Chapter Text
0. Sarah
When the worst thing you can imagine happens, fear loses its grip. Since Sarah bled out in his arms, gasping, her expression pleading to help me, dad, please help me , Joel hasn’t been afraid of anything. He might experience an adrenaline rush when something would go wrong back in his old work with Tommy or when he and Tess got into a sticky situation, but true fear that runs like ice through his veins, that blooms into his chest and freezes his lungs, bringing him to his knees -- Joel’s immune to that shit now.
Because fear means you have something to lose, and Joel’s already lost everything.
When Sarah was born, placed into his arms with her huge, dark eyes, gasping and crying with the shock of entering the world, he took a deep breath in. And when he released it, he was a changed man -- a man whose purpose had shifted. She was gorgeous, angelic, and she was his . He would do anything in his power to protect her. And when her mother moved off to Seattle three years later without a second thought, Joel vowed then and there that he could be everything Sarah needed. That he would be everything she needed.
When she died, all of that purpose in him died too. All that was left was the void of grief, regret, and vengeance. It made him hollow, like a sink that had been unplugged -- anything real or tangible just flowed right through him and left, whether it be the comfort of Tess’ sleeping body nestled against him or the guilt of slitting an innocent man’s throat and watching him choke on his own blood until the light left his eyes. Nothing stayed with him, except for the emptiness.
1. Boston QZ
So the first time he felt the fear, he thought it was a fluke. It was dark, it was raining, and that fucking FEDRA officer was shining a light on him just like that police officer did that night. Tess was with him, and so was Ellie, and his body was screaming that he’d been here before. He’d slaughter an entire crew of FEDRA officers before he made the same mistake again.
Tess never said a word to him about it. She’d seen him lose it worse than that before, snap even more viciously, and she could probably guess that it had something to do with the officer that had shot Sarah. He’d told her that Sarah had been shot by a cop and nothing more -- that was all he could get out.
Ellie never said anything to him either, even though she’d been staring at him as the officer’s skull was collapsing under his knuckles. He’d expected her to be cowering, shielding her face at the violence, but she’d been looking at him head-on, an odd gleam in her eyes.
He chalked it up to some sort of PTSD shit, being in the same situation then as he was with Sarah -- a trigger-happy officer pointing his rifle at him in the dark with someone he cared about behind him. Thinking about it now, he knew it had less to do with Tess and more to do with Ellie -- Tess could handle herself. In fact, she was usually more self-sufficient than Joel himself. It was one of the things that drew him to her -- she never needed his protection, and if she never needed it, then he couldn’t fail to give it.
The fear didn’t hit again for a while, even as he did his best to shield Ellie from the clickers in the museum, even as he saw the bite mark on Tess’ shoulder and realized that he was never going to see her again.
But that was the thing with Tess. She’d wanted more from him, but he had to hold her at arm’s length. He knew he would lose her eventually, especially doing the kind of work that they did. There were moments that he missed her, but he’d been anticipating this from the start.
What he hadn’t anticipated was her dying wish to be for him to take an annoying 14 year old girl across the country, but he would honor it. He had never been able to give Tess everything she wanted, but this he could do.
2. Kansas City
The next time he felt the fear was the first time Ellie saved his life.
After Bill and Frank’s house, they’d settled with each other a bit. Ellie still grated on his nerves with her unending questions, especially those of a personal nature, but he’s learned how to dodge the questions he doesn’t want to answer, and at times he’s even grateful for her conversation because it helps pass the time. Her pun book is fucking ridiculous, and he’s had the urge to throw it out the truck window more than once, but he’s decided to let her have her fun. After all, even Joel finds it hard to stay stoic when there’s a 14-year-old kid giggling over stupid word jokes in the seat next to him.
The fear didn’t hit when he saw the raiders in the street, when he crashed Bill’s old truck into a store window, or even when he was being strangled to death with a rifle. Hell, he’d been ready to die for decades.
Instead, the fear hit when he and Ellie were crouched in an old storehouse with papered-over windows, waiting, and Ellie said: “Are you okay?”
He was so startled by the question that he fought the urge to get up and walk away, shifting awkwardly on the only box he was perched on.
She wanted to know if he was okay. If he was okay, after she had just shot someone for the first time. He might have dealt the killing blow, but Ellie had heard the guy’s name and heard the desperation in his voice when he moaned “ I can’t move my legs” and asked them to call his mother. She was there to listen to him humanize himself, and there to witness the consequences of what she’d done. What she’d done to save his sorry ass.
And he’d seen the consequences of her actions, seen her scrub at her face in that room just feet away from the dead bodies, and moved on when she’d said “I’m okay,” with a mixture of embarrassment and determination.
The coldness entered his chest and crept around his lungs, squeezing, and he fought to take a breath.
“I’m alright,” he managed to mumble out, and then he looked at her.
She was curled against the wall, knees up, looking away from him. He’d seen her sit like that a million times before, but for some reason, all he could notice this time around was how small she was, her cheeks round with childhood even despite the bare rations they’d had over the last weeks. He thinks about her little fingers wrapped around the trigger of the pistol.
And despite himself, despite the resentment and distrust he held for this fucking annoying kid and this fucking frustrating situation that ended up with Tess dead , he can’t help himself. “Are you … okay?”
“Yeah.” She answers, still not looking at him. Her answer tugs at his chest -- the way she said it so quickly, so casually, and with a sincerity that seemed both genuine and incomplete.
“The thing is…” He trails off. He’s realizing that he has to say something , because she’s a kid and she just shot someone, but he has no idea what to say.
Ice runs through his veins like a knife, and he starts talking again. “I didn’t hear that guy comin’, and . . . you shouldn’t have had to, y’know?”
Her response is again frustratingly immediate. “Well, you’re glad I did, right?”
Is he? He supposes that she did save his life, even if it’s not much worth saving. But he’s not trying to thank her, he’s not trying to praise her for what she did even if she deserves it. Instead he’s looking at her and realizing that she is a child , barely 14, even though he’s known that all along.
“You’re just a kid.” It slips out of his mouth without his permission, and once he’s started, he can’t stop. “You shouldn’t know what it means to…” he trails off again, looking for the right word. Kill? Murder? Irreparably harm? “It’s not like you killed him,” he starts again, scrambling at his own implication, “but … but shootin’, or…”
She’s looking at him with those wide eyes, her head tilted to the side as she watches him bumble his way through this. But all he can think is that she’s a kid, and even though she’s a kid who grew up in a FEDRA military school after the fucking zombie apocalypse hit, even though she’s already watched him kill someone with his bare hands and watched as the building with Tess inside exploded, he knows that she still has innocence left to lose. He knows that she’s lost even more of it today.
“I know what it’s like.” He settles on. “The first time you, uh, hurt someone. Like that.”
The words hang in the air, but only for a moment. He waits for Ellie’s breath to hitch, for her face to crumple, for her eyes to line with tears. He waits to see the pain that his incompetence has caused her.
But she just looks at him, watching him carefully.
“If you, uh. If you w--” his voice dies in his throat without his permission. He doesn’t know what he’s offering her, but he needs to give her something, something to make up for the violence he’s forced her into.
God fucking dammit, Joel. “I’m not good at this.” He exhales out, more to himself than to her.
But again, Ellie’s response is immediate. “Yeah, you really aren’t.” She says. Her normal edge of sass is there, but it’s softened a bit, and he takes that as a sign to continue.
“I mean, it was my fault. You shouldn’t have had to.” He looks at her again, meeting her gaze. “And I’m sorry.”
Admitting his guilt out loud brings him a measure of relief, even as the ice runs through his veins as he attempts to anticipate her response. He figures she’ll rip him a new one for the danger his incompetence has put them in, and he’ll deserve every word.
But instead, Ellie looks away. Her lips tremble, and he sees a flash of wetness on her cheek before she’s burying her face in her arm, wiping away tears with a ferocity that belies her embarrassment over crying in front of him.
He wants to look away, give her some semblance of privacy even though they’re trapped in this room together, but he can’t take his eyes off of her. He’s possessed with an absurd instinct to move closer to her, to put his arm around her, to tell her that it’s okay . He’s so taken aback by the pure strength of the urge that he’s frozen in place, watching her trying to scrub her emotions out of her face.
She sniffles, then takes a deep breath. He expects her to dismiss it, say that it’s nothing, act tough the way she has every single time something scary has happened to them. But she’s Ellie, and she doesn’t do any of that.
Instead, she surprises him.
“It wasn’t my first time.” she says, and looks at him. Her gaze is defiant, but there’s a vulnerability there, like she’s confessing a secret. He supposes that she is. The innocence that he thought he’d forced her to give up tonight was already long gone.
He looks at her again -- her jaw set determinedly, her shoulders square, and her eyes pink from tears. He doesn’t know what to say, but he knows what he can give her.
He stands up, takes the pistol out and offers it to her. “Show me your grip.”
3. Kansas City
The third time happens just a day later.
When he’d woken to Ellie’s voice saying his name and seen a kid -- a literal kid -- holding a gun against his head, the fear hit again. Coldness squeezing his lungs, cutting off circulation to his brain, making it hard to breathe and hard to think and here he was again, too deaf and dumb to hear danger coming . The weight of his failure piles up in his chest until he thinks he’s going to burst.
But then Henry starts to talk, and Joel clocks the guy quickly. Henry isn’t even holding the gun right, and the kid’s gun still has the safety on. Henry wants something from them and he definitely doesn’t want to hurt them -- he just wants Joel’s attention. And Joel knows what to do with that, knows how to size a man up and make a deal.
The real fear hits that night, up in the shack with the old man’s dead body bleeding out next to him, bits of his brain and skull oozing down the walls. A woman is screaming on the streets, screaming Henry’s name and talking to him like she’s some kind of fucked up Moses coming down the mountain with the 10 Commandments.
Then there’s a rumbling sound, and Joel squints, willing his vision not to fail him in the dark. And suddenly the ground erupts, disgorging runners and clickers and the biggest fucking bloater he’s ever seen. And people are screaming and shooting and the cold fear slithers down his spine. His chest contracts, and he zeroes in on one thing: Ellie.
Just minutes before, he’d asked her if she trusted him, and she’d nodded. Now she’s on the ground with monsters both human and other, and he knows he can’t get to her fast enough.
Good thing he’s one hell of a shot. He breathes in. Breathes out. Rests his finger gently on the trigger, settles into the scope, and narrows in on the car that he knows Ellie and Sam are hiding behind.
He catches a flash of her -- her green backpack with the dirty old keychain, and her brown ponytail. And then he starts shooting with a clarity that’s both familiar and foreign. He knows what it’s like to kill, to snipe out someone who has no idea where he is and couldn’t see him coming, but he’s never done it with this kind of desperation , this clenching of his chest. All he knows is the ice down his spine, the flash of Ellie’s ponytail, and his finger on the trigger.
Then she climbs into the car, and he takes a breath for a moment, willing her to remain hidden in all the chaos.
And then a fucking little girl contorts her way into the car like something straight out of a goddamn horror movie, and fuck , he’s shooting but the angle is all wrong, and then Ellie is trapped inside the car with a goddamn infected.
His breath hitches. His lips tremble. His face tingles like it’s going numb and when he tries to inhale it’s like his lungs are frozen in place and there’s no room for any air, but he keeps his eye on the scope and his finger on the trigger.
He watches for what feels like an eternity. Run, Ellie. Get out of the fucking car and run.
The door opens, then shuts, and Ellie is safely on the ground, waiting on her hands and knees. He feels like his legs might fall out from under him.
But then she’s looking up -- looking at him, and somehow he knows exactly what she wants. He wants to scream at her no, crawl under the stupid van and wait until all these motherfuckers kill each other , but Ellie is someone who still has hope. She’s looking at him and he can hear Tess in his head: Save who you can save .
So he nods at her, steels himself, and covers her as she runs towards Sam and Henry, nailing every single runner that even gets near her. He watches as she navigates the chaos, and nearly grins as she drags Sam out from under the car, wraps her arms around an infected, and stabs it right in the fucking neck. Atta girl , he thinks, and fires a shot to finish the job for her.
And then she’s herding Sam and Henry and he sees his chance -- grabs the gun and runs, only to find all three of them frozen, watching that same little girl tear Moses-lady to pieces. But Joel doesn’t have time to be shocked -- he’s too busy trying to get Ellie the fuck out of there.
Later, he and Henry sit in the motel, resting. Even after everything he’s done in his life, there are moments where he’s still surprised that he’s survived, and this is one of them. He’d never seen a bloater that big before in his life, and he’d met more than most people.
He keeps finding himself glancing back at Ellie, who’s sitting with Sam. It tugs at his heart in a weird way, to watch how kind Ellie is to Sam. How she can make life fun for him again, and have a little fun herself. He reminds himself constantly that Ellie is just a kid, but this time with Sam is the first time he’s ever really seen her act like one.
She’s just reading him that stupid fucking comic, and he’s noticed that he keeps looking back at her, scanning over her body. He knows she’s not injured beyond scrapes and bruises, but he can’t help himself. It irritates him, until he realizes that he’s intent on her face, her eyes, her expression. He’s on the lookout for tears.
And what the fuck is he supposed to do with that? Why the fuck is he even doing it? He already knows the facts -- Ellie’s alive, the deal is still on, and they’re on their way to Tommy. That’s what matters.
He huffs and shifts his chair slightly, turning his body more squarely away from Ellie and Sam.
In the morning, he wakes with a new confidence. With Henry and Sam coming with them, they’ll all be able to look out for each other more. Sleep more with more people to take watch. Ellie can spend time talking to Sam and not to Joel, and she can learn to rely on Henry. If something goes wrong, Henry will be there to help, even if he’s never shot a gun in his fucking life.
Joel sighs, his chest easing a little.
Then there’s a thump from the bedroom, and Ellie shrieks. He leaps to his feet, but the door has already opened and Ellie and Sam are on the floor. She’s screaming, and Sam is making this horrible screeching noise, and he’s on top of her.
He’s fucking infected.
Joel lunges for the gun, which is right where he and Henry had agreed to place it between them last night, at arm’s length for either of them. But Henry is younger and faster and has better fucking knees, and he gets the gun first.
Ellie screams , ragged and desperate. He’s never heard her make a sound like that before and it’s making his ears ring and his heart pound, and that icy chill is slithering down his body, settling in his gut. He lunges for her, desperate to shove Sam off her and plant himself between them.
And then Henry fucking shoots at him.
He snarls at Henry, a nearly animal sound ripping out of him, and Ellie’s still half-screaming, half-sobbing on the ground. He’s digging for something, anything to say to make this situation better, but then Henry swings his arm around and fires.
Joel nearly chokes as blood splatters on the wall, paralyzed as he tries to see where the fucking bullet landed. Then Ellie shoves Sam’s lifeless body off of her, and he exhales painfully, his shutting in relief.
But they snap right back open again, because this is the moment that Joel realizes this is about to be a tragedy. He knows because this is his story, too, and he tried to play out the ending dutifully. He’s spent many, many nights over the years wishing that he had.
Ellie turns around to look at him, and he forgets about Henry and about that damned scar on the side of his head, zeroing in on her instead. She’s still gasping and there are scratches on her neck from Sam and her eyes are glittering.
“Ellie.” He breathes out. “Are you okay?” His mind is racing. If Sam bit Ellie, she’ll probably be okay, but what if she’s been injured otherwise? What if the bullet hit her too? She’s just blinking at him, trembling, and he moves towards her without thinking.
And then Henry is pointing the gun at him , but all Joel can think about is Ellie. He knows how this story ends, and he can’t blame Henry. But he doesn’t want Ellie to see it, wants desperately and illogically to save her from yet another trauma.
But he’s helpless. And Henry doesn’t flinch the way Joel did. Ellie lets out this terrible little scream as Henry’s blood spreads over the floor, and they’re both frozen. He takes a breath, and the metallic smell of blood brings him back to his senses.
He walks to Ellie slowly, and she watches him with eyes overflowing. Her lips are trembling, and he’s overwhelmed with the urge to just pick her up and run out of this place with her, to get them as far away as possible and just pray that Ellie forgets what she just saw.
But Ellie is looking at him, haunted. So he approaches her, gently pulls her off the floor, and guides her out of the motel. They round the corner and settle between a grove of trees and the side of the building.
He places his hands on her shoulders, turns her to face him. She looks at him steadily, her breathing slow and intentional. But her lips are still trembling, tears are still wet on her face, and she’s tilting up her chin to look at him and trying to be strong, and he’s once again struck by how little she is, how young.
His throat tightens up, and he forces himself to swallow.
“Are you hurt?” It comes out gruff.
She takes another deep breath and then shakes her head.
They bury Henry and Sam. He’s not really sure why, because it doesn’t make sense. Burying bodies is a waste of time and energy. But Ellie has withdrawn into herself, and he knows that Sam had been a friend to her. He hopes that maybe this can give her some peace.
She leaves Sam’s writing board on his grave, and he can’t help but notice what she’d written on it.
I’m sorry.
As he leads her away, he ruminates about what she might mean, what she might feel she needs to apologize for. He’s been traveling with Ellie for a while now, and he’s settled into the cadence of her chatter and questions and sarcastic comments, but she has these moments of levity that remind him he doesn’t really know much about her at all. Doesn’t know how a 14-year-old FEDRA military school kid ends up getting infected at fucking mall and falls into the arms of the Fireflies. He knows that’s she’s hurt someone, badly, but doesn’t know who or why. He knows that she feels she failed Sam.
And that’s what makes the coldness in his chest compress into a heaviness that he can’t seem to shake. She’s 14, she’s a kid, but he sees the guilt that she’s carrying with her and he knows it intimately. He’s been carrying around guilt like this for decades, and he knows that he’s crumbled under it.
And then he watches her walk next to him and sees how small she is, how narrow her shoulders are, and grieves for the extra weight that his incompetence has loaded onto them. After a while, she perks back up, whipping out her stupid pun book and asking questions about anything and everything again.
But he notices that the dark circles under her eyes are only getting darker. The pressure on his chest isn’t lightening with time, it’s getting heavier, and his heart pounds when he looks at her. That’s when the nightmares start, the dreams that have him waking, paralyzed, with tears on his face. He can never remember what they’re about -- all he can remember is a pair of brown eyes gazing up at him, begging him for help.
4. Nebraska
The pressure on his chest has settled in, never letting him breathe deeply. He won’t sleep, he can’t, because he’s slept through his precautions before and woken up to a gun pointed at Ellie’s face. Even worse, winter is coming, which means that keeping Ellie alive is about to become a lot harder than dodging bullets and infected. Nebraska can be a hellscape in the winter, cold and bleak with shelter and game few and far between.
So when the old couple in the shack tell him that the safest way to go west was to go east, that bodies get left behind, he knows that he needs to be more vigilant than ever. Ellie’s learned how to run and hide from a clicker, and he knows she doesn’t shy from violence.
But human monsters are a different breed, and he knows that anyone who might come across them might want to hurt Ellie. Or worse, keep Ellie.
It’s thoughts like this that clench around his chest like iron, making his vision tilt and his head spin. He finds himself propped against the fence outside the old couple’s cabin for support, gasping for air that his lungs just don’t have room for. He blinks hard, and vaguely hears Ellie calling his name, asking if he’s okay. He mumbles out something, not wanting her to get to close to him, because his vision is spinning and he has no idea what the fuck is wrong with him.
Her voice is still in his head, but he’s not taking in her words -- they’re warping around his brain, his ears ringing. That is, until she says: “... just a reminder that if you’re dead, I’m fucked .”
That comes through clear as day, and suddenly his head is clear. If I die, she’s fucked . The words drip down into him, settling into his gut, adding onto the weight that’s been pressing on him for weeks now.
“I said I’m fine.” He snaps at her, more out of embarrassment than anything.
When Tommy came back from Desert Storm and started sleeping on Joel’s pull-out couch, he had a couple episodes like these. Joel remembers waking to the sound of ragged gasping and running to Sarah’s room, thinking she was sick or having a nightmare. But all too often did he find Sarah fast asleep, curled up with her hands folded under her cheek like an angel, and then realize that the gasping was coming from downstairs, from his brother.
And he remembers how helpless he felt, how changed Tommy had been especially in those first six months after he returned, and how the only thing he could do was just sit with his brother, just sit with him and put his hand on his shoulder and wait until Tommy’s breathing slowed.
A fucking panic attack. But for what? An old couple that didn’t know shit about shit?
Joel was losing it. But Ellie was still looking at him, her brows furrowed in a rare display of genuine concern, no sarcasm to be found. “It’s just -- the cold air, all of the sudden.” He gasps out, deliberately slowing his breaths and still holding onto the fence post for support.
Ellie, to her credit, doesn’t push him even though she clearly thinks he’s full of shit, just starts walking and changes the subject.
Just the cold air, he thinks, and wills it to be true, because Tommy is relying on him and Ellie is relying on him, and he can’t fail. He takes a deep breath, his heartbeat finally slowing, and follows after Ellie.
That night, around the fire, they chat. It’s not like they haven’t chatted before -- Ellie chats endlessly, a fact that grated on his nerves for weeks. But somehow, Joel’s come to find it almost comforting.
Ellie is curious and bright, and her cheerful demeanor returned about a week after they left Kansas City. He doesn’t know how she does it. He saw her face after Henry committed suicide, after they buried both their bodies, and he felt the heaviness of her grief in the silence that followed. But Ellie’s questions are back with a vengeance, and Joel’s grown to enjoy answering them. Somehow, talking to Ellie has become almost natural.
They sit around the fire and he shares a sip of his whiskey with her, raising a brow when she says it’s “still” gross but declining to rise to the bait. He enjoys the burn of the alcohol as it travels down to his stomach, inhales the scent of campfire smoke, and looks to the sky.
Then Ellie announces, “So, I’ve been thinking,” and he reverts his gaze to her. He can see that her cheeks are pink with cold even in the dim light of the fire, and has a bizarre urge to tell her to scoot closer.
He’s not fucking going to though, and discards the thought immediately. They had a fire, and the kid was fine.
“Let’s say we find the Fireflies, it all works, they draw my blood and put it through some of their fancy machines and make a cure.” She pauses, and looks at him.
He furrows his brow, not sure where she’s going with this. “Okay.”
“Then what?” She stares at him expectantly. “Like, what do we do?”
“Oh, it’s ‘we?’” The words come out without thinking, but he doesn’t take them back. It was never part of the plan for them to be a “we” beyond getting Ellie to the Fireflies. Hell, it was never supposed to be a “we” beyond getting her to the old State House outside of Boston, and that was 100,000 miles ago.
Ellie looks sideways, slightly abashed but not enough to quash her curiosity. “Okay, fine, whatever. You. You can do anything you want. Where are you going? What are you doing?”
He processes her question, and then realizes with a prickle of discomfort that he doesn’t have an answer for her the way he usually does, when she asks things like “why do some trees lose their leaves in the winter and others don’t?” or “how do you know you’ll find Tommy?”
“It’s never been an option.” He tells her, his voice gruff. And it’s true. Since the moment his baby girl died in his arms, he’s never thought about a big-picture goal. He’s been too busy trying to put one foot in front of the other every single day since then, and that kind of effort doesn’t leave any energy for dreaming.
“Maybe… an old farmhouse, with some land.” He thinks of how self-sufficient Frank and Bill had been. Even though they didn’t have everything they had needed, and he himself had made that point to Bill, he can’t honestly say that he didn’t envy their independence. In the QZ, everything had a price, whether it be labor or otherwise.
Ellie looks up at the sky and sighs. The fire illuminates her face, and he’s struck for a moment by a sudden memory of camping in the middle of nowhere with Sarah and Tommy, looking at the sky as they taught her about the constellations and made up increasingly ridiculous stories behind their names. Sarah’s profile had looked just like Ellie’s -- young, and wondering.
The thought stabs like a knife. He takes another sip.
“And what about you?” He finds himself asking. “What will you do?” He’s doing it to fill the silence, to be polite.
“It’s probably because I grew up in the QZ,” she says, her voice a bit softer than normal, “behind you, there’s ocean, and in front of you, there’s a wall. Nowhere else to look but up.” Despite himself, he finds himself looking up at the stars too, curiosity piqued by the wistfulness in her voice.
She tells him a bit about her love of space, and without even knowing, he easily guesses her favorite astronaut, because he and Sarah always thought space exploration was pretty cool, and of course Sally Fuckin’ Ride is Ellie’s favorite astronaut, because it’s obvious.
He’s bemused by her enthusiasm despite knowing that there’s not going to be any more space exploration in his lifetime, and probably not in Ellie’s either. But he can’t bring himself to say so, so he closes his eyes instead until Ellie says, “It’ll work, right?’
He opens them and finds Ellie staring at him again, biting her lip. Something about the tone of her voice, her expression, has him sitting up, leaning towards her.
“The vaccine?” She elaborates.
He considers her for a moment, because the truth is he has no fucking idea. Strangely, ridiculously, the all-too-familiar ice starts trickling down his spine. “It’s a bit late to start wondering.”
She looks at her lap. “I tried. With Sam.”
“Tried what?”
“I knew he was infected.” She admits, her voice quiet. “I rubbed some of my blood in his bite.”
He opens his mouth to chastise her, to tell her that she could have infected herself doing that, but she beats him to the punch. “I know, I know, it was stupid. But I…” she trails off, looking down. “I wanted to save him.” She admits.
He remembers Ellie and Sam giggling in the tunnels under Kansas City, playing soccer and reading comics and just being kids. He remembers Sam’s board, the one Ellie left on his grave. I’m sorry.
His chest contracts.
“It’s a lot more complicated than that, I reckon.” He says softly. “Marlene, she’s a lot of things, but she’s no fool. If she says they can do it … they can do it.” He’s not sure why he’s saying this. Although he does know Marlene is smart, he also knows that by the time he and Ellie track down this Firefly lab, everyone who knows anything about a cure could be dead, or the machines could be gone. In this world, anything and everything can change in a second.
Ellie looks at him and nods. “Do you want first watch or second?”
Her face is still somber, unfamiliar traces of worry and doubt around her brows, her mouth. The weight that has seemed to take up permanent residence inside his chest becomes heavier. “I’ll take both.” He says. “Get some sleep. Dream of sheep ranches … on the moon.”
She gets up and grabs her sleeping bag. “I will.” There’s a lightness in her voice that wasn’t there moments ago, and he feels sure of his decision, confident that it’ll be easy to take watch until the sun rises. After all, he’s been doing it for weeks now.
Of course, he’s fucking wrong.
He wakes in a panic, heart pounding and a desperate cry locked and loaded in his throat, ready to be unleashed. He rolls over and finds Ellie standing at the mouth of the alcove they’ve settled in, calm as a cucumber, holding the rifle that’s as almost as big as her.
“Still mumbling in your sleep.” She says to him. He blinks at her, trying to breathe around the metal weight that’s settled in his chest permanently.
“I woke up early. You were passed out, so I took second watch.” She explains. Her voice is easy, like she’s explaining that the sky is blue, and it enrages Joel.
“You gotta wake me if that happens. You can’t do stuff like this.” He grits out, his fists clenching by his sides.
“But I can. ‘Cause I just did.”
He shakes his head. “I’m responsible for you.” He says, and the words fall off his lips and clank to the ground, heavy and sharp.
But Ellie shrugs them off like dandelion seeds. “Then don’t fall asleep.” She cocks her head at him. “I was quiet, I checked my six, I looked for tracks, I found the high ground, and I kept watch. Like you taught me to.”
She’s looking at him expectantly again, and he realizes that she’s waiting for him to praise her. But how can he be proud of her for taking on the burden that is his to carry? How can he congratulate her for taking care of him, when it’s supposed to be the other way around? How can she even seek his approval when he’s such a fucking wreck that he can’t even stay up a few hours to make sure she sleeps safely?
The rage is boiling in his stomach, but his lungs are filled with ice. He struggles to take a breath between the blinding rage and the paralyzing fear. He wills himself to contain his emotion, keep it away from Ellie, who has done nothing wrong. “You wake me up next time.” He says, and she agrees. They both know she doesn’t mean it.
As they set off again, he can feel his chest getting tight, his lungs shrinking inside his body. He’s in a mood, in a funk, and Ellie seems to realize that for once, tactfully keeping to herself. He just can’t believe that he fucking fell asleep. After everything he and Ellie have been through, he has to be better. He needs to be. Ellie is his responsibility.
He can hear Ellie’s footsteps behind him, crunching in the freshly fallen snow, and the sound grounds him. Last night was the last mistake. He’ll do better.
He has to, because he can’t think about what will happen if he fails again.