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“I wanna show you something,” Ellie says.
Joel steps inside Ellie’s room, taking in the fairy lights and drawings that fill the space. He built the room’s shelves and painted its four walls, but he still tries to stay out of it on principle, wanting to respect Ellie’s privacy as much as possible.
Whatever Joel can do to slow the ticking time bomb of Ellie’s trust.
Ellie plays with her fingers and tugs at her sweatshirt, classic signs of when nerves are eating at her. Joel would know those things.
Joel knows more about Ellie than she probably does herself, and he’d like to know other things, too. Things like what the swell of her breasts would feel like under his warm palms, or the kinds of noises she’d make when he angles his tongue just right inside her warm core.
When his thoughts start to wander further, Joel digs his nail into his hand and averts his gaze back to the on-edge girl in front of him.
“What is it, kiddo?”
Ellie sighs before shrugging off her sweatshirt and tossing it somewhere. “Don’t give me shit for this,” she mumbles under her breath.
Now, only in a plaid short-sleeved shirt, Ellie steps closer to Joel, holding out her arm towards him. He arches a brow, his gaze skirting down the length of it, before freezing when it lands on…
Ink?
“Ellie,” Joel murmurs, eyes flitting between the girl in front of him and her burgeoning tattoo. There’s an outline of a fern present, along with some moths. It spans the length and more of her splotchy, red chemical burn, where the scarred bite once was.
Holding onto her hand with his left one, the fingers of his right hand reverently glide up the expanse of now inked skin.
“When’d you get it, kid?” His voice comes out gruff and strained, and his eyes flit back up to her face, even as his thumb still rubs back and forth.
“A month ago,” Ellie replies, swallowing. “I just– I had to do something about it, Joel. Somebody’s gonna notice it at some point.”
“I get it,” Joel replies, squeezing her arm. “I do, Ellie. I’m glad you figured somethin’ out. It’s beautiful.”
Joel takes in the art again, tracing the intricate lines with the pad of his thumb. As he gazes at her soft skin, goosebumps start to pepper the surface.
“You gettin’ cold?”
“N-no, Joel. I’m not cold.”
Joel’s eyes fly back up at that. It’s not Ellie’s denial in itself, so much as the tone she said it in. Like there was an unsaid meaning, too.
Ellie shakes her head back and forth to emphasize her point. There’s a wildness to her eyes, and it flares up even more as her gaze lands on her swirled ink, where Joel’s thumb is still caressing the skin.
…And then, it clicks.
“Fuck," Joel hisses, stepping back away from Ellie. When he looks away from the body of the woman he desperately wants to touch, he finds himself staring at her hand-painted astronaut figure.
That damn figure that Joel painted for her, because Ellie’s not a woman, she’s a girl. A 17-year-old girl who loves space and dinosaurs and comic books. Who, despite having a body count of both infected and humans, didn’t even know what a goddamn seatbelt was.
(Even then, Ellie was trouble. She was only 14, but as she’d wordlessly peered at him with those bright eyes as he buckled her in, Joel had known he was going to an even deeper layer of hell than he’d been destined to before.)
“Hey, earth to Joel, hello?” Ellie snaps her fingers in front of his face, and Joel reluctantly turns to look at her.
“Don’t even say it,” he eventually bites out. “Please. Just blame those damn goosebumps on the cold, and then we’re just gonna move on from whatever you were gonna say there.”
“Nope.”
"Ellie–”
“Nope. I wasn’t shivering because of the cold, Joel.” Ellie moves further into Joel’s personal space, tilting her head up. “You know that. And I’ve… seen how you look at me.”
“For christ’s sake,” Joel mutters, ducking his head and shutting his eyes. “There’s no way I look at you, kid. Not like that.”
“Nah, Joel,” Ellie quietly says in reply, stepping so close to Joel that he can hear her breathing. “It’s in your touch. Your voice, too. And that guilt you always carry around.”
Joel groans, dragging a hand over his face. There’s another reason for that guilt, too, but that’s a problem for a different day.
“Ellie, don’t– please don’t do this,” Joel weakly says, before finally looking up.
She’s so goddamn close. She’s shallowly breathing with her pupils blown wide, and there’s a tiny grin creeping onto her lips, like she knows she’s won already.
And maybe she has, Joel thinks to himself.
Throwing all sense out the window, Joel cups Ellie’s jaw with one of his hands and tugs her in for a warm, wet kiss.
There’s nothing gentle about how their lips meet, but it's full of longing. His other hand wraps around her scar– no, not her scar, her tattoo, now. A reminder of how he’s kept her alive for all these years, how the choices that will inevitably lead to her losing her faith in him were worth it.
Ellie lets out a little gasp as Joel lowers his head to suckle on the soft skin of her neck, and at that noise, Joel makes another damning decision.
Before he loses all of her, he’ll take as much as he can get. He’ll breathe in her smell, swallow her moans, and bask in the wet warmth of her core surrounding him.
He’ll absorb these parts of his girl, just as he’s done with the rest of her.
Joel leads Ellie back towards the bed and lays her underneath his body. He signs his soul away to the devil with another searing kiss, the scruff of his beard brushing against her skin.
“That tickles,” Ellie whispers, grinning up at him before chasing his lips for more– and more will soon become everything, Joel knows.
He’ll let her have him.