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She can’t fucking do this. She can’t do this.
She’s the one who tells shitty jokes and swears and asks a million questions about anything and everything.
It’s ironic that she’s never asked a question about what to do in a situation like this though, isn’t it? Just more proof that this wasn’t supposed to happen. Joel’s supposed to be fine. He’s the one who keeps them safe and knows where to go and knows how to fucking do everything. She doesn’t.
He’s the adult here. Not her.
She doesn’t know how to keep them safe, or how to keep them from falling apart. Or how to fucking fix everything. Sure, she’s had different lessons about medical stuff before, she’s seen injuries and been told stories. FEDRA raises soldiers, she knows a thing or two, at least.
But this all feels pretty over her head. It’s not like she can remember any of the important stuff when she really needs it. It’s hitting her now, the awful realisation in her head. I’m just a kid.
It’s a voice that gets louder and louder as the mantra repeats. It plays on repeat as Joel tells her to leave, as she thinks about Riley, as she pulls apart drawers and searches for anything helpful with a numbness that she’s not quite sure she’s ever felt before.
It’s a voice that’s screaming as she pierces Joels skin and tries to stitch him back together. Almost loud enough to drown out the sound of Joel’s cries of pain.
I’m just a kid. I’m not supposed to need to do this.
I’m just a kid. I’m just a kid. I’m just a kid.
Petulantly, she knows, she can’t help but think that this is supposed to be Joel’s job, as the adult on the scene, and all. He’s supposed to be stitching things back together, he’s supposed to be fixing things. Like a real contractor, or whatever.
“You’re such a dick.” She whispers into the silence when she’s finished and all that’s left is an eerie silence. She wishes he’d open his eyes back up, wishes he’d say something. Even if it was making fun of her, or being annoyed at her, or yelling at her for doing a bad job.
She hates the silence.
She realises, after a few minutes of glaring and getting nothing back in response, that she has tears in her eyes. They’re clouding her vision, which makes it a lot harder to glare at Joel, which means she needs them to fuck off, like now. Her fist comes up to rub her eyes, only to realise with much, much, more embarrassment, that she’s already got tears running down her face, her cheeks are already wet with the tear tracks.
She didn’t even know that she’d been crying.
What the fuck was wrong with her? She didn’t do that shit. She harshly scrubs her face with the back of her sleeve and tries to get rid of any evidence of her crying. Not that there’s going to be anyone to hide it from if Joel gets any worse. The thought alone makes her feel sick.
She’d give anything to have Joel telling her to get her shit together right now. To tell her to knock off her crying and sort herself out. As long as his eyes were open to fucking notice it. Although, she’s not entirely confident that that’s the kind of thing he would be saying if he was awake right now. Still.
“Such a dick.” She whispers again into the basement. At this point, it doesn’t even seem like their fucking horse is interested in what she’s saying anymore. She’s so not used to this.
Sure, FEDRA may not have cared about her as an individual, but there was always someone there. Someone listening, if only to tell her to shut up. Riley always let her talk for hours. Even Joel listened. Maybe she hadn’t been good enough for a response, for a while there, but she likes to think that she’s worn him down enough by now that that’s changed too.
She’d fucking kill to have somebody, anybody, listen to her right now.
Mostly, she just wants Joel to listen, though.
Her vision starts clouding over again, and she becomes aware of how hard her hands are shaking, the way her teeth are grinding together, the tremble of her bottom lip.
“You are such a dick!” She chokes out, and Joel doesn’t react, but she knew that he wouldn’t.
Briefly, she considers telling him that she hates him, but that doesn’t feel right. The thought alone actually makes her feel more guilty than she cares to admit, so that’s off the table. She’d regret saying something like that.
Besides, that makes it sound like he’s going to do something that she’ll never forgive him for, like fucking dying or something, so she can’t say that, because that makes the possibility of it fucking real and that’s not going to fucking happen, because she won’t fucking let it.
So she doesn’t say anything stupid. She bites her tongue and doesn’t threaten his sleeping form. She doesn’t say anything like ‘Don’t fucking die. Don’t do that to me’.
She just continues to glare through her tears and hope that he’s receiving the message.
She lies down on the floor beside his mattress, curling up as much as she can manage, no matter if it’s a little uncomfortable. She tries to sleep.
It doesn’t work.
She’s all pent up, is the thing. She’s worried, obviously. Joel could fucking die here, they’re in a cold, awful basement, and she’s somehow the most responsible thing here.
She’s stuck between a rock (Joel) and a hard place (Callus). Maybe she amused herself a tiny bit with that one, but the feeling doesn’t last long.
And what if things don’t get better? What if she needs like, real medicine. The strong shit that you have to fight someone for? The type that FEDRA weren’t so happy to dish out to them. What if she needs to find food, and she can’t? Or what if she lets her guard down and somehow there is an infected around. Or two or three, or maybe there’s a sinkhole full of them, like back in Kansas City.
So when she says she might be little stressed, she fucking means it.
But she also knows that that isn’t the whole truth of it. Which she may as well admit to herself, when she’s the only conscious, awake, living thing in the basement as of right now. Seeing as Callus has been a real bummer of a sleepover partner.
Maybe, just maybe, because it’s not like a definite thing… But maybe she might not be able to sleep because besides that night in Jackson… She’s grown to be a bit used to their little routine by now.
She covers her face with her hands and actually groans out loud at the thought of it.
It’s so fucking stupid that she can’t fall asleep because she can’t get her bedtime routine like a fucking baby, she knows, but…
Up until now it had been really nice! And it had helped, hadn’t it? She’d been having more dreamless nights than nightmare nights, and that was always a good thing. She’s giving it the credit it deserves, because despite how embarrassing it might be, she does like it. Not that she’s admitting anything further than that. She likes it. She can live without it.
Well. Thought she could live without it. Look at her now.
She sits upright in frustration, huffing a ‘Stupid’ which briefly wakes Callus up enough to lift his head in what seriously seems like a glare in Ellie’s direction.
She holds her hands up, hoping to convey an apology. It wasn’t Callus’ fault, after all. “Hold your horses.” She mumbles as he drops his head back down.
3 out of 10. She tells herself.
She sighs, scrubs both of her hands up and down her face in frustration. “Just go to sleep.” She whispers to herself, then repeats it again and again, as she rests her elbows on top of her knees.
She’s not a baby. She shouldn’t even need this in the first place.
But then again, she racks her brain for an instance where Joel had made fun of her for needing- wanting? She can’t tell which one makes it sound worse- something so babyish, but nothing really comes up. Sure, he likes to tease her, and he definitely does things to purposefully annoy her and push her buttons, but she can’t remember a time that he’s specifically called her a baby for their routine. In fact, she can really only remember herself saying it was babyish.
It’s always been a sensitive thing, and has largely remained unspoken too. She can always say that he’s just keeping his thoughts to himself, but that’s never been Joel’s style, so she’s not exactly insecure about that.
She’s overthinking this, is the problem. Which is really fucking annoying because it makes it blatantly clear just how much she cares about this whole thing.
Her face feels gross, eyelashes stuck together from her tears drying and her fists rubbing at her face every few minutes. Her eyes are still fucking wet too, and she doesn’t want to think about how many times she’s cried, even a little bit, over the past couple of hours.
What’s wrong with her? This isn’t like her. This isn’t supposed to be like her, not at all. Of course as soon as she needs to be the adult in the situation, is the moment she starts acting more like a child than she has the entire fucking journey.
She looks at Joel. She wishes everything was fine. She wishes he was awake and not hurt. Wishes he was okay. Okay enough to tuck her in and speak to her in that tone he’s started using when it gets dark and they’re both too tired to care about appearances. She’d kill to hear just one of those ‘it’s okay’s right now.
She might not be ready to admit it out loud to Joel yet, but it makes her feel safe.
And not like a inside a community’s walls, no infected kind of safe, but a inside my own head and emotions kind of way. She doesn’t think she’s ever felt that kind of safe before.
Safe.
She lets that roll around in her head for a bit before she gets what is, undeniably, a pretty stupid thought.
But also one that she can’t help but entertain.
She sniffs in a way that would make Joel glare at her and grumble ‘gross’ if he were awake, wiping her nose on the back of her sleeve, then she stumbles onto her feet and grabs her blanket.
This is so fucking stupid, she thinks as she lays the blanket over the top of Joel, and crouches down to try and tuck it around his shoulders as well as she can.
Her own skills obviously don’t come anywhere close to Joel’s own blanket magic, but she thinks that that’s something he’d appreciate, even if it’s only for sentimental reasons.
She almost scoffs then. Since when was Joel sentimental over her?
Maybe daytime, smuggler, contractor Joel wasn’t sentimental over anything, except maybe his watch. Definitely not of Ellie.
But maybe bedtime routine, soft voice, tucks her in and keeps away the monsters Joel would be? There’s that spark of optimism again.
She just wants to make him feel safe, just for a moment, if she can. Safe like he makes her feel.
It’d be pretty fucking nice if both of them could feel safe, though.
Fuck it. She needs to go to sleep, and Joel doesn’t look like he’s waking up anytime soon, so who even cares anymore? She gently lowers herself onto the ground next to him, and lays as close as she can to Joel. Very hesitantly, she lays her hand down over the top of his heart.
Unexpectantly, nothing happens. She feels silly for panicking, obviously nothing would have happened. It’s just that… There are currently no consequences. She can do this just because she wants a little more comfort than she’s getting, and it’s like a million times more comforting than she expects it to be. Like she could close her eyes and shit and still know that he’s literally right there! Like alive! She can feel that he’s alive.
Her mind is like a tug of war of ‘what would Joel think?’ and ‘who cares what Joel would think?’.
No backing out. No backing out. No backing out.
She gently lowers her head down onto his chest, fitting perfectly in the space just below his shoulder.
Just for tonight, she tells herself. She’ll let herself have this tonight.
She closes her eyes, exhales with a shudder, and makes herself think about nothing other than Joel’s steady heartbeat underneath her hand.