Chapter Text
Everything passes in a whirlwind of grabbing hands and shaky voices. He cradles Ellie to him. She's lost so much weight; even wrapped in the quilt, she's all bones, too angular. While they're in the waiting room, she squints up at him. His chest lurches. It feels like flying and falling at the same time.
“‘M gonna die,” she mumbles hoarsely. He squeezes her hand.
"No," Joel says with as much conviction as he can muster. "You're not, baby. You're not."
Not if he can help it.
He yells at the doctors to hurry the fuck up.
Joel takes her home with a brown paper bag filled with chalky white pills that she’s to take twice a day: once when she wakes up, and once when she goes to sleep. She’s always groggy, so he has to set the pills under her tongue, pour water into her mouth, tip her head back and plug her nose. It’s effective, but it freaks Ellie out when she wakes with a mouthful of water and dissolving pills. Four times she’s scratched the hell out of his arms, three times bit his hand, five times choked down the pill and immediately started sobbing, and one time just fully swung at his jaw. She’d missed, barely. He’s still nursing the angry red lines up his forearm, though. He knows Ellie would feel terrible, so if she asks, he’ll say he adopted another feral alley cat to keep her company. She’d laugh, and hopefully forget what she was asking.
The pills completely knock her out, so she sleeps for most of the week. He actually gets Tommy to watch her one evening so he can walk over to the clinic and ask if it’s normal for her to have slept for so long. (They said it was.) Joel starts to think they might be okay.
Ellie's coming back to herself in little starbursts of consciousness. It's as if she's caught in a riptide, choking on brine and being flung head over heels in endless currents. But every so often, she'll surface and gasp and remember. Then the water draws her back under.
She's underwater right now. Salt fills her nose. She thinks about the blood of a green-eyed girl, the scream of sirens. Her stomach sinks.
“I’m so scared, Joel,” Ellie whispers, like a secret. “I don’t know where I am.”
The hand on her back pauses for a moment. She can’t imagine that’s a reassuring thing to hear from a feverish kid.
Everything is so hazy. Thinking feels like wading through mud.
“You’re in Jackson, baby. With me ‘n Tommy.”
“‘M gonna be okay?”
Joel smiles, soft, sad. His eyes crinkle a little at the corners.
“You’re gonna be okay,” he echoes.
She’s so confused.
“Am I… sick?”
This makes Joel look even sadder, which Ellie didn’t even think was possible.
“Yeah, kid. You’re real sick— but we’re gonna get you fixed up, yeah? You’ll be good as new in no time,” Tommy butts in.
His tone is all weird. Like he’s trying not to set her off.
“No clinic?” She asks.
The brothers exchange a look.
“We went yesterday, honey.”
Damn.
The smell of antiseptic drifts through the air, and it freaks her out more that she knows she’s imagining it. She fumbles for Joel’s hand, eyes blown wide.
Every time she thinks Joel can’t look any more heartbroken, he proves her wrong. “Whoa, honey, it’s okay. It’s okay— it’s okay. Jus’ breathe.”
Ellie sucks in a straggled, pathetic inhale and looks him dead in the eyes.
“ Joel ,” she says, and it’s so many things at once. A plea, a question, a scold, a promise.
He just holds her hand tighter.
And that’s enough for her.
Joel wakes to the sound of something crashing against the floor. Before he knows it, he’s in the doorway of Ellie’s room, hands reaching for the gun at his hip that he knows isn’t there.
She’s sitting upright, hands curled into the sheets. Coughs wrack her whole body; tears stream down her face.
“Hey,” he says, rounding the corner of her bed. “It’s okay. Just breathe, Ellie. Breathe.”
She coughs so hard she gags. “Can’t—”
Her arm shoots out to steady herself on something , and her hand should’ve hit the lamp on her nightstand, but it already toppled to the floor (the source of the noise he heard earlier, he presumes).
When her coughs subside, she hunches over her knees and wheezes. Joel rubs her back, slow, gentle— her ribs probably ache.
“Joel?” Her voice sounds awful, that one word all cracked and broken.
“Yeah, Ellie?”
“My throat,” she starts, speaking in broken wheezes. “Hurts— so bad.”
Joel never liked feeling powerless. He remembers all the times Sarah had come down with something awful, and he’d sat at her bedside with all this buzzing energy in his hands: to heal, to fix , because that’s what Joel did. But there was nothing he could do then, and there’s nothing he can do now.
“I know, baby. I’m sorry.”
She tries to push herself upright with shaking arms and fails. “Do you remember— do you… remember Sam?”
He doesn’t think he could forget if he tried.
“Hurts— to talk. Do you remember Sam?”
Joel thinks he understands. He’d read somewhere that sign language was good for the development of your baby, so he’d taken it up with Sarah. It was a long, long time ago, but he reckons some stuff stuck.
Remember what? He signs.
For the first time since he found her on the kitchen floor, he sees something like clarity in her eyes. Like choppy seas finally gone clear. She smiles, sniffles.
That , she replies.
“I remember,” he says, real quiet. “What did you wanna talk about?”
Ellie swallows, and it looks like it pains her. Head hurts. Throat hurts. All hurts.
He takes her clammy hand in his. Her knuckles protrude more cruelly than they had last month. He hates that he can see the weight she’s dropped. “I’m sorry.”
Feels like… Ellie thinks for a moment, then points to herself and holds up two fingers in the air in front of her. Then, she signs train and mows over the place that imaginary Ellie was standing. Joel didn’t understand much of the classifier grammar concepts in ASL, but he can gather that much.
“I bet. Maybe you should go back to sleep for a little while, yeah?”
Ellie blinks at him, slowly processing what he’s saying, presumably. After a few seconds, she nods and burrows herself down in her pile of blankets.
Stay? She signs. Her eyelids flutter and droop with exhaustion, but he can still see the sting of fear beneath them.
I promise , he signs back.
I’m tired. Too warm.
It takes him a second to figure out what she’s signing because her hands are trembling so much, but he gets it eventually.
“I know,” he repeats. “Go back to sleep, baby.”
He doesn’t have to tell her twice.
Ellie fully wakes up eight days after she’s taken to the clinic. She only knows this because Joel told her so. She doesn’t remember much of her feverish, medicated state.
She peels her eyes open after several tries. Relief washes over her like ice water; wherever she’d gone while she was sick felt all-encompassing, never-ending. Ellie was afraid she’d be there forever-- too warm and terrified and weightless.
She blinks and Joel is there, cupping her cheek and saying something she can’t hear over the dull thrum of her heartbeat in her ears. The corners of her eyes are crusted with sleep and her lips are so, so dry. She doesn’t feel well.
Being awake is exhausting. And it’s bright. Ellie doesn’t like it anymore.
Ellie turns her head back into the pillow, eyes slipping shut. Joel makes a small noise of protest, but then she raises her hands and draws a line down the column of her throat: thirsty . Almost immediately, a broad hand braces the back of her head, the rim of a plastic cup is tipped into her lips. She gulps down the water desperately.
Joel pulls the cup away from her, sets it down with a crinkle that resounds in the quiet room.
“How’re you feelin’, kiddo?”
Not sick, she signs, thumb flicking out from under her chin and middle fingers brushing her forehead and chest. Just bad.
Joel frowns. “Sorry, one more time.”
She repeats the signs, slower, and Joel hums in understanding. He smooths down her tangled hair. “Yeah, that’s because your body went through a lot this past week. But you’re okay now, yeah?”
Ellie nods weakly.
“Why don’t you get some more rest?”
I just slept all week. Not even tired. She exaggerates the sign for tired , rolling her eyes at Joel. He laughs at her, just a little.
In the end, Joel takes out a book and reads to her; within five minutes, she’s out like a light.
Joel pulls the blankets up to her chin. There's another cup of water and her next dose of while pills on the nightstand for when she wakes up. Ellie murmurs something in her sleep, rolls towards him with a scrunch of her eyebrows. Her brown hair spills around her face in ripples, shifting in time with her breath. He listens for her breathing, and it's clearer now. Less labored. Her face is slowly regaining its color, her lips less chapped. For the first time in weeks, Joel feels his shoulders drop from around his ears, lets the tension in his chest unravel.
She's okay, he tells himself. We're okay.
We're okay.