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Ellie isn’t talking.
A part of Joel is severely worried that the cogs of her motormouth are jammed, but most of him is still so downright exhausted that he doesn’t really lay the groundwork for uncovering the details of her horror - he needs more color in his face, less snow on the ground, more strength to hold them up when her quiet facade might just crumble into something much more fragile.
They find a house a few miles away, filled with traces of snow from a busted window, but includes a ridiculously large green velvet couch stained brown from years of water, pollen, and dirt. The house is close enough to that stupid resort that it’s been raided of most things, but there are still curtains in the dining room that he rips off and uses to make up the couch for her.
“Okay, kiddo,” He says, making blankets of the curtains. She starts to shrug the coat off but he shakes his head. “Keep it for now. I’m alright.”
She blinks, wrinkles her nose, and Joel stares at the crusted blood on her upper lip. “Nose hurt?” he asks her and she nods. “Broken?” She shrugs and Joel slips into the dining room once more to drag a chair by the couch. “Can I check?”
Nothing, this time. Just a blank stare. “Okay. Just tell me if I’m hurtin’ you.” He pauses, then amends, “Or just swipe at me. I don’t mind.”
She takes what he assumes is supposed to be a deep breath, but it’s a shallow and shaky thing. Calloused fingers dance along her nose and he’s relieved to find it’s only bruised. “I don’t reckon it’ll be leavin’ you with any shiners. It ain’t broke.”
As if that was all the permission she needs Ellie jerks and uses the back of her hand to swipe at her mouth a few times before she turns her wrist and uses her palm to scrub harshly on the button of her nose.
When her breathing begins to get rapid and harsh, he leans in a little, and shows both his hands with his palms out, but is careful not to touch her. “Whoa, don’t be doin’ that, baby. Lemme get you a rag so you can clean up. I don’t want you openin’ any wounds.”
Her arm is slow to go down, fresh blood dripping from her left nostril from her scrubbing. He rips a corner of the curtain before he runs outside and dampens it in clean snow. When he returns she lets him wipe her face and he dabs above her brow, around her cheeks, underneath her chin - it’s all just blood, no cuts to be found.
When he’s finishing cleaning around her hairline, the sun’s shifting light breaks jaggedly through the broken window and he notices a dark and chunky patch of hair. “Shit, did you hit your head?”
He doesn’t wait for an answer this time, but she doesn’t swipe at him as he tips her head forward and scrabbles through her hair like a parent checking for lice. Her hair is matted in blood, sure, but he doesn’t see anything staining her scalp. “I don’t see an open wound,” he says, thinking out loud, which is something he doesn’t normally do. But the silence is too suffocating for even him. “But what’s - “
The sentence dies on his tongue.
He untangles a soft piece of something out of her hair. He feels his stomach begin to knot, the wound on his side suddenly burning like an omen. But his eyes must tell a whole story, of asking himself what on earth - when Ellie finally speaks.
“Brain.”
Joel’s mouth is slightly parted, a loss of words.
“His,” Ellie clarifies. “Not mine.”
He drops it on the ground and stomps the thing underneath his boot like a roach.
Ellie’s eyes are still blank as Joel finishes checking her over. It’s all just bruises, her hands, her ribs, her knees. He checks her head another time, just in case, before he gently nudges her down on the couch. She squirms as he tucks her in, making sure she stays snug in his coat as he wraps her up in the drapes. “Sleep. Just for a bit. You’ll feel better when you wake up.”
She shoots him a look, subtle, that almost calls him out on his bullshit, but the look is half-assed, the dark circles under her eyes and the heaviness of her eyelids betraying it all. She sighs out her nose before her eyes close and her head slumps against the armrest, velvet smushed against her cheek.
Joel takes the opportunity to take stock of, well, everything. He looted a few things in his quest for Ellie - the guys looking for him all had jerky on them, and one of them had two cans of vintage Campbell’s tomato soup. Hell, he snagged a single lighter, which was a surprise. No smokes, which was a bummer.
He found the house only in moderate shambles - it’s pretty remote, and it seems whoever came through stuck with the basics of raiding the kitchen and not much else. He roams the bedroom and finds there are a few pieces of women’s clothing that haven’t been completely eaten by moths: two short sleeve shirts, a green sweatshirt, and a giant lavender puffer coat. The cold prickles at him and he wraps the coat around him best he can, unhappy that it’s not as tight a fit as it should be. Smaller. Weaker. It won’t do. He’ll have to hunt at dawn.
There are two more bedrooms - kids' bedrooms - but he doesn’t find any clothes. The first looks a lot like the room in Jackson that Ellie was given, with traces of floral plum wallpaper on the walls and once-white wicker furniture. It’s a strange contrast to the velvet couch and drapes on the first floor. There’s a child-size vanity with nothing but an old tube of lipstick. His curiosity gets the best of him and he rolls what’s left out of the tube - It’s peachy colored and misshapen in a way that a kid would use it. He rolls it around, and tries to find the name of the color in hopes that it’s a funny pun to cheer Ellie up - like, I’m Just Peachy or Coral Me Surprised.
On the side, in faded permanent marker, it says Sara’s.
Not that punny.
He shoves it a bit too harshly back into the vanity before he moves on to the next room: another faded wallpaper disaster, covered in blue stripes. There’s a broken easel in the corner, but Joel doesn’t see any art, crayons, or anything of the sort. He raids the closet and comes up empty (so they’re stuck with the gaudy jacket) and crawls on his injured belly to look under the bed.
He doesn’t find clothes, but he does find a hard guitar case.
“No way,” he grunts, pulling it out and coughing as dust blows into his lungs. It’s heavy in a way that gives him hope, and he’s delighted to find a guitar with all its strings inside.
He takes it out slowly, as if it’ll disintegrate with any sudden movements. He sits on the floor and spends a good few minutes tuning it with weakened ears, a task much harder than it was twenty years ago. Once he’s satisfied he searches the case for a pick and finds one, along with a collection of folded-up pieces of paper - sheet music, to be exact.
There’s no title, just the notes. He hasn’t read music in years, and lets himself fumble softly on the floor of the bedroom; the tune is so familiar, on the tip of his tongue. Classic. Like an old vintage wine.
The notes come to him eventually and muscle memory kicks in. It gives him enough of a chance to really study the sheet music like some old cartographer, and he finally notices the faded pencil markings numbers that have nothing to do with beats or measures or time signatures. 10…8…9, all the way to 1, and in girlish scrawl the word:
liftoff!
“Do you only know that song?”
Joel is in a recliner he dragged across the room and is using the pastel puffer as a blanket, its faux fur collar tucked around his neck, strands tickling around his chin. He tilts his head and sees Ellie’s eyes peek at him from her curled-up position on the couch. She still looks tired, but some of the panic has melted away. “You keep playing it over and over.” It’s said as a fact, not a mean undertone to be found.
He strums a few more notes. “S’how you learn. Gotta practice.”
Ellie hums, cuddling more tightly into the drapes. Her mouth is hidden. “Does it have words?”
He’s trapped, in a way that doesn't fill him with dread. Sarah used to walk him right into these sorts of things, to catch him on his ego trips or make him look a little silly. He knows the challenge - he told Ellie he wanted to be a singer, and knows he’s gotta pony up.
So he sits up a little straighter and makes sure his feet are flat on the ground to tap to the time. When he clears his throat and adjusts the guitar Ellie’s eyes twinkle.
“Ground control to Major Tom,” he sings, once, then twice. He almost sings it a third, the song a bit of a ghost to him, but he finds the words, and sings about protein pills and helmets. “ Ground control to Major Tom, commencing countdown, engines on. Check ignition, and may God's love be with you.”
He strums a little louder, and Ellie’s smile starts to poke out beneath the covers.
“This is Major Tom to ground control. I'm stepping through the door. And I'm floating in the most peculiar way. And the stars look very different today.”
Like a butterfly, she begins to scoot out of her cocoon. Her arms slip out and help cradle her cheek as she continues to rest on the couch’s armrest.
“Ground control to Major Tom, Your circuit's dead, there's something wrong. Can you hear me, Major Tom? Can you hear me, Major Tom? Can you…”
His fingers keep strumming, but his voice, hoarse as it is, starts to fizzle out. The song, classic as it may be, is still as faded in his memory as it was in that guitar case. He’s forgotten the words.
Ellie’s smile starts to flicker out. Circuit’s dead, he thinks ironically.
It takes a moment, a few annoying and repetitive chords, but like the tides pulled by the moon, it ebbs back to him. “ Here am I floating round my tin can. Far above the moon. Planet Earth is blue, and there's nothing I can do…”
He strums, quietly, and lets the song fade away.
When he looks back at her, she’s snuggling back into the drapes, but she keeps enough of her head poked out. Her smile is gentle and warm, so he’s surprised when she says. “Didn’t know that one. It’s kind of sad.”
“The song?”
“Mmm.” She blinks. “Major Tom dies, doesn’t he? Drifts off alone into space.”
Joel knows David Bowie wasn’t that literal - most songwriters aren’t. But he supposes when he removes the dreamy quality that the original has, Ellie is right. It is a bit sad. He does die alone, circuits dead, drifting off with nothing to do.
“Yeah, but,” He strums out a chord. Thinks about how the humans left behind decay and rust, but the trees bloomed and the oceans stayed blue. “You can’t deny that view.”
It manages to wrestle a snort out of her, a soft shake of her head.
Ellie goes back to not talking.
They leave the guitar behind - without the horse, it’s just too much, but in his head, he’s already dreaming of something made of rosewood. Ellie puts on the lavender puffer coat without complaint, even rips up some of the drapes to make a scarf, and walks out of the house looking like a clump of wisteria, posture hunched and somber, if not a little defensive.
The snow has finally stopped, and Joel is pleased to discover that the air is already a lot warmer; that doesn’t mean the snow doesn’t crunch beneath their boots as they make their trek to Salt Lake. Ellie used to fill the silence with puns and nonsensical conversation, including the occasional one-round of “I Spy something…..white!” that would end with her cursing with no heat when he’d answer snow.
But now, it’s pretty much radio silence.
He wants to try something, but he just doesn’t know what. Ellie’s little party tricks are hers and hers alone. It’s not as endearing when he drums up his own silly pun or starts a game of I Spy with every intention of choosing the blue sky. He barely manages not to harass her with parental-like questions of whether or not she’s warm enough or if they need to take a break since they haven’t had much to eat the past several days.
With every glance, his little wisteria wilts more and more.
Then, he starts singing.
It comes to him like old muscle memory, like the calluses from playing guitar that never really left. It’s the brand that Sarah left, an instinct to try and get her to smile that leads him to start some so-so belting of Elton John’s Rocket Man.
He’s lost on the mantra of and I think it’s gonna be a long, long time when Ellie slows her steps and flashes him a bemused look, red nose wrinkling and eyes squinting in the bright afternoon sun.
“I know that one,” she says before she adjusts her pack and keeps moving forward.
There’s a meteor shower.
After Joel finishes setting up camp and they’re sitting in silence with him poking the fire needlessly, Ellie cranes her neck and stares up at the sky without a word before Joel follows her gaze to see the stars falling.
He waits and tries to see if she’ll say anything, but she’s like a statue - for her love of space, her face is heartbreakingly stoic in the presence of such a phenomenon. “Did you make a wish?” He asks.
She hums, the noise a question, and slowly lowers her head to look at him. The reflection of the fire dances in the white of her eyes.
“See a shooting star, you make a wish,” he tells her. “That’s the rule.” Joel shrugs. “From the mouth of Sally Ride herself.”
A smile, fragile as it is, breaks through like the very stars catapulting through the atmosphere.
“One for every star.” Joel clarifies. He shifts his weight and pokes at the fire a bit before he looks back up, hoping to encourage her to do the same - it really is quite a sight. “I’m not much of a mathematician, but I counted at least twenty, don’t you think?”
A few embers fly out of the campfire and Ellie flinches, her entire expression wilts - part of him wishes it would crumble and fracture into something ugly with screaming, crying and snot dripping out of her nose because somewhere deep inside, he thinks that’ll help. But her mouth just hardens and she pokes at the fire a few times before she stiffens and drops the stick - it’s like she got licked by the flames, but Joel’s watching her close enough to know the only burn she got was that of an ugly memory.
When she’s quiet too long, he whispers, “Ground Control to Major Tom.”
She blinks rapidly, snapping out of her thoughts. “Hmm?”
He’s desperate to keep her distracted. “You know anything about the constellations?”
Ellie looks back up, eyes searching. “The spoons. Big Dipper and the Little Dipper. Not much else.”
“They ain’t actually spoons, they’re bears.” A more Ellie-like expression flashes across her face and her skepticism makes him breathe out a laugh. “I know, I know. They look like spoons. It’s funny, what people see in the sky. You seen the Hunter?” She shakes her head no. He stretches his arm out and invites her to sit closer. “C’mere, darlin’.”
She goes without complaint, content to duck underneath his arm and attach herself to his side. Her ruddy cheek rests against the front pocket of his coat. “Pretty easy to spot,” he tells her. “You see those three tiny stars in a diagonal? Well, that’s the belt…”
He goes on to try and paint the picture of Orion with his arm drawn back and the small curve of his - shield. Bow? It looks like a bow to him, and he hells her as much. He points out Canis Major - the dog - with the brightest star but then falters when he sees another almost equally bright sky that could be Venus.
“They don’t look like any of that,” Ellie decides, and Joel feels his stomach knot in disappointment. But then, because she’s still his Ellie, she snuggles closer to him and makes her own rules. “I see a frog.”
“A frog.”
“Yeah. Right there. Next to the cup of coffee.” She lifts her arms and flicks her wrist back and forth, slowly. “See the heat crawling up towards the moon?”
He doesn’t. But he plays along. “Ah. That frog is lookin’ to jump in my coffee, ain’t he?”
“You can kiss your nasty bean sludge goodbye. And if the frog doesn’t get it, the two-headed deer definitely will.”
They rewrite the stories of the sky until she falls asleep.
She wakes up crying.
It’s not loud, and it’s not violent, but it’s heartbreaking all the same. Her fear is choking her and she shakes like a leaf, hiccuping shallow breaths while tears roll down her eyes - few and rare, like someone whose eyes water because they’re too afraid to blink.
“Hey, hey, hey,” Joel soothes. He adjusts her, drags her a little to the right, and places her in front of him. He has her lean her back against his front and he wraps an arm loose around her so she can use his forearm as a pillow for her shaky chin. His fingers scratch soothingly on her shoulder. “It’s okay. Just look up. Find our Starman friend, yeah?”
She does, and he rests his chin on the top of her head. “There’s a Starman, waiting in the sky,” he sings softly, swaying them back and forth, “He’d like to come and meet us, but he thinks he’ll blow our mind.”
Ellie shakes. “If we can sparkle,” she says, “He might land tonight. Right?”
It’s not quite right, but Joel doesn’t dare correct her. They’ve already rearranged the constellations - what’s a song?
“That’s right, babygirl. We’ll catch him on channel two.”
Ellie keeps rubbing at her scalp.
Of all her injuries, Joel had thought it would be her ribs giving her the most grief; they hadn’t been broken but they have bruised something fierce. But the kid hasn’t been caught looking out of breath - not a wince, not a hand on her side, nothing.
But she keeps rubbing at her damn head.
“You got a headache, kiddo?” He asks her. “I know you took quite the tumble off that horse.”
“No. It’s not - my head doesn’t hurt, it - “ She purses her lips and keeps her mouth decidedly closed, but he can see the bob of her tongue as it rolls across her teeth. Contemplating. Her foot taps in the mushy snow a few times. “You never told me your, uh, wish.”
“My wish?”
“Your Sally Ride Shooting Star Wish.”
“Ah.” They’re closer to the hospital, maybe two days, and they’re nearing the time to set up camp. The sunset sets the sky on fire, and he knows they only have a few minutes to pick a safe spot before warm orange fades to something softer, dustier - wisteria skies with stars poking out. “I’d reckon I’d wished I’d saved that guitar.” He blows out a breath. “Cup of coffee wouldn’t hurt. Or a bar of soap. I can’t decide.”
She’s staring at him, expression almost alarmed; like a fawn in the woods who thinks it hears a branch snap. “Seventeen.”
“Huh?”
“You can have them all. Because you have seventeen more wishes. Sally Ride’s rule, right? One for every star.” Ellie scratches at her head, or at least starts to, stopping just when her fingers graze some of the finer hairs sticking out of her ponytail - but it’s like she’s ashamed she’s been caught with her habit and she can’t bear the weight of him watching her. “I’m sorry,” she admits, eyes screwing tight for a second. “Sorry. It’s just…” This time she lets herself scratch at her scalp. “I can still feel it.”
He walks closer to her. “Feel what, hon?”
“His brain.”
The color in his face, though seldom there these days, drains instantly.
Ellie laughs bitterly as she removes her hand from her hair. She stares at her fingers, rubbing them together like the dark sticky blood is still stuck to the pads. “I counted,” she tells him. “I grabbed the cleaver, and I just…” She mimes the motion, slashing at the air. “Twenty-one times. I hit him as hard as I could with that knife right in his face. Twenty-one times.” She points to her scalp, then twitches, her mind making her check again. Her fingers pat right above her ear. “That’s why his brain ended up in my hair.”
Joel watches as she twitches, clenching her hands and then shaking them as if she splatters the bad thoughts away. “I get twenty wishes, right?” Ellie looks up at him, biting her lip so hard it bleeds. There’s a familiar desperation in her question. The two of them, they’re always gonna be trying to dust off the regret. “Twenty times. I shouldn’t - I didn’t stop .”
“Ellie. You -” He sighs softly, and grabs her by her puffer, pulling her close into a hug. “Babygirl. You did what you had to do to survive. I don’t care how many times you hit him - dead is dead.”
“I know,” She mumbles into him. “I don’t regret killing him. It saved me. It saved you. But.” She pulls back and Joel takes the opportunity to cup her face, cheeks stained red. “He said I have a violent heart .” She says it like it’s foreign, a language she’s never heard of. “That he and I had violent hearts. As awful as he was, I wish I didn’t hit him twenty-one times. Those are my wishes. Because without them…”
A sad laugh bubbles out of her and she hiccups a quiet sob.
“Without them, he’s right. And that makes me like him,” she whispers, eyes darting up to him. “I don’t want a violent heart.”
The sun hides behind puffy clouds and he pulls her close again, swaying them back and forth. So much time goes by that the stars flicker on like a big city skyline and he looks up at the frogs, the cup of coffee, and the archer in the sky and he tells her to rewrite it.
“That’s all we’ve been doing these past few nights, right?” He tucks some of her hair out of her face, seemingly soothing her worries by checking for the shrapnel left behind. “I know you. You stop every time you see a butterfly and you don’t move until it’s flown away. You keep a tin of dog treats in your pack, just in case we come across one. You’re gentle to this world, but you’re so strong. You were ready to fight for Tess and for Sam. You fought to save me. You, babygirl, are fierce. Your heart is so big that monster saw it a mile away. Anyone can. It’s in your smile, your laugh. And I know he said that to be cruel. But listen to me. You don’t like the word violent? Fine. Don’t call it that. Rewrite it. Call it bold. Call it fervent. Call it anything else. But don’t waste one of those Sally Ride wishes trying to dull that heart of yours.”
She pulls back and looks at him, her smile watery and expression borderline hopeful.
“Let it be violent,” he whispers harshly. “It doesn’t make you a monster.”
This time, when she hugs him, she squeezes so hard that the atta girl he says into her hair comes out in a strangled breath.
“Grab those protein pills and put your helmet on,” She tells him before she falls asleep. The hospital is just beyond the horizon. They’re so close that Ellie says she can taste it, but Joel knows it’s the overwhelming smell of honeysuckle that makes the air taste sweet. Even with spring budding, she wraps herself in that lavender puffer coat. “ We made it. I’m gonna save the world.”
She’s got dreams that could launch a rocket. But all Joel feels is enough dread to sink a diving bell.
He still makes one of his shooting star wishes that she’s right.
Joel kills twenty-one people before he makes it to the pediatric surgical wing.
He stops, briefly, to run his hands along the faded painting of a giraffe on the hallway walls. Blood stains its spots and then he walks in and adds the count to twenty-two.
Let it be violent, he tells himself when Marlene makes it twenty-three. He loads Ellie in the car and tells himself that this is the right decision, even if it’s not. Let it be violent.
Night falls. Ellie wakes up. He lies, oversteps a line that only she’ll ever see, and makes a wish that she believes him.
“Okay,” she says, and she looks up at the sky as if hoping to find a shooting star to wish on so she could believe him, too.
He finds a guitar, back in Jackson. It’s not rosewood, but it’s nicer than he could have realistically hoped for; Ellie likes the moth etched into the fretboard.
It’s not Texas, but Wyoming feels close, especially with all his ranch duties. He does a lot of horse wrangling and cattle herding and, yes, even some sheep shepherding, much to Ellie’s delight. Which is something that Joel does still witness despite it all - Ellie’s delight. She doesn’t yell at him or give him the cold shoulder. They’re almost the same, the two of them. Almost. But sometimes she fixes him with a blank look - her wisteria look - and Joel starts to wonder if she was only pretending to be asleep when he pulled her out of that hospital.
He plays a lot, now that he has time. Usually, it’s on the porch but sometimes he takes a horse and goes out a bit, perches up on one of the lookouts, and strums away.
“This must be how giraffes feel,” Ellie tells him one day as she climbs the tower to be with him. The first time she's done so since they've gotten back. “Is this where you do all your singing? Or did dreams change?”
“I ain’t as good as I used to be,” he tells her and she neither confirms nor denies it. It’s one of the differences. She lets things - him - go a lot more often.
They sit without talking, listening as Joel strums through different songs, all the way until the night is dark and they’ve only got their bright lamp. Ellie reaches over and turns it off so they can see the stars scattered above them.
A shooting star blinks down under the horizon.
Joel adjusts the guitar and starts to strum with a little more purpose. “Saw a shooting star tonight, slip away.” He sings. “Tomorrow will be another day. Guess it’s too late to say the things to you that you needed me to say, ‘Cause I saw a shooting star tonight, slip away.”
Ellie leans against the railing of the lookout, first down, and then up. With her sleeve rolled up, he sees her tattoo, new and fresh, a scattering of flora on her skin with the exception of a small marking up in the crook of her elbow.
A star.
“It’s a bit sad,” Ellie says.
It’s all too familiar. “The song?”
Her smile is tight as she reaches over and lazily strums across the sound hole. “I’d rewrite it.”
She looks up at him and hears a million meanings behind those words. Loud and clear.
“Goodnight Joel,” She whispers, and then she’s climbing down, managing without trouble as she disappears into what feels like total darkness.
It’s eerie until he hears her shout, “New constellation unlocked. Look for the tube of lipstick!”
Joel looks up at the sky as if it’ll appear right before him. “Where?”
“You’ll find it, Major Tom. Two skips to the left of the moon. Can’t miss it. The color is divine.”
“I’m Just Peachy?”
“It’s Coral Me Surprised, you blind moron!” And he’s thankful to be on Earth where he can hear her laughter echo out into the fields.
But it doesn’t stop him from sitting up there and strumming away into the night, staring up and hoping that another shooting star will fly his way.