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First it was Riley. Then Tess. And then it was Sam, and Henry. Dead. Dead, dead, dead, and Ellie could have fucking done something about it. If she had been quicker, or smarter, or better. The Fireflies treated her like she was a goddamn miracle, with golden nectar flowing through her veins.
Bullshit. It’s all bullshit.
Because now, she’ll be the next to fucking die.
Flames are licking at the walls, swallowing up every inch of wood and fabric in sight. The heat is overwhelming, with beads of sweat trickling down her face and muddling with the blood crusted around her nose and lips.
Salt drips onto her tongue as she screams and fights, desperate for anything that could get her out of this – away from David, away from the heat, away from this whole fucking town or whatever the fuck it was.
David’s spewing bullshit, she had stopped paying attention to his words, her mind too fuzzy. Ellie is pushing everything she has into the ends of her fingertips, desperately searching for the meat cleaver she knows is near, but instead laughs and spits in her face by being just out of reach.
Another sob tears from her throat – it borders on a scream, but her throat hurts too much to tell the difference – there are hands at the hem of her jeans, and she wants them fucking gone and deteriorated, burned to ash.
Her fingertips brush against the handle, still sticky with blood. Her eyes flash with the image of James falling limp, his mouth slightly agape while crimson trickles down his collar, soaking into his clothes.
Ellie doesn’t know if she screams out of fear or anger, maybe it was a mix of both. She jams her knee into David’s stomach, utilizing his surprise to launch forwards and land atop him. Then, without hesitation, she’s swinging the meat cleaver down at his face.
Once. Twice. Three times.
His fingers still twitch, his chest still heaves, albeit weakly and pathetically. Ellie doesn’t even hesitate, she just keeps swinging. Four, five, six, all she’s thinking about is how he’s a fucking cannibal, a monster. He… he was gonna — seven, eight, nine, Ellie distantly wonders that if his body survives the fire, would the townsfolk eat him, too?
Bad. Bad. Don’t think like that. Ten, eleven, twelve, he isn’t fucking moving anymore. He’s dead, and Ellie knows that, but she can’t make herself stop because every time she even dares close her eyes, she hears him. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, his face is a bloody pulpy mess. It’s not even a face anymore.
She still can’t get herself to stop, though.
Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, the flames are licking at her face and arms, tongue like sandpaper. It’s rough, and hot, and it burns. Ellie knows she needs to grab the goddamn keys from his belt and get the fuck out. She just… nineteen, twenty, twenty-one.
Ellie hesitates, the meat cleaver is soaked in blood and dripping down the handle, staining what little skin remained untouched from the blood splatter.
Twenty-two.
The cleaver falls to the ground with a clink that never fucking ends. It keeps ringing, and ringing, and ringing, and Ellie’s hands just shake and tremble as she reaches for the keys clipped to the belt loop of David’s pants. The blood on her fingertips drips onto the fabric, and it makes her grip on the carabiner slippery.
Her throat fucking burns as she screams again, this time she knows for a fact that it’s from frustration.
Eventually, she just violently jerks the bundle of keys towards herself, tearing off the loop of denim with her prize. She spares one more look at David’s mutilated face – bone and brain and blood. If she looked hard enough, she probably could make out what used to be an eye. She feels sick, and stumbles to her feet.
Like a newborn giraffe, she’s staggering aimlessly towards the doors. The smoke is heavy, dragging her down with its weight settling in her lungs. Ellie keeps going though, fiddling through the keys, unsure of which one would unlock the door to her freedom.
She’s sweltering in the heat of the building — her sweater (it’s not even hers) is stained with sweat and blood and with vague remnants of ash.
The third key works. The door swings open into the bright outdoors, too bright. Ellie’s ears still ring, muffling out the whispers of the flames behind her. Winter air bites at her nose and cheeks, a shivering cold seeping into her bones. Every step is blurry, uncertain, unfamiliar. Like she’s relearning how to fucking walk like a fucking baby.
Ellie just needs to get back to Joel. She doesn’t know how. She doesn’t even know where she is. David had told her that it was hours from her little hunting catch, and she hadn’t even been fucking conscious on the way here, so she couldn’t rely on muscle memory.
Hell, Ellie isn’t even confident that she could get her brain to fucking work for long enough to bother trying to find Joel. He’s probably dead now.
Stabbed again, maybe he’s shot, maybe somebody slit his throat and left him to drown in a puddle of his own blood. He’d been so out of it when Ellie left him, and it terrifies her to think that now she’s lost him, left alone, and hurt, and hungry.
She feels it in an instant, the way her mind starts shutting down. She can only stare at the ground in front of her and fucking hope her leg takes the next step forwards.
And then there are arms grabbing her from behind, and she has a terrible vision of David getting up again and coming after her, holding her down in the snow, and — she starts fucking screaming.
“No! Get
off
of me!” her throat feels torn in two from how much fucking hollering she’s been doing in the past few hours, but she can’t help it, and she bucks wildly while flailing her arms about, trying to land a single hit when she knew she could barely stand. “Get
off.
Get off!”
“It’s me,” the man says, she can barely hear him when the hysterical and desperate sobs start kicking in. His arms are turning her around, forcing her to look. She’s terrified that she’ll see the blood and the bone and the brain, dribbling down his neck and staining the snow an ugly red.
Ellie sobs as she looks. Really looks. His hands cup her cheeks, and they’re warm – not soft, but familiar. His eyes are open, he’s standing, he’s here–
“Hey, look, it’s me,” he says again. Joel. Joel is standing a whole fucking foot in front of her, not dead, not bloodied, not drowned, his lips blue, in a pool of his own fucking blood. Here. He’s fucking here. She keeps crying as her walls melt away, the fear puddling down into her stomach because Joel’s here. “It’s me,” he whispers again, as if she needed to hear the affirmation.
(She did).
Her eyes can’t rip themselves away from his face, scanning every feature, searching for the loose end that would unravel the whole illusion and leave her cold and alone, soaked in blood and sweat and tears, and probably little tiny pieces of brain mush, too.
“It’s okay,” he says, and she knows it is because he’s here, and in the ringing there’s nothing else. Just them.
“He…” she can’t find her words, they’re swirling too fast inside her mind, she can’t pull them together even though she wants to. She wants to fall and cry and tell Joel everything, so she sucks it up and fucking tries again. “But I…”
She gives up on words, following Joel’s lead. He lowers one of his hands from her cheek, wrapping it around her back. Ellie throws her arms over his shoulders, hiding her head away in the crook of his neck. She can hear his heartbeat.
“It’s okay,” he says again, as she just clings to him and breathes and cries and relishes in his presence. The tears don’t stop stinging. “It’s okay, baby girl. I got you.”
Ellie breaks down and falls apart. She’s crumbling, like the burning building behind them. Joel doesn’t know what’s wrong, but he doesn’t seem to fucking care, only focusing on holding her tight and telling her, “I got you.”
Baby girl. She hadn’t heard that from him before, but Ellie decides she likes it. It feels like the blankets in the beds at Jackson, wrapped around her and holding her tight throughout the night. Warm and cozy.
Incoherent mumbles slip through her lips between sobs, but eventually, with choked breath, Ellie pulls away. Her mind simply… whites out. She sees the colors. She sees the shapes. The ringing is loud as fuck.
Limply, she sees Joel take off his coat. He tucks it over her shoulders, holding her close to his side. Together they stumble forwards, and Ellie is so, so tired.
They walk. They don’t talk. But Joel’s grip never leaves her shoulder. He’s here, next to her, and he’s not disappearing or dropping dead to the ground. Ellie’s eyelids are heavy as fuck, and she lets them droop, just for a second.
Somehow, when she opens them again, they’re in a cabin. It’s not the same one as earlier, she doubts they could possibly walk that far in the current state that they’re in. Joel was still —
Shit, Joel’s fucking medicine.
“Your medicine,” she snaps out of her trance, her voice raw and raspy. Joel seems surprised that she’s even speaking, and he furrows his eyebrows like he always does when he’s worried. “It’s in the basement still.”
“Relax, baby girl. I’ve got it, you don’t have to worry ‘bout me,” he soothes her worries immediately. He even opens his pack, showing her the bottle and syringe, just so she knows for a fact that he’s telling her the truth.
And there are those words again. Baby girl. She melts into it.
“Alright, Ellie,” Joel says. He scoots a bit closer to her, and holds up a bowl and a damp cloth. When he had gotten the water, Ellie has no fucking clue, but she’s glad he has it. “I gotta clean you up. Can you tell me if you’re hurt? I need to know so I can help, okay?”
“I…” Ellie trails off, thinking back. Her nose stings like a bitch, but it doesn’t feel like a broken nose, so she suspects it’s more so severe bruising. On the other hand, her chest aches deeply, pulsating pain emanating from right between her ribs. Right where David had fucking kicked her like a ball. “Nose and ribs.”
Joel’s gaze pulls down. “Nothin’ else?”
Ellie follows where his eyes land, finding the button of her jeans torn out of place, hanging on by a thread. The zipper is down halfway. She clenches her fists, yet shakes her head. “Nothing else.”
He doesn’t push, he doesn’t prod. Joel just brings the cloth to her face, waiting for her wordless nod to start wiping away the crusted blood. He’s careful around her nose, rubbing away the crimson as gently as he possibly can.
It makes her stomach twist knowing that most of this blood isn’t even hers. Eventually, Joel’s done, and he drops the cloth back into the bowl.
“Can I lift up your sweater? Gotta check your ribs,” he asks her, so warmly. It’s almost impossible to envision the man in front of her partaking in a single act of violence ever. Almost. Ellie nods, exhausted, trying to wrangle her down. Her mind feels the need to interject.
“It’s not mine,” she mumbles. The fabric feels itchy, now. Uncomfortable and tight and disgusting. “I don’t… I don’t want it.”
“That’s alright, baby girl. Let’s get it off of you,” Joel doesn’t even miss a single beat, and Ellie nearly misses the pure anger that settles in his eyes for just a second. He helps her lift it over her head, tossing it to the side. “I’ll give you one of my shirts once I check your ribs, okay?”
“Mhm,” Ellie manages. Joel’s hands move towards the epicenter of her pain, a glance down showing a myriad of mottled yellow and blue skin. She winces as his hands make contact with her skin. He sucks in his breath, and checks her ribs cautiously. Ellie watches him wordlessly.
“You’re banged up real good, but it doesn't feel like you’ve got any breaks,” Joel informs her. True to his word, he then rummages through his back, pulling out an oversized long-sleeve flannel and tossing it towards her. “Go change in the bathroom, switch your pants, too.”
Numbly, Ellie does as she’s asked, grabbing her second pair of jeans from her own pack (which she’s happy to actually have after it had been taken from her) and stumbles to one of the two doors in the cabin.
It is, in fact, the bathroom.
When she’s done changing, she finds Joel still by the couch, except it looks more like a bed now.
“They’ve got a futon, Ellie,” he laughs, as if she knows what the fuck that means. She doesn’t have the energy to tell him as such, though. “C’mon, let’s get some rest. We can plan in the morning.”
Joel climbs in first, patting the spot right next to him. Ellie dashes to him, burying her head against the side of his chest, his arm once again resting over her shoulder, keeping her safe.
“G’night, Joel,” she grumbles, holding him tightly.
He gives her shoulder a squeeze, with a light, “goodnight, baby girl.”
When she wakes up, the button on her other jeans is sewn back in place, and Joel is still completely conked out, a spool of thread clutched in the hand that isn’t wrapped around her shoulders.
They’d be okay.