Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Wind is howling outside, going absolutely batshit fucking crazy. The windows shaking in their frames, tree branches creaking in suspension, flag pole whacking metal against metal.

Ellie was no stranger to the wind. Not even the kind that felt like it was trying to rip through your skin, bury down into your bones. She’d slept in it, a cologne-scented sleeping bag pulled over her face. Walked through it, teeth digging into her lip as she pushed forward a little bit further, a little bit longer, a little bit more. 

She ain’t afraid of the wind. Just like she isn’t afraid of this house or this bed or this town. There are a lot of things to be afraid of in this world. None of those hit the mark.

Even with her distinct lack of fear, she can’t sleep. Flipping from side to side, flopping onto her back, and blowing out a heavy, restless sigh. She tries closing her eyes and thinking of nothing. She tries staring at the ceiling and thinking of everything. She tries pretending that they aren’t here at all. She imagines she and Joel are back in some abandoned house in some abandoned town, never more than a few dozen feet apart. 

And it’s not like she can’t sleep without him in the room or something. She’s not that goddamn codependent, after all, but she knows that, even if she wanted to, she couldn’t get herself to crawl out of bed, twist her doorknob,  and walk the short distance across the hall to his probably cracked-open bedroom door. 

Because he’d lied to her. She’d asked him, made him swear. And he lied. The motherfucker looked her right in the eye and swore something that she knew was not true. He was a shit liar! Why would he even try? 

Ellie lets out a muffled growl, hands coming up to rest on her forehead before falling back to the covers, smacking down. Not a single tuft of dust comes rising out of the comforter. Five-star accommodations right here, and she can’t even enjoy them. 

Fuck you, Joel. She thinks it extra loud, extra hard. Try and ignore it! Try and miss this message, motherfucker! 

If he senses her angry, internal rampage, he does nothing about it. There is no creaking of the hardwood floors, no rustling of bedsheets, no light rap on her door. 

There is nothing but the wind, the way it blows and flusters and destroys, just as the wind is supposed to do. 

Ellie cannot sleep and there is no one she can go to.

//

“Temporary respite.” That’s what Maria calls it. A week or two for them to sleep, to recover. Joel’s wound never fully healed; it was still splitting open in odd spots and oozing blood even after all these weeks. Ellie was a shit medic, what could she say?

Ellie’s still got this pain that’s sometimes in her lower back, sometimes her hip, sometimes all the way down her leg. Joel calls it nerve pain. She wants to shoot back, “You’ve got some sorta nerve diagnosing me,” but that’s not who they are anymore, so she doesn’t say much of anything.

He breaks out Boggle. Fucking Boggle. Ellie looks at that game, and she remembers numbness, loss, suffering. She looks at that game, and it takes her back to that feeling of not being in her own body, a part of her own self. It reminds her of him trying so damn hard to bring her back down to the earth. 

“I think I’m broken,” is what she never got to tell him, never had the chance to confess. And now it’s too late. Now she doesn’t trust him with something like that. Now she doesn’t know how to drop a dumb joke or a teasing jab or anything that had once made her, her . And it’s not just because she’s broken anymore. It’s because they are. 

“I swear.”

When she looks at him, she hears those words—again and again. 

But sometimes, when the night is winding down and the sun is setting and she’s half asleep in this little house that’s been designated to them, she catches a glance of him and hears something different, feels it. 

“It’s okay, baby girl.” 

She watches him several seconds longer when that happens, just so she can hear it in her head. Just so she can feel that rush of warmth, of promise, of truth.

“I’ve got you.”

//

Ellie’s supposed to be asleep. Honestly, she halfway feels like she is. Exhaustion has been a heavy thing since their arrival in Jackson a week ago, holding her down even when she attempts to fight it back. But she’s just awake enough to hear the creek of the hardwood floors when Joel comes to check on her. Awake enough to hear the click of the door being slipped shut. 

It’s not like it’s hard sneaking up on Joel. She’d once said she would follow him anywhere, but maybe not going by his sense of hearing. She’s barefoot, but the house isn’t too cold, just a chill in the air as she twists the knob and edges the door open. 

Creeping to the top of the stairs, she can’t hear everything, but it’s good enough.

“-can’t tell you no more than that.”

“Why the hell not?” 

Whatever explanation Joel gave, it must’ve been short. He’d only been downstairs a minute before Ellie began eavesdropping. 

“Just trust me, Tommy.”

And there they are, shoulders pressed against a rotted-through frame of a car, barrel of a gun between their faces and moon hanging bright and full in the sky. “Do you trust me?” The answer had been easy. Yes. Always. How could I not? 

Now it’s a demand, not a question, and all Ellie can think is maybe. I don’t know. How could I?

Whatever they say next is mumbled, just bits of “Need answers” and “Protect her.”

Something triggers Joel to raise his voice as he says, “If I tell you it just puts her further at risk!”

“Oh, so I have to trust you, but you can’t trust me?” Comes Tommy’s agitated reply, words hurried and angry. 

The legs of a chair scrape against the ground, footsteps pacing the floor in measured, even steps. “It’s not like that,” Joel says, back to mumbling. Ellie eases down a single stair, careful not to let it creak beneath her weight. “You’ve got Maria now. She’s family-”

“So?”

“So,” Joel shoots back, hard edge and frustrated growl, “You tell family things. You trust them. I tell you the story, and you’ve got no choice but to tell Maria. And what loyalty does she have to me? To Ellie?” 

He’s worried someone’s gonna sell them out. There must still be somebody looking for them, for her. ‘Course there is. There always is. And why wouldn’t they be looking for her? She’s the cure. 

Knuckles rapping on the kitchen table, weight shifting between floorboards, wind whistling outside. The brothers stand in silence. 

“Is there a cure?” Tommy finally asks, and it’s not like Ellie’s seen his baby, but she has seen a baby. She can picture what he’s thinking about. About a kid who had a hope and a prayer of growing up in this world with one less evil to fear. One less thing to kill them. Because there was already enough of that without goddamn Cordyceps, wasn’t there? The guards, the raiders, the creepy preachers out in the woods. Nah, there were already plenty of ways for humanity to wipe itself out. 

There’s a beat, a heavy rush of nothingness. Ellie can imagine the leveled gaze, the naked lying face begging to be believed. “No.”

“Will there ever be?”

“Not from her.”

Instinct draws the pads of Ellie’s fingers to run over the rough patch of skin on her forearm, tracing the hardened edges of scar tissue, the mark she’d need to keep covered for the rest of her life. No tank tops for her.

“Because it didn’t work?” Tommy prompts, easing out the roots of truth, digging to the very depths of a full story. 

And then soft, so soft Ellie barely hears from all the way over on her staircase, ear angled down towards the slats in the railing, breath held while awaiting a reply. She needs the truth, too. She deserves the truth.  After all of this. The blood on her hands, on her face, on her memories. She gets to know why. Why after all this shit, none of it was even worth it. 

What Ellie once believed to be heavy, uneven breathing, she comes to realize, is quiet, fractured sobbing. “I can’t lose her,” he confesses, an omission to what Ellie already knew from the second she woke up in the back of that car, woozy and light and empty. Bare legs, cold and exposed in a hospital gown. The whole car reeked of human blood and sweat, while her skin was the cleanest, the purest it had been in months. 

“I couldn’t let ‘em take her, Tommy.”

It’s all the answer she needs.

//

They start a life, the kind that doesn’t involve sleeping bags or standing guard or watching your six. 

“You need to go to school.”

“I don’t wanna go to fucking school.”

“Ellie…”

“It’s the end of the goddamn world, and you think I’m gonna save it by learning long fucking division?”

.

.

.

“Ellie.”

“I’m not going to save it at all, though. Am I?”

Two weeks later, she’s enrolled in high school.

//

Saturday, lunch in the mess hall. Community meals were a staple, required for lunch every day except Sundays and four nights a week. There was a rotation on who cooked, who cleaned, who passed out napkins—one on each placemat. 

She’s sat beside Joel, fork twisting in her food. Hunger doesn’t grasp her like it once did. Which was a good thing most of the time (a bad thing when she couldn’t choke down a single meal because everything reminds her of human flesh). Joel said she was growing, which she guessed she was. Her pants looked stupid. He promised to find her new ones. And she got her period every month like a normal person is supposed to. 

But sometimes, when hunger is no longer a yawning, aching creature in your stomach, it is harder to force down more…unsavory options. 

“Ellie, eat your vegetables.”

“Ellie,” she imitates, voice deep and gruff like his, “eat your vegetables.”

He glares at her, half-hearted. “Don’t you got any friends to sit with instead of pestering me?”

Tommy’s watching them; Maria next to him with a baby snuffling in the cradle of her arms. They’ve got amused smiles on the corners of their lips, and Ellie can do this, play to the audience, and forget that she doesn’t even know the man who sits next to her anymore. 

“Aw, it’s okay, Joel. You know you’re my best friend.” She reaches wide to stretch her arm around his shoulder, shooting Tommy a closed-lipped grin. “He’s very insecure,” she stage-whispers.

And there it is, a hard stare and her answering toothy smile. They knew their roles. They knew how to do this. She just didn’t know how to accept that it felt different, that it felt wrong. 

“Eat your goddamn peas.”

A loaded-up fork deposits a mouthful and a half. She mashes them around before delivering the grossest smile she could possibly ever provide. 

“Disgusting.”

She lobs a pea at his head a moment later. The giggle that slips out of her on the face he pulls after is completely genuine. He smiles in response.

For half a second, she feels happy. And then she just feels robbed. 

//

Anger is a funny thing. How it sits between her ribs and gathers in her bones. It makes her feel heavy, but strong. It leaves her feeling raw, but quiet. 

It’s not the same as fear, the kind that was beating through her heart and shaking in her fingertips and forever memorialized by the small, near imperceivable bump on her nose. Joel had set it right. At least the bastard could set something right. At least if it’s one thing in the world, it was something on her fucking face. 

Anger isn’t like loss, either. Not like the tearing apart inside of you. Not like the quivering shoulders and weepy eyes and primordial grief that welled up and burst out. No, anger was too quiet to be like that. 

It lived in her eyes and in her breath. Footsteps echoing forward with a simmering rage that she did not know how to displace. 

Sometimes, sometimes Ellie forgot—in the mornings with his coffee brewing on the front left burner of the stove. She grew to appreciate the smell but never the taste. At lunchtime in the mess hall where he’d find her midday, not always to eat with her, but regardless to drop an open palm against her shoulder or exchange a funny look with her across the room, drawing out a smile. It nearly dissipated entirely in the evenings when they would sit quietly together in the living room. 

Ellie decides it’s just something she’s going to live with. What choice has she got? And one day, maybe it will get better. One day she’ll forget about the exact set of his features when he looked her dead in the eye and lied to her. She would forget that she probably could have saved the world, saved this miserable fucked up place, but instead…didn’t. Couldn’t. They stopped looking for a cure. They stopped looking for her. Joel made sure there was no one left alive to do it. Not that she knows for sure, but…well, they know each other pretty damn well. 

Anger sleeps beside her in her bed. It’s carried around in her backpack at school. It lives in the toes of her shoes and the chunks of hair littering the floor as they're trimmed from her head. It’s a part of her. Just like the violence is. That violent heart of hers. Now it’s angry too.

God, she’s so fucking angry.

//

He comes home with a guitar. 

It’s a Tuesday night. Mid-summer. The sun stays out late, casting rays until almost nine at night. They eat at home three nights a week. Tonight it was her job to make something edible. Rabbit—shot and killed and dressed and roasted. A damn fine job, too. In the summer, there are vegetables and fruits. It makes Ellie long to never bear witness to another winter day in her life. 

Anyway, Joel comes through the door, strumming something that sounds like music, like a memory. Her eyes widen, face splitting in a grin without her ever telling it to do so. “What is that?” she asks, one hand reaching up to wipe the hair from her sweaty forehead. 

“A guitar,” Joel answers, barely biting back a smile of his own. There was once a time he didn’t smile at all. Not once, not even with her best efforts. And then a time when it was hidden. His back turned, his chin falling to his chest. And now, it's plain across his face. Now it’s for her. Because of her. 

“It wasn’t time that did it.”

She smiles back, the kind that splits her face in two and splays everything wide open. “What are you gonna do with it?”

“Oh, ya know,” he shrugs and glances by the hearth of their fireplace. “Seemed like some pretty fine firewood.”

“Joel.”

“Stupid questions get stupid answers, Ellie.”

A roll of her eyes, bouncing on the balls of her feet. “Well play it already!” 

“Gotta tune it up first,” he tells her, moving to sit on the couch as they both forget entirely about dinner. “Let me show ya how.” 

Perching next to him, up on her knees so she can lean over and watch his every move. Her chin on his shoulder, his back to her chest. Good. Familiar. Home. 

It’s funny, she thinks, watching him tune and then strum the guitar. How right something can feel even when there’s a layer of wrongness, of deceit, buried somewhere between the foundation of who they were and the towering turrets of what they became.

He plays for an hour before settling it into her hands and showing her how to press her fingers into the strings to make a chord. 

That night, she falls asleep with a soreness in her fingertips and a song in her heart.  She falls asleep feeling as though something has clicked back into place. 

//

The stables aren’t where Ellie plans to spend most of her working hours. There are a lot of ways to contribute to the community. Cooking group meals and cleaning out abandoned buildings and going out on patrols and chopping wood for the fires that will be needed in the winter. 

A whole list of activities Ellie can choose from until she finds the best way to entertain herself each day after school. Joel’s the one who recommends the horses.

It’s a good idea, which Ellie resents, so, for almost a month, she does anything besides stable hand duties. She doesn’t want him to be right about anything, about her. 

But it’s a hot sort of day with no breeze carried in on the air. Stagnant and stifling, Ellie can’t find herself settling into anything. She hates the kitchens, the fires crackling and the chopping on cutting blocks, and the salted meat drying out. No, thank you. It’s too hot to chop wood, the one chore she likes the most. 

Tommy offers to walk with Ellie to the stables. “Heard you like horses,” he says with a hint of that same familiar drawl Joel slips into periodically. 

With a shrug, Ellie trails just behind Tommy. She wasn’t sure about him still. Or Maria. They were people, but they weren’t her people. She hadn’t chosen them. She was pretty sure they weren’t all that interested in choosing her. “If you don’t, you might wanna tell Joel,” Tommy carries the conversation as they walk beneath an unforgiving sun. “He talks about it all the damn time.”

It shouldn’t make her smile (it shouldn’t make her feel like she’s winning) because she’s mad at Joel, dammit. But there’s something about him talking about it “all the time” that makes her heart flutter in her chest. It means he’s talking about her, like she’s still on his mind, even when she’s not right in front of him. 

“I guess he’s not wrong,” is the most she’ll allow.

But then they’re in the stables and the horses are pawing at the ground and snorting in her direction. It smells like hay and oats and shit, and she can’t help but smile when she reaches out and lets one of the horses sniff her palm, and he nuzzles up against her neck. 

“Wanna ride?” Tommy asks after several minutes of Ellie not doing anything productive at all.

“Aren’t we supposed to feed them and stuff?”

Tommy’s got a saddle already thrown over his forearm as he approaches her. “Someone’s gotta give ‘em a workout first. Why not us?”

Tucking away a smile before it can take over, Ellie accepts the saddle Tommy offers and goes to the stall he points at. She tacks up the horse like Joel had shown her and declines Tommy’s offer for a boost up once they get outside. She slides into the saddle with ease, weaves the leather of the reins between her fingers, and squeezes the horse on with her calves. 

They walk slowly for a few minutes before Tommy picks it up to a trot and Ellie’s horse, Shimmer (what a stupid fucking name), follows. Ellie’s jostled around for a minute before she remembers what Joel had taught her and finds the rhythm. 

It’s like that with sweat dripping down her back and her heart picking up speed from exertion, Ellie has to admit the truth. It’s like that, under an unrelenting summer sun with a quick growing ache in her muscles, Ellie finds something she loves. 

Joel was right. The bastard.

//

Ellie doesn’t have nightmares.

Joel does.

She doesn’t interrupt, doesn’t invade the space in his room to make sure he’s okay, to give away what she knows. But on the nights that she can’t sleep, she hears him. Mumbling sometimes, nonsense words barely audible through the house’s old walls. 

Then there are the shouts. One or two, followed by heavy, urgent breathing. She can picture him sitting straight up in bed with his hand clutching his chest. She can picture it because she’s seen it before.  

Does he dream about his daughter dying? Over and over? That seems like a terrible way to sleep. Is it about Tess, blown to bits with her trembling hands and spreading infection? Maybe it’s about Ellie. Dead in that fire she’d started, chopped to bits and eaten, or whatever was going to happen at the hospital, whatever had actually been in motion. Maybe he dreams it all happened as it was supposed to. Maybe that meant she would be dead right now. And she doesn’t want to be. At least, she doesn’t think so. 

If only he could tell her the truth, Ellie likes to think the rest of it wouldn’t matter. She likes to think she wouldn’t care what he did or how he did it. Because that’s how the two of them worked. They killed for each other. She was okay with that part of the deal. 

Tonight, he screams awake. Like he’s lost something. 

Ellie doesn’t move. She barely breathes. 

In the other room, Joel draws in ragged, uneven breaths. It keeps her company as she stares up at the ceiling above.

//

Sunset, out on the porch. Fireflies are blinking in the dusk. The normal kind, the little bugs that float and bop and don’t mind at all when you capture them between your hands and peek through to watch them ignite and flicker back out. Joel says Sarah used to hate all bugs (butterflies didn’t count), even fireflies. That’s another difference. Ellie let a spider crawl on her the other day. She doesn’t give a shit. She’s not scared of what can’t hurt her.

Joel’s playing the guitar tonight. She’s happy to lean back and listen, catch fireflies in her palms, and watch the sun drip beneath the horizon. It smells like summer; that’s what Joel says. Ellie wonders if that just means sweat, but she catches it too. Grass, rain on the horizon, warmth baked right into the earth, rising off in tufts as the darkness settles. Summer.

He plays her a song. Sings and everything. Something about rainbows and what’s over them. It’s repetitive, soothing. Ellie closes her eyes and tries to commit everything about this moment to memory. Some part of the good to hold on to and carry with her during the bad.

She sings along with him the third time through. He looks up and flashes her a smile. Their voices don’t really go together, his too deep and hers not high enough, but she sings the whole way through, appreciating the simplicity, the wistfulness, the hope. She imagines growing up in a world where you wonder what’s ahead, what’s tucked just out of reach at the end of something beautiful. 

“When’s that song from?” she asks when the music turns back to just strumming. Her toes are planted against the porch floor, pushing their swing back and forth just so. 

Blowing out a heavy breath, Joel pauses his playing as he thinks. “Sang by Judy Garland in the Wizard of Oz.” It’s a book she’s read now. Jackson has a library. It’s one of the good things she can’t deny, can’t pretend like she’s too good for. “So probably the ‘40s, I guess?”

It’s too easy, low-hanging fruit, Joel would call it. “So you were there, opening night?”

“Oh, come on,” he shoves her playfully, gently. “I’m not that old.”

“Well, you aren’t that young,” she counters with a teasing smile. Scooching just a smidge closer, dropping her head to his shoulder. Angry—so angry. Confused—so, so confused. “Joel?”

His arm wraps around her shoulders. It was the first time she’s really sought him out for anything close to comfort since they’d walked through those gates, through the front door, through the pathway of their future.

“Yeah, kiddo?” 

Why did you lie to me? Why did you have to ruin what we had? Why did you have to make me trust you just to take it away? 

“I liked that song.”

Maybe she’s lying, too. Maybe she’s just as much the problem here. 

But as much as she’s never afraid to confront him, to demand answers and ask questions and push and push until she gets what she wants, this one hurts too much. This feels like something he should be giving her without her asking. She’d asked once. That should be enough. 

His cheek drops to the top of her head, holding her closer, tucking her against him. “I’ll play it every night,” he whispers in promise. No one to bear witness besides Ellie and the glimmering, luminescent fireflies.

//

August comes, hot and dry. Arid is how Joel describes it one morning. 

He passes her a bowl of oatmeal, sticky and tasteless but a fine amount of sustenance and easy to grow. They had a fair amount of oats ‘round here. “Well, geez, couldn’t even spare a couple scrambled eggs for my birthday,” she says as she takes the bowl from him. 

Joel does a double take. “Your…” he looks from the calendar drawn out and hanging on their fridge and back to her. Like he can’t be sure if he should have known and has forgotten, or if he just never knew at all. “Shit, why didn’t you tell me?”

Ellie shrugs, shoving a spoon through the thick, tan slop in her bowl. “Just did, didn’t I?” It’s a school day. She’s got a history test. History is very different here than it’d been in the QZ. She’s learned a lot. One of those times she hates to admit; maybe Joel was right in making her go. 

“Wait here.” He’s out the back door, doesn’t even close it behind him. It was the point in the summer when the only time the windows were dare to be closed was when a thunderstorm rolled in. The kind that shook and shattered and struck. Ellie wasn’t afraid of them. 

He comes back through the door, something cradled in his left palm. Sink water running, his hand slipping beneath, and then he rolls five red, beautiful raspberries right into her bowl. “Happy birthday.”

Never before has she had a raspberry. She looks at them quizzically, then to him. He urges her on with a jab of his chin. She scoops the berry up, rolling it around in a healthy dose of plain oats. Just in case she doesn’t like it.

The flavor explodes on her tongue. Sweet and a little bit tart, sharp and completely overpowering any bit of blandness her breakfast may have previously included. “Oh my god,” she mutters. Joel chuckles behind her. 

“Five, for your fifteenth birthday.”

She twists in her chair to shoot him a funny look, the next berry already halfway to her lips. “Aren’t you about ten short there?”

“Knew that whole school thing would pay off.” 

Instinctively, she shoots him the middle finger. He laughs. She eats a bowl of raspberries and oatmeal. 

//

When she comes home from school, Joel’s already there. 

“Got off early,” he says when she finds him in her room, a space he normally doesn’t enter, with some weird shaped tool in his hand and one of her walls half-bare.

“What the fuck are you doing?” 

“You don’t like pink,” is his answer. Helpful.

She blinks at him, watching the process as he raises the tool to the top of the wall and begins dragging it down, stripping the wallpaper clean away. 

“Insightful.” Her backpack flops heavily to the hardwood beneath them. She shrugs out of the long-sleeved flannel she wears even on the hottest days, keeping her arm carefully out of view. 

There’s a funny scent in the air as Joel scrapes and pulls the paper from the wall. “We’re gonna paint it some color you like. You can pick.” He pauses, flashing her a short look. “For your birthday.”

Blinking at him, Ellie finds herself in a familiar conflict. She tampers down the smile, opting instead to simply ask, “Why?”

“Because,” he answers her, turning back to his work. There’s a slight shake to his hands, easily tired from a long day of too much labor. A wince each time his hands rise above his head from some shoulder injury he’d sustained months ago. A less than perfect run of the tool down the wall. So much work. Just for her. “We aren’t just survivin’ anymore, Ellie. We’re living now, you and me.” ‘Oh so it’s a we?’  'Fine, where would you go?' “Living means you get to have preferences. You’re not just clinging to whatever you can find to stay alive.” That’s why the commune had weekly movie nights and home-baked desserts. That’s why they wasted greenhouse space on certain foods just because they tasted good. That was why, once a month, there was an event with music and singing and dancing and so much food that no one went hungry, even a little. “Living means you get a green bedroom. Or blue. Or hell, yellow, if that’s what you want. Got it?”

Her tongue darts out and licks her lips, dry and cracked.  “Got it.”

Living was freshly grown fruit bursting in her mouth. It was a good song played on a mostly tuned guitar. It was a newly painted bedroom. It was the future and looking toward it. When Joel glances at her next, Ellie sees something there. Ellie knows with unspoken certainty she would have been forever fourteen if he hadn’t done whatever he did in the hospital that day. 

And she’s mad he can’t just tell her the damn truth, but she puts that to the side for just a moment to rush forward and hug him, arms around his torso and face buried against his chest. “Thank you, Joel.” The words come out muffled, but his arms ease around her all the same. 

“Happy birthday, Ellie.”

Living means he did whatever it took to keep her alive.

Chapter Text

The stables become a sanctuary. A place where things make sense. A world where there aren’t a million questions. It’s her and the horses. Stalls to muck, bins to fill, hooves to pick. She’s good at it; Tommy says she’s got good instincts. Ellie wears that with pride and does her best not to lose herself in the memory of Callus being shot down with her on his back all those months ago. The abrupt loss of strong muscled being beneath as she flew from the saddle. The abrupt loss of safety as she crashed into the worst experience of her life.

She shakes her head as if to break the memories apart and get them out. Shake them free like the Etch-A-Sketch Jesse had shown her at school last week.

Other people help her with the horses, a rotating cast of characters who she learns the names of but nothing more. Tommy and Dina and Rachel and Oscar and Mr. Hernandez. People. Just normal, whole, actual people. Ellie can’t help but wonder if they take one look at her and see her for what she is. Damaged. Violent. A sacrifice never made. 

She doesn’t talk to them.

The horses, though, the horses she talks to. Sometimes just nonsense soothing words when they get skittish or a story, made up or real. Even a pun or two. Though they aren’t as satisfying to share with a being with no grasp on the English language. Whatever. They still make her laugh. 

Some days she swears she could ride for hours, heels of her boots sunk deep in the stirrups and legs strong and powerful on the wild animal tamed to follow her every whim. In return, she lets them eat oats and apples straight out of her hand. In exchange, she pats their thick, muscular necks and pets the smooth, velvety fur of their nose. In offering, she leans her body against them and tells them the truth. 

“I don’t know what to do.”

//

September 26th. It’s another day. A Thursday. Ellie’s got school. Joel goes to work. 

He doesn’t meet her at lunch, but that’s not so unusual. Sometimes he worked through it. Sometimes he ate on the site. Ellie wonders if he’s trying to give her space. She sits with friends now anyway. Kids from her classes, kids her age. They think she’s strange, for the most part—she can tell. But they’re nice enough, for now. They aren’t really her friends, but she’ll call them that anyway. Call them that to ease that worried little expression Joel makes sometimes.

Ellie pulls the sleeves of her flannel down and clenches the fabric in her fists as she glances around the room. He’d been gone before she woke up this morning, which was unusual.

Tommy stops by her table, baby in his arm. It’s getting bigger, can hold his head up and everything. His big, blue baby eyes stare at Ellie like he’s never seen a human before. She saw him yesterday. 

“You’re gonna stay with Maria and me tonight.”

Ellie blinks up at him, the rest of her table hushed and listening. “W-why?” she asks, looking more furtively for Joel, feeling like all of these questions are starting to add up into answers she doesn’t really like. “Did something happen?”

Tommy shifts the weight between his feet. He wasn’t as good at ignoring her questions as Joel. He got uncomfortable quick. Ellie used it to her advantage. “Where’s Joel?”

Tommy clears his throat. The baby reaches forward to grab a loose piece of Ellie’s hair. She gives him her index finger instead. “Just needs the night, Ellie. He dropped your stuff off earlier today.”

She can feel her eyebrows gathering in the center of her forehead. Confusion whittles its way down inside, questions with no answers. Trying to remember if they’d had a fight. Trying to remember if she’d finally lost it on him, vicious and angry, just like who she really is. 

A palm wraps around her shoulder. Tommy’s hand doesn’t feel like Joel’s. She slides out from under it as he says, “It’s just for tonight.”

Everyone’s eyes are on her. What the fuck else is Ellie supposed to do here? So she says, “Okay,” and goes back to her bowl of rice and beans as Tommy walks away. 

//

Maria cooks dinner. She apologizes four times; Tommy is usually the cook of the household, but he got stuck out late on patrol tonight. Ellie looks out the window and glances across the street to her house, hers and Joel’s, and how dark it is. Was he eating alone? Was he even home? 

And why does she care? She’s mad at him anyway. A night away is a good thing. It will give her space, time to think. Even if she is sleeping on an old mattress on the floor of a baby’s room. Why should she wonder if he’s eating or sitting in the dark or going around lying to more people who trust him? It makes no difference to Ellie. 

They have venison for dinner. Protein sources aren’t easy to come by at the end of the world. Deer, however, were plentiful. She pushes the meat around on her plate. She eats the fresh, leafy greens and the seeded roll and sips at her glass of milk. 

“Not hungry?” Tommy asks. The table is awkward, uncomfortable. Ellie is pretty sure this isn’t how they eat when she’s not clouding their table. She’d bet they normally eat on the couch, Maria’s feet on Tommy’s lap. She’s sure they talk about their days and their community and the rest of their lives ahead of them. 

The baby paints with applesauce in his handmade wooden highchair. 

Ellie shrugs. “Guess not.”

Joel never made her venison. She threw it up. Every time. He would shoot a lot of rabbits out there and save them for her. Hunting and gathering on the road to Utah for cans of Chef Boyardee so she would have something to consume that wouldn’t turn her stomach. 

And how is she supposed to tell these people, these people who owe her nothing but are still allowing her to intrude on their dinner table on Joel’s behalf, that she can’t swallow down deer meat anymore because it makes her think of him? It makes her think of a chopped-off ear. Of bodies swinging on chains. Of the bowl of human meat she’d been served. It smells like a burning building. Tastes like blood and brain matter in her mouth. Feels like a pounding, horrible fear in her chest. 

“It’s just for tonight,” Maria says with a little more gentleness than Ellie has come to expect of her. 

It takes Ellie a minute to decipher that Maria isn’t talking about the meat. 

“Why?” Ellie implores them again, looking between these adults she only sort of knows and only sort of wants to be with. She’s sure they’re nice and all, but it unsettles something within her. Across the fucking street. He’s just across the street. 

In tandem, Tommy and Maria’s eyes flash across the room, through the archway to the memorial plaque that rests above the fireplace. 

“Oh.” She figures it out even when they look away almost immediately. It’s got nothing to do with her. 

Knives and forks scrape against plates. Ellie cuts her meat into smaller pieces. The baby babbles, and then he cries. Maria scoops him up, cooing at him about bedtime on her way by. 

Tommy doesn’t make any further eye contact. He doesn’t comment on Ellie’s half-unfinished meal. There’s a clock ticking by in the corner. It’s something small, but Ellie’s forgotten what it’s like to know the time and live by it. She’d gotten used to waking up with the sun, eating when it was high in the sky, and sleeping once it’s fully dropped below the treeline. She isn’t used to knowing the date, either. 

“Is he okay?” she asks finally when her bread feels like it’s lodged halfway down her throat. She takes a swig of milk and the whole conglomeration just feels like glue, clogging her up. She’s mad at him, furious. But she still cares. Of course she still cares.

Tommy wipes his face. He pushes back from the table and gathers first his and Maria’s plates and then Ellie’s meat-filled one. “He just needs some space.”

She’s left sitting alone at the table.

//

This day is never ending. Ellie’s lived a few days like that, ones that just seemed to never close out and ones that flew by before she’d so much as blinked. 

On this side of the street, a light shines through the window and casts the room in a strip of golden color. The baby is sleeping, or at least she assumes he is. He stopped making all his baby gurgly noises a while ago. Ellie is wide awake.

Just like at home (what a funny fucking word to think), she flips from side to side. Flops on her back. Thinks of nothing and everything. And sure, she never goes to Joel’s room, never asks him to make anything better, because he’s a liar and traitor and a motherfucker. But at least she could. Maybe. If she decided that the amount that she wanted to was more than all of the reasons she didn’t. 

But instead, she’s here. On a baby’s nursery floor. It’s carpet. Ellie hates carpet. It reminds her of the motel they’d stayed in with Sam and Henry. Sam, who…and then Henry, who took the gun and pointed it right to his temple. He didn’t flinch. 

The gunshot from almost a year ago is somehow still ricocheting in her brain, loud and persistent, triggering a racing heart and short, panicked breathing. “I was the guy that missed.”

Without ever deciding, Ellie’s on her feet. She doesn’t even try to be quiet. She walks down the stairs and lets them creak. She pauses to glance at that memorial, propped against the brick of the fireplace. She unlocks the door and pulls it open, half expecting an alarm to start going off like on the front door back with FEDRA. There’s no alarm, no one getting up to check what all the commotion is. No one to stop her.

She steps out into the night. It’s chilly; summer nights are gone with a gust of autumn air. She’ll have to go back in the morning for her stuff, but for now, she leaves it behind. 

It’s not a far walk. Across the dusty street, under the steady streetlamp to light her way. The world is quiet, empty, nearly devoid at this time in the morning. There’s no one out here to save her if a Clicker came crawling out or a man clamped a hand around her mouth and carried her away. But it’s okay. She’s not scared.

The door isn’t even locked. 

It’s dark. No golden streams of light, no hum of lamps, no flashing green light from the radio. She steps inside, and the door knocks gently against the wall behind it. 

He’s there, on the floor. Legs splayed out, back against the wall, a bottle of something next to him. 

Bullet ricocheting, people who don’t flinch versus the ones that do.

His hand runs down his face like he could hide the tracks his tears have left behind. “What are you doin’ here?” he asks, voice wavering and without any bite.

“The baby shit his pants.” She goes to sit next to him, legs stretched out just like his. The toes of her shoes fall to the side until she taps his calf. “Whole room smelled, not very conducive to sleep.”

Joel turns his gaze to her, and even in the dark, she knows that he knows she’s lying. It makes her angry, just for a second, because why can he know when she’s a fucking liar, but she isn’t supposed to when he is? Ridiculous double standard. 

Neither of them say much of anything. Ellie tries to think of a joke, some pun that would fit the situation, but she’s coming up empty and it feels wrong anyway. So she settles for letting her head fall to the side, resting her forehead against his arm. 

At first, she’s afraid she’s done something wrong ‘cause he breaks down. All sobbing and blubbering and miserable in a way that scares Ellie. Joel isn’t like this. But then he wraps his arms around her, pulls her to him properly, one hand holding the back of her head so she’s pressed right against his chest. She can feel his tears in her hair. She can feel his sadness in her bones. 

“You shouldn’t be here,” he finally grounds out after several minutes. There’s a weird twist in her back that’s starting to hurt, but Ellie doesn’t move away. Trying to be a good sport like he’s been for her so many times. All those nights after Silver Lake, staying up with her. Holding her hair while she puked up venison. Promising, “It’s okay. It’s okay. I’ve got you. You’re gonna be okay,” until she believed it.

The glue that had been in her throat at dinner feels like it’s back, so it’s hard to force out a response, all wrapped up in the only person in the world who hasn’t left her and the only person who has managed to betray her regardless. 

//

Harvest time. Three weeks off of school to get to work out in the fields. The greenhouses allowed for year-round growth and consistency of food supply. But the harvest was what really kept a community of this size going, especially as more families continued to come. 

The days are long and the weather fluctuating. Ellie yearns to strip from her long sleeves but knows she can’t. Joel reminded her often enough she couldn’t forget if she wanted to. It’s her and Dina picking together in total silence. They’re on carrots duty today. 

Ellie yanks dirty covered orange sticks from the ground with just enough might on their leafy green tops. She fills baskets quickly, even as she wipes her arm across her forehead every few minutes to mop up the sweat. 

“I never thought I’d actually miss discussing themes of The Scarlet Letter.”

Ellie hates that book. It’s stupid. Her teacher rejected the idea of reading the Savage Starlight comics instead. “I don’t,” she grumbles. “This shit is better than school.” It’s not that Ellie hates school. She’s actually even pretty good at it. But she hates being cooped up in a room. She hates the other kids who are always there just as much as she is. She hates how much trouble she manages to get into, even when she’s trying to be on her best behavior. 

“You only think that ‘cause you’re ripped,” Dina giggles.

If Ellie wasn’t already sweating like a pig, she’d probably flush red at the dainty little sound. “No, I’m not.” Besides, how would anyone know? She’s covered like a fucking Amish woman every day.

Dina pokes a shoulder blade. “I can see your muscles under your shirt, Ellie.”

It makes her uncomfortable, this sensation of being exposed even when she thought she’d been hiding away pretty damn well. 

“You’re fucking ripped.”

Hauling around hay bales and bracing herself in a saddle, and pulling several hundred-pound bodies of stubborn horse muscle probably would get her in shape at some point. But still. Why did it have to be Dina pointing it out? Of all people. Dina, with that funny little half-smile she does and the laugh that stutters Ellie’s breathing and her green eyes that lock right onto Ellie whenever she’s talking. Shit. 

“Not my fault you’ve got noodle arms,” Ellie mutters under her breath, deflecting any further conversation about the muscles in her body and whether or not a pretty girl is noticing them.

//

“Let’s go camping,” Joel says on a particularly warm day in October. No rain or clouds, all sunshine. Ellie’s spread out in their backyard, arms bare in the small sect of land it’s safe for her to do so.

She peers up at him, eyes opening just a crack to catch him staring down at her with something that almost looks like a smile on his face. 

“Didn’t we do that for a whole fucking year?” she grumbles, wanting to tell him to get out her sunlight. She had to soak it up while she could. There were only so many chances to feel the sun on her skin. There was only so much opportunity to let it grow within her, feel it sinking right down into her marrow like maybe it could become a part of her. Replicated and replenished just like her funky Cordyceps immunity. “Your memory failing you already, old man?”

There’s a brief moment of silence and then the unscrewing of a cap. It takes just a moment to register what is about to happen, but she’s too late. The water pours over her, cold and startling, sinking through the fabric of her shirt right down to her abdomen. 

Shrieking, Ellie pushes herself to her feet, tearing after Joel. “Fuck you!” she shouts, but she’s laughing, and she launches her body at him, her arms locking Joel’s at his side so the canteen can’t be put to use as a weapon any further. 

“One day, you’ll learn some manners, young lady.” His voice teases at reprimand, but Ellie knows it’s all a joke. He breaks free of her hold, swinging her up like she weighs nothing more than the sacks of potatoes he huffs into the mess hall every other Tuesday. 

Her stomach hurts from laughing so hard, and all of the cold water is soaking through the shoulders of Joel’s shirt and the sun is bright and shining overhead. She’s dizzy from lack of air and being spun around and screaming, “You dick!” with the amount of vitriol someone might yell, “Love you!” and her whole world is twisted and turned and upside down, but it’s also exactly what she could have ever dreamed of asking for, of wanting. 

The earth meets her feet once again as he sets her down. His face is flushed from exertion, his smile stretched all the way up to his eyes so the wrinkles set in even deeper. 

You lied to me, Ellie thinks but doesn’t say. “Sure, let’s go fucking camping,” she does instead.

//

Outside the walls, armed to the teeth. Joel clears the area and then clears it again and, when Ellie gets the fire going, clears it a third time. “You’re awful skittish considering this was your idea,” she tells him. The wood begins to crackle, burning in earnest after being egged on by her stupendous fire-building skills. He didn’t compliment her fire-building skills these days. They were old news. 

The rifle is slung on his back but not removed, weapon at the ready. “Just want to be safe.”

“We could’ve just slept in the yard, ya know.” She had told him that was stupid when he originally suggested it. 

“No, you were right.” His hands hover over the licking flames, dry skin and calluses rubbing together as he attempts to warm them from the night chill. “It’s good to get outside the walls every once in a while.”

Not a chance in hell Joel believes that. He likes the safety, the assurance. Just being the two and a half miles out that they are has him twitchy. Maybe she should’ve let him sleep in the backyard. 

“So why are we doing this again?” Ellie tucks her legs beneath her, wiggling her toes in her boots to keep the blood flowing. “You missed smelling like pine sap and B.O.?”

Joel shoots her a glare as he roots through his bag, pulling out whatever offerings he’s managed to procure for dinner. “Thought it would be good,” he grumbles without looking up. 

“Why?” Ellie presses. Just because she’d given up on some answers didn’t mean she was willing to relent on all of them. The wind blows, and she huddles further into her coat but finds it doesn’t make her hair stand on end. She finds that the woods hold no fear for her to accept or deny. It’s just where they are, where they have been. 

The tug of a zipper pierces the air as Joel clears his throat. He grabs two long sticks and burns the ends in the fire, sterilizing them. “I know it’s been…hard, trying to fit in.”

“No it’s not,” Ellie denies with a knee-jerk response. She doesn’t know why she jumps to it so quickly. It’s not like she doesn’t see how Joel struggles too. How he almost fits in on the periphery but when she’s actually watching him, actually noticing, can see how he still itches for a gun in his hand and to know if someone’s watching his six.

“Tommy says you talk to the horses.” Bastard.

“Everyone talks to the horses, Joel!” she argues. He shoves a homemade, round sausage onto the end of her stick and guides her hands to hold it over the fire. “They are alive, you know. It’s not like I’m talking to a tree.”

There are several beats of silence. Just Ellie and Joel and the crack of the fire accompanied by a lone, remaining cricket. Poor bastard didn’t get the memo that summer is over. “I know things have been hard since-”

“No. They haven’t.” She cuts him off before he can say it. Whatever it was he was even about to say. It really was a fucking toss up, wasn’t it? Since Joel’s near-fatal wound. Since the hospital. Since the lying. Since David. 

“Ellie.” The way he says her name is gentle, soothing. She hates it.

But it’s not like she can lie to him, not like he can to her, apparently. Because he knows already. He was there. All those weeks after, even still. He witnessed the panic, the air getting trapped in her lungs and the world going blurry at the edges of her vision. All those days when she was right next to him but barely heard a word he said. All the nights she woke up screaming and any amount of touch would set her off like a wild banshee. Who was she kidding, trying to lie?

“I’m fine.”

He slides closer to her, his sausage never tipping too close to the flames as he props himself just beside her. Close enough that she could fall against him if she wanted to. Close enough that he could take every bit of weight from her spineless, weary body. 

“You don’t have to be.”

She gives in. Because she’s still weak and he’s still strong enough to hold her, and she remembers all those weeks and months and how it was him and her and a field littered with death behind them—some hope of a future ahead. Her temple nudges against his arm and it’s almost instant, the way he tucks  her against his side. Like he’s protecting her. Like he could still. 

“Be careful who you put your faith in. Those we trust are the only ones who can betray us.” 

“I want you to feel like Jackson can be your home.”

It does. With freshly painted green walls and a stack of books resting on a homemade shelf. It does, next to the wood-burning stove in the early morning chill and arms deep within the depths of warm, soapy water during the evening clean up. It feels like home with a whinnying horse at her side and a strumming guitar greeting her on the front porch. It feels like home, but so does this hastily made firepit and the arm slung around her shoulders. 

“What if I can’t?” she asks, unsure why she does it. But maybe she needs to hear it, even if she already knows he’s going to say it. Maybe she needs to know without a doubt. 

Joel tucks her head beneath his chin and reaches out his free hand to lift her arms up an inch or two, so her dinner doesn’t burn. “Then we find somewhere that can.”

Betrayal stings like something sharp, alcohol poured over an open wound. But dedication like this, promises pressed between paragraphs, soothes and settles and assures. 

I don’t want to end up alone.

“Joel.”

“Yeah, kiddo?”

She tucks her face against his chest, hiding from the wind and the firelight and the whole, wide world laid out in front of them. “Things have been hard since.” Tears well in her eyes, but as long as she keeps her face tucked, he can’t see them. He doesn’t need to know. It’s hard because of you.

“I know, baby.” He somehow holds her a little tighter, taking the stick from her hand so she can wrap her arms around his waist. “I know.”

//

“I read in a book once,” Ellie says, lying on her back and staring up at the sky. The moon is just a sliver tonight. Their fire is dying down and all she can see are stars. So many of them, clustered and cluttered and chaotic. They take up the whole sky. It’s funny to think that they’re there even in the daylight—to imagine that something so numerous and grand and all encompassing can be hidden by something so simple as daylight. “That people used to like, buy each other stars and name them after them.”

Joel doesn’t say anything.

“Pretty stupid, right?” He’s lying on his back, too, and if Ellie stretches out of her sleeping bag by an inch or two, the crown of her head could be pressed against his. It’s nice, sleeping close together again. 

“Which one ya want?” he asks her, and it makes her roll her eyes. 

“It’s not real. It was just some dumb certificate or something.” Ellie didn’t really know how much significance something like a piece of paper could hold. Though apparently, in the old-world, something as simple as a piece of paper would mark when you were born and when you had died. A legal date of birth and two parents’ names were assigned to identify the exact DNA that had been split apart to make you. 

The only proof Ellie had of being born was the sensation of a root currently digging into her ass.

Index finger pointed towards the sky, Joel asks, “how ‘bout that one?”

Ellie cranes her neck to try and determine exactly where he’s pointing. “That’s the North Star, dumbass.” She knows he knows. He was the one who taught her how to find it. “If anything happens to me-”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“If anything happens to me, you find that star and you go north. You go north and find Tommy. He’ll take care of you.”

I don’t want anyone to take care of me but you, is what she doesn’t say. 

“Brightest star in the sky.”

“That’s a myth,” Ellie corrects him.

“Hm,” he grumbles, reaching his arm over to tug on her hair. “No more school for you, smartass.”

Giggling, she flips over onto her stomach and props up onto her elbows. She lingers into his space, grateful to find him there, waiting for her. “Did everyone get a star?” 

“Nope.” 

“Why not?”

He sighs, not actually annoyed by her needling questions these days. “I mean, you weren’t wrong. It was kinda stupid.”

They share a smile, and Ellie flops back around onto her back. So many stars. “There would be enough for everyone, though. Wouldn’t there?”

A branch in the fire cracks, a gust of wind knocks a few leaves loose from their branches. “There are more stars up there than grains of sand down here.”

“I’ve never been to a beach.”

Joel lightly knocks his head against hers. “I’ll take you.”

She stays awake for a while longer, wrapped in the silence and her sleeping bag. When she falls asleep, the last thing she remembers watching is the North Star, shining brilliantly above them. Her star. Joel said, after all. And what he says goes.

//

The vinyl is cracked beneath her thighs. Ellie runs her fingertip along the serrated edges of the split, sharp tan material and waits. She doesn’t say a word even as the adults all talk around her, about her. There’s nothing to say.

Joel shows up in record breaking time. At least, she thinks so. She hasn’t really been minding the passing of time. All she knows is that snow is still falling out the window. All she knows is that something is yawning open from within her, and she can’t figure out a way to seal it back away. 

More talking, Joel and Mrs. Roberts and Ricky’s mom all just…talking. 

Joel kneels in front of her. His eyebrows are drawn together. Deep furrows resting on his forehead—his worried wrinkles. “Are you okay?” It’s the first thing she really hears since it all started. 

“She’s not the one with a black eye,” Ricky’s mom shoots back. Ellie’s gaze instinctually jumps to the woman whose face is set in a nasty-looking glare. 

“Are you okay?” Joel asks again, diverting Ellie’s attention back toward him. “Did he do anything to you?”

This would all be easier if there was even a chance of a yes to that question. But the first time Ellie opens her mouth since is for Ellie to defend this poor bastard whose face she somewhat unintentionally bashed in. “No,” she whispers. “It wasn’t his fault.”

Somewhere in the background, Ricky’s mom is talking and so is Mrs. Roberts, but right now, all Ellie sees or hears or focuses on is Joel’s heavy, unbreaking stare. He’s looking for something on her, in her, and he must see it because he gives a single nod of his head. 

If Ellie could, she would explain the situation away, but there’s not really a means of explanation that can be had in polite conversation about this sort of thing. What’s she supposed to say? “I’m sorry Mrs. Ricky’s mom. I had a trauma flashback when we were all joking around at lunch, and when he grabbed my wrists as a joke, I had no choice but to begin pummeling him in a wild frenzy for survival.” It just didn’t have quite the right ring to it. 

“Did you tell him to get off of you?” Joel asks because he already knows. She doesn’t even have to bother with an explanation here. He looked into her eyes and knew exactly what had happened. As well as he knew that the first snow of the season might unfreeze something previously lodged within her chest. 

“Yes. He thought it was a game.”

Joel waits until she’s looking at him again. Until it’s the two of them and no one else. “Let’s go home.”

Ellie didn’t know what she had been expecting, but it wasn’t this. It wasn’t Joel’s arm wrapped around her shoulders and guiding her away with gentleness and warmth. It’s not him neglecting to remind her to mind her manners or issue an apology.

Joel wraps her up and offers no apologies and no excuses. In fact, the world is a little hazy in her head, but Ellie’s pretty sure she hears Joel tell Ricky’s mom to, “Take him home and put some goddamn ice on it already,” as he escorts her from the school. 

It’s nice, Ellie thinks while caught somewhere between numb and delirious. Nice to know there’s someone solely on your side, no matter what. It’s nice to have someone take her home and want to know nothing more than, “Are you okay?” 

Just so goddamn nice.

Chapter Text

Winter can go fuck itself.

Ellie hadn’t always felt this way. Back in Boston, she could almost love it. So fucking cold but layers of fluffy white snow coating the rooftops of those crumbling, filthy buildings until they were almost beautiful—until they were almost something worth looking at. 

But now she knows what it means to fall and get a face full of snow. She knows what it means to have that icy slush slip through the top of your boots, sink down into your socks, and dampen your feet for the rest of the day. Now she knows how it feels to sink to the ground in desperation and let the wet, numbing cold soak through the denim of your jeans as you try to keep the only person you have in this world from bleeding out. 

Now she knows what it looks like when blood and snow run together. 

She wakes up to a full coating in December. Not much more than an inch or two, really, but the ground is white, and the sky is gray, and Joel watches her with a careful eye from the moment she slips out of bed that morning. 

It takes longer than it should, initiating that first step off the porch. She has to psych herself up. She already knows how the snow will crunch beneath her boots. She knows what it will remind her of. 

“Are you…alright?” Joel catches her hovering, waiting. 

“Fine.” The answer is immediate. It’s necessary. The past can’t ruin her if she doesn’t let it. 

A beat of silence. A truth not revealed. A hundred snowflakes are cluttering the earth. 

“You don’t have to go today. If you don’t-“

Ellie hikes the straps of her backpack tight and stands up straight. “I’ll see you tonight.”

//

It’s worse. Everything is worse. 

And it’s not supposed to be. Time heals all wounds, maybe. A little bit. Whatever. But it’s been a year and sometimes it still feels like yesterday. It’s been a year and the snow still sets something rolling in her soul. 

Just like a touch she doesn’t know is coming. Just like red, fatty meat. Just like a large log cracking in the fire or the sound of a cleaver slamming down onto a wooden cutting board. 

Flinching, freezing, fleeing. It’s not a pattern she wants to align herself with. It’s not a feeling that sits right. 

The nights are long, but Ellie can’t sleep through them. The mornings are cold and she finds no way to warm herself. She wakes in the early gray of dawn and shivers and trembles and crawls until she makes it downstairs. 

Joel watches her with careful eyes. Joel asks if she’s okay. Joel’s desperate to know what he can do to help. 

It’s not that easy, though. Because how can Ellie accept his help? How can she turn to him to ease her through this when he has lied to her face. When he has taken everything, every lousy fear and miserable moment and horrors that had become their life, and made them all for nothing and then refused to admit what he had taken? What he had decided for the both of them. For her. 

She doesn’t want his help. 

Eventually, she learns that sometimes it’s better to just give up. The long nights of staring at the ceiling do nothing to soothe her, so why continue to lay there? 

In the empty hours of morning, Ellie haunts her home of six months now. She stands and stares out the kitchen window behind their sink. She slumps against the pillows of their living room couch. She swings her feet while perching on the bathroom counter. 

Whatever she can do to pass the time. Whatever she can do to remind herself that this is her world and her life, and she is living in it right here and now. There’s no before that still has its claws dug deep beneath her skin. There’s no chain tying her to a history she cannot escape. 

Water comes cold from the faucet. Sometimes cold enough to make her hands go numb. She stands there for long minutes, the rush of water filling her ears. The fuzzy sounds complement the hazy headspace she lives in perfectly. 

Her nail beds go purple and the feeling starts as a sharp, uncomfortable pain. But if she just waits long enough, fights it hard enough, the sensation vanishes entirely and she is nothing but blissfully, perfectly numb. 

Daylight does little to draw her out. She talks less at school than before. She visits the stable, mucks the stalls, and turns out the horses, but she declines Tommy’s attempts at conversation or Mr. Renaldo’s commentary on the weather. Head down, eyes ahead. 

“Are you sleeping?” 

“Yes.”

One beat. 

Two. 

Three. 

“Are you lying to me?”

Her heart catches in her chest, snagged on something broken and jagged. And it’s too easy. Too perfect. She’s still Ellie, after all, at least some part of her previous self still exists. The moment lines itself up exactly right so that she might look him dead in the eye and say, “I swear.”

//

Joel finds her in the dead of night. She’s doing her sink trick. It was still hurting, killing her a little bit as all the blood fled her hand and left it a pale white in the glow of the moonlight. 

The faucet shuts off without a word. A towel wraps around her hand. It’s the yellow checkered one that hangs off of the stove handle and adds a spot of brightness to a dim, dark world. 

The couch cushions give beneath her but they give heavier when Joel settles at her side. 

It’s snowing outside. 

A blanket draped around her shoulders. Joel angled towards her so his knee bumped against her leg. The only thing to be heard is the rush of a heartbeat in Ellie’s ears. Her heartbeat, probably. 

They don’t say anything for a long time. Eventually, Joel stands with a grunt and goes back to the kitchen. The stove clicks to life. 

“C‘mon,” he says a minute later as he cracks open the front door.

 An icy chill comes blasting in and Ellie pulls the blanket tighter around herself. “I don’t have shoes.”

“You won’t need ‘em. We aren’t going far.”

The cold startles her awake, back into a form of consciousness she almost recognizes. When Joel sits on the porch swing, she’s close to follow. Her legs tuck up close beside her, and Joel drapes another blanket across the two of them as he holds out a thermos with his other hand. 

Ellie sniffs it cautiously. Thermos usually equates to coffee. “What is this?” she asks because the smell is sweet and rich and unlike anything she’s ever breathed in before. 

“This,” Joel says with his arm draped around her shoulders and his feet rocking the swing gently back and forth and his tone soft and sweet and warm in all the ways Ellie has come to recognize as just for her, “is a goddamn luxury.”

The first sip is careful. The liquid is hot, not quite burning but close to it. The scent has nothing on the taste. Decadent, that’s the word that comes to Ellie’s mind as her eyes slip close and she swallows the warm, healing nectar down. There’s the creak of the porch swing, the rustling of Joel’s flannel as her cheeks pressed against it, and that distinct hum of silence that only came with the snow. 

“Jesus,” she whispers almost reverently, almost like a prayer, as she swallows it down. 

Taking the thermos from her, Joel swigs back a drink of his own. Ellie doesn’t think he takes the time and the respect that something so delicious deserves. Which was something coming from her. She’d choked the first time she’d been served a plate of homemade mac ‘n cheese from devouring it so quickly. “Hot chocolate,” is how Joel interrupts her thoughts. 

“Twenty year old hot chocolate?”

He holds her closer, tucks her beneath his stature so she’s consumed by him. It should feel restrictive, but it’s cold outside and numb inside so she folds herself a little bit closer still. “Nah, baby girl. This is the real stuff.”

“You’ve been holding out on me,” she accuses with no heat to her words. Another sip, chocolate remnants licked from her lips. The wind blows and loosely packed snow whisks from their porch steps. 

“Just waitin’.”

“What for?” Ellie can’t imagine why anyone would bother to wait for something this sweet and precious. She also can’t imagine why finding her freezing her fingers at three in the morning would be the occasion when he decided it was finally time to bring it out. 

A heavy sigh. “When Sarah was little-“ And there it was. That aching clench within her rib cage. Sharp. Demanding to be felt. “-well, let’s just say some problems are best solved with a cup of hot chocolate.”

Ellie sits with that. It holds her almost as tightly as Joel does. It makes her want to pull away. It makes her want to clamber on top of him and hold him back as securely as he held her. “Is my problem one of them?” she asks. 

“No.”

She already knew the answer. 

“Ellie.” He says her name and she holds her breath. 

It could be how he says her name before he leaves her. 

It could be how he holds her before he lectures her. 

It could be how he cares for her before telling the truth. 

She doesn’t answer him, doesn’t dare to meet him halfway. They wait in silence. 

His head bows into her hair—nose and mouth and forehead all smushed against the crown of her head. 

Joel doesn’t say anything else. In fact, Ellie’s pretty sure he’s crying into the top of her head as the pins and needles finally release their grip on her left hand. 

She drinks the hot chocolate. 

//

Christmas had been a thing in the QZ. 

They had learned about it in school. Some of the kids in the orphanage crafted trinkets to trade with their friends. One year, Riley had gifted Ellie a mixtape she’d probably stolen from someone else if the blood on her knuckles was any indication. 

In Jackson, Christmas was a proper occasion. School closes. There’s a communal tree that they all decorate. A special dinner, provisions passed out for holiday breakfasts, a designated church service held. There was Hanukkah, too. A few of the kids in her school do a presentation to the whole school about it. They reference the Holocaust and when Ellie asks Joel about it later, he pales. 

When he tells her about the history of it all, Ellie can’t help but consider how maybe the worst thing that has happened to humanity wasn’t ever Cordyceps. (She thinks about how her dying would never eliminate that sort of evil from the souls of men.)

In the stables with Maria, the day before Christmas, she can’t help but ask. “What’s the point, anyway?” It’s a random question, out of nowhere and from nothing. Ellie was doing better at talking to people, on the good days at least. Sometimes the kids in her class. Sometimes the adults she shared work duties with. Usually Joel, but occasionally Tommy and Maria and Ms. Rachel and Senor Lopez and Cat. 

“The point of what?” Maria asks, going along with Ellie’s random topic of conversation. She’s mucking while Ellie’s restocking. The horses are all draped in their blankets out in the snowy fields. She was getting better about that, too, about walking in snow, seeing it. It was here to say for another three and a half months; she might as well get used to it. 

“This whole Christmas bullshit.” She wipes her hands on her pants, shivering from the sweat that had gathered on the small of her back. It was almost time to lead all the horses back in. Brush them off, take off their leads, and wish them a merry fucking holiday. “I mean, besides the whole Jesus thing or whatever.” Ellie did not subscribe to the whole Jesus thing or whatever. In fact, she rejected it so vehemently that Joel actively tried to distract her whenever someone in their vicinity was talking about it. She knew what a prayer was. She knew how it felt for it to go unanswered. 

It’s something Ellie really appreciates about Maria, how she doesn’t waste words. She thinks before she answers. She makes use of the things she’s saying. Even if, at one point, those things were insults about Joel. “Back before, Christmas was a really big deal. A time for family and gifts and honestly, a lot of headaches. Commercialized, sure,” Ellie doesn’t know what that means, but she doesn’t ask, “but important regardless.”

“So it’s important now because it was important then?” She didn’t understand how they did things here sometimes, the way resources were allotted and distributed. The way they utilized limited items that had nothing at all to do with survival. 

Maria shrugs, propping the rake up beside her and leaning on it slightly. “A little bit, yeah.” She’s a little out of breath. Always blames that ball of human flesh she’d created when it happens. “People need their traditions. It’s important to our cultures and our happiness which directly relates back to the happiness of the community.”

“What’s happiness got to do with anything?” Ellie mumbles more to the cup of oats she scoops out from the bin than to Maria.

“Everything, Ellie.” It makes her spine straighten, Maria saying her name like that. “Happiness ties right back to resilience and to motivation. Happiness, contentedness, it’s what we strive for. That’s what makes all of the hard work and suffering worth it a little bit.”

Thinking about suffering sends Ellie somewhere dark and vacant. A chain link fence and steel tray of stew and burning support beams with fingers creeping towards her. Her heart beats like she’s sprinting from the infected as sweat fills her palms and her breaths come too short and sudden for no damn reason. Because it’s fine. Everything is fine. 

Ellie meets Maria’s gaze and holds it, unsure how to demand to know if there was anything that would ever make her suffering worth it. She doesn’t know how to be content with this life, this world, when she’d pushed through for so long for a cure. To be a cure. Not to be happy. That wasn’t ever the point. 

Because Riley was still a decomposing body back in that mall. Because Marlene had pulled Ellie behind her even as Ellie screamed like a raging banshee. Because the leader of the goddamn Fireflies looked Ellie right down into her very soul and said she had a purpose, bigger than anyone in this entire godforsaken world could ever imagine. She was going to be worth it. Everything that happened. It would be worth fixing the world, even if that world had been too broken to hold the most special person Ellie had ever known. 

//

On Christmas morning, there’s not any more hot chocolate to be had, but Joel makes her a cup of warm cider that’s been flavored with the apples from the fall’s harvest and steeped in plucked cinnamon sticks. It makes their entire little home smell delightful. 

They make pancakes and omelets. Joel drops a dab of batter on the end of Ellie’s nose, and she rolls her eyes (no one else is there to witness her laugh right before). 

The radio is on, and Joel tells Ellie about how there used to be whole stations dedicated just to Christmas music at this time of year. 

“You’re pulling my leg,” she accuses him, watching closely as he flips the pancake to reveal a perfectly golden brown shade. 

“Scout’s honor,” he says, and Ellie decisively does not think about how he could just have easily said “ I swear. ”

She shakes her head, forcing herself to be in a more happy place, for Christmas. Joel had talked a little about Christmases before. Sarah was a fan, apparently. Ellie could at least try and be a good sport. “Now you gotta sing ‘em.”

He’s one verse into Jingle Bells before Ellie cuts him off. “That is not real!” she insists with a stitch in her side from laughing so long. Joel just jumps right into something about a red-nosed reindeer and it’s all Ellie can do not to dissolve to the floor in a jumbled pile of giggles. 

//

Santa Claus is Coming to Town, Frosty the Snowman, Grandma Got Run Over by a fucking Reindeer? She pesters him to play her a portion of each of these absurdly horrible songs until he insists that he’s out. 

“This is the shit people miss?” Ellie finds herself asking as she licks globs of maple syrup from the ends of her fork. Maple fucking syrup, man. Talk about divine. 

Joel shrugs. “They remember Christmas being something that made ‘em happy,” he says by way of explanation. “No one ever said humans were all that intelligent of creatures, you know.”

He seems to be on her side. Not resolutely enamored with the concept of Christmas to the point that he can’t acknowledge a whole song about grandma being run over by a reindeer is objectively absurd. 

It isn’t snowing outside, so that’s one perk of the day. No sausage or bacon to choke down with the breakfast meal is another. And, even though she still gets pretty mad at him and doesn’t always know how to be the dream team of Joel and Ellie anymore, a little part of her is happy to have him all to herself for the morning. No work or school or Tommy showing up to ask for something. It’s nice, even if she’s not supposed to think that way anymore. 

The fireplace gets lit early in the day because the house is cold, and it’s not like they’re going anywhere else. A few other men are out on patrol, but Joel said he “Got out of it” in a way that made it seem it was important for him to. 

First, he plays the guitar, singing some song about it being cold outside that she only catches a fraction of the lyrics to ‘cause he keeps mumbling. Then he passes it to her. She knows like, four songs that actually sound like songs so she sings that one about the other side of rainbows. 

Sometime in the morning, he passes her an odd-shaped lump covered by a blanket. “Don’t really have wrapping paper these days,” Joel mumbles as he sets it in front of her. 

Ellie watches it skeptically. “What is it?” she asks, head tilting forward to inspect but not daring to reach out and touch it. 

With a go on motion of Joel’s head as encouragement, Ellie pulls the blanket off of the item and stares down at the soft, light brown object on the floor. 

“I figured your last one…well, you needed a new one. So. Seemed practical.”

And it is. The soft, leather backpack is a practical gift. But Ellie’s fingers reach out and graze over fine gold stitching and a carefully tailored red and blue NASA symbol that has been tethered to the bag with the utmost of care. Hand stitched, looped, and slightly off-center but also quite literally perfect. 

There’s nothing practical about her trinkets. Not a single damn use for them. That’s the whole reason she liked them at all. She liked the idea of things existing just to be things. Just to be. 

The leather is supple beneath her hands, flexible and cool and smells a little bit like Joel when he’s wearing his tool belt around the house. It’s perfect. The whole thing is just so goddamn perfect. “You made this?” she asks, voice as reverent as it gets for hot chocolate and green paint and guitars and the things in life that matter. 

“Ya like it?” Joel asks her in place of an answer. The stitching is done with a deep blue thread, complementing the brown of the bag while offering a color accent. It’s soft, worn and flexible instead of stiff in the way leather goods could sometimes be. Her thumb runs back and forth across the golden wings, stroking the thread so it was smooth against her fingerpad. 

She feels a little guilty that he’d gotten her a newly painted bedroom and fresh raspberries and a beautifully handmade bag and music and patience, and the only thing she’s given him is a headache, fear, worry. All she can give him is the fact that she’s still here. That she heard his lie and chose not to leave entirely, even as she felt something detach between them and float out of reach. 

“I thought only people who did the whole religion thing celebrated Christmas,” she answers. If she’d known…well, it’s not like she could manage anything worthwhile but she could have figured out something. 

“You don’t gotta do the God thing to celebrate Christmas. Lots of people don’t.”

Ellie is still just staring down at the precious gift clasped in her hands. Something made for her. “What about Santa Claus?”

Joel blinks at her, a half smile creeping onto his face. “Do you-” he poorly attempts to hide a laugh. “Do you think Santa is some sort of deity?”

“Well how am I supposed to know?” she demands, not dropping the bag from her hands to cross her arms over her chest like she might otherwise. “You just sang a dozen fucking songs about the guy! Seems like a deity to me.”

Joel laughs so hard Ellie can’t help but join in. Even though she stands by her point, thank you very much. Jesus had a lot of songs about him, too. “You’re such a dick,” she laughs without ever letting go of her gift. When they stop, the silence seems a little heavier, a little louder. The fire crackles. Outside, Ellie hears music pouring from the church doors down the street. “Hey, Joel,” she says, finding her thoughts caught somewhere between faith and trust and how she doesn’t have either of those things. But the man who used to call her cargo and pulled her along by the hood of her sweatshirt stares down at her like she’s the only person ever worth anything in this miserable world. “I love my gift.”

“Merry Christmas.” Joel smirks. “May Santa be with you.”

//

New Year's Eve is stupid too. Ellie is starting to think maybe she just hates holidays in general. 

Community event. There’s music, that’s the good part. And people, a lot of people. It snows heavily that day. The sort where you have to wait for a break in it before you venture outside or you will surely be lost in the fluster of white, white, white. 

This morning, she woke up angrier than usual. This morning, she decided she hated Joel’s guts again. This morning she looked out a window and felt like her soul wasn’t even attached to her body anymore.

Joel’s hanging out with Tommy now. He’s holding the baby in his arms. Ellie catches him smiling down at the little slimeball and has to remind herself that she hates him right now. She hates him because he could be here with that same slobbering pile of human and his brother and whoever the fuck else he spends his days with, and she could be exactly where she’s meant to be. Dead but in the most life-saving sort of way. A little piece of her distributed throughout the world. A little piece of her in every one of these motherfucker’s. A life worth something instead of whatever the fuck she’s doing currently. 

A life worth having suffered through instead of one where she can’t look out a window without a fucking panic attack.

She woke up this morning and decided she hated Joel’s guts and three hours or three days or three years later, he found her crumpled on her bedroom floor trying to remember how to breathe. This was what he’d damned humanity for. A girl who forgot how to breathe. 

The music is cheerful. People are dancing, and the whole room smells like apple cider and roasted pig. It’s a night of celebration. Another year lived, another rotation around the sun. Big fucking whoop. 

Sometimes she thinks about leaving. Not in the kid running away from home sort of way, she’s not that much of a cliche, but in a get me back to where I was meant to go sort of way. Let her see through what was started. Let her get to where she was supposed to be going.

Except there’s no more doctor, she’d bet. No more Firefly scientists. No more Marlene. In her pocket, her thumb runs over the decorative edges of her knife. Marlene had said she knew her mom. That she was going to tell her about her. 

Ellie had woken up in an unfamiliar room, lungs still aching from whatever that smoke bomb was she’d breathed in and a gnarly bruise on her elbow from how she landed when Joel pulled her down, covering her body with his to try and protect her. She woke up screaming for him. She woke up remembering damp, cold basements and how dirty needles pierced through skin and how liquid sucks out of a glass bottle through a syringe. 

The baby squeals with joy over the music at Joel’s fingers tickling at his belly, and Ellie’s standing in a corner thinking about how she’s practically an adult but can’t entirely deny that she feels jealous over some heathenous infant getting raspberries blown onto his chubby cheeks and how strong hands heft him into the air and float him around with exaggerated airplane noises. 

It hurts in a way it shouldn’t, because she’s not a kid and she’s not his kid and she never really was anyone’s. And then Ellie’s just staring off at the dance floor jealous of a girl who’s fucking dead because she got to have Joel as the dad who tucked her in and read her bedtime stories and made goddamn choo choo noises with the goddamn spoonful of mashed peas and the whole feeling makes her sick. It makes her want to vomit and scream and cry and-

“Ellie?” 

The way he says her name suggests it’s not the first time. 

Up on the stage, they’ve broken out the fiddle, so now there’s something with some twang being sung, and it’s not really Ellie’s vibe but she knows Joel likes this country shit, so he should really be listening to it instead of stuck standing here watching her like she’s halfway reduced back to that crumpled ball on the floor. 

“Headache,” she answers before he can ask if she’s okay. “I’m just gonna get some air.”

His hand comes up like it’s going to reach out and feel her forehead; check for a fever maybe, but it falls away before settling. That’s the thing about Joel. He doesn’t touch her without her leaning in and asking him for it. And it’s nice. It’s the right thing to do. Because she’s not his daughter, and he’s a grown ass man and one time a grown ass man tried to take her pants off in the middle of a building burning to the ground, so really, Joel’s just being a decent human being. But it also stings, sharp and stringent. She’s too damn angry to ask him for what she needs. 

She just wants him to give it to her. 

“Want me to come with you?”

“I’ll be back,” is how she responds. She could crack a joke, tell him to stay and enjoy his shitty music. But she doesn’t have the energy, the desire. It’s getting too hard to pretend like anything is okay. With her. With them. With being alive. 

Outside is actually fucking freezing and no amount of anger can keep her warm. 

Someone else comes around the corner, illuminated in the streetlights that reflect off the almost foot high, white snow. 

Cat, that’s her name. She's pretty. Ellie has to admit: This town has some things going for it. 

“You good?”

The library and the horse stables and the mac and cheese and some very, very pretty girls. 

“I’m fucked up.” Ellie doesn’t always know how to take advantage of the things in front of her. 

Cat smiles, long and slow and a little bit dangerous. And then she tilts a bottle forward with sloshing, amber-tinged liquid inside. “It’s the end of the world, bitch. We all are.”

Except Ellie knows for a fact, Cat has a mom. And she’d bet she’s the sort of mom who had snuggled Cat on her lap and said I love you before bedtime and blew raspberries on her fat, baby cheeks. Meanwhile, Ellie remembers asking a FEDRA employee for another cup of water just to feel that thrum of affection of someone doing something for her. She can’t forget slurping the drink down so she could ask for more; so she could feel that rush of being cared for again. She drank it so fast that she threw the whole thing back up, right onto the tiled mess hall floor and earned herself nothing more than a backhand across the face. 

Ellie takes the bottle. 

//

She pukes burning amber liquid at 3 in the morning. Joel doesn’t hit her when she’s a few feet shy of the toilet. Just holds her hair, rubs her back, and tells her everything is going to be okay.

//

It’s almost ironic how not even two weeks after celebrating the completion of another year lived, a bought of flu surges through the community with a vengeance. The clinic is overrun within days. School is closed and those who were out on patrol at the start of the true surge of illness stayed out, with those able to replace them few and far between.

Of Ellie’s little group of people, the baby catches it first. 

Two days later, it was Tommy and Maria in the same morning. 

Joel goes over to help, because of course he does. Ellie follows behind him, even when he says she doesn’t have to. He knows she’s not exactly taken with the baby and only slightly more so with Tommy and Maria, but still. It seems like the sort of thing she’s supposed to do. 

The whole house smells stale and dry and like sour milk. Ellie wants to open a window, but the below-freezing temperatures outside don’t seem like they’d be welcome. Maria looks relieved when they walk in the door, a strange pallor to her usually dark skin and a sheen of sweat across her forehead. 

Taking the sobbing baby, Joel sends her off to bed. 

How anyone gets any sleep is beyond Ellie. The thing never shuts up. Just wailing in misery for hours on end, regardless of how much rocking and shushing and soothing Joel attempts. Ellie’s on bottle duty, fetching pre-pumped bottles from the fridge and rewarming them on the stove. He shows her how to check the temperature on her forearm while still doing all these crazy rocking motions to get the screaming hunk of boogers to shut the hell up. The baby never even takes the damn bottles.

There’s a two hour window in the evenings when the fevers break through the house.

Tommy and Maria resurface, still looking gross as all get out but well enough to eat whatever food Ellie has managed to prepare for them and hold their own screaming baby. Well, he stopped crying earlier, but, as much of a relief it is to Ellie’s ears, she doesn’t miss the concerned glances between adults. 

Maria talks about the deaths while holding her own sick baby. Infants, elders, healthy seeming middle-aged folks. Dehydration, uncontrolled fevers, secondary infections. 

As much as Ellie hates being here, she finds she can’t pull herself away after hearing Maria say that. The next day, she even offers to hold the now borderline comatose baby so Joel can take a shower. She runs moistened fingertips across his tiny, chapped lips and swaps out the ice pack being held against the back of his neck. 

Maybe it scares her, just a little, the thought of something this small and this helpless being this sick. Maybe.

Joel returns, resembling a person and holds his arms out. “You look like you’ll drop him on his head,” Ellie quips, readjusting her grip on the snoring baby. “I’ve got him a little bit longer.”

Too tired to argue or question, Joel drops to the couch, laying his too long body across it and pressing his fingertips against his temples. 

“Was Sarah ever sick like this?” Ellie finds herself asking before she can think better of it. Joel talked about her more—more often and more easily and more honestly. He volunteers information, and she knows he’s not trying to compare them, but sometimes Ellie does it all on her own. 

“Couple times,” Joel says with his eyes still closed. “RSV got her good her first year. We spent a couple nights in the hospital.”

The mention of a hospital sends a tingle up Ellie’s spine. Probably a lot less shooting that time. “Sounds shitty,” she says because she can’t think of anything else. The baby in her arms grunts but doesn’t wake.

“It’s the worst when they can’t tell you what’s wrong,” he answers, and it makes Ellie remember those days stumbling around in the snow when he alternated between never letting her go and not daring to touch her, and she woke up screaming when she wasn’t sure she’d even been asleep. How he kept grabbing her shoulders and staring into her eyes and begging her to say something, to let him fix whatever was wrong. And she couldn't. She didn’t know what she needed at all. “Can’t stop feeling helpless.”

Holding the little piss rocket now, Ellie doesn’t feel so helpless, but then she considers his line of untouched bottles and the distinct lack of wet diapers needing to be changed and something rolls within her gut. “Is he going to be okay?”

“They’re like rubber,” Joel says. “Kids bounce back from just about anything.” Except for gunshot wounds to the abdomen and Cordyceps bites to the hand and burning buildings that they come stumbling out of with bits of brain matter on their face and a broken button on their pants. “It’ll just take a couple more days.”

In the end, it’s not just a couple more days. It’s the next day when a nurse who’s finally made a comeback shows up and puts the world’s tiniest needle in the world’s tiniest arm, and, when that doesn’t work because he’s so dehydrated, she shaves a patch of hair and puts the needle into the baby’s head. Ellie vomits off the railing of the back porch but not from the flu, she’s pretty sure.

They pump that little body with fluids like that, and Maria and Tommy each hold some tiny baby appendage and whisper nonsense and Joel and Ellie sit on the other side of the living room, and she’s still mad at him but also thoroughly attached to Joel’s side because she’s faced Clickers and raiders and growling dogs, and she hates how her heart is stuttering now just like it had done then. 

That night, little baby Jacob drinks a whole bottle and doesn’t even puke it back up. It’s the only time Ellie’s seen Maria close to tears. 

For the first time in four days, she and Joel go home. 

He says his head is killing him and goes up to bed. Ellie finds herself stuck in the entryway, not sure what’s rolling through her body but just knowing she feels it between her ribs and low in her gut and gathering behind her eyes. She sits on the hardwood floor and sobs as quietly as she can and has no fucking clue why.

//

Joel’s back at work for three hours before he comes home looking like actual shit. 

“Are you sick?” Ellie asks from her spot at the kitchen table. School was still closed. It was snowing again today.  She hadn’t actually managed to move since breakfast. 

With a grunt, Joel kicks off his boots and passes by her to get a glass of water. “I’m going back to bed.”

So that’s a yes, then. 

Ellie listens to the stairs groan against his weight and the flop of his body onto the bed springs overhead. 

A part of her can’t not imagine IVs in heads and sweat-sheened faces and the list of people Maria had said had been alive one week prior but not the next.

Shaking out her hands, Ellie sits at the kitchen table.

//

A full twelve hours, that’s how long she lets him sleep. The mess hall still isn’t open for communal seating, but meals are being handed out three times a day for those well enough to pick up and distribute. Ellie takes a stack of trays on a cart and passes them out all along the street. She writes a pun onto each napkin, saving the best ones for the neighbors who were nicest to her. 

Picking at her own dinner takes close to an hour. There still hasn’t been any movement from upstairs, and she can’t stop imagining pushing open Joel’s bedroom door and finding nothing more than a skeleton in his bed. Which is stupid, obviously. Bodies don’t decompose that quickly. She would know.

She makes him dinner on the stove and then takes it upstairs, letting the hall light be her guide into his room. The door was mostly closed but still cracked, so she simply nudged it open. “Joel?” It’s not supposed to be a question, but she’s partially convinced herself he’s a pile of bones. She decides it’s fair that it comes out that way.

He’s snoring, though. Kind of loud and obnoxious. So cool, not dead then. Back to hating him she goes. 

“Joel.” She kicks his bed a little, trying not to jostle the tray in her hands. Sometimes she remembers, after Silver Lake, all the things he did for her. She’s pretty sure he brought food to her every single day for a while and begged for her to eat. She has a faint recollection of rabbit stew at one point. He begged her to take a bite, and she was lucid enough to do so. She didn’t even manage to swallow it the whole way down. Joel had sighed before straining out the meat and allowing her to just sip on the salty, flavored broth. 

With a grunt, he opens one eye to look up at her. “Is there anything you ain’t immune to?” His voice is heavier than usual, a deep drawl enhanced by sleepiness and 36 years in Texas, probably. 

“Your stench,” she shoots back with ease. “Come on, sit up and eat, lazy ass.”

The light stays off, Ellie remembering her own splitting headache a few short weeks ago when she’d drunk too much whiskey and how the sunlight streaming through her bedroom window briefly tempted her to claw her eyes out of her skull. Joel called her dramatic when she filled him in on her plans.

Chicken noodle soup used to be the gold standard for the ill. But chickens don’t give enough meat to bother slaughtering all that often, and no one’s spending precious time to regularly make homemade noodles, so Ellie created the next best thing of beef broth and doughballs with some of those carrots she remembers hefting from the ground all those months ago, chopped up with an onion and some celery. 

“You made me soup,” Joel observes with that thickness in his throat as she sets the tray on his lap. She should slip out of the room now, leave him to his soup and his sickness, but a part of her doesn’t want to just yet. She climbs onto the other side of the bed and props herself against the pillows. “It’s not very good.”

She laughs. “Shut the fuck up and eat, old man.” “Your old man was lookin’ for ya,” Tommy said a couple months back, and something warm and foreign rushed through Ellie at the thought of someone being hers. Of that someone being Joel. Like she had staked a claim. Like all that time she spent digging her claws in and grasping for purchase had paid off. 

“Did you eat?”

“Not that shit,” Ellie answers instead of saying no. She wasn’t hungry. Her appetite had been buried down by anxiety. 

They sit in silence save for Joel’s slurping noises and the squeaking of the bed springs as Ellie adjusts her position on the bed, restless and unsettled. She wants to ask him how he feels, if he’s as sick as the baby was, if he is going to die like those healthy folks Maria had mentioned. She wants to make this damn flu go away so she can go back to being mad at him without also having to worry if she is going to lose him.

The spoon clatters against a mostly empty bowl. “Hey.”

Her gaze swivels over to him. The room is dark. She can’t tell if he’s pale or sweaty or fading in the way people do when a sickness is leeching something vital from them. 

“I’m okay.”

Ellie digs her teeth into her bottom lip. There’s something stuck in her throat. 

“Ellie.”

It’s dark, but she can still see his eyes. She holds onto them and wants to ask him to swear to her. Swear that he’s going to be just fine. But she knows what those words mean to him, the weight that they hold and the truth that they don’t.

“If anything’s killin’ me, it’s your cooking, baby girl.”

She doesn’t laugh, but she doesn’t cry, either. She’ll count it as a win.

//

The next day is worse. It reminds her of stained mattresses in damp basements a little more than she’s comfortable with.

He still wakes up and drinks water.

He still wakes up and runs a fevered palm against her cheek.

//

School opens again. The virus has mostly run its course through the community. 

Joel’s still too far gone to have any clue, so Ellie doesn’t go. Besides, what is she supposed to do? Leave him here all alone?

He drinks less water, wakes up less. His body radiates heat, and Ellie isn’t sure if it’s the right or the wrong thing, but she opens the windows of his room, convinced all that warmth needs to escape somewhere before it cooks them both alive. 

It’s messed up, Ellie knows, but she can’t help but remember that nurse who took care of Jacob, and, when she falls asleep, Ellie dreams of them shaving a patch of Joel’s hair and shoving an IV into his head. It goes too deep and punctures his brain. She wakes up with air caught in her lungs. She wakes up because she stops breathing in her sleep.

//

On day three, Ellie asks herself if it’s even worth being mad at him anymore. Maybe if she forgives him, she thinks while laying on his bedroom floor and listening to his rattled breathing, he’ll get better. Maybe if she forgives him, she can save him.

It’s the illogical wonderings of a child younger than her fifteen years, but sometimes she still feels so young. Sometimes she thinks she was stunted by all those years of no one loving her or taking care of her or prioritizing her, so a little piece of her is still a baby, one and a half years old, with its recent chance to be raised up right in the arms of someone who gave a shit about her. 

//

Ellie wishes she was the sick one. This would be so much easier if their roles were reversed. 

Joel knows how to take care of her. 

All Ellie knows how to do is sit back and hope.

//

Tommy comes over and finds her curled up at the bottom of Joel’s bed like a homeless dog. 

“Why didn’t you tell me he was sick?” he demands of her, but when she has no words to say, he reads an answer in her expression instead. “Why don’t you go take a shower, and I’ll look after your old man?”

Social etiquette demands she asks about his baby, but Tommy’s got on clean clothes and a grief-free face so there’s no necessity. 

Ellie stands with the blanket draped around her like a cape. Her head aches and her stomach turns, and she doesn’t know if she’s sick or just worn down from days of standing vigil. 

Irrational, she turns back around and makes sure Tommy’s meeting her gaze when she says, “Don’t let them put a needle in his head.” Don’t let them get close to something so precious. She’s starting to get it a little bit. The need to protect what’s yours. 

The look Tommy gives her is so sad, filled with sympathy and pity and maybe a hint of regret. “You got it.”

He doesn’t bother to tell her that’s not how it works anyway.

//

The spray of the water shuts off, and Ellie’s standing in the middle of her room, wrapped in a towel. It’s the first time she’s cognizant enough to recognize that the house is almost freezing. 

Maria brings over mashed potatoes with a healthy baby strapped to her chest. 

Ellie stares at the little shit, some mix of relieved and envious. 

No one tries to talk to her, but Tommy does press a hand to her forehead at one point and hums. Ellie lays her head down on the table after three bites prove to be too much. She’s not sure if she’s sick with worry or just sick in general. 

Maria sends her off to bed and makes her tea with honey and presses a cool cloth to her forehead. It’s nice, but all Ellie can really think about is that she wishes it was Joel fretting over her instead.

//

Fever dreams are real. Ellie wakes up drenched in sweat and gasping for air. She feels better, the sort of better that only comes with a broken fever. She slurps down that cold tea and the glass of water Maria had left on her bedside table and wastes no time swinging her legs out of bed and crossing the hall to Joel’s room, the exact place she wouldn’t let herself go for all those months. 

It felt so real.

She edges the door open, hinges creaking but not disturbing Joel from his ongoing sleep. 

Tommy told her while she was eating her mashed potatoes that Joel had woken up earlier, drank and ate a little, but mostly just asked about her. 

He’s back asleep now, and she crosses the room to where he is. The window is still cracked. It’s snowing outside. Goddamn snow just doesn’t give up. 

The wind whips through and freezes the sweat still tacky on her body at once. She climbs into the bed and pulls the covers up to tuck beneath her chin. Laying on her side, she faces Joel, who sleeps on his back and breathes a little funny but mostly right.

Alive. He’s still alive. 

There are no bleeding, festering wounds. 

There isn’t a needle jabbed through his brain.

There isn’t a bullet placed between his eyes, Marlene standing over him.

Ellie wonders if that’s how it would have ended otherwise, if Joel hadn't gotten to her in time or even at all. She wonders if it would have ended with him being seen as a threat to be eliminated. She wonders if he would have sought out someone who wouldn’t flinch. 

Not that she’d know, is the only consolation she can find. She would’ve been dead first. Maybe she could have met him there, out in that unknown.

Except Sarah beat her. Sarah’s been waiting longer; she staked her claim long before. 

It’s the sort of thought that sours something inside of Ellie, the realization that even in death, Joel wouldn’t be hers. She’d cross into an afterlife with no one to look after her still. Maybe Riley, if she didn’t resent Ellie for being the one to shoot as well as the one to live. Maybe her mom, a woman who Ellie can’t even conjure the face of.

“Ellie.” Her name is a rasp from his dry lips. And sure, she didn’t want the nurse to come put needles in his brain but couldn’t they give him something? Couldn’t they see he was worth that?

Like a newborn foal, she scrambles her way over to him. Head on his shoulder, just like she slept on those long, empty nights in the basement. She’d slept with a hand on his chest so she could feel his heart beating first thing when she woke up. She liked to believe it would make it easier, if he died like that. She liked to think it would be less horrifying if she realized his heart had stopped beating versus realizing his hand had gone cold and frozen wrapped within hers. 

Rigor mortis, that’s the term they taught them in FEDRA. They’re supposed to get the bodies burned before it sets in. Easier to move when the muscles aren’t all locked up.

For some reason, that’s what breaks something inside of her. 

She cries against him, no words to say or explanations to give. 

The hand smoothing back her hair quiets the yawning grief within her.

She’s so scared it bleeds the anger dry. She’s so afraid that a lie almost doesn’t matter anymore.

//

“You’re sick.”

“Less sick than you.”

“You shouldn’t be taking care of me.”

Someone has to.

“Maria made mashed potatoes.”

“I’m gonna be fine, Ellie.”

“Swear it.”

“I swear.”

//

Joel is fine. He wakes up the next morning still pale and a little shaky, but largely fine. He bundles her up in his bed and takes over taking care of her. 

She sips orange juice through a straw from a cup he holds for her. 

He fluffs her pillows and reads her Savage Starlight comics, even making the sound effects and everything.

Mostly, she sleeps. At one point, she opens her bleary eyes to Tommy leaning in the doorway. Ellie is still all wrapped up in her blanket cocoon and Joel’s arms, so she doesn’t let on that she’s awake, lest she be moved. Her eyes slip back shut and she fights off sleep long enough to catch snippets of their conversation.

“-be just fine. Thank Maria for the potatoes.”

“Sure thing, Joel.”

Her head aches, and Ellie digs her face deeper against Joel’s chest, blocking out the light and breathing him in. He was better now, freshly showered and mostly healthy. He didn’t smell like old sweat and the tinge of death illnesses carried with them. 

Joel’s hands hold her to him. 

“It’s all Sarah would eat when she was sick,” Tommy says, his voice thick. “Know she’s a different kid but still thought…”

Joel kisses the top of her head, and even though it aches something in Ellie whenever she’s compared to a dead girl who was always wanted more, even after twenty years gone, than Ellie’s been her entire life, it feels a little like Joel is saying she’s a different kid, but she’s still mine. It feels like being claimed regardless.

“Peaches,” Joel says, stroking her hair. “Weird comfort food, but that one’s hers.”

“Peaches,” Tommy parrots back. “And puns, right?”

“The worse the joke, the more she’ll love it.” His voice is so soft. His words are holding her as closely as his arms are. 

“And no venison.”

Joel tenses. “No venison. Meat is tricky in general.”

On instinct, her shoulders tense, and Joel runs his hand along her back, shushing her quietly, easing her back to sleep.

“What happened to you two out there?”

“Long story,” Joel answers. “The short version: endured and survived.”

Ellie’s lips twitch. He’s been reading those comics to her on repeat. She showed him the sign language Sam had taught her. He held her when she got all misty eyed thinking about it. 

“Right, Starlight comics.”

“Savage Starlight.”

Tommy chuckles. “I know. I know. I find ‘em for you on patrol, don’t I?”

They must be exchanging some sort of look or something. Ellie doesn’t open her eyes to see. She was too content. At some point, she’d be better. At some point, she’d have to go back to being angry and resentful and rejecting. But right now, she doesn’t have to be anything besides a kid. A kid with someone to look after her.

“I’m trying, Joel.”

Who the hell knows what that means.

“I know you are.”

The front door closes shortly after, and Ellie falls back to sleep.

//

“The flu fucking sucks,” Ellie declares when she finally returns to a semblance of a human being. She must look ridiculous with her unwashed hair that’s gone sweaty and dried again half a dozen times. 

There’s something like relief in Joel’s eyes when he looks at her, and she wants to roll her eyes at his worry, but she remembers the way fear followed her down into her dreams. She bites her tongue. 

“That it does,” he says. 

Tommy and Maria come over for dinner that evening, bringing a meatless casserole dish, and Tommy asking, “Did you hear about the restaurant on the moon?” Ellie narrows her eyes as she waits for the punchline. “It had no atmosphere.”

She laughs so hard her stomach starts to hurt. Joel tucks her against his side and for just a minute, the world is right.

//

When there are no more fevers or waves of dizziness and their lives return to this newfound normal they’ve staked a claim in, Ellie is angrier than ever before. She sees what she could have, what she should have, but instead, all that she’s gotten is a lie she’s expected to live in. 

It should be easy, as easy as anything in this life is, her and Joel. This is when things are supposed to be set right. This is when she’s supposed to be whoever the fuck she’s going to be. 

Instead, she’s locked in a past she never got to see through. Instead, she’s swallowed by the guilt of how she prevailed when so many others didn’t. How she survives and there are all of the people that still aren’t going to. 

Her anger is funneled into a dozen different activities, different methods. She plucks at the guitar when she’s home alone, stumbling her way through the chords that match the angry, violent lyrics she’s learned. She draws, sometimes images from the nightmares she has lived and sometimes just the ones that live in her head. She chops wood, and she sits out in the field with Jesse and Dina on bad days when none of them can stand to sit through another reading of fucking Romeo and Juliet, and they scream at the world for what it’s done to them. They scream until they laugh.

Sometimes they ask her questions, where she was from and how she got here. Ellie guards her secrets even from the people she grows to care about. She’s not sure if she’s protecting herself, Joel, or the dead, but she holds them close to her chest and keeps them buried beneath a layer of scar tissue and deflects like her life depends on it. 

“It’s good you’re finding your people,” Joel tells her on her way back from dinner one night.

Ellie looks up at him. She’s getting taller, doesn’t have to strain her neck so far to meet his eyes these days. She looks up at him and swallows back, You should be my people. You should have been number one. “Yeah,” she offers instead. “It is.”

They go to bed and every night, Ellie spares one final glance over her shoulder to the cracked door of Joel’s room and aches for something she knows she can’t allow herself to be weak enough to seek out. The comfort, the assurance, the certainty. It’s there. It’s hers.

She just can’t take it.

//

They’re fighting. They do that sometimes. 

Ellie gets ratted out for skipping class again or Ellie blows off the community event she told Joel she’d meet him at or Ellie runs her mouth just a little too long, a little too far. He snaps at her. She bites back.

That’s how they did things on the road. It kept things evened out.

But then he stopped snapping at her. She stopped having to snarl in return. 

The frustration is pulled taut between them, ready to fray and fracture and split. The anger is heavy with the resentment and the betrayal and the guilt all piled on top of this overpowering disappointment. 

Now it doesn’t always start with Joel snapping at her. She’s all bite without any prompting. Sometimes she thinks she’s asking him for a fight, begging him for it. She wants to throw some punches, hit him where it hurts. It’s only fair to give back all the hurt he’s piled onto her shoulders. Share the weight, motherfucker.

The anger twists and sneers and does ugly things to her insides that all come pouring out on the outside. Rage is the only thing she can get out of her system. Rage seems like the only thing she’s willing to let consume her entirely. It’s so much easier than the sadness and the panic and the loss. It’s so much easier than whatever David broke from her in Silver Lake and what Joel decided for her in Salt Lake City, and she’s tired of men who think they can make decisions for her even when they are not one and the same. 

“Don’t you lie to me, Ellie!” He’s raising his voice now because she’s been screaming at him for unending minutes, days, months, and it’s only fair for him to be heard. But she’s heard enough from him. 

“Oh, so that’s how it is?” she shoots back, arms crossing over her chest. Her heart is pounding in her chest, frantic and frenzied with what she’s so close to spitting at him. “I guess only one of us can lie, then.” It almost makes her flinch, how her voice loses its power. How she sinks down to a little kid wanting to beg him for the truth, for what she deserves from him. 

There’s a beat where Joel looks stunned, a moment where Ellie knows she’s let the cat out of the proverbial bag. “What are you talkin’ about?” His words drip with drawl. Ellie can identify feigned casualty after painting it onto her every action for months now. 

An itch in her arm and a pounding in her head and an imagined handprint on her waist. The secrets are so hard to bury. Her chest is full of truths she tries to hide within her ribcage, letting the bones protect what is too fragile to be exposed to this world. It’s funny, she thinks as she rips her heart out of her chest just to make a little more space for all those secrets to be able to gather. 

“You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

It’s funny how they still don’t sit.

The door slams behind her, and it shakes through her sternum, with her breaths. Huff and puff until this home comes down, she can’t help but think.

//

It’s Dina who finds her. 

Ellie almost wishes it was Jesse. He’s easier to talk to. She’s less afraid of how he’ll reject her. 

Arms wrapped around her knees, sleeves pulled down over her hands. Wind blowing and snow falling, and there’s no fever in her body but there’s a fire in the building and smoke in her lungs and she doesn’t think she’ll ever get out. She doesn’t think, even if she does, she will ever be the same. 

Sarah is a ghost, and Ellie sent a part of herself to the same place where Joel’s real daughter rests. She said here’s the good parts of me, the whole ones. The human ones. Keep them safe. They don’t belong to me anymore. 

“It’s fucking freezing.”

Dina doesn’t curse often. It almost feels like an olive branch. Here, I can be ugly too. 

But that’s nothing. 

It’s fucking nothing. 

It’d be better if Dina left her. Ellie is still too hollowed out to be anything more than violent and filled up to the brim with secrets. 

Ellie blows out a breath and watches how it forms smoke in the cold winter air. She rolls up the sleeve of her shirt and presses Dina’s fingertips to the ugliest, most broken part of her. The part that could have saved the whole world but damned it instead. Damned every last person who got near her. Until she was a girl who killed her mom and her friends and everyone she had ever loved, ever cared about. Until there was one person left, one person in all of the other shit. One person who was going to ruin it anyway.

It’s too dark out here to see. Dina’s fingers map out the rippled, scarred tissue with parted lips and a glimmer of fear in her eyes. “Have you-are you- should I…I’m going to go get your dad.”

He sure as hell ain’t my dad, Ellie thinks but doesn’t say. “It’s a year and a half old.”

Dina stops breathing.

Ellie wants to break something. Smash it all to pieces, destroy and kill and decimate. Her violent, violent heart. It yearns to take something precious and turn it into nothing more than fragments. She wants something precious to resemble who she is, what she has become. 

“Ellie…”

Shaking her head, dragging her sleeve back down to wipe away snot and tears before they can freeze in this bitter cold. “Don’t tell anyone.”

Ellie walks away.

//

Joel waits up for her. 

It feels like a breaking point. It feels like an end. 

“How long have you known?”

It’s the wrong question to ask.

“The whole time, Joel.” 

There’s an echo of the way his sobs broke through, a memory of the quiet confession to Tommy. The same one Ellie never received. 

Regret lines his eyes. Fear encases his mouth. 

“It wasn’t your burden to bear.”

So many damn questions that need answers. And Ellie should be able to ask them. She shouldn’t even have to. But she knows from how he stands in front of her that he doesn’t get it. He’ll never understand what he’s taken from her. He won’t ever repent for damning humanity to save her. 

Squaring her shoulders, Ellie doesn’t back down as she answers, “It wasn’t your decision to make.”

The stairs creak beneath her weight, so heavy, and she curls atop her unmade bed, eyes fixed on green walls and comic book collections and a handmade leather backpack. 

She mourns what she’s lost almost as desperately as she grieves the things she never really had.

//

What a dumb way for everything to come out. All those months of miserably holding onto the truth, and she blurts it out at him over some ridiculous argument she couldn’t even remember how it started.

Seems like a waste, all that time she spent pretending like things were okay. All that energy spent trying to move on. 

What a fucking waste.

//

A knock on her door is met only with silence. 

“Ellie.” Her name fits the same way it always does in his mouth, like he’s trying to hold onto it. It’s like he doesn’t quite want to let it go. 

“It wasn’t on you. Do you hear me?” Oh, don’t go spinning that bullshit, Joel. Just get the fuck out of here with that. “That’s the whole reason I lied to you. It was never supposed to be on you.”

It sits so heavily that she does not answer.

//

In the brief glimpse of sleep she manages, Ellie dreams about Tess. She sees two old men wasting away in a bed together. She remembers a man shooting himself after killing his own brother. She imagines a fourteen year old girl bleeding out. She creates a mash of nothing out of a human head. 

When she dreams, she sees what was sacrificed to get her where she was supposed to go.

When she wakes, she wants to scream for the nothingness of it all.

//

A piece of Ellie longs for the flu to return. To be drenched in sweat and drawn down to sleep and so tired it was hard to walk without blackspots popping in her vision. So tired, she could allow herself to sink beside the closest thing she’s ever had to a parent and let herself be loved, all other factors no longer contending. 

She thinks about leaving. 

She thinks about finding a new batch of Fireflies. 

She thinks about how death feels so much easier than whatever the fuck she’s doing right now.

Her fingers press against healed over flesh, and she closes her eyes, remembering Dina’s fingertips pressing in the same spots. Maybe the whole town knows about her by now. They’ll come and kill her themselves, for being a threat and for being a savior who simply could not be hanged on a cross. 

A sick part of her wonders what David would say to that. How much could God love anybody when he let his own son die like that? How much more could she be loved that Joel would never, could never, allow anything as close for a kid who wasn’t even his daughter?

Take your God, she thinks to a dead man. I don’t need him. She’s got something better. Or at least, she once thought she did.

//

“You’re a child,” Joel says the next time she sees him. It almost feels like he’s slapped her across the face. “You can’t decide to get a goddamn tattoo or smoke a cigarette or join the army and you sure as hell can’t decide whether or not you consent to a medical procedure. Especially one that’s going to goddamn kill you. I’m the guardian. That’s my job. That's how the world works.”

Ellie blinks at him. 

She doesn’t have any fight left in her to spare.

//

A day later, Dina is exactly where Ellie expected her. In the light of day, Dina holds Ellie’s gaze before her delicate fingers reach out and push up the sleeve of Ellie's sweater. She marvels at the healed skin staring back at her. 

Inhaling something sweet and alive and whole, Ellie asks, “Can you do something for me?”

//

“What the hell is this?”Joel grabs her arm as she walks by him to the steps. The inky black design is rudimentary, but beautiful in its own right; it's beautiful in the promise of what it might one day become.

Staring back with hard eyes, Ellie snatches her arm out of his grip, fresh tattoo and all. “It’s a different fucking world, Joel.”

It’s the most she’s said to him in days.

It feels like the last thing she’ll ever say to him again.

Chapter Text

The concept of spring is exactly that. A concept, an abstract idea, a promise that is taking too damn long to be delivered.

The snow persists. It falls in fat, white flakes. The endless piles grow taller, even on warm days when they should be melting away. 

Maybe it’s punishing Ellie, this cruel, endless weather. Maybe she was meant to feel like she would always be trapped within that cage. (Maybe it was the realization that she could have the whole world wide open in front of her and it was all just still a cage.)

She barely talks to Joel. She hardly even looks at him. 

A week goes by when she finds him waiting at the front door as she comes down to flee out the door for school. She’s been waiting until the last possible minute. Skipping breakfast and tea and that little side hug he used to give her in the mornings if she stepped close enough into his personal space.

There’s a look on his face that suggests he’s waiting for her. 

She almost turns back upstairs to where he wouldn’t follow.

“Ellie.”

His saying her name shouldn’t hurt. It shouldn’t remind her of how he whispered it in the early hours of the morning when she was broken or called it in distress when she was in harm’s way or rolled his eyes with an affectionate little snort masking a laugh as he said it. 

“I’ll get up and have breakfast at Tommy’s from now on.” That’s not how she expects the sentence to proceed. “Okay?”

Her lips are dry, and her stomach is empty, and her eyes are heavy but hollow. Ellie blinks at him, looking at his face for the first time since she’d snatched her arm out of his grasp all those nights ago. “Why?”

God, he looks so sad. It’s almost pathetic. She wants to think it’s pathetic. Instead, it just makes her sad, too. 

“You need to eat in the mornings. Me being here gets in the way of that.”

Honestly, her appetite hasn’t really been craving much these days, anyway. Joel opens the front door. It’s goddamn snowing out. 

Ellie wants to ask him to play her a song. Sing about the rainbows and the brown-eyed girls. Sing to me, for me. His guitar hasn’t been touched in a week.

“I’ll be out by 7,” he says with his back turned to her. “Just…make sure to eat something.”

The door closes. 

All Ellie hears is, “Take care of yourself. Take care of the thing I love.” All Ellie hears is the click of a closing door.

She goes to the kitchen stares at the container of oats left out on the counter, at the empty front-left burner, at the bare raspberry bush outside their window. 

//

She kisses Cat on the first day there’s rain in Jackson.

It doesn’t melt much of anything, but it’s something. It feels like one thing is dying and another might come to life. 

Cat kisses her back, hard on the lips. 

It feels nothing like Riley. 

There’s something missing, something absent. 

Ellie pushes forward, searches harder, waits longer. She waits for something she doesn’t expect to ever show.

//

Maria finds her in the stables. The weather has reverted back to snow. It’s late morning. Ellie had an English essay due in class, but she’d sat at her desk with a pencil clamped tight in her hand and the only thing she could get it to do was draw uncertain, shaky lines. Some of them looked like a chain link fence, some like a hospital stretcher. Some looked like a guitar leaning against a porch swing with a backpack resting on the seat. 

Wordlessly, Maria grabs a shovel and begins to clean.

“What are you doing?” Ellie asks because even though she’s beginning to feel a bit like a mute, she isn’t one yet. Might as well stretch her vocal cords while she still could.

The hay rustles as shit plops down into the empty, metal wheelbarrow. “Mucking stalls.”

Together, they conquer five stalls before Maria next speaks. “Do you want somewhere else to live?”

Ellie freezes halfway through a brushstroke on a horse’s back. All she could think about was that first conversation, the one they’d had with a towel wrapped around Ellie’s shoulders and a hardness encasing Ellie’s heart, as well as anything that pertained to Joel Miller. She had been holding him close then. She had been keeping him safe. 

“You can say it, you know,” Ellie says in response. She returns to motion, brushing the gentle beast in front of her and shoving his snout away when he attempts to dig into her pocket for some sort of treat or another. “You can tell me I told you so.”

Maria is arguably one of the most important people on the council. She has a six month old baby and a husband and a very busy life to maintain and grow all at the same time. It’s not lost on Ellie that most of their conversations are had surrounded by horse shit while doing the labor of teenagers. It’s not lost on her that Maria meets Ellie wherever she is. 

“I have no desire to do that.”

Does she know? Ellie wants to ask. Ellie wants to lift the sleeve of her shirt and see how Maria reacts to old scar lines and new tattoo ink and whether it would be old news or a fresh shock, or simply the justification of a bullet to Ellie’s head. She can’t deny, it would solve a lot of her problems. 

“You have to go to school, Ellie.” 

Ellie didn’t have much to say about George Orwell. He got it all wrong, anyway. 

“If Joel isn’t willing to fight you on this, I am.”

Partially, Ellie wants to ask her why she gives a shit. But mostly, Ellie wants to pretend it’s because Maria gives a shit about her, not the commune rules. In fear of what the answer would be, Ellie does not ask the question. 

“I see you two are…at odds. So if you need somewhere else to stay or someone else to rely on, then that’s fine. We can arrange that.”

Someone else to rely on. Ha. Just the thought makes Ellie wish she could hoist herself onto the bare back of this horse, lay her body atop it, and let him carry her to someplace else in this world. She wishes someone would just carry her away.

“Could I live on my own?” “ I’m not on my own.” She still wasn’t. That was the part that made it easy to pretend. She knew that if she wanted to, needed to, Joel would be right there waiting. She knows that Joel will never turn her away. It makes her so angry, that only now would the universe give her someone to love her like that. Only when there was so much to be gained from the end of her life was there a person who needed her alive. What a fucking joke. 

“Absolutely not.”

Ellie didn’t expect much else.

“There’s a young couple who said they’d be happy to take somebody in, and Mrs. Schneider, who lives by the theater, has housed a few teens in the past, so-”

“I’m good,” Ellie interrupts before Maria can continue. The idea of living with someone else, of being someone else’s to whatever capacity, makes the world feel tilty and weird. 

A hard stare digs through Ellie’s back, deciphering and analyzing and destroying layers of protection. “Then you go to school. You come to community meals. You do your part. No negotiations.”

The funny part is, Maria almost reminds Ellie of Joel here, making a list of rules for her to follow. 

“What you say goes.”

“I get it.”

Something softens in Maria, and Ellie’s reminded of those evenings in the living room with a sick baby. It lights her skin on fire to be seen that way. “You aren’t all on your own, Ellie.”

It’s a good thing she’s facing away. The heel of her hand makes quick work of the tears that spill.

//

New people come to the community. One of them is an older man, probably a couple years younger than Joel. He takes to the stables. 

He watches her in a way that makes Ellie feel too seen, too naked. He watches her like he wants something from her.

Hair standing on end, Ellie approaches Joel in the mess hall for the first time in almost three weeks. They don’t talk, really. They live together, but it’s the furthest she’s felt from him since he’d shoved her to the ground and pointed a gun at her head.

But Joel has a presence, even if he’s not trying to. There’s something written in the hardened edges of his face that say, “Don’t fuck with me. Don’t even think about it.” And Ellie really believes that through proximity alone, people will understand they can’t fuck with her either.

The snow is starting to melt outside. The man watching her makes her feel closer to David than she has since he lay atop her body. 

Joel stares at her as she approaches and continues to when she plants herself at his side. 

Her friends are watching her too. She ate with them every community meal, not having missed one since Maria’s chat in the stables. 

“You good?” It’s the first time she’s heard his voice, gentle and quiet and calming since their fight. Ellie wants to cover herself in it. She wants to lay on the floor and submerge in that reassuring promise that fits in his words, even when the ones that come out are not always true. 

If Ellie tells Joel what had driven her over to him, she knows he would spring into action without a second thought. He’d take her home. He’d “talk” to this Mr. Fisher. He would make sure she’s safe. (Or at least that she felt like she was.)

“I know you want to…protect me.” How foreign that had felt. How clumsily the words had tripped off of her lips. It didn’t seem quite right, quite real, that someone would be desperate to protect her at their own expense. 

Searching her brain for an answer, Ellie sidles closer still. Eyes. She can feel the eyes. 

“I need a new notebook.”

She doesn’t. She has three untouched ones. 

Joel’s eyebrows furrow, and his gaze remains completely fixed on her. “Okay.”

He doesn’t reach out and touch her, but she needs this new man to see. Someone is looking out for me. Someone will notice if you come for me. Someone will protect me. One more step into Joel’s space. 

An arm, wrapped around her shoulders. 

A breath, released from her lungs.

She sits beside him for the remainder of the meal. Maria looks between the two of them for the whole hour.

//

Ellie doesn’t have nightmares. But maybe she does have bad dreams.

It takes her back to the nights after Silver Lake and the fever dreams that bounced between her consciousness and exhaustion. 

It’s not like she wakes up screaming. Sometimes, she’s not sure if the dream she was having could even be all that bad because she woke up with her heart steady in her chest and air filling and exiting her lungs. But, if she thinks too hard or too long, the dream will pull her back under, and she would feel the need to pull her skin up from her body and scratch something beneath the surface, something that could remove what hideous, vile thing was hiding beneath it. 

Tonight she wakes up and tries not to see Marlene blood-spattered. She tries not to see the infection crawling its way up toward Tess’ face. She can’t help but see the gray, gaunt face of a mostly-dead Joel. The lifeless, tan-tinged eyes of Riley. 

It almost makes her feel crazier, the way she doesn’t feel crazy at all.

Her throat gets tight, and her palms begin to tingle, and the already dark world gets even dimmer at the edges of her vision.

Pushing the sheets away, Ellie clambers off of the mattress, and with heavy, clumsy limbs, she pulls herself beneath the frame of her bed. The hardwood is cool against her back and the springs are twisted and turned less than an inch from her face.

A cage, that’s what it should feel like.

A shelter, that’s what it does.

Ellie hides and thinks of the years of playing hide and seek with the other kids at FEDRA. “Ready or not, here I come.” She thinks about how someone didn’t always find her. She thinks about how often they stopped looking.

//

Four weeks in is when something shifts again.

Joel had taken to leaving ingredients out for her breakfast every morning. Tea stuffed into a steeper and a pot filled with enough water to boil a single mug on the stove, two eggs and two slices of toast waiting uncooked on a plate or pre-mixed pancake batter or oats already measured out. 

She comes down that Monday morning, and there’s a plate at her spot on the table with a fully cooked breakfast on it, steam still rising in drifts. The door had clicked only when her feet had creaked on the first step.

Thinking of Maria’s rules and Joel’s efforts and her own growling stomach, Ellie sits at the table and eats.

//

The snow is gone. It’s supposed to feel like a relief when Ellie looks out her window and finds nothing left to crunch beneath her boots. To her disappointment, she has to admit it brings not a single ounce of consolation. 

Her breath still fogs the glass of the window.

//

Cat likes to kiss. She likes kissing more than she likes to talk. Ellie is pretty sure she’s okay with that. 

Cat likes to put her tongue in Ellie’s mouth and suck on her bottom lip and run her hands all over Ellie’s back. 

It feels nice. It feels like being wanted. 

Honestly, Ellie isn’t sure she’s even that good of a kisser, but there are only so many lesbians to make out with in Jackson, so she figures that, to some extent, making out is kind of just the default for them. 

Cat’s older than her, Ellie learns. She’s seventeen, getting ready for her first steps into the world outside next year. She’s got shit aim with a gun and only slightly better with a bow. But she seems smart, hard. She seems like the sort of girl who would fuck someone up if she wanted to. (She seemed like the type of girl whose skin would pierce too easily beneath a pair of infected’s teeth.)

Sometimes, Cat tries to take off Ellie’s shirt. But no one knows about the bite on her arm besides Dina, and, as previously established, Cat wasn’t one for talking. Ellie keeps her shirt on.

Today, they’re in Ellie’s bedroom. “Homework?” Cat had asked after school. They hadn’t once done homework together.

Today, Cat started kissing Ellie like it was the start of something more.

Hands travel, not bothering with the sleeves of Ellie’s shirt or running over the expanse of her back. They’re kissing, and it feels good, and Ellie has her eyes closed and a handful of Cat’s hair and a slightly elevated heart rate. 

She’s leaning back against the pillows crowding her mattress.

It’s spring outside. The sun is shining. There are tulips beginning to sprout from the unfrozen dirt. Crops were planted in a community event last week. A caterpillar crawled across Ellie’s shoe that morning.

Cat’s moving frantically. Her hands brush Ellie’s waist, wrap around her hips. Her fingers dip to the button of Ellie’s pants.

The world freezes. No snow outside. No man on top of her. No blood on her face. 

Ellie stops kissing back.

Cat gently pulls down Ellie’s zipper. 

The air in her lungs is doing nothing. It doesn’t stand a chance to when it comes in urgent, desperate wheezes. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stopstopstopstop.

“Fuck!” Cat stumbles back, tripping over her own feet. “Jesus, Ellie!” 

But Ellie can’t assess what she’s done, how she’s hurt someone else, because she can’t breathe and she can’t feel her heart in her chest or how the secrets are clustered all tucked up in there. Her skin is an overstimulated nerve. Part of her wants to cover with every layer she can grasp and the other wants nothing to be touching her at all.

Knees to chest, hands over ears, oxygen into lungs. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay. 

Muffled voice, pounding heart, rushing blood. Feral scream and the crack of burning wood and knife hitting flesh and bone and brain and blood and-

“Ellie!”

Her gaze flashes to Cat’s. Ellie can feel how wide her eyes are, pupils blown as desperate fingers grasp at baby hairs loose around her face. Wild animal. Caged. Too violent to be tamed. (Too violent to need a father.)

“Are you okay?”

Fucking crazy, that’s what she is. She’s fucking crazy. 

Head shaking, mouth opening and closing and opening and there aren’t any words. Shaking, trembling, pulling at her scalp. For a second, she thinks about yanking out a chunk of hair, focusing on the pain and feeling like a whole, actual person for whole, actual seconds. But Cat is already looking at her like she’s in need of a padded room. Ellie forces her fist to relax. 

“Joel.”

Of course that’s the fucking word she gets out. Jesus, what’s wrong with her? There was a pretty girl who kissed her and liked her right in front of her face. Cat hadn’t even run screaming from the room yet. Ellie could talk to her. She could let this nice girl with her too-hard lips and too-pushy tongue help make this better. But she doesn’t want Cat. She doesn’t trust her. Not like she does Joel. Not like she does the one motherfucker who betrayed her most. She really is fucking insane. Making no damn sense at all. 

“Did he…” Cat winces. “Does he touch you?”

“Fuck, no.” Those words come to her easily. “Jesus, that’s disgusting.” 

“I know that. ” 

Cat’s defensive. Ellie’s offensive. Volatile combination. 

“But you said he’s not your dad, and now you’re acting like this, and saying his name, and, well, conclusions have been drawn, El.”

Ellie shudders. “No. It’s not…Joel’s not...” The thought makes her want to vomit right onto her bedroom floor. Because Joel was safe. Even if he was a liar. Even if he was, more or less, a mass murderer. He was so fucking safe. “It wasn’t him.”

Nodding like she gets it. Cat takes a step forward and then two more back when Ellie flinches. 

Raindrops patter the windows. There is not a flake of snow remaining on the ground. 

Ellie’s hands itch for the firm grasp on a knife. Ellie’s heart seeks a familiar pair of arms to hold her. Violence and love. Love and violence. How they bleed and blend and unite. How they divide and detach and re-entangle. How they have fucked her up.

“You don’t have to stay.” Ellie is staring at her rumpled quilt. It’s blue. Joel found it on patrol. He washed it by hand and hung it on the clothesline out back on the sunniest day of winter. It smelled of lavender-scented detergent and cold air and old sweat. It feels like a gift. It feels like hers. 

Cat’s socked foot toes at the grains of the hardwood. “I’d feel like a dick just leaving.”

Maybe she would be one. Who knows? “I think…I think I want you to go.” 

Relief, that’s the set of Cat’s shoulders. Liberation, that’s the exhale from her mouth. 

“You sure?”

Ellie nods. She can’t look in Cat’s direction. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. 

Already halfway out the door, Cat answers, “It’s okay.”

Ellie is very much alone.

//

The rain stops. 

The world is quiet. 

Of all times to skip on dinner, Ellie feels validated tonight. Maria will just have to understand. (And she thinks she would. Ellie thinks if she said it all, from start to finish, Maria would be kind. She thinks maybe she would react like a mother.)

The sun is setting. Her room has been cloaked in darkness. Ellie’s eyes have adjusted. From her rigid position atop her covers, Ellie looks at her stack of belongings: her notebooks, her backpack, her knife. It’s stupid, irrational. Her fingers almost make a move for the blade. Her mind is telling her this will all be better if she just hurts. If there was some way for her blood to cover her sins. 

But that’s dumb. Her sins will never be repaid. Her debts are too great.

She goes downstairs. 

Nothing quite feels right. Nothing feels like she’s the one doing it, but she turns on the lamp in the corner of the living room and picks up the guitar that’s leaning against the arm of the couch and lets her fingers dig into the strings, allowing her thumb to drift aimlessly. 

At some point, she turns it into a song. She was getting better. Joel wasn’t teaching her anymore. Sometimes he still played. Sometimes she laid with her ear to the floor and listened. 

It sounds like music, what she pieces together. It sounds like a song she knows. Her fingers start to ache, but she plays through the pain. Her eyes begin to burn. She closes them and sees nothing at all.

Winter is over. That season has passed. The rest of this shit should too. 

Cat shoved to the floor and Ellie panting and frantic and horrified. The only thing that could come to her mind was Joel. The only things that feel like a balm are his soothing words and gentling hands. It’s not right, how he can take her whole purpose from her and still make her want him. Still make her crave being someone to care about. Someone precious. Still makes her crave being something she can’t ever become. Parentless girls don’t get to be daughters. (Violent hearts don’t get to have fathers.)

When the front door opens, she’s still playing. 

Her eyes open; she almost expects her fingers to be bleeding. 

Joel’s leaning in the doorway. Almost like he doesn’t know if he’s allowed inside. Almost like he doesn’t have the strength to leave.

The music continues. 

“You’re gettin’ good.”

She feels bad. She feels fractured. She feels so fucking worthless. 

Untying his laces, Joel’s mud-covered boots sit just outside the front door. He shuts it with him inside. The ambient noise of distant voices and newly bloomed trees rustling in the wind gets shut out. 

“G’night, Ellie.”

“Joel.”

He’s not even to the bottom step yet. 

He stops, waits. 

There aren’t any more words. She doesn’t know how to tell him anything. She doesn’t know how to ask for what she needs. 

I hate you. I never want to see you again. I never want you to hold me like I’m the only thing that matters in the world. 

I never want you to leave me. I never want you to not walk through the front door. I never want anything to be more important than me to you.

She stops playing and thinks about holding the guitar out, an offering. He can sing to her. His voice can be a lullaby; his arms can be a shield. 

“My desk…it’s uneven.” 

God, of all the olive branches to offer, this one is pretty fucking lame.

He nods once. “I’ll fix it tomorrow.”

She should probably clean off all of her unfinished homework before then. 

There aren’t any other words Ellie can think up to say. Slowly, like approaching a wild animal (feral, she’s so damn feral), Joel enters the room and lowers himself to the floor with a groan. 

The couch was her space, her territory. 

(So fucking safe.)

“Did you kill Marlene?”

Joel swallows like it hurts. “Yes.” He speaks like it doesn’t.

Ellie begins to play. Fingers strumming. Chords combine into songs. She is getting pretty damn good. 

“Were they going to kill me?”

“Yes.” That word hurt. It cost him something. Good.

She nods. She plays. She hums. 

“Why didn’t you let them?”

That question damages him more than anything else. It’s a splintered baseball bat to the gut. It’s a bullet that doesn’t quite hit its mark—almost kills him. That’s what that question does to him.

“Ellie.” She used to think he was saying her name like he didn’t want to let it go. When he says her name now, she knows what it makes her think of. She knows who else he holds like that. 

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Joel looks like he could cry. Joel looks like she’s breaking his heart. 

Her fingers hurt so damn bad. (So does her chest. So does her brain. So does her scarred-over arm.)

“You’ve gone through enough. I coulda carried this one.” Joel shakes his head. “I couldn’t let them hurt you, Ellie.”

“Kill me, you mean.” This time, when his face contorts, she just feels cruel. “What about everyone else? What about Sam? And Riley? And Tess? Aren’t they worth anything?”

“They’re gone.” 

Hard voice. Straight mouth. Empty eyes. 

“They ain’t worth you.”

Her hands stall. They’re shaking too bad. Anger swells up, rushes and tangles and swirls with hope and desperation and that vicious loneliness that has backed her into so many corners and made her wrap her greedy little fists around whatever ounce of affection she could obtain in this world. Whatever bit she could cling to and label Ellie’s . Whatever minuscule piece the world couldn’t just take away. (It could always take it all.)

“I think I hate you.”

Joel doesn’t flinch at all. “That’s okay, baby girl.”

Goddamn motherfucking bastard. 

“How can you say that?” She doesn’t mean to sound like she’s about to cry. She doesn't intend for her bottom lip to wobble. “Why doesn’t that make you leave?” She doesn’t want to let him know what, after everything, still scares her the most. 

“I won’t stop you from leaving, Ellie if that’s what you need. So long as you’re safe.”

And doesn’t he see? Doesn’t he get it? “Joel.” She’ll never be safe. Not while she’s in her own head. Not while she’s in this body. “There’s no such thing.”

He levels her with a stare. “There is if I got a say.”

It’s easier to look at Joel than anyone else, easier to hold his gaze and not flinch away. It’s easier to have all of her secrets tangled around the vertebrae of her spine, inscribed onto her very DNA when he’s the only one who might see. Most of her secrets already belong to him anyway. “Who gave you a say?”

The answer is not hidden away at all. It sits right between them in this room. 

Ellie did. 

//

She gets up early. His coffee pot is under the sink. She puts it on the front-left burner before tip-toeing back up to her room. 

//

Community movie night. For the past couple of months, Ellie had been going with Cat. But that doesn’t seem like it will be the case anytime soon. If she could stay home, she would. They’re showing some cartoon she doesn’t give a shit about, but Maria said Ellie was to come to events. So to events she went. 

Joel’s putting his shoes on to leave.

Ellie takes the stairs faster than she means.

“We can walk over together, if you want.”

Joel raises an eyebrow at her. “That ‘spose to make me feel special?” He takes her coat off the hook and holds it out to her. “Temperatures are dropping.”

She takes it, ignoring how special the act makes her feel. “Tolerable, at best.”

When he shoots her some form of a half-smile, she can’t help herself but to reciprocate. 

During the movie, they sit beside one another, and Ellie steals all of his best popped pieces of popcorn. She pretends not to notice the way Joel picks around them for her to take.

//

It’s the sort of spring day that makes people forget the horrors of the world.

Sun shining and the grass a vibrant green. Trees in bloom, white and pink flower petals floating through the air on a breeze. A bumblebee bobs in the garden outside of Mrs. Ramirez’s home. The sun soaks through to warm but isn’t yet oppressive. It feels like the whole universe decided to work together and create something wonderful, something perfect. 

Ellie feels like shit.

Sleep continues to evade her the majority of the nights. Her eyes were tired and her shoulder was sore from the horse that threw her from the saddle yesterday. There had been another dream. Joel was away on patrol until nine tonight. Cat wasn’t really talking to her. 

Total shit.

If she wasn’t worried about Maria locking her up in some stranger’s house, Ellie would totally ditch school. But instead, she dutifully rises, skips the breakfast she would most definitely have to make herself with Joel gone so early, pulls her hair into a ponytail, and goes to school. 

Jesse waves to her. Dina smiles at her. 

God, she’s tired. 

“I can come with you,” Dina asks at the end of the day. Ellie’s got stable duties today, like most days. 

With a grimace, Ellie says, “That’s okay. I’m good.” Dismissive, maybe, but she can’t imagine talking to someone for another second today. 

Hurt flashes across Dina’s eyes but it only seems right. That’s what Ellie does to people. (She thinks of Cat stumbling on her bedroom floor and Joel with his back pressed to the living room wall.) “Maybe next time.”

Jesse doesn’t try to talk to her on days like this. He knew it was pointless.

The day is so gorgeous there are hardly any horses left in the stables to care for. 

Well, that makes her job easier. She gets to work, mucking, restocking, humming to whatever tune pops into her head. The day could almost be nice, if it could just stay like this. She needed to be alone. She needed to have no one expecting a damn thing of her. (She needed to stop dreaming about David.)

Hooves come clomping onto the hard stable floors. Ellie turns to accept the returned horse and feels the breath leave her lungs. 

Mr. Fisher holds up his hands. “Didn’t mean to scare you, sweetheart.”

The name only makes her recoil harder.

She scans for someone else, anyone. There’s no one.

“I…” Her heart accelerates like she’s already begun running away. She takes a step back.

“What’s your name, darling? It’s Ellie, right?”

Another step.

His hands raise further, going as far as to drop the reins of the horse.

“Mean you no harm. I swear.”

God, wrong fucking thing to say.

She could stand to see the world’s worst liar coming up behind her right about now, though.

“Look.” The man reaches into his pocket. 

Ellie goes for her knife. 

Mr. Fisher’s breath gets caught in his throat. “Williams, right?” The sound of her surname startles her. She doesn’t relinquish the knife. “You look a lot like her.”

A horse nickers. Another stomps a hoof. Ellie almost drops the only form of protection she has. 

“What.”

He holds out a pendant on a chain. Ellie would recognize it anywhere. A firefly is raised on the surface. 

So they have found her. After everything. After all those nights of wishing they had just taken her a year ago when they were supposed to. Take her brain. Take her suffering. She was over it.

But now there’s a threat dangling in her face and a new song to learn on the guitar and tacos in the mess hall tonight. It’s almost raspberry season again. 

She looks her own death in the eye and realizes she does not want it. 

“You look just like Anna.”

“My mom.” It’s a question, just doesn’t come out as one.

The name on his pendant reads Gregory. 

“Don’t worry,” he says again as he pockets the pendant. “I left that group over a year ago. I left when…”

“When they wanted to take out my brain and experiment on it?”

He doesn’t nod nor does he deny. “I was there. Held you in my arms. You had a hell of a cry.”

Ellie sucks in a breath. “You knew my mom.”

Gregory smiles at her, and it stops feeling like a predator seeking out prey. It feels like he’s found an old friend in her. 

“You were there when…”

A couple of kids from her class return, setting off to untack their own horses as they turn the corner. Even still, Ellie doesn’t want to risk being overheard. 

“A few hours after.” He looks at her arm even though it’s completely covered. If he had been a Firefly long enough, he knew the secret already. And at least it doesn’t seem like he’s going to try and kill her. “She lied her ass off, I guess.”

Blinking in the glaring sunlight, Ellie waits for an explanation. 

“She told Marlene that the cord was cut before she got bit.” 

The lie settles over Ellie as she ponders it. “What if I turned? What if I infected somebody else?”

More people are milling in and out of the stables. All of the doors and windows are open. They shouldn’t be talking about this. 

But now that the potential for knowing has been waved in front of her face, she can’t allow it to be taken away. What if Joel comes and puts a bullet in this guy’s brain as well? 

Gregory gives her a look that can only be described as sad. “She was your Momma. She would’ve done anything to give you a shot.”

“A shot at what?”

“What do you think we’re doing?” he asks, grabbing the abandoned horse’s reins and holding them out to her. “Living.”

(Not just surviving.)

//

That night, Ellie walks through the front door. Joel’s in the garage, working on something or other. 

She picks up the guitar, carries it out, and extends it like the offering it is.

“Hurry up. We’ve only got twenty minutes ‘til tacos.”

//

Dina approaches her during dinner when Ellie feels bone dead tired but also the closest to okay that she has in a long while. 

“Are you going to be at the stables tomorrow? After school?”

Ellie’s got a mouthful of taco and sauce on her chin and, in general, just an overall unattractive situation going on, but Dina’s also seen her crying outside in the middle of a snowstorm and felt the ugliest, darkest piece of her body and still keeps coming back. So maybe taco sauce isn’t a deal breaker. 

“Yeah,” she says around a mouthful of food. 

“I’ll come with you.”

Normally, Ellie would be sitting with her friends, and they could have this conversation without the fucking peanut gallery present. Joel didn’t question when she chose to plop her tray down next to his tonight, though. 

“Yeah…okay.”

“Cool.” And then, “Bye, Ellie’s dad.” Which is just stupid because everyone knows he’s Tommy’s brother, so Mr. Miller is the obvious name to go for.

She’s gone before Ellie can bother correcting her. 

Tommy raises an eyebrow. Maria tucks away a smile. Jacob smashes a tortilla in a slobbered chubby fist. 

The heat rises to Ellie’s cheeks. Who knows if it’s because of the mislabeled dad or the way Dina’s pulled her hair back so the entirety of her long, smooth neck was exposed along with the curve of her shoulder and the jut of her collarbone and… 

Clearing her throat, Ellie takes another bite of her taco. 

“Did you guys hear about the kidnapping at school yesterday?” Ellie asks around yet another mouthful of food. She didn’t care when it was these people. Her people.

For a beat there are looks of alarm and furrowed brows. 

Ellie swallows, smiles. “Don’t worry. He woke up.” She’d been waiting to tell that one. 

//

It “rains like cats and dogs,” as her teacher Ms. Sullivan says. 

Class gets out to a torrential downpour, and kids slowly back their way into the building. Thunder rumbles in the distance.

Jesse’s on one side of her, Dina the other. Ellie grabs their hands and pulls them out into the storm.

The rain puddle she jumps in soaks her to her knees, but it gets Jesse all the way to his mid-thigh. Worth it.

When she gets home, Joel’s waiting with their biggest, fluffiest towel and an affectionate eye roll. She rubs her soaking wet head against his chest and only laughs when he throws her over his shoulder, just like all those months ago in the backyard. 

//

“If I tell you something, do you promise not to murder anyone?” Ellie asks the question in the kitchen. For several weeks now, the routine has gone like this: Joel comes home and makes all of his Joel coming home sounds. Shoes being kicked off on the hollow boards of the front porch, door squeaking closed, and a heavy sigh at the foot of the stairs. Fridge door opening and closing, water being poured in a fresh glass from the drying rack, stove clicking to life as whatever the dinner was for the night was started. 

For the last several weeks, Joel ate dinner by himself at an empty kitchen table. 

Ellie’s portion sat in the pan, easily reheated when she could feed herself in relative peace.

Tonight she waits not long after his heavy sigh to come skipping down the stairs. She had to tell him. Even with all of the things she didn’t tell him, all of the secrets she told no one, this one needed to come out.

“Depends if anyone needs to be murdered,” he grumbles while getting out the water pitcher. He drinks half the glass in one go. 

Ellie groans, “Come on, dude.” It feels light, casual, easy. It feels like them. “Just one guy.”

That gives Joel pause. He stops digging through the fridge for dinner ingredients and turns his eyes on her. “You got a boyfriend?”

“Ew, no.” Her nose wrinkles with displeasure at the very thought. “Don’t be gross.”

Joel laughs. It loosens something in Ellie’s chest, frees up space to take a breath. 

Asparagus and paper-wrapped meat and potatoes are all set out on the counter. Ellie grabs the knife and starts to peel. She wanted something to do with her hands, her eyes, while having this conversation. It’s hard not to feel Joel’s gaze on her. Dude’s gonna start fucking crying at her peeling potatoes if she doesn’t keep him distracted. Sappy motherfucker. 

“He’s a Firefly. Was one,” she corrects quickly when she notes the tension that immediately fills Joel’s muscles. “He left over a year ago, he said. When they were going to…” She makes a slashing motion across her throat, like someone chopping off her head would have had to make over and over again to detach it from her shoulders. The thought makes even her shiver a little bit. 

Joel’s not heating oil in a pan or chopping off the butts of the asparagus. He’s frozen there in the kitchen. Ellie half-expects she’s going to have to grab the butt of his rifle to keep him from walking out the front door and taking out yet another threat. 

“He knew my mom.”

Joel swallows and moves only to lean back against their countertops and watch her. 

“You already killed the other person in the world who knew her, so maybe you could leave this one.” Her voice is hardened, unmasked anger, undiluted frustration. Marlene had been her mom’s best friend, she said. Marlene was going to tell her all about her, she promised. Marlene was going to let them heft Ellie’s brain out of her skull, though, so maybe she wasn’t actually going to tell her anything at all. Fucking rude. 

Arms crossing over his chest, eyes staring at his shoes. Ellie assumes he’s gathering his cool before responding. Gotta appreciate the effort. “Who is it?”

“Uh-uh, no way. You still have murder voice.” 

“That’s just my voice.”

Ellie puts down potato number three to look at him. “Joel.”

“I just wanna talk to him.”

“‘Cause you’re so good at talking.” 

His hands scrub down his face. His hair looks grayer than Ellie remembers. He’d joked a few times that she was gonna be the one who made him go fully white. He looks so old it almost hurts to look at. It feels too much like admitting he’s not invincible, that he’s not forever. 

“What makes you so sure we can trust him?”

Ellie moves on to asparagus. Seriously, Joel could at least try and pull his weight around here. “I mean, he didn’t kidnap and murder me in the stables the other day. If he wanted to kill me, you’d think he would have gone for the element of surprise.”

Something clouds Joel’s face. “I don’t like you being alone in those stables. Someone should be with you.”

“I’ve got fifteen hundred pounds of horse to protect me.” And Dina, Ellie doesn’t add on. Dina, who had come with her every single day since their chat in the mess hall. Dina who smiles when Ellie is a little weird and whose hand never shies away from the mangled mess of skin that is Ellie’s arm. (Doesn’t shy from the ugly, twisted words that come from Ellie’s mouth.) Right, focus.

“I still don’t-”

“Oh my god, Joel. Can you fucking focus?”

He glares at her. Swallows. Drizzles oil in the pan. “So this nameless Firefly that would never dare to hurt you because he claimed he left the cause; if you don’t want me to kill him, what about him?”

Why does it have to be so fucking hard to tell him anything? “He knew my mom. He was…he was there when Marlene…” Who the fuck knows why her throat is getting all tight and weird and her eyes all blurry and wet. Someone give her an onion to cut already. “Did you know she lied?”

“Marlene?”

“No.” Ellie swallows. There’s nothing left to cut up. She stares at the cutting board, doesn’t think about the time she’d been supine on top of one, and a cleaver came down three inches from her skull. “My mom.” Now she’s the one turning, leaning, staring at her bare feet on the off-white kitchen tile. “She lied to protect me, I guess.”

The breath Joel drags in is ragged. 

“Probably put a lot of other people at risk,” Ellie continues, her own inhale shaky and uncertain. All of this telling is heavy. All of this assuming is hard. “Why do you think she did it?”

Ellie knows the answer. It’s the sort of thing the kid of dead parents always wants to believe, but hey, a confirmation is nice. 

The burner turned to low, Joel faces her. He looks weary. He looks tired. He looks like he wants to hold her. “I’d expect it’s like you said, to protect you,” he gets out. The emotions are poorly masked from his words. They bleed right through. “If I had to wager a guess, I’d say it was because she loved you.”

Tears spring to Ellie’s eyes, too quick to will away. “I’m still really mad at you,” she gets out, all pathetic and kind of squeaky. 

Joel takes the three steps forward. He’s right in front of her, and Ellie sees it now. It’s always been hers for the taking. She’s already been claimed. She didn’t have to fight for it anymore. She just had to accept it. “That’s okay, baby.” His thumbs wipe at her tears; she leans into his hands. Big and warm and rough and Joel. He would kill the whole world to keep her safe. He would wash the blood off after and hold her until she felt better. “I’d do it again, though. You should know that. I’d do it a hundred more times.”

It should bother her: The violence. The death. The lying. No remorse. No ‘I’m sorry.’ 

She falls against his chest. His arms were waiting for her. Maybe it makes him a bad person; maybe it makes her one too.

It doesn’t feel that way, though. 

It just feels like being loved.

//

Three days later, Dina kisses Ellie in the corner of a half-mucked stable. It’s quick and subtle and gentle. Dina turns bright red. 

Afterward, Ellie smiles with something warm sinking through her veins. Afterward, Ellie kisses her back.

//

A scream caught in her throat. Bad dreams keep coming for her. She wakes up before they end with her dead. Not before they end with someone else that way, though.

Her hands clutch the tangled sheets in desperate clumps. Her breathing was coming hard and fast. It reminds her of that scream, how it raged on and on until there was no air left in her body, no oxygen remaining to expel. 

She hates this. Hates that the snow has melted and the sun comes out for long, golden hours every day. She hates how the flowers have bloomed, the leaves fill the trees, and nothing is getting better. Nothing is going away. It’s supposed to get better. When will she be better?

And then she’s thinking about Cat and how messy and ugly that had all ended and how it was all her fault because she can’t just be normal, and now Dina is going to be the same exact scenario all over again. 

How many people want to love a broken girl?

Her feet slap against the hardwood floors. Her door creaks when she opens it. Joel keeps saying he’s gonna grease the hinges. Ellie was teasing him the other day about dragging his feet. 

Across the hall, the door is cracked open. It’s permission. An invitation, even. 

Standing in the doorway, one arm wrapped across her midsection to grasp at her bicep. Ellie makes herself smaller. She makes herself believe she could be small enough to let someone hold her and eliminate the nightmares that refuse to leave. 

“Joel.” The deaf bastard doesn’t even flinch. With a roll of her eyes, Ellie curls up at the foot of his bed like she’d done while she was sick. 

His snoring is loud. It should keep her up. She drifts off listening to it.

//

“What are you doing down there?” 

“Trying to sleep, you dick.” She’d been out good, too.

The room is still pitch dark. “C’mere.”

Ellie crawls her way up the bed and flops with her face smashed against the pillow. 

It makes her think of septic wounds and hemorrhagic shock and the flu. She turns her face to look in Joel’s direction. It’s too dark to see much, but he’s looking at her, and his eyes hold no signs of death. 

Fingers brush hair gently from her face. It reminds her of safety. It reminds her of home. It reminds her of all those ramshackle places they slept on the road and how they all felt the same with him there beside her; they all felt like it was going to be okay.

“Nightmare?”

Not fair she still has them. Not fair she isn’t better yet. 

Ellie shrugs. 

“When will they stop,” she whines like a child. 

Joel wraps her up like one, presses a kiss to her hairline. “I don’t know, baby. You should’ve told me you were having them.”

She sniffles, feeling young and dumb and really fucking tired. “Was mad at you,” she mumbles, face pressed against his chest. “Still mad at you.”

“Hell hath no fury like Ellie Williams,” he says with that goddamn tender voice of his. 

“‘Bout time you learned that.” She liked the sound of it, even if maybe she shouldn’t. She liked that her fury could be worse than hell. She likes to think of how it rained around David, how he went out of this world in a room full of flames with a girl as furious and angry and detrimental as the devil himself. She likes that where he landed next would almost have been the exact same. God, she really likes the sound of that. And then, “What if he broke me for good? What if it all did?” 

The confession takes something from her, but she’s been in pieces all this time anyway. What’s one more missing fragment?

Joel’s breath is all stuttery and stunted, like the idea of her being in so much pain hurts him. She knows it does. She knows it. He kisses her head. “Then you become something new, Ellie.” He hands her that piece back and lets her keep it. “You shouldn’t have to. It’s not…right, but that’s what you’ll do. If I know anything about you, baby girl, you’re going to become something even better.”

She listens to the beat of his heart and the rustling of his shirt and the stuttering of his breath and realizes he’s right. It’s not fair; she shouldn’t have to do any of this. But if she’s going to, then that’s exactly how she’ll do it. She’ll be something more. Someone worth lying for, even. 

Joel holds her without saying another word. Joel holds her, and Ellie can’t help but think that through it all, at least she’s become someone worth holding. Through it all, maybe she gets to become a daughter.

//

Jacob moves so much these days. He keeps trying to army crawl across the room to wherever Ellie is, no matter how many times she goes somewhere else. 

Maria laughs the fifteenth time it happens, the slobbery hand grasping the denim of Ellie’s jeans to pull himself closer. 

“What the fuck is he doing?” Joel kept telling her to stop cursing in front of the baby. She keeps explaining to him that someones gotta teach him, might as well be her. 

With this soft sorta smile, Tommy tugs on Ellie’s ponytail as he walks by. “What can I say? He just really likes his cousin.”

She looks down at his gummy smile and wide, brown eyes. Oh.

//

A lot of nights, it was still too hard to talk—to confess that forgiveness may not be as unachievable as Ellie once considered it. 

It was still awkward between them, though. She didn’t know how to navigate quite what they were and what they had been, and what Joel had forced them to become. (She doesn’t know how to accept that the only thing she thinks they could ever be is a family.)

The guitar becomes the default. An easy fall back, a solid shield. 

A week ago, Ellie had passed a cassette to Joel and said, “The third song. I need to learn how to play it.”

Tonight, he was working through the chords of an acoustic version of Take On Me for her to learn. It’s all by ear, so sometimes he’s strumming and makes a little hum in the back of his throat with a chord that doesn’t sound quite right and goes back to the beginning. 

In typical Joel fashion, he doesn’t ask her why it’s gotta be this song or why she gets a little teary-eyed when he figures out the sequence for the chorus. Ellie’s sitting on the floor, knees to her chest and arms wrapped around them, wishing for the days that it was warm enough and light enough that they could spend their evenings out on the porch swing again, and Joel’s been fighting with the bridge for twenty minutes when Ellie blurts out—”It was Riley’s favorite song. This was.”

Joel pauses, doing that little thing where he pretends like he’s only half-interested in what she’s saying so she doesn’t get scared off from saying it.

“It seemed like the sort of thing I should know, how to play her favorite song.” A loose thread dances at the end of Ellie’s sleeve; she twists it around her index finger. “Felt important, I guess.” She clears her throat. “Probably stupid.”

He’s looking at her now, looking at her like he is completely, fully interested in what she has to say. He’s looking at her like maybe he understands. “Not stupid,” he says with a gruff voice. 

“I could’ve saved her.” The words don’t even make sense, but he has to get it. He has to understand just what he’d taken from her in Salt Lake City. “I mean, not really, but in a different sort of timeline maybe, me dying for the vaccine could have saved Riley.” She was the first to die. “Tess. Sam.” Not Sarah, though. Never Sarah. “I could’ve saved someone else’s Riley.”

It surprises her how long it takes Joel to speak, how he doesn’t immediately jump into “That’s not your fault” or “You can’t make yourself responsible for everything that happens.” Instead, he just nods. “Maybe,” he says, still strumming. “Maybe not.”

She can’t save Riley, though. No matter what she does now, no matter what she’d done then, past in the past. Save who you can save, all that jazz. Ellie scrubs a hand down her face and tries to erase tear tracks and grief and that horrible, dawning moment of realization. (She thought that finding the bite was going to be the worst thing that happened to her that day, the worst bit of realization. And then she didn’t turn, and she began to grasp something entirely different. It’s not very poetic if only one of them loses their mind, is it?)

“But who was gonna save my Ellie?”

The possession of it causes her head to swivel in his direction. It’s still weird, belonging to someone. It’s still mystifying, being a priority. 

Ellie crawls over to where Joel’s sat across the living room, on the floor. He’s at her level. He’s meeting her where she is. 

It’s sure to make playing more awkward, but Ellie rests her head on his shoulder and closes her eyes to the familiar tune. It’s missing the upbeat synthesizer and quick, funky tone, but it also doesn’t hurt like it does to hear on a tape that sounds just like an abandoned Halloween store in a mall and feels like hands wrapped in Ellie’s and looks like the darkness of an old, plastic mask. It doesn’t taste like whiskey kissed from someone else’s lips. 

“I guess you,” she whispers. Her arms wrap around his bicep, and not for the first time, Ellie thinks about how Joel ravaged an entire hospital just to save her. Not for the first time, a rush of affection battles with the smoldering rage. “I guess it had to be you.”

Joel kisses the top of her head. 

Ellie learns how to play Take On Me, and it’s something like a memorial. It’s something like remembering the dead while staying alive.

//

“Wait.” She stops playing and looks at Joel with wide eyes and a sudden concern she can’t quite explain. “What was Sarah’s favorite song?”

The pained expression on Joel’s face isn’t the one Ellie has begun to associate with references to Sarah. “You don’t wanna know,” he answers, almost laughing. “She had the worst taste in music.”

It’s said so fondly, Ellie can’t help but smile too. For half a second, she considers another timeline, another impossible one. Sarah playing god awful music, and Ellie and Joel groaning in sync, blasting some good shit to try and drown it out. For just one minute, Ellie considers what it would have been like if all three of them could have laughed together at the same time. 

//

A beautiful spring day in the stables. The sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, and the outside smells fresh and new and alive. (Dina just says it smells like allergies.) Tommy’s helping Ellie today. They work in well-practiced synchronicity. He was more at ease around her these days. Maybe it’s because she’s a little more chill with him, too. 

Somewhere down the hall, metal rings out as a horseshoe, probably, falls from someone’s grip and hits the floor. Except it doesn’t register as such; it just sounds like a threat.

Ellie gasps, grabs her knife and ducks and watches with wide, desperate eyes to scan for danger. Heart in her throat, trembling in her hands. Stupid. She realizes just a moment too late. She was being stupid.

Tommy’s standing there, watching her not quite with pity, but she doesn’t know how else to label it.

For a while, they go back to working in silence with nothing else said. Leave it to Tommy not to be able to leave it at that.

“You know,” he says when they’re three stalls down, and the shake has gone out of Ellie’s fingers. “I used to have a hard time, too. When I came back from the war.” He doesn’t look at her as he talks. She has to wonder if it costs him, talking about it. She has to wonder if it ever stops being such a hefty fee to pay to get something awful off your chest. “PTSD they call it. Had a pretty bad run of it. Still do, once in a while. Sometimes…sometimes it feels like you’ll never be happy again or like you don’t deserve to.”

Goddamn, so it really doesn’t ever get better. “That sucks.”

“I’ve got a couple books on it, if you wanna borrow ‘em.”

The offer rests between them.

“And if you ever wanna talk about it…” He’s only slightly better at this than his brother. “I might be able to get what you’re going through a little bit, is all. Sometimes it helps, ya know? Knowing you aren’t the only one.”

Just the offer makes her feel a little less alone. “When does it get better?” she asks, getting right to the meat of what she wants. She doesn’t care about hows and whys and wheres. It’s all when. She just wants to know when. “What did you do to make it better?”

Always careful with his hands, Tommy makes sure she sees him before he reaches out and musses with her already messed up hair. “Hard work. Time…Accepting that there was something wrong.”

Which isn’t the answer Ellie wants at all. She just wants it to go away, like everything else in her life did. (Why is this the one thing that stays? Why are the only permanent fixtures Joel and misery? So fucked up.)

“Accepting help.” This one, he says with a very pointed look right into Ellie’s eyes. 

“Maybe I don’t want your help,” she deflects, ducking out from under his hand.

Tommy just chuckles. “That’s fine, darlin’. Just let it be somebody. Hell, let it be lots of somebodies.”

Ellie runs her fingers over the stitching of a fine leather saddle. It needed to be treated before being put away in the tack room. She doesn’t know why she says it. Maybe because she feels like a jerk and maybe because it would make Joel happy and maybe because Tommy is actually just a really chill guy. It might be nice if she could add one chill guy to her little arsenal of people that she was affectionately labeling as Ellie’s. “I guess you could be a somebody,” she mumbles to the saddle. 

It doesn’t matter that she’s not looking at him. She can feel his smile anyway. “Well, now, don’t let me go twistin’ your arm.”

Ellie’s never had parents, let alone an extended family. But she exchanges a small, shy smile with Tommy, and he goes back to ruffling her hair, and she feels safe and warm and like there’s someone to count on. If Sarah doesn’t mind sharing her dad, Ellie’s hopeful she wouldn’t mind doing the same with her uncle.

//

“I’m already telling you, it’s god awful.”

Finally, Joel had hit the jackpot. Turns out the jackpot was actually just at Jackson’s local library, and he’d only found it because Ellie dragged him in by the sleeve of his shirt and made him peruse the music selection with her.

They check out two Backstreet Boys CDs, no NSYNC which apparently was a cardinal sin, and one Britney Spears. 

“You have to start with her favorite.” The album art on the CDs is a little water-damaged, but Ellie can make out boys in a variety of gross outfits and odd hairstyles with weird stances, and she can’t lie. She’s intrigued as hell. 

There’s actual pain written across Joel’s face as he inserts the CD. “And here I thought four years of listening to this song would be enough.”

He skips to the second song and winces as a cheesy opening guitar plays, followed by an even cheesier “Yeah.” The lyrics aren’t any better. “You are my fire. The one desire. Believe when I say. I want it that way.” It gets to the chorus, and the other boys join in on a god awful choir sounding rendition and Ellie gets it. She’s starting to feel some physical pain, too. 

“Joel.”

“Trust me. I know.”

“I never wanna hear you say. I want it that way.” 

“JOEL.”

“Four years, Ellie. She played this on and off for four years.” He shakes his head, smiling in the way he only does when he’s really happy. “You don’t gotta tell me.”

She’s pretty sure her ears are bleeding. “Make it stop! Dear god, make it stop.”

Immediately, she swaps out the CDs for the next Backstreet Boys. “What’s her favorite one on here?”

Joel jumps to track four. This one takes forever to actually get going. Just starts with an awful beat that in no way whatsoever makes Ellie feel inclined to dance. (None. What. So. Ever.)

“Backstreet’s back, alright!”

“Is it…is it actually worse?”

“There was a choreographed dance.”

Ellie smirks. “Did you learn it too?”

“Abso-fucking-lutely not.” She laughs. The expression sounds especially funny coming from Joel’s mouth.

When the song ends, she puts it back on and smacks Joel’s hand out of the way as he moves to turn it off. “I haven’t decided which one is worse yet.”

Ellie giggles, unable to help herself. “I think this is worse than Santa music.”

 “Am I original? Yeee-aahh.”

“Am I the only one? Yeeee-aahh.”

“Am I sexual? Yeeee-aahh.”

Shit. It was kind of catchy. 

The second time around, Ellie sings along because it really is awful, but singing along to the lyrics makes it fun. Especially when Joel joins in. 

They laugh so much Ellie almost can’t breathe. 

“ Please tell me you still remember those dance moves.”

“Backstreet’s back, alright!” Joel sings it whole-heartedly. Ellie about busts a rib she cracks up so hard.

//

Britney Spears was actually a DVD. Joel said someone put in the effort to record them off of MTV, whatever that means. The music video opens with a blonde girl on a plane in a tiny little outfit and the same girl in a transparent sparkle suit singing to the camera about being toxic and all of the moisture is gone from Ellie’s mouth before she can also declare this as the worst thing she’s ever heard. Because this girl is dancing and stealing wallets out of pockets while making out with people and straddling some guy as she wears a tight leather suit and….Ho-ly shit.

She doesn’t feel like Joel should be sitting here with her for this. 

The next video isn’t any better. Britney Spears in a tiny schoolgirl’s uniform dancing in the hallway. 

Ellie licks her lips. Joel looks over at her.

“Jesus Christ,” he mumbles, pushing up from the couch with a shake of his head and walking out of the room, leaving her to Britney Spears.

//

It’s Easter. Another weird, made-up holiday. Joel says they can skip this one.

Instead of joining the community meal, they go to Tommy and Maria’s. She plays on the floor with the baby and sings Backstreet Boys lyrics to him while wiggling his little limbs all over the place. The belly laugh she gets out of him makes her laugh, too. Ellie blows a raspberry on his cheek. His little baby fist grips her shirt and holds himself to her. 

There are a lot of ways to be loved, she realizes. She’s figuring out she’s got a lot of them already.

//

Kissing Dina back in the field where the two of them and Jesse used to scream at the world instead of going to class quickly becomes one of Ellie’s favorite pastimes. 

The grass is lush and bountiful. It tickles against Dina’s cheeks as she lays back, the sun dancing on her tanned skin and easing out the freckles on her cheeks. There are a thousand wishing dandelions around them. Ellie thinks of picking them all and holding them in a fat fist. She thinks of what she would wish for.

Ellie kisses Dina, slow and careful and gentle. Ellie kisses Dina the way she wants to be kissed. 

Ellie’s hair is all pulled back in a ponytail. Dina reaches up and tucks a stray strand behind her ear. When she smiles, Ellie can’t help but reciprocate. “It’s nice,” Dina muses with the sun and Ellie pressed against her. 

“What is?” she asks, flopping out beside Dina and staring up at the fluffy, white clouds floating by. Her arm reaches out and finds a hand to grip. Fingers intertwined. She feels rooted to the earth. Like a dandelion. (Or maybe more permanent, maybe like the thick, deep roots of a tree, the kind that hold even in a storm. The kind that hold even at the end of the world.)

Dina turns her head to the side and watches Ellie. Another shared smile. “Seeing you happier.”

It halts her heart in its tracks for a moment. But Dina found Ellie in the freezing cold darkness of winter. She could appreciate her in the new, brilliant sunlight of spring. 

“It’s nice being happier,” Ellie says, and the words don’t make her afraid. For once, she doesn’t have to worry about all the ways she could lose it.

//

“I WANT IT THAT WAY,” Ellie shouts the lyrics at Joel. She’d figured out how to play that god awful song all on her own, even if it did require playing it on repeat for almost three weeks. It only felt right, learning Sarah’s favorite song even if it was literal trash.

Besides, Joel acts like he hates it, but when she’s done, he just presses her against his side. Ellie knows he secretly loves it, kinda like how he used to be with her. 

It feels right, holding those two impossibly important people there, in between the strings of an old, beat-up guitar. 

She sets it beside her. “Hey, Joel?”

He looks at her. His fingers are playing with her hair. They’re back on the porch swing and the weather is perfect. The air smells like rain, though. It will probably roll in by tonight.

“Riley was…she was more than just a friend.”

And like, she knows he’ll literally kill for her. Like, a lot, but saying the words still makes her fingers feel restless and useless, and her chest gets kind of tight, and it’s all kind of like the beginning of the panic attacks she wakes up to sometimes.

Joel’s hand doesn’t even pause in running through her hair. 

“Kinda like Dina?” he asks eventually. Ellie wants to shove him away and demand how he knows. She wants to hide her face behind her hands. She wants to stuff all the words back in and pretend like it wasn’t real.

“I-I don’t know…I mean, it’s not like…it’s just…” Oh god, someone put her out of her misery. 

She swallows. “There were a few kids back in the QZ who…well, their parents didn’t like that they were, you know.” Most of them showed up a little bruised and beaten. Not a bad thing in a FEDRA orphanage, necessarily. It shows you aren’t afraid of a little pain. 

“I really don’t mind if you’re gay, Ellie.” The words are blunt, but the way he delivers them is tender. “I want you to love whoever makes you happy. Simple as that.”

Happy. God, what a word. It’s been everywhere recently. She’s been feeling it everywhere, too, she thinks. Even on the bad days, the really awful ones where all she can think is what a waste her life feels like or she gets stuck in memories she can’t outrun or she has to crawl beneath her bed to try and abate the panic that was seizing her lungs and holding them captive. Happy was lingering right there, just out of reach. Happy was a promise of something she might be able to get to. 

“I think I’m getting there.”

To Joel’s credit, he doesn’t cry. “Me too, baby. Me too.”

To Ellie’s credit, she does.

//

Summer’s on the horizon. The days are long, and the midafternoon sun is hot. Joel talks about taking her out to the lake and teaching her to swim. Joel talks about her sixteenth birthday. Joel talks about how much he loves her.

There’s a small stack of books on her nightstand, about PTSD and trauma but also about space and dinosaurs and a novel about two teenage girls who love each other. A nightlight is plugged into the outlet by her bed and the nights when Ellie wakes up in the clutches of terror, of loss, of darkness, there’s a little bit of light for her to hold onto. At least, long enough until she pushes out of her bed and crawls into Joel’s, nudging him awake enough to let him know she’s there. 

Maria cuts Ellie’s hair in the kitchen. She has Ellie help her in the garden and still meets her in the stables. On the days when it’s hot and Maria sheds down to a tank top, she doesn’t question Ellie on why she doesn’t. A few days later, though, she hands over a pink armband, just wide enough to cover bite marks not yet completely obscured by tattoo ink. Maria tells Ellie she’s proud of her. It shouldn’t matter, but it does.

Gregory Fisher sits down with Ellie and Joel and tells them stories about her mom. He lets Ellie get a glimpse of the woman who brought her into this world. The first person who lied to save her. It feels like something special to consider how Anna Williams wouldn’t be the last.

One week, when Joel gets set on making a “Proper southern meal” Ellie’s told to invite Dina, and she does. Joel says it’s a right of passage, meeting the family. Ellie burns bright with pride. Tommy and Maria come. The iced tea is sweet, the cornbread is moist, and the brisket almost melts in her mouth like butter it’s so tender. She swallows the meat without having to convince herself it isn’t human.

At the dinner table, Tommy tells a truly terrible joke but follows it up with an impressively informed question in regards to the Savage Starlight comics. Ellie jumps up from the table to get issue number seven off her bedside table to best answer him. 

Dessert is freshly sliced peaches and still-warm biscuits with homemade whipped cream. Dina sits with her knee pressed against Ellie’s, teasing right along with the rest of the family. She fits, Ellie thinks, hopes. They all could just fit. 

After, Tommy insists on a rendition of Backstreet Boys. He and Joel both know all of the words. Jacob claps his hands off beat to the music as Ellie plays, shooting her a smile with his two bottom teeth on display. 

It took so much to get here. The loss and the suffering and some war Ellie found herself fighting in order to deliver peace to a broken world. She remembers standing on that ledge with Joel as giraffes wandered away from them. He told her she didn’t have to do it anymore, didn’t have to fight to make her way to the place where she could be the salvation for humanity. After everything we’ve gone through. After everything I’ve done. 

Not seeing it through felt like a waste of pain, of suffering, of death and loss and being broken down to fragments. What was it all for? She’d asked that question so many times since then. What was the point of any of it if she was just going to do nothing, be nothing, forever?

But sitting in this home with sugar on her lips and the late evening sun slipping beneath the horizon and the weight of a guitar on her lap and the promise of a family around her, it starts to click into place. She’d fought to get to this moment. Maybe it hadn’t been what she once thought she was striving for. Maybe instead of fighting for humanity, at the end of it all, she’d been fighting only for herself. 

And maybe, she thinks with Tommy’s terrible voice continuing on and Maria’s laugh mixing with sweet baby Jacob’s from over on the couch and Dina’s eyes closed and happy and content and Joel’s arm wrapped tight around Ellie’s shoulders, maybe that was enough of a reason. Maybe she deserved that much, after all. 

Ellie was going to build something better with the pieces she’d been left with and the ones she’d grasped along the way. She was going to build it on the foundation of a family who loved her. She had exactly what she needed to create something that would last. (She’s got a pretty damn good contractor to help her out along the way.)

The anger ebbs. The violence quiets. Not gone, but dormant. For right now, she could just be loved. Happiness is within reach. She extends a hand and grasps it. It comes to her with ease. It came to her like it was waiting.

I’d do it all over again.

Yeah, Ellie thinks, leaning so her back presses against Joel’s chest, finding him right behind her; I would too. It might just have been worth it. So fucking worth it.