Work Text:
Joel's room is quiet. It is stale. There is sun filtering in through the blinds but it does very little in the way of providing light.
Ellie looks around, sees remnants of unfinished projects. Her eyes gravitate towards a group of small, wooden figures. There are smatterings of wood shavings under the figures where they are propped up on a stack of books. Tools lay strewn over Joel's work desk, but they are kept strictly to the desk. The wood shavings litter the surface of his desk and only his desk. The rest of the room, save for the dust that has accumulated in the absence of any human life, is pristine—everything in its right place.
She takes a few steps into the room, tries her best not to let her eyes linger in any one place for too long. She's not used to being down here—the layout of the main house is familiar to her, yet labyrinthine at the same time. She hasn't been here in a while, for reasons both she and Joel find easier to shuck off.
She thinks of Joel. Joel knocking at her door. That exasperated feeling when she knows it's him and he's not going to leave and she unlatches the lock but leans against the door because she knows if she were to invite him in he'd just stay, stay for longer than she can bear to be around him without saying something she'll regret, giving him some look she'll regret, and she does all this despite the fact that, really, she'd give anything to let him in and feel right about it.
She thinks of Joel and wonders if there was a time he'd felt that way—heard the rap of her knuckles against the door, shave and a haircut, two bits, and grumbled, sighed, made his way to the door and asked who is it? even though there's no one else it could be. There's nobody else, just them.
She peers into his closet, past all of his clothes—jackets, plaid shirts, jeans, work boots—because it hurts to look at anything of his, and she watches the dust particles flitter in the sunlight, instead. The room is quiet, stagnant, absent of any part of him and yet it's overflowing with him.
He is everywhere she looks.
Against her better judgement, she allows herself a couple of steps into the closet, into his space. It feels wrong, deep down inside, because she didn't want him in her space, so why should she be allowed in his? And yet, despite how suffocating the small of the closet feels—it is not small at all; it's a walk-in, and it has a window, and she knows this because she is standing directly in front of it, her skin soaking in the sunlight—she stays, looks around, feels around for Joel.
The first thing she touches, the first thing she's touched since she's walked into the room, is one of his jackets, so big and heavy it's almost slipping off the hanger.
He'd taught her to fold.
She runs her fingers over the rough, worn fabric. He'd worn this particular jacket on one of their last real patrols together. She remembers this because he'd draped it around her shoulders when the snow forced her cheeks to flush.
She rips it off the hanger and it's in her arms in an instant, her face pressed into the fabric. It smells like him but it's not warm like him (like he is? Like he was?). She thinks of all the hand-me-downs and worn, variegated clothing she's given away and wonders if anything of Joel's will face the same fate. She wonders if she'll be walking the square and see a man in plaid that could be him but isn't, and never will be.
These clothes—this jacket, they aren't Joel, and she knows this, and she knows it well, because in all the ways they feel like Joel, there are a million indisputable reasons as to why they are not. But she closes her eyes and wraps this big thing around herself, and it feels like him. It feels like home.
His physicality lives in this fabric.
When she's sinking her arms into the sleeves and pulling it over her shoulders, she's sure she can feel Joel, embracing her, wrapping his arms around her and holding her still.
She doesn't know when, or how, but the next thing thing she knows she's on Joel's bed. She's laying there, fetal position, head on his pillow, on his side of the bed. He prefers the side closest to the door. He hadn't told her this but she knew, and she knew why.
She's in his bed, and for a second it doesn't feel so bad, because even after all the months he's been gone, there's still a dip where he had slept. She settles there, atop the blankets because she doesn't know if she can go that far, isn’t sure if she'd be able to reel herself back from the feelings it would elicit to really sleep in his bed, to stake this claim on a place that's not hers but has to be because it's no one else's.
Inhale for four seconds, hold for seven, exhale eight. That's what Gail had taught her at the hospital. After the third time, she loses track—can't concentrate over the buzzing in her head, the sound of things swimming—but she knows she's breathing, can feel a fire stoking in her chest.
She zips the jacket up as far as it can go, and jams her hands into the pockets. She stays like this until the sun goes down and the only visibility in the room comes from the streetlights outside.
There is a warmth—a warmth other than the kind that's blossoming in her chest—a real warmth, whole-body, fiery and venomous, acidic like it wants to burn through muscle and bone and skin.
This heat—this rage, this insatiable thing that threatens to crawl up and out of her throat and kill something—instead springs forth in the form of hot, angry tears. They spill down her cheeks, her chin, soaking into the fabric where she has the jacket pulled up to just below her mouth. She sniffles, chokes a little, doesn't make much sound other than that, but it wracks through her body all the same.
She wants to break something, but she knows that won't do. Every inch of this room feels suffocating, like it's closing in on her. It's like she's back in the hospital—that cold, clinical sort of barrenness that only exists on hospital cots where patients die and limbs are amputated and everything is wiped down to start all over again.
She buries her face into her arms, the tattered sleeves engulfing her small hands, and despite the ache in her ribs and the wrongness of it all, she falls asleep that way.