Chapter Text
I
The second morning dawned like the one before it— shedding light on the endless torrent of ice and snow outside the house. Ellie, exposed in her bare muscle shirt and cargo pants, shivered involuntarily as she made her way through the rooms, checking for supplies she may have missed the last three times she scavenged the building. Her search turned up fruitless except for a few more scarfs and shawls found in a corner bin that she could bring back to Jackson.
When she descended down the wooden stairs back to the living room, she was bitterly unsurprised and yet irrationally disappointed that Joel hadn't moved.
Looking at his limp body made her want to vomit, but she forced herself to kneel next to him and gingerly prod at his injuries. He had to live through the torture; she could at least stomach looking at him to make sure he was— not okay, probably never okay again, but— not rapidly declining. And he wasn’t. By some miracle of luck, he hadn’t gotten worse. His wounds weren’t infected yet, maybe because Ellie tried her best to soak towels and strips of fabric she’d found to dress his head and his knee.
It was hard to bandage him, though, since he had no knee and she was pretty sure she could see his brain. The golf club had crushed the strip of bone from his left eye socket to the part of the skull behind his ear, and there were tiny flinting slivers of white bone in the mush of his split skin and dried blood. His left eye was just… gone, somewhere, under his swollen flesh, but Ellie had a sick feeling that it wasn’t intact. His right eye was only bruised from a few hits, but it didn’t look too good either. His left ear was basically obliterated; the cartilage was pulverized into mush. And his head… it was caved in, with a sickening impression in his skull.
Tommy had stabilized Joel as best as he could before he left. He hadn’t known much, but after a few rotations helping out with medic shortages he’d had the minimal knowledge to stabilize his brother’s neck and mitigate the bleeding.
Tommy’d answered blunt and honest to her frantic questions while they’d worked to keep Joel alive: “Will he live?” “Probably not.” “Is he gonna— Is he gonna forget us?” “That would be the best-case scenario.” “Was he scared?” “I think he was more scared about you goin’ on alone.”
Tommy had left only after they both made sure the others were incapacitated. Ellie could’ve gone instead of him, but he was less of a target and it went unsaid that she was unwilling to leave Joel with Tommy.
Tommy and Ellie discovered grimly that they made a pretty good team, dual rage and violence tearing up everyone who’d dared to lay a hand on their family.
It’d been two days since Tommy left. Joel had expelled waste twice and she’d cleaned it as best as she could. The first time, she held back sulfuric tears as she washed her hands for the fourth time in ten minutes. It wasn’t his fault he wasn’t okay enough to use a fucking toilet, though, so she’d told mirror Ellie to “suck it the fuck up” and went to check his pulse again.
The hours were blurring by alarmingly slow, punctuated only by Joel’s shallow breaths and Ellie’s frequent mental breakdowns.
“You can’t leave me,” she’d furiously whispered to Joel this morning, as if he could possibly hear her. “You can’t, not when I just found you.”
Hours later, she‘d yelled at him. What a bitch, she knew she was, yelling at the dead man on the floor. But her anger over his lies never dissolved; it sat in her chest churning into guilt, and as a result she just lashed out more.
At night, Ellie sobbed into the floor next to him. “Please don’t die, dad. Please. I’m sorry, but please don’t die.” She’d never called him that to his face, but in this quiet lonely house she allowed her lips to savor the word. Her dad, her dad, her dad… her dad was dying.
Around midnight, after a few hours of silently watching the rise and fall of Joel’s chest, she heard scuffling outside the house. She drew her gun and exhaled slowly as she approached the front door.
“Ellie? Ellie!” hollered from outside.
Like a broken dam, breath inflated her lungs and she inhaled raggedly. “Tommy, fuck—” she cursed as she ran and opened the door.
Maria stood on the front porch with Tommy and ten other Jacksonians, armed with packs and supplies and horses behind them— help and hope.
Ellie, running on zero sleep, felt no embarrassment as she simply sagged against the doorframe and sobbed with relief.
II
Maria took Ellie aside as Tommy and the medics swarmed Joel’s prone body.
“He’s so still,” she mumbled to her aunt in another life. “He’s— what if he never wakes up?”
“He might not,” Maria said grimly. “But he’s got a chance.”
They watched in silence as the medics lifted Joel onto the stretcher. After a moment, Maria asked her quietly, “Where’s Abby?”
Ellie closed her swollen eyes and swallowed.
The house had a basement, and Ellie had dragged all of the bodies into it after Tommy left, to keep from stenching up the house. Tommy and she had killed most of them, but Abby—
“Pleasant,” Maria said dryly as they opened the basement door and met the damp and metallic stench of blood. It hung heavy in the air as they descended the stairs into the darkness. Ellie briefly pointed her flashlight at each of the bloody bodies for Maria’s sake and then centered it on a support beam in the center of the space.
Abby was tied to it, her labored breathing echoing through the cramped space. Ellie could tell the moment Maria’s eyes caught where her legs ended at her knees. Waste pooled underneath her on the cement floor.
Seeing Abby’s unharmed face made the dark and bitter thing inside of Ellie rear its head again, and she— absurdly— fought the urge to smile. “She won’t be going anywhere,” Ellie said. “Leg for a leg, yeah? Well, one of them was in exchange for his leg; don’t pretend like we can save that thing. The other was for every swing she took of that club.”
“Let me shoot her, Ellie,” Maria said. “Or you. Just put her out of her misery.”
“Her misery? She deserves eternal misery, she—” Ellie laughed tightly. “She threw down that club at Joel’s head. She had them tourniquet his leg so he wouldn’t die instantly. They—”
“I know,” Maria said placatingly. “Tommy told me. I didn’t mean mercy. I mean that keeping her alive will keep you from moving on and helping Joel recover.”
“If he fucking recovers.”
“If,” Maria allowed. “Still. Kill her, and we can leave. She’ll probably die from her injuries soon enough, but if she doesn’t— we can’t guarantee she won’t ever come after you, years and years from now. Not unless we see the body.”
Ellie cursed to herself. The memory of Joel’s involuntary grunt as the golf club violently crushed his skull flashed every time she shutsher eyes. “She wouldn’t tell me why,” she whispered, a hollow tone to her voice. She felt distinctly like a little kid again, looking for answers she’d never get.
“She never will,” Maria said. “I’m sorry. I know that would have helped.”
Ellie gritted her teeth and drew her gun. Unceremoniously three bullets split Abby’s skull, and her body went limp.
“C’mon,” Maria encouraged. “Let’s go home.”
Ellie looked at Abby’s body a moment longer and then turned to ascend the stairs. Maria followed her in silence.
III
In the end, they removed the leg.
Joel was on all of the life support Jackson could offer him, so regarding his comatose state they could only wait. His leg, though, needed bandage changing every day. It got infected, even while in the sterile hospital, so Dr. Meng, the only licensed physician Jackson had, recommended they remove it.
Tommy was unanimously elected as Joel’s medical proxy, but the decision to remove his leg was a polarizing one.
"You're the one who said it'd need to come off!" Tommy exclaimed lowly.
“Yeah, but— I got to thinking, and he would say no,” Ellie said furiously, standing furiously in Tommy’s living room. “He’d try to keep it. Without his leg, you know him, he’d never be the same.”
“Yeah, and he’s also a stubborn ass,” Tommy shot back tightly. “He’d just be in pain for years and then we’d have to remove it anyway.”
“He’ll never be able to patrol again, with or without his leg,” Maria told Ellie. “Even disregarding the skull fracture, he’ll have to readjust to a vastly different way of living. That leg is just going to tie him down to pain and dependence on drugs. That, he’d hate.”
“He’s—” Ellie blinked back tears. “He protects, that’s what he does. What’s he supposed to do if he can’t do that?”
Tommy exhaled heavily. “I know you’re used to having him lookin’ out for you Ellie, even when you threw it in his face, but you’re gonna have to look out for yourself now.”
“Now?” Ellie demanded. “Now? He had a fucking piece of rebar in his stomach for months, and I was completely alone. And before him— There was a before him, you know, and I did a great job protecting myself.”
“Did you? You got bit,” Maria snapped.
Ellie recoiled back. “That’s— We were distracted—”
Dina stood from where she’d been silently watching the spitting family. “I know I’m not really a part of this, but Ellie—” her voice was soft as she addressed her girlfriend. “It’s okay to be scared.”
Ellie stared at Dina. “Of what?” she asked, her voice carefully flat.
“That he won’t be the same. And yeah, it’s pretty clear that he won’t. And it’s okay that it’s scary, because he’s been pretty steadily there for the last few years, and all of a sudden you’ll have to be there for him in the long-term. Not to mention you’ve been trying to forgive him, and now you don’t get the chance to properly process that and come to terms with what he did.”
Ellie shook her head but tears were tracking down her cheeks. “But his leg…” she croaked.
“... Is even more change. I get it. The leg he has now is obliterated, and with anybody else you’d instantly recognize that it needs to go. You’re just scared to make things even more different than they already are.”
Ellie rubbed at her red face and let out a pitiful groan. When she removed her hands and tucked them across her chest, she looked at Tommy and nodded. “Okay,” she whispered.
And they removed the leg.