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Tommy is drunk when Joel barrels into his room and declares that Joanna is pregnant. He is nineteen and his grandest concern is hiding his father’s bottle of scotch from his Catholic mother, but Joel is twenty-two and already a bundle of nerves. He roars back on his checkered blue bed, the Chilean flag hanging low from his ceiling, and runs a hand through his own thick curls as Joel spouts some shit about marrying his girlfriend for the sake of their mother.

“The hell am I supposed to do?” Joel mutters, swearing under his breath.

It occurs to Tommy that his older brother doesn’t ask for Tommy like he used to ask for their father’s advice. José has been gone for nineteen years, and no one feels the absence more than Joel. Their mother, Tommy thinks privately, is a close second.

“Mom hates Joanna,” Joel tells Tommy, brown eyes wide in fear. “Shit.”

Tommy snorts. “She’s not Catholic.” She’s Christian, but the distinction is important to their mother sometimes.

But Joel isn’t listening to his brother (Tommy doesn’t think he ever does). “I’m going to be a father.” Immediately, a shadow looms on his brother’s face and Tommy knows he’s thinking about José Miller, taken from them too soon for some disastrous disease their mother can’t even pronounce in English. “Mierda.”

*

In the desert, Tommy encounters the devil in arms. Humans are demons and the army encourages it. But he doesn’t know this yet, so he fights and thinks that he’s got a niece to meet. He’s got a brother, a nephew or niece, and a mother that flew for hours on a plane to give them this life.

He thinks his life is a joke, but doesn’t dare tell his army buddies this. Nationalism is too deep of a wound to gut, so Tommy indulges their closeness, and wishes for his family.

*

Tommy recovers with alcohol in his mother’s home. He is nineteen still; he has nightmares of sand and blood and firecrackers in his ears. Joel barrels into the waiting room, boots skidding on the tile floor as he stops short of smacking another waiting family. His eyes are wide and frantic, dazedly finding their mother cocooned in blankets opposite of Tommy.

“Mami,” says Joel, gasping for breath. “It’s a girl.”

His first thought: holy fuck.

His second is what he tells Sarah later when recounting the memory: I don’t know anything about girls.

A girl. A niece. Mierda.

Verónica Miller shrieks and claps so loudly that other members in the waiting room join in, each just as pleased with the results of birth. They’re all still reeling from war, he thinks. Verónica does not immediately sing praises to God or his angels or his saints. She is a mother first. So, she runs to her firstborn son and cradles his face with the adoration only a parent can have.

“Lo quiero tanto, mijito. Estoy tan orgullosa de ti,” their mother divulges. Her words are watery and they shake with meaning, but Joel basks in it. “Y su papá diría lo mismo.”

Tommy only blinks, too startled and too unnerved to offer his own wonder at their mother’s discussion of their father. José isn’t discussed in the Miller household, and Tommy has accepted he would never know his father.

But in this moment, he craves and yearns for someone to pat Joel’s shoulder in the way he’s seen his own uncles do to their sons.

He swallows his drunken stupor, ignores the pounding of war, and stands at Joel’s side, casting an arm over his brother’s shoulders and pats him encouragingly.

If he were to look harder at his brother, he would see the pride in having his family around. Family is everything in these scenarios. Their mother has said as such their entire lives. But right now, Tommy shakes Joel through his embrace and cracks a joke that only lands because Joel is so overcome with levity.

There is an old man watching them from a corner, obscured by shadows. He watches Joel and Tommy and Verónica with envy and serenity—if two such things could ever coexist. He doesn’t know how he knows (it is certainly not because of pictures; their mother left those behind in Chile). But he is sure that the man watching them is José Miller, and Tommy thinks he can hear his father thank the Lord for a new Miller.

Verónica cries harder, coaxing Tommy from his own thoughts, and thanks the Lord for a healthy delivery before declaring that she must see her daughter in law.

And if that wasn’t a fucked up think to come home to.

His brother married the girl he knocked up, and Tommy knows the marriage isn’t happy. It’s a vicious cycle that lends itself to repetition. A pastor at a church Tommy doesn’t attend once told him that there are such things as generational curses, and broken marriages are a part of that. The worst part is that Tommy believes him because there is no other explanation for Verónica becoming a widow or for Joel drowning to keep a loveless marriage alive.

He vows to never marry. To never give himself so wholly to someone that it fractures his soul in the process. The war has already taken too much from him. He doesn’t think he can handle being taken apart by a human—hellish as some are.

War is still bloody in his ears, still ringing somewhere in the distance, but Joel pulls Tommy away from the waiting room and hastens him down the hall. The younger brother stumbles some, but whether it is from the haze of war or family, he isn’t sure. He is sure Joel knows that Tommy is stuck somewhere in the war, and gives him an out.

Joanna’s parents—gentle Christians who Tommy never bothered to meet—run after Joel, but Tommy is the first to cross the threshold of the hospital room. Verónica lets Joanna’s parents move in after Tommy, allowing their only daughter to connect with them before being overrun by an overeager family. But Tommy is an older brother, so he doesn’t care for such lines of respect. He sticks to Joel’s side, like he always does, and admires the scene before him.

Joanna, still beautiful despite the hours of a tumultuous labor, smiles indulgently at Tommy, breaking contact from the baby’s doe eyed stare. She offers the baby to Joel, who takes it without a word. He coos down at the swaddled thing, allowing Joanna to find respite with her parents at the hours of hurt she just endured.

He sees his brother fracture, but it isn’t horrifying to witness. It glistens. He watches as pieces of his brother rearrange when Sarah’s bleary eyes open and find her father. Puzzle pieces rearrange and bump into each other, hastily adjusting themselves for the new person that holds Sarah.

Joel is no longer an older brother, or the first son. He is a father. He is Sarah’s father, and Tommy doesn’t think anything suits his brother better.

The baby’s skin is lighter than Joanna’s, but it carries the same gilded glow that Joanna has. There are tufts of brown hair on its head.

“Shit,” Tommy mutters. He glimpses at Joel, and finds his brother still dopily enamored with the child. “She looks nothing like you.”

Joanna laughs softly, but it sounds tired. “You should hold her, Tommy.”

The look on his face must only encourage her, and he thinks he might like Joanna if it weren’t for the horrors she’s put Joel through over the last few months of her pregnancy. Not that Joel blames her. He doesn’t ever blame anyone but himself.

“Joel,” Joanna says, breaking her husband’s trance. “Give the baby to your brother.”

The new parent relents, and with all the delicate care a burly man like Joel can offer, he offers the baby to Tommy.

He doesn’t have experience with babies. The family on both their mother and father’s side live in Chile. Occasionally, he hears his mother crying over the state of her home, but whenever he tries to ask and offer his mother some condolences, Joel stops him.

Let her cry, Tommy. She can’t do it with you there.

The baby is in his arms before Tommy can object any further, and immediately he feels the same reparations occurring in his body. His cells vibrate as this little thing squirms in its blankets.

“¿Cómo se llama?” asks Veronica, rubbing an age spotted hand over Joel’s bicep. Said man leans into his mother’s touch, tired and craving his mother, but he perks up at the question.

Joel glimpses at Joanna, and the young woman shrugs.

(This, Tommy thinks, should’ve been the first sign of Joanna’s exit from the baby’s life. But Tommy doesn’t know this yet.)

“Her name is Sarah,” Joel reveals. Their mother cries and so do Joanna’s parents, perhaps realizing what this baby means for their family. A biblical name. A holy name. It fits her.

Her. It’s a girl. A niece.

He preens so suddenly that Joel snorts, suddenly aware of the title that is now seared into his legacy. Into his very bones.

Uncle Tommy. He thinks the title is only second to Miller.

“Hi, Sarah,” Tommy whispers, twisting his body slightly in a way that might mimic a rock. “I’m your Uncle Tommy.”

*

When Sarah turns six, Joanna leaves, and Tommy thinks, ‘Good riddance.’

The woman has had her foot halfway out the door since they brought Sarah home. Tommy can’t blame her. Joanna wanted a career, wanted a life outside of motherhood. So, she leaves with only a note to remember her. She doesn’t offer goodbyes to anyone—not even Sarah.

It bothers Tommy so irreversibly that he feels his skin prickle in a way that can only occur when one has been personally offended. He’s reminded of what Joel tells him of his character: you feel things too deeply.

“It ain’t a crime,” he’s argued to his brother in the past, at his wit’s end with the accusations. He went to war. He fought like hell to come back here. He wants to help. He has bloody knuckles and a crooked nose from how many times he’s fought to help.

But everything he joins feels like a lost cause, and eventually Joel tells him that he’s got something new for him to do. “Be an uncle. Take care of Sarah when I can’t. That’s how you help.”

“But—”

Joel gives him a look that Tommy can only compare to a mother, which tells him that if Tommy protests anymore, he’ll find himself sleeping on the side of the road.

He misses his mother, who died seven months after Sarah was born. Car accident. Tommy can’t even guess what the woman was doing, driving at 3am through Austin, Texas. Joel knows, but he won’t tell Tommy, and Tommy tries to come to terms with being left in the dark again.

Good riddance, he thinks when Joanna leaves.

But the thought crashes when he sees Joel trying to soothe a wailing Sarah when her mother doesn’t come to tuck her into butterfly sheets. He clenches his jaw at the sight of his brother begging his daughter to listen, and fumes at Joanna’s absence when Sarah cries harder.

Eventually, Joel can’t handle it anymore and he vacates the room. Sarah howls in mourning, kicking and screaming at how horrible this all is, but she goes ignored.

The butterflies Joel painted last year shake with how hard Joel brings the door shut. Joel leans against it, squeezing his eyes shut.

His big brother, brought down by a little girl’s tears. Sarah is only six. Joel is only twenty-nine, and his age passes with ease. He gets older and older, weighed down by long hours and whatever shit Tommy finds himself in during the week. There is no hint of his big brother from before Sarah. There is only the aftermath.

Joel turns thirty this year, and he is a father and a satellite. He orbits Sarah and Sarah alone, occasionally communicating with ships and astronauts. But his sole focus, his sole identity, is Sarah.

Tommy thinks it's terrifying.

Apparently, his brother does too because Joel wipes a hand over his hooked nose. There are fresh tears in his eyes, and Tommy feels the familiar lurch of his stomach that comes before a cause Tommy aligns himself with.

Uncle Tommy. The identity he assumed himself, and decides that he will use it to the best of his ability today.

“Get some sleep, Joel,” Tommy mutters, slapping a comforting hand on Joel’s shoulder.

Joel starts to protest, but it dies when Sarah shrieks from her room. He winces instead and nods mutely. He’s defeated and divorced and a single father.

I’m never getting married.

He sends his brother to his room at the opposite end of the hall. Joel goes, but not before offering him a swallowed thanks. Tommy shrugs it off, and doesn’t move from Sarah’s door until the lights in Joel’s room have flickered off.

Stupidly, he thinks he’d rather take on Desert Storm than Sarah’s wobbly voice and fat tears.

Uncle Tommy.

He steels himself and urges the door open a smidge, peering inside to find Sarah curled under a butterfly blanket. Her pajamas are the ones he got her last month for her birthday in July. The starry ones with constellations. She only liked them because they were purple, telling him that she would rather butterflies than space.

Tommy doesn’t agree, but he indulges his niece.

Sarah perks up when she sees him, sniffling to herself. Her curls somehow managed to avoid the disaster of her tantrum and are still soft looking. The butterfly blanket practically swallows her willowy body, and Tommy doesn’t think he’s ever seen anything as sweet. “Tommy?”

He offers her an encouraging smile as he shuts the door behind him. His knees protest only some as he kneels to her height, but it's easy to ignore when Sarah tears herself away from the blanket in her rush to get to him. Her hair engulfs his senses until he can’t quite smell anything but lavender shampoo and strawberry scented lotion.

“Hola, linda,” he murmurs into her hair. “What’s going on, sweetheart?”

Sarah parts from him, lips quivering. “Daddy said mami isn’t coming back. Is she dead?”

Tommy tries not to wince at the conclusion his niece has come to, but his face must only confirm Sarah’s worst nightmares because she cries again.

“Todo me duele,” she insists, tugging roughly on his flannel. “Why does everything hurt?”

From crying too much, he realizes. But he doesn’t tell his niece this, preferring to wrap her in a warm embrace. Sarah burrows herself into him, wrapping her scrawny legs around his waist like a koala favoring a tree. “A dormir, princesa bailarina.”

Sarah giggles and Tommy deflates at the sound. “I don’t dance, Uncle Tommy!”

He gasps into her hair as he straightens with her clinging to his neck. “Really?” Tommy jests, poking the back of her spine with his fingers. “Then what are you?”

His niece doesn’t miss a beat. “I wanna play soccer.”

“Futbol,” Tommy corrects immediately, tossing her on her bed with a flourish. Sarah squeals at the fall, laughing when she bounces on the bed her father made. “Americans are wrong.”

Sarah rolls her eyes, and Tommy mourns the day she becomes a teenager. She points to the Chilean flag in the corner of her room, merged with the American flag, and a patch from Desert Storm. He tries not to flinch when he sees it, wondering when it was that Sarah found the patch. “I’m both, Tio Tommy.”

A huffing laughter escapes him, more in compliance than in actual humor before he brings his lips to the crown of Sarah’s curls. “Sleep, princesa. You’ve got school tomorrow.”

The girl’s octopus arms latch onto Tommy’s neck while he’s down, lips quivering once more. He resists the urge to shout for Joel to come back, thinking that perhaps his ‘Uncle Tommy Attitude’ was nothing more than a farce he’s convinced himself of. “What’s wrong, honey?”

“I think I made daddy sad,” Sarah whispers. Her cheeks are spotted with red streaks from earlier tears, and her eyes haven’t recovered from the tantrum. “I didn’t mean to.”

Tommy smooths down Sarah’s hair, tucking big curls behind her ear. “He knows you didn’t, baby. Your daddy’s just tired.”

Sarah bites her lip, unsatisfied with the conclusion her Uncle Tommy has come to. “But I was mean to him. Miss Capiro says I have to be nice to people who have lost somebody.”

This kid. Fuck.

What can he tell her about Joanna that won’t sound like her mother doesn’t love her anymore? She isn’t dead, she’s just gone. No, she’s never coming back. It’s not Sarah’s fault. Or Joel’s. Hell, it’s not even Joanna’s fault. It’s just the fucked up nature of whatever hand was given to this family.

This is why he is never having kids. Being an uncle is much easier, and he tells Sarah as such whenever she asks why she doesn’t have a cousin (never mind that he still feels too young to even look at a kid).

An idea occurs to him, and it's spilling from his mouth before he knows what he’s doing. “Why don’t we make your daddy some pancakes tomorrow? You can draw him somethin’ nice of you an’ him an’ me.”

Sarah perks up at the idea, the moon illuminating her features through the frilly curtains Joel bought her a few weeks ago. New room, he remembers. The Clash is a centerpiece above her bed, and he has to stifle his laughter at the idea of Sarah finding the poster somewhere in her father’s room. Her grubby fingers must have latched onto the teenage shit Joel was into, holding it close to her to feel older.

“Pancakes?” she tests him, whispering so loudly she might as well be talking. She’s doing it for Joel’s benefit, making sure her sleeping father won’t overhear. He misses having that kind of innocence, that pure unadulterated belief that your parents are always aware of you.

In a way, he supposes they are. He still remembers his mother flicking the lights to their small townhouse on, shaking from the fear that her son had vanished because he was stupid enough to miss curfew. His mother had sobbed in relief, vacating her chair to wrap her aging arms around him. He remembers curling his back down from how short she was, and he remembers Joel pursing his lips at making their mother worry.

He never missed curfew after that. He couldn’t stomach it.

Tommy would get home, drunk and unaware of himself, but his mother would never worry where he was again.

Except for Desert Storm, Tommy realizes blandly. His mother worried plenty then.

“Promise,” Tommy tells Sarah. “We’ll make pancakes.”

*

Tommy buries his niece, and they never made pancakes.

The chasm in his soul first burst by the war widens, violating sweet memories of butterflies and a lavender room. There is no memory of Sarah and soccer where he can find relief. It is a bloody scene, it is a warring scene. It is familiar to the haze of After the war: the ringing in his ears, the vibration of his flesh as he struggles to understand human horror.

His hair is slicked back in sweat, and his hands ache. Joel is shoulder deep in soil and blood, caked in gore. The remains of his daughter paint his skin and his clothes and his eyes. There isn’t a single part of his brother that is left untouched by death.

Fire lights the scene, explosions follow, and Tommy knows they have to go. But he can’t force Joel to stop digging, can’t force himself to move from where he keeps Sarah’s eyes closed.

She’s small in Tommy’s arms, barely larger than the rifle he shot the soldier who killed her. But Sarah doesn’t curl into him like she usually does when she sleeps, she doesn’t open a cautious eye to pretend to be asleep so she can be carried by her father, she doesn’t giggle when Tommy smooths down her hair. She doesn’t do anything except sit.

He covers her face with his red overshirt, wiping off grime and blood. Sarah shouldn’t have to breathe in soil and river dump for the rest of time, he thinks. Dead don't breathe, he realizes. Fuck, Tommy thinks, maybe I’m dead too.

Joel is sobbing in a ditch, and Tommy doesn’t know what to do except cradle his niece.

Hundreds of seconds pass, but he doesn’t think his brother notices.

When Joel emerges from the wreck of Sarah’s grave, his eyes are bleary and red. Desolation clouds his features. Tommy is returned to the day of Sarah’s birth, when he saw pieces of Joel rearrange themselves until he was nothing but a father with a daughter.

What’s a father without a daughter? What’s an uncle without a niece?

And Tommy wants to cry into his niece’s hair too, but Joel takes Sarah’s lifeless body and cradles her like she were a newborn. He rocks her and murmurs a lullaby so that she can sleep. Tommy’s red shirt is adjusted around her neck, covering the gaping hole and the bullet and the blood and the purple shirt from her favorite artist’s world tour.

“Joel,” Tommy finally says, voice cracking under the pressure it takes to exist. He wants his mother, and he wants his father. He wants his brother. But it’s like no one is home. No one but the haunted house and a dead body and his dead niece. It pains him more than the war did. It pains him to have family. It pains him to lose again. It pains him because he knows loss well, and he knows his brother will fracture under the weight of it. “Joel—we have to go.”

They go, and Sarah is buried. The little girl they raised is buried by a river. She wears purple and blood, has curls matted in her own blood and grime. She is buried with Joel’s soul, she is buried with Tommy’s family.

*

Tommy isn’t sure when he realizes that his family is gone. Maybe it’s when he realizes he is an orphan after his mother dies. Maybe it’s when he realizes Sarah has been shot. Maybe it’s when his brother puts a pistol to the side of his head, only walking away because Joel had the audacity to flinch. He remembers his mother praising Joel for audacity, for survival.

Joel would’ve been better at war than Tommy was. Joel survives, but Tommy endures. He understands suffering, and as such, can handle the grief that comes with it.

He learns the name of this pandemic. Learns of cordyceps and learns of infected. He learns that these monsters are walking humans, alive but controlled. And thinks Joel is the same. Alive by the sheer definition of science, but not really. Joel breathes because he has to, because Tommy begged him to.

“You can’t leave me, Joel,” Tommy begs him in the old medical tents the military set up. He wonders if the soldier who killed Sarah followed the order of someone here, but doesn’t dwell on it because he is too consumed by his brother’s near death experience. “Please. I need my brother.”

The vacant look that haunts his brother clears somewhat, allowing for an old identity to slot itself into Joel’s very being: brother. Tommy tries not to feel guilty, but fails.

“We go on for family,” Tommy says, shaking Joel’s shoulder. He ignores the pointed glare of the nurse that tended to them both. She’s Hispanic and she reminds him of their mother, but he discredits the idea when he realizes it might just be because she’s old and a woman and Catholic. He misses his mother. “Alright? Say it.”

Joel doesn’t respond immediately. Tommy later realizes that it's because he’s filing Sarah into factions in his brain that are labeled DO NOT TOUCH. Right now though, he only waits with bated breath as his brother takes in the information.

Finally—and Tommy nearly sobs in relief, nearly falls to his knees in thanks to God—Joel nods. “We go on for family.”

In the end, it's the same phrase that makes Tommy leave his brother in Detroit. We go on for family becomes we kill for family. He is drowning in blood and it reminds him of war. He trembles when he shoots, he cries over the bodies of innocents, he buries them because they deserve peace in the afterlife.

He meets Tess, and learns that she lost a kid. She fractured like Joel did. And Tommy wonders if they can help each other. But they don’t. Tess and Joel are cut from the same cloth—a mourning one. Tess won’t talk about her kid or her husband. Joel won’t talk about Sarah (and Tommy wonders if Sarah existed at all sometimes).

The dead don’t breathe, and neither does Joel. Neither does Tess.

(Privately, Tommy thinks Tess might be able to breathe eventually. But it’s too soon now. But eventually, she’ll breathe. Maybe she’ll get Joel to breathe too.)

Tommy leaves with a bang.

Literally.

A bomb derails him from his brother, but he doesn’t feel the all consuming need to return to his brother. He doesn’t have a brother. Joel died with Sarah.

“I can’t do this anymore, Joel!”

Joel scoffs and turns away from him. Sarah’s watch is still on his left wrist, still cracked, still frozen at 2:45 AM. Sarah is still dead. “But you can light shit up with Marlene and her fucking Fireflies?”

Another round of shooting follows, but it's too far away for Joel to care. Joel survives. Tommy does. Tommy cries for the dead when he doesn’t know them. Tommy endures, so he has to leave.

“Better than whatever the hell we’re doin’!” Tommy shouts back, suffocation clawing his vocal cords into strips. “Do you even feel it anymore?”

The answer is no. Joel doesn’t feel anything anymore, not to the degree of Before.

Everyone Tommy meets uses Before to refer to the world before it went to shit with the apocalypse, but Tommy refers to Before as the world prior to Sarah. There is a Before Sarah and an After Sarah. He wishes he could tell his twenty-two year old brother to never have the little girl he will go on to lose, but also can’t stomach the idea of never knowing his niece. So, he is stuck in this sickening middle.

“We’re doing what we have to do to survive,” Joel tells him, ignoring Tommy’s earlier question. “That’s what you told me.”

And if that doesn’t fuck Tommy up in hundreds of different ways because Joel is right. Tommy told him to survive, and Joel has. Everyone thinks Joel has some kind of authority over him, and he does, but it’s also Tommy’s control over Joel. If Tommy folds, so does Joel.

Tommy leaves, and so does Joel.

*

His time with the Fireflies is something Tommy can’t reconcile with himself.

He leaves them too, and tries not to feel like a failure for it all. Joel once gave him an out for all the fighting and justice Tommy wanted to barter. His brother made him an uncle, and it was enough. But now it isn’t.

Tommy has all this lidded sense of justice, this desperation to help, and he doesn’t know where to put it. He wants to find peace and have his sins washed. He wants his brother to find solace.

Most of all, Tommy wants purpose.

*

Tommy meets Maria, and finds purpose.

He can almost hear Sarah laughing as she nudges Tommy’s side. Never getting married, huh?

Tommy imagines himself shrugging as pink doses his cheeks. Yeah well, she wore me down.

*

Maria lost Kevin after the Outbreak, after Sarah. She tells him that Kevin wasn’t bitten, but that he was shot by the military after they were tricked into thinking they were safe. That Kevin was being held by his father when the automatic rifles blew into them both. That Maria only survived by being behind them both.

He holds her as she cries about her child and her husband. Purpose. It doesn’t bleed into him like Desert Storm or Marlene or Joel’s suicide. It spreads with warmth, coloring a gray world with bright colors. He doesn’t see Jackson’s snow as gray, but as white. He sees the lights that flicker now that the dam works—thanks to Tommy and a few others. It feels like when Joel gave him Sarah and told him: take care of Sarah. That’s how you help.

Purpose.

Tommy doesn’t know why he does it, but he tells Maria about Sarah. About his first purpose that wasn’t drenched in blood. She listens and gasps when she hears who his niece was brutalized in her father’s arms, while Tommy all but watched.

When he marries Maria, endorsed by Jackson and her doting father, he cries. He thinks of Sarah, and decides that he will honor her.

She deserves remembrance. She deserves a grave. She deserves peace. So does Kevin.

So he sharpens chalk on a used board. He lights two small candles, and prays that somewhere out there, Sarah appreciates his memorial.

Maria cries when she sees the board. She kisses his cheek and then his neck while they hug.

“You care so much,” she tells him later when they’re a lot less clothed. Tommy hums noncommittally, thinking back to what his brother told him. He’s tired. “You’re empathetic.”

He’s too tired to understand her. He groans and settles further into the mattress, squirming under the thick blankets in the summer heat. “Not ‘thetic.”

Maria laughs and angels sing with her. “Empathetic, Tommy.”

“Ah.”

She kisses him again. “Thank you for caring.”

Tommy leans forward and presses a sleepy kiss to the lobe of her ear. “Love you too.”

His wife rolls her eyes. “I like it better in Spanish.”

That draws a laugh from him, real and bright like the Jackson sun. Purpose. Thank fuck.

Tommy doesn’t talk to his brother for thirteen years, and he’s been in Jackson for four of them. He offers him updates. I’m still alive, fucker. But he doesn’t talk. He doesn’t tell Joel about Maria or Jackson or anything of the sort. He doesn’t ask about Tess or about the QZ. His brother won’t offer that information anyway.

It’s winter in Jackson, and Tommy has been dragged by Eugene and the others to build an expansion on the communal dining room. He isn’t thrilled to be away from Maria, especially in these months of pregnancy, but she all but shooed him away.

“Do your part,” Maria laughs at his expression, gently pushing him in the direction of the gathered men. “I’ll be with the patrol group.”

“But—”

Maria shoots him a glare. “I know you aren’t trying to tell a pregnant woman what to do, Tommy Miller.”

He rolls his eyes but concedes, but not before peppering a kiss to both her hair and her stomach. The baby rolls, or maybe it’s just Tommy’s overwhelming desire for it to be the baby. “Stay safe, Mar.” The nickname rolls off his tongue in Spanish because she loves it.

The baby will have a Spanish name, Maria made him swear when she told him. And you’ve got to teach them Spanish.

You got my word, babe.

Tommy’s been hiding the Spanish dictionary under their bed for the last few months, languidly going through old words and idioms he almost forgot. He doesn’t tell Maria when he cries over Spanish, wishing that his mother could peer over his shoulder and scold him for pronunciation. She’s lost her father, and that’s enough mourning for one home.

‘Sides, Sarah’s birthday passed a few months ago. Maria’s father died a few weeks before, and Tommy doesn’t want to overwhelm his wife more than he has to.

“TOMMY!”

He’s jolted from mindless work and banter by a Southern accent that Tommy has had to commit to memory in the fear that he won’t ever see his brother again. When he turns over his shoulder, he clocks his wife on a horse, and the patrol group. But he sees his brother, and everyone blurs into meaningless shapes.

Joel is older—shit he’s fifty-six. Fifty-seven now. Salt and pepper hair, they call it. He wears a wardrobe that Tommy knows isn’t his. There is no blood on his brother, and whatever grief he may have once been weighed down by, has changed. It’s evolved in the way only grief can after twenty-years. His brother.

They’re hugging before Tommy can even think to express anything. He chuckles because what else is there to do when his brother has found his way to Jackson. Joel follows suit, laughing through a sob. They rock back and forth, the way they used to when Joel got back from football practice and Tommy was waiting up.

When they part, Tommy keeps his gloved hands on Joel’s shoulder. They’re not crying, but they’re close. “What the fuck you doin’ here?”

Joel helplessly gestures to the side, guffawing quietly, before looking back to Tommy. “I came here to save you.”

An incredulous look dawns on Joel’s face, and Tommy can’t help but fall back on the behavior of their youth. He copies his older brother and laughs with him, before embracing him again. He’s alive. He’s laughing. Maybe he’s breathin’ again.

He’s already thinking of how great his brother will fit into Jackson. Joel was great at construction, great at fixin’ things. He can take over the work Tommy despises, can join the patrol when Maria gives birth so Tommy stays home, and can become Uncle Joel.

The last part unnerves him. Uncle Joel doesn’t carry the same gentleness that Uncle Tommy does, but he thinks the new roles will suit them—eventually. With time.

But Joel turns around after they’ve embraced in front of Jackson, and whatever happiness that has lightened his brother is gone. He stiffens and awkwardly pats Tommy’s shoulder in the fashion he did when he told his recently returned veteran of a brother that he had married Joanna.

"Joel!”

Tommy flinches at the squeakiness with which it's said. He hasn’t heard a child talk to his brother since Sarah, so he frantically searches for a kid amidst the others.

She’s smaller than Sarah, drowning under the big coat she wears. It isn’t her’s. It looks like it belongs to someone else, someone with Joel’s stature—and if that doesn’t fuck Tommy up. His brother is traveling with a kid. A kid a little older than Sarah.

Two patrolmen are holding the girl in place, with the others circling the scene with trepidation. Children are never easy to distrust. Maria’s pocketing a pistol that ain’t hers, and pursing her lips as the girl thrashes in Adam and John’s tight grips.

The girl roars her disapproval and kicks Adam in the knee. The man groans in pain, choking on the snowy air as he forcefully bends to cup the already injured knee. “THAT’S WHAT YOU GET, YOU FUCKER—HEY!” Adam wraps his arms around the little girl’s waist to hold her in place.

Shit.

"Hey! Let her go!” Joel barks out. He’s charging towards them, and Maria motions for them to drop the little girl.

The girl falls into the snow with a surprised gasp before jumping into a defensive position. She pulls out a switchblade from her winter jacket, pulling it free, and pointing it at Adam with the feral nature of an alley cat. “Listen you shitty motherfuckers—”

“Ellie!” Joel snaps at her, drawing Tommy’s attention back to his brother. He’s panicked some, not a lot, but enough that Tommy feels a hole digging into his skin. Shit. “Stop it.”

Adam, whose son has only recently turned fourteen, and has braved temperaments before reels back in surprise at the vulgar language. But Tommy knows that nothing beats an angry girl from the Outside. And Ellie has fury in spades.

Ellie tears away from the group, white cheeks flushed pink, until she reaches Joel. Her arm slips around his waist to make a tight turn and positions herself behind him. The knife is held menacingly behind Joel, her face looking rather adorable for the amount of rage her eyes carry.

“Make one fucking move and I swear to God, you’re fucking—”

“Ellie, I swear—”

“Joel! They’re trying to kill—”

“If you would just—”

“Oh, come the FUCK on, Joel—”

“Ellie, I’m serious, shut—”

“Oh for fuck’s sake—”

Tommy steps in before Ellie can scare the patrolmen with her words. Ellie must not have noticed him because she flinches when Tommy takes his place next to Joel. “I’m sure,” he starts pointedly, motioning for the patrolmen to leave them, “that this is all just sum' misunderstandin'. Thanks guys, but Maria and I can take it from here.”

*

He doesn’t mean to, but Tommy searches for Tess in Ellie. She’s too white to be Joel’s kid, but she might be Tess’. Sarah took after Joanna. Joel and Tommy take after their mother. Miller’s tend to favor their mother’s. But Ellie don’t look like Tess.

Ellie’s hair is thinner than Tess’, and her eyes are brown. Tommy thinks he remembers Tess having blue eyes, so different from any of Joel’s other girlfriends.

Ellie calls him Joel, but it’s always in a whine. Like an only child who feels their place has been violated by a third party.

She also eats like she’s never had a proper meal, which she probably hasn’t.

“Manners,” Joel hisses to her. Ellie rolls her eyes and continues to down her plate, but Tommy hears the kick she gives him under the table.

Tommy has to fight the smile that blooms on his face when Ellie sighs as if this is a common occurrence. To her, it must be. To Tommy, it’s familiar. To Maria, he imagines the image he painted of his brother a few years ago does not reconcile with the one before her.

His brother isn’t necessarily the same as he was before, but he channels grief into something new. Into someone new, and shit. He’s got a niece.

"I don’t think I’ve ever had a proper meal. This is fucking amazing—”

“Ellie.”

Definitely not Tess’ kid. And probably not Joel’s kid. But there’s something there, something Tommy recognizes in Joel.

It’s the same fracture that happened when Sarah was born. The rearranging of atoms and veins so that fatherhood could take hold of him. It’s the same rearrangement that Tommy went through—but it’s more extreme Outside than it is in Jackson.

He sees Dina creep closer in the distance, and knows that Camila must be off doing her own patrol to notice that Dina has drifted from the schoolhouse to catch sight of the new arrivals. She’s wearing the braid Eugene did for her earlier, and feels a wave of affection for the curious girl (affectionate for all the kids in Jackson who are allowed to feel curious).

“What?” Ellie snaps, jolting in aggression.

Joel sighs in exasperation and drops his fork. “What’s wrong with you?”

“What about her manners?” she demands.

Maria takes control of the scene, allowing Dina a quick escape. No doubt to a waiting Jesse in the corner, who is laughing with Peter at the embarrassment that reddens Dina’s cheeks.

“Maybe I’ll teach ‘em,” Ellie says offhandedly. It’s a promise, and Tommy wonders if Ellie knows she’s insinuating a permanent stay in Jackson. Joel doesn’t look bothered by the threat in Ellie’s voice, swiping some of his food onto Ellie’s plate. Ellie peers down at the newly added food and shoots Joel a glare, but it goes ignored. Ellie is very much a child born after the Outbreak, angry and volatile. But Joel is a parent from Before, and that means, he wins whatever silent argument they’re having. She chews on another bite of food. “I want my gun back.”

Tommy glimpses at Joel, silently praying that his brother will talk the kid down. Joel doesn’t argue, and wonders if perhaps his brother is in agreement with the feral girl.

“They’re also not armed,” Maria deflects, and Tommy feels a tantrum coming in full force. He doesn’t know if it's parental instincts or if it's stuff he carries over from Sarah.

“Y’know what,” Tommy tries awkwardly, hoping Maria won’t hold this over him later. “I think maybe ya’ll got off on the wrong foot.”

Ellie drops her utensils and gestures to Maria. “She was gonna have her guys kill us!”

Tommy is answering, and the conversation veers off the course that he originally intended it to go on. He alludes to something, and Maria drives it further. Maybe she’s angry that Joel’s here. Maybe it’s about Ellie, who Joel has apparently dragged across the country or something (he doesn’t even want to know why).

He watches in real time as Joel hangs back on himself, a flicker of memories playing like a film reel in his eyes. Of course, Tommy thinks. Joel has always been a master of ignoring the problem ‘till it went away. But this issue, the issue of Tommy disappearing on Joel—it’s gonna take more than Tommy thinks he can handle right now.

Then Joel mentions family, and Tommy has to stop himself from reeling back in surprise. Because shit, Maria’s being asked to leave, but Ellie is perfectly content at Joel’s right side. Family.

Any volatile nature Ellie might have carried dissipates at Joel’s sentence. She doesn’t smile, but it’s pretty damn close. Her cheeks are flushed some, and she fiddles with the meat and vegetables on her plate.

Mother fucker. Family.

"Well, uh, Maria is family, actually,” Tommy explains, taking Maria’s hand. Maria watches him gratefully, and he wonders if she was afraid he’d ignore their bond for the sake of his brother. He’s greeted by silence and an unenthusiastic response from his brother. Maybe he’s thinking about all the times Tommy insisted he wouldn’t get married.

Tommy can’t say the truth: Joel fucked him up. Their mama’s grief fucked him up.

Oh, shit!” Ellie responds. She’s not enthusiastic, but she is relieved. He knows that look in orphan kids well enough. Thank fuck you aren’t here to take him away. “Congrats.”

Silence.

“Joel,” Ellie prompts his brother, eyeing Joel in a way that tells him she’s done this before. “Say congrats.”

Silence, and then: “Congrats.” Ellie mouths it with him, proud when she’s able to sway him.

He realizes that Joel’s always been this way. He’s easily warped and rearranged by kids. Tommy did it first. He was Joel’s first kid, looking after him when their mother was still grieving. Sarah was next. And, Tommy guesses that Ellie is the last.

(He thinks that maybe he’ll have to dust off the role of Uncle Tommy for Ellie. But he doesn’t voice it because Joel might just collapse on himself.)

*

In hindsight, telling Joel about Maria being pregnant was probably the stupidest thing he’s done since joining the Fireflies. He sees his brother shaking and thinks of going after him, but decides against it.

I don’t understand this version of you, he wants to tell Joel. He knows how to handle an angry Joel, a grieving Joel. But this Joel is different from the others. He is grieving Sarah and he is grieving something else.

*

Joel has never been one to take the easy way out. So of course, Joel picks the kid with what could be the answer to some degree of world peace.

Tommy doesn’t find out what the something else is until that night, when Joel confesses to practically loving this feral girl like he does Sarah.

“What kinda dreams?” Tommy asks him, and feels the grief of September 27 come back in full force. It nearly swallows him, so he grips onto whatever is around him in order to steady himself.

Joel is shaking so fiercely that it terrifies Tommy. His brother is quaking from invisible monsters and invisible ghosts. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.” He takes in an unsteady breath. “I just know that when I wake up, I’ve lost somethin’.”

It can’t be Sarah, Tommy realizes hauntingly. The realization leaves a sour taste in his mouth. The dreams can’t be about Sarah because if they were, then Joel would know. These dreams are about a void left after insurmountable grief. A dead weight plummets to the pit of his stomach when Joel says, “All I’ve ever done—is fail her.”

Ellie. Sarah. One and the same. Two daughters, and holy shit. Fuck.

He’s got a second niece, and the title is attached with so much lament that he feels it might crack lightning in the ground with how strong it is.

“I have to leave her,” Joel tells him, determined. But it sounds like the idea tears him apart in sixteen different ways. He doesn’t want to, and Tommy doesn’t think Joel can bear to. But fatherhood is tricky, it’s poisonous. It won’t let him hurt the kid, so Tommy knows what Joel is asking.

He accepts because Joel gave him a purpose thirty-two years ago. Joel told him to take care of Sarah when he can’t, and Joel’s telling him to take care of Ellie now.

Uncle Tommy, but the title feels like a death sentence.

*

When he finds Ellie the next morning, his knees almost buck at the sight of her. She’s wearing purple, and whether it's Maria’s intention or not—she feels more like Sarah in that moment. He imagines a different time where Ellie might have reused Sarah’s clothes—not because she has to, but because she wants to.

The thought is discarded when Tommy remembers that Sarah would be thirty-two now. She would be old enough to be Ellie’s mother. A stupidly young mother, but a mother nonetheless.

He doesn’t acknowledge her beyond a nod and an awkward smile, doesn’t think he can muster anything beyond it. This little kid is his brother’s weakness, and Tommy knows she’ll be his soon enough. He doesn’t mind it much, but can’t quite see the kid as his niece yet. The girl is violent and defensive, but sad. Her expression doesn’t change drastically, but it loosens like she might cry if she were alone when she sees it's only him.

Tommy’s never been good in silences, doesn’t like ‘em much. He likes to talk. His mother said he gets it from his father, but Joel says he gets it from their mother. Tommy thinks Joel’s like their dad—talkative under the pressure of a kid. Joel would only talk an ear off when he thought Sarah might be sad.

Overcompensating, Maria told him many years later. I did that too. And shit, if that doesn’t say a lot about the person he marries, Tommy doesn’t know what does.

"Stables jus’ right there,” he tells her.

Ellie doesn’t answer him, doesn’t even acknowledge that he spoke. It’s a far cry from the girl cursing up a storm in the square.

A voice in his head that Tommy has long since identified with Sarah giggles at his incompetence. Out of practice, Uncle Tommy?

Yeah, he thinks bitterly, I am.

When they reach the stables, his brother is there. He’s there with Pinecone, an older horse that Eugene and the others use during the summer to teach kids how to ride.

He knows this Joel, the one who bows out when fighting with his kid. The saddle is being secured mindlessly, as if Joel has spent the last hour mulling the steps over.

“You came here to say goodbye or somethin’?” Ellie asks, and though it can be taken as hostile, Tommy hears the underlying hope that perhaps Joel is willing to stick around.

Joel swallows, and shakes his head, not looking at either of them. “No,” he answers, voice thick with emotion. If Tommy asks, Joel would blame it on the weather. But Tommy knows better. He thinks Ellie does too. “I came here to steal one of these horses and go.”

Without a goodbye. Without so much as a glance in his direction. He doesn’t blame Joel for that, but it stings all the same. He guesses that’s what Joel felt thirteen years ago when he left him and Tess.

“I woulda gave you one,” Tommy interjects, talking to talk. Ellie was so quiet, reminding him of Joel when they were younger, and Joel was mad at their mama or something.

Joel studies him for a second, but agrees. “I know.” It’s not much, but it’s an acknowledgement of something. Of perhaps a bridge that Joel and Tommy can both begin to mend. Sarah’s at the middle of the bridge, waiting for the two old fuckers to get their shit together.

“Anyway. That was thirty minutes ago, and I guess…” Joel trails off, pats Pinecone once more before steeling himself. His brother goes to Ellie with a new resolve, the shakiness of last night hidden under the thick coat and the hope in the little girl’s eyes. “You deserve a choice. Still think you’ll be better off with Tommy, but—”

"—Let’s go,” Ellie cuts in with a firm nod, pushing her duffle bag onto Joel.

“Okay,” Joel says, slightly in awe of the young girl. He doesn’t address it though, and neither does Tommy. Ellie doesn’t even look at Tommy as she stalks past them both, entertaining herself with Pinecone’s fur. It’s not forgiveness, but it's as close as these two emotionally stunted shits can manage.

When Joel finally meets Tommy’s eyes, he fights back a proud smile. He knows that look in Joel. Purpose. It’s Joel and fatherhood. The complicated twist of his brother that Tommy first identified when Joel stumbled into their mother’s home and admitted to Joanna’s pregnancy. The rearranging of cells, the fracturing of the soul.

He prays his brother survives this one.

Joel helps Ellie onto the horse with an ease that only comes with being a parent. He gives her some instruction, and Ellie basks in it. She’s an orphan, Tommy now knows. But she’s latched onto her brother, latched onto the idea of a parent. She hums her agreement at his command, and pretends to entertain herself with the horse while Joel and Tommy discuss where they’re going.

Marlene is a name he’s tried his best to forget about over the last few years, not wanting to dwell on all the atrocities he did in the name of freedom. All that time; fighting, killing, bombing—when he could have just found Maria earlier. But everything happens for a reason, and suffering has to lead somewhere.

Tommy breaks formation first, and hugs his brother. His eyes flutter closed for a single second, and he sees a lifetime. He sees himself and Joel hugging after Tommy’s first day at school. He sees Joel lifting his space themed sheets so that Tommy can crawl in bed after a nightmare. He sees the day Sarah is born, and the hug that both brothers shared when they realized they had assumed new titles beyond brothers. The realization that they were both bonded even stronger now because of a small bundle of purple and curls.

He can’t form the words to tell Joel this, so he tells him that there’s a place for them both when they get back.

“Countin’ on it.”

And then, because Joel’s his big brother and shit with his own emotions: “Can I borrow that?”, referring to the rifle.

“Yeah,” Tommy breathes, dislodging the rifle from his shoulder.

Joel shrugs, but there’s amusement there too. “Cus Maria took mine, y’know.”

“I already said yes, Joel,” Tommy replies, helping Joel slip on the weapon. “Adios, big brother.”

Ellie smiles at Tommy before she and Joel leave the walls of Jackson. It’s forced, but it’s a smile, and Tommy will take what he can get until he can spoil her rotten.

Uncle Tommy. Mierda .

“Stay alive, you old fucker,” Tommy says, and beckons for the patrolmen to close the doors.

Chapter Text

In the army, ghosts are encouraged. They never say so outright because to say that is to admit a death sentence for their troops. But the vulnerable are preferred to the soft, they’re more malleable, easier to convince a suicide is honorable.

He learns this on his third day in the desert, sweating buckets under the army wear. A buddy on his right tenses before he shoots at something beyond Tommy’s line of vision. Hell, his buddy could have been shooting at sand and Tommy would’ve thought it human. Desert makes you think different; it’s drilled into their heads by their superiors. Everyone’s an enemy.

When his buddy is shot in the head, Tommy believes them.

*

In Jackson, ghosts are a casualty of the War Outside. Since moving into the small community, he’s been getting loads of sympathetic pats on the shoulder. A bunch of people clamoring around him and commending him for the brave effort it must’ve taken to travel from Texas to Detroit to Boston to Jackson. He doesn’t tell them that it was his brother who ensured his survival, can’t stomach the thought of Jackson knowing his bloody history.

He resolves to keep to himself. Like Joel does.

It doesn’t last long because Tommy ain’t built like Joel. His brother was born somber, but Tommy is born with fiery resolve. His mother told him it was his father’s spirit living on in him, but Tommy thinks it has something to do with audacity. Joel always said he had it in spades.

He meets Maria on his second day in Jackson and the ghost of Sarah is peering over her shoulder like a curious angel. He imagines God must have let the little girl loose on this planet to look after the people she left behind, but he doesn’t really believe in God, so he just ignores the ghost (or angel, or whatever the fuck she is), and lets her peer over the new woman that is reprimanding him for stepping foot in a stable without the proper wear.

“Aren’t you from Texas?” Maria snaps at him, hands on her hips. She’s pretty, and if Tommy weren’t so haunted by Sarah and the desert—if the world hadn’t ended—Tommy would’ve flirted almost immediately. He doesn’t though.

Tommy offers her a wide grin, a fake one. The same one he offered his mother and Joel when Joel came back with another notch to add on his belt. Joel’s infectious that way. People like him in spite of his prickly attitude. He makes sure his drawl is slowed, true to a Texan’s man, and offers her a dipped nod. “It ain’t the wild west, ma’am.”

Maria glares at him and takes the paint from him. “Then you shouldn’t be riding.”

“Thought we was free,” Tommy tells her. It’s an old accent, and hell, it should be faded by now. But it comes back when he reverts to who he was before Desert Storm, before the Outbreak, before Sarah. “I did my day labors.”

“Sure,” Maria notes with a frown. “That doesn’t mean I’m comfortable with you taking out Themis for a joyride.”

“Themis?” he asks, a teasing lilt to his voice. “That’s a new one.”

“God of justice,” Maria replies offhandedly. “Not a good one for you.”

He tries not to flinch at the implications of that, but he must react in some visceral way because Maria winces at her own words.

Sarah, on the other hand, immortalized at twelve, peeks around Maria’s waist and offers him a toothy grin. She’s still wearing the purple Halican Drops t-shirt that Joel got her on that stupid tour. He still remembers her bouncing into Tommy’s room in the middle of the night, babbling about costumes and the explosive lights. He blinks, and Sarah is still grinning up at Maria, nudging a ghostly elbow into the woman’s side. I like her, Uncle Tommy.

Yeah, Tommy thinks stupidly, I like her too.

*

When Tommy marries Maria, no one in Jackson is surprised.

*

Tommy sees Sarah everywhere after marrying Maria, after living in Jackson. But peace does something funny to ghosts. He doesn't see her at twelve anymore, hard to do that when speaking with kids and the community of Jackson. When she first appears after the wedding, Sarah is a sparkling twenty-nine years old. Her hair is as voluminous as it always is, bouncing with her own excited squeal at Maria’s love for him.

I knew you’d get married.

He wants to tell her to look after her father, to check in on Joel because he is lost without her. But he doesn’t. The sight of his little grown niece is a little too much. She turns thirty, and Maria celebrates Sarah’s birthday with him by telling him about the settlement of Jackson. Tommy sighs into this story to avoid thinking about Joel and Tess and every other fucker he abandoned in his quest for the Fireflies. Maria quiets his fears in a way that no one has ever been able to do before, and he knows that she’s his purpose—or at least crucial to it.

Sarah lives as a ghost in Tommy’s head, an innocent conscience to him. He sees her sometimes when people don’t come back from patrol or a raid of an abandoned house, like a harbinger of death. He hates himself for seeing his sweet niece as such a horrific legend. The ghost of Sarah turns thirty-one. Then, thirty-two.

And then—

“I’m pregnant.”

He short circuits, the way Joel did when he found out about Joanna. About Sarah. Shit.

Pregnant.

His brother’s words sneak into his mouth and—“Mierda.”

*

After Maria tells him, Sarah reverts to the ghost of a twelve-year-old girl. She cries and screams for her Uncle Tommy and her father, but they’re always shy of reaching her. Sarah’s bloody grave warps into his own kid’s grave, buried by Tommy because he wasn’t fast enough to shoot an Infected—or a raider.

He has nightmares, and Maria always wakes him. He tells her about inadequacy, tells her about this faithless hope he’s always had in himself and his purpose. He tells her that his brother gave him something, and that God snatched it away because of some twisted sense of humor. She presses her lips to his neck in comfort, and urges him to continue. He tells her that Sarah loved Halican Drops, hated coffee, and loved butterflies.

Tommy makes the mistake of mentioning his People years. That’s what Joel calls them. He doesn’t know if his brother still calls them that, but it's the years where he killed both innocents and guilty. Somehow, the words twist in his mouth. Nothing sounds right anymore, and Maria calls it a panic attack.

“S’not what it is, Maria,” Tommy argues.

Maria rolls her eyes in their dark room. “Don’t be stupid, Tommy.”

Yeah, Uncle Tommy. He twists in bed, in a frenzy that startles Maria, and finds a nineteen year old Sarah perched on the loveseat in their bedroom. His mind imagines Sarah in Joel’s old shirt and jeans, bulky boots, and butterfly socks. She looks like an odd combination of the innocence of Sarah and the wear of the apocalypse. Sarah kicks her legs over the armrests and tilts her chin up. Shit like that is real, Tio. Don’t be stupid.

“Tommy?” Maria murmurs, brows drawn in concentration as his own eyes bore holes into the armchair. “To—”

He flinches in her hold. Sarah disappears, and he almost shouts at his niece to come back. She doesn’t, so he turns back to Maria with a newly placed haunted look in her eye. Tommy doesn’t know if she understands, but she lets him curl into her neck and sob.

Maybe this will end badly one day, with his wife resenting his brother for all Tommy has gone through.

(Tommy doesn’t think about this though because he’s in Maria’s arms and that’s all that it takes for him to mourn Before.)

*

He doesn’t tell his brother he’s okay after Maria tells him she’s pregnant. Can’t stomach the idea of telling his brother that he’s fine when Maria’s bulging stomach sometimes makes the bile in his stomach infect his lungs.

It’s sickening. Tommy prays that Maria doesn’t know of the fears he has, prays that if Joel ever comes into Jackson—that he’ll understand.

*

Joel doesn’t understand, but Tommy can’t really blame him anymore.

*

Ellie and Joel return in late Spring. They’re causing a ruckus a little beyond the gates, with Tommy only hearing about it because he’s leaving Maria’s most recent doctor’s appointment.

“Sofia's fine, Tommy,” Maria told him before, but he hadn’t believed her.

He wishes he had now because Maria looks pissed.

“Tommy!” calls out Eugene. The man is hobbling towards Tommy, ignoring Dina’s shouts at him that he shouldn’t be running on a broken leg. When Eugene finally reaches him, he’s panting and holding on to Tommy for support. “Got—” he gasps for breath—“news.”

Maria takes Sofia from Tommy’s arms, making the loss so much more prevalent. He misses Sarah. Misses normalcy, and wishes he would have had it Before.

“Well?” Tommy probes impatiently, the drawl returning with the fear that something otherworldly is coming for his kid, for his wife. “What is it?”

“Your brother’s at the gate with—.”

*

Tommy takes off in the direction of the gates before Eugene can finish his own explanations. He doesn’t even care when Eugene yelps at the loss of support on his left, leaving him to flounder until he falls into the pavement.

When Joel left in Winter, he was sure the man was a dead man walking—the same way he was when Tommy left him years ago. But the fact that his brother is back, the fact that he survived Winter out there. Shit.

He’s running until he sees Joel supporting a leaning Ellie at his side. She’s peering up at Joel, eyes wide and frantic at something a patrol guard tells them. Joel shakes his head down at her, smoothing down her features before pressing a soft kiss to the crown of her head.

Fuck, Tommy realizes, blinking at them. I’ve got a niece and a kid now.

Ellie finds him first, nudging Joel and pointing at him.

Tommy meets Joel halfway, Ellie still in tow. His brother is more jaded than he was in Winter. It makes him want to drag Joel and his…kid to the infirmary, but thinks the girl won’t take too kindly to it. So, he stays nauseatingly still as Joel slaps a hand over his shoulder in greeting.

“You didn’t die,” Tommy jokes, and hopes that Joel can hear the relief. Joel does, but Ellie flinches in a way that tells him the joke didn’t land with her. “Good for you.”

The little girl tugs on Joel’s sleeve, pulling his brother’s attention back to her. Her eyes communicate some language Tommy can’t speak, but Joel seems fluent in it. Ellie scuffles the grass beneath her ratty converse, and sighs harshly, like she’s out of breath from the exertion. Joel nods resolutely at her, pursing his lips. “Got any place we can stay?”

Tommy grins so wide he thinks his face will break in two. “Yeah, same house is cleared for you. Hoped you’d be back.”

“Well,” Ellie voices for the first time, her tone is hard but not unkind. “We’re here.”

He nods at her, hoping his easy demeanor will calm her some. It doesn’t, but he tries not to let it sting. “What about—”

Joel must know what he’s asking because he cuts Tommy off, “—Not possible.”

There’s a lie in there somewhere. He sees it in the way Ellie’s hands tighten on Joel’s sleeve, the way Joel shifts them so that Ellie’s body is slightly shielded by his own. It’s not his place to question his brother, so he nods his agreement.

“Okay.”

The walk to the house is short and terse, no one wanting to break first.

When they do reach the family home, Maria is on the bottom steps, Sofia bubbling on her hip. She raises an expectant brow at Tommy, but doesn’t comment when he offers her a sheepish smile. She rolls her eyes and pours Sofia into his own arms. He gladly accepts his baby, softly thumbing her cheeks as a way to avoid looking at his brother.

“What the fuck!” The adults flinch, but the baby only gurgles. Ellie shoots out from Joel’s side, bounding towards the baby at record speed before giggling when little Sofia reaches her hand out for the newcomer. “Holy shit! Joel!” It sounds like a whine, and it warms Tommy’s heart more than anything could. This is what he wanted. This is perfect (he ignores Sarah’s ghost leaning over the baby with interest). “You didn’t tell me they were having a baby! You dick!”

Joel sighs heavily and approaches them carefully. “Ellie, language.”

Tommy swallows and looks up at his big brother, almost nervous to be holding Sofia in his arms. He knows he shouldn’t be. Screw what Joel thinks, he’s going to be a great dad. So what if his brother can never look his own niece in the eye, so what if Tommy’s been haunted by Sarah for years and would appreciate some of his guilt to be exalted—fuck that. But even with all this resolve, he still cowers something small before his brother, nervously bouncing the baby.

“What’s her name?” Joel asks softly, a voice he only refers to when around kids.

He perks up, and allows his lips to pull into something resembling a smile. The air is still tense, but it's lessened by Ellie excitedly playing with Sofia’s little chubby fingers. “Sofia Veronica Jones Miller.”

“That’s a long ass name,” Ellie comments, unfazed by Joel’s quick reprimand. It’s nice. It’s comforting. Then, Ellie squints in suspicion. “Wait.” Maria holds her breath, as if she knows what’s coming. Which makes no fucking sense because Joel and Tommy are lost. The girl turns over her shoulder, ponytail flinging and falling onto the baby’s feet. Sofia goes to grab it, and Tommy lets her, only because Ellie’s glaring at Joel with fiery surprise. “YOU GUYS SPEAK SPANISH?”

*

It takes a while to calm Ellie down after that. She’s running after Joel, stepping on his heels as she pesters him with questions. Tommy and Maria are content to sit on the couch with Sofia, amusingly watching as Joel tries to peel Ellie off him long enough to check the doors and windows and any other Contractor business.

“Yes, Ellie,” Joel says eventually. It’s not a snap, but it’s a near one. He’s not annoyed, but he has been fighting with her to get some sleep after their long travel, and the girl’s been putting it off in favor of her asking him to speak Spanish. “My mom was Chilean, my dad was Mexican. They met in Chile when my dad took a trip there with some friends. Tommy, my mom, and I moved to the US a little after Tommy was born.”

Ellie’s mouth parts in shock. “But that means that you weren’t even born here. Holy fuck, dude. You’re not from Texas!”

That pulls a laugh from Maria, but Tommy and Joel look anything but amused. Righteous indignation, his wife calls it. Tommy doesn’t think it’s funny.

“I am from—”

“Hey now—”

Joel’s kid cackles, throwing her head back at the thought of Joel not being a Texan native. Joel sighs and rests his hands on his hips as he waits for Ellie’s excitement to die down. It doesn’t though, not until her eyes are wide enough that Tommy can compare them to saucers. “Does that mean you can sing in Spanish?”

“No,” Joel tells her quickly, swooping in before Tommy can get a word in edgewise. Tommy snorts into his chest, drawing Ellie’s attention. “Is he lying? He’s lying, right?”

“Yeah,” Tommy says, “he’s straight up lyin’. Joel here’s got a talent for Las Mañanitas.”

Ellie gasps at Joel, glaring at him. “You never sang for me laus mananitas!” She stumbles over the Spanish words, but doesn’t look at all embarrassed when Joel snorts. He kneels before her, and runs a thumb over her knee to get her attention. “You sang the Pearl Jam song!”

Joel knocks his chin to his chest in tired exasperation, but Ellie must know he’s not really bothered because she smiles toothily at him. It's so similar to the smile she offered Joel when pointing out the sheep in Jackson’s pen during Winter that Tommy has to blink the image away. “I’ll sing for you later. But sleep first.”

The teenager glimpses at Tommy and Maria with apprehension, then at the baby and it softens some. Her cheeks flush with embarrassment, and her earlier excitement drains to a childish want. “You’ll still be here, right?”

His brother doesn’t flinch, but it's a near thing. Of course, Tommy thinks. Ellie’s nervous about being left with him again, never mind that he and Maria’s home only has two bedrooms—theirs and Sofia’s. Ellie doesn’t know this though, all she knows is that Joel tried to hand her off before. Joel brushes strands of Ellie’s hair from her face, tucking it behind her ear. “Yeah, babygirl,” he tells her, “I’ll still be here.”

Tommy short circuits, swallowing bile so as to not startle the scene more than he already is. He’s been here before. Twenty-some years ago when Sarah was sleeping over a friend’s house, nervously biting her lips as Joel kissed her head and murmured some words of comfort. Sarah, gaining a sudden resolve, rolled her eyes when her father poked her stomach, and insisted she would be fine at her friend’s house.

He and Joel were knee deep in popcorn and movies when Joel was called by Mrs. Garcia, telling him that Sarah’s had a nightmare and was insisting on being picked up.

“Papitis,” Tommy had teased Joel, guffawing when Joel groaned into the pillow. It wasn’t that Joel didn’t want to make the drive, it was that Sarah would no doubt have changed her mind by the time Joel got there. When they were younger, Joel and Tommy couldn’t be paid to part from their mother. Joel was always indignant at it being called mamitis, a term for children who are overly attached to their mother. But Tommy liked that about them, thought it meant that their bond as a family was stronger. “It’s the shit we used to have.”

The memory is flushed by a roaring death knell, and Tommy’s returned to his body with an awkward thrust that keeps his skin reeling for minutes after. The ghost of Sarah looks down at the scene with interest, thirty-two and content with the happy family that’s managed to form in spite of her brutal death. Shit.

He takes a steadying breath, ignoring the way Ellie’s eyes follow his movements. She mimics his earlier breath and looks back to Joel, communicating something silently before offering both Maria and Tommy a brisk nod. The girl offers a smile to the baby and a nervous mumble to Joel before tearing through the staircase to her bedroom.

*

Maria leaves with Sofia not long after Ellie has left the room, perhaps sensing the talk both brothers have been dreading to have. She kisses Tommy’s mouth briefly, pouring understanding in the chasteness of it. I see you, Tommy Miller. They were the same words she told him when they married. I see you and I love you.

When it’s just Tommy and his big brother, Joel sighs and slips into the couch with the exhaustion that only Tommy understands. He thinks Tess might have to. Survivor’s Exhaustion, the one that those responsible for others have.

“Sofia?” Joel asks softly. He doesn’t mean for them to be, but the question sounds pained. His brother isn’t looking at Tommy or the seat Maria vacated, but at the hollow staircase that Ellie swept through. He’s counting under his breaths, maybe trying to account for himself and her breaths. Tommy doesn’t fucking know. It’s been a long day, a long month, a long winter—hell, a long pregnancy. He wants his wife.

Tommy shrugs, twiddling his thumbs to do something. “Mami liked that name.” He debates whether the next reason for the name is wise to say aloud, but it's his brother, and Joel already knows. Sarah was the one to bounce around the house in the weeks after watching the Telenovela her father was watching, screaming at the top of her lungs that the protagonist’s name, Sofia, sounded like it belonged to a princess. “And Sarah liked it.”

Joel snorts, but it's not as painful as it could be. It’s a genuine snort, a laugh that snuck out from the grave his brother dug, settling deep in his bones before leaving him. “Yeah she did.”

An easy silence follows, but Tommy hates it. He’s not good at silences, not good at anything that involves processing. He’s never been good at that. It’s why therapy ain’t for him (although Maria says that’s his Lone Star talking).

“A daughter,” Joel muses, still looking up the staircase. “Three for three.”

And Tommy has to swallow the sob that threatens to burst from hearing his brother admit this. “Yeah. Three for three.”

*

Joel and Ellie are given a month to assimilate to Jackson before he is put to work. Ellie is lucky, Tommy knows, for having arrived at the end of the school year. It means she gets away with five months before being put in with the other teenagers in Jackson. His brother is less lucky, and joins Tommy for patrol and carpentry—and hell, Joel has always been good at adapting (or at least, he looks like he’s good at it).

“Your brother’s a riot,” Eugene tells Tommy, slapping his bad knee while Joel hands off the materials to Gabriel. “He was just telling us about your nineteenth birthday.”

Hell fucking no, Tommy thinks with wide eyes. But the horror at Maria discovering just how wasted and ignorant a drunk Tommy could be is lost at the realization that his brother is reminiscing to a time just after Sarah’s birth, and it almost numbs the horror.

Sweat beads on Joel’s neck, making Tommy remember the sole picture he still has of their father. Joel takes after him, bronze skin and brown eyes and worry lines and any other feature that Tommy missed out on. Joel has them, though, and it suits him. The legacy of José suits his brother, and he’s pleased to discover this.

Joel has never been one to laugh at the stupid (unless it was told by Sarah, although Tommy thinks that Ellie has joined this exclusive list), but he does crack jokes at Tommy’s expense. Communism, patriotism, and Desert Storm are all jibes that Tommy laughs at, a genuine laugh. It’s never the fake ones that make his skin feel like he’s fighting sand in the desert, or the fake laughter he offered to Jackson citizens when he was still reeling from the Outside. No, it’s real. It’s his brother, his brother whom he thought was buried with Sarah. Desert storm ain’t funny when it's other people, but he’s never minded Joel poking fun at it; he guesses it's because Joel’s been through war. Veterans always get a pass.

The brothers are the last to leave the site, with both of them slipping into the old habit of possessiveness over their work. Night hasn’t quite crested Jackson in darkness, but Tommy knows Maria is going to start worrying any second now, and Ellie can only stay entertained by Sofia for so long. In part, it’s Tommy’s fault. He’s been itching to get his brother alone for days, but it's hard with a kid as clingy as Ellie.

(Not that Tommy blames her. She’s a sweet kid, wrapping skinny arms around Joel’s middle in an effort to ground herself to him. He calls it codependent, but doesn’t mind it. It’s the apocalypse. Everyone’s a little codependent.)

“She alright?” Tommy probes after he takes a swig of water. Some of it gets into his hair, but he doesn’t brush it off. Shavings of the wood would get into his hair, and he don’t feel like showering tonight. He twists over his shoulder to find Joel running a thumb over a clumsily made bracelet. It’s Ellie’s. She made it with Maria a few weeks back, bony fingers tripping over each other in an effort to craft it. The colors are green and purple (Tommy wonders if Ellie knows purple was Sarah’s favorite color). Joel treasures it as he does Sarah’s watch. “Settling in well?”

Joel sighs heavily, eyes misting over before clearing when he adjusts the bracelet. The wide shoulders of his brother sag slightly, and he sits on a crate by the exit.

Damn it. It’s never easy with Joel.

Tommy follows suit, sitting next to his brother like they used to do when they were younger and Joel was still mourning their father. It’s ironic, really. Joel has been in a perpetual state of mourning since childhood. Their father, their mother, Sarah, Tess…someone is always buried in a grave the Miller brothers buried. It’s sickening how at ease God is with taking from their family.

“We were doing fine,” Joel starts lowly, voice gruff with lament. He knows it might not be lament, it could very well be the Texan accent that Joel’s getting back from hanging around Tommy too much. In this light though, with wood shavings in his salt and pepper hair, Tommy thinks the voice and scene is mourning some. “Was teaching her how to shoot, she was tellin’ me about Sally Ride and some space shit I don’t remember.”

Sally Ride, Tommy muses. Interesting. It makes sense, it fits Ellie for some reason. Of course his niece’s favorite astronaut would be the one named Sally Ride. Makes sense for the spitfire the girl is. It suits her. Sally Ride is Ellie’s Halican Drops.

“When we got to the university—” Joel cuts himself off with a tortured gasp that makes Tommy think his big brother might cry. He doesn’t, but it’s scary to witness. “Raiders just showed up n’ took us by surprise. Comin’ in all directions. I thought I took care of them all, but I guess one of ‘em got me good…” Joel lifts his flannel in the dim lighting, exposing a poor stitching pattern with white histories of pain spreading from the wound. “Some piece of a bat, I think.”

Tommy itches to touch the wound, to graze along it with the healing fingers their mother possessed as kids. He doesn’t do these things because his brother’s gaze is unfocused, shivering like he was still stuck in the thick of Winter.

“Somehow—not quite sure how—Ellie got me to this old house where we laid low for a bit,” Joel reveals tightly. He sighs, shaking his head clear of the memory. “Don’t quite remember much about what happened. At some point, Ellie puts a knife in my hand and tells me to kill some guys who are after us. Everything’s a blur after that. I’m not really aware of what’s happenin’, only that she’s in trouble, and I couldn’t find her.”

When Sarah was nine, Tommy lost her in a mall. It had only been a few years after Joanna left, and Joel was still reeling from Sarah’s ninth birthday a few days prior when Tommy volunteered to take her to the mall so Joel could get some shut eye. He isn’t sure how it happened, only that one second, Sarah was holding his hand, and the next, she was gone.

It took Tommy all but fifteen minutes to find her, having been led away by Halican Drops playing in a nearby store. Tommy didn’t tell anyone his niece was lost, afraid that it’d only encourage some sick motherfucker to take her or something. In hindsight, it was a stupid ass decision—especially the not telling Joel part. But it didn’t matter in the end because Joel had called Tommy fourteen minutes after Sarah had gone missing, frantically insisting to talk to his daughter.

Sarah took the phone from Tommy’s hand, and ignored Tommy’s own sobs of relief as she replied to her father that she was fine.

Parent’s intuition, Joel told him later. Guess I just knew.

Tommy thought it luck. Now, as a father, he isn’t so sure.

“She was different after I found her,” Joel admits, fingering the threads that hold the bracelet together. “More reserved—afraid.”

He doesn’t ask his brother what it is, he doesn’t think Joel will ever tell him. But Tommy knows that Joel fears People. People are terrifying, Tommy knows firsthand. They’d never want a cure to cordyceps, would never want to be healed from whatever disease infected them the day the world ended. Young Ellie shouldn’t be privy to this knowledge, but she is, so Tommy doesn’t ask about People and about Ellie—he fears the answer.

“She’s been through a lot,” Joel murmurs.

“And the Fireflies?”

Joel stiffens, not answering for a heavy minute. “They were already dead when we got there.”

Tommy doesn’t believe him.

*

Ellie and Joel come over the next day, Ellie looking a little worse for wear. Her head is tucked into Joel’s side, fingers gripping the ends of his flannel shirt with the makings of a kid going to school. She doesn’t even leave Joel when Maria and Sofia breach the first floor despite Ellie adoring the baby.

“Bellie,” Joel murmurs to her, poking her stomach with gentle amusement. The girl recoils, but it’s not mean or afraid, just a habit of the Outside. Slowly, Ellie drags her face up Joel’s shirt to look up at him. He gestures to Sofia. “Go on, baby. I’m still here. I’ve gotta talk to Tommy about somethin’.”

Reluctantly, Ellie sloths away from Joel and shuffles over to Sofia and Maria. Sofia gurgles at seeing her favorite babysitter, which manages to pull Ellie from whatever dark haze she was previously in. Innocence does that too the hurt, it manages to soothe it long enough to live. When Sofia’s little hand reaches for Ellie’s ponytail (longer from good food and a roof), Ellie laughs, and the tension in the room breaks.

Joel deflates in relief, before a twinkle shines in his eyes. He knows this Joel, recognizes him from Before. It’s Joel, the big brother who punched Harley Peterson for pushing Tommy into the pool during a Texan winter. It wasn’t too cold, but Joel was still livid. Protective Joel, who hugged Tommy when his first girlfriend broke up with him. Joel turns back to Tommy, and offers him a smile (albeit still strained). “Vas a ser un maravilloso padre, Tommy.”

You’re going to be a wonderful father, Tommy.

Tommy kind of wants to cry, but he won’t. Candle wax is thick in his throat, clogging whatever he might have been able to say. But Joel is a man of simple words, his brother has never required verbal reassurance, only physical. When Joel reciprocates his embrace (and copies Tommy’s strangled cries; though he will come to deny it later), Tommy feels the last wounded part of himself close. The part Sarah carved into his flesh with her supplications, the part he lost to People Outside. This is healed with the hug his brother offers him.

“She’s so cute,” Ellie says in a marvel. Her wide brown eyes twinkle as Sofia blinks up at her.

He can’t help himself when he sees Sofia brace Ellie’s thumb in her small palm, laughing at the touch of the older girl. “Runs in the family,” Tommy jests, knocking her shoulder.

Ellie freezes for a second, glimpsing at Joel with the nerves an orphan can only muster, but Joel only smiles encouragingly at her. He backs Tommy like public support of Tommy’s indirecto. Ellie brightens at the show of support and straightens herself to appear taller. “So fucking cool.”

Maria winces at the curse, but Joel rolls his eyes good naturedly. Tommy gets it. It’s a new world; kids aren’t as restrained to their manners (Joel would’ve had a fit if Sarah had cursed the way Ellie does now). “Careful, kiddo. If your cousin’s first word is anything other than ‘mami’ or ‘papi’, I’m screwed.”

Ellie laughs, boisterous and all consuming. It's a laugh Tommy is sure he’s heard before, but can’t put a face to it. She laughs from her belly and outward, and he thinks the Bellie nickname is appropriate now. In her fit of laughter, she doesn’t notice Maria shuffling her and Sofia to the couch until the older woman is placing her in Ellie’s skinny arms.

It’s smart, he knows, to have Ellie hold Sofia while sitting. The girl is still too thin by Jackson standards, and it will be awhile before Sofia’s well fed body can adjust itself to Ellie’s hollow one. One day, it will be as easy as Esther’s pie for the older girl to croon at Sofia from her feet. But for now, the teenager’s laughter compensates for the sadness of a baby being better fed than a full grown teenager.

“I’m going to teach you everything I know,” Ellie whispers to Sofia, lips grazing Sofia’s nose. She bumps it against his daughter’s and squeals when Sofia giggles at the response. “I’m Ellie.”

Through this happy daze Tommy finds himself in, he can see the ghost of Sarah looming over all of them—thirty-two and proud.

*

Ellie doesn’t like him, Tommy realizes pretty soon after. It shouldn’t surprise him, but it does. He figures calling Ellie Sofia’s cousin, being shepherded into his and Maria’s home, and allowing her to get away with shit he doesn’t let other teenagers do—would all work in his favor. But none of it does. Ellie is distant and cold to him, never vocal to him unless absolutely necessary.

He learns of Sally Ride and the moon through Joel, learns of Savage Starlight through Maria, learns of Pearl Jam through Joel again. Never does Ellie offer up information, never does she purposefully seek him out as she does Maria or Sofia. She loves her cousin, loves her aunt, but she despises her uncle.

It jades on Tommy’s soul. The part of his soul that rearranged when Sarah was born, the one he thought was still very much in effect twenty-years later. Apparently, Ghost Sarah was right. He is out of practice, and Ellie can tell.

There was a phase in which Sarah wouldn’t let anyone near Joel, even Tommy was kept at an arm’s length. It was harder to prove Before. The world was different, and Joel was less inclined to offer himself and his family up on a silver platter when everyone was aware that it was a phase. But Joel doesn’t consider Ellie’s dislike of Tommy a phase, only a natural consequence of Ellie’s lack of family prior to Joel.

“She’ll get used to it,” Joel assured him after Tommy voiced his feelings on the matter. “She’s just nervous.”

The excuses work their first two months in Jackson, but when it’s July, and Ellie won’t even be in the same room as him—Tommy’s not stupid (disregarding anything Ellie and Joel may come up with). Ellie stays with Sofia all the time, hangs around Maria and Joel. But she won’t come near Tommy with a ten-foot pole. She sticks close to Joel whenever Tommy is around, clinging to him like a climbing koala. He thinks that maybe this is all a consequence of Joel trying to leave her with him rather than an orphan thing, but Maria had to be wise and say it could be both.

Even if his wife is right, Tommy knows something else too: his uncle senses can tell when his niece is mad at him. It weighs on him the same way it used to when Sarah was mad at him, which wasn’t often. The little girl was only ever mad at Tommy when he was the reason for her father missing some event or another—a birthday party or a soccer game. The dinosaurs are something he realizes through Sofia.

Ellie babysits while Tommy and Joel are on patrol, bouncing the little girl while feeding her. Sometimes they draw together—well, Ellie draws. Sofia dirties herself and the white cloth Ellie spreads out under them. On the fourth night of Ellie’s babysitting duties, she left Sofia with a small drawing of a brachiosaurus.

“Bye, Sofie,” Ellie told the baby, pressing a soft kiss to the little girl’s blemished cheeks. The teenager picks up on Spanish fast, adamant that she will eventually reach the level of fluency that both Tommy and Joel have achieved. Neither tell her that there isn’t much use for Spanish this out west, in this apocalypse. She’s too excited to care. “Bonitos sueños.”

*

When Ellie leaves, Tommy gets the idea for the movie.

“A library?” Ellie repeats slowly, sounding each syllable with the concentration required of an overactive child. She is, once again, clinging to Joel. Her hair is braided instead of trapped in its usual ponytail, and something tells Tommy that it’s Joel who carefully plaited the hair. “Jackson has a library?”

Tommy nods enthusiastically, thinking: finally. “We’ve got a bunch of them comic books you like. Savage Starlight and some rented movies you can take home.”

The teenager glances at Joel, querying him silently. His brother only rolls his eyes, already aware of Tommy’s ingenious plan. He waves them away. “Yeah yeah. Go with your Uncle Tommy.”

Ellie purses her lips at the name but does not dissuade Joel from referring to Tommy as such. It only hurts slightly, like an old wound from Desert Storm. When she looks back at him, her eyes have taken an apprehensive look. “What kind of movies?”

“Ever seen the dinosaur one?” Tommy asks, feigning indifference when Ellie begins the excited bounce on her heels. “Jurassic Park?”

The result is instantaneous, and Tommy feels stupid for not broaching the topic earlier. Of course, Ellie would love a dinosaur movie. Of course his brother would fail to mention the movie ahead of time. He likes to think that Joel may have done it on purpose to create an opportunity for Tommy, but that is information he won’t ever be privy to, so Tommy settles for excitedly telling his niece that they have the completed trilogy in Jackson.

“Joel!” she insists, tugging on her pseudo father’s sleeve. “You didn’t tell me there were three dinosaur movies! Only the one!”

His brother does his part in the overeager teenager role as the father by sighing and nodding at Tommy. “Alright, go with your Uncle Tommy.”

If the movie wasn’t about dinosaurs and if there weren’t three of them, Ellie might have said no. But she loves dinosaurs and Joel must have told her that he enjoyed the movies somewhat. So, It doesn’t surprise Tommy when she barely offers Joel a goodbye before zooming past Tommy in a direction that he classifies as: Unaware.

“Have her home by six,” Joel tells him, eyes serious. “I don’t want her out too late.”

Tommy grins back at him, feeling the familiar flicker of amusement that comes with a rule that is bound to be broken. He agrees with Joel regardless, already knowing that he and Ellie will reach Joel’s place at 6:42 or some other late hour (like 7). “You got it, big brother.”

“En serio, Tommy,” Joel instructs, his stare on Ellie’s fleeting form. She’s still close enough for them to see her, but she’s bouncing on the balls of her feet. It tells him that she’s aware of the instructions Joel is dishing out, and is unbothered by them (so unlike any other teenager in Jackson who grew up safe). “La quiero en casa a las 6.”

Filling the little brother role too well, Tommy nods easily and pats his brother on the back. “Have her home by six. Promise.”

*

Tommy does end up bringing Ellie home at six. She insists upon it. The little girl is conscious of the clock the entire time they’re together, but it never retracts from her excitement. In the end, Ellie picks up the three Jurassic Park movies, two books on space, and The Hobbit (at Tommy’s insistence). He has fun, the same way he did when Sarah was nine and eager to get away from her father in the summer. Ellie, however, doesn’t like to be away from Joel. She appreciates the outing nonetheless.

And when Tommy drops her off, the little girl shoots off to show Joel what she’s gotten. Joel tucks Ellie into his side, pressing a kiss to her head, and nodding emphatically at all Ellie’s acquired in the short span she’s been gone.

Ellie forces Jurassic Park onto Joel’s chest with little regard for the construction the man has been drowning in since noon when they were sent off. He grunts a little, but not loud enough for Ellie to pick up on in her excitement. “We can watch it with Sofia! Tommy and Maria can come too!”

He has to control his beaming smile at the invitation, not wanting the girl to pick up on the strings he and Joel have pulled to garner an invitation.

(It will be years before they discover that Ellie knew, and invited him anyway.)

“What do you say to your Uncle Tommy?” Joel reminds in a mindless drone that tells Tommy he’s falling back into old habits.

Ellie perks up and flings her head back to regard him. “Thanks, Tommy!”

Ellie’s off like a light immediately after, dragging Joel behind her as she tells him about Sally Ride and the book she published in 1989.

*

She doesn’t hate him anymore, but there is still an open distrust of Tommy that he battles with whenever he and Ellie cross paths without Joel, Sofia, or Maria to intervene. The movie night is a success, even if she ignores him for the six hours they’re all planted on their asses to watch dinosaurs fight people. Ellie, it seems, is a talker during movies. She’ll talk an ear off on intention and fact on a director’s choices, without ever accounting for the intensity someone cares for the thing she’s talking about.

It’s so fitting and childlike that no one can quite complain, too overwhelmed by the affection they feel for the teenager to tell her to let the fight sequence play out as it should.

“Don’t fall asleep,” Joel warned Ellie when the third movie began playing. Ellie’s fetally curled into Joel’s side, chin smushed into his side while her eyes drooped as the opening credits played. Her arms are squeezing his bicep like a plush toy. “I ain’t carrying your ass into bed.”

“‘Course I won’t,” Ellie mumbled, already fighting sleep. “It’s too riveting.”

Ellie did end up falling asleep, and Tommy’s relationship with the girl’s improved since the initial hatred his niece felt for him.

Today marks three months since Ellie and Joel ghosted into Jackson with haunted eyes and a drag to their step. Since then, Sofia reaches three months of age, Joel starts patrol, and Ellie is static. She doesn’t make friends—not for Joel and Maria’s lack of trying, she doesn’t leave the house unless it’s with any of the Millers, and she doesn’t take interest in anything that can’t fit inside her green backpack.

He trades off with Joel on patrol, knowing his brother’s been itching with nightmares in the last few weeks. Peace, he told Joel. It gets the mind acting up more than it should. Jackson’s been known to do that to newcomers. It’s probably worse for Joel because he’s been so worried about Ellie in the last few months, so his mind hasn’t let itself to lax enough to break under the pressure. Joel doesn’t admit to it out of some misguided effort in being a “good dad”, but Tommy knows that his big brother is aware of the tumultuous weight of peace on trauma, so he accepts the offer to switch patrols.

When Tommy gets to the stables, Ellie is petting Shimmer’s chestnut coat. The horse nickers when Ellie presses a kiss to her snout, and giggles when Shimmer recoils at the new contact. It’s not rejected, just surprised. It gives Tommy an idea for something he doesn’t know Joel will immediately allow, but might be able to come around to later on in the month.

“Hola, cariño,” Tommy greets softly, approaching her softly with his rifle tucked to him like a baby. Joel says it's a bad habit he has, but Tommy finds comfort in the heavy weight of a gun. It’s not a position he would normally hold a gun in, but it’s a sign to him of safety. I don’t need to hold it good because we’re safe enough to not need a gun. Joel rolled his eyes at the explanation, but didn’t argue it.

Ellie startles, turning so quickly her hair slaps Shimmer’s mouth. The horse snorts in annoyance and bucks backward, away from the stable door. His niece’s switchblade is drawn, but it’s near her hip—a precaution, rather than a threat. Still, his eyes widen and he puts his arms up in defense. “Easy, girl,” he drawls in an accent that can only belong to him and Joel. “Just me.”

The teenager has the decency to look guilty, but she doesn’t fully relax her defensive nature. It’s good for her, sucky for whatever bonding they might have had at Jackson’s makeshift library. She offers him a truce by pocketing her blade, but her shoulders are still tense, so he doesn’t think he’s forgiven for announcing himself.

Shimmer has returned to poke her head through the stable window door, knocking her head against Ellie’s neck to get her attention. She smiles at the horse through the corner of her eye, appreciating the weight of the animal. The smile dies before Tommy can truly appreciate it though, with Ellie’s expression souring to a dark look. “I’m sorry about Callus.”

He blinks. There is a list of Ellie’s interests in Tommy’s head that he’s been meaning to pull up at a moment’s notice, but nothing has the name Callus, which makes him brave enough to question the girl’s sanity. “Who?”

His niece flushes a beet red, only possible by the white of her skin. He thinks it's easier to spot emotions on Ellie’s face since she’s white. It’s harder with Maria and Joel and Sarah..

They’re all too dark to flush in pleasure or in embarrassment. Flushed cheeks don't look so obvious on them. They only ever whiten, and it's something Tommy doesn’t like to see since it usually means fear. Ellie though, Ellie shines red. “The horse you gave us,” she explains. “We didn’t know his name so I named him Callus.”

It’s a god awful name. Really, Maria would hate it. All the horses here have a nice name, something cool or amusing to reduce the blow of the Outside. Callus is just another thing to add to it, but he can’t hate it. He can imagine Ellie bonding with the chestnut horse on the road, pressing butterfly kisses to his snout, and proudly calling him Callus—scarring that builds up to protect the individual. It’s telling, it’s Ellie. “That’s a better name than he was given.”

The flush only reddens, but it’s not angry or bitter, it’s content. He’s never seen flushness with pride, but Ellie has it in spades, and it warms Tommy’s heart more than it should. He knows the kid is learning Spanish through Joel, maneuvering through traditions. He also knows his niece has been desperate to achieve the accent Tommy and Joel have—never mind the accent is different. Ellie can’t quite tell the difference yet, but she will eventually. So will Sofia.

“What was his real name?” Ellie asks him, turning to give Shimmer with the attention the little horse has been craving. “‘Cause Joel said ‘Callus’ was a stupid name.”

Tommy rolls his eyes and moves to stand at her side, keeping a good distance so as to not startle her. Shimmer snorts at the showering of affection she’s receiving, and he knows he’ll have to deal with the fallout of not giving his own horse some attention before patrol. “Pinecone.”

“Pinecone’s a stupid name,” Ellie replies easily. Her eyes are stuck on Shimmer, and her voice isn’t louder than a nervous whisper. Maybe she’s nervous about voicing her distaste with an adult. He can’t imagine FEDRA encouraging anything of the sort. “Callus is better.”

“I reckon you right,” Tommy agrees, shrugging. He cautiously extends his fingers to brush through Shimmer’s braided hair (Ellie’s doing), desperate to do something that isn’t just standing and staring at a traumatized kid.

Ellie opens her mouth to respond, but it dies when the familiar rhythm of hooves echo in the stables. Upon turning over his shoulder, Joel is dismounting from Winchester, a white stallion given to Joel for the name and build of it.

“You’ll love this one,” he told his brother upon showing him three weeks ago. “He’ll remind you of Vida del Mar. Just as crazy as that old broad.”

Joel had grinned like he had when they were kids, and their mother had taken them to Chile to observe the horses of her family’s ranch. “Sounds good to me.”

His brother has barely taken a step back from the horse, when Ellie is off like a bullet. She pierces through the thick air of June and jumps into Joel’s arms without regard for her surroundings, or the 18-hands of stallion at his left. Winchester doesn’t balk, and Tommy remembers the second reason why he gave Winchester to Joel: he’s Shimmer’s sire. Winchester understands overenthusiastic children—foals, or whatever horses think of their humans.

Joel groans and lifts Ellie so her feet graze the ground. She laughs in his arms, tucking her face into the side of his neck for warmth. It warms Tommy more than the June sun in Wyoming could. It’s not dissimilar to Sarah’s first day of school: the relieved laughter from Joel as he swung his daughter in his arms, the eager laughter in Sarah as she squealed explanations into Joel’s ear at 2:30pm and Joel had pulled a ten hour shift. It’s so similar that Tommy has to blink the image away.

“Am I?” Joel mocks her, but it sounds like he’s recalling a conversation. “Really?”

“Oh, you’re so old,” Ellie jokes, but it sounds like she’s recalling a conversation. “I can hear your knees crack from how old you are, you lazy ass.”

“Lazy ass,” Joel snips at her, but it’s gentle. “I’m fifty-seven years old, you little shit.” His fingers squeeze under her arms, and Ellie guffaws from the tickling. She throws her head back and climbs Joel’s embrace to get away from the teasing.

“JOEL!”

The moment is dampened for Tommy by Ghost Sarah’s sudden appearance, immortalized at twelve, blood on her Halican Drops shirt. Like a beacon of death, a marker of doom.

*

It’s Maria’s idea. It’s also a reminder of how much he loves his wife. Like shit. She’s real and she loves his family—or she wants to love his family as much as he does.

“A small family dinner,” Maria says to Joel and Ellie that morning. “I’m making my famous mashed potatoes.” It’s a point of pride for Jackson. They’d spent months trying to figure out how to make mashed potatoes from scratch. There’s a peace settlement in Idaho that trades with Jackson enough for them to have potatoes in the early spring and summer to abide by the travel it takes members of the Smithsonian to travel to Jackson with the goods.

Joel glances at Ellie curled behind him, still holding the door to disallow entry. It must have been a bad night for her, but none of them comment on it. “What do you think, Bellie?”

The girl squirms from behind him, but a quick glimpse at the baby settles the score. Ellie can never say no to her cousin, which in part, is why Maria dragged him and Sofia from their respective nap times. She’s insistent on this dinner happening. (“If I’m going to love your brother, I need to see your brother, Tommy.”)

Tommy hears them before he opens the door. They’re arguing about something, with Ellie spewing some nonsense about Tommy liking her. Joel is doing his best to dissuade her from such thoughts, but she’s inconsolable, eventually groaning and knocking at the door before Joel can truly calm her down.

“Hey, ya’ll,” Tommy greets easily, his lopsided smile calming Ellie’s nerves some. And just because he’s her uncle, he winks. “¿Cómo andas, Ellie?”

Ellie blinks, surprised by the Spanish. “Bien, ¿y usted?”

“That’s pretty good, pumpkin pie,” Tommy praises. It’s an old habit to break—the whole nickname thing. He knows he should probably tread carefully. Joel mentioned People, and People loved nothing more than to violate innocent things. But Ellie has never reacted negatively, and Joel has never discouraged it, so he doesn’t stop. “Accent’s getting better.”’

Joel doesn’t sag in relief but it's a near thing because Ellie brightens like the sun. It dawns in her eyes and spreads to the rest of her features until the overexcited teenager is returned to them.

“Really?” she gushes. Ellie turns to Joel for his confirmation of the truth. When he grins down at her and nods, she laughs in conquest. “I did it!”

Without another word, she barrels through Tommy and rushes in to inform Maria of the news. Maria herself has been trying to learn Spanish alongside Ellie, but it’s harder when you’re an adult. She’s gotten as far as understanding his remarks. If his mother were alive, Maria might be able to carry a pleasant conversation with her, but not a deep one. It don’t bother him, it’s just not a priority to adults like it is to Ellie.

(Part of him thinks Ellie is doing this to feel closer to Joel, to lay a claim on their family. She speaks Spanish just like he and Joel do, which means that they must be a family. It’s an orphan’s skewed logic, but it isn’t one that he and Joel are gonna deconstruct.)

“Thanks,” Joel tells him shortly, still reeling from whatever fight had broken out earlier. “She had a bad night, and this…family dinner has her all sorts of freaked out.”

Tommy waves it off off and beckons him in. “Kid’s just adjusting.”

“She’s been adjusting for months now,” Joel mutters, shrugging off his jacket to hang. It’s not impatience, it’s not real frustration, it’s just a parental worry. Joel’s always been this way with his kids, nervous about not doing enough for them to assimilate to an environment as quickly as he does. It stems from his having Sarah young. “Can’t quite get her to leave the house without me.”

“No la culpes, Joel,” Tommy soothes, falling back into Spanish comfort. It’s reminiscent of what their mother used to do with them. “Lo ha tenido difícil, hermano. Dale tiempo.” It’s not her fault. She’s had it rough. Give it time. All these things are acceptable explanations for a teenager struggling, but Joel will always misdirect the missile onto himself, so he knows the comfort won’t do anything but remind Joel of his failures. It ain’t Tommy’s fault either, just Joel’s nature since he was a kid and a brother.

Ellie’s filled out since getting to Jackson. She’s still too skinny for his standards, but he chalks that up to his mother’s raising. He’s always eager to get food in kids, desperate for them to have the baby fat stage they’re meant to have. Not all the kids reach that, but some do, and Tommy tries his best to not feel pride when a kid’s cheeks are round like squirrels. Ellie’s got this childish face naturally, but baby fat is lacking on her. Tommy knows she eats with Joel at the Dining Hall and at the house—eggs, bacon, sourdough bread. Anything that girl can get her hands on, she eats.

He never estimated the reason being his brother, only that Ellie was an underfed teenager.

But it becomes clear when Maria is serving steak, greens, and mashed potatoes. Joel digs into the meal almost immediately, in a way that tells Tommy it’s his mother’s manners drilling into his brother. No comas hasta la cena, Joel. Don’t eat until dinner, Joel. It’s considered rude.

Ellie doesn’t eat immediately. She pauses, poking at steak and the fluffy mashed potatoes with uncertainty. She’s good at hiding it. Her mouth is running a mile a minute, glimpsing at Joel’s cutting of his own food every so often. When Joel takes his first bite of the steak, she goes a bit quiet, but it’s hidden by Maria responding to Ellie’s story. Joel swallows his bite and nods briefly, and sure, it might be a compliment to Maria’s cooking, but Ellie eats shortly after, which tells him it’s not. Her movements are slow, digesting every piece with care. Even then, she still picks the steak apart until it’s strips of meat.

“So, Ellie,” Maria starts easily, probing a spoonful of applesauce to Sofia. “Have you thought about school in the fall?”

The teenager drops her fork onto her plate, startling the entire room into a thick fog of tension. Tommy wishes he’d packed his Uncle-Sensor glasses for this dinner because he’s at a loss for the shock in Ellie’s expression. Both Maria and Tommy eye Joel for answers, but he seems as at a loss as they do. “What?”

Aware of the tension caused, Maria treads carefully. “You still have time to decide—”

“—I’m not going,” Ellie cuts in brazenly, but it sounds too desperate to be brave. She nudges Joel’s shoulder. “Joel, tell them I’m not going.”

The man swallows his greens and sighs, turning to face Ellie. “Ellie, you’ve got to go to school eventually. We’ve got to do our part.” Maria hums in agreement, but Tommy stays silent. He guesses it's the plus of unclehood. You’re not required to offer insight. There is a maternal figure in the form of Maria, a paternal figure in the form of Joel. Tommy is an extra, so he is free to observe.

“Bullshit!” Ellie crows at him, rage blistering her skin red. Sofia’s jovial eyes dampen some at her cousin’s moodswing. “Fuck communism or whatever the fuck this place is. I’m not going to school here.”

Tommy cuts in there. “It’s different from FEDRA school, honey. There ain’t no structure like that here.” He wants to tell her that most of the teenagers love school in Jackson. It’s easy and the practice in Ellie’s age group accounts for most of their hours in the worn down school. “You’re done by midday, which means you’ll still have loads of time to kill before Joel gets back from patrol.”

But his niece isn’t soothed by any of his words, in fact, she is only further agitated. Ellie shakes her head no, denying all in the room. “I’m not going to school. You can’t make me.”

He knows Joel wants to argue, can see the parental frustration rising. School was Joel’s saving grace, Tommy knows. It was a way for Joel to think: I’m doing somethin’ right by her. Ellie’s refusal is a shot in Joel’s pride, and he knows the man values it some (not too much; good parents rarely have any pride to salve).

“It’s still summer,” Tommy cuts in, calming Joel before the man can work himself up. Ellie senses this too, and returns to stabbing her steak with the small knife. “We’ve got time to discuss all of our options.”

It’s a bandaid on a bullet hole wound, but it does the job. Ellie deflates and nods, but doesn’t touch her steak for the rest of the night. At the end of the dinner, Joel and Maria are discussing some building plans for Jackson, when Tommy decides that now is perfect.

“Ellie.” He gently jostles her shoulder to get her attention. When she peers up at him with big brown eyes, he considers telling Maria that school is stupid, and that Ellie shouldn’t have to go. He stops himself when he realizes that he knows this purposeful soft look that Ellie has weaponized. He’s seen this on Sarah and on his mother. Hell, he’s seen it on Sofia. It fills him with such stupid fondness for this kid that it only strengthens his resolve to mend an invisible bridge. “I’ve got something for you, cariño.”

The teenager is still hesitant of the adults in her life tonight, weary of being caught off guard the way she was during the dinner. She agrees, maybe only because it’s Tommy. He’s easier to handle than Joel, less intimidating than Maria, he knows. Tommy’s got a tendency for picking to stick by people who scare the shit out of everyone (Ellie’s one of them too; but right now, she’s more kiddy than freakish adult who terrorizes people. Besides, kids are apt at terrorizing parents in worry).

He tells her to wait and goes to his room in search of the book he found while on patrol with Eugene awhile back. Tommy meant to give it to Ellie for her upcoming birthday in July, but it felt wrong to put this girl through the eighth ring of hell without something to show for it. He comes up with The Guide To: Dinosaurs, published two months before the world went to hell. He offers it to her with a great deal of space between them, nervous that this’ll only set her back.

But Ellie is a sweet kid in spite of the cards she was dealt. Her eyes land on the thin and colorized book, and her mouth drops open in shock. “EN SERIO?”

The Spanish takes him off guard, but he’s surprised by how easily it falls from her mouth. It’s like she was always made to speak the language of their family, and he finds himself nodding with tears in his eyes. Yeah, he thinks of telling Joel, I am a self-righteous prick. Screw you. I love this family. I love what we’ve become.

“En serio, cariño,” Tommy tells her warmly. He isn’t fully over his niece’s excitement, when she barrels into him. Her skinny arms wrap around his waist as she bounces on the balls of her feet. It’s the kind of hug and excitement that only Ellie is capable of. No one but Ellie would be rendered speechless by a book of dinosaurs. But to a girl who’s had so little, she is always left in wonder at the kindness of humans. It both makes him want to tell her of the dangers in excitement, and shower her in gifts and small eccentrics.

Privately, Tommy thinks that warnings are more of a parent’s job than an uncle's job.

*

Early the next morning, Joel is on patrol again and Maria is by the dam with Eugene, interrogating some new arrivals. He would have gone with her, but she’s more adamant that at least one of them must always stay in Jackson with Sofia. It’s smart, but it’s nauseating as well. He’s lucky for Joel’s patrol aligning with Maria’s interrogation.

He needed out of the empty house with his daughter. His instructions were clear: look after Ellie, don’t wake her up, if she has a nightmare—don’t engage until she knows it’s you. Joel already told Ellie that Tommy would be by in the morning, but nightmares displace you, so he follows Joel’s directions to a T.

Tommy is rocking Sofia’s rocking crib—built by Joel a few weeks ago, telling both he and Maria that Sofia should have a place at their house. He nearly cried when he saw the dark wood of the crib, and then cried again when he saw the small designs Joel had carved into it. Small clouds and suns and moons and stars, all repeating in a small pattern. The same pattern of onesie Tommy gifted Joel when Sarah was born. He did cry then. Joel had awkwardly brushed Tommy’s hair from his face, the same way he’d done when they were kids, and muttered something about overemotional fatherhood. Maria handled it better, but she had gotten teary eyed upon seeing the Sofia Veronica carved into the head of the crib.

“Estas son las mañanitas que cantaba el Rey David

Hoy por ser día de tu Santo te las cantamos aquí.

Despierta, mi bien, despierta—”

The lullaby is cut off by a piercing scream that jolts the soft scene. Sofia starts to cry, wailing for answers, but it goes ignored by her father. Tommy is already taking off in the direction of Ellie’s room. It’s on the second floor, third door to the right, with green paint, and—he’s not really thinking as he’s running through the list of things that could be hurting his niece. But by the time he reaches the second story, Ellie is already tearing past him and through the staircase in a dizzying effort to get to the first floor.

“Ellie!” Tommy shouts for her to stop, twisting to chase after her. “Honey, what’s wrong?” He’s half afraid she’s going to run, screaming bloody murder into the streets of Jackson, but Ellie skids to a halt short of Sofia’s crib. “Wh—”

The baby is in Ellie’s arms before Tommy can even get his thoughts in order. Ellie’s strengthened body means that she no longer needs to sit to hold Sofia’s well-fed body. It also means that Ellie never stops holding Sofia if she doesn’t have to, content to carry her cousin anywhere that Maria and Tommy will let her. Right now, Sofia’s cries are quieted by Ellie’s rhythmic bouncing. Ellie’s breaths are anything but relaxed, gasping and panicked with trembling arms, but Sofia doesn’t notice any of these feats. She’s entertained by Ellie’s bounces, and is being lulled to sleep with panic. He wonders if that’ll be detrimental later, or if it's a consequence of Sofia being born into this world. Sofia finds the odd comfort in panic, in danger, because to not find comfort in it, is to not survive.

He swallows the urge to take Sofia from Ellie and talk the girl down. It’s only possible because he has the impression that Sofia is the only thing holding her cousin together.

Okay, he steels himself. A nightmare. Easy enough. Tommy’s done this before. It’s a matter of falling back into the rhythm of it, but he knows what to do.

Step One: Get kid to a safe place. Check.

Step Two: Hot chocolate.

Step two is harder than step one in the apocalypse, but he’s lucky because Joel found a stash of hot chocolate a few weeks ago. He knows Ellie’s been addicted to the stuff, and has only been restrained from consuming the entire thing out of the fear that Joel will never find it again.

Joel’s kitchen is this reworked room that his brother has placed an unhealthy amount of time into. He painted the cabinets with vines and other flowers, some with butterflies, some with stars. His two daughters are found in every crevice of this house, represented by paintings and carvings, and anything else that Joel can get his hands on.

The hot chocolate is made minutes later, poured into two respective mugs, and steamed. Ellie has been able to calm herself since his brief acknowledgement that he’d be back, but she’s yet to put Sofia back into her crib. The baby is fast asleep, unaware of her cousin’s turmoil.

Ellie looks up at him with watery eyes, brimming with guilt and fat tears. Her cheeks are flushed a sunny pink, the blotchy pink that only comes when a kid is crying.

“I want Joel,” Ellie says through the thickness in her voice.

Tommy nods, not denying his brother’s absence. “I know, hon. But Joel’s on patrol for another three hours. It’ll take three hours to get him and tell him.” The tear ducts loosen, and hot tears leak from her brown eyes. He doesn’t touch her. “I know, I’m sorry, cariño.”

He knows this routine.

“I had a nightmare,” Ellie confesses shamefully.

“That’s alright,” Tommy tells her, placing the space ceramic mug that Ellie painted a few weeks ago at the end table on her side. “Wanna talk about it.”

Ellie shrugs. “Joel says I should talk about it.” It’s said bitterly, but the tears make it sound more like a whimpering pout. The urge to curl her into his arms and shield her from whatever fucker haunts her dreams is still present, still stomping violently in him, but its quiet in comparison to Joel’s rules on Ellie-care. “Which is stupid because he never talks about anything.”

Tommy laughs at that. It’s true, and it’s sad. “Yeah. No one could ever get my brother to talk about nothin’ he don’t want to.” He meets her gaze, offering her a small smile. “You n’ Sarah are the exception to the rule.”

At that, she fiddles with Sofia’s onesie, deep in thought. “Is it true you fought in a real war?”

The topic change is jarring, but Tommy recovers enough to nod. “Yeah, I did.”

“Why?” Ellie probes nervously. She must have some idea on the difficulty of the subject, probably impeded on her by Joel. Not your business, he can imagine Joel telling her. He don’t like talkin’ about it.

“Well,” Tommy starts and trails off. He’s been trying to find a reason for years, and he isn’t sure if he has one now. How the hell does he explain purpose to a fifteen-year-old kid? “My mama had Joel, and I had Joel. My brother was always bein’ pulled two different ways.” He shrugs, swallowing his nerves with the warmth of hot chocolate. “When I turned eighteen, I thought—hell, here’s my chance of making it mean something.”

Ellie nods. “Did it mean something?”

Tommy snorts into his mug. “No.” The war did nobody any good, and it don’t even matter now. Everything the old world concerned itself with seems stupid in hindsight. Who cares about stock market crashes and political turmoil when Infected ate the President? But Tommy knows why she’s asking. “But that don’t mean I don’t mean somethin’. People get these stupid ideas about soldiers…that they’re defined by their war. That just ain’t true.” He looks at Sofia, eyes shining at the small thing taking wispy breaths. “I’m a father, a husband, a survivor, and an uncle. I ain’t defined by my blood or by my war, but what I do with what I’ve been given.”

Ellie twitches and sighs shakily. She straightens her shoulders and places Sofia in her cot, before settling into an armchair, curling into herself.

“What are you?” he asks her.

“A failed cure,” Ellie replies hoarsely. It’s the first time since the Gate where either of them have mentioned the Cure. It makes him want to ask, but he doesn’t. It’s not what his niece needs.

Tommy shakes his head. “Nah. You’re Ellie. Who was Ellie before this nonsense cure?”

Ellie thinks about it. “An orphan.”

“That still true?”

“No,” Ellie replies after a moment, and a new certainty accompanies her words. “I’m a survivor…” Now Tommy knows what Ellie’s thinking, but he’s a good uncle, so he lets her get there on her own. “...a reader…a daughter.” The last bit is said with wonder, a surprise that wells over her slowly until she has become something new.

“You’re forgetting three,” Tommy tells her kindly, speaking as soft as his Texan drawl will let him. He wants to laugh, wants Joel to be here to witness this.

Ellie furrows her brow.

“You’re a niece and a cousin,” Tommy says, feeling comfortable enough to swipe her hair from her face. “And you’re a sister.”

When Ellie springs from her chair and into his arms, Tommy is not surprised.

*

For Ellie’s birthday, Joel gets her a dinosaur and the moon. But Tommy gets her Shimmer, the horse. He doesn’t cry too much when Ellie insists on riding Shimmer immediately. He does cry when Sofia crawls for Ellie’s birthday.

Joel laughs at both, but he knows that deep down, his brother is thinking that Sarah would’ve loved this little family.

Tommy doesn’t see the ghost of Sarah for months, and he thanks God for that.

*

It’s Joel’s idea this time, but Maria supports it with a smile. Good for bonding, they said. She needs to have some structure. Which is how he lands himself as Ellie’s private riding instructor. Joel ends up covering Tommy’s shifts as well as his own in order to accommodate Ellie’s horseback riding lessons. Most of the time, Joel will join the lesson as a supportive father. He teases Ellie throughout the lesson, thinking it funniest when the girl grows impatient with Tommy’s teachings, and rushes on things she might not yet be ready for.

She can handle it, as it turns out. Ellie is a natural at horseback riding, in the way Joel was, not in the trying that Tommy had to do.

At the end of the lesson, Ellie is cantering on Shimmer with ease, laughing at some story that Tommy tells her about their childhood. He was starting to get into Joel’s first girlfriend, when he catches sight of a teenage girl and a horse much too large for her leaving the stables.

He sighs, already dreading the conversation he’s going to have to start with Maria and the girl’s parents. “Dina?”

The teenage girl stops in her tracks, Japan following suit. The large horse bucks his hoof against the ground, drawing out soil and rocks. They’re attune with each other in a way that's only possible if Dina has done this before. He abandons Ellie in the corner of the ring, knowing Joel would help Ellie dismount while he deals with this.

Dina peers over Japan’s saddle, a guilty expression settling in her wide brown eyes. The horse allows the girl to hide behind him, and if Tommy didn’t know any better, he would have thought the horse was encouraging the behavior. Peace, Tommy thinks amusingly, is the reason that teenagers think they’re entitled to a horse that doesn’t belong to them.

“Tommy!” Dina says loudly, sounding so much like her mother as she does so. Her hair is in the familiar braid she’s been donning recently, paired with her purple flannel. “Uh—good to see you! I thought you were on patrol!”

He levels her with a dubious stare, arching a brow at her deflection. “I got it covered,” he tells her. “What are you doing out here with Japan?”

Dina’s mouth makes an ‘O’ shape, glimpsing between him and the horse. “Well, uh—I was getting him saddled and ready for the next patrol group.” She nods at her own lie, grinning up at him. “Yep, that’s what I’m doing.”

“And Dexter Harrington wanted a braid on his horse?” Tommy tests with a teasing edge to his tone. He’s known as the easy going leader in Jackson, not quite as enforcing as his wife or the rest of the council. He does a quick count of the braids. “Three braids on his horse?”

The teenager rolls her eyes and stomps her foot in annoyance. “Screw Jesse, he was right.”

Jesse is a recently turned sixteen year old boy, Dina’s something. He volunteered for patrol and hunting parties the second the clock struck midnight. Joel likes him, thinks he’s got a level head on his shoulders.

“Well, I do hope a new member of our patrol team isn’t encouraging the theft of horses,” Tommy notes mindlessly, enjoying the way Dina freezes at her friend. “It’d be some bad form.”

From behind, Ellie and Joel approach the scene. Ellie is still towering over them on Shimmer, not ready to abandon her lesson. Unfortunately for the girl, the lesson’s been cut short. He’s got to get and go talk to Maria about Japan and Dina’s friendship. They’ve got to figure out a way to let the girl down easy. He and Maria have also not announced Shimmer’s new ownership to the council, and he doesn’t want to set a precedent for horses belonging to particular characters in Jackson. Especially, when the first one was the leader’s niece.

“Hey!” Dina calls out enthusiastically, gesturing to Ellie over Japan’s saddle. “You’re the girl who was here before Winter. I'm Dina. Why are you training with Tommy?”

Ellie stiffens at the eagerness. When the older man nudges Ellie’s knee, she stutters an introduction worthy of a toddler. “Uh—I’m Ellie.” She holds up her reins to motion to Tommy. “Tommy’s my uncle.”

Dina’s eyes widen in surprise, mounting Japan before Tommy can object to it. “Mierda,” she curses, loud enough for Ellie to perk up at the Spanish. “That’s so cool. Is that your horse?”

“Yeah,” Ellie says proudly, brushing down Shimmer’s mane. “This is Shimmer. I got her for my birthday.” In hindsight, he and Maria should’ve definitely spoken to the council ahead of Ellie’s birthday. Shit, they’re in for it now.

Dina smirks, an evil look in her eye looming as an idea forms. “Oh. That’s so cool that you’ve got your own horse. This is Japan, he’s my horse.”

“Now, Dina—” Tommy starts, but the teenage girl cuts him off.

“—Well, he’s my horse as of twenty seconds ago when Tommy realizes that I’ll keep my mouth shut on Shimmer’s new owner, if I get to keep Japan.”

Ellie laughs, and the sight of it is so warming that Tommy lets Dina get away with blackmail. His niece turns to Joel with a warm grin, proud of herself for engaging with someone else. His brother pats Ellie’s knee, and that’s enough for the girl.

“You wanna ride for a bit?” Dina interjects, unaware of the milestones the father-daughter duo are hitting all at once. “Japan’s all saddled up, and I’ve been meaning to practice jumping?”

“Sure!” Ellie rushes to answer, effectively cutting Tommy’s protest off. “I’d love to.”

“Girls,” Joel says hesitantly, “Tommy’s got to go talk to Maria, and I’ve got patrol. We can’t stay with you.”

His niece, eager to branch out, rolls her eyes. “We’ll be fine, Joel. We’re in Jackson. What’s the worst that can happen?”

Anything, Tommy sees his brother think. Ellie could fall, an Infected could breach Jackson’s walls, People could get in, Ellie could die from the flu, Ellie could scream and Joel wouldn’t be able to hear. But in the end, Joel swallows his fear and nods.

“Alright,” Joel agrees softly. He takes something from his pocket, revealing Ellie’s switchblade. The knife is tucked into Ellie’s jacket pocket, patted by Joel in an effort to ensure its safety in Ellie’s clothes. “Keep it on you, okay?”

Ellie leans forward on the saddle, knocking her head with Joel’s in comfort. “Got it, Joel.”

In the end, he and Joel are left behind by Dina and Ellie’s laughter as they trade stories and other outrageous gossip that a town like Jackson can produce. Joel takes a deep, grounding breath. Tommy slaps him on the back with a low laugh. “Shit. She’s practically movin’ out, ain’t she?”

Joel glares at him. “Don’t you have a wife to go talk to?”

It shuts him up quick.

*

In spite of Ellie’s best efforts, she starts school in the fall with everyone else. It’s a miserable time for most. She skips her math and science classes, is volatile towards both of those respective teachers, and hides in the stables for these B days. The only time Ellie is calm in school is on her A days, during English and history where she hangs out with Dina and Jesse. As August colds to early September, Ellie bounces back and forth from violent to extremely reserved. No one can quite predict what she’ll be like on any given day, even Joel, ends up being at a loss half the time.

It’s hard to be upset with such a sweet kid when she’s so gentle and kind with her family. She is never angry with Sofia, never brutal with her family (unless as a consequence of school).

Currently, Ellie entertains Sofia with drawing. The white cloth Ellie used the first time she babysat is being used as cannon fodder for Sofia’s newest attempt at drawing. She’s drawing a dog, though Ellie doesn’t know this. He knows this because he’s Sofia’s father. Parents know what their kids mean in this way, or so he tells himself. Ellie is sketching a giraffe with the pencils Maria got her for her birthday, while Tommy tries his own pathetic attempt at a butterfly.

Maria and Joel are talking on the front porch, discussing some council meeting Joel was recently invited to concerning new houses they want to expand on. His brother (for all his jokes on communism) has assimilated to Jackson like he used to assimilate to the neighborhoods they moved to. He fixes porch lights, pipes, creaking floorboards, and draws up plans for other houses.

(“Dorinda likes him,” Maria reveals one night in bed. She curls into Tommy’s side, and kisses his chin to keep him awake. “She purposefully unscrewed the pipes to cause a problem in her house, so that Joel would come over.”

Tommy laughs into his wife’s hair. “Shit,” he gushes in a low drawl. “Guess that explains why Andrea’s been coming ‘round that house with pies. Joel thinks she’s being neighborly.”

“Well both can be true,” Maria excuses.

“Nah,” Tommy jokes, “can’t be true. If it were, then she wouldn’t have been so goddamned freaked when Ellie opened the door.”

He falls asleep to his wife’s laughter.)

“That’s pretty good, Ellie-bean,” Tommy pipes up after the silence has strained for too long.

Ellie’s been suspended for the third time this semester (it’s only been a month since it started), and the girl’s been pretty tight-lipped about everything since. She’s only at their house tonight because of the established weekly dinners, but he knows if it weren’t for that, Ellie would be curled under her blankets, clutching the dinosaur plush Joel got her a while back. Her fingers are sooted with pencil shavings, but Ellie doesn’t seem to care. She’s deep in thought, curving the giraffe’s jaw and its long tongue, too enthralled to listen to him.

“Ellie-bean,” Tommy probes, poking her shoulder with his index finger.

The teenage girl jumps, but not in fear, just in surprise. She smiles at Tommy’s encouraging look. He gets the impression that she’s tired of people frowning at her for school, so he tries to keep himself upbeat every time she gets suspended. There’s got to be a reason, a real one that don’t include FEDRA or whatever excuse Joel gives the school principal so as to not spill Ellie’s personal fears.

“Sorry,” she murmurs to him, shy under the attention. It’s a new thing too, this striking shyness that renders everyone around her so careful. No one wants to overwhelm her, so all their words and actions are slower. Joel says he’s seen this before, and all that helps is keeping her engaged in some way or another.

Tommy shrugs, shaking his head. “Where’d you see a giraffe?” He doesn’t think any of the books she’s read have had giraffes. Jackson is limited in picture books, it’s another reason why her dinosaur book means so much to her. “Any book Maria and I should pick up for the baby?” Giraffes were his favorite animal as a kid, it sucks that Sofia might never see them.

“Near the Firefly hospital.” Ellie’s earlier pride in her composition drains the moment she says it, her body shutting down in response. Shit. Damn it. He needs Joel for this crap.

Tommy doesn't quite know what to say, so he keeps sketching. She does so too, but it’s less with energy than before. Eventually, Sofia’s droopy eyes get to be too much, and Ellie is volunteering to put her to bed before he can voice his own idea. He doesn’t get to dissuade her from it, before she takes the baby from the highchair and is traveling up the stairs.

He leans back into his chair, sinking into it with a heavy sigh. Fuck’s he supposed to do about this? Army never taught him anything about this crap. He doesn't know how Joel handles it all so easily—how the hell does Maria handle him when he gets in his head?

Before he’s aware of himself, Tommy is dragging his feet to the front door in search of his wife when he overhears Maria offer her condolences on Sarah. He pauses short of the door, white hand freezing on the handle at the mention of his niece. Not for the first time, he doesn’t think of Joel when thinking of his niece. He’s thinking of his niece alone, separate from her father, and her final hours Before.

“Just feel like she’s gettin’ worse instead of better,” Joel confides gruffly, the admission leaving his mouth reluctantly. He can’t see his brother, but Tommy can imagine the swig with which Joel might have admitted this years ago. “Every time there’s progress, something happens, and boom. There’s a setback.”

Maria doesn’t deny Joel’s points or fears. “It’s normal for young girls to struggle—especially after all that you both have been through. She’s a tough girl.”

Joel doesn’t seem all that convinced. Even through the thin door that separates them, he can hear his brother’s tells. The anxiety that worries Joel’s brows and skin. It’s what causes dips in his face, lines on his face. “Sarah was easy ‘cause I raised her.” It should shock him, the realization that Joel is able to talk about Sarah with his wife, but not with Tommy. “She knew she could come to me because I was there for her from the beginning. But Ellie…Ellie don’t know what it’s like to have a parent. She’s still learning. I’m still learning.”

Luckily, his wife doesn’t let Joel sit in his self deprecating shit. “We’re all still learning.” She sighs loudly, telling Tommy that she knows he’s there. “I was a nervous wreck that first week I realized I was pregnant. I failed Kevin, so I thought failing Sofia was a no brainer.”

Joel draws a sharp breath. “Yeah.”

“But Tommy was a massive help,” Maria continues, affection dipping into her words. He vows to kiss his wife senseless. “So is Ellie. So are you. That’s what family’s for.”

*

“It’s not smart!” Robin insists, hot on Tommy’s heels. Her eyes are angry and her expression jilted as she maneuvers through thick snow. Winter came early to Jackson, and there isn’t a single person who is angry at that realization. They’re going to be fine, but it’s an annoyance to deal with. “Jesse is still sixteen. He shouldn’t be outside in the dead of Winter. Summer was one thing, but Winter? He should be in school!”

Tommy draws a hand over his mouth, smoothing his brows and mustache down in frustration. It’s a maneuver he picked up from Joel, who picked it up from their mother. “Robin,” he tries to explain (for the fourth time), “Jackson law states that the youngest patrol member can be as young as sixteen. Jesse turned sixteen early Winter this year. I’d say he’s late to the game.”

He knows it’s the wrong thing to say as soon as he does, but it’s too late to take it back now. Robin balks at his audacity. “Tommy Miller, I’ll have you know—”

“DON’T FUCKING TOUCH ME!”

Ellie. The schoolhouse. She’s at the schoolhouse. Without her family.

Tommy is off, ignoring Robin’s concerned gasp. He maneuvers through disastrously placed people, pushing past adults whose sole entertainment involves the meaningless patter of teenagers. Some actually part as he tears through them, reminding him madly of the Red Sea and Moses, and some other Bible shit he can’t focus on right now.

Upon reaching the schoolhouse, he finds Ellie thrashing in the grip of her math teacher, and another student groaning on cement. Tommy knows this student as Ethan, a kid who’s gotten in trouble before. He remembers Maria complaining to the council about him. Ethan’s the first kid to bully a newcomer, but since Ellie never mentioned him, they thought she’d been saved from Ethan’s uncalled wrath.

Mr. Baker is shouting at Ellie to calm herself, but the girl is thrashing desperately, sobbing violently and crying for her release.

“LET HER GO!” Tommy shouts. It’s instantaneous. The math teacher drops Ellie, who scurries back against the hard snow. Her fingers dig holes into the rockiness of it, dragging herself away from the teacher and Ethan. Blood is pooling on her fingers and down her nose. She’s hyperventilating, barely breathing between her bloody screams.

Tommy reaches her and swings his arms around to keep everyone away from the girl. “GET JOEL!” At the mention of Joel, Ellie releases a horrible combination of both a scream and a sob, squeezing her eyes shut as she rocks herself in the snow. He doesn’t look away from Ellie, keeping his arms stretched wide to avoid anyone nearing them. Her screams quiet to maddening murmurs under her breath, but this peace is short lived when Ellie strips herself of her green sweater. It's torn off her with a rip to the seams, and tossed into the snow, leaving her in nothing but her ridden up long sleeves. Her bite is on full display, jagged lines of white scaring kissing two bites on her forearm. Luckily, everyone is so focused on Ethan who is bleeding profusely to care about a white scar.

Tommy approaches her carefully. “Ellie—” She screams at her name, making him jolt back in surprise at the strength of it. “—Alright. I’m sorry, cariño. I’m sorry,” he continues soothingly, drawing Ellie’s eyes to his own. He shrugs off his jacket, but her eyes are blank, not quite aware of him or the scene she’s caused. “Your dad’s on his way, but I need you to put on my sweater, honey.”

Ellie shakes her head feverishly and whimpers. “He wanted to eat me.”

A sickening weight settles in his stomach as pieces of Winter begin to reform and puzzle together. The food that Ellie struggles to consume, the fear with which she regards men in Jackson, the hatred she has for school and her male teachers. “Honey, you’re in Jackson. You’re safe. C’mon. We need to get you warm, nena.” He’s going on a limb, but he waits. The term of affection must be enough to snap her out of her daze because she begins a slow crawl towards Tommy.When Ellie reaches him, Tommy wraps her in his jacket.

Where the fuck is Joel?

“You’re safe here, cariño,” Tommy whispers. He still hasn’t touched her, keeping his distance from across the snow. The jacket is so huge on her that it nearly swallows her, but she isn’t shivering from the cold anymore. Her trembles have everything to do with everything else.

“ELLIE!”

Tommy thinks his brother’s cry might set her off again, but Ellie turns wildly under Tommy’s jacket, and finds Winchester’s galloping form. Joel sits on his saddle, rifle still strapped to his back.

“Joel,” Ellie mumbles.

Her hands sink into the snow in her desperation to get up. She nearly slips a few times, but manages to catch herself before falling again. Once she is upright, she is off like a light, Tommy’s jacket slipping off her in her desperation to reach him. Winchester snorts at the sudden stop, but doesn’t move when Ellie barrels into Joel, and Joel nearly falls back at the added weight. Winchester, if anything, serves as a wall for Joel to hold himself upright with Ellie in his arms.

Now in his arms, Ellie sobs into his neck, a blubber and mess of half-started explanations and a toddler’s meltdown.

“I know, babygirl, I know,” Joel murmurs into her hair. He lifts her, and her legs wrap around his waist like a koala. “I’m here. I won’t let him hurt you.”

Maria stops upon seeing the schoolhouse like she’s been hit and can’t move from her place. She’s not looking at the scene yet, only at Tommy. Her shoulders drop with a sigh of relief, her hand coming up to cover her mouth as a halfway hysterical sound erupts from it. She runs to Tommy and pulls him into an embrace, drawing his eyes away from his brother.

“I thought something happened to you,” Maria says into his neck.

He shakes his head and presses a kiss to her head. “Not me.”

When she’s gotten ahold of herself, Maria turns over her shoulder to find Joel still carrying a shaking Ellie. The girl hasn’t abandoned her position as a koala, and though it might look funny, the scene is dampened by the distraught sobs sounding from Ellie’s mouth.

“Come on,” Maria tells him, squeezing his hand in comfort. “Let’s get them home.”

*

In the aftermath of it all, Joel leaves his room with Ellie soundly sleeping. The crying took a lot out of her, and she was out the second they got back to the house. Tommy followed his brother up to his room, knowing he shouldn’t, but needing to see his niece safe.

“Joel?” Ellie murmured, squeezing her eyes shut to block out the light thinly veiled by Joel’s curtains. “Are we home?”

Joel brushed strands of Ellie’s hair from her face, pressing a soft kiss to the pale skin. “Go to sleep, babygirl. I’m still here.”

“‘Kay,” Ellie said, sleep leading her mouth. She was out after that, unaware that her uncle watched with a heavyset heart.

His brother doesn’t shut the door, leaving it slightly ajar for Ellie to hear them in the house if she were to wake from her somber induced sleep. He offers his brother a concerned look, worried about just how they’re going to address this while still respecting Ellie’s privacy on Winter and the Fireflies. Joel doesn’t offer him and Maria nothing more than a grim, defeated frown.

“Livin’ room,” Joel mutters harshly, gesturing to the stairs. The new parents follow Joel downstairs, only stopping to let Buckley, the dog Ellie insisted on adopting when they found him near the dam, pass through on Joel’s right side. To his credit, Joel pets Buckley’s head with the comfort only an owner could provide. It’s an improvement from what it would’ve been before, but it’s still concerning to see his brother revert to the shadow business of Before.

It’s not until they’re all sitting on the lumpy couches Ellie loves that they begin talking.

“David,” Joel starts. Buckley barks at the name, to which he is shushed immediately. While the dog is agreeable, it whimpers and paws at his eyes, as if horrified by Joel speaking a vile man’s name in their home. “The man that…hurt Ellie—he was a math teacher.”

Ellie’s horror of school and being held back by Mr. Baker suddenly becomes a lot more clear. Her insistence that school would only hinder her growth, her avoidance of her STEM related classes despite loving those subjects on their own. She would never engage on her B days, never think to do her homework for the classes despite it being easy to her.

The rest of the story unfolds in a low drone that Tommy isn’t sure how Joel manages. He tells them about Winter, about David, about the cleaver, about the aftermath. Ellie couldn’t hear her own name until two months after the whole ordeal had occurred. Joel stuck to nicknames and other apodos, anything but her name. People violate the innocent. Tommy’s always known this. But to know, and to hear how his niece’s name was violated by vile humans. He’s glad there’s no cure. Glad for whatever justice Ellie and Joel gave out.

A silence follows the explanation, but Maria breaks it by sucking in a sharp breath. “I’m going to ask you something, and I need you to answer me honestly.”

Joel swallows, tightening his grip on the half-empty mug of tea. “Sure.”

“Was she raped?”

He and Joel both flinch. Fourteen—now fifteen—year old Ellie, screaming for help and to be released. His niece, cursing up a storm until she was let go, and then spiraled into something fragile.

Please God, he finds himself praying to a God he doesn’t believe in. Please not her.

“No. She stopped him before…he was dead when I got there.”

Tommy feels an immediate sickening relief. Only for the bile to come back with a force so strong it nearly winds him. Because almost is still horrible.

His wife is relentless. “And what about the hospital? What about the Fireflies?” This makes Joel look away, and he nearly wants to tell Maria to lay off. But she’s right. “We need to know, Joel. Lay all the cards on the table, so that we’re not running around blind.” They need to know. “We care about her too, Joel. I promise.”

It’s not forgiveness. Tommy doesn’t think Maria will ever forgive Joel for those early years of the Outbreak, but it is a truce. It’s family. The understanding that the worst can be healed, the good can be encouraged. It’s a matter of a family.

It’s this that makes Joel tell the truth.

Joel tells them that when they got to Salt Lake City, he was knocked out by a group of Fireflies. He tells them that the last thing he saw was Ellie screaming for him before being sedated by a huge syringe. Ellie was taken by this group and put into a room, while Joel was still out. When he woke up, Joel was told some bullshit by Marlene about Ellie choosing to die for the cause. He was being escorted out when he heard the commotion.

According to Joel, the doctors got the dosage wrong because Ellie woke up minutes before the start of the surgery, and panicked. She entered this Fight or Flight mode, and stabbed the nurses with their own equipment. Joel only heard shots before he began fighting like a bat out of hell to get to Ellie. At some point, Ellie got a gun and shot the doctor that was operating on her. She left the pediatric ward and found Joel, who was already shooting his way through the hospital.

“A little girl and her dad helped us get out,” Joel reveals. The mug is empty now, chipped and whitened from the cold tea. “Her dad apparently warned Marlene about the risks, but she didn’t care. They got us a car, and we left.”

“What about Marlene?” Maria asks, no doubt thinking the Firefly leader was coming to Jackson. Tommy doesn’t think he can stomach the reunion with everything on the table.

“Dead,” Joel finishes. “I shot her.”

Tommy breathes easily. “Good.”

*

Ellie doesn’t go to school for the rest of the month. She gets a tutor, and hangs out with Dina and Jesse when she can. Ethan’s suspended for the rest of the semester, and is told to get his act together before the council decides to throw him out of Jackson after too many fouls.

All is well.

Tommy almost forgets about his stint and the ghost of Sarah, until she appears on his couch a week after what Ellie refers to as the Incident. She’s nineteen now, the weird mix of apocalypse and Before. You’re doing pretty good, Uncle Tommy.

He remembers Sarah’s first time getting sick and the absolute panic that set in which Joel realized. Sarah had gotten sick before, but usually, Joanna would mind Sarah while Joel worked and came home. He’d get home and snuggle with Sarah when the hard work had already been done, kissing her sweat stained forehead, and offering her a lullaby.

The first time Sarah got sick after Joanna left, Joel nearly dragged Sarah to the hospital, only stopped by Connie Adler and her overbearing husband. It was Connie who slapped Joel’s neck in correction, instructing him on the exact actions that must take place on behalf of the father during the sick child stint. Back then, Tommy desperately wished for their mom. His mother would have known how to calm Joel down.

Hell, his mother would know how to calm Joel down now. Verónica Miller would be able to get it through Ellie’s thick head—you worried your father, mijita. His mother would be able to tell Ellie that a CHEMICAL BURN is not a solution to her whole bite dilemma.

“I didn’t want to be defined by it anymore!” Ellie argues. Her arm is bandaged. Joel is still staring at her as if he won’t ever see her again.

"Baby—"

“—No,” Ellie cuts him off, sounding more fifteen than she ever has. “Joel, I was right about this. I’m sorry I scared you all, but it needed to be done.”

“You getting hurt should never be a price, nena,” Tommy counters.

Maria nods her agreement. “You could have talked to us, Ellie.”

Ellie crosses her arms. “You would’ve said no.”

“Yes,” Joel growls. “I would have.”

“Well, then I’m glad I didn’t,” Ellie huffs in response.

*

Joel doesn’t trust Ellie for weeks after it happens. She’s grounded (her first time, much to her glee), and isn’t allowed to do anything that isn’t sanctioned by Maria or Joel—which ain’t a whole lot when both are angry at her.

The closest Ellie gets to time out of her house is when she’s babysitting Sofia. The baby is her sole company for two weeks, something that doesn’t bother Ellie as much as it should. “I should not be this attached to my cousin,” Ellie mutters to herself. The baby gurgles in Ellie’s arms in response, and Tommy tries not to laugh too hard at his niece.

When Ellie regains her freedom, she takes it in the form of a field trip with her friends. Peter (a new guy to their friend group), Jesse, and Dina have all decided to venture into the lake for a picnic and a day of swimming. Ellie’s been looking forward to this for weeks, excited to get more practice in without Joel there to watch over her. They’re going with the older teenagers on patrol for protection, and are each armed with their own respective weapon. It’s only sanctioned by Maria because of how much Ellie begged for this.

Shimmer is already saddled and ready to head out by the time Tommy gets there to meet his brother and niece.

“Swear you’ll be careful,” Joel tells his daughter, helping her onto the mare. Ellie swings a leg over the saddle and adjusts herself. Her hair is longer now, curling at the ends with untamed frizz. “Come back at the first sign of danger.”

Ellie wrinkles her nose and throws Tommy a look that reflects all teenage angst. “I was thinking of causing a stampede of clickers,” Ellie retorts.

“Swear,” Joel reminds her.

His niece sighs and adjusts the reins awkwardly, knowing that the both of them were drawing looks. He knows Ellie ain’t too bothered. She loves having a family to dote on her, but there are times where he finds her taking advantage of it. It’s good to see. “On my life.”

“On mine,” Joel corrects, petting Shimmer’s snout in an effort to do something that isn’t worrying for his daughter. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

Her lips twitch. “I’m leavin’ all the stupid with you.” It’s a habit she’s picked up on, copying the Texan drawl that Joel and Tommy have fully assimilated to. She’s pretty good at it, a near miss. Most of the time, it sounds as if she lived in Texas for a few months before being carted to Boston. It’s a weird hybrid, but it’s one he and Joel find comfort in.

“Be safe,” Joel says softly, drawing his head forward. Ellie meets him halfway, connecting their foreheads. “Te amo, preciosa.”

His niece softens against him. “Yeah, me too.”

“Come on, Ellie!” Dina calls out. She’s backing up with Japan out of the fence, eager to remain on her newly assigned horse for as long as possible. “Jesse wants to race to the lake.”

Ellie separates from Joel, and without sparing them a second glance, catches up with the other teenagers as they leave Jackson’s gates.

His brother don’t move for a moment, and it’s all Tommy needs to shake his shoulders from behind in comfort. “She’ll be fine,” he drawls. “You and I got a date with some wood.”

*

Tommy doesn’t know how Joel knows. All he knows is that one second, he and Joel are trading remarks with Eugene and a few of the other guys, and the next is chaos incarnate.

“C’mon,” Eugene encourages joyously. “Birthdays oughta be celebrated.”

Joel shrugs off the question, not responding. Tommy doesn’ tell them that Joel’s birthday was yesterday, that they had celebrated Sarah’s life by having pancakes, and that the Millers had all watched Curtis and Vipers II. It was as good as a birthday without ever addressing the elephant in the room. He wasn’t sure how Ellie found out about Joel’s birthday, but the girl didn’t mention Sarah or the 26th of September the entire day. Maria thought it was admirable, but Tommy thought it was sad.

They’re working on the wooden foundation for a new house on the outskirts of the neighborhood they live in when Joel drops his tools, and takes off in the opposite direction. He doesn’t waste any time following after his brother in a frenzy, knocking through workers and unsuspecting townsfolk, keeping his eyes on Joel’s frantic movements.

When they get to the Gates, they’re already opening with a slog. Protestors on both sides are shouting for entry, but the doors can’t get open fast enough with how heavy they are. As soon as the gates are open enough for a single person to slip in, Jesse is barreling inside, eyes wide as he looks for a figure amidst the gathering crowd. When Jesse finds Joel and Tommy in the crowd, Tommy feels his bones freeze over like hell in Desert Storm.

Ellie, his little niece, is being carried by Jesse, a bullet wound bleeding profusely from her side. Dina is walking side by side with Jesse, holding a bronze hand to Ellie’s wound, sobbing over the girl as if she were already dead.

She’s not.

Voices are lapping over each other, but it's all funneled in Tommy’s ears as Joel shoots into action. He’s running to take Ellie from Jesse before the boy can stutter an explanation about raiders and clickers, and so many were dead. But Joel doesn’t care about this world, he never really has. From the beginning, Ellie’s been his sole priority. It was Tommy, then it was Sarah, and now it’s Ellie.

The screams are what manage to break through his focused vision. Ellie is screaming, gripping Joel’s shoulder with all the effort it takes her, sobbing for some relief. It’s different to the screams of before, this is a new pain, something the little girl hasn’t experienced yet because she’ never had a family prior to now. It’s the screams that echo and bruise family because it's a cry for them to take away an unforgivable offense of pain. And it’s a scream when the hurt realizes there is nothing the family can do to save them.

Joel is running faster than Tommy has ever seen him run. From Clickers. From People. Joel’s never run as fast as this moment, holding Ellie to him as he ignores the shouts of patrol telling him that she’s been bitten.

Not now.

Oh fuck.

The patrol goes ignored and Tommy is barreling after Joel too. Vaguely, he’s aware Dina and Jesse are following him too.

Jackson’s clinic is a reformed hospital, and Tommy has always hated it. It smells of disinfectant and the dead, something Tommy thinks the clinic carries over from Before. He never voices these thoughts to Maria, understanding the madness attached to it. But the hospital is rundown and clean, and Tommy avoided it like the plague.

Until now.

His brother bursts through the swinging doors of the clinic, followed by a jarring band of teenagers who cry out to their waiting parents. He isn’t sure who told Robin or Teresa to gather at the clinic for Jesse and Dina respectively, but they’re waiting for their sobbing teenagers when the chaos storms into the hospital. Ellie is screaming into Joel’s bad ear, gasping for breath in between as murky red pools on her stomach.

Tommy doesn’t stop to greet the families or to take control of the situation. He can’t focus on anything but the frantic run he joins his brother on. Joel tears through corners as if this clinic is familiar. He knows it isn’t. But maybe all hospitals with a death sentence are the same. The Firefly hospital and this one are one and the same for Joel.

The teenagers drag their parents down Joel’s conquest for a doctor, and he doesn't know when, but Maria has joined as well. They reach the fourth room on the right, and Joel is through the doors with Tommy hot on his heels. Maria stays back, needing to wrangle the teenagers into order.

He doesn’t care, so he doesn’t stay.

Joel gingerly places a screaming Ellie on the hospital bed, pressing hard on the wound that pours blood like wine at a dinner party. Ellie sobs into Joel’s neck, staining the shirt with blood and tears and sweat.

“I know, baby,” Joel insists into Ellie’s hair. “I know, I know. Just hang in.”

But Tommy ignores this. Please, he begs silently to any God who is listening. I—he—we— can’t do this again.

Ellie sobs into Joel’s shoulder, trembling with the exertion it takes to hold herself up for comfort. “I wanna go home, Joel—please. I wanna go home.”

“I know, I know,” Joel says again. He pulls his lips from his daughter’s head and gears his eyes at Tommy, and suddenly, the hospital is a burning field, and Tommy is thirty-one. “Help me!”

He makes a move to go forward, but is stopped by his own horror. He remembers the three modes of survival—flight, fight, and freeze.

Maria holds him in place and he pretends that it was his choice to stay.

Tommy freezes, and Joel cradles Ellie harder.

Dr. Niccola is the third and only female doctor in Jackson. She is the one to burst through the doors and immediately begin attending to Ellie before Maria can even explain what has occurred. It’s obvious by the blood, by the bullet shaped opening in what Tommy knows is Joel’s shirt that Ellie stole, that it’s a bullet wound. A gunshot wound to the side.

Like Sarah.

It’s September 27, 2024, and Joel’s daughter is dying from a gunshot wound.

The realization that this is familiar, this very scene has taken place once prior chills his body. He hugs his rifle to him (not even sure when he’d gotten it), the very same way he hugged it twenty-years ago to the date. He watches helplessly as his brother cries for his daughter, begging a God their mother believed in for mercy. Tommy stumbles back some, catching himself before ramming into his wife.

“You need to get out of here,” Dr. Niccola instructs harshly, not stopping her examination of Ellie. Her commands are ignored as Joel cups Ellie’s cheeks, thumbing over the blotchy skin. It’s so different from Sarah’s, Tommy thinks. But the desperation with which Joel clings to his little girl is brutally the exact same.

“I’m sorry!” Ellie wails upward at Joel. She hiccups into his neck, bloody lips marking green flannel. Tommy thinks Joel won’t ever wear green again after today.

Joel shakes his head and shushes her, peppering messy kisses to the crown of her head. “Don’t talk, baby. Just—” he breaks off from his pleas when Ellie howls in pain, and Joel tears his head in Nicola’s direction. “Do something!”

Tommy knows that hearing this cry will forever burden Nicola, a mother herself. He finds himself taking a step forward, but Joel cradles Ellie away from him, jostling her only slightly, distrust in his features. There is no reason for this, Tommy knows. It’s Joel and fatherhood. The complicated twist of his brother that Tommy first identified when Joel stumbled into their mother’s home and admitted to Joanna’s pregnancy.

“You need to get out of here, Joel,” Dr. Nicola tells him. “I’ll handle this.”

Joel shakes his head madly, never looking away from his daughter.

“Please don’t leave me,” Ellie begs. “Please don’t—He—I don’t want to die, Joel.”

“You’re not going to die, babygirl. Te lo juro, nena,” Joel swears into her forehead. Ellie coils into his words, both from pain and comfort. To that girl, Tommy thinks, both must be interchangeable.

“It hurts,” Ellie tells him, brown eyes wide in fear. “I—I don’t know.”

“I know, baby,” Joel tells her, but Tommy knows that he doesn’t. He recognizes this look in Joel. He knows the desperation that sickened Joel when Sarah caught the flu from a friend when she was four. He knows the calm Joel wielded as a bloody weapon when Sarah sobbed into his neck after puking all night. “Nothing’s going to happen to you. We’ll go home, baby. I promise, we’ll go home.”

Sarah, immortalized in youth, stands over Joel with worried eyes. She sets a hand down on Joel’s shoulder, wisps of it breathing from the contact. Joel doesn’t notice Sarah, and the little girl doesn’t seem bothered by the realization. She nods in comfort at her father, squeezing his shoulder with ghostly hands, and then abandons him for the sister she never got to meet.

The little girl Joel cradles cries, but they’re getting weaker, and Sarah approaches her softly.

Tommy springs into action before he knows what he’s doing, slamming through Sarah’s shiny figure to reach Ellie before Sarah can touch her. The ghost shimmers away, and Tommy is hauling his brother away from his daughter. Joel howls obscenities at his brother, fighting in Tommy’s harsh hold as they pull back from the hospital room. He only manages to get him away from the room by tossing his brother against the wall.

(Later, he thinks himself horrible for keeping Ellie from Sarah. But maybe his first niece will understand.)

“JOEL!” Tommy shouts at him, vibrating from fear and disgust at his actions toward the ghost of his niece. He swallows when Joel collapses against the wall, smearing blood over the white wall. “Joel, you can’t do this right now, man! Not right now!”

His brother is too out of it, too consumed with himself to keep himself together. He’s spiraling faster than before, and Tommy’s half afraid he’ll reach for a gun before Ellie’s out of the danger zone.

Dr. Niccola bursts from the clinic, a dozen other doctors rushing in to help his niece. But she’s looking right at Tommy. “She needs a blood transfusion! We don’t have anyone with AB-, and—”

Tommy is thrusting his arm at the woman before she can finish her sentence. Fortunately, Dr. Niccola doesn't doubt it for a second. One moment he’s offering his blood for the girl, and the next he’s being drained of his supply. He quickens their pace by rolling his finger and insisting they don’t stop until Ellie has what she needs.

Maria is handling Joel right now, keeping him away from the guns and his own delusion of Ellie being dead. Occasionally, through the roar of his ears and Ellie’s deafening screams, he can hear his brother sob into Maria’s shoulder. Maybe forgiveness is achieved in this way, maybe Maria will understand what Tommy’s been trying to verbalize since he met her.

He doesn’t pass out, but it’s a near thing. Dr. Niccola doesn’t stick around after the blood has been drawn, leaving him in the care of a nearby nurse. This unnamed nurse gives him juice and food and anything she can think of to help his delirium.

Tommy doesn’t have the energy to tell her that half of his delirium would vanquish as soon as Ellie was okay.

Through the blood donation infused haze, he sees Sarah at multiple points in her life. She is always vibrant and strong, always sweet and gentle with those she think need it. She would have loved Ellie, would have loved Sofia and Maria. In one of these hazes, Sarah is so viscerally real that she cups Tommy’s cheeks with the childlike wonder of a twelve-year-old.

“Tio,” Sarah whispers to him. “You’ve got to get up, slowpoke. Papi’s really scared.” He wants to tell her that he’s scared to, that he doesn’t think his brother will survive another daughter dying on the 27th, but Sarah waves him off. “Don’t worry about that. She’s going to be okay. Anna is looking after her.”

“Anna?” he mumbles under his breath, drawing the attention of Maria, but he’s too tired to care about this. “What?”

Sarah giggles at his expression, and nods. “Anna’s been looking after me for a few years here. She found me first. She told me that Dad would be looked after by Ellie. We’re okay, Tommy.”

Who the fuck is Anna?

“Tommy,” Sarah calls him again, waving him down so that he’ll zero in on her. “You need to focus and listen to me. Anna and I are okay. We’re safe here. We’re happy for them. You’ve got to tell Dad and Ellie that Anna and I are okay.”

Tommy does black out then.

When Tommy wakes up, he’s in a waiting room with Maria and Joel, and a few scraggly teenagers. Dina is dozing on the floor with Jesse resting his head on her lap. His brother is wide awake with broken eyes doting on Ellie’s sleeping form. He is fiddling with his daughter’s fingers with one hand, the other one drawing on the loose strings of Ellie’s bracelet on Joel’s wrist.

“Tommy?” Maria whispers, drawing him from his own spiral. He looks back at his wife, and nearly sobs in relief when he sees Sofia sleeping in her arms. Her brows dimple in concern. “What’s wrong? You okay?” He doesn’t really remember getting here, but he knows he must have at least engaged with some of them because Maria looks worried about him. At his silence, she nods. “Disassociation?”

It’s a vocabulary word he learned to tolerate for her sake. He knows things like this are real now, understands the severity of them when he lives in a town of peace. But his mind still drifts to Desert Storm and their affinity for ghosts, still drifts to the company the ghost of Sarah keeps him when he feels like he’s slipping.

“Yeah,” he agrees hoarsely, knowing that Maria already knows. “That.”

A soft, barely there laughter sprinkles levity into the vague hospital room. “C’mon, Tommy,” Ellie whispers with effort, “at least say it like you believe it.”

“Ellie!” comes the collective shout as they all rise to their feet.

Joel is the only one who remains seated, wide eyes boring into Ellie’s fluttering ones. His hand is still grazing Ellie’s hand, sobs racking his body, but he doesn’t make a sound as a father’s relief threatens to swallow her whole.

“Can’t get rid of me that easily,” Ellie assures him with a tired smile. “You owe me a Spanish lullaby.” She glimpses at Dina’s excited figure looming over Maria’s shoulder and glares. “You were supposed to stay with Shimmer and the others.”

With that, her friends create a barricade around Ellie, only letting Joel meddle between them. Jesse and Dina pepper Ellie with questions, who does her best to answer without overwhelming herself or her father.

“Tommy literally gave you all his blood,” Dina gushes excitedly. She pinches Ellie’s cheek affectionately, redness coloring her cheeks from the embarrassment of it. “That means you’re half Tommy now.”

Ellie’s eyes widen a fraction through the dreariness of medicine. “How much blood?”

Too much, he knows, but is glad when Maria answers, “Just enough for you to come back to us, sweet girl.”

The teenager doesn’t seem to believe her aunt, but she doesn't argue with her. He supposes he’s grateful for the steadfastness that are Maria’s words. Eventually, Ellie slumps deeper into her cot, mushing her nose into Joel’s arm. He is still threading fingers through her hair, still grazing his other hand over her hand. Father and daughter.

“Tommy saved your life, babygirl,” Joel reveals to her, affection coating his words.

Ellie grins into Joel’s arm, and tosses Tommy a thankful eye. It isn’t for her, he knows. He knows Ellie well enough by now to know that she’s grateful for her father’s presence. She’s grateful that the world won’t lose another Miller before their time. She’s grateful that her father didn’t get himself in a position that would cause him to flinch again.

“Thanks, Uncle Tommy.”

Tommy fractures and rearranges, pieces of an old identity falling into place. He’s a dad, a husband, a brother, and an uncle. And shit, that’s purpose.