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The only warning she has about what’s about to happen is the sound of a single shot, and the feel of hot blood spraying her face as Michael–a tough, no-nonsense man who still has the “patience of Job” to quote Joel–goes down, dead before he even fully slips out of his saddle.
Ellie gathers her reins up at once, heart pounding as she tries to decide where to go. She swears when there’s no cover to be found. Michael’s gelding squeals with terror and takes off before she can grab his reins, and it’s all she can do to stop her mare from following, the horse’s eyes wide and rolling with terror at the smell of blood.
“Easy, easy sweet girl,” she coaxes breathlessly, as the animal fights against her restraint, trying to buck up until she gathers the reins tight to keep her from gaining her head. She’s tempted to give the horse her freedom and let her pick their path, but she’d rather not get her damn neck broken getting tossed into a ditch by a frightened horse.
She knows she needs to move, needs to get out of a direct line of sight for another sniper shot. Joel would throttle her if he saw her now, right out in the open, frozen with panicked indecision.
But Joel isn’t here.
Joel’s back in Jackson, a two day ride to the south, and Ellie’s supposed to be on this overnight training mission–one of the “baby runs” as the teenagers call them–learning how to work as part of a team on patrol. Each of the adults had split off with a teenager to teach them how to navigate back to a central point. Michael had been assigned to her as the one with the most experience, helpful given that she was already being given an exception to go out at 15 and not the standard 16.
But now Michael’s dead.
And Ellie’s completely alone.
*
She finally decides to follow the gelding’s path in the vague hope that he smelled the rest of the herd and will lead her back to them. It flickers through her mind that leading whoever is chasing her in the truck she can hear gaining on her back to the group is a shitty idea, but her pistol had been confiscated after being found in her pack. She’d had Joel’s permission–hell, it had been one of his requirements for her to go out, that she have it tucked in her pack–but Michael had still said he’d keep it on him. It was supposed to be a safety thing.
She can’t say she feels real fucking safe now, though, unarmed and fucking helpless in the middle of nowhere.
She cries out when her mare fumbles over a bush hiding a hole in the ground, and it’s only the drills beaten into her in riding lessons that have her pushing off to roll to the side before her mare can come down on top of her. She wrenches her shoulder with her landing, but she’s on her feet again at once, ignoring the pain. She looks to her horse, terrified she’s broken a leg and stranded them both, and her terror ratchets several notches higher when she sees that the animal is fine, already back on her feet and galloping away.
“No!” She calls out uselessly. “Here! Come!” But the mare is relatively new to the stables, not even named yet, and it has no bond or loyalty to her.
She takes off in a sprint in the opposite direction, hoping they’ll follow her horse and give her time to get away, to find a bolthole to hide in.
The truck catches up to her in mere minutes.
To her own credit, she gives it her best shot when the agents–FEDRA, she notes grimly, though their uniforms are battered and faded in a way that suggests they’re not exactly the cream of the crop–spill out and surround her. She’s nothing against the guns pointed at her, but she knows she damn fucking well won’t go down without a fight. She kicks and scratches and claws with everything she’s got, but she’s one skinny, unarmed 15 year old against a group of trained adults, and in no time, they have her facedown on the ground, one of them kneeling on her back so that she can’t move and can barely breathe.
“Get-the fuck-off me!” She wheezes, trying futilely to get loose, giving it all she has to buck the guard off. Her mouth is slick with the coppery taste of blood from where she’s bitten more than one person, and she spits as she struggles, trying to get it out of her mouth.
There’s a sharp prick of pain in her neck, and the world slowly dissolves into darkness.
*
She wakes dizzy and sick to her stomach, and it’s the sensation of itchy, stinging hives up and down her arms that says she’s been drugged with sedatives.
They’d learned fast in that Firefly hospital, Joel and her, that she doesn’t process most sedatives well. No one had been able to give a solid answer about why she’s allergic to some degree to all but a select few, and the trial and error process had been a bitch, made tolerable only with Joel at her side, as loyal a guard and protector as a sick kid could ask for.
But there’s no Joel here now, to smooth her hair back and hold her close to his warm, solid chest while she shivers through the come-down of yet another medication she hasn’t responded well to.
There’s just blindingly bright lights overhead and restraints around her wrists and ankles. Through her dizziness, she manages to lift her head and finds herself in something that looks terrifyingly like a surgical suite. She’s shivering, hives on her arms interrupted with goosebumps, and she tries to clench her teeth against the way they want to chatter. She’s been changed into a hospital gown, and something about the fact that her clothes have been changed while she was out of it makes her stomach flip and clench angrily. She struggles against the restraints, trying to get enough slack to get a buckle loose, but all she manages is sapping the little strength she had remaining, body aching from the reaction to the sedative still making her feel slow and groggy.
Finally, she has to admit defeat, letting her head drop back down, breathing labored. She can’t remember which variety of sedatives had nearly sent her into anaphylactic shock in the Firefly hospital, but she thinks the one used on her this time must be related, because each breath is harder to draw than it should be, which does nothing to help her in remaining calm.
She tries to do what Joel’s taught her, counting down in her head with each breath, noting things around the room, and imagining each inhale and exhale like a wave on a beach to keep them steady and calm herself down.
Without Joel there with her, though, coaching her through, steady and gentle, it’s not nearly as effective as it usually is.
*
She tenses when the sound of movement indicates someone has entered the room, and she grits her teeth when they linger out of sight. She tries to crane her head as far as she can to get a look at them, but they’re playing a game with her. She can hear them breathing, can feel the weight of their eyes on her, but they don’t speak or step forward.
“Pretty fucking creepy to hover like that,” she calls, words a little slurred still from the drugs in her system. She waits, hoping for a response. “Will you just tell me what this is about, you fucking creep?”
Silence. Total, unsettling silence.
She runs out of steam for verbal abuse quickly and is forced into the same silence as the silent watcher.
After a while longer of the same tense silence, the watcher leaves, and she’s all alone once more.
*
The next time someone comes in, they don’t bother with the silent treatment.
“Ellie Williams?” A man asks briskly.
She’s now the one to remain silent, glaring.
The man sighs, like she’s being a recalcitrant child.
“Were you this uncooperative with the Fireflies?” He asks, and she has flashbacks to being sent to the office for punishment at FEDRA school, that same condescension and “I just don’t know what we’re to do with you, young lady” tone.
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” she says, voice completely even.
He tsks.
“Lies won’t help you, Miss Williams, not now.”
The words are creepy as fuck, and being called by her actual last name is jarring. In Jackson, she hasn’t given anyone her actual name, hasn’t seen the need, so people increasingly just refer to her as a Miller, assuming she’s Joel’s, one way or another.
It’s an assumption she puts in no effort to correct.
Being Ellie Miller suits her far better than being Ellie Williams ever did.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way, Miss Williams,” the man continues. “You’re already guilty of aiding and abetting a terrorist organization in subversive propaganda.”
God, she’d forgotten how it felt to have to listen to bureaucratic bullshit from people stroking themselves off to their own limited importance.
“I don’t know who Ellie Williams is, and I have no fucking clue what you’re talking about,” she says, cutting him off as he drones on. “You sound fucking crazy, man.”
The man’s lips thin.
“That scar on your arm would indicate otherwise, Miss Williams,” he says.
His tone is so cold it sends a shiver through her.
*
She’s in a medical facility, she learns in short order.
FEDRA seems to be more than a little pissed that the Fireflies have a cure to distribute and they don’t, and this kidnapping is apparently part of an effort at creating one of their own.
She also learns quickly that FEDRA agents don’t really care what happens to the person they’re deriving the cure from.
They inject her with something that paralyzes her, and to her terror, the only thing she has control over is her eyes and her breath, which comes shallow and fast as she slowly loses control over herself, helpless to the mercy of the doctors and nurses that crowd around the exam table she’s laid on.
And for traitors to FEDRA?
There’s not much mercy to be found.
*
They’re thorough, in their procedures.
They test everything they can think of, as many times as they want.
And Ellie just lays there, silent and helpless.
When she screams, it’s only in her head.
*
They get frustrated over the next however fucking long they experiment on her. Time is a long, formless haze of pain. She passes out more than once, agony making her black out, but always she wakes again to more of the same. Whatever the end game of their trials, they’re not succeeding.
That’s when words like biopsy start getting thrown around.
*
It’s a sort of hell, she thinks, to be limp and helpless when you hear your death being discussed the way other people discuss crop rotations, as one step in solving a problem, no more consequential than corn versus cabbage.
There’s a coldness to the doctors and nurses around her that she recognizes, to a degree, from her time in the Firefly hospital. People desperate for a cure don’t tend to always think about the means when they’re so focused on the end.
And this time, there’s no Joel right at her side to remind them.
It seems unthinkably quick, the speed with which they decide her death is the logical next step. She half-hopes, in her despair, that someone will step forward and go, “Maybe we think about this a little more.” Their own grudge with her going to the Fireflies and not them aside, she would think they’d at least keep her alive, their only shot at their own cure.
Apparently, though, FEDRA logic is a great deal different than hers.
*
Her eyes water with tears when she feels the cold trail of a marker across her forehead.
It’s a guiding line.
On where to cut open her fucking skull.
She’s trying to remain calm, to look tough, to not give them the satisfaction of knowing how scared she is.
But Jesus Christ, is she scared.
In its wild spinning, her brain provides the only other memory of a sensation similar to the marker that she has, Joel in the Firefly hospital tracing gentle fingers across her hair and forehead when the MRI dye gave her headaches so bad that even the lights from the machines monitoring her vitals had made her want to sob with pain, each one an icepick in the space behind her eyes.
He hadn’t spoken, even his softest voice too much for her tender head, but the gentle path of his fingers on her head had been something to cling to, a lifeline in her pain.
The marker, though, isn’t warm like Joel’s touch had been.
It’s ice cold, and she feels every millimeter of its path, a line leading to her death.
She hears the whir of what she knows in her gut is a bonesaw, and the way it revs twice before it goes silent says they’re fucking with her, extending her terror as long as they can.
That’s what you get, the noise says, when you betray FEDRA.
Heads appear in her field of vision, and God help her, for all of her determination to die a warrior, to be strong and fearless in a way Joel could be proud of, she tries to beg with her eyes for clemency. Please, she tries to say, I’m not ready to die. Not like this. Not here. Not now.
Not before I’ve seen Joel one last time, not when I haven’t had one last hug, one last laugh, one last chance to suck up my own cowardice and finally say “I love you” the way he deserves to hear.
Even in her fear for herself, she feels an aching void in her chest, knowing what her death will do to him. She doesn’t dare compare herself to Sarah, to think it would gut him hollow in the same way, but he’s lost a kid before, and she’s seen how he’s responded to thinking he would again. This will kill him, she thinks. It’ll kill me, and then it’ll kill him, too.
For the briefest moment, she thinks she might succeed with her silent plea. The eyes of a couple of the nurses look stricken, conflicted, and her own gaze flicks between them, begging. Please, please, she thinks, I’m only 15. You don’t have to do this to me. I’ll help you. I’ll play along.
Then the sympathetic nurses are out of her field of vision, and rough, uncaring hands are moving her head to center it in a bolster, a strap slipped between her teeth and tightened until it’s cutting into the corners of her lips, to immobilize her head completely.
What, she thinks with sudden, terrified defiance, not so sure about your fucking paralyzing drugs now?
She squeezes her eyes shut as hard as she can when the buzzing whir starts again, and she feels the tears flowing freely while she nearly hyperventilates. She’s trying to pull up a good memory, a single good thought, trying to drown out the buzzing getting ever closer with memories of guitars and Joel’s deep voice, singing the one song about a brown-eyed girl she always requests because it makes her feel special. She begs her brain to be delusional, to let her pretend that the straps holding her down are an embrace. She tries to summon the scent of Joel, wood and laundry soap and earth, green things from their little flower garden she convinced him to plant with her. Joel’s holding me, she tells herself, even as she knows it’s a damn fucking lie. Joel’s holding me, and I’m okay. I’m okay. Joel’s here.
Lost in her own desperate attempts at delusion, she misses the sound of gunfire at first.
And then the screaming starts.
Her eyes fly open as glass shatters somewhere in the room, and there’s a scream before the saw buzz finally stops. Strapped down the way she is, she can’t even move her eyes enough to see, her vision blocked by the bolster holding her head centered.
She’s hyperventilating, terrified and confused. An explosion? Maybe? An invasion? A-
“Sweet Jesus.”
She inhales a shaking, disbelieving sob at the words, rough and horrified and angry.
And so wonderfully, blessedly familiar.
Joel.
His face is over hers in the next second, and her breathing goes too-fast again as she cries harder with relief. Her tongue is still too thick in her mouth to move even if it weren’t strapped down, but she can’t help the way the relief rushes over her, making the tears fall faster.
“Jesus,” he says again, and there’s a dark edge to it. He’s fucking pissed, she can tell, which, join the club there, pal, she thinks with near-hysteria.
His hands, though, are gentle the way they always are with her.
“I’ve gotcha, baby girl. You’re okay. I’m right here. We’re getting out of here.”
The strap is out of her mouth, making it a little easier to breathe, and she doesn’t bother to parse the individual words Joel’s saying, just wrapping herself up in the sound of his voice, eyes shut, as she tries to get her breathing under control. Joel’s here. She’s safe.
She’s gonna be okay.
In no time, the restraints on her wrists and ankles are off, and when his face appears in her field of vision again, he’s visibly terrified by the way she doesn’t move. His hand, when he rests it on her cheek, shakes slightly.
“Baby, what’s wrong?” He asks, voice rough with his own fear.
Oh, she realizes dizzily, he doesn’t know I’m drugged.
She flicks her eyes as best she can to the corner where she thinks they keep the vials of whatever they’ve been using on her. He frowns, confused, but he follows her line of sight, and she sees a tick in his jaw when it clenches as he makes the connection.
“They drugged you?” He asks. She squeezes her eyes shut tight in what she hopes he can read as a yes. “Okay,” he says, “so it’s just the drugs?” She can hear the fragile hope in his voice, the desperate plea for her to not be permanently paralyzed.
God, please don’t let this be permanent.
Another affirmative squeeze of her eyes, and he’s gathering her up gently, wrapping her up in a thin blanket produced from somewhere, a blessing given the flimsiness of the hospital gown she’s still in. She’s horrifically floppy, and she can feel the tension in his body it causes, but he’s nothing but careful with her, tucking her head against his neck and holding her close and secure to his chest.
Nothing she could notice right now would help him given that she couldn’t convey it, so she gives herself permission to keep her eyes shut and soak in the warmth radiating to her through the contact.
For the first time in however long she’s been here, she starts to believe she might one day feel warm again.
*
With her eyes shut, she misses looking at most of the outpost, but when she starts to hear birdsong, she opens them to find what can only be described as carnage.
Her eyes widen at the pools of blood and sprays of bone and brain matter on the walls and floor and-
And the fucking everything, it looks like.
She wants to ask what happened, but the ferocity of the killing and the desperation with which Joel holds her answers her question.
They threatened her.
Joel took care of it.
She closes her eyes again.
*
She doesn’t bother to open them even when she feels sunlight on her face. Joel carries her a ways and then stops, and she blinks her eyes open to find them standing beside a horse. She wonders why they’ve stopped when she’s certainly fucking eager to be gone, and then it dawns on her.
Ah.
Hard to ride together when one person doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of hanging on.
Joel stands and thinks for a few moments, but then he just sighs and gathers the reins in one hand. The reins aren’t tied to anything, she notes, and something about the desperation to get to her that speaks to makes her feel so important and cherished that her eyes prick with tears once more.
In the end, they don’t have to walk long, the horse following along behind meekly.
They hear hoofbeats near a turn in the road, and Joel stops to set her down in the tall grass to swing his rifle back over his shoulder. Her heart pounds, watching him as he walks away until he’s out of sight. He won’t leave her, she knows to her bones. He’ll stand and fight and die if that’s what it takes to keep her safe.
All the while she’ll lie here, useless.
“Joel!” She hears, and she shuts her eyes tight with relief. Tommy.
Joel is back at her side in a moment, gathering her up, and then Tommy is beside him. He smiles at first, a relieved thing, but his face falls when she doesn’t respond at all, and he looks to Joel, expression grim.
“Drugged her,” Joel says shortly. Tommy looks back to her briefly, still looking worried, but finally he stands up, one hand moving to support her head and lift it up to rest on on Joel’s shoulder when it wobbles.
“Bastards,” Tommy says.
“Dead,” Joel responds, and the brothers exchange a long look, a conversation she can’t read.
“Be back soon,” he tells Joel, and then with a gentle touch to her head, he’s out of her field of view. She hears the creak of leather, and then there are horses moving away.
She makes a soft noise in question, the drugs finally wearing off enough to let her, but Joel just ducks his head enough to kiss her temple.
“He’s just taking care of something,” he tells her, “don’t worry about it.”
And well, she’ll have to take his word for it.
*
It’s embarrassing, the way she’s helped up onto a horse behind Joel, but beneath the humiliation of being handled like a baby is the fucking agony of it all.
Still coming down from terror, she hadn’t noticed it at first when Joel was carrying her, but she aches, sharp and stabbing and dull and throbbing both, all over her body. Her hips scream with pain when she’s lifted to sit on the back of the horse from the bone marrow harvests, but the whimper she manages is so weak she doesn’t think anyone hears it over the snort of a horse not pleased to be carrying dead weight.
To keep her upright, someone pulls out a length of cloth from somewhere and wraps it around her upper back and head to keep her pressed against Joel, cheek against his back, before tying it in a knot across his chest. It’s comforting, being right against him, secure and safe from falling.
It’s also more than a little humiliating, feeling like a baby in a sling.
She wants to scream from pain when they’re in motion, each step jolting through her like fire. She doesn’t know everything that’s been done to her or all of the drugs that have been tried on her, but she knows that the aftermath is agony, worse by far than anything the Fireflies dared try with Joel right there, watching them like a hawk.
She closes her eyes and tries to focus on the warm comfort of Joel’s body, ignoring the all-encompassing pain of her own and trying to listen only to his heartbeat, strong and steady. It doesn’t work, not really, but upright and in nearly unbearable pain is still a relief after days strapped to a table, so she’ll take what she can get.
After what seems like half a lifetime, they arrive at an old house, two horses with Jackson residents she recognizes standing by. The ride has given her time to get back some of her voice, and she can’t help the thin whine that escapes her when the movement of being gently handed down sends her body alight with a fresh wave of pain.
Joel’s face goes dark and angry when he sees the tears on her face, but when he sees her looking at him, the expression drops, and in an instant he’s her Joel again, gentle and concerned. He holds her close when he carries her into the house and carefully settles on the floor in a corner. One of the riders who came with them–a woman whose name starts with an N, she’s pretty sure–changes her out of the hospital gown. It’s even more embarrassing than being carried like a baby, but Joel closes his eyes and there’s no one else in the room, so it could be worse. She feels better when she’s in the clothes, even though they swallow her. She thinks the jeans are the woman’s because they only swamp her a bit, but the flannel shirt is Joel’s, she knows, and it fits almost like a dress on her.
Still, the softness of the fabric and the familiarity of the smell centers her, so she has no complaints.
N-something gives her a kind smile before she leaves, and it’s a relief, to be free of outside observation, just her and Joel again.
Joel props her up against his arm–and again, she thinks wryly, she’s currently no better than a baby–and pulls out a water bottle from his pack. She only accepts a few sips, conscious of the way she has no ability to move at present and unwilling to stretch N-name’s goodwill as far as helping her stand up to pee, and then Joel tips a splash of it over his sleeve, gently wiping away the marker lines on her head.
She closes her eyes and doesn’t bother to stop the tears from falling at the simple relief of knowing she’s no longer marked up to be butchered.
“You’re okay,” he says quietly, the words low enough that she feels the rumble of them in his chest as much as she hears them. “I’ve got you now, baby. You’re gonna be just fine.”
He cleans up the many marks on her arms from blood draws and IVs and any other number of procedures, and after a moment of hesitation, he calls N-name–Nancy, it turns out–back to check her hips and legs when shifting her makes her wince. The woman is kind and quick, but Ellie’s still glad when she’s done and gone once more. She feels vulnerable, completely unable to move, and as safe as Joel’s presence makes her, she prefers it to be just them in the room until she can at least hold her head up on her own.
There’s nothing to do but wait, apparently, and Joel fills the time with funny, low-stakes stories from his time growing up. Free from immediate terror, smaller annoyances come to the forefront of her consciousness, and she’s about to be driven mad by the way her hair is touching her neck when Joel seems to notice, stopping his story and shifting enough to dig in his pocket. After a moment, he withdraws a hair elastic, and she feels her eyes sting with the urge to start crying again at the sight of it. It’s one of a pack she found during a scavenging mission a couple of months ago, and she’s touched that he would think to keep one on him for her.
“Know you hate it touching your neck,” he says, seemingly more to himself than to her, and the simple fact that he would know such a thing makes her feel so much love it seems impossible that she can’t say it out loud. He gently finger combs her hair out of her face and then twists it into a low bun, passing her head back and forth between his hands gently to wind the elastic around the base of it. The absurdity of her head being handled like a fucking basketball is a blessing, and she exhales a laugh through her nose that he picks up on, mouth quirking slightly in a smile in response. “Well,” he says when he’s done, “I wouldn’t send you to a dance looking like this, but it’ll do.”
Ellie closes her eyes again when he adjusts her once more to lay with her head in the crook of his arm, Joel adjusting his own position so he won’t crick her neck. She hums a few bars of a song in a voiceless request, and Joel pauses mid-story, just for a moment. She hums again, trying to sound more insistent, and finally he laughs, softly.
“Well, if the lady insists,” he says teasingly. “Hey, where did we go? Days when the rains came-” He starts to sing softly, only loud enough for her to hear.
She’s asleep by the second “You, my brown-eyed girl.”
*
She wakes an indeterminate amount of time later. Her body still aches like a motherfucker, but she finds that she can twitch her hands, which is a hell of a relief. She can tell by the feel of the person that it’s still Joel holding her, and after a moment, her fuzzy brain clears enough to hear that he’s speaking to someone over her head in a low voice.
-all gone,” she hears a voice she identifies as Tommy’s say after a moment.
“You’re sure?” Joel asks, tension detectable in his voice even at such a soft volume.
“Do you think I would have left if I wasn’t?” Tommy responds, and there’s the faintest hint of offense in his voice. “One of the remaining nurses was about her size. Broke her neck and then used that saw thing on her head. Cara got into their computers and recorded that Ellie Williams was killed during a botched brain biopsy, let it upload, and then we torched the place. If they find anything of the bodies, they’ll just think everyone was killed in revenge.”
“They were,” Joel says darkly.
“Yeah, by a fucking idiot who snuck off without backup when I wasn’t looking,” Tommy says, and there’s displeasure in his voice, but there’s affection, too, exasperated but still there.
“Wasn’t time for a fucking meeting about it,” Joel grumbles. “Had to get my kid already.”
Ellie manages enough movement to press her head closer to his chest, overwhelmed by affection for the man holding her so gently, like he didn’t single-handedly slaughter a whole building of people just a few hours ago, all for her.
“Yeah, yeah,” Tommy says, but there’s something resigned in his voice. “Shoulda kept you on a leash, I know.”
Joel snorts.
“Like I wouldn’t have gnawed through it if I had to.” He shifts her just slightly, and she thinks for the first time that his arms have to be tired from holding her for so long. Still, he doesn’t let go. “Figure out what they used on her?” He asks, and she hears the tension in his voice.
“Cara said atricuri-something. Said it’s usually used during surgery to keep people still, at least it was before.”
“But it wears off?” Joel asks, and there’s clear tension in his voice that makes her heart beat a little faster with the same worry.
“Yeah,” Tommy says soothingly. “Cara said if she didn’t have any bad reactions to it that she’d be just fine with a little time, and any reactions would have already happened.”
“Mm,” Joel says, soothed a little but still clearly not settled. “Might have before. She doesn’t do well with anesthesia.”
“Oh?”
“Was fucking hell in that hospital in Salt Lake, guessing and checking, and not a single one of those doctors knowing what they were doing.” There’s an anger in his voice, a grudge still well-nursed at people making her suffer, no matter that it was by her choice and for a cause, and it makes her love him just a bit more.
“Well, she ain’t in Salt Lake now,” Tommy says softly, and she knows it’s an attempt to calm Joel down.
“Won’t be,” Joel says, “there or any fucking hospital. Not ever again.”
Tommy doesn’t respond, but he doesn’t really need to.
The tone of Joel’s voice says that it’s a promise he’s damn well going to keep.
*
She finally regains the ability to move her body about an hour before dawn, which she discovers when she wakes up and manages to move her hand from its place on her belly to flop to the ground. It stings, the impact, but against the ache of her body and the relief both, it’s a pain she’ll take.
She inhales a shaky breath in relief, keeping her eyes shut for a long moment.
“Ellie?” She opens her eyes at the sound of her name and finds Joel watching her, one hand moving to hers, capturing it in his giant one. He rubs a thumb over her knuckles gently, and the touch is so soothing that she almost says fuck it and lets him gentle her back to sleep.
But no, she has something important to handle first.
She clears her throat a couple of times, just to test her vocal chords, and then she looks him right in the eye.
“I love you,” she says. Her voice is hoarse and cracks a little, but she manages enough volume that it’s audible, which is a win.
Joel’s eyes go a little glassy-looking, and for a moment she’s afraid he didn’t understand her and she’ll have to work out how to say it again, but then he’s cupping her head, bringing her close to kiss her temple and lingering, afterwards, forehead bowed to rest against her.
“I love you, too,” he says, voice rough. “So, so much.”
Most important business handled, Ellie lets herself slip into a warm half-awareness, held close and on her way to recovery.
She doesn’t think Joel will mind.
*
She regains the ability to move by the time morning has well and truly arrived, enough that she requires only privacy to handle some personal business before they’re to set out for the day.
One problem remains though: the unbelievable amount of pain she’s in.
She insists on leaving the house on her own two feet when they’re getting ready to leave, but she almost crumples to the floor until Tommy and Joel brace her on either side, strong arms keeping her up while she shuffles on aching, shaking legs. She’s breathing hard when they sit her down on the porch while the last horses are saddled up, and she feels a little nauseous already at the idea of another day of riding when even breathing makes her want to scream with pain.
Tommy leaves them for a moment while Joel remains. She tips over a bit to rest against his side, unable to stop the grunt of pain when it puts pressure on one aching hip. She opens her eyes when a shadow indicates someone in front of her, and she finds that Tommy’s returned, several bottles in his hands.
“Here,” he says, looking at Joel. “Cleared out their supplies before we torched the place. Cara said these would knock her out long enough for us to get some distance.”
Joel shifts her enough to get both hands free, his arm still around her, and he takes the bottles, reading the labels with a frown.
“Don’t-” She starts, swallowing against her dry throat when her voice cracks. Both of them look to her. “Don’t wanna be knocked out,” she says, and she hates how her voice wavers.
She can’t get a good look at Joel’s face, but Tommy’s expression is so pitying that she wants to break something. She hates being pitied.
“Ellie-” Tommy starts, voice placating.
“No,” she cuts him off, already feeling panicked at the idea of losing any measure of control over her body when she’s barely gotten it back. Tommy opens his mouth again, likely to try and convince her like the peacemaker he is, but Joel cuts him off.
“Give us a second,” he says, handing the pill bottles back. When Tommy’s nodded and gone off a ways to talk to Nancy, Joel shifts until they’re facing each other. He cups her cheek gently, and she closes her eyes for the briefest moment to enjoy it. “You’re in pain, kiddo,” he says. She opens her mouth to play it down, but he keeps going before she gets the chance. “No, I can see it. You’re hurting, Ellie, and you don’t need to.”
“Don’t wanna lose control,” she tells him, voice small, and he pulls her forward gently to kiss her forehead.
“I will not let anything happen to you,” he promises her. “You’ll ride with me all day like you did yesterday. I won’t let anyone even touch you until you’re back 100% to say yes or no, alright?”
She presses her lips together, so overwhelmed by the way he understands her.
The way he loves her.
“I just don’t want you to be in pain, baby girl. Not when you don’t need to be.”
His worry for her is so clear in his voice that she knows already there’s only one answer she’s going to give. Besides, he’s a man who keeps his promises. If he says he’ll watch out for her while she’s out of it, he will.
“Okay,” she says at last, leaning forward to rest her head against his shoulder.
He brings one hand up to cup the back of her neck gently, and she feels the motion when he nods his head to bring Tommy back over. She turns her head when he removes his hand from her neck enough to see him sorting through the bottles, reading the labels thoroughly.
“Not those,” he says, handing all but two bottles back. “She has bad reactions to them.”
It’s a silly thing to be so touched by, Joel knowing off the top of his head the names of the drugs she can’t take even when most of the names on the bottles mean nothing to her, but she’s so overwhelmed by the care behind it that she just presses her face a little harder against him, hoping he can feel the affection in the gesture. A quick consult with Cara–she was a paramedic before, Ellie only remembers now–and they narrow it down to one bottle.
Joel opens the bottle for her, her hands still too uncoordinated, but he puts two pills on her palm and lets her bring them to her mouth on her own, a small but appreciated allowance for her sense of control and independence. Tommy keeps one hand on the water bottle as she takes a sip, but with the way her arm trembles when she holds it up that high, she can’t resent it too badly. She feels a flicker of anxiety, still, at the idea of taking medication that’s going to make her lose control, but once she’s swallowed them, Joel shifts to let her rest against his chest, and the feel of him against her, strong and steady, lets her relax a bit.
He won’t let anything happen.
She knows that, if nothing else.
*
The medication acts quickly, and she starts to feel floaty and loose. There’s pain, still, but it’s a distant thing, easily ignorable. When she wobbles back, her bones feeling like jelly, Joel scoops her up and carries her over to a horse. With him on one side and Tommy on the other, they get her up, and Tommy holds her in place while Joel mounts, too.
The world is fuzzy around the edges, and she only distantly registers when she’s bundled tight to Joel’s back again. She has a brief moment of panic at finding herself restrained without having tracked how that happened, but Joel reaches back to hold one of her hands when she tries to shove away.
“Easy, kiddo,” he tells her, looking over his shoulder. “You’re alright. I’m right here. You’re just fine.”
It takes a few more reassurances before she settles, but finally she calms. He pulls her hands forward to wrap around his waist, holding them in place and using his other hand for the reins.
Ellie, floaty and finding that being bundled close to Joel is actually quite relaxing when she stops panicking about it, just rests her cheek on his back and dozes, relaxing into the slow rocking steps of the horse.
*
It takes them three days to get back to Jackson, and most of them are a drugged haze in Ellie’s memory.
True to Joel’s promise, no one touches her without her knowing about it. She rides tied to his back during the day, and she’s aware enough by the time they stop in the evening to nod her permission when Tommy comes to stand by the horse to help her down.
She doesn’t eat much during the trip back, too drugged during the day and too tired at night, and she knows she’s worrying Joel, who worries about her being too skinny all the time anyway. She thinks with some amusement that she probably has some fattening up in her future, and sure enough, their first night back, Tommy brings them cheesy potatoes and roast chicken and honey carrots and strawberries with whipped cream from the dining hall. The intent focus on Joel’s face as she eats, propped up in her bed, tells her he played a hand in what was served in a move meant to tempt her, and so for him, she does her best to clean her plate.
She doesn’t quite succeed, but at least some of the tense worry lines on his face have eased by the time she sets her fork down and yawns. She gets up to brush her teeth while he leaves to take her plate down to the kitchen–always such a stickler for tidiness–but he returns before she’s fully asleep. She’s already taken a dose of pain medicine for the night, and it eases the ache enough in her body that she shifts over and pats the space beside her without even wincing. He obeys the silent summons and lets her maneuver him until she can curl against him comfortably, head on his shoulder and one hand on his chest, matching the rise and fall with her own breath.
“Love you,” she says around a yawn.
“Love you, too, kiddo,” he says, and she can hear the smile in his voice.
*
It takes about a week and a half–most of it spent sleeping–before she can wean off of the pain medicine to willow bark tea, and only then is she finally clear-headed enough to ask for details about what actually happened. Joel demures, because he doesn’t want to worry her, but unfortunately for his plan of sparing her, he’s also shit at telling her no when she really wants something.
She persists, and finally he gives up, sitting down next to her on the couch and putting an arm around her shoulders. She slumps against him, closing her eyes, but it’s more to enjoy the warm closeness than out of tiredness.
“From what we can tell,” he says, hand moving in slow, gentle strokes up and down her back in what she knows is an attempt to soothe her to sleep, “the Fireflies have been working overtime to distribute the cure.” That’s not a surprise, really, and it’s probably a good thing. Most of Jackson is immune by now thanks to the last two rounds collected by delegates sent for that purpose. Once they got it down, the Salt Lake City hospital has apparently been turning out vaccines like nobody’s business.
Joel tells her that one of the delegates asked some questions about where the cure came from on the last trip, and the rage in his voice lets her guess where the story is going. Sure enough, one of the Fireflies was less circumspect than Joel had tried to threaten them into being, and they’d said that the cure had come from a girl in Jackson, someone naturally immune. They hadn’t used names, but it’s not as if it would take that great a leap in logic to make the connection between her and Joel arriving and the cure being sent out.
“Fucker thought he could use the information as leverage,” Joel nearly growls, and she wraps her arms around his waist and squeezes, trying to soothe him, a reminder that she’s here and (relatively) fine now. He brings a hand up to her hair and strokes over it gently, calmed at least a little. “Found a FEDRA outpost and offered to hand you over in exchange for a position in the ranks. Apparently life in Jackson was a little below his ambitions. Told them what you look like and then told them where to find you when the training ride was planned.”
Ellie feels a flicker of fear go through her.
“They know I’m here?” She asks, trying and failing to keep the worry and guilt out of her voice. Fuck, is the whole town in danger now? Because of her? Knowing that Michael was killed as collateral damage is enough, but to think that all of Jackson-
“Easy,” Joel coaxes, threading his fingers through her hair and kneading at her scalp gently. “Tommy took care of it.” She remembers the discussion she overheard between him and Joel now, and feels herself settle. “They hadn’t even sent the intel back to their headquarters, from what we could tell. Think they wanted to work it out first so they’d look better.”
“Anything for a promotion, I guess,” Ellie says dryly.
“Apparently,” Joel says.
“What happened to the rat?” She asks, and she feels Joel tense just a bit with anger.
“Dead,” he says firmly. “He tried to run after the rest of the training patrol got back and reported what happened. Council tried him and hanged him before we even got back. His body’s still hanging on the wall. He wanted to be part of FEDRA so bad, he can die like ‘em, too.”
She wonders if the man realized, at the end, that his hanging was a mercy killing. Compared to what she imagines Joel would have done to him, it was practically a kindness.
“He just fessed up?” She asks.
Joel pauses, and she can feel him weighing his answer before he says it.
“Eventually,” he finally says.
It’s one word, but it’s enough. She knows enough about Joel and Tommy to fill in the rest of the blanks for herself. If he hadn’t caused one of the worst fucking events of her life, she might be tempted to pity the poor bastard.
As it is, she’s just a little regretful that Joel didn’t get to finish him off for her.
*
Joel keeps her close for the next couple of months. Thanks to Maria, his work assignments are shifted to coincide with her time in school, so the second she’s out, she can make her way to his side. They don’t talk about what happened to her, not really. It’s still a little too fresh for her to be able to talk about it just yet. They just spend time together, working on projects or going for walks or fishing. Once she’s fit enough that she can ride, they take horses out for short distances, sometimes hunting, sometimes just letting Ellie get used to breathing through the fear that being in the open on horseback sparks in her now.
Nights are hard, still, and after certain nightmares, even the feeling of her blankets over her makes her feel so restrained she wakes up screaming for help. On those nights, Joel cranks the heat in the house so high he’s sweating a little, but it makes it possible for her to lay on her bed without needing anything on top of her. She lays on her side just for the proof that she has the option and holds his hand and breathes, slowly, in and out, matching her rhythm to his until it lulls her back to sleep. He waves her thanks off after these nights are over, but she still hugs him a little tighter the next morning, knowing how lucky she is to be loved so much.
Today, they’re in a clearing by a little pond about thirty minutes outside of Jackson, close enough that it’s well-cleared of any infected by now but far enough that anyone from town is unlikely to stumble on them. Joel first taught her to swim after they settled in the town, and she’s become pretty good at it since then. She’d paddled around a bit today and even splashed Joel specifically to make him chase her so he would toss her into the water, and now she’s tired, but in a good way.
Joel’s leaning back against a tree, eyes closed and head tilted back, and she’s laying with her head pillowed on his thigh, hair spread across his lap to let it dry in the sunshine dappling down through the leaves. She has one of his hands in both of hers held against her stomach, and she’s toying with the idea of dozing. In the end she decides she should probably stay awake, just in case, but danger is more of a distant abstract than an immediate threat, so she doesn’t bother to sit up.
They’ll need to get back eventually, she knows. They’d taken food with them to eat for lunch by the water, but it’ll be supper time soon, and she’d hate to miss it and get stuck with cold leftovers. Besides, she’s pretty sure it’s taco night, which is always a treat.
For now, though, she just rests in the quiet bubble of a peaceful afternoon, safe and content, with Joel at her side.