Chapter Text
Everything in her is saying run into the lake.
It’s a half-frozen sheet and she doesn’t know how to swim, but the urge to get away is gnawing at her insides, calcifying to her bones.
It seems like the only option.
They skirt along its perimeter, barely a yard away from the shore break, feet crunching into the icy snow. Dark gray pebbles peek through in spots where the powder has thinned to just a dusting. When their boots hit them, the ground shifts, and nestled together they both slide, tripped up by the loose stones.
By the second stumble, Joel adjusts his stride, picking his way more cautiously over the unstable ground, but she struggles to do the same. For a third time, her feet skid, and she careens into him, knocking a grunt from his chest. His grip around her arm tightens, and she’s not sure if it’s out of pain or wanting to keep her upright.
“Sorry.” It’s barely a breath of a word, but it still scratches her throat, grated down from screaming.
They - the screams - her screams, but maybe some of his - still linger in her ears. It’s a weird sorta ring, somewhere between a memory and a background track, kinda like how the cassettes sounded as she fell asleep on their drive into Kansas City: audible but indistinguishably distant.
She knows she should be looking down - watching where she places her boots, but her head is fixed left, eyes stuck on the soft swell that laps against ice chunks just a few feet away.
She barely can walk, but she wants to run to it - jump in.
Drown.
She slips on the rocks again, ankle buckling, foot contorting into an “L” for just a second before snapping back into place. It doesn't hurt in the slightest - feels too far from her body to register things like that - but it does make the world wobble as she once again veers toward the ground. Nausea pokes at the back of her throat, and when she tries to swallow it away, she’s reminded again that it’s tight and dry and raw.
Joel’s fingers clamp down near her shoulder blade, catching much more of his oversized coat than her, fingers bunching the fabric. He pulls at it, and her, jerking her back into place until her feet square firmly atop the snow and stones. His arm drops from around her back, and she’s aware he’s moving away from his position to her left, but she doesn’t - can’t - track where he goes. In the back of her mind, his soft, “hold up, kiddo” registers, but just barely - just enough to know that he’s not really leaving her.
Sucking in a breath, the cold air sears her nose and throat, settles like heavy bricks of coal in her lungs.
She read one time that drowning burns.
Her chest already kills, maybe the water would feel no different.
A tug at the bottom of her leg has her looking down. Her vision spins and then settles.
Joel is crouched in front of her, backpack and rifle precariously clinging to the edge of his shoulder as he lightly pulls upward at her boot and soggy jeans. He says something, but the wind is mixing with that overbearing ringing in her ears and it's leaving her deaf to everything else. He gently pats the side of her leg and glances up. His mouth is moving, yet even when she tries to focus on the sound of his voice, she can’t quite catch it against the high-pitched whooshing.
She thinks he wants her to lift her foot, but for a long moment, she can’t remember how to tell her body to do that. When she shouldered the kitchen service door open and felt the sting of cold air replace the heat, her body went into autopilot - no thoughts, just go.
There had been hands and him and “Look, it’s me, it’s me,” but otherwise, she’s kept pushing forward, one foot clomping ahead of the other, over and over.
She’s not sure if she can do anything different right now.
Her eyes flick down and go between him and her boot - its very tip peeks out from beneath the bottom of her backpack. He must have given it to her, but she doesn’t remember taking it from him. Clutching it to her chest, her fingers tingle and sting when she squeezes them tighter around the handle.
With a shaky exhale, she attempts to focus for just a fraction of a second on her lower half; strangely it doesn’t feel like it's there at all, but something clicks anyways and she shifts her weight towards the left. Her balance is all off when she goes to lift her foot, and clumsily teetering, her backpack sways and bumps into the top of his head.
“Easy, easy,” he murmurs, eyes darting up to watch her through his bushy brows. His hand comes up to her hip and applies pressure gently keeping her steady in place.
She wants to say sorry, but the words get stuck. All that comes out is a muffled grunt, the rest gone somewhere in between her brain and mouth.
A pull at her backpack has her grip tightening, and for some reason, out of all the things she’s feeling and not, the stretch of dry skin over curled knuckles weasels to the forefront. Another pull has another grunt attempting to rise out of her throat, this time born of disapproval.
“Just for a second.”
Reluctantly, she releases her grip on the handle, bag dropping fully into Joel’s grip. She tracks it down to the ground as he places it just beside him.
Safe.
She gives a small conciliatory nod, but he doesn’t see it. He’s already back to her boot pulling at it again, a little harder this time - rocking her forward. Her arm shoots out, hand bracing against his shoulder. The contrast of red against faded green draws her attention, eyes widening as she digests just how much blood marks her hand.
In the restaurant, they were dripping with it - fresh, hot, and gooey. Feverishly, she had dragged them across the carpet, wiped them on her pants, ringed them out in her sweatshirt - tried anything to get the blood off as quickly as possible as the heat of the fire pressed into her back.
She thought she’d gotten it all.
The lake could get the rest.
There’s an upward tug, and with it her fingers curl into a claw, digging into Joel as she raises her foot just a centimeter off the ground to match the motion. The moment she manages it, he is grabbing at her undone lace, yanking it out from underneath the tread of her boot, and sliding her whole foot onto his bent knee.
She didn’t even know it had been untied, but of course, he did. There wasn’t a day on the road where he didn’t stop and make her fix her laces.
Dropping her head, she watches as his shaky fingers pluck at the wet and worn strings, loosening them and then pulling them taught. His hands are red like hers and his right knuckles are scraped and smeared with dark congealed blood.
They weren’t like that in the basement.
Her head tilts back towards the water where the wind twirls snow across its surface in large, airborne white waves. They billow towards them, kicking up a rough gust that splatters icy flecks of snow onto her face. Her eyelids flutter, trying to blink back the intrusion of the wind - barely mange more than a twitch with the frost clinging to her lashes. A shiver ripples through her body, the frigid air creeping into Joel’s unzipped coat, hanging loosely around her.
Ice floats, maybe if she gets cold enough, she could too.
A twinge of pain shoots from her shoulder to her fingertips as Joel stands and her arm rises with him. Gravity fixes the issue before she consciously can, listlessly sliding off of his shoulder and falling back down to her side with a muffled slap.
In her periphery, he lingers, but she doesn’t move her attention away from the dark blue water.
Drown.
Her ears fill with a faint rustling as he begins to readjust his coat to her frame, weighty fabric shifting around her rigid body. Cold rough fingers skim her neck as they fix the collar. She flinches, head drawing to her shoulder, ribs tightening too. Still she doesn’t look to face him.
A gust hits. Her whole body shudders, muscles painfully squeezing her ribs as it ripples up her spine and out. It must transfer into Joel like a static shock because when his hands slide down to her shoulders she can feel how they tremble too. Shakily, they proceed down and dip inside the coat flapping open, and although she tenses at the touch of his hands on her arms, she really could not care much less about what he’s doing. Her mind can only manage to focus on one thing at a time, and right now, it’s still lake.
Nobody would follow her in.
He threads her arm through the first sleeve then the other - raises them, bends her elbows, pushes her hands into the openings like she’s just a puppet. Her brows knit together, lips compressing into a thin line. It kind of hurts. It shouldn’t, but a wince escapes, the motions pulling at her ribs and stretching her shoulders.
“Sorry,” he murmurs, leaning in closer, hands slipping around to her back.
Instinctively her arms raise to give him space, even though she’s caught off guard by the intrusion. Unsure of what he’s doing, she takes her eyes away from the water just in time to look down and watch her pliant body sway with another tug - his fingers this time hooking into two belt loops and pulling up in an effortlessly swift motion. Before she can digest the first, there is a second tug moving her body, his fingers gliding to the front of the denim, finding another pair of loops, hooking inside, and heaving up again.
As quick as they came they are moving again, hands hopping back to the edge of the coat and pulling the fabric taught so it hangs a bit more straight before gliding down the sides to the bottom zipper. He tries to insert the edge into the pull tag, but it’s a choppy attempt that misses, and when his quivering fingers fail to catch the sides together again, her attention veers back toward the lake.
Run, then safe, until drown.
The metal teeth click together with a long whizz as he draws the zipper up to her chin. His hand lingers at the top for a second, and then brushes against the underside of her chin with his pointer finger.
He says something to her, but his voice seems to come from a distance, muffled and indistinct like he’s underwater - like he’s where she wants to be. She can't make out the words, but her mind takes note of a changing tone to them, something kind of playful that morphs into a seriousness.
Or maybe it’s sternness. His hand comes back to her jaw - finger and thumb touching her chin again, almost feather-light, and nudges her head toward him. Her eyes move sluggishly, head turning before her gaze follows, eyes dragging along the water's edge, then the horizon, then to his shoulder, and finally onto his face.
She sees him then, really sees him, for the first time since stumbling out of the restaurant – expression soft, yet eyes filled with concern and a certain bit of fear that seems…wrong.
Joel is tough.
From the moment they met, he was nothing but rugged stoicism with a protective edge. No fear, no worry, just ‘do or die.’ All the times they were shot at, and cornered, and facing infected, he never once seemed concerned.
And even that time with Sam and Henry, she distinctly remembers finding him out of the corner of her eye, and he was fucking snarling. Henry was holding a gun in his face and shooting at the floor, yet Joel was flashing his teeth like a wild dog, ready to tear someone’s head off. Even when he was dying on the mattress, he didn’t look scared. Hell, he was ready to die alone, in pain, without anyone to even try to hold his hand until he reached the other side.
His expression is so un-Joel that it has her body kicking back a bit of adrenaline that had started to wane, muted sounds and fuzzy sights clarifying within just a few heartbeats. Even the ringing abates, increasing in pitch for a second before finally dropping off into silence.
She sucks in a long breath; it gets caught halfway and she coughs into a closed mouth, chest rattling. It has Joel frowning, which isn’t what she wants.
His hands rise to either side of her face, fingers snaking behind her ears and into her loose hair.
“Can ya’ hear me alright?” He moves her head softly from side to side, peeking at her ears.
Her brain still isn’t quite all there yet, but even still, she clocks it as a weird question and her brows knit together, not sure how to answer.
With his thumb, he rubs hard at the edge of her temple, trying to brush something away. He stops for a second, and with her head still firmly between both of his hands, tilts it gently.
“You’ve got some blood -“
Her face scrunches as the queasiness returns.
“-and you haven’t…” he trails off quickly, diverting to: “ears fine?”
Oh.
She nods her head, body replying before her still sluggish brain can muster up some words.
Joel nods back, small short strokes, and untwines his hands from behind her ears, but does not drop them away fully. Instead, he gently brushes some hair out of her face, and with equal care plucks at some remaining stubborn strands that have caught in drying splats of blood. His lips go tight in a line as he does it, nostrils flaring like he’s mad, even though the rest of him doesn’t quite match. She’s seen angry Joel - his face now isn’t quite it.
“Suppose it shock or som’thin then,” he mutters, lips barely moving, words practically inaudible had she not been staring right at his mouth.
His head twitches back and forth as his hands drop to her shoulders. “Gonna head us into the woods - use the trees as cover in case we got some people followin’.”
He squeezes her shoulders. Maybe it’s meant to reassure her, but it just feels strange.
Strange - like the people in this place. No, strange is an understatement for them.
She wonders if he knows what they are.
Her eyes move back to the Lake. It’s still there. Waiting. An easy way out. Maybe the only way out, if they are being trailed by whoever else is back there. She doesn't want to let it go.
“Ellie?”
Perhaps she should say something, explain they’re not just people.
“Need to get off the shore, away from the lake. Find somewhere to hol’up,” he repeats.
“Tiny little pieces.”
She rather drown.
“You understandin’ me?”
He cranes his neck to catch her gaze.
Her mind screams that leaving is not the right thing to do, but she’s never not followed one of his plans.
“Ellie?”
She shuts her eyes, blocks Joel out, listens to the wind pound the water heavily into the ice and rock. Her chest burns as she takes another breath.
“Do what I say, when I say it.”
Opening them back up , she gulps down, and with a nod, says, “Okay.”
- - - - - -⋆❆⋆- - - - - -
It was a bad idea.
The tree cover isn’t unbearably dense, but the snow is. The blanket of powder is uneven and thicker than at the shoreline, and their boots sink deep, at times unexpectedly up to Joel’s shins and her knees.
Every time her boot disappears beneath the white, a little more snow weasels in. She got new socks from Maria - thick and hearty- but they are on the floor of the basement somewhere, dried blood acting like starch, fabric stiff and crunchy after using them as a sponge to mop Joel’s insides off his abdomen. The older pair she is wearing now are worn thin, and they are no match against the iciness.
It’s like she is stepping on tiny slivers of glass, and each uncomfortable step forward whittles down her remaining stamina. It has the numbness dusting off her as if she’s one of Joel’s carving sticks, and slowly but surely, her core’s exposed - raw and aching.
And she just can’t fucking take it.
“Joel.” His name crumbles in her mouth as she tries to get his attention, voice cracky and scratchy - pathetic.
But he catches it nonetheless, arm draped around her shoulder squeezing her closer into his side. “Soon,” he mutters into the top of her head as his hand brushes up and down her arm.
Her body reacts before his reply even settles in her brain, feet stopping in place.
Joel keeps moving, tugging her forward as him arm drags against her back. Already unsteady, she stumbles forward, barely able to keep upright. It doesn’t help that every time she moves her eyes, the world rocks, the horizon sloshing up one side of her vision and then coming back to sway over to the other - left to right, right to left.
She’s never been on a boat before, but she’s seen pictures and read books and she’s pretty sure this is the same reason why people get seasick. The last thing she wants to do is vomit in the snow, and her body is telling her to just close her eyes, but letting her guard down- losing sight of Joel - is sickening too.
The image of his pack and rifle jaggedly bobbing against his back as he limps away stays in her head as her eyes close. The sound of his boots crunching into the snow grows fainter as he moves ahead.
Just a short break .. “just a few seconds,” she mumbles.
She’s not exactly sure what part of her body produces the phony assurance. In her bones, it feels like a big fat lie, and her heart wants her to stay nestled next to Joel, and her brain knows that if she stops she’s dead, so perhaps it’s the same unidentifiable part that urged her to close her eyes in the first place.
His steps pause, and then the crunching intensifies, footsteps resonating loudly as he gets closer to her again.
“Can’t stop.”
His hand encircles hers with a gentle squeeze.
A flicker of a memory plays out on the back of her eyelids: her and Joel with the patrol outside of Jackson. Then it had been “get behind me” punctuated by two squeezes she could feel firmly even beneath her thick winter gloves. In the grip of his hand, her fingers twitch subtly, stirred by the memory.
“Need ta’ keep goin’,” he rumbles lowly as he gently tugs at her arm, urging her to continue walking with him as he makes to turn back around. Her right foot slips forward with his tug, but otherwise, she remains rooted in place. A disapproving whine escapes her throat when his grip on her hand stays unyielding, even when she tries to gently pull it free.
She just needs a minute - one minute- she knows she can’t, knows she shouldn’t - but she just needs a break - one minute to catch her breath.
Her jaw sets hard, molars scraping against each other, eyes clenching til the blotches of colors behind her lids become stars.
Just a minute to catch her breath.
He gives her another small squeeze - “need’ta get further.”
Further is the last thing she wants right now.
Everything feels disgustingly heavy- her brain, her bones. If she takes another step, she’ll crack, shatter into a million pieces, body brittle.
She gives it more of an effort this time and attempts to harshly yank her hand out of his - it's more of a squirm, but it has her tripping back with the effort, and then suddenly she’s looking up at a grey spinning sky.
Out of the corner of her eye, she can see the snow coming up against her face - she’s sunk in deep several inches - and stunned she’s not quite sure what to do. Being flat feels nice for a heartbeat - she can catch her breath - but then the chill begins to seep in. Joel’s coat is keeping the cold off her back, but she can feel it settling in through her hair and nipping at the tips of her ears and fingers.
“You don’t ever lie down in the snow, capiche?” Joel had scolded her once. She stopped to make a snow angel - harmless she thought - seen pictures about it but never tried it herself. He hauled her up out of the dusting of snow and lectured her about hypothermia, about falling asleep in it, slipping away without even realizing your going until it’s too late.
There’s a part of her whispering to let it happen - probably the same part that told her to stop walking, close her eyes, tug her hand away … drown … -but she doesn’t want to slip away, not forever. She’s tired, but not like that.
She blinks away the specs of snow caught in her lashes, draws in a dry breath, and rolls off her back before the allure of stillness pulls her any deeper. A sharp pain flares up her side, ribs pulling with the movement. Her arms tremble as she pushes against the ground, working to lift her chest off the snow and get onto all fours.
With a blink, the snow is cold tan tile. Her heart jumps into the bottom of her throat, pounds against it like it’s trying to escape - no, no she’s supposed to be trying to escape.
“Gotta… get out.”
She blinks again - hard - and the ground is white. Gripping into it, her fingers curl into the snow.
“Get up,” she corrects.
Her legs feel like dead weight as she tries to shift them against the thick powder, knees noticeably growing wet. When she pushes up on her arms more fully, locking out her elbows, her shoulders burn. She can’t help but to let a pained gasp slip free, and she pauses, suddenly feeling out of breath.
She hears Joel’s strained grunt before she feels his presence beside her. Her body jolts and tenses as she feels his hands on her again, stronger this time, lifting her with a groan that reverberates through his chest and into hers. His fingers dig into her sides - firm but not rough - like he only has one shot at this and has to make it count. Catching a glimpse of him, it's probably true - his face is pale and tight with effort, sweat beading along his brow despite the cold.
“It’s okay,” he murmurs, voice a rough whisper in her ear. “I got ya’.”
She leans back into him as she’s pulled standing. It’s inadvertent at first, but then the feeling of something solid against her back begins to feel nice and she lets her body go more - a move that has Joel sucking in a non-appreciative breath in her ear. He moves away once her feet are under her, brushing snow off her back as he comes around her front.
He regards her for a long minute, a twitch of his brows the only sign he isn’t a frozen statue in front of her. Her face must give something away because before she can find even the simplest of words to say she’s exhausted and sorry and she wants to keep going but it's fucking hard, he’s dropping his head with a little shake. One hand holding his stomach while the other is planted on his hip, he heaves out a long deep sigh that rivals the wind.
She can’t help but focus on the small little snowflakes sticking to his hair, adding much more white to its already peppery color. She’s never seen someone with fully white hair - most people didn’t last that long anymore. She wonders if Joel will make it to white, or if this is the closest he’ll get.
Up until last week, she couldn’t imagine him dying, much less of old age; he was just too Joel. But after seeing him bleed out and wither away on the cold basement floor for days and days, and now seeing him act differently, doubt is creeping its way in.
For the first time since walking away she steals a glance back. She’s not able to catch all that much over her shoulder, but just through the tops of the trees is a plume of dark smoke. Seeing it does something, because suddenly she can smell it now too - a smoky mix of pine and chemicals sauntering through the air, drifting in behind them, following their tracks - following them.
“Elllliiieee Elllliiieee”
She doesn’t want his grays and the speckles of snow to be as far as he gets. Steeling herself, she sucks in a breath, holds it in her chest, and opens her mouth to tell him she’ll walk but she doesn’t get that far.
He lifts his head, his brows knitted so deeply together they are one line, voice quieter then she’s ever heard.
“Can ya’ push a lil’ longer?”
He has all of three tones - pleading like this has never been one of them.
Immediately she wants to say yes just to make things better - make Joel sound more Joel, but her slack jaw snaps closed, surprised by his tone. There eyes connect; his are wet - just the start- waterline glistening. She swallows down rough, throat still dry. This all feels wrong. This doesn’t feel like them.
He doesn’t wait for an answer.
“Fine…that’s -“ He looks past her, eyes scanning from side to side, “- that’s alright kiddo.”
His voice carries a certain sadness that has her stomach turning into a knot. She wants to tell him they can stick with his plan, stay in the woods - she’ll do just about anything to keep him safe, isn’t about to throw that away after a week of keeping him alive - but she’s tired. So fucking tired. And it’s a selfish sorta tired because she wants to think of Joel, be responsible for him like how he’s always saying he’s responsible for her, but that’s exhausting -it’s been exhausting.
Making the call for them - it's what she wants and what she doesn’t want.
“Just - we’ll go back to the shoreline- where the snows ain’t so bad.”
He reaches for her backpack, discarded on the ground when she tripped backward, and she weakly raises her arm to it, but he slings it over his back with a grimace. The moment is brief, but she catches the wince of discomfort he tries to mask with a strained smile as his hand slides back over the area of his stab wound.
“I’ll take it, ‘ust focus on walkin’,” he instructs with a curt nod, reaching his hand out toward her. She stares at it for a minute before slipping her hand into his and giving him a lethargic nod back.
- - - - - -⋆❆⋆- - - - - -
It catches up to her out of nowhere.
The steady increase of tiredness was only a primer for the main event- a full body zap of depletion that has her on the cusp of falling asleep upright.
She breathes in and she’s tired and cold and wants to sit down and then she’s breathing out and utterly exhausted.
One step her body is aching - it sucks but it’s bearable - and then the next it feels leeden, like her skin and muscles are metal trapping one long throb of pain just below the surface, a perpetual cramp.
She looks down to make sure her feet are still moving forward with Joel’s and the urge to close her eyes is completely irresistible - body desperately seeking out a reprieve from the white snow that burns into her retinas.
When she goes to open them once it’s like trying to unstick glue.
She pries them open another time and they snap back closed almost immediately.
When she tries again, she only manages to get her right open - face contorting into a pained sort of wink.
She lets it go, both eyes coming closed, telling herself she’s just resting them - just for a minute. She relies on her ears instead, listening to the sound of Joel’s boots stepping beneath them - 1 .. 2 ..1.. 2 - and then her own keeping pace - 1 .. 2 ..1.. 2.
The dark behind her inner eyelids is gentle and calming- reminds her of sleep.
All she wants to do is sleep.
He tells her they will soon. She hadn’t meant to voice the thought aloud but she must’ve.
Using the hand not locked in Joel’s grip, she goes to wipe at her eyes. The cuff of his coat hangs over it, and the damp and frozen fabric is scratchy against her lids. She wasn’t necessarily expecting it to be soothing, but she wasn’t expecting it to be so irritating either - she just wanted the bleariness to go away - it almost does the opposite.
“Keep’em open baby.”
There is only one person he could be talking to but something about it doesn’t sound like it’s for her - even so, she cracks open her eyes again.
Her feet drag. If the snow was any deeper, her tracks would show as long hash marks - tip of her boot drawing lines - but instead they trawl the stones of the shore, digging them up with a long rattling rhythm.
“C'mon,” Joel encourages as his hands sneak into her armpits, hoisting up her sagging body. She’s not exactly sure when, but he’s come more around her back, not fully, but enough to where he could easily catch her if she suddenly pitched backward.
Which she does.
There’s a change in the ground, the give she’s grown accustomed to swapping to a hardness - metal by the sound of the echoing clangs of their footsteps. It’s beneath her just a moment before she’s slipping, one foot skating forward while the other slides back, skidding on slick ice that coats it. Her eyes jolt open - whites and greys and dreary blues storming in, unwelcome. Joel catches her with a grunt, pushes her back into place, and her eyes fall shut again.
“Just a few more minutes,” he whispers.
A few more minutes.
The words hit her brain with a delay, but when she finally processes them, enough intrigue bubbles up to prompt a reaction. With a few measured blinks, her eyes chip open and she takes in their surroundings. They stand at the base of a silver-colored ramp leading to a long, sprawling dock. Connected to it is a large building that sits about 10 yards back, its silhouette stark and ominous against the wintry landscape. She had seen the building before—it was impossible to miss, even from the far side of the lake, but she hadn’t realized they were heading toward it.
She hadn’t realized how close they had come to the water either. Its frozen expanse stretches out before them, deceptively inviting now that the wind has died down and soothed the swells.
Jump in. Drown.
Her tired eyes set hard on the inky ripples. She’s just inches away, an arm's reach. Pitch herself over the railing and she would be in. Joel would be too slow to stop her, the fabric of his coat slipping through his fingers as she splashes down. Its would anchor her just below the surface. It would be dark but she would look up and see light shimmering through a glassiness. It would be calm. Peaceful. Restful.
“Ellie?”
One of Joel’s hands comes firmly between her shoulder blades, the other on her hip, and the unsettling urge departs from her body as quickly as it came.
“A few more minutes,” she confirms.
- - - - - -⋆❆⋆- - - - - -
She’s losing small bits of time - she’s with it enough to know it, but not enough to stop it.
When her eyes come open again, she’s staring at the bottom edge of a partially open metal roll door, divots kissed with frost and snow and rust.
“Ellie,” Joel’s voice calls, distant but echoey, rolling in from the gap, “gotta come under.”
Her eyes flick down to her hand when she feels him give it a small squeeze. It’s hanging outright, pulled forward to the other side, Joel already past and through. Her eyes scale the metal, traveling upward to see the building in full. It’s a bad idea. The white brightness from the sky burns, and when her eyes snap close, her head spins. It tests her balance, knees threatening to buckle and give out. Somehow she stays upright. Maybe cause Joel’s hand is still on hers.
Or was. His hand drops away. It’s followed almost immediately by a groan, rough and throaty. Pushing her eyes open, she finds him now next to her on the outer side.
“ - st’bend a little, okay?” He tells her softly, gently pushing at the base of her head, but not forcing her to move.
She’s not sure how long he’s been waiting, but he has that face - eyes soft, yet jaw set hard and rigid; he’s losing his patience and trying to hide it.
“Oh,” she breathes out, face twitching with a cast of confusion. “Under..Right,” she mumbles, bending her neck and slipping under the metal pane, unsure of exactly what she is stepping into. It looked like a garage door from the outside, but that doesn’t seem right so close to the lake. She squints against the darkness, eyes adjusting as Joel follows her under, another large groan punctuating his efforts.
Slowly the black bleeds away and she can see that it is a garage - well, sort of.
The shadowed expanse of the room is lined with long towering racks stacked with a rainbow assortment of slender boats. Scaling high, they almost hit the wood-beamed ceiling.
Recognition flickers in her mind—kayaks, or something like it, for racing. Officer Martin had several dusty photographs of them pinned to a corkboard in his cluttered office, faded and yellowed at the edges, but still clear in their depiction of some pasta-sounding race on the Charles.
Boston.
An unexpected twinge of sadness flutters in her chest, rattling her otherwise numb insides.
They hardly ever talk about it.
Boston ended with “rule 1, you don’t bring up Tess, ever.” And she knows it wasn’t his home, or at least not his real home, but it was hers.
And she does miss it.
A big part of home is dead - she knows that - but left behind somewhere there is still her books, and posters, and music, and drawings, and Franklin the friendly dorm rat, and Kathy in the kitchen who would give her extra applesauce, and Lieutenant Leo who would let her run a lap less, and of course Winston in the tent in the alley who would share a swig of his whiskey when she snuck out to the park.
She used to know the ins and outs of everything in her little QZ bubble - “smart as a whip” Captain Kwong told her once - but then the bubble popped; and the comfort of knowing was gone. She’s had to learn and relearn everything - even the things that should be natural - like how to walk, how to sleep, how to breathe, how to fight, how to trust - who to trust.
And she knows it’s silly, but part of her wonders if she would miss it less if she could talk about it more.
And, another part of her wonders, that maybe missing Boston made a blindspot. That if she hadn’t been quietly longing for some semblance of the old comforts - trying to be Boston Ellie - perhaps she never would have made a dumb trade and talked to dumb men and been caught in a dumb cage ready to be eaten and -
She flinches, shoulders darting to her ears as Joel’s hand connects with her back and gently nudges her forward.
She hadn’t realized she had stopped moving, but it doesn’t come as a surprise, it’s just another flash of lost time.
He keeps his hand firmly planted between her shoulder blades as he leads them toward an opening in the back wall - a shadowy entrance to a staircase.
“Okay, gonna go up and check it’s clear,” he tells her, ducking his head up into the stairwell before quickly looking back to her. He murmurs a brief, "stay here," as he pushes her into an adjacent corner, dropping their bags down and swinging his rifle round front in a series of distinct motions.
Her eyes connect with the intersection of the two walls adorned by long wispy ropes of spider webs and bits of leaves and dust. She gets stuck tracing the white lines as her mind flashes her images of Boston - of derelict buildings, and dorm blocks with dusty halls, and the timeout corner in Ms.Boyer’s classroom drenched in webs. Mind muddled, her brain gets lost, takes a wrong turn and presumes she is back there completely, standing in punishment for something she can’t quite remember.
Her hands feel cold, but tacky. Eyes flicking down, she sees their red hue. This must be something to do with the blood. Before she can think more on it, there is the metallic cock of a gun in her ear accompanied by a deep heavy sigh, and the combination has “sick kids get slugs” chiming in her head.
She had let her secret spill - “Look at it, look at it!” - and it has her lined up on the wall. That’s how pasty Peter Perkins went - bit and shot in the head.
Bracing for the inevitable, her body holds in one long clench, heartbeat a subtle whooping in her ears as she bears down against the incoming bullet, but instead there are just hands hitting her shoulders, and someone twisting her front ways.
“Jesus Christ,” Joel heaves out despondently, warm breath hitting the back of her neck on the spin.
Seeing his face has her mind clicking back to the right time and she gives him a nod, trying to conceal her embarrassment. She knows she has been losing time, but blanking out and thinking she is somewhere else are two very different things.
“Need me, ya just yell.” He instructs, ducking his head and widening his eyes to look at her - make sure she is really listening.
Ellie gives him another nod. They are starting to feel mechanical.
“Be back.” His voice is a gravelly whisper as he moves away, steps silent yet swift as he climbs the stairs and leaves her alone.
And then within a blink he is in front of her again.
She really swears it was just a blink this time, but their packs are already hanging off his shoulders and the rifle is restrapped securely around his back. A whine of disappointment escapes her body - she doesn’t want to keep going blank.
“It’s open- we can go up.”
She blanks out on the stairs or almost blank - must have closed her eyes because there’s a lingering sensation of her feet knocking into the steps, but can actually remember climbing them. And then the next thing she knows, she’s standing in a room, facing a new wall.
And not just a wall. It’s a wall covered in large dusty photo frames flanking a massive deer head, tacked up, staring back at her.
It shows the ravages of time, with its once proud antlers now coated in a thick layer of dust. Cobwebs stretch from them back to the wall, extending out like some macabre crown. The fur on its face looks matted and grimy, and discolored, like a young infected before the fungal plates set in. It’s dead, clearly, but its eyes - those somehow seem still full of life, piercing through filth and glinting with a soul.
Its gaze feels familiar, but she can’t quite remember why. She knows she’s playing with fire when she lets her eyes close - she doesn’t want to invite the blankness back, not when something in her is whispering that this buck is important - but she needs this to be able to think more.
Rewinding the day’s events as much as she can, it’s there, subtle - an itchy memory - scabbed over but irritated. She wants to pick at it - pick it apart- see all of it, but her brain just can’t do it.
It flashes behind her eyelids and she almost has it, but it’s gone when her eyes pop open, body jumping at an unexpected “all clear,” in her ear.
The floorboards creak loudly as Joel settles in beside her. She glances to her left and catches his face -some strange mix of hurt, sad, confused, tired. It’s so far from any of his normal expressions that he might as well not be Joel.
She doesn’t like that.
She shifts back to the dusty black orbs, trying hard to form words that make sense with the memory stuck on the tip of her tongue.
It has him in it - normal Joel, not this one next to her.
“I did that -,” she begins and then quickly abandons, not feeling right about it.
Barely wasting a breath she tries again. “I got it pregnant..like you said to,” she flatly tells him, voice soft.
She’s vaguely aware the words aren’t quite right, but it feels right, and she just hopes it’s enough to make that weird little look slide off his face. She turns her head slowly to look at him, and finds that it’s done just the opposite.
His brows have raised and crunched even closer together pecking a kiss at one another.
“Like you love it?” She offers, dropping her register just a bit to mimic his gruff voice, while she fights to keep her eyes from dropping closed again, wanting to see his reaction.
His hand comes to the back of her head and gently brushes down it, head bobbing as he strings together a series of short nods.
He doesn’t say anything as he angles her away.
She doesn’t like that.
- - - - - -⋆❆⋆- - - - - -
He puts them in the farthest corner, wedges them out of the line of sight of grimey glass windows and open doorways - back behind a large chair covered in a once white sheet now yellow and green and speckled black with mold. His hands rest atop her shoulders as he leads her there, feet shuffling meagerly across the wood until finally she blinks and is staring into the dark damp crook of a wall.
The deja’vu is strong enough to cut through the fuzziness and for a second she wonders if she fell asleep standing up, never climbed the stairs, imagined the deer, and them upstairs - is about to turn her head to check - but then Joel is scooting around her, pushing himself into the limited space left between her and the corner, and she focuses on him rather than dwelling on what’s real and what’s not.
Bracing both hands on either wall, he sucks in a breath and slides down, grunting as he jaggedly descends in inched chunks, jaw clenched and lips tight as he drops to the floor.
Her eyes are slow to find his again; when they do meet, he gives her a nod as he rests his head back and takes several measured breaths. Her eyes get stuck on the pronounced rise and fall of his chest; she hasn’t seen it move like that in a week, and the contrast has something twitching in her gut.
“Something’s wrong, look at his breathing!” Is what it’s screaming to her brain, but she’s so fucking tired that the signal falls flat, lingering as nothing more then a mental note of “that’s different.”
Her name comes out of his mouth as he positions his rifle and pack to his right and situates his legs so there is enough space for her to sit between.
“Ellie,” he says again, waiting for something, clearly.
“Sit bah- ,” he pushes in a heavy breath, words fading as he tugs at her hand.
This time she doesn’t have to think about moving her body, her knees give out on his command, and when they inevitably get caught up beneath her, Joel’s already fixing the issue. His hands slip under her armpits and he’s turning and tugging her back against him before she can even really understand what’s going on. She must tense then, because he is softly telling her “it’s okay, it’s okay - just relax,” as he maneuvers her, even though her arms and legs feel like uncooperative limp noodles.
“Thatta girl, go back,” he wheezes into th crown of her head, breath broken as she settles against him. He huffs out a groan and she immediately stills when she feels his body tense up behind her.
“It’s - it’s alright,” he adjust himself a fraction, “sorry, just -“ His hooked arms push at her shoulders, and she sinks back into his chest.
She can feel it moving now, but it doesn’t feel as strong as it looked. It hitches when it puffs out into her, and rattles when it settles back down. She can feel the air coming out of his nose and hitting her scalp, warm but weary - can hear it too, air steadily pushing through a stuffiness, over and over, in and out, in and out.
Her eyes don’t come open on the next blink, and she tracks the pattern of it all mentally in the darkness- drawing an undulating line that dips and rises with him. She’s not sure how long she traces it, how long it takes sitting like this, but finally she asks a question she should’ve hours ago.
“Joel?”
He replies with a hum she can feel more than hear.
“Hurt still?”
Words are still not coming out like she wants, and she considers trying again - gets lost in the thought about what to try to say that she doesn’t manage anything at all before Joel’s settling his cheek into her head and taking a long breath in.
She hangs on to it - a dot at the top of a peak of a line behind her eyes - waits for the reply that she thinks is about to come, but then there’s nothing. He just shifts again, arm snaking out from here’s and pulling the rifle closer toward them. It scrapes across the worn wood floor, echoing in the silence as the only reply. Another couple of beats without an answer has her trying to open her eyes to turn her head up and look up at him. They don’t make it more than a crack - only catching her eyelashes - so instead she twitches her shoulder, hoping it’s enough to pull his attention. She starts again:
“Are-“
“-nah, doin’ better.”
He cuts in quickly, even though the words are groggy at best. It’s almost certainly a lie, and part of her brain does know that, but she’s too tired to do anything, but take them at face value.
She hums in an acknowledgment.
”Don’t worry,” he adds, left hand finding hers and squeezing it - weaker than the others today- “we’re just ..goin’ to rest, for a few now.”
Rest for a few. That’s good. Rest sounds good.