Standard Disclaimer; 'The Last of Us' isn't mine. I wish it was, but to quote John Green, 'the world is not a wish-granting factory.

o~O~o

When the fever hit – really hit – he spent a lot of time hallucinating.

Ellie was with him from word go. The night following the accident found them in an abandoned university residence about a mile south of the actual campus itself. The windows were boarded up but secure, the beds stripped of their sheets but with their mattresses still in place, the doors equipped with working locks. Ellie, unwilling to leave Callus outside, guided him into a room adjacent to the one she'd picked to temporarily shelter her and Joel and helped her wounded guardian down. Grunting, Joel accepted the shoulder she offered him with quiet grace and staggered in the direction of the bed, a hand placed squarely against his abdomen which, though hours had elapsed since he had been impaled, was still leaking blood. The second his head hit the musty pillow he was out like a light. Ellie spent a good few minutes dithering at his side, waiting for him to wake up, but when it became apparent he wasn't going to she sighed and began raiding the draws for a needle and thread.

She stitched him up as best she could. The needle was slightly bent at the tip so the skin came together unevenly, a ragged patchwork of muscle and blood and veins and skin and, though she'd later kick herself for doing so, a fair few of her own tears. As she drew the final inch of thread through Joel's abdomen and prepared to tie a knot he stirred abruptly, head lolling sideways even as a pained frown pinched together his weathered brow. Concerned, Ellie reached out to steady him.

"T-Te-Tess …"

Ellie froze. The air inside the room was frigid; Joel's breath coalesced before his blue-tinged lips, morphing slowly into nothingness even as Tess' presence had faded, so long ago, from their harried lives. For a long time he was still. Then, when Ellie lifted her hand to reach for their scant supply of bandages, he cried out with enough force to drive himself hoarse and let his back arch powerfully off the bed.

"No, no, no, no, NO!"

Crrsshh-THWACK. A few of the stitches popped loose, their sticky ends tickling the raw edges of a wound that had begun to reopen. Alarmed, Ellie's hands flew to it.

"Joel, stop!" she cried, not caring if he could hear her or not. "Please! I need you!"

Joel groaned, a long and agonised sound, before relaxing slowly back into the mattress, his hands clenched into fists that twitched sporadically at his sides. With no more thread at her disposal with which to repair the damage, Ellie wrapped his belly with as many bandages as she felt they could spare, hoping that the skin would begin to at least mend on its own. That done, she crawled onto the bed alongside Joel and placed herself between him and the floor. On the other side was wall; it was her line of thought that, if nothing else, she could at least stop him from rolling out should another fit strike unexpectedly. Exhausted, both physically and emotionally, and soothed somewhat by Joel's twitches – a constant ascertain of his lingering vitality – she let herself drift into a fitful sleep.

o~O~o

Ellie awoke to the tentative cadence of birdsong, those few individuals being either too old or too weak to make the journey south yet bound enough to their mortality to offer her even this meagre comfort. For a moment she lay there, unable to fathom her abrupt return to consciousness, when to her back Joel coughed and she sat bolt upright, immediately twisting to assess his condition. A pair of bloodshot hazel eyes met her own, tinged with pain and an almost imperceptible air of defeat, and then crinkled around the edges as Joel smiled at her.

"Mornin'."

"J-Joel …" Ellie breathed, tears spurting from the corners of her own eyes. Sniffing, she swiped at them impatiently and held a hand to Joel's forehead. At her touch he grunted and swatted away her hand, almost before the heat of the fever had registered on her icy palm. Almost.

"Joel, you're burning up."

"No." Even in sickness, weak as a kitten, he was stubborn as a mule. "We've been here too long. We …" He tried sitting upright as he spoke, only for his wound to pang and send him powering back into the mattress with a groan of discomfort. "We gotta keep movin'."

"Moving?" Ellie echoed incredulously. Anger rode hot on the coat-tails of the concern that preceded it. "Do you even hear yourself? You wouldn't make it a half mile!"

"We gotta try!" More powerfully now, Joel swung himself up and off the bed. His knees gave way and he doubled over for a moment or two before standing and heading somewhat groggily for the door. Ellie flitted behind him, hands half extended towards him in case he fainted. Through the hole in the back of his jacket, she saw blood began to leak through the bandages. "We … damn it, Tess, you know Bill's waitin' with the next shipment. Any longer an' we risk missin' him. We … we gotta strike while the iron is hot."

Fumbling with the door handle, Joel swung it outwards and hobbled into the hallway, heading in the direction of Callus' temporary stall as if guided by some unspoken instinct. He was oblivious, so blissfully oblivious, to the stunned silence he'd left in his wake. Exhaling softly, Ellie swiped once more at her eyes and followed him once more out into the dangerous, unpredictable world.

o~O~o

She guided Callus to their next shelter; one she believed was capable of housing them through the winter. Joel was silent as they rode into a long-abandoned street of lakeside cabins, his chest resting against Ellie's back, a solid and uncomfortable weight she bore on top of her other, somewhat less physical burdens. Choosing one at the head of the street, with its garage still intact, she tied up Callus and helped Joel down into the basement. From the look of it someone had tried to hole up in here before; there was a mattress and a pile of dirty laundry, a few overturned and unfortunately empty tins of food, and a small pit for making a fire. After getting Joel settled and checking his wound – maybe dousing it with scavenged alcohol for good measure – Ellie swiped the bow and arrow from his backpack and stubbornly headed out to find them some food. The bitter wind brought with it bitter snow; within seconds her vision was blurred and bones frozen through, yet still she, the guiding grace for a dying species, plod solemnly on.

Eventually, and by pure chance, she happened upon a warren of rabbit nestlings and sank her switchblade deep into the neck of each one. Their startled squeals brought a lump to her throat. As she so often did, she wondered who she was to take the lives of others. They had not asked to be brought into such a harsh world. Why should it be so that they should be punished further with such brutal deaths?

These somewhat existential musings were brought to a dramatic halt by the ear-splitting cries she heard upon re-entering the garage. Callus was shifting thence uncomfortably, ears pressed back and hooves twitching, a distinctly uncomfortable look present in his molten brown eyes. Alarmed, Ellie dumped the bunnies just inside the door and sprinted downstairs.

Joel, thank god, was exactly where she'd left him – sprawled out on the mattress, a rolled-up towel keeping his head in place and a blanket keeping him warm. Regardless of this he was thrashing like a stranded eel, fisted hands flailing at nothing, mouth agape in a raw bellow of pain. Ellie dropped to her knees beside him and placed both her hands on his chest, unable to wrench her gaze from his face as it twisted through a myriad of emotions that, to her immature mind, were yet a foreign concept.

"Agh! No! Please! You can't … no, Tommy, you can't do this!" Joel's hand shot out and seized Ellie by the front of her coat. "We had a deal, remember? We … you can't just leave. Please, little brother … please …"

Ellie didn't know what to do. How could she? Even Riley, on the brink of turning, had not succumbed to a fever the likes of this. She felt boxed in by fear; a dark and icy place in which to be, in which to realise that, for the first time since Boston, her one deepest fear was being realised. Intentionally or not, Joel was drawing away from her. How long until his stuttering mind failed entirely? A month? A week? A day? Mere hours?

Anxiety seized her heart in an iron grip and squeezed. To stave off the impending terror, Ellie dropped a hand to Joel's and gently pried his fingers from the fabric of her coat. To ground herself she slipped her fingers between his, relishing in the comforting strength of his grip as he latched on, and tucked her backpack next to the mattress so it could act as a makeshift pillow.

They stayed like that for a long time; the crippled and the desperately lonely.

o~O~o

The days rolled by at an agonisingly slow pace. Snow built up in the street outside and made riding Callus difficult, the horse – familiar with the hard-packed earth of the streets of Jackson – sliding and stumbling on even the smallest patches of ice, his head tossing beneath Ellie's guiding hands and his alarmed whinnies echoing across the vale. For Ellie was out as much as she dared; finding food and raiding the nearby houses for medicine whose purpose she didn't have the first clue about. Cough drops, stomach-settlers, headache-banishers, all were dutifully fed to Joel in an attempt to manage his symptoms as they presented. The nausea as the wound's close proximity to his stomach made eating a painful activity, the agony the headache tablets did very little to mitigate, the hoarse throat that arose from shouting himself to sleep each and every goddamned night.

The latter symptom, strangely, was the one Ellie was most concerned about. Three weeks in and still the hallucinations had not abated. If anything, they were getting worse.

It was a different person each night, she quickly realised, with Tess and Tommy intermingling so frequently those first few days that it was hard to decipher who Joel missed the most. Then came ones regarding people she was completely unfamiliar with … a woman named Chelsea stole the spotlight most frequently. Joel's wife, perhaps? Ellie didn't particularly care. On the other hand, Ellie found Joel's lamentations for Sam and Henry particularly hard to stomach.

"H-Henry? I'm gonna … I'm gonna get the gun from you … Henry. Henry! No! This is nobody's fault … no! Henry! HENRY!"

"W-where did you go, kid? Your brother's awful worried 'bout you … Henry, no, I swear, it wasn't me … don't take it out on her! She's innocent, goddammit! Innocent!"

Then, the morning she encountered David, it was Sarah who finally made an appearance. Joel's feeble calls and cries for his daughter started just before dawn, rousing Ellie from another fitful doze and driving her, once more, to wearily kneel at his side. She wet a flannel and mopped his ravaged brow, pulled the blanket up to his chin and rubbed soothing circles into his palm, listening quietly so as not to startle Joel into further opening his wound. As if sensing her presence – the closest he came these days to actual lucidity – Joel's free hand stretched out and cupped her face. His heedless eyes wandered unseeingly over her wan face. A smile tickled the corners of his mouth.

"Sarah …"

Ellie didn't bother trying to correct him, as she had early on. It hadn't made a jot of difference. "I'm here, Joel," she said, forcing herself to smile. The muscles, stiff from lack of use, ached as she mimicked her once-easy grin.

Joel mirrored it. "Hey, baby," he breathed. "How … how you doin'?"

His voice was so hoarse, so faint, so ravaged after so many nights of calling out to people who would not, could not, answer him, that it damn near broke Ellie's fractured heart.

"I'm …" she cleared her throat of gunk and tried again, "… I'm alright."

"What's … baby girl. Don't be sad." Joel's thumb caught a stray tear. "You know it's okay, don't you? It'll turn out fine in the end."

"I know," Ellie replied in a small voice. Joel wheezed and grimaced as his wound nagged at his mind. Ellie gripped his hand a little harder. "I'm here, Joel. I'm not going anywhere."

"I know, baby, I know." Joel sighed and relaxed into the mattress. His voice, an almost inaudible croak, faded softly as Ellie strained to catch what could so easily be his last words. "But, you … Sarah. Sarah, where are you?"

"Right here. Not going anywhere."

"Right." As she watched, Joel slipped into sleep. She could almost see the heat rising from his face and neck. Abruptly, she came to a decision.

"Okay. I lied. A little." Gently freeing her hand from Joel's vice-like grip, Ellie glanced up at the window. Watery winter sunlight streamed in and brushed Joel's outline with a gentle touch, transforming him into an other-worldly being that slumbered on, oblivious to the severity of the situation; to the harsh reality of this sick, twisted world. "But I'll be back real soon, okay? I just need to get us some food."

Her belly growled as if on cue. Feeling something not unlike a smile touch her lips for the first time in weeks, Ellie ascended the basement steps armed with only her backpack and Joel's trusty bow and quiver of arrows. Before she left she paused and glanced back at him, watching the gentle rise and fall of his chest. Her tired heart, for an instant, quietly stilled.

"Don't you worry, old timer. No matter what …"

Her legs guided her out backwards, slowly and silently, a weary ghost padding the edges of a foreign landscape.

"… I'll come back for you."

o~O~o

A/N: And thus begins the 'Winter' arc.

Thank you all very much for taking time out of your day to indulge in this little ficlet. Again, it's another one that I've had in my mind for a while, and this whole world over there's nothing quite like getting it down on paper. Virtual paper. 1s and 0s. You know the stuff.

Reviews, as always, are welcome and greatly appreciated. Thank you all so kindly for partaking in the other LoU fics I've posted … I'm beginning to wonder if I haven't been bitten by the pesky ol' LoU bug. It's such a great title, I'm not surprised I fell in love with it so quickly. Is anyone else ridiculously excited for the release of the DLC?

Until next time folks!