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Thick smoke, biting wind, bone-chilling ice, the metallic tang of blood. There’s shadows in the corner of her vision, hands reaching out for her. She’s running down the stairs into the grimy basement with her eyes locked on the limp and gray body laying upon the mattress. The steps feel endless, like she has been maneuvering them for hours. But she can’t stop-she has to get to him. She has to save him. She reaches out as she nears the landing of the stairs, only to be jerked back suddenly by her hair. Her gaze lifts and meets the man’s icy blue eyes, cold and shimmering with mirth.
Though she can’t hear herself, she knows she is screaming from the way her throat is raw and her jaw is aching. When she looks back down to the mattress, it is empty. Only old, brown blood stains remain. The view of the now-empty mattress shrinks as she is dragged upstairs. She writhes in the man’s grasp, kicking and screaming and clawing with all her might. It’s useless. She failed. Joel’s dead and it’s her fault. She feels her body lurch downwards as if being suddenly dropped, her head collides with one of the steps, and everything goes black.
When her eyes open again, it’s dark, but it isn’t cold anymore. Not how she expects it to be, anyways. Her hands support her weight on a cold wooden floor, but she feels warm otherwise, a little sweaty even. Her eyes blink heavily through the darkness as her chest heaves, desperate for air. Wide eyes land on a window, through which she can see the moonlight trickling in. It illuminates the window seat and the small stack of books on the right side; a familiar stuffed giraffe plush sits against them. The giraffe that Joel had gifted her a few months ago. In Jackson. She wills herself to take a deep breath in and slowly exhale. She’s home. She’s safe.
Another fucking nightmare. As her vision adjusts and her heart rate evens out, Ellie moves so that she’s sitting cross-legged on the floor with her back against the bed. Joel isn’t here, so she couldn’t have actually been screaming like she felt in the dream. She pulls her dark blue comforter down to be wrapped around her shoulders.
Ellie vaguely registers a soft stinging sensation on her forehead, leading her to assume that a collision with the bed frame when she fell was what woke her. She notices her shaking hands when she brings one up to gingerly feel along the area. No blood, but it’ll probably give her a nasty bruise. She lets her hands fall into her lap.
In, two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four. Out, two, three, four. Rest, two, three, four. Just how Joel showed her. Joel. She has to—no. Slow down.
She forces her head to lean back against her mattress. Her gaze moves towards the myriad of glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling, another gift from Joel. She forces air in and out of her lungs.
Joel’s okay. It was a nightmare, you know that. He’s in the other room, chill the fuck out, her mind whispers. Joel is alive and David is dead. He’s dead. Joel is okay.
After a few long minutes, Ellie extracts herself from her bedsheets and tiptoes towards the window. She isn’t trying to be sneaky, but this house gets so quiet here in Jackson that any disruption sounds like thunder in her ears. There’s a thick layer of snow on the ground that she can see from the window, just as Joel had predicted earlier that evening with his weird old-man-knee-powers. It’s the heaviest snow she’s seen since they arrived in Jackson those months ago. The first winter since…
Since last winter.
Her eyes stay transfixed on the snow flurries outside the window for too long. The wooden floor is cold beneath her feet, which drags her mind back to that dimly lit basement, the cage, the burning building. The sound of Joel’s bed springs creaking as he shifts down the hallway pulls her back. Ellie quickly crosses the room to shut the curtains over the window and makes quick work of pulling on a pair of bright pink fuzzy socks, courtesy of Tommy’s last trip out. Though Ellie had warily raised her eyebrows at the color, she has to admit that they’re the warmest, coziest pair of socks she owns.
Once her feet are no longer in contact with the freezing floor, it’s easier to stay present in her own body. She follows her normal post-nightmare routine of stepping down the hallway to set her eyes on Joel. Ellie knows, logically, that he’s fine every time she goes to check. She knows that her nightmares are just that. Still, when her eyes land on Joel’s sleeping silhouette and hear his quiet snores, she feels like she can finally relax.
Sometimes she wakes up screaming. On those nights, Joel is there to hold her steady, keep her grounded, and coax her back to sleep by providing the warm spot in his bed closest to the wall so that she feels secure. Safe. Untouchable.
It’s something that she is endlessly embarrassed by, but it’s by no means new to them. In the aftermath of Silver Lake, the nightmares plagued her mind any time her eyes shut for long enough. During those days, she rarely got any sleep and if she did, it was short-lived and unrestful. Laying in Joel’s sleeping bag, wrapped in his jacket, with her head on his thigh and his hand on her back, kept the nightmares mostly at bay while they recovered.
He always tells her that he doesn’t mind, that he’s there to help her no matter what. He says that Sarah used to go to him all the time when she was scared. And while she appreciates him for sharing such memories, she can’t help but feel like a helpless little kid when she slides under his covers. She’d never even had a Joel for like, all of her life until two years ago, so relying on him for comfort so heavily now feels somewhat like a betrayal to herself. She’s a badass motherfucker who survived FEDRA, infected, fireflies, and a pedophilic cannibal. She shouldn’t need someone else to comfort her.
Still, when the nightmares are bad enough, she doesn’t hesitate to follow his gentle nudge into those strong arms. She childishly feels like she’s inside of a glowing force field, like she sees in Savage Starlight. Nothing can touch her when Joel’s arms are surrounding her. It’s nice, when she allows herself to bask in the feeling.
The past two nights have followed the same pattern. Ellie has a nightmare, wakes screaming and crying, Joel comforts her, leads her to his room, and tucks her in, Ellie falls into a fitful sleep while he stays up to ensure that any additional nightmares are intercepted as soon as possible. She tells him not to do so, but he’s too damn stubborn to listen. It eats at her, the guilt of knowing that she’s causing him to lose sleep. Joel works hard—patrols, contracting shifts, taking care of her, babysitting Benjamin, taking on various projects for their neighbors even when he doesn’t really know how to fix Ms. Johnson’s ice maker. Point is, he needs his sleep and she hates that he loses it because of her.
Tonight, it’s enough to see him in bed and watch him sleeping peacefully for a few moments from the hallway. Sure, maybe its a little creepy, and Joel would absolutely have a damn heart attack if he woke up to her watching him in the darkness, but who cares? It keeps her mind from floating away from her and it doesn’t involve interrupting Joel’s much-needed rest. Win-win.
Once she’s satisfied, Ellie carefully steps back into her room and closes the door. She sits at her desk and turns the lamp on to illuminate the surface. Joel seemed to be sleeping really heavily, so she doesn’t want to risk falling asleep and having another nightmare. He deserves some rest without her interruptions. She spends a while staring blankly at the open sketchbook before her, then grabs a pencil and starts drawing.
Eventually the sun starts to rise, so she turns her lamp off. She listens carefully for the sound of Joel waking and shuffling around. If he knows she’s been up all night, he’ll get those extra wrinkles around his eyes and forehead, and he’ll frown and be all concerned, and she just can’t deal with that today. She’s exhausted, guilt is eating at her already, and she just wants him to go about his day like normal. She’ll be fine.
When she can hear his sheets rustling and the shuffling of him moving around his room, she quietly hops back into bed, facing away from her door, and closes her eyes. She focuses on slowing her breathing and keeping her face slack as if she’s actually asleep. It isn’t too hard, considering that her muscles are weak from yesterday’s farm rotation and her body is gratefully sinking into the warmth of her bed.
When her door opens, her body jolts as if forgetting momentarily that the whole point was that she was supposed to be asleep. She doesn’t have to fake the heavy, sleepy blinks as she sits up and turns to face Joel. His eyes are soft and crinkled at the edges from a smile when they meet hers.
“Mornin’. Didn’t mean to scare you. Slept okay?”
“It’s okay, that’s just the effect your face has.” Ellie quips easily. She hopes he doesn’t press the issue of her sleep quality.
He scoffs at that, but amusement is clear in his eyes. “Alright, you little shit. I wanted to come by before I left. I got some of them sandwiches you like made in the fridge, so no excuses for skipping meals.”
“Listen man, I just get distracted sometimes! It’s not gonna kill me, we ate way less on the road, in case you forgot.”
“I didn’t forget, that’s why you can’t be skipping meals. You’re too damn skinny. Anyways, Tommy’ll bring you some dinner from the dining hall tonight.”
Her shoulders sag, eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “Why?”
“I mean, I could ask Maria if you want-“
“No, dumbass. Why not just meet me at the dining hall?”
Joel’s face does something weird at that question. His eyebrows furrow and his lips twitch slightly like he’s unsure if he wants to say something. He hesitates for a second before replying,
“I’m going on an overnight patrol, remember?”
Ellie is silent as the foggy cogs in her brain start to creak to life.
“We talked about it yesterday.”
Oh. They did talk about it.
In fact, they’d spent the morning bickering about it. This isn’t his first overnight patrol, and she’s fared just fine on his previous ones—aside from the unyielding feeling of anxiety at the bottom of her stomach from the moment he left to when he came home. However, with Ellie’s nightmares increasing in frequency and intensity as the weather grows colder, Joel had insisted that she stay with Tommy and Maria.
And boy, that had ruffled Ellie’s feathers. She isn’t some baby who needs to be watched. He disagreed every time she’d argue that she isn’t a kid, saying that he wanted her to be a kid because she didn’t have the chance to, blah blah. This had led them into the same circular argument that always arises when she tries to convince him of her maturity.
It didn’t develop into a full-blown argument—a true testament to Joel’s patience, considering how snappy she’s been with the lack of sleep—but it had ended tersely with him backing off about her staying with Tommy for the night. They didn’t talk about it for the rest of the day, and come dinner, they continued on as if the conversation had never happened at all.
“Yeah yeah, no! I know! Just slipped my mind.” She says, too quickly.
Joel doesn’t look convinced. If anything, he looks more concerned. “Tommy and Maria are right across the street if you need-“
“I know, Joel. Really, I just forgot for a second. I’ll be okay.” She tries again, putting forth her most genuine tone to avoid any more back-and-forth. He can’t be worrying about her when he’s outside of the walls on patrol, he has to be able to focus. She gives him a toothy grin, “I won’t even burn the house down.”
That earns her a small huff of laughter and a brief nod, “Okay. Okay.” Joel’s hands lift in a placating gesture. They fall back to his sides and he looks over at her. She can tell he wants to say something else, but she really doesn’t want to drag this out any longer so she interrupts him.
“Just don’t die out there, man.”
“Not a chance in hell.” His words are suddenly deathly serious, mirrored with the hard glint in his eyes.
Silence falls between them for a second. She glances towards the window, curtains still tightly drawn.
“What time will you be back?”
“Should be no later than noon tomorrow. But if you need anything-“
“I know, Joel. I know.” Her voice is exasperated now. Only part of it is her attempting to maintain her ‘normal’ facade.
“Alright. I’ll get out of your hair now.”
He leans forward to ruffle Ellie’s hair gently, a smile once again on his face. “Take care, kiddo.”
“You too, old man.”
With that, he offers her a smile and turns away, retreating from her room. When the door to her bedroom closes, she holds her breath. She can hear Joel downstairs shuffling around and grabbing his gear. She hears the door open and shut, followed by tense silence. She exhales slowly and glances at the clock on her wall. 6:30 AM to noon tomorrow. That’s a hell of a lot of time to kill, and she doesn’t even have school or any work shifts today.
The silence is deafening as she sits in her bed and, without thinking, her eyes slide over to the window again. The curtains are closed still, but she knows that beyond the glass is pure white, icy cold, and Joel is going out into it and she won’t be there to save him—
Stop. He’s fine. He’s going on patrol, he has other people with him. He’s okay. You’re okay, get a grip.
She shoves the covers off of herself and stands. She shakes her hands out and stretches as if to expel the thoughts from herself physically. With a sigh, she decides to find something to kill time.
She starts out drawing at her desk again, but that gets old fast since she had already been drawing for hours before Joel woke up. That, combined with the fact she’s running on roughly 8 hours of sleep combined over the past 72 hours, she’s getting increasingly frustrated with her mistakes and is having trouble focusing even more than usual. She slams her sketchbook closed with a huff and decides to switch gears.
She tries reading a book, but she can’t focus. Her eyes unfocus on the words on the page until they become blurry. She swears she can smell smoke in the air distantly, as if someone down the road has a fire going. Maybe they do. Maybe it’s just her stupid fucking brain taunting her again. No rest for the wicked, right?
After ten minutes of trying to read the same paragraph, she shuts the book with the same frustration as the sketchbook. She attempts to watch a movie—Jurassic Park, her favorite—but finds her mind wandering still. Without thinking, she bites at her cuticles and only notices when she tastes the metallic tang of blood. That shocks her back to reality for a second and she looks at her own hand with a mix of fear and surprise in her eyes. It’s not bleeding that much, but the taste of blood is really, really fucking with her right now. She pauses the movie to get a bandage and then returns to the couch with shaky legs. When the movie’s over, she still has that thrumming restless energy running through her. It’s only 9 AM. Fuck. Time to pull out the big guns.
She’s always been good at cleaning, even if she doesn’t particularly like it. It’s something that had been instilled in her at FEDRA—an easy way to stay out of trouble was keeping her space organized, and when she did get in trouble for other things, she sometimes got cleaning duty as punishment. Since arriving to Jackson, she’s slowly started accumulating trinkets, leaving laundry on the floor, letting toothpaste pile up on the ceramic of her bathroom sink. Joel pokes fun at her about it occasionally, but doesn’t get on her ass too much after one good-natured comment a few months ago sent her into a cleaning spiral.
One thing about cleaning though: it’s methodical, mindless work that takes just enough brain power to keep her thoughts at bay. She starts with washing dishes, dusting, sweeping, then mopping, then doing the laundry from both her and Joel’s rooms. She wipes down every surface she can think of. She makes her bed, then Joel’s bed. She cleans her bathroom sink, then Joel’s bathroom sink for good measure. She scrubs the toilets spotless. She even finds an old toothbrush and scrubs at all of the grout in the house before passing the mop over again. She organizes all of her books in alphabetical order, arranges her closet by color, and properly folds or hangs all of her clothes even though she really couldn’t care less about any of those things. Eventually, she runs out of ideas and her body is aching so she plops back onto her bed. The clock on her wall tells her that it’s only 4:15.
Her stomach grumbles, which reminds her of the sandwiches Joel mentioned having pre-made for her in his absence. Thinking of the sweet peanut butter and honey sandwiches that await her only make her stomach growl more, but she’s too tired to move. The sleep deprivation, physical labor, and exhaustion of staying in her body rather than floating off is finally catching up to her. She’ll just sit and rest for a minute, and then grab one.
There’s a book on her nightstand. It’s some sci-fi novel that Joel had picked up for her. Might as well give reading a try again. It’s probably better than sitting in silence. As the golden afternoon light filters through the sheer curtains over the window, Ellie sinks further onto the bed and opens the book. She finds it much easier to focus now that she’s expelled some of that energy, and the book is really good. She flies through the pages, and she’s about halfway through when her eyelids start growing heavy.
The book slips from her grasp as her eyes shut, though she occasionally lifts her head when she catches herself. Her mind spins fantastical depictions of scenes in the book which meld into real life scenarios and other dream realms. She floats between sleep and wake cycles, random dreams coming and going. They fly through her mind, never sleeping long enough to get a good grasp on any one dream. Then, she hears it.
“Ellie….”
That long, drawn out call. It’s enough to startle her fully awake, but she’s disoriented. Her room is dark now—she can barely read that the clock is at 7:00. She can’t remember what she was dreaming about. It must have been getting into nightmare territory though because her heartbeat is thrumming through her whole body and she struggles to takes deep breaths to bring her mind back to the present. It was just a dream.
“Ellie…”
Her blood turns to ice. She can almost hear the echo of it throughout the otherwise silent house. The call of her name was definitely, certainly not a dream. She’s awake now…right?
She hears the floorboards of the stairs creak, and she’s on her feet in an instant. She’s still disoriented from the nap, still unsure of how much time has passed or what’s real and fake, but her mind is starting to float away. She’s spent so much energy today just being present and functional. Now, she feels like she’s underwater.
He’s dead. He’s dead, and she’s here, she’s home, she’s okay. He’s dead, he has to be. She smashed his skull into itself and watched his brain gush onto the floor-Joel picked out the pieces of viscera from her hair. Is Joel okay? Where is he? He’s not here, but she can’t remember why. The fog in her brain is too thick to see clearly.
In her haze, she finds her knife on her bedside table and crawls under the bed. She can hear the footsteps nearing, thundering in her ears. Her eyes are wild as she looks through the space between her bed and the floor. This was a stupid fucking place to go, but where else could she go? She’s supposed to be safe here!
“Ellie?”
The voice sounds concerned now. It also sounds familiar, but not in a creepy religious cult leader who tried to eat her-way. Still, her heart is racing too fast and her breathing is shallow and she doesn’t know what’s going on and where the fuck is Joel—
Her bedroom door opens which causes her to flinch and grasp her knife so tight that her knuckles are white. The light turns on. She can see the outline of his cowboy boots. Since when did he—that’s not right.
“Ellie? Funny prank, but where are you hiding, kiddo? Joel’s gonna tan my hide if I have to tell him I couldn’t find you.”
Relief floods her body so fast that she feels like she’s going to melt into the floor. Her cheek lands heavily on the ground. She can barely feel her body.
“Tommy?”
The boots shuffle, but don’t move any closer to the bed.
“Ellie? Are you under the bed?”
“He’s dead, right?” She breathes, eyes closed as she tries desperately to stay in her body.
Tommy’s response is quick, panicked.
“No, honey, Joel’s fine. I was going to see if you wanted to come with me to the radio tower to check in with his patrol.”
“No, not Joel.”
“I’m afraid I’m not following, honey.”
“David.”
“Who?”
“He’s dead, right?” She hates that her voice wavers.
Tommy pauses to consider, but recovers quickly.
“Yeah, honey, he’s dead. David’s gone. Can you come on out?”
“Okay.”
Even though she agrees to leave the perceived safety of the underneath of her bed, she makes no move to crawl out. Instead, she just lays on the ground with her eyes still firmly shut and attempts to reign in her breathing. Following the wave of relief was an unsettling numbness in her limbs. She’s not sure how long it takes, but when she doesn’t have that tingling feeling in her hands and legs anymore, she slides herself into the light of her room.
Tommy’s crouched on the ground right by her door. His eyes are soft, warm, but concern is deeply etched onto his face. His eyes linger somewhere other than Ellie’s face for a moment. She glances down-oh. The knife probably isn’t a good look right now.
“I thought he was here. I know it’s stupid, I-“
She looks at her knife and closes it slowly. “I’m so tired, Tommy.” Tears sting behind her eyes, which is just shit-icing on the disaster cake.
Tommy, though, just nods in understanding. “I hear ya, Ellie-girl. Have you eaten today?”
She shakes her head in response. “Forgot.”
“Alright. Wanna try and eat now? I’m sure I can whip something up for you real quick.”
“Theres sandwiches in the fridge. Peanut butter and honey.”
“Well shit, why didn’t you say so? I might just have to steal ‘em, sorry Ellie.”
That gets the tiniest smile out of her. Tommy helps her up and wraps one arm around her shoulders in a gentle side-hug. She notes the brevity, the tenderness. He wants her to know that she can push him away. She doesn’t.
He leads her downstairs to the kitchen where they sit in silence as they eat the sandwiches. After swallowing her last bite, Ellie glances up at Tommy and then quickly away before their eyes can meet.
“David is dead. I killed him. Sometimes, my brain just…”
“Works against you?”
“Something like that.”
There’s a long stretch of silence before Ellie speaks again.
“Has Joel told you about Silver Lake?”
Tommy tilts his head, then nods once.
“Religious group, eatin’ people. Said he was out of commission for a while there and you took care of him.”
“Yeah. David was their leader. He…” She feels her heart rate increase again and clams up. Her lips press together in a thin line and she shakes her head softly.
“You don’t gotta tell me if it’s too much, darlin’.” Tommy murmurs.
Ellie closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and opens them again. “He really, really sucked. I killed him.”
“Well, I’m glad you took care of it.”
Ellie looks up and holds his gaze for a moment. There’s a sadness in those warm brown eyes, an understanding. “Me too.” She whispers.
“Why don’t you come visit Benji for a little while? He misses his favorite cousin.”
That title floods Ellie’s chest with pride. She shrugs nonchalantly, but a smile tugs at the corner of her lips and she nods her head in response. “Okay.”
“Well, how about you grab some of your things to show him and we’ll go over once we check in with Joel?”
Ellie doesn’t have anything to show a baby that’s a few months old. She loves him to death and talks to him as if he can understand every word, but if she finds anything she think he’ll like, she just gives it to him instead of holding onto it. It’s a weak attempt at making her feel like she’s going over just to visit of her own accord, but she appreciates it nonetheless.
After cleaning up, Ellie packs some of her clothes, one of Joel’s flannels, and her giraffe into her backpack. It’s the one thing that has been able to reliably pull her out of her mind and back into her body after a nightmare. They drop the bag off across the street before heading to the radio tower.
Ellie sits in the chair next to Tommy as he makes the call to Joel’s patrol group. Joel answers immediately. He sounds out of breath.
“How’s Ellie?”
Tommy rolls his eyes at her playfully.
“Mother hen. Go ahead, darlin.”
“I’m fine, Joel. Just doing a bunch of normal teenager shit. Partying, alcohol, all that fun stuff.” She attempts to sound exasperated.
“So is our house still standing or burnt to a crisp?”
“That’s a mystery you’ll have to discover for yourself tomorrow when you come home.”
“Ha-ha. Seriously, though—everything alright over there?”
Ellie glances over at Tommy, offering him the opportunity to respond, but he shakes his head softly and motions for her to go ahead.
“Yeah, everything’s good. I’ll probably go over to Tommy’s and visit Benjamin for a bit, hang out or whatever.”
She can hear the relief in his voice when Joel responds.
“Alright, that’s good, that’s real good to hear. Well, I better give the walkie back to Michael so we can do our official check-in.”
“Okay. Stay safe, old man.”
“Will do, kiddo. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Bye, Joel.”
She hands the microphone back to Tommy and sits back in the chair while he finishes up with the boring stuff. The exhaustion from the previous days has really caught up to her now, and hearing Joel’s voice has coaxed her body into finally feeling safe enough to accept her sleepiness. Tommy’s southern drawl rumbles around her as she relaxes. It soothes her like a lullaby. When Tommy stands up, she blinks blearily up at him. There’s a warmth in his eyes that reminds her so much of Joel she can’t help but crack a small smile.
“C’mon, Ellie-girl, let’s go see your cousin.”
She leans into him when he offers his arm around her shoulder as they walk back to his and Maria’s home. She glances across the street at her own house, sitting dark with all the lights off, but she doesn’t feel anxious about leaving it. She’ll be back home tomorrow with Joel. She’s just hanging out with the rest of her family for the night.
Tommy and Maria set her up on the couch with a pile of blankets and pillows. Ellie sits with Benji when they’re done, cooing softly at the widely-grinning infant. She shows him her giraffe plush, earning a fit of giggles that makes her smile so wide her mouth hurts. She puts the plush on the coffee table gingerly when he loses interest. Maria gives her a mug of chamomile tea with honey and they sit together for a while. Ellie sips her tea and holds the baby while Tommy and Maria talk about some building renovations needing to be done, their words warbling together as time passes.
Benjamin’s weight sinks against her comfortably as they sit and she slowly starts to nod off. She can distantly feel the weight being lifted from her chest, hands guiding her to lay down, and blankets being wrapped and tucked around her shoulders.
She feels another piece of fabric placed gently on top of the blankets and she knows it’s Joel’s flannel without even opening her eyes, the smell of wood and gunpowder and whatever else that makes the signature Joel scent surrounding her like a blanket. Her fingers tangle in the fabric and pull it closer. She’s too tired to be embarrassed that either Tommy or Maria—or both—know her well enough to have known she had Joel’s flannel in her bag. Subconsciously she lets out a contented sigh. There’s the sound of shuffling, low murmurs, and gentle hands carding through her hair—Maria’s. Her nails gently scratch at her scalp and goddamn, Joel should grow his out because that feels great. She’s deep asleep before the hand is removed.
She sleeps through the night, cradled by the warmth and love surrounding her.