Smoke. Swirling embers. Ellie tried to run but her limbs were slow and heavy, clumsy in her panic. She could hear his breathing right behind her, the threat in his voice when he said, "It's gonna be all right." She was too slow, too out of breath, and this time he would catch her, this time he would…
A heavy hand came down on her shoulder and spun her around, slamming her to the ground, momentarily knocking the wind out of her. He loomed over her, machete raised and silhouetted against the bright orange of the burning restaurant. She raised her hands, too weak for anything but this final, ineffective defense.
As the machete sliced the air towards her body, she gasped…
And sat up in bed, shaking, a terrified moan still dying in her throat. Her heart was pounding in her chest and her eyes burned with unshed tears. She gathered her knees to her chest, hugging herself tightly, and tried to take deep, even breaths to calm herself.
Fuck. It had been well over a decade since she'd dreamed about that place. About him.
"You okay, baby girl?"
For a second, the deep voice beside her startled her even more than her dream had. But of course he was there. This was his room, after all. In the dim predawn light, she recognized the guitar propped up in the corner by the closet, the wide double mattress, the careless piles of clothes strewn around the room. She must have had trouble sleeping last night and crept in to lay her head next to his. Sometimes he'd wake up and put his arm around her, but even when he didn't she drew comfort from his warmth and the steady sound of his breathing; it was usually enough to help her sleep through a bad night.
She didn't remember coming in here at all, but here she was. "Yeah, Joel," she finally replied around the inexplicable lump in her throat. "Just a bad dream."
"C'mere." In the dark, she felt him reaching toward her, and she let him draw her back down onto the mattress and pull her tightly to him, pillowing her head on his warm chest. She inhaled deeply to breathe in the scent of his skin, as familiar to her as her own, as familiar as coming home. For some reason the smell of him released the floodgates, and the lump in her throat loosened into tears.
"Joel…" She cried brokenly into his chest.
His big hand stroked her back, up and down, in soothing repetition. "Shh. It's gonna be all right, Ellie. I won't let anyone hurt you. Not ever again."
She cried harder, because she knew it was a promise he couldn't keep, hadn't kept. No one had ever hurt her more than he himself had. Still, she cried and clung to him until she was exhausted and her head lay heavy and silent against him.
His deep voice rumbled in his chest under her ear. "Ellie?"
She didn't answer. She was too wrung out. So it was a surprise when he said, "I'll always be with you. You know that, right?"
Joel never talked to her like that. Maybe he thought she was already asleep. Maybe this was how he talked to her when he thought she couldn't hear. She lay still, feigning sleep, waiting to hear if he said more.
His hand was stroking her hair now, and she felt him raise his neck and kiss the top of her head. She felt a pleasant warmth spread from the tips of her toes to her fingertips. This was comfort, this was home. Even though he'd wounded her so deeply that time that…
Her mind shied away from it. She didn't want to think of that, not when she was wrapped in his arms, listening to his heartbeat. Not when his touch was soothing the nightmare out of her mind, chasing the specter of David back into the nether regions of her psyche. Not when she felt happy for the first time since...since…
Joel's beard tickled her face as his jaw moved one last time. "Love you, Ellie," he murmured, almost too low for her to hear. She curled up against him, basking in his warmth, finally letting her mind drift out to sleep, letting go, safe in his arms.
She slept more deeply than she had in years.
"Ellie! Jesus, there you are. Your shift on the wall started ten minutes ago!"
She cracked her gummy eyes open at the sound of Maria's voice, blinking in the bright morning sunlight that streamed through the uncovered windows.
"Are you all right?"
Ellie sat up on the bare, stained mattress, shaking her head groggily before she looked at Maria. The older woman's hair had gone a silvery-gold in the past few years, and she wore it longer than when Ellie had first met her, coiled back into a tight bun at the nape of her neck. Her brow was furrowed with concern.
"I'm…" Ellie started to say she was fine, but then she remembered how Joel had held her as she fell asleep. "Joel," she gasped.
"I know," Maria said, misunderstanding. "This is the last place I expected to find you."
Ellie looked around. She was in Joel's old room, the quilt he used to sleep with wrapped around her hips over the bare mattress. His guitar and his personal effects were long gone, either given to community members who could use them or burned after he...after…
She lifted the quilt to her face and breathed deeply, but no lingering scent of him remained. She felt a pain deep in her chest, like her heart was breaking all over again, and she raised her stricken face. "Maria, he…" Her face was wet and her throat closed up before she could tell Maria how he'd been here, how he'd held her. How he'd told her he loved her.
Maria sat down next to her, her face grave and sad. "Ellie, it's been seven years. It's time to let him go."
Ellie's hand went to the battered watchband on her wrist, the cracked crystal of the watch face. She shook her head, but she remembered his words. I'll always be with you. And she knew he had been telling her the same thing Maria was telling her now.
She wiped her face and disentangled herself from the quilt. Stood up. Straightened her clothes while Maria watched her anxiously. People had been walking on eggshells around her for the past seven years, with good reason. But for the first time since that day her life had shattered, since she'd become half of herself, she felt whole again.
She nodded to Maria. "It's okay. I'll be all right now."
Author's Note
This story was based on the following prompt from otpprompts and originally posted on Tumblr:
Imagine Person A waking up from a terrible nightmare, completely terrified and shaking. Person B assures them it was only a dream before pulling A into their arms, lulling them to sleep. Moments later, A's alarm clock goes off, waking them up. That's when A remembers: Person B died years ago.I wasn't going to write it, but I woke up the morning after I saw the prompt with this story so clear in my head that I had to write it down. I like the idea that Ellie can survive anything, even Joel's death, and that she'd someday come to the end of her grief and accept his loss. I substituted Maria for an alarm clock because I imagine working alarm clocks are few and far between, forty some-odd years after the fungus-zombie apocalypse.
This has been posted on AO3 for a while, but I guess I never got around to posting it over here.