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Joel’s on edge the entire time they’re in the hospital.
He’s not stupid. He knows how science-types tend to put the why above the how. He sees the way they look at Ellie, like she’s a fascinating specimen instead of a child. There’s a calculation in their faces that he mistrusts immensely, and he knows at once that he won’t leave any of them alone with Ellie.
They try to keep him out of the room at first when they do their tests, but HIPAA died twenty years ago along with the rest of their world, and it only takes pinning one doctor to the wall by his throat for them to see that he’s best left to his own judgment calls about whether or not he needs to stay with his kid.
The gratitude in Ellie’s grip when she reaches for his hand when they start drawing blood tells him he made the right one.
“Easy,” he snaps at the nurse at the fourth needle prick, the man digging for the vein enough to make Ellie flinch, body twitching as she tries not to make a sound, always trying to act tougher than she needs to.
“Her veins are difficult to-”
“Then get someone else,” he says, with enough growl to his voice to make it clear that it isn’t a mere suggestion.
“Thanks,” Ellie says, when the man has skittered away.
He doesn’t say anything in response, just giving her a small smile and tucking her hair behind her ear where it’s fallen out of her tie.
*
It doesn’t take long for the number of medical practitioners who deal with them directly to dwindle. He watches them all like a hawk, and it’s a rare few who don’t fumble or panic under his mistrustful vigil.
“Overprotective,” Ellie says under her breath after he nearly breaks a young doctor’s arm for trying to take more blood when he’s decided Ellie’s already given enough for one day. Despite the tease in the word, he can tell she’s pleased by it, and he squeezes her shoulder gently before he helps her lay back.
“Can’t let ‘em kill you now,” he tells her dryly. “Not when it was such a pain to get you here.”
“You’re such a dick,” she says, with the same warmth that other people use to say “I love you.”
*
When he does take brief breaks from the containment of Ellie’s room, he doesn’t go farther than the hallway. He’s made a certain amount of peace with a nurse named Amy, who is clearly a veteran of the field and greets him for the first time with, “So you’re the fucker tossing people around, huh?” with her fists propped on wide hips. She gives him a considering look up and down.
“Suppose so,” he allows, sizing her up in return. After a long moment, she grins, clapping him on the shoulder as she passes.
“About time,” she calls back over her shoulder, “that new resident was pissing me off anyway.”
After enough times of crossing paths, he gains enough of her good favor to be granted cups of chicory and dandelion root “coffee” from her massive thermos. There’s no caffeine in it, of course, but there’s a certain amount of comfort in the simple routine of drinking it.
He remembers downing gallons of coffee when Sarah had her tonsils taken out when she was five. She’d only needed to stay one night after a bad reaction to anesthesia, but he’d about worn a rut in the floor with his pacing, downing coffee like water partially to stay awake and partially just to have a warm cup to hold.
He has the same buzzy feeling now, the same sensation of being at loose ends. He can’t leave, would never even consider it, but his only job is protecting his kid, and it doesn’t require more of him than brief stints of menacing medical professionals.
His job gets even easier when Amy takes over the majority of procedures involving Ellie. Her experience means she never needs more than one try to draw blood, and she charts vitals with such clear confidence that he doesn’t doubt she could recite them all from memory. He still sticks close to Ellie, either perching on the edge of her bed or pulling the chair on the side close. She still doesn’t like needles–not surprising, given her current starring role as professional pin cushion–and will reach for his hand when they aren’t in front of someone she wants to put on a brave face for.
“The most important thing is to B-positive,” he tells her, when they have to use a vein in her inner wrist that makes her whimper when the needle goes in.
“You’re so fucking lame,” she groans, but still, she doesn’t move away from where she’s pressed against his side.
He wraps an arm around her shoulders and holds her closer.
*
His impatience with his kid being used as a guinea pig grows in proportion to the quantity of dark bruises from blood draws littering her arms. They don’t appear to be making any progress in their research, and when the anemia from blood loss gets bad enough that they need to give her an intravenous iron supplement after she passes out just walking to the bathroom one day, he’s about ready to haul her over his shoulder and kill anyone who stands in between him and the outside of this hospital.
His tolerance nearly snaps entirely on the day they give her an MRI.
They introduce the contrast dye through an IV, and she makes a face and sticks her tongue out after a few minutes.
“It tastes like I licked a shovel,” she complains.
“And how do you know what that tastes like?” He asks, raising an eyebrow.
She sticks her tongue out again, this time at him.
The MRI itself starts innocuously enough, even though Ellie in her hospital gown all alone on the table looks so small that he almost says “fuck it” and demands they leave immediately, the rest of the world be damned. Amy is with them that day along with a technician who seems cheerful enough, putting on a CD of Disney music even though Ellie has no idea what any of the songs are from. For his part, Joel does his best to tune out the musical stylings of an anthropomorphic candlestick and keep his eyes fixed on his kid as she slowly slides into the machine.
Things are okay for approximately five minutes.
Then Ellie starts fidgeting.
“Ellie,” the technician says, with the calm confidence of someone who’s gone through this process dozens of time, “you need to stay still honey, okay?”
Ellie doesn’t respond, but when the speaker turns on, her breathing comes through, shallow and too fast.
Joel is at the microphone like a shot, sending the technician whirling away on his wheeled stool with one good kick against the seat.
“Ellie,” he says, firm but making himself stay calm, “talk to me. What’s wrong?”
“Joel,” she says, voice breathy. She sniffles, and he can hear hear her swallow hard. “I can’t-I can’t breathe, get me-get me out, please get me out-”
He’s through the door before the technician is even done picking himself up off of the floor.
The bed starts sliding back out, far too slowly, and Ellie appears, white-faced and trembling. He pulls her up before the bed has even stopped moving, picking her up and moving in one smooth motion. Amy wisely keeps herself and the technician back as he storms past.
For lack of other options, they return to Ellie’s room, and he sits on her bed and lets her cling to him until her trembling starts to abate. He presses one of her hands to his side and tells her to follow his breathing as best she can.
“Sorry,” she says after a long stretch of silence. He tries to look at her, but she keeps her head ducked, clearly embarrassed. “That was stupid.”
“You’re fine,” he tells her, squeezing her shoulder.
She falls asleep against him, snoring softly.
*
They try the MRI again at Ellie’s insistence, this time with sedatives that leave her loopy and giggly. He smiles despite himself when she all but droops out of the wheelchair as she’s taken to the MRI suite, laughing when she finds herself suddenly slumped all the way down.
“Joel!” She says brightly when he appears in her field of vision, her speech slurring. “Gravid-grav-” She cuts herself off with a giggle, and he gives her a fond look when he squats down in front of her. “Gravity,” she manages at last with one finger raised to the air, swaying slightly, “it got me!”
“I can see that,” he says, slotting his hands under her arms and lifting her back up while Amy and the same technician–who is now giving him the same wide berth as the other people he’s dealt with eventually do–set up. Her head wobbles like a newborn’s when she’s upright, and he braces her head for her while she blinks at him owlishly.
“I read-I read a book about anti-gravity once,” she says, giggling already at her own joke before even getting to the punchline. He shakes his head at her while she laughs, unable to continue.
“You couldn’t put it down?” He provides eventually, and his finishing her joke sends her into a peal of giggles so intense there are tears in her eyes.
Finally, they load her up, giggles and all, and the technician waits until she settles before he starts rolling her back in.
“Joel?” She asks once she’s inside. He’s right by the microphone this time and thus doesn’t have to shove anyone to move.
‘Yeah?” He asks immediately. “You okay?” He readies himself to get her out at once.
“Will you…will you talk to me?” She asks, voice small.
The request makes his throat feel tight, but he swallows around it.
“Sure, kiddo, whatever you want.”
He talks to her for an hour about a series of stories from his childhood, some of them new and some of them ones she’s already heard before. About 33 minutes in, he hears soft snoring that means the sedatives have knocked her out, but he keeps talking, voice soft and as soothing as he knows how to make it.
*
Finally, a team of doctors approaches them one morning with an idea for a cure they want to try. When he sees the group of them shuffling to the door, he’s on his feet at once, one hand on the pistol at his hip. Before he takes up a place directly in front of her, he sees Ellie push her blankets off and swing her feet over the side, ready to run if she’s told to.
It speaks to so much faith in him that it makes him nearly ready to snarl when the first uneasy-looking doctor sidles her way through the door, shuffling quickly in line with her colleagues so she won’t stick out when they’re all through.
Their elected delegate walks him through their plan, and although he remains suspicious on principle, he slowly relaxes.
They think Ellie’s resistance is related to some quirk of her stem cells and the way they produce white blood cells, they tell him. If they can extract some stem cells and run some tests, they explain, they might be able to grow leukocytes in a lab that could be distributed like an anti-venom after exposure.
Then they get into how they plan to “harvest” the bone marrow.
The word itself has him tense again at once, and they nearly stumble over each other in their haste to talk him down. He eyes them all mistrustfully, trying to judge if it’s all a cover for a procedure they don’t want to tell him about. He hates the idea of anything that involves her going under anesthesia, but he has a vague enough understanding of the process to know that the procedure itself is relatively low risk.
“We’ll let you know,” he tells them when they’re done with their pitch.
One of them opens their mouth to argue, but one finger tapping on his pistol has them all scurrying away quick enough.
*
“I want to do it,” Ellie tells him the moment the doctors are all out.
He leans back against the door, head tilted in acknowledgement.
“It could…” She trails off and looks down, gathering her thoughts. She bites the inside of her cheek, a tell for when she’s thinking hard, and he feels so much affection at the sight that it’s a wonder his body can contain it. “It could save people, Joel,” she says at last, looking up, earnest and so, so young.
“There are still risks,” he points out. It’s his biggest sticking point. He’s held his peace–relatively–up to this point, but that’s been in large part only because they haven’t tried putting Ellie at true risk.
“It’s risky to do anything,” she says, with all of the self-assured confidence of a teenager. “You could get bitten looking for a can of beans.”
He snorts.
“You could let that go,” he says, trying not to remember that particular close call, which ended in Ellie bashing a rock on the infected’s head until he could heave it off of himself and reach his pistol.
“That could have killed you,” she says, so solemn that he straightens up and moves to sit on the edge of her bed. She reaches for one of his hands, and he holds hers in both of his. It’s cold to the touch, and he collects the other as well to chafe them both between his palms. “Joel,” she says, recognizing a stall. He looks up. “I want to do this.” She lifts her chin, decision made and presented.
“Alright,” he says, still rubbing her hands between his, “we’ll do it.”
*
He scrubs in for the procedure and tries not to feel too ridiculous in scrubs and a hair cap. He watches them putting Ellie under through the large window that looks into the OR while he follows Amy’s instructions, and when he’s done, he almost wishes Ellie weren’t out already, knowing she’d get a good laugh out of looking at him all done up.
He feels more than a little twitchy watching them maneuver Ellie’s completely slack body, a mask still over her nose and mouth. It makes him a little nauseous to watch the massive needle as it makes its way into her hip, but he knows he would be climbing the walls if he weren’t right there to make sure they kept true to their word.
I’m right here, he thinks to her unconscious form. I’m right here, Ellie. I’m not going anywhere.
*
Ellie wakes up from sedation exactly how he should have guessed she would: disoriented and angry as a result.
He curses to himself fiercely while he finishes up in the bathroom and darts back to her when he hears yelling from the direction of her room, arriving in time to see that in short order she’s managed to somehow cold clock an orderly and rip the IV from her arm. A brave nurse ventures forward, wielding a clipboard like a shield.
“Joel!” She shouts, the call growing more desperate when the nurse tries to restrain her while she bleeds over the bedclothes, smearing wide streaks of red all over the white with her flailing. “Joel!”
“I’m here,” he says, moving at once to her side. He shoulders the nurse out of the way and cups his hands gently around her face. “I’m here, baby girl, I’ve got you.” She blinks blearily at him, face scrunched with residual confused rage, before she recognizes him and her eyes fill with tears.
“Hurts,” she says plaintively, and he ignores the nurse trying to stop him as he climbs up onto the bed, curling around to hold her close without jostling her hip too much. “It hurts, Joel,” she says tremulously, tucking her face into his shoulder, one hand moving clumsily until she catches a fistful of the scrubs he’s still in.
“I know,” he soothes, pressing a kiss to her temple, her hairline. “I know, baby. It’ll stop.”
The look he sends the nurse conveys clearly that that better be the case, and quickly.
After another attempt at bandaging her still-bleeding arm ends in her nearly breaking someone’s jaw with a kick, Joel takes the supplies he’s handed and sends everyone else out with a brusque command the moment a new IV has been run with a morphine drip. With fewer strangers in the room and both of them readjusted for her to settle on his lap, Ellie quiets, blinking slower and slower as the pain medication takes hold.
“Still hurt?” He asks, keeping his voice quiet.
“Mm-mm,” she says with a slow shake of her head, nearly melting against him when she yawns. She makes a grumpy noise when he cleans up her arm with some alcohol wipes, but she remains slumped against his chest until he’s done, taping a bandage in place and wrapping it to stay in case she gets yank-happy again. Her new IV is secured with so much tape that he’s not sure they’ll ever get it loose, but he still gives it another couple of pieces just to be sure.
“Jesus, kid,” he says when he’s done, tossing the supplies onto the chair he usually occupies, “you sure know how to make a scene.”
Ellie, practically asleep, just makes a quiet, sleepy noise and nuzzles her cheek against his chest before she settles.
Making his peace with playing body pillow until she can be trusted not to try and commit violence against herself and others, he settles back, shifting back and adjusting her until she’s slumped against him completely, clinging to him like a koala. He smiles when she grumbles at him for trying to move again once she’s comfortable and reaches down with a quiet apology to tug her covers up, tucking them up around her shoulders.
“You’re okay,” he says when she startles awake at loud voices in the hall. He frees one hand to rest on her back, rubbing slow circles the way he used to when Sarah was sick and restless. “I’ve got you,” he tells her, lowering his head to rest his chin on the crown of her head. “I’m right here, baby.”
*
“Fuck,” she says the first time she gets out of bed two days later, stumbling and bracing herself against him when he catches her. Her hand moves to press against her sore hip instinctively, but he catches her wrist gently. “Is this what being old feels like? No wonder you’re so slow.”
“Bold words from someone who looks like she needs a walker,” he tells her dryly, and she gives him one of her big grins, the ones that make her look so young it hurts a little to see.
Using him as a crutch, she manages to stagger around her hospital room for a few minutes until her hip bothers her too much to continue. Careful about pressing on it, he stoops slightly to scoop her up and carries her back to her bed.
It still sparks an instinctive little primal panic, carrying her like this, and he wonders if it will ever go away, the memory of feeling Sarah’s body go limp in his arms.
His hands shake a little when he sets her down, and she notices, grabbing one before he can step away. Her hands are so small it takes both of them to encompass one of his, and it hurts with a sweet kind of pain to see it.
“You okay?” She asks, eyes intent despite the pain medication she’s still on. He squeezes her fingers gently and then lets go, shuffling her to lay down despite the way she grumbles at him for it.
“I’m alright,” he tells her, brushing her hair off of her face. He gives her a smile and then pinches one of her cheeks to make her scowl at him, batting his hand away with all of the disgust a teenage girl can summon.
She’s asleep between one insult and the next.
*
Amy’s the one who delivers the verdict.
Given how many times Joel has threatened the head doctor, Jerry something or other, when the man tried to push when Joel decided Ellie was done for the day, it’s not that surprising that someone would be sent in his stead. His last detailed plan for how he would carve the man’s spine out if he tried to make Ellie give another pint of blood after nearly a liter in one day was truly something of beauty.
Ellie extends her hand silently when the nurse doesn’t speak immediately, and he squeezes it gently.
He prepares himself to argue that they need to give the girl more time to recover before they try anything else. He imagines they’ll want to try bone marrow at least once more before they give up, and he’s already making a plan for how he’s going to research if that’s actually safe or not without having to leave Ellie alone while he does.
“It worked,” Amy says, round face lighting up as she beams. She looks giddy, disbelieving.
Ellie’s hold on his hand tightens reflexively, little fingernails digging in. He doesn’t chide her.
“It worked?” She asks, voice a little shaky with disbelief. She looks to him then, like she needs him to confirm it for her.
He looks back to Amy, who presses both hands to her mouth and bows forward a bit, what seem to be happy tears escaping.
“It worked,” she says again, voice muffled. “Fuck,” she says with a little gasp before she looks up again, smiling so widely that it looks like it might hurt. “We have a cure.”
Ellie sets off about every fucking alarm in the room by jumping out of bed to hug him with such speed and force that she rips off almost every monitor attached to her. Joel winces at the shrill, piercing cacophony as Amy, scrubbing the tears from her face with one arm, bustles around shutting them all off.
He doesn’t let go, though, as Ellie clings to him and cries, repeating a litany of “it worked it worked it worked it worked” through shaky breaths.
He hitches her up slightly higher to hold her more securely, burying his face in her hair and tightening his arms around her. She laughs even while she still cries, and he doesn’t miss when she wipes her snotty nose on his shirt, little shit.
Still, he doesn’t let go.
(And if he tears up a bit as well under the wild force of giddy disbelief, well, she’ll only make fun of him most of the time for the rest of their lives for it).
*
Amy explains that they’ll likely need at least one more marrow harvest but that they’ve been able to cultivate the stem cells in their lab enough that they’ll be able to produce all they need after that. She says some more things, after that, but Joel still has his arms full of teenager, and really “it worked” and “you’ll be able to leave within a month” is all he really needed to know in the first place.
“It’s all going tibia okay,” Ellie says when he finally lets her go and helps her back into bed, Amy leaving them with a promise of coming back soon with supper for them both.
“Christ,” he says, rolling his eyes and pulling her blanket up over her head. “They didn’t even get it from your tibia.”
She shoves her covers off and then shrugs, unrepentant.
“I’ll come up with something better later,” she says with a grin. “Right now I’m bone tired.”
“I’m going to leave you here,” he warns her as he ventures into the en suite for a cloth for her to wipe her face with. “You can be someone else’s problem.”
“Nope,” she says when she accepts the washcloth, “you’re stuck with me forever and ever, sucker.”
Well, he thinks when he sits back in his chair, crossing his arms loosely over his chest, he supposes there are worse crosses to bear.