Work Text:
Ellie is fed up with constantly having to worry about her bite showing. Dina once rolled up Ellie's sleeves for her because her hands were covered in mud and she thought Joel would have a heart attack at the action. She hates working the stables or at the gardens, mostly in direct sunlight all day, and having to wear long sleeves during it, sweating so much she nearly passed out on Tommy once. She has nightmares about someone seeing her bite and shooting her in the head. It always ends with Joel crying her name in this guttural voice that, while not real, stays with her long after she wakes up. She hates the rumors that go around school about the supposed scars she hides under them, and she hates the teachers that tell her, if she ever needs to talk to anyone, to let them know. As if.
She'd come up with the idea to tie a bandana around it and tell people it's a scar she's self conscious about, but Joel veto'd that because it could easily come off. So really, the way Ellie sees it, she either dresses like a nun for the rest of her life, or everyone needs to get really cool really quick about infected bites, or the option she chooses: getting rid of the damn thing.
It's not too hard to steal the fertilizer from the greenhouse. Bonnie is supposed to keep it locked when she's not there, but she leaves the key buried in the potted plant by the door in case Ellie has a bad day and needs to get away from everything for awhile. All she has to do is sneak herself and her backpack in, fill a small container with ammonia, and put it back where she found it. Joel and Tommy aren't getting back from patrols until later that night, so she has a few hours between dinner and then to get it done.
Sure, Joel will be pissed and that vein on his neck might actually burst this time, but he's not the one who has to live in constant fear of getting shot in the head by one of her neighbors, or her friends. That's not even mentioning what might happen to Joel, Tommy, and Maria if the town ever found out that they knew about her scar and helped her hide it. Maria could lose her position, or the council could exile all of them, but one things for sure, she wouldn't be the only one made to suffer if someone finds out about the bite.
She doesn't exactly know what ammonia can do to your skin, or if there's anything she needs besides burn cream and gauze to heal it, but she decides that's a smaller problem than essentially waiting for the day she'll be exposed. She's only gotten this far based on luck, but it's bound to happen one day, and can for any number of reasons, especially with summer coming up.
This way, she takes that fear out of the equation, takes the risk out of it for the family she loves and that has sacrificed so much for her, and she gets to wear short sleeves again. Ellie's not stupid, but she doesn't know much about chemicals, and she couldn't exactly ask specific and seemingly random questions about ammonia without raising some eyebrows. So, she sits on the rug in front of the bathtub in the bathroom next to her room, open med kit next to her, burn cream already uncapped and ready, gauze and medical tape handy.
Ellie turns on the faucet of the bathtub, questioning if she should wash off the chemical immediately after or if she needs to wait a bit for it to really sink in to the scar. Kneeling next to the running water in her favorite blue sweatpants and an oversized harley tee that she stole from Tommy's closet, Ellie stares down at the ugly, mottled scar on her arm. The worst reminder of the worst night of her life, her first kill, her best friend. Looking at the lumpy skin, punctured with teeth marks and accented with white mycelium, she knows that no matter how badly this might hurt, or how pissed Joel will be at her, it'll be worth it to get rid of it for good. She knows Joel won't see it her way, even if he sees her point about there being no better route, there's no way she doesn't get grounded for the next month at least. He's going to make her endure so many lectures after this; he, Tommy, and Maria will probably take turns.
She uncaps the green bottle of stolen ammonia, trying to make the effort not to breathe it in, knowing that, at least, isn't good for her, but that's about where her chemical knowledge ends. Despite her resoluteness about her choice, she still sits frozen for a solid few minutes, tense with the realization that this is probably going to hurt like a bitch. She counts off from five in her head, then starts over when she hesitates still, and does that a third time before muttering don't be a little bitch Williams, under her breath, which is what gets her to finally tip the bottle over her arm.
At first, she worries she stole the wrong fertilizer, unable to feel anything but a slight buzzing sensation over her skin. Then, the pain kicks in, sudden and white hot, blinding like someone's taken a hot poker to her scar, every crevice and divot burning hotter than the fires of hell. So hot that she shivers, her entire body cold with sweat as the liquid bubbles and hisses on her skin. Her arm feels like it's going to fall off, and she feels panic swell inside her as she slumps over the side of the bathtub with tears streaking down her face. She can barely twitch her fingers, it hurts so bad, and she screams out a sob, grateful that she didn't decide to do this when Joel was home. She almost throws up in the tub, and her entire body flops lamely when she tries to draw herself up to rinse off, so that she has to drag herself closer to the stream of water with her good arm.
When the water hits her arm, she does throw up in the tub reflexively, barely registering it's going to happen before it does, consumed as she is with pain, her own heartbeat thundering loud in her ears. Her scar is hidden beneath a scarlet patch covering a large part of her forearm, the water turning pink beneath it. The water adds another layer to the freezing burn, it feels like needles on the shiny, abused skin, each and every drop near excruciating. A few times, she jolts up when her head involuntarily hits the tub, going floppy on her neck, and each time she shakes herself to keep awake, distantly feeling panicked, but unable to do much about it when her body isn't following her commands.
Joel will be angry no matter what, but he'll be slightly less angry if he doesn't have to find her body unconscious in the bathroom. There's a sharp pitch ringing in her ears above the sound of her heartbeat, and her arm is starting to turn bone white in some spots beneath the pink water running off of it. Sinking her teeth into her lip to try and silence her cries, she drags her arm out of the water, dangling limp over the side of the tub and wondering faintly if her arm is going to fall off, if she left the ammonia so long that it ate right through the bone, because that's what it feels like.
She knows she needs to get it wrapped up and the burn cream on, though by now she's highly doubtful the meager tube she has is going to do an ounce of good. Mentally, she screams at herself to move, but physically, her strength feels sapped, and her vision clouds with shades of gray, multiplying and blurring so that it looks like she's peering through several foggy mirrors. Distantly, she hears a door close, and voices rumbling through the downstairs, as well as the rattle of the fridge door opening and closing.
Logically, she knows it has to be Joel and Tommy, but they shouldn't be back this early, and that's the thought that gets her up, though she moves clumsily and painfully slow even as she tries to rush, her body feels as though it's moving through wet sand. Deciding she doesn't have time to waste, Ellie tries to hastily wrap the gauze around her arm, but the faintest brush against the burn nearly has her screaming again, and that would definitely send Joel and Tommy running, so she drags herself to her feet with her arm curled to her stomach. She leans heavily against the counter as she waits for her vision to clear, rocking on her feet precariously, burning and freezing, violently nauseous as the room whorls around her.
It's only a few steps to her bedroom, she tells herself. She only has to make it to her bed, then she can pass out and Joel will only think she fell asleep early. She can deal with the burn in the morning, when she can look at it without feeling the world around her tilt viciously and losing whatever dinner might be left in her stomach. Ellie picks up her head, trying to take deep breaths around the unrelenting pain, and silently praying she's not going to have to get her arm amputated. She doesn't know if that's a thing with chemical burns, but it sure fucking feels like it, and she thinks Joel might actually not forgive her if she loses an arm. She inches her way to the bathroom door, using the counter for support, and then the doorknob, listening carefully before inching the door open.
Ellie's hand slips along the wall as she stumbles along, trying to be as quiet as possible, having to go painfully slow so that she doesn't puke on her feet. It feels like it's getting hard to breathe, but maybe that's just the nausea. It takes way longer than it should to get to her door, using the wall as leverage, and she's so close to being home free, all she has to do is make it to her bed. Ellie closes her bedroom door behind her, having to fight herself not to lie down right there, drained of energy and drenched in sweat despite the violent shivers she cannot control. There's nothing to lean on the way to her bed, it's about ten feet there, and she tries to wait for reprieve from the vertigo, or the weakness in her every limb, or the clouds in her vision, but it doesn't come.
Ellie decides that she'll push off her door and use the momentum to get her to her bed, so she gets her feet underneath her, preparing herself to move as she braces her good arm on the door. She pushes forward and feels as if she is running downhill as she moves, and her brain appears offline, because it's not until she hits the ground with a guttural screech and pain exploding like an atomic bomb, that she realizes she wasn't running at all, but falling.
Joel and Tommy take the stairs two at a time, beelining for Ellie's room, Joel with his pistol in hand, and Tommy with a kitchen knife he'd hastily grabbed after already putting away the rifle he patrols with. They burst into her bedroom to find her crumpled on the floor a few feet away from her bed, arm twisted underneath her at what looks like a painful angle, face half buried in her rug.
"Oh god," Joel chokes out, grabbing the door frame as his knees wobble beneath him.
Tommy sucks in a breath, dropping the knife on her desk and rushing to his niece's side, his brother stumbling behind him, a slur of whispered words spilling from his lips that Tommy ignores, his singular focus on her. He shakes her shoulder, trying to get a good look at her face, "Ellie? El?"
They kneel on either side of her, wordlessly helping each other maneuver her onto her back, Joel's hands going to her face, fingers running through her hair as he searches for bumps or blood. It looks like she hit her nose when she fell, a trail of blood gathering above her lip, but otherwise, nowhere else. Her skin feels unnaturally clammy underneath his fingertips, her chest rising and falling quickly, though her breaths are shallow, and her face is lined like she's in pain.
Joel pats her freckled cheek with shaky hands, "Wake up, baby, c'mon. Ellie."
"Joel, look," Tommy says, his voice is somewhere between pained and panicked.
Reluctantly, he looks away from his daughter's slack, too pale face, to where Tommy is pointing to her arm. From her wrist nearly to her elbow, Ellie's arm looks like someone skinned her with a cheese grater, a vibrant, glossy red that usually screams infection, and pools of bubbled, white skin on top of it. Joel feels like he's been gut punched, both by the extent of the injury, and the thought of her doing this to herself while he's on patrol. He doesn’t even know what she’s done, it looks like her arm is melting off. Panic like a rushing river flows through his veins, and he sees the same expression reflecting on his brother's face.
"What the fuck? What the fuck," Joel rasps, unable to think of anything else to say, his brain stuck on the images of the burn and her white face, of her crumpled form in the middle of her bedroom. "What the fuck, Ellie, open your eyes, babygirl."
Ellie's eyes don't open, and though he can see her breathing, the shallowness of it paired with the severity of her wound, doesn't help him feel any better. Tommy presses his fingers into the pulse point on her wrist, frowning deeply at the tinge of blue on her fingertips.
"She's in shock," Tommy realizes out loud, and he repeats it under his breath, trying to remember anything first aid his mind can latch onto while panicking. He looks at her face, lined with pain though it doesn't even twitch with Joel's prodding, his stomach doing somersaults. It takes Tommy several seconds of scrambling to remember a single bit of useful information before he's moving, closing his fingers into a fist and pressing his knuckles into her sternum, rubbing firmly. "Okay sweetpea, need you to wake up for us. C'mon, you can do it."
Ellie gasps awake, brown eyes blown wide and teary, coughing as she tries to reorient herself. Joel breathes out a heavy sigh of relief, slipping a hand to the back of her neck, helping hold her head up so she can catch her breath, panic written all over her confused face. "Atta girl, you're okay, just breathe, babygirl. You're okay, I gotcha."
Tommy passes a hand over the flyaway strands of Ellie's hair briefly, "I'm gonna get a doctor, don't move,” He orders, sprinting out of the door faster than Joel's ever seen him move.
Ellie coughs and cries, her mouth working but unable to form words beyond the pain that has her writhing on her carpet. Joel's eyes water as he tries to soothe her, wiping the blood under her nose with his sleeve, brushing away her tears and hushing her, eyes continually straying to the massive burn on her arm, desperate to know what happened and why.
"Ellie," He begs, feeling like he's in physical pain because of his inability to stop hers, a gaping pit in his gut where all his despair sits. "Baby, why'd you do this?"
She only moans in pain, brown eyes rolling. "Joel. Joel!"
"I'm right here," He promises, though it sounds more like a plea to his ears, the air heavy with everything he desperately wants to say. Her skin so cool to the touch it's unnerving, but she calms a little when he puts his palm over her forehead. "I'm here."
"C—Cold."
He shucks his jacket off, carefully lifting her bad arm and moving it off to the side so it doesn't touch his jacket as he lays it over her, tucking in the sides as she writhes and groans. Joel can tell by the way her eyelids grow heavier, that she's starting to fade out again, and promptly starts talking trying to keep her awake.
"Tommy stepped in a toilet," He blurts, hoping that Ellie's favorite past time of teasing her uncle will invigorate her to stay awake. She doesn't sit up eagerly or smile mischievously at him, but her head lolls toward him like she's listening. "He was balancin' on the toilet to reach a vent above it in Greg's house. Toilet seat was broken, so it was open. Apparently they'd been hearin' noises, thought an animal was livin' in there. Turns out they were right, the second he got it open, a raccoon popped out at him. He almost cracked his head on the tile flinchin' away from it, lucky I was there to spot him. Didn't stop him from steppin' directly into that toilet water." Joel finishes with a phony laugh, though he's sure it's not a great performance, but Ellie gives him the slightest twitch of a smile anyway, tears falling in shining tracks down her cheeks.
Downstairs, the door slams open, and footsteps bang up the stairs, making Joel's muscles tense instinctively, even though he knows who it is. Doctor K, or Katherine, rushes in after Tommy, a medical bag slung around her shoulder, and her hair already pulled back in a ponytail, though it looks like she might've been dragged out of bed based on her pajamas.
"What happened?" She asks, taking her stethoscope and pressing it on Ellie's chest, frowning at what she hears.
"We don't know," Joel says uneasily, feeling like the worst father in the world to have let this happen. How could he not have known? Was she really struggling that bad? Is it even possible that she didn't mean to do this? "Tommy and I heard a bang a few minutes after we got back, found her here, unconscious. I don't even know what we have in the house that could do that," He gestures to her arm.
“How are we doing, Ellie?” Katherine asks, snapping gloves over her wrists.
Ellie slightly turns toward her voice but doesn’t open her eyes when she gasps, shivering under Joel’s jacket, “Fuckin’ peachy.”
"Can you talk to me about your arm? This looks like a chemical burn, how did that happen?”
Ellie doesn’t respond, too busy moaning in pain to care, trying to turn away from the doctor, but Joel keeps her on her back, pressing on her shoulder to keep her still.
"Here," Tommy reenters the room, sounding a little winded, nobody realizing he'd left, holding a mostly empty green bottle. "Smells like the stuff we use on our plants to me, ammonia, if I had to guess. Found it next to the tub, looks like she got sick, too."
"Do you have any idea why she'd do this?" Katherine asks Joel, giving the half conscious girl a shot in her bicep, something Ellie barely reacts to, and a pain reliever she lets kick in before slathering the burn in something thick and gel like, wrapping it tightly as Ellie tries to arch away, fighting back weakly.
“I don’t— I don’t know,” Joel croaks, feeling inside out, like he doesn’t know his own kid, like he failed her again by not somehow anticipating this, “I don’t know.”
"Alright, step here, careful," Tommy guides Ellie up the stairs to her house, after two days in the clinic, spent desperately trying to convince Katherine it was an accident, though not very successfully.
"My fucking legs aren't the problem," She grumbles, picking at the thick white layers of gauze covering her arm.
Despite the fact that she nearly scared Joel into his grave, and the obnoxious hovering all three of the Millers have been doing since, she's pleased with the outcome. Disgusting as it looks, and as painful as it was, it really did work, even if none of the Millers were particularly delighted to hear that it was her plan all along.
"No, your brain is," Tommy teases, though there's an edge to it, as he deposits her on her bed, "You ever come up with a hare brained scheme like this again, you let one of us in on it so we can keep you from gettin' yourself killed next time. Better yet, don't scheme ever again. You're bad at it, and you're liable to be sued for murder if it kills my brother. I know a good lawyer, Williams, don't try me."
Ellie rolls her eyes, "Lawyers don't even exist anymore."
"Don't matter, I'll find a way. But seriously, honey," He places strong hands on her shoulders, bending so they're eye to eye, his mouth pinching, "I get why you did it, I do, but never again. Please, I like my niece to be in one piece."
"Such impossible standards."
"Us Millers are go getters," He drops two kisses on top of her head, "Get some rest, and let my brother mother hen you a bit, I know you hate it, but he needs it, so try to endure the pampering. I know it'll be hard."
"Have you been on the other end of it? It's suffocating."
Tommy snorts, "He raised me and I was about as stupid as you, so yes, often. It's love, sweetpea, let him."
Not for the first time, Ellie swallows her guilt as she nods. She knows she scared them, but she stood firm in her decision even to Joel, Tommy, and Maria's faces, once she wasn't sedated anymore and her mind was clear enough to articulate what the plan had been. Watching their faces morph from horror, anger, fear, and back as she explained it was sort of funny, if it didn't also mean they will probably never let this go or let her around anything remotely dangerous again.
There's a knock on the open door, one of the rules of her grounding for now, no locked doors, and Joel shuffles into her room, purple smudges beneath his eyes. He settles on her bed, handing her a glass of water and her painkillers, fluffing the pillows behind her and arranging the blankets needlessly. She lets him, taking her medicine and closing her eyes contentedly when he skims a hand over her forehead and hair, quietly urging her to lay down. She does, letting Joel tuck her in, careful to keep her arm outside the covers. Katherine gave her good painkillers, but the slightest touch still hurts something awful, and probably will for a while.
"You can teach me to swim now."
"What?" Joel questions.
"When my arm heals, you can teach me how to swim. I won't have to cover it anymore, so I can finally go with the other kids." She explains, feeling a bit sheepish for whatever reason. She's cautiously excited about summer, Dina told her the older teens leave the gates to swim in the lake in one of the regularly patrolled areas, and Ellie has been hoping to ask Joel to teach her so she can join them.
"Okay," He says softly, pulling his fingers through the ends of her hair in a way that always makes her sleepy. "You been thinkin' about this for a while, huh? The things you can do without the bite."
She nods, letting her eyes fall closed, "It wasn't a spur of the moment thing, I wasn't being impulsive. I wanted this. I knew I did, even when it hurt so bad I couldn't see."
"I just wish that wasn't the answer you came to."
"I know."
Joel strokes the skin between her eyebrows, "I just want you safe because I love you, sweet girl."
Ellie smiles faintly, the burning in her arm a distant sensation as compared to the lull of Joel's voice, humming a song she doesn't know the name of, callused fingertips stroking her skin until she drifts to sleep.