Ellie can hear the unspoken vow behind his words. If you’re afraid of me, tell me, and I’ll stop. It’s that which makes her nod her head and pull her shaking hands away from her abdomen.
She leans back against the stairs, wincing when the edges dig into her back. It makes it easier, though, somehow, not lying flat. It helps that Joel is looking at her like she’s breaking his heart with each passing moment. There’s no power, no greed, in his gaze—only pain. She leans her head back against the flat of a step as he takes a seat next to her. There are still tears running down her cheeks; no point in trying to wipe them away when they just keep coming.
“Can you lift your sweatshirt up, or do you want me to do it?” Joel sounds uncomfortable, upset, like he’s hoping she’ll do it for him. Ellie’s not altogether sure she can move right now, though. She sniffles.
“You, please.” Her voice is wasting away by the second—it’ll probably be gone completely soon. When Joel moves to sit beside her, Ellie tilts her head to face in his direction, so she doesn’t have to watch his hands. Hers are crossed in front of her chest like a mummy, fisted in the fabric of the shoulders of his coat.
Joel meets her eye for a moment and nods.
“I’ll be fast, kiddo.”
Ellie nods, steeling herself. Joel’s eyes look regretful. She feels the fabric of her sweatshirt slide up her stomach and hears his sharp intake of breath. She doesn’t have to ask, doesn’t have to look, to know what it means—her ribs must look like shit from the outside.
He really is fast, gentle fingers palpating against her ribcage, feeling along each individual one with the precision and ease of someone who’s done it before. He’s probably done it to himself plenty of times.
From how close they are on the stairs, Ellie can smell the now-familiar scent that makes Joel, Joel. Sweat, gunpowder, rain. It sounds weird, but it’s ninety-nine percent of the reason she isn’t freaking out over being touched. As she lies wrapped in his jacket, as he leans over her torso, Ellie realizes for the first time how used to Joel’s smell she’s become, how much it brings her comfort. Like, he kind of reeks something awful, but it’s the best thing she’s ever smelled.
“Done,” he says, pulling her sweatshirt back down carefully over her stomach. “Nothing broken that I can tell. Might be some fractures by the looks of those bruises, but that’ll go away on its own in time. Could put some snow on it once we get you warm, help the swelling.”
Swelling. Ellie chances a glance down at her stomach, forgetting it’s already covered back up.
Joel places a hand on the back of her shoulder and helps her back to a sitting position. Her backside is starting to go numb from sitting so long, but moving feels like a task too insurmountable to even think about.
“Legs?” he asks.
Right, head to toe. Her legs feel fine, just sore—she used them as leverage to try and get David off of her. Ellie shakes her head.
“Fine,” she rasps. Joel nods, looking relieved.
“And feet?”
“Fine.” She curls his coat tighter around her, absently rubbing her cheek against the fabric that’s all softened from use.
“Good,” Joel breathes. He catches her face between his hands once again. “You’re gonna be just fine, honey. Gonna be okay.” He nods over and over, like he’s trying to convince the both of them.
Ellie can’t recall ever being spoken to with such care, such tenderness. Joel’s voice is tight with worry but layered with heedfulness; it makes her eyes well up again.
“Hey, hey,” Joel says quickly at the sight of fresh tears, looking panicked all over again. “What is it, what hurts?”
Ellie shakes her head, each turn making her skull throb, unable to convey her feelings even if she wanted to. She just heaves an almost-sob and shivers into his coat. Joel’s hands come around to the sides, pulling the fabric tighter around her, searching her face for answers that don’t exist.
“Here, let me get the blood off’a you, clean you up,” he says, ducking his head to meet her eye line. “Okay?”
Blood. Ellie can’t see her own face, but she frees her hands from inside Joel’s jacket and stares down at them—really looks at them—for the first time. Her palms are coated in red, already dried and cracking in the stiff winter air. The tops of her hands are spattered with it; it’s caked deep under her fingernails, the line of blood spots reaching as far as she can see up her arms.
It’s his. It’s all his. It’s all over her; it must be on her face, where Joel can see it. Ellie wonders how much. Violent heart. Her breathing goes shallow; thick sobs taking her air away.
Joel realizes his mistake and rushes to smooth her hair with his hands, cup her cheeks, squeeze her shoulders, anything to calm her down. It doesn’t work to quell the aching, the feeling like she’s on the precipice of a cliff, losing her balance.
“Okay,” Joel reassures, “I’m gonna get it off of you. I’m gonna get it off.”
“Please,” Ellie murmurs, voice nearing on a whimper.
“I got you.” He pets her head again. His backpack is just behind him on the landing; Joel yanks it up onto the stairs and digs through it. Since he’s barely had water in the past few days, there’s still a good bit left swirling around the canteen.
He grabs an old t-shirt too, and holds the bottle between his knees so he can unscrew the lid. Soaking the t-shirt with the rest of the water, Joel brings it up to Ellie’s face slowly, as if she’s a spooked animal (she kind of is).
The wind whistles softly outside as Joel gently rubs the wet shirt onto her skin, starting from her forehead and working his way down her face, all the way to her neck. The water is freezing cold, and it feels soothing on Ellie’s face, which is burning from crying and throbbing with pain.
Joel’s extra gentle on the skin of her nose, above her lips, all the places where the blood is more hers than David’s. The furrow in his brow tells her that, the more blood he wipes away, the more bruises are revealed.
Her nose does hurt a lot, now that she thinks about it; it might be fractured, hopefully not broken. Ellie’s not a vain girl—you really can’t be when you grow up in the apocalypse—but the thought of her nose healing crooked makes her want to cry harder.
She’s still quietly weeping, and it’s probably hard for Joel to tell what’s emotional distress and what’s pain, but for Ellie, it’s impossible to parse out—it’s all over, it’s everything. He shushes her every so often, not so much an actual entreaty for her to be quiet but a bit of comfort to keep her tethered, feet on the ground.
Eyeing her hairline—there must be blood caked there, too—Joel moves his hand to a fresh part of the t-shirt, a space not tinted pink. He gently scrubs at the baby hairs there, the ones that have come loose from her ponytail. Ellie closes her eyes again.
Once he’s done with her face, he uses the dry half of the shirt to pat her face dry, movements slow and soft. He grunts every so often when he shifts his weight from one knee to the other. Ellie wants to tell him that he can stop if he’s tired, or they can move somewhere more comfortable, but the words are hard to come by.
“Alright.” Joel’s voice is nearly a whisper. “Hands.”
Ellie removes her hands from where they’ve curled back into his coat, holding them out in front of her. The gentle prodding of Joel’s hands, his mumbled comforts, the cool t-shirt against her face, it all quiets her cries into a gentle sniffle.
Her hands are still shaking, partly from cold but mostly from lingering adrenaline. Joel gathers them up in his, wrapping the t-shirt around them and squeezing gently. He then grabs one to focus on, scrubbing at her palm and running the fabric back and forth against her nails in an attempt to get the blood out from underneath them.
Ellie watches on, her eyes half-lidded. It finally feels like the nagging sensation in the back of her stomach that’s telling her to run, run, run, is finally ebbing. She wants to sleep, but she knows she won’t be able to, not when she’s still covered in blood. Not when she feels filthy, all the way down past her skin and into her bones.
There’s something hanging in the air, a look of something on Joel’s face that Ellie knows means he wants to say something. She finds herself chanting in her head, a sort of mantra for her lingering panic: please don’t ask what happened, please don’t ask what happened, please don’t ask what happened.
Maybe he can read her mind (she hopes not), maybe he can read her face (probably), maybe he just understands (50-50 chance), but Joel stays quiet, rubbing the blood out of her hands, dirtying one of his last t-shirts for her, all so she’ll stop freaking out.
Her elbows are resting on her knees, and she slowly uses the leverage to slump forward, curling into herself, as Joel finishes up her hands and nails. A bone-tiredness sits heavy on Ellie’s shoulders the longer she sits here.
“Done,” Joel says, tossing the shirt over the handrail to dry, even though they definitely won’t be using it again now that it’s soiled with blood. Ellie curls her hands into loose fists, flexing and unflexing the digits.
“Thank you,” she says, eyes flicking up to Joel’s for just a moment before she casts them down again.
“S’alright, kiddo.” Joel cups his palm against her cheek for a second before turning his attention to the backpacks behind him. This time, he goes for Ellie’s, holding it out to her in offering.
“You got another outfit in here, still?” he asks.
Ellie genuinely can’t remember what’s in her backpack anymore, but she nods anyway.
“Think you can get dressed?” Joel continues. Ellie hums, grabbing her backpack out of his hands. It’s heavier than she remembers—or maybe she’s grown weaker.
Joel watches, clearly waiting for her to stand up. It’s just that Ellie’s not sure she can. Her fingers curl around the sides of her pack, her eyes roving around the room, as if a solution will present itself in the empty air.
After another beat, Joel seems to decide something in his head and pushes his hands against his knees to stand up, groaning a bit.
“Let’s get you up the stairs, huh?” He bends forward and holds one arm out for her to grip.
Ellie stares for just a moment, working up her courage, before slinging one strap of her backpack into the crook of her elbow and gripping his forearm with both hands. She’s holding him so hard it has to hurt, but Joel just pulls her upright, his arm steady as ever as she catches her balance.
He turns them around to face the upper landing and brings his arm back down to his side. Suddenly, the loss of contact between them feels not like a foot of space but instead a yawning gap, and Ellie finds herself digging her body into Joel’s side, her arm coming around his back, her cheek squishing into his shirt. A small oof leaves him from the impact, but he circles his arm around her shoulders, squeezing her even closer to him.
“Alright, one at a time,” he says and slowly they make their way up the steps. Each movement of her limbs sends a burning through Ellie’s muscles and a throbbing in her head. Sparks float at the edges of her vision, and when they make it to the upper floor, she leans against Joel until they abate.
“There’s a spare room up here,” Joel says, nodding down the hallway towards an open door. Ellie’s not sure if he’s ever spoken so much and she so little. It’s such a reversal of their usual dynamic, it’d be jarring were it not for everything that had just happened to her.
Ellie peers down the hallway and releases her arm from behind Joel’s back just for a moment, just so she can grip the side of his shirt in her fist, pushing him forward and ahead of her—a silent plea for him to lead her down the hallway. He obliges, letting her trail behind him, pulling on his flannel. Her free arm droops, weighed down by her pack.
Down the hallway, Joel pushes the door open wider. Inside is what Ellie thinks is a guest room (she’s not sure—still doesn’t know exactly what they are since Joel explained them to her a few months back). The wallpaper is a fading, peeling green, the bedframe an ornate, dark wood. It’s entirely innocuous, and yet Ellie can’t stand the idea of being in here alone.
Joel turns his head back to look at her.
“Want me to close the door?” he asks.
Ellie shakes her head violently, body hovering closer to his on instinct. For a moment, she sees the basement she all but dragged Joel down into. She sees the cell she woke up in, in Silver Lake. She sees a burning restaurant, smoke choking the air out of her lungs.
Ellie doesn’t want to be closed in anywhere.
“No,” she says, nearly cutting Joel off in her haste to reply. It’s the strongest her voice has sounded since he found her in the snow.
Joel bends his hands up at the wrist in a placating gesture.
“Okay,” he says. “I’ll just turn around.”
Ellie eyes the door anyway, but nods. Joel turns his back to her, leaning up against the hallway wall. She keeps forgetting that he’s still hurt. Whatever she’s done with the penicillin must have worked out okay, but she can tell he’s starting to flag. Ellie’s starting to flag, too.
The bed has a thick layer of dust on the duvet, but it looks clean enough—no bloodstains, no decay. She places her backpack down as carefully as possible, but it still kicks up dust into the air. She coughs lightly, not bothering to cover her mouth in the way Joel is always getting on her to do.
Unzipping her backpack, Ellie is surprised to find she has one change of clothes left, just as Joel predicted. The little pile of dread sitting in her chest begins to fizzle at the sight. A part of her worried that she would have to stay in these clothes—the ones he touched her in.
She wants to rip them off—she wants to rip them to pieces—but her body hurts too much. It’s all she can do to lift her arms above her head to remove the blood-flecked sweatshirt. Her ribs burn white-hot, and she takes shallow breaths until the pain ebbs.
Slowly, but surely, she removes and replaces every article of clothing, right down to a clean pair of socks, which feels better than Ellie can even say. Her clean t-shirt is huge on her, but soft in the way that it’s over twenty years old, and it’s probably been washed dozens of times.
When she spent that afternoon with Maria in Jackson, when Joel was off with Tommy making plans to pawn her off, she brought Ellie to the clothing swap off Main Street and let her pick out a few changes of clothes. She found the t-shirt in a pile of men’s stuff. It’s chocolate brown and says WYOMING in big yellow letters across the front. Maria told her it was from the university down in Laramie.
Ellie’s favorite part, though, is the outline of a cowboy on a horse, front and center on the tee. She picked it out partly because she could use it as leverage to poke fun at Joel, and partly because she kind of really wished she was a cowboy these days. Something about the Jackson air had gotten to her, making her want to ride horses and wear a Stetson.
She holds the shirt between her hands, staring at that cowboy, zeroing in on him. It tugs on something in the back corner of her heart, makes her want to smile. She doesn’t, but she wants to. Ellie finally tugs the shirt on when she shivers from the cold air. There isn’t a spare sweatshirt in her pack.
Stepping into the doorway, Ellie taps Joel softly on the shoulder. He turns around and assesses her, his eyes landing on her bare arms. His face droops, darkens, in a way that makes Ellie’s pulse spike back up. It’s like they share a heart now—he worries, she worries.
Ellie stares down at herself, and her heart jumps when she sees her arms. She wasn’t paying attention to them when she was getting dressed, but they’re littered with bruises, rings of indigo and purple that are clearly from hands holding her down. No different from the rest of the bruises covering her—all inflicted upon her by other people, one man in particular—but Joel looks paler, sicker, than before as he stares at them.
He sniffs, clears his throat.
“You ain’t got a clean sweatshirt?” he grumbles, voice both thick and soft.
Ellie hums in the negative, shaking her head. Joel nods.
“I got somethin’, hold on. Put my coat back on in the meantime.”
He turns and makes his way down the hallway without another word, Ellie hurrying to grab his coat from the bed and tug it back on, following at Joel’s heels. It still feels all kinds of wrong to be more than a couple feet apart, as if they’re tethered by an invisible thread.
Ellie watches Joel head back down the stairs, one of her hands on the banister, keeping her steady. He reaches down into his pack again (sometimes Ellie thinks it’s bottomless) and pulls out a spare flannel—his last one, probably.
“Here we go,” he says as he makes his way back up the stairs, holding it out to Ellie.
A ghost of a smile passes over her face as she reaches for the flannel. It’s thick and soft and perfect.
“Wow,” she muses, “I didn’t even have to steal it this time.”
It’s a hollow attempt at a recurring joke between them, her voice just a little too broken to make the humor land. Joel tugs her ponytail anyway, not hard enough to hurt, one corner of his mouth perking up.
His face fades back into a frown as he watches her remove his jacket and shrug the flannel on, wincing around her injuries, moving slow as molasses to avoid excess pain. Ellie watches him clench and unclench his hands, mute-Joel-speak for feeling utterly helpless.
When she hands him his coat back, he just shakes his head.
“You put it back on for now,” he says.
The sun is making its descent out of the sky, the light in the house transitioning from yellow gold to cornflower blue within minutes. It still hasn’t stopped snowing, and Ellie wonders whether it could just go on forever. For a moment, she imagines her and Joel, holed up in this house, watching themselves get buried alive. It strikes her as a comforting plan B to her plan A (plan A is moving the fuck on from here tomorrow, which she doubts Joel will agree to).
He turns to glance out the front window, eyes lingering on the fading light.
“Need to refill our canteens with snow,” he says.
Ellie nods, waiting for his departure. Joel hesitates, body turned halfway towards the door. He looks at her, indecision spread across his face.
“I’m fine,” she urges, voice a hollow rasp. She can’t quite meet his eyes, so she stares at the space between his eyebrows instead. Joel looks uncertain.
“Can see you out the window.” Ellie gestures with her head to the long twin windows on each side of the front door.
Joel finally relents, nodding. When he opens the door, he lets in a blast of freezing air, making Ellie shiver, even from the top of the stairs. She knows it’s beyond her luck for there to be a coat left somewhere in this house that she can take, but she hopes for it all the same.
Joel closed the front door when he went out, seemingly deciding that Ellie not freezing to death was more important than her newfound anxiety every time there’s so much as a wall between the two of them. The closed door does make her breath creep back up into short puffs, makes her hackles rise, but she tries to reason her way out of the spiral.
I can see him. He’s right there. I can see him; she repeats it to herself. Ellie watches him kneel down into the snow, getting the knees of his jeans soaking wet again. She can practically hear the grunts and groans slipping from his lips. It makes her feel selfish, knowing he’s pulling himself together for her while she’s incapable of doing the same for him.
Ellie’s worked her whole life to not be seen as weak. She’s always been small, always been underestimated, and it didn’t take her long to realize that if she had no bark, she sure as hell better have bite.
For the first time, she feels entirely unmoored from her identity. All the pain, all the fear, it’s twisting her up into a shadow of herself, a photocopy when the printer is running out of ink.
Joel gets put through hell and somehow comes out on the other side still taking care of her. It doesn’t make a shred of sense to Ellie, on more levels than one.
She’s sitting on the top step by the time Joel comes back in the house. She tried to stay standing, but each breath started to feel like she was lifting boulders with her lungs. It’s easiest, hurts less, to be curled in on herself, so that’s how she sits, hands cupped around her knees and chin resting on her hands. Now that most of the adrenaline has passed, Ellie feels bone-deep exhausted.
Joel must read it on her face when he comes inside, because the lines on his soften when he meets her eyes. His head and shoulders are dusted with snow, and when his shoulders relax, some of it floats down onto the floor, melting on the tile.
“C’mon, let’s find somewhere for you to sleep. It’s gettin’ dark out.” Midway up the stairs, he stops in front of her, bumping his knee softly against hers.
Ellie fists her hands in the sleeves of his flannel to haul herself to her feet. Joel cups his hands under her elbows for support. Her sight grays out at the edges for a few seconds.
“You sleep too,” she mumbles, waiting for her vision to clear. Joel just hums noncommittally.
She follows behind him as he traverses the house, searching for anything they can steal, anything they can make a bed from. In the kitchen, they actually find three small cans of mixed vegetables (it’s Ellie’s least favorite canned meal, but the sight makes her mouth fill up with saliva anyway) and a couple of kitchen rags, which Joel takes outside and packs with snow. He holds the cold bundle out to Ellie and makes her rest it on her ribs while they move around the house, her hand stuffed under her t-shirt even though it makes her shiver.
In the living room, most of the furniture has been toppled over or ripped apart, but Joel manages to tip a couch right-side up and discovers it’s not moldy or rotten. The main bedroom is completely torn apart, but there’s a linen closet in the spare—the one Ellie changed in—that still has a few blankets and bath towels left undisturbed.
Joel carries a pile back to the living room, arms held to the side so he can see where he’s going. Ellie still keeps a close distance behind him, quiet and stoic, like the stray cat that once followed her home when she snuck out of school. The whole routine of it—gathering supplies, setting up camp—calms her down.
“Think you can sleep?” Joel asks. He’s busy layering blankets onto the couch.
“Yeah. Tired.” Ellie grabs a couple of the blankets out of his hands and starts laying them on the floor, in the space in front of the couch. Some of the melting snow from her ice pack drips onto the blankets.
Joel looks down at her handiwork and shakes his head.
“I’m not sleeping, you are,” he says, voice laden with his usual matter-of-fact snark, a tone that she hasn’t heard in days. It almost makes her smile.
Ellie just shrugs.
“You’ll have a comfy place to sit.”
She knows he won’t sleep. Her real intention in laying down blankets for him is to ensure he’ll be close by while she’s sleeping.
Before Joel got stabbed, they used to roll out their sleeping bags at least a few feet away from each other, every single night. In that basement, though, Ellie slept against Joel’s heartbeat. She did it so she’d be able to hear if it stopped, but it became the thing that anchored her to the world. She doesn’t want to give it up—being near him—not now that she knows what it’s like to be apart.
“Alright,” is all Joel says in response. They stand, staring at each other for another moment before he speaks again. “Go to sleep, Ellie. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
Ellie lowers her gaze, eyes resting on their feet. Her right hand is still holding the snowpack in place on her torso, her t-shirt bunching and pooling over her forearm.
For the first time since Joel found her today, there’s nothing left to do. Nothing in the immediate present that requires her attention—no more walking to safety, dealing with injuries, rummaging for supplies, setting up camp. All that’s left is to sleep.
And that’s when her face crumples.
Joel goes on alert immediately, cupping her cheek in one hand, eyes roving over her to make sure she’s not hurt.
“What is it? What hurts?” he asks, concern like a lance through his voice. He pulls her forearm away from her ribs, taking the ice pack out of her hand, tossing it aside.
Ellie shakes her head until it hurts, a thousand breaths coming in but none of them coming out. Her lower lip is jutted out, trembling, and in a distant part of her mind, she feels like a baby for it.
It takes Joel another panicked moment to fully realize that the cause of her distress is not physical.
“Okay,” he breathes, “you’re okay, kiddo.”
He crouches slightly, trying to meet her eyes. His hands run up and down her arms soothingly. Ellie butts her head forward, leaning into Joel until he gets the hint and pulls her into his chest.
She’s trembling, sobbing to the point of near choking, her arms bundled up between their chests. Joel has a hand on the back of her head, palm heavy and comforting against her scalp. His other arm is wound around her, squeezing her tight against him. The deep pressure, though painful, helps ground her, helps bring her back into her own body.
“Baby,” Joel soothes when Ellie still won’t calm down, “you’re alright now. Ain’t nothing coming after you anymore. You’re safe.”
Pressing his cheek into the top of her head, Joel continues to shush her. Ellie unbundles her arms and reaches them around his middle, squeezing him as tight as she can manage without hurting her ribs too much.
“Safe,” she whispers into his chest. She’s not sure if it’s a confirmation or a plea.
Joel runs a hand down what remains of her ponytail and pulls back as much as he’s able while keeping his arms wrapped around her. Ellie meets his eyes, her vision still slightly blurry.
“Think we should fix your hair before you sleep? Don’t want it to get tangled again like last time,” Joel says, a soft, near-teasing smile on his face.
Ellie sniffles and thinks her eyes are smiling, even if her lips aren’t. When it first started getting cold in the months between Kansas City and Wyoming, Joel started stopping in every building they found along the road until he found appropriate outerwear for Ellie, including the grey beanie she had up until Silver Lake. He found the hat before he found her a coat, and Ellie was so cold by that point—the bone-deep kind of cold that never seems to go away—that she wore the hat for a week straight. By the time Joel noticed and made her take it off, her hair was matted to her scalp, and he spent an hour freezing his fingers off, untangling it from the root.
“That was awful,” she says, shaking her head in agreement. Her voice is wet and thick still, but lighter than it was before.
“Sit here,” Joel says softly, nodding his head toward the floor, the part she covered with a blanket for him.
When Ellie sits, she folds her legs in crisscross applesauce and feels the weight of another blanket being draped around her shoulders. Joel steps around to the front of her and crouches, pulling the sides of the faded blue blanket tighter around her shoulders.
“You got another hair tie in your backpack?” he asks.
Ellie’s hand goes to the back of her head on instinct, making sure the one in her hair right now still remains. She feels it down near the nape of her neck.
“Just thought I could do two braids instead of one,” Joel says.
“Braids?” She swipes a palm across her cheek, clearing away an errant tear streaking down her face.
Joel shrugs.
“If you want.”
Ellie waits to feel surprised that Joel knows how to braid, but the feeling never comes. Because of course he does. Because Sarah. It feels like he’s handing her something precious, like he’s cutting away a little piece of his heart for her. She finds herself nodding.
“In my backpack,” she says.
Joel nods and fetches both of their packs from the bottom of the staircase, depositing them on the floor beside the couch. He unzips her backpack like he’s going to search for the hair tie, but hesitates before handing it over to her to look through instead. The gesture stitches up one of the thousands of tiny cuts in her heart.
Ellie’s last hair tie is littered at the bottom of the backpack, making friends with the random knick-knacks she’s picked up on the road—a golden dollar coin, a colorful woven bracelet, a little cat figurine that Joel says is called ‘Hello Kitty’. She stretches her arm out toward him, hair tie in hand, and he takes it from her, moving to sit behind her on the floor. She’s still so much shorter than him, so he has plenty of leverage to work with, without having to sit on a higher plane than her.
Joel gently removes the hair tie from her hair, and she hears it snap softly as he rolls it onto his wrist with the other one. He rakes his fingers through her hair slowly, the same way he did on the road a few months ago, his hands ever-patient, ever-gentle, the way he only seems to be for her.
Her hair is not as bad now as it was then; it’s not matted, just messy. It doesn’t take long to detangle, but Ellie thinks Joel keeps combing through it anyway, as if he can somehow sense that this is the slowest her heart rate has been in days. He can’t see her face, but somehow he can tell that the gentle movement through her hair is making her eyes droop, lulling her into a state so close to sleep she can’t quite tell if she’s awake anymore.
All Ellie can focus on is the windows beside the front door, the sight of the snow falling. In the pitch black of night, the flurries look like little grey spirits, meandering down onto the ground in a sullen haze.
By the time Joel’s nearing the end of the second braid, she feels herself teetering on the edge of sleep. Forgetting that he’s still working on her hair, Ellie leans back, her cheek falling against the soft flannel of his chest. Joel doesn’t say anything, just moves his hands and the braid around to the front of her and ties it off, letting the plait fall onto her shoulder.
“Joel,” she mumbles, voice garbled from her cheek being smushed into his front. She’s not sure why she says it, thinks maybe it’s just because he’s here. She’s barely awake.
“Here,” he replies, pulling her closer, holding her tight, like he knows she’s strong enough not to break. He presses his lips to the top of her head. “I’m here.”