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The first time she feels it is after she stumbles out of Silver Lake.
She’s covered in blood, flecks on her face and she feels it on her hands and the metallic taste of it in her mouth. The numbness is the only thing that’s keeping her from scrubbing until her skin is raw, spitting up until his blood becomes hers again.
Joel being alive feels impossible, more impossible is him being on the other side of the door. Ellie feels arms around her, tugging her, and she can’t keep going. An instinctive, belligerent wave comes over her - she’s not doing this again. She is sure David has come back to haunt her even with a face mutilated into nothing but gore. It’s a man and he’s bigger than her, stronger than her but she doesn’t care, the cleaver will come down until it stops moving and past then, too. But she traded the cleaver for keys and keeps wondering if it was the right decision. She just used them to get out and the screams are stuck in her throat and she wonders if she’ll be screaming for the rest of her short life.
“Get off me!” she screams and she knows he won’t listen, knows that isn’t the fucking fun of it for him.
“It’s me.”
Masculine, muffled, it doesn’t matter - it’s a man’s arms around her and there is no love, just unadulterated fear pinning her down and she’s still always reaching for that fucking knife. She can’t breathe and it smells like smoke and it’s choking her. It doesn’t matter if she’s choking, she’s not dying like this, he won’t pin her down again.
“Get-”
“It’s me.”
He says it again and she has to be fucking crazy to think it’s Joel, even as hands come from her shoulders to her face and her hits become more feeble than menace. The hands are rough and cold and calloused and it’s Joel’s face, not David’s, looking back at her.
“Hey, look,” he says, Joel says - and she does and she folds instantaneously. “It’s me, it’s me.”
It’s Joel - the Joel who beat the man who tried to kill her into a bloody pulp after knowing her for hours, the Joel who stood watch with a rifle over their camp every night, the Joel who she last saw dying in a basement as she pressed a knife into his hands. But he’s here and he’s walking and he’s real, and the look on his face is begging her to believe it.
She’s not sure that she does.
A whimper leaves her, and she wants to explain that this isn’t - that she just isn’t like this for no reason, wants to scream what happened, but she can’t. “He -”
She can’t finish the words, can’t finish the sentence, because when she thinks of what would’ve happened if she didn’t reach for the knife when she did she wants to burn in that building. Ellie wraps her arms tightly around him instead, clinging to him like a life raft and if this were normal, if they were themselves and she wasn’t almost - and he didn’t almost -
He’s holding her and saying it’s him, that she can believe it and he’s here. He tells her it’s okay. And for a moment she can forget her hands are stained red, forget the burning building behind her, forget that she thought he was dead, and believe him. It’s the first time anyone has held her since Riley, and the first time anyone she can remember did before her.
“It’s okay. It’s okay, baby girl.”
She lets herself hold on and imagine it’s just this, that she can just rest. Then she smells the smoke, and Joel lets her go. He hands her her bag - and she didn’t even think, didn’t even realize but he knew and it’s here - and folds his coat over her and then his arm, as if she was worth sheltering. She leans against him and just lets his weight hold her up because she’s just so fucking tired.
Ellie still doesn’t feel like she can breathe.
-
The feeling doesn’t go away, not when they stop a couple of miles away. It’s slow progress - between Joel’s injury and how far Ellie feels from her own body. Joel doesn’t comment on her erratic breathing, just asks if she needs to slow down. She furiously shakes her head because she needs as much distance between her and that place as possible as if any could ever be enough. He at least seems to understand that, doesn’t press or push or ask for rest even though a day ago he couldn’t get off the floor.
Then she looks at the blood on her hands and sees Riley’s and the hyperventilating gets worse.
“Ellie,” and she can’t hear him, not really, just sees red stained palms and she’d held her after she shot and -
His hands are around her face again, head down to her eyeline even though the wound on his abdomen must hurt like a bitch when he does it. “Ellie, look at me,” he says, and she does.
“My hands,” she says, and the words are shaky. Stained red, sticky and stark and awful. Joel looks down at them and she expects him to recoil, but he doesn’t, just takes them in his.
“We can clean them up later, okay? I don’t want you to get -”
“My hands,” she says again, more insistently, and the blood transfers to his too. Ellie wants him to take all of it but he can’t, so she reaches for the snow on the ground and starts furiously scrubbing at them. Joel’s voice is drowned out by now, the hand at her elbow may as well not even be there. She takes the snow in her hands until her fingers are raw and red again but from under rather than over the skin.
“Ellie, please,” he says, and he’s taking her hands again. “Please. It’s okay.”
She’s shaking her head furiously. “It’s not. It’s not.”
And she hates the helpless look on his face, hates how even he can’t think of a fucking solution when he’s the one that’s supposed to fix everything, he’s the one that’s supposed to know what to do here. His hands feel warmer than hers now, and even though it must hurt to touch something so cold and she’s long gone numb he squeezes until the sensation comes back to her fingers.
“I’m right here,” he says. “I’ll make sure you’re okay.”
It’s a promise he can’t ever hope to keep.
-
They find a house, eventually, miles away from Silver Lake even though it can’t ever be far enough.
“They won’t find us here,” he says as soon as they get through the door, as if he knows who they are.
She looks around, wary and disbelieving. Joel walks around the house to make sure nothing will jump out at them - not Infected, not raiders, not David - and she follows him more closely than usual.
“See?” he says, voice soft. “Nothing’s here.”
But she feels like that motherfucker will always be here, whether she likes it or not. Ellie thinks of the fighting is the best part and she buckles. Joel is by her side in an instant, he was never far in the first place, and she’s just sitting on the floor staring blankly at the fucking wall because she can’t will herself to do anything else. She’s always going to be trapped here, in a burning room. Ellie feels dizzy and faint and her chest feels like it’s buried under rubble.
“Ellie, hey,” his voice is soft, his hands on her shoulders. “Hey, hey, hey - it’s just me, okay? It’s just you and me. We’ve done this for a while now, remember? I won’t let anything happen.”
But he almost died and then something almost did, he almost -
Her face stays blank.
“Ellie…”
And she should’ve never told him her name, should’ve never let the sound of his voice ring in her head no matter how different it sounds from Joel’s.
“Can you breathe for me? C’mon,” his thumb rubs her shoulder, his other hand directing one of hers to his chest. “Breathe in…”
She feels his chest fill with air, and hers does too.
“Good, good,” he praises, before, “Breathe out.”
She breathes out.
“Do it with me a few more times, okay?”
Ellie nods.
“Okay, breathe in…”
-
She falls asleep shortly after that and wakes up on fire. Ellie sits up in a flurry, determined to get a ghost off of her.
Joel is right there, he didn’t go far in the slightest, rifle next to him and sitting on the floor next to where she passed out on an old couch. “Hey,” he says, voice soft. “Hey, you’re here with me. It’s okay.”
She doesn’t know if it’ll ever be okay again, but she nods all the same with the scream stuck in her throat. It’s dark, the snow is still falling around them and she can tell from the purple light filtering in from the windows. There’s a fire in an old fireplace, and Joel is looking up at her from the floor.
“It’ll feel okay, again, someday,” he tells her, and that feels more like the truth and further from it at the same time because someday isn’t today and she’s not sure, doesn’t know how to bridge the gap there. “Right now, we’re in this house miles away. They’re dead. I took care of it, and you did too. Now we’re here and we’re going to keep going further, okay?”
She took care of it, he took care of it. David’s men were supposed to kill him. He was almost dead the last she saw him.
She wants to ask, so she does. “How did you find me?”
Joel pauses. “I asked for directions.”
What he means by that, she knows, is he took hostages for directions. The knife she gave him he used to get an upper hand, and kept the momentum going from there. They’re dead. He took care of it.
The fighting’s the best part, and David knew that because she wasn’t the first and they had children with them, and his party knew he kept her alive for some sick fucking reason. Suddenly she wants the details, wants to know they went out bloody and screaming, and -
“I couldn’t recognize his face when I was done,” she admits, and the words almost stick in her throat.
Anyone else would have flinched. He doesn’t. “You saved yourself. I’m glad.”
I wish you’d killed David, she wants to say but doesn’t. She’s not even sure if she means it, if she’d believe it by any other hand but hers. She’s not a monster, she doesn’t want to like the violence, doesn’t want to feel relief when it’s over because it’s so fucking short-lived anyway.
“I almost didn’t,” she says instead.
“You’re here and you’re alive,” he emphasizes, the flames of the fireplace only barely illuminating his face. “That’s what matters here.”
A sob builds. She swallows it. “He wasn’t going to kill me first.”
Joel stills.
Tell me how you’d kill him, she wants to say but doesn’t. Joel is a killer, and that’s the wall between her and the rest of the world, the killer who keeps saving her. The sniper in the window, the human shield between her and anyone else, the armed guard standing over her bed - he was dying in a basement and all she had was a cleaver.
“He didn’t…”
Joel can barely get the words out. Neither can she.
“I got to the knife first,” she manages.
Another beat passes, the only sound between them is the crackle of the fire.
“Good,” he says softly, as if he’s praising her ability to breathe rather than her ability to kill rapists.
It may as well all be the same.
-
She wakes up again sweating.
“Joel?”
“I’m right here,” he says instantly. Joel is still in the same spot. “I’m right here. Nothing’s gonna happen, I promise.”
Ellie shifts. “You should sleep.”
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”
“You almost were.”
Joel huffs. “Some people might say that’s too soon.”
“I think it’s too soon for someone who was about to croak to pull all-nighters,” she says. He gives her an unamused look. “Give me the gun.”
He looks between her and the rifle and shakes his head almost imperceptibly. All she hears from him is silence.
“Shit, I can take care of myself,” and it’s indignant, because she just killed a man and she should at least have this going for her, the ability to protect herself, if nothing else.
“I know you can,” he says. His voice is soft again. “That’s not what I’m worried about.”
Ellie doesn’t know what to do with that, doesn’t even know what he means by that.
-
It’s days later and she’s more quiet than not. Joel is trying. He keeps pointing out different animals like they’re at the fucking zoo or talking about shit he and Sarah used to do on snow days or trying to add more things he think she’d like to her pack. He’s treating it with levity, like a trip that’s more than just trudging to Utah in the snow to get more distance between them and a colony of cannibals. Like the thing she used to do.
Ellie feels a wall between her and the version of herself from a week ago, concrete and impassable.
But Joel is there, just gently nudging on the other side of it.
She sees footprints in the snow that aren’t theirs and she can’t breathe again. Joel is just a few steps ahead of her and he turns on a dime, crouching right in front of her.
“Ellie, hey, you’re here. You’re with me. We’re far away, I promise. I’ve got you,” and the words are a rush and she still can’t breathe, not really.
She knows it’s not just David she needs to worry about it, knows it’s just the first face in a long line of fucked up people who would do something terrible to her if they had a chance to. And that just makes her more furious, that the teacher who hurt kids and who tried to hurt her exists somewhere in someone in some fucking form and she will spend the rest of her fucking life running from it. Right now it just presses on her chest, all of the fear and anger and even Joel on his knees in front of her can’t drown it out.
“Breathe, okay?” he suggests quickly, as if she’s not already trying to. Hand back on his chest, breathing in again. “Breathe in for me, alright?”
“I feel so fucking stupid.”
“You’re not. Breathe,” Joel says, voice insistent.
Her eyes fill with frustrated tears, but she does it all the same. Eventually, her breathing gets back to normal. Joel stands up.
“We’ll go the other direction. I won’t let anything sneak up on us, alright?”
Joel gestures for her to follow him, as he’s always done. Joel has been using himself as a shield for so long she forgets when it started.
“It’s so fucking stupid,” she says with a huff. “See a footprint and I can’t even…”
Breathe. Exist. It’s all so fucking ridiculous, the person she’s turned into.
Joel shakes his head patiently. He doesn’t touch her, but he stays within a stride of her. “S’not. Happens to me, too, every now and then. You used to ask if I was dyin’,”
Ellie stops and he stops too. She thinks of outside that house in Wyoming, countless times between Kansas City and Jackson. Here she thought he was just having a fucking heart attack. She doesn't know what this is and she's too afraid to ask in the case she has to feel it for the rest of her life.
“You’re doing your best,” he says. He’s so patient lately, she doesn’t even know what to do with it. “I know.”
She wants to ask what the memory is for him that does it. Ellie swallows the thought instead. They keep going.
-
A week later, the snow melts. She lets herself be furious because it still won't leave.
It’s rage and it’s all consuming, burning from the inside out. She hasn’t let herself feel it since she had a knife in her hand, since she got bitten and had a timer she never noticed hanging over her and Riley’s head and Riley’s went off and hers didn’t. And when she’s hitting everything she can get her hands on in the house they're staying in, from the linens to the plates to the furniture, she’s hoping it’s hitting David again. However many times she’d hit him, it wasn’t enough for him to be beyond recognition, he had to be dead in her mind too.
But no matter how many times she hits him, the fucker just won’t die.
She just woke up from a nightmare and she hates that David will live forever in her dreams. He’d invaded her mind and refused to leave, refused to take no for a goddamn answer. Then it’s Joel’s hand on her shoulder, and she’s ready to swing at him too until she realizes and shame takes over.
“Don’t hurt yourself,” he says. “Okay? Let me…”
He trails off, then turns to go to another room. She huffs, embarrassed her tantrum has come to this and even more irritated that he’d just leave without explaining what the fuck he was doing. And then he comes back with a baseball bat.
She raises her eyebrows. “Seriously? You want me to play baseball, now?”
He carefully reaches for her hand, pulls out a small piece of glass on the back of it she didn’t even notice. It’s so shallow it barely bleeds. Then he just hands her the bat.
“Have at it,” he says, gesturing to an already destroyed and abandoned kitchen, “Just don’t hurt yourself.”
Joel leaves the room, leaving her to herself. She looks around it for a moment, then decides it’d be satisfying to take a baseball bat to the cabinets. There's a satisfying shatter, and she keeps going until she's exhausted and she has nowhere else to put any of it.
-
Around the Utah border, she realizes she misses herself.
The Old Ellie would have made a joke about the rock on the side of the road. The Old Ellie would be replying to Joel’s attempts at conversation with something other than a nod or an “uh huh”. The Old Ellie would be braver than she is, never stepping out too far and never wanting to take the path that seems harder. She feels like she forgot to drag her out of that burning building, neglected to save her too.
Joel looks at her like she’s still in there, like it’s just lurking underneath.
“What do you think that rock looks like?” he suggests, squinting at the sun and absentmindedly kicking it. It's the size of a fucking boulder, so it doesn't move an inch. Spring is coming the further they go south.
Ellie shrugs listlessly. She hasn’t slept more than three hours a night, can hardly will herself to eat despite the gentlest of insistences, and the only point that’s left is getting the Fireflies their cure. What happens to her doesn’t matter, she’s already long gone.
She’s not sure she’ll ever come back, not really.
-
“Anyway, the reason I’m telling you all this,” Joel says to her in Salt Lake City as she sits with him, after explaining the scar on his temple. He’s about to finish the sentence when she stops him.
“I know why you’re telling me this,” Ellie replies, and she does.
Joel didn’t want her alone with the gun the first night. She hardly eats. She gets it. It’s not intentional, it’s not as if she wants to waste away, but in her head maybe she already has. David has already killed her.
“Yeah, I reckon you do,” Joel responds softly.
He’d told her someday, and someday feels impossibly far away. But it works out eventually, one way or another, it has to.
“I guess time heals all wounds,” she surmises. The most longed after resource after the apocalypse - time. As if many of them even had much of it. The gap between her and her old self, past and future, just feels so long.
Joel just looks at her. “It wasn’t time that did it.”
Ellie looks at him like she can’t believe it, because she can’t. She’s suddenly very grateful for these stupid medical tents, glad he flinched. It only took twenty years, but she wouldn’t have had him otherwise. She wouldn’t have made it, half-alive or half-dead or not, if he wasn’t here with her. She recognizes it for what it is, an acknowledgement that maybe he couldn’t make it without her either even with the way she was right now.
She sniffs. “Well, I'm glad that... that didn't work out.”
And she’s more grateful for it, glad for the fact that Marlene handed her off to some stupid smuggler she couldn’t sneak up on with a knife, glad in the face of everything else that she still has Joel, than she’s ever been grateful for anything. Ellie wonders what life would look like, after it's over. The job will be done, and she’ll be back to her shell.
“Me too,” Joel says, like he’ll always be there to pull her back out of it.
-
For a while she’s furious with him, after she finds out the truth about what happened in Salt Lake City.
It shouldn’t be such a shock to her that the man with the bloody fist and the rifle could ruthlessly kill a hospital to save someone who wasn’t worth it, but it is. And when he tells her he’d do it all again, she wants to scream that she was already fucking done. She’s just a teenager who fucked up more times than not, and here was her chance to pay penance. Save the world, say goodbye - this was her only chance to mean something.
-
But maybe the old Ellie is still alive, after all, because she forgives him because she can’t see another way. When she wakes up every night in the winter, there’s blood on her hands and in her throat. No matter what she does, it won’t go away, and there’s only one person who can really understand that girl or the girl she was before that. A selfish part of her has always wanted to live, out of spite if nothing else.
When she's back home and wakes up screaming in the middle of the night slick with sweat and tears, he knows why.
“Breathe in.”
He’s kneeled by the bed, just like he was next to that couch in Colorado. She inhales, following his direction when he does it first.
“Good,” he says softly. “Breathe out. You’re okay, I’m right here.”
And a fucked up and selfish part of her wants to say thank you for him getting blood on his hands so she wouldn’t have to, because she’s scared of the survival instinct she has left in her. If she forgives him, maybe she can forgive herself too.
“Breathe in again,” Joel says softly, patiently.
He’d never even had to forgive her.
“Why won’t this end?" she asks, finally. “He’s been dead a year, why am I still like this?”
Joel is only faintly illuminated, it’s the middle of the night and he’s never lost patience with her even once for her nightmares. Not in Colorado, not here a year later when those ghosts should’ve long been laid to rest.
“We’ll kill him as many times as we have to,” he says, and it shouldn’t be comforting.
But it is.