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When Ellie realizes the hands cupping her face belong to Joel, when she realizes he’s fucking alive and here and holding her, when she picks out baby girl through the rushing in her ears, when Ellie realizes she’s safe, she shuts down.
It’s sudden. She’s everywhere, she’s everything, she’s scared and angry and desperate and she just doesn’t want anyone to hurt her anymore—has to keep them all off of her—and then Joel is here, and everything is gone. It’s all blissfully gone.
She doesn’t think about David: he doesn’t exist, anymore, in her thoughts. He doesn’t exist, and neither does Riley, or the bloodstains on her clothes, or the wound on Joel’s side. It’s all gone; it’s all hidden behind thick layers of fog that Ellie doesn’t particularly want to squint through anyway.
She’s not sure what does still exist. Maybe the coat wrapped around her shoulders, maybe Joel’s steady hands guiding her, maybe the snowy ground in front of her as she walks. Only maybe, because it’s hard to keep her grip on the coat, and she thinks Joel might be saying things she doesn’t understand, and she keeps stumbling over every little rock and stick and dip in the dirt.
She decides she feels floaty—that’s what it’s called now. Not quite here, not quite anywhere, sort of transparent, like a ghost. Ghosts are floaty; Ellie is floaty.
She decides she does not want to stop being floaty. She decides she would like to keep the fog forever, if possible. The guilt curled up behind her bruised ribcage twitches at that thought—at making Joel take care of her like that, at the fact that she’s doing it right now—but it’s easier to manage the uncomfortable pressure when she can barely feel her body anyway.
Too floaty, she thinks. Nice try.
She thinks they walk for a very long time. She thinks, because she’s not sure she can make sense of time right now, so maybe it’s only a little bit. She decides Joel can figure it out. It doesn’t really matter anyway: nothing does, as long as her brain gets to stay all blurry and calm.
At some point, they’re in a little house instead of the snow. At some point, she’s looking at her hands in her lap instead of the ground in front of her. At some point, Joel’s steady touch is gone.
Ellie thinks about being scared, but she decides Joel would never leave her, so it is okay. She decides he’s somewhere close, watching over her. No need to check; she trusts him.
It’s not that she really stops being floaty—more like she drifts a little towards the ground. Enough to hear Joel’s steady voice from across the room, enough for the guilt to burrow deeper into her chest, enough to move her eyes, just a bit, to look at him.
He’s beside her before she can register him getting up from in front of the fire. There’s a fire, and Ellie decides she doesn’t like that, but she’s not sure how to communicate such a thing so she just looks back at Joel as he sinks down in front of the couch that she now realizes she’s sitting on.
He must have said something, because he’s looking at her like he wants her to respond. He looks really really sad, really scared, and it makes more emotion tighten in her chest than has managed to wriggle through the fog so far. Ellie does not like it. Doesn’t want to make him look like this.
She tries to make a sound, just a little one, in her throat—wants him to know she’s trying, at least, even if she’s all broken. Wants him to be proud of her, wants to make him laugh and smile and call her baby girl again.
He doesn’t do any of those things, but she thinks his shoulders maybe get a bit less tense, and she decides she will take that for now.
His hands move all slow to her face, and he cups her cheeks just like he had before. Ellie wants to sink into them, wants to close her eyes, maybe, but he’s tilting her head uncomfortably and peering at her pupils. She wants to tell him it is very rude, but before she can manage to his hands drop and he’s looking like he’s going to say something and she very much wants to understand.
“We walked here,” he tells her. His voice is all soft and gentle, and Ellie decides it’s a very good voice, and maybe worth being just a little bit close to the ground so she gets to hear it. “You remember that?”
Ellie does remember, she thinks, though when she tries to focus on it it sort of dissolves. She endeavors to say this, but then she’s not really sure which words to use, and she thinks she ends up just mixing up some sounds that kind of seem like sentences.
Joel’s face drops a bit, and she really really doesn’t want to disappoint him—really wants to make him be all soft again.
“S’ hazy,” she manages, because hazy is a good word—it doesn’t require as much explanation as floaty. If she said she was floaty she’d have to explain about ghosts, and she doesn’t know if he would really get it, and it would be a whole mess, probably. So it’s hazy.
His face breaks, and she realizes it’s relief painting his features. She’d be happier about that if it didn’t really show how scared he was before, while she’s been all floaty and not scared at all.
He says something about how that’s okay, and then he asks her if she knows who he is, which is a bit of a confounding question: if she didn’t know who he was, she would be scared. She’s only able to be floaty because he’s Joel—it’s too hard to explain this, so she just nods and says his name.
All of this talking is making her drift closer and closer to the ground; she can almost feel her body, now. She looks down at her hands, in order to confirm their belonging to her, and that’s when she registers the blood.
And suddenly it’s all back, all at once. All the fog is whooshed away. She’s not floating anymore, she’s on the floor, and David is there, and he’s on her then and he’s on her now, all staining her hands.
She needs to rip off her skin. That’s the only way. She’s trying to, albeit fruitlessly, when Joel’s stronger hands grip hers. She doesn’t thrash—doesn’t have it in her to after all the thrashing she’s done today—and anyway his eyes are so wide and desperate and she doesn’t want to make him look like that.
So she just collapses, like all her bones turned into jelly. She distantly realizes she’s sobbing. She tries to tell Joel she needs to get it off, tries to string together sounds that make words that make sense because if she stays coated in him any longer she thinks she’s going to stop being Ellie and start being some sort of creature.
He gets it. Of course he gets it, he always does, somehow.
He doesn’t look away from her for a second while he retrieves a thermos of water from beside the fire—like if he looks away, something bad will happen. She supposes he did look away and something bad did happen, so it makes sense.
“Here we go,” he murmurs as he dips a rag into the water and starts to wipe the blood away.
The fabric comes off so red. Ellie closes her eyes before it suffocates her. She reminds Joel not to miss any.
She drifts a bit while he does it: not properly, like before, but enough to stay still. Enough where David exists but he is more like a story someone else told her. Like something that happened to old Ellie, and now old Ellie is somewhere else and Ellie-Ellie just has the notes she left.
At some point Joel asks if she’d like him to clean her face too, and Ellie’s stomach twists all over all at once because she hadn’t really thought about it being on her face even though it makes sense. She nods.
Her face hurts a lot more than her hands. She wishes she was more floaty because every touch makes her want to shrink back in pain, and she knows doing that will make Joel’s eyes all squinty like they get whenever she gets injured. She tries to focus on not doing that. It is good to have something to focus on.
“You bit someone,” Joel remarks quietly.
Ellie, very pointedly not going to the dangerously-un-foggy places, does not appreciate this. She does not appreciate how it plops her right down in the moment: the bitter saltiness of his blood, the shiny silver blade of the cleaver gripped in his hand.
Just notes, she reminds herself. Didn’t happen to her. Just cursive in a diary like that one she’d found in the room at Jackson—maybe a bit more morbid, but still just words.
She hums, which means yes. Yes, she bit someone, or at least old Ellie did.
“They were gonna eat me,” she mumbles, before she decides to say it. They were. Or at first, they were. It’s all a bit confusing; old Ellie would probably be able to explain.
“Seems like you were too damn fast,” he says.
But was she? They didn’t not-eat-her because she was fast, really, did they? More because he changed his mind. She supposes she was fast and then he changed his mind, so maybe it counts. She hums again; this time it means maybe.
The thing is that she’d really rather stop reading old Ellie’s diary now. She’d really rather put all of its contents very safely back in the fog, instead of them all pouring into her all at once.
She wishes old Ellie gave Joel the diary instead. She thinks he would know more what to do with it.
“I told him I was infected,” she tells him, because it is a fact that she doesn’t want to have to herself anymore.
“Smart girl.”
“I told him my name. I can’t remember why.”
She can’t. All she can remember is how he stretched it out, all sing-song like they were playing hide and seek. Ell–lie.
It doesn’t sound like her name anymore.
She welcomes the fog as it drapes all over everything again. She decides she much prefers floaty-Ellie to the other versions.
She wonders if this is what drugs are supposed to do. It would explain a lot—would explain why people are willing to do such crazy shit for them. She wonders if Joel has ever done drugs, and then she entertains herself imagining him all loopy.
She wonders why everyone isn’t just floaty all the time. Why anyone would choose reality over this.
This time she doesn’t get to drift gradually down like before. This time she is floaty one moment, all safe and okay, and then the next she can hear the wind outside and the fire crackling and she can feel her socks and the squishy couch and the coat around her shoulders and she looks up to see Joel right in front of her, searching her face.
“Anything else hurt?” he asks her carefully, like she hasn’t just come crashing down in a blaze of fear and confusion.
The answer is fucking everything, everything hurts, and she can feel all of it and she knows that’s not how diaries work, but she doesn’t know how to say any of that so instead she just says his name, like somehow he’ll make it better.
“M’ right here, Ellie,” he assures her. He’s right here, and a day ago she would’ve done anything for him to say that, and now it’s not enough to keep her heart from pounding against her chest like her ribs are a big mesh cage.
“Fuck,” she whispers. “I don’t—,” I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what to do. “Joel.”
“Everything’s alright,” Joel says, and it’s not, nothing is, and she doesn’t think he thinks it is, really. “I’m not gonna let anything hurt you no more.”
She wants to tell him that David is in her brain, wants to beg him to somehow find a way to protect her from that, but she knows that’s not what he means. And she can already see the guilt so heavily weighing down his shoulders—which isn’t right because all he’s ever done is try to protect her and it’s not his fault he got fucking stabbed—and she doesn’t want to make it worse.
David is in her brain. He’s everywhere. Fuck.
She’s ripping off her sweater before she can think about it: it’s splattered in him, in the blood that sprayed from his chest at some point between the second and sixth time she swung that fucking cleaver.
She tries to throw it, tries to get it as far away from herself as possible, but her arms are weak and shaking and it ends up falling on the ground by Joel’s feet. She looks up at him, pleading for him to get it away.
He jolts into action after a moment, but she sees the dark expression on his face before he turns away to bring the sweater to the door.
She looks down.
It doesn’t really look like skin, is her first idle thought.
Wait until you see the other guy, is her second, and then she thinks she might pass out.
It’s all purples and blues: she thinks it’ll probably adopt the familiar sickly yellow as it heals, but for now it’s a shockingly dark mural of injury across her skin. She wonders where most of it comes from. The fall? Struggling against them in the cage? She knows the darkest mark right on the side of her stomach is from David’s boot.
She manages the few steps to retrieve her backpack, driven by fear and adrenaline and rapidly mounting pain. She decides she’ll apologize very profusely for being a dick to Maria if she survives long enough to see her again, because there’s a spare shirt in the bottom of her bag. She pulls it over her purpling bruises just as Joel returns, bloody sweater mercifully nowhere to be found.
“Ellie,” he says, like he’s about to confront her about eating her vegetables.
She knows he wants to check her for injuries. He’s always so careful about it—always telling her to take stock, pay attention, an annoyance now can kill you later—but she can’t. Not right now.
“Don’t,” she says resolutely, and she’s not sure whether it’s don’t ask to check my injuries or don’t ask about my injuries at all. “Don’t.”
He looks at her. She looks back, curls her arms protectively around her shirt even though she knows he’d never force her to take it off. She doesn’t think he notices it. He’s distracted, maybe wondering what the fuck happened, which would be reasonable.
He sighs. “Tomorrow. But I have to look them over, alright? Don’t want you puncturing a lung or somethin’.”
Ellie’s already swinging her backpack onto the couch so that she can have it close while she shrinks into the cushions. She pulls Joel’s coat back over her, and it’s very comforting, she decides, and she doesn’t particularly want to ever give it back.
When she was little the dorm leaders told all the FEDRA kids stories about rats that scurry around the hallways at night waiting to eat little kids’ toes. It was meant to keep them from sneaking around in the dark, but Ellie got it in her head that as long as she wore her special pair of dinosaur socks, they couldn’t get her.
She thinks Joel’s coat is a bit like dinosaur socks. She thinks maybe as long as she keeps it wrapped around her no one can hurt her anymore.
Joel is still standing in front of her, looking at her but not really. She doesn’t like it. Doesn’t like the haunted look on his face, doesn’t like that she’s making him upset, even indirectly.
“Joel,” she prompts, and his eyes focus immediately.
He kneels down in front of her, all creased brows and careful movements. “What do you need? What can I do?”
She risks her hand leaving the safety of the coat to tug on Joel’s sleeve and tilts her head to the spot beside her. She doesn’t really care to be embarrassed anymore—if she had to stitch Joel’s fucking skin together, they’ve surely reached the cuddling stage.
He’s very warm, and she burrows under his arm immediately, pressing her ear against his chest. She thinks she can hear his heartbeat. It’s a very comforting thought.
She fell asleep listening to his heartbeat almost every day in that basement. Her paltry assurance that he was still alive.
“Don’t move,” she mumbles. “Don’t fall asleep.”
She feels bad asking more of him, but she needs to be floaty again. Needs to stop thinking. She hasn’t slept in a long time—she’s been unconscious, but she doesn’t think it counts when it’s ground-induced—and the only chance she has is if she can manage to take comfort in the fog.
“I won’t,” he promises, and she doesn’t doubt him for a second. It’s weird: doubting people is basically her day job, and she doesn’t even press him to make sure.
She just hums, and curls closer, and lets floaty-Ellie deal with the task of falling asleep.
In her nightmare, the cleaver isn’t enough. In her nightmare, his mutilated not-corpse just gets back on its feet. In her nightmare, the flesh that used to be his face gets closer and closer no matter how much she sinks the metal into his skin. Ell-lie.
And then she’s somewhere else; she doesn’t know where but she’s screaming and she can feel him touching her. She frantically pushes herself away, desperately trying to keep her balance as she stands up because if she falls it’ll be too fucking late.
She turns to check—to look for a sickening smirk or a gaping wound where one should be—but it’s not David.
Her legs threaten to buckle. It’s not David. It’s just Joel.
She still flinches back when he starts to stand up, because she doesn’t really know what’s real and she’s scared and she doesn’t want anyone to hurt her anymore.
He sits back down. Whispers to her. “Ellie.” Not Ell-lie. Just Ellie. “It’s me. You’re alright. You’re safe.”
She sinks to the ground.
She needs Joel to know David’s coming after her, needs him to know how his face is all messed up, how she’s the one who did it, about the cage and the cleaver and the intention in his voice when he said “I’ve decided you do need a father.”
She needs him to fucking know because if he doesn’t she’s the only one who does. If he doesn’t it means David is her secret, and that makes him too important, too much to carry.
She needs him to know because she thinks she might be crazy. Crazy, or a monster, or both. She needs him to know because she needs him to make David go away, she needs him to reach into her brain and scoop out everything he fucking did.
She needs him to know because the most selfish part of her just wants him to absolve her of this.
She tries to tell him, tries to explain it all at the same time, but something in her is broken and it’s all just sounds. She knows it’s all just sounds, can hear them as they escape her throat. At some point, she says his name—some sort of plea—and that at least comes out with all the right letters.
“Right here,” he whispers through her gibberish. “Right here. It’s me, it’s Joel.”
“I’m scared,” she manages, and if she can’t tell Joel what happened she at least has to tell him this. Has to make up for all the times she’s told him I’m fine because she wasn’t then and she’s really fucking not now. “I’m scared.”
And then she can’t stop saying it: over and over and over, rocking back and forth on the floor, like some sort of weird ritual.
“That’s okay,” Joel says, and the relief of it is overwhelming. Not: Don’t be scared. Just: That’s okay. “You’re allowed to be scared. I’ll keep you safe, you can just be scared if you need to be.”
Suddenly she needs him to hold her again. Needs him to do just what he said. To keep her safe, to let her be scared, to protect her from the rats that want to bite off her toes in the middle of the night.
She pushes herself back up and staggers to the couch, burrowing back into her spot under his arm. She threw his coat off in her panic, and he gently pulls it over her.
“I’m scared,” she tells him again. She’s never told him before today; she needs him to understand. “I’m scared.”
“You can be scared.” He gently tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear. She’s never had anyone do that before. She doesn’t know how it makes her feel. “You’ve been so brave, baby girl.”
It’s maybe that that makes her able to try. Maybe you’ve been so brave. Because she wants to be brave, for him. Wants to tell him what happened even if telling him makes it real.
“He said don’t be scared,” she murmurs. “He said—”
Her body won’t let her say it. Would rather close her throat than let the words get out.
She barely manages to turn from Joel and lean over the arm of the couch before she’s gagging all of the dregs of liquid left in her body onto the floor.
It hurts, and she’s tired, and frustrated tears rise and spill over as she coughs. She just needs him to know. She’s not entirely sure exactly what, not entirely sure what she’s saying, but she needs to.
She spits the last of the bile from her mouth and turns back to Joel, gripping the coat around her shoulders.
“He said he was gonna teach me,” she forces out quickly, while the words are still at the top of her throat. She glances at Joel. His jaw is set and his face is white. She blinks and looks down. “He said—,” her breath hitches, and she ignores it, “there’s no way out, fuck, he was gonna—”
She can’t say it—doesn’t even really know how to say it—but she stares at Joel and wills him to get it and she sees the exact moment he does.
“Ellie,” he breathes. All the anger and confusion and devastation in his voice is some sort of twisted comfort.
“Call me what you called me before,” she mumbles, slumping against him. Call me something that was never poisoned by his fucking voice.
“Baby girl,” he whispers immediately, as if it was already on the tip of his tongue. His voice is so gentle. Like she’s so important. “I’m so sorry, my darling girl.”
“I killed him,” she admits. She already knows Joel won’t blame her for it, but it still feels like the biggest admission she’s ever made. “I hit him and then—then I just kept hitting him. He didn’t even look like a person.”
“Oh, baby,” Joel says, and she’s grateful he doesn’t sound glad about it—grateful he realizes how much it took from her to do. “You defended yourself. You did what you had to do.”
But Joel wasn’t there. He doesn’t know the way the blood gurgled from David’s throat. The sickening crunch made by each heavy swing of the cleaver. Ellie can’t tell him, can’t explain it without breaking down, but she manages to mumble the thing that's lurking under all of it.
“He said I have a violent heart. Like him.”
“Bullshit,” Joel says, but Ellie is already drifting—already being pushed back against the wall of that fucking cage.
And you know what I see when I look at you?
“I just wanted to get out,” she murmurs. She’s not sure if she’s trying to convince Joel or David or herself. “I didn’t want to hurt someone again.”
Me. You remind me of me.
She’s broken out of her sickening reverie when Joel speaks again.
“Can you look at me?”
Ellie would really rather not, and she considers telling Joel this, but he never really asks her for anything and she supposes after everything he’s earned getting to see her tearstained face. She pushes herself up with her arms and forces herself to meet his eyes.
His voice is grave. Certain. “He would have hurt someone else. People like that don’t just stop after one person.”
Ellie looks down.
“I don’t think I was the first,” she mutters. She hadn’t really thought about it before now, but now that she does she’s sure of it. The fighting is the part I like most.
Joel sort of ducks his head to catch her eyes again, and Ellie blinks away David’s sneering face.
“But do you understand, Ellie? You’re the last.”
It takes her a moment, staring at him blankly while she connects what he’s saying.
You’re the last. You might not be the first, but you’re the fucking last.
Suddenly David’s blood doesn’t feel so much like a curse. Suddenly it feels just a little bit like an honor.
“No one else,” she echoes. She finds Joel’s hand and squeezes it tightly, like some sort of pact between the two of them: some sort of dual acceptance of what she did. “He’s fucking gone.”
Joel nods and squeezes her hand back. “Fucking gone.”
In the moment, she doesn’t think she needs the fog. The memories are all there, all sprawled across her brain, and in the moment they’re just that: not a diary left by a past incarnation, not a reality waiting to swallow her, just memories.
She thinks she might survive this.
The fog comes back when they set out again. She supposes it’s unfair to expect it to go away forever all at once. She supposes things can never just be convenient.
The thing is that she likes being floaty. She likes being a layer away from the Ellie that flinches back at loud noises, the Ellie that presses close to Joel until he brushes against her in some random way that makes her stumble back.
She likes being floaty. That’s what fucking scares her—she doesn’t know, given a choice, that she’d be able to keep herself from just forever drifting through the sky.
Joel tries to bring her down. He talks to her, points out things that would’ve excited her a week ago, but now it’s a conscious effort to even hear him, and she knows he can tell.
They stop early: Joel didn’t notice anything dangerous when he checked Ellie’s injuries, but he said he didn’t want to risk anything by pushing her strength too much so soon.
Joel helps her unroll her sleeping bag on the floor of the secure little shack he managed to find, tucking his coat over her securely. He gets into his a few feet away from her. It’s that, she supposes, that brings her down this time—the strangeness of sleeping far away after weeks drifting off with her head against his chest.
“Joel?” she whispers. It brings back in a rush every time she’s said that over the past four months—all of the forest floors and caves and abandoned buildings—Joel?
He shifts so his good ear is facing her. “Yeah?”
She fidgets with the button on his coat. Prepares the question that’s been sitting in her chest since the moment he found her in the snow.
“What if I never feel okay again?”
He doesn’t respond right away, and for a moment Ellie thinks maybe he didn’t hear, and she decides she’s grateful for that. Maybe it’s too raw of a question to ask. Maybe thoughts like that are better kept in the dark space underneath your ribs.
“I don’t feel okay,” he finally replies, really slow, like he’s carefully picking out his words. “Never do. But sometimes all the other shit—sometimes it’s all more than the not-okay part. Sometimes you’re so caught up in caring about other things that you forget to care that you’re not okay.”
Ellie stares at the dark ceiling. She thinks maybe she gets it. She thinks maybe that’s what Riley was doing when she pulled her up onto that fucking Halloween store display case.
She thinks maybe that’s the point of staying on the ground.
“Promise not to leave me,” she demands, with all the gravity she can muster, because suddenly she can’t keep going until he does. “Never. No matter what. Promise.”
“I promise. Of course, I promise.”
He doesn’t miss a beat. What surprises her is that she didn’t expect him to.
Ellie wonders when this happened. When what will you do after this? became what will we do?
She thinks she’d like to collect more things to care about. She thinks the two of them can manage that.
She wiggles with her sleeping bag across the floor to curl up tightly to Joel’s side. His arm wraps gently around her shoulders. Like it's just natural.
She turns down the familiar fog opening little tendril arms in its alluring offer of nothingness. She stubbornly thinks about sheep and constellations and carousels instead as she meanders her way into a gentle sleep.