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Jackson is kind of a shithole.
Sure it’s got hot water and good food and a giant fucking wall that’s guarded day and night, but the commune is also full of other people, and in Ellie’s experience, other people tend to end up going one of two ways — either dying or trying to kill her, neither of which she’d describe as fun.
The other problem is that being in Jackson reminds her a little too much of life at the FEDRA military school in Boston.
And that place was a shithole.
“You know the goal here is actually not getting ourselves kicked out of this place, right?” Joel asks as he cups Ellie’s chin with one hand, gently turning her head so he can get a good look at her black eye.
“I’m aware.” The fight was admittedly over something stupid, but she can’t seem to conjure up any remorse, no matter how hard she tries. “I was just trying to make friends, like you told me to.”
“You might want to rethink your methods. What did Maria say?”
“That she wants to talk to you about how I’m such a fucking delight to have around.”
“Oh, I can’t wait.” The lines on Joel’s face soften, the corner of his mouth quirking up into a not-quite smile, and Ellie knows exactly what’s coming next. “How’s the other guy look?”
She smirks. The ‘other guy’ is a 17-year-old boy who’s currently in the infirmary with a bloody nose. “Worse.”
“Good girl.”
It’s been almost a year since Ellie and Joel found Marlene and the rest of the Fireflies dead at the hospital in Salt Lake City and even longer since the pair first rode out of the commune in Jackson, bound for Colorado. Coming back to Jackson should have felt like a failure after the grand plan to save the world went belly-up at the finish line, and in a way it does, but it’s not the kind of failure that has anything to do with the vaccine, like Ellie expected. It’s almost more like… an overwhelming sense of incompatibility. Like she’s a square peg being shoved into a round hole, and she doesn't know which piece is faulty — her, or the place she’s trying to fit into. Like she doesn't know how to be a goddam person anymore.
“So, you did this before, right?” Ellie asks Joel. “Like, you had a job. I assume you lived in a house. Like, a normal fucking life, right?”
Maybe an orphan who grew up in a military school and trekked across the country through a goddam apocalypse might have issues settling down, but Joel was by all accounts a regular guy before everything went to shit. And the QZ in Boston was a fucking mess, but it was a functional fucking mess, at least. Mostly. When shit wasn’t blowing up.
“A long time ago,” Joel answers, not exactly instilling Ellie with the reassurance she was hoping for. Although she probably should have anticipated that — Joel acts like more of a pariah than she does, a lot of the time.
Maybe they’re both too far gone to come back to anything resembling normal.
Everyone has jobs in Jackson. Guards, cooks, hunters (for animals, not people), teachers, doctors, tailors, gunsmiths, just about anything that needs doing has a job title attached to it.
Despite Ellie pulling for ‘shepherd’, Joel gets added to both the patrol roster and the carpenters’ group in equal measure. And despite Ellie’s persistent argument for patrol or the armory or anything fucking interesting, she gets booted off to school with all the other kids.
The other kids who have definitely never been bitten by an infected and who have probably never watched a man shoot his own brother before turning the gun on himself or chopped somebody up in a burning building before he could… well.
She’s always been shit at making friends anyway.
Most of her time after school is spent in the barns or the armory. Guns and animals are two things she feels like she understands, and no one ever says no to an extra pair of hands willing to volunteer. Joel finds her in the armory sometimes, cleaning rifles like it’s second nature.
The thing is, even though growing up in FEDRA’s care felt normal, it’s not difficult to accept that it wasn’t when so much evidence of before still exists, decaying right in front of everyone’s eyes. It was easy to see, traipsing across the country, what the world used to look like. Easy to imagine the abandoned little houses and towns full of people. Full of life.
It’s easy to believe this community, here in Jackson, is how it’s supposed to be.
So Ellie keeps her head down and her scar covered and tries not to think about what she’s had to lose in order to get here.
Not long after their re-arrival, one of the hunting parties comes back with a moose and there’s a big community dinner followed by music and drinks and a whole lot of people asking questions. Basic shit like so you’re Ellie right and where are you from aren’t too bad, but more complicated queries like so what’s the story with you and Tommy’s brother make her want to scramble for an exit.
But she promised Joel that she would at least try to have a good time, so here she is, fucking trying through clenched teeth and forced smiles and yes ma’ams and no sirs and all that hospitality shit that’s supposed to prove she’s someone who deserves a place in civilization and not somebody who once shot a man in the back and didn’t even manage to kill him.
(Somebody who once shot a man in the back and then listened to him scream for his mother as he died.)
The easiest place to be is right next to the trash cans, Ellie finds, because no one wants to linger there for long and she mostly gets left alone. She spies Joel across the lodge, leaning against the wall and glancing around with a kind of nervous, jumpy twitch, and Ellie realizes that between the music and the chatter he can’t hear a goddam thing. He’ll never admit it, but she knows it scares him, his hearing loss. She knows it makes him feel vulnerable, even in safe places. Especially in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people.
Ellie stares at him until he catches her, and then she tilts her head toward the door in the universal gesture for let’s get out of here. By the time they make it home, she’s not sure which of them is more relieved.
Joel has a tendency to disappear whenever Maria and Tommy’s baby is around, and while Ellie really can’t blame him for that, his reticence also somehow means that she is the de facto babysitter for this kid, even though the most time she’s ever spent with a baby was at the orphanage before getting shunted to military school, when she wasn’t very much older than a baby herself. And that means whenever she’s in the vicinity of the newest addition to the Miller family, if she hasn’t already strategically filled her arms with food or boxes or ammo, then her arms are going to be filled with infant.
(Ellie also gets the impression that Tommy feels like if she approves of his kid, then it’s like Joel approves of his kid, which is its own special brand of fucked up, but that’s between Joel and Tommy so she just leaves it alone.)
She’s eating in the mess hall when Tommy appears out of nowhere and asks Ellie to watch the baby (“just for 10 minutes, I swear!”) even though Joel is clearly sitting across from her with nothing better to do than nurse a cup of coffee and for once not running away at the sight of the child.
In fact, not only is he not running away, but he is taking a kind of grim satisfaction in her discomfort. “You look miserable.”
“I look happier than you,” Ellie tells him, and she doesn’t miss the way he’s staring at his brother’s kid while suddenly hugging the coffee mug a little closer to his chest. “You okay?”
He nods. She doesn’t believe him.
There are times when Ellie’s thankful that Joel’s half deaf, like right now because it's making the whole trying to sneak out of the house in the middle of the night endeavor way easier. Of course, this plan only works if Joel isn’t also awake and wandering around like the insomniac he is. Ellie almost screams when she turns a corner and smacks right into him.
“What the fuck are you doing?” she snaps. “Jesus, you fucking scared me.”
“What are you doing?” Joel retorts.
Ellie hesitates, but a lie doesn’t come to her fast enough so she ends up blurting out the truth. “Sneaking out.”
“Why?” More than concerned or angry, he sounds confused. Like he can't understand how anyone would want to be anywhere but here in this picture-fucking-perfect two-story farmhouse.
“Because…” Once again, her brain betrays her. “Fuck, man. Because sometimes I miss sleeping outside. Okay?”
Joel blinks at her. “Okay.”
“Really?”
He steps aside, and Ellie leaves the house before he changes his mind or decides she needs a lecture or starts asking questions about her feelings.
The ground is a lot harder than her bed, but it’s a cool, clear night and already feels better than being inside. Eyes closed, she concentrates on the sounds of nature — the crickets in the grass, the owls in the trees, and the creak of the back door, which is followed a second later by the sudden weight of the blanket that usually hangs off the back of the couch.
And a few seconds after that come the curses and grunts from Joel as he lies down next to her.
(It’s possible, Ellie realizes in the morning, that it’s not the sleeping outside she misses so much as the sleeping next to him.)
Joel seems to think he promised her that he would teach her how to play guitar, and though that’s not exactly how Ellie remembers that conversation, she lets him carry on about it because it makes him happy. Eventually he comes home from a supply run with an acoustic guitar that’s about as beat up as anything else she’s ever seen, and after he cleans it and tunes it and starts playing it like an old pro who might be out of practice but hasn’t forgotten a single note, Ellie learns the son of a bitch really can sing.
“Holy shit, dude,” she says. “Forget the sheep farm.”
He laughs and teaches her a few basic chords, which she bangs out with as much precision as her sharpshooting. But Joel’s patient and Ellie’s stubborn, and it feels good to know how to do something with her hands that has nothing to do with killing people. So she plays until her fingers bleed, staining her skin with the same kind of red but a different kind of pain.
Joel is missing.
It’s the middle of the night, and Joel is fucking missing.
He’s not in his bed. He’s not in the bathroom. He’s not in the kitchen or the common room or by the back door or anywhere in the entire fucking house, and Ellie feels like she’s on the verge of one of those panic attacks that she and Joel are always pretending they’re not having.
Outside like a shot, Ellie’s in the street by the time the front door slams shut behind her, and suddenly there he fucking is, ambling toward her like he’s out for an afternoon stroll.
Ellie marches up to him. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“You’re supposed to be in bed,” Joel says, as if that’s the goddam problem here.
Fear and frustration boil over and Ellie shoves him, hard, for the first time since the last time they were in Jackson. “Asshole!”
“The hell is wrong with you?”
“Me? The hell is wrong with you?” She can’t believe he has the gall to be angry right now. “I fucking wake up and you’re gone? What the fuck is that?”
Joel’s expression hardens. “You really want to play this game? How many times have I woken up and you’re gone?”
“That’s different,” Ellie snaps through gritted teeth. “You know where I am.”
He does, or at least he should, since during her own excursions outdoors she never actually leaves the property bounds and always wakes up with him beside her.
“Yeah, it feels real different,” Joel barks at her, sounding like a mix of exasperated and exhausted. He draws a hand over his face. “Christ, kid.”
“No, fuck this, you don’t get to be angry,” Ellie starts, and then they’re both shouting at each other until a nearby porch light flickers on and Tommy steps outside.
“Everything okay?” he calls.
“Everything’s fine,” Joel answers at the same time Ellie yells, “Does everything fucking look okay?”
(The truth is, nothing — not cannibals, not raiders, not rapists, not any version of the infected, nothing — scares her as much as that scar on Joel’s head. Ellie can save him from getting strangled in Kansas City, or bleeding out in Colorado, or dying of an ear infection in the Nevada desert.
She can’t save him from himself.)
Some kid yanks on Ellie’s sleeve — the same sleeve that hides her scar — and gets a split lip for it. Ellie meanwhile gets hauled off to Maria’s little office in the town council building for what she assumes is going to be another discussion about her problematic behavior (the same way it always was with FEDRA), and Maria really should know by now that this is just gonna be a waste of time.
“So when’s his lecture gonna be?” Ellie asks about the other kid, who she’s pretty sure is to blame for everything. “Because he fucking grabbed me first. Maybe your shitty little school should be teaching people not to do that.”
“I’m aware of your extenuating circumstances,” Maria says, and that could mean goddam anything. I’m aware that people think you’re feral and honestly they’re not far off. I’m aware that you’ve been having such a hard time adjusting that you’re sleeping outside. I’m aware that you once hacked a man to pieces...
But something about Maria’s tone makes Ellie immediately put her guard up and ask, her own manner dripping with a thinly-veiled hostility, “What extenuating circumstances?”
Maria casts her eyes downward, landing directly on the place where Ellie’s scar is covered, and the teen’s heart jumps into her throat as she realizes exactly what Maria’s talking about.
She knows Ellie was just protecting her secret.
Which means she knows about her fucking immunity.
Ellie’s never seen Joel so furious.
And she’s watched him kill a man.
Multiple times.
The fact that Tommy swears on his life that he told no one but Maria and that Maria didn’t tell anyone at all doesn’t stop Joel from yelling himself hoarse at his brother and his brother’s wife, both of whom are throwing it right back at him. Or at least Tommy is, although Ellie can imagine Maria silently standing behind her husband with that glare she only ever seems to reserve for Joel.
Ellie could have been that person in Joel’s corner. But she’s ‘just a kid’ and instead can only listen to the fight from where she’s sitting at the top of the stairs.
“I didn’t think you were coming back, Joel!” Tommy shouts. “Christ, the shit you gave me for keeping off the radio and then what, a year goes by with no word from you? What the hell was I supposed to think?”
“You weren’t supposed to think anything! You were supposed to keep your goddam mouth shut!”
“Oh I’m supposed to bend over backwards for your kid when you won’t even look at mine?”
Ellie winces and isn’t surprised in the least that the fight ends after that, with the slamming of the front door marking Maria and Tommy’s exit from the house.
He comes upstairs later and doesn’t look surprised to see her waiting on the landing.
“Did you get us kicked out?” Ellie asks.
“I don’t know.” Joel sits a few steps below her, pressing his palms into his eyes. “A lot of that wasn’t about you, you understand?”
“I sort of got that impression.” She scooches down the stairs until she’s sitting even with him and, rolling up her sleeve, gestures to the scar on her arm. “So, what are we going to do about this?”
Because the solution is simple: the easiest thing to do for everyone is just find a way to dispose of the evidence completely. That way it doesn’t matter that Maria and Tommy know and no one has to be stressed over the prospect of the secret getting out.
Joel raises his eyebrows at her.
Ultimately, the business end of an emergency flare works just fine, and soon enough Ellie’s in the infirmary babbling to the doctor a story about how a model rocket blew up in her face while Joel sits by the bed worrying himself into a frenzy and second-guessing this entire plan (and possibly his competency as an authority figure), even though it’s far, far too late for that.
Ellie’s not sure why he’s freaking out. Everything is going perfectly so far — her arm will heal and her bite scar will be permanently replaced and no one is even questioning the validity of how she got burned. (Actually, it’s a little insulting just how easily everyone believes the rocket story. Joel and Ellie? Homemade fireworks? Yeah, that checks out.)
“You’re never doing anything like that ever again,” Joel lectures her. “Ever. You understand me?”
“What, you mean I’m never allowed to sneak into an abandoned mall with my best friend, get bit by an infected, join a commune on the other side of the fucking country, and use an emergency flare to burn off the scar so no one who sees it assumes I’m sick and shoots me dead?” Ellie sums up with more than the usual amount of sarcasm. Chalk it up to the pain medication. “Yeah, alright, that’ll be tough but I guess I can do that.”
Joel stares at her. “I thought you were alone when you got bit.”
Oh, shit.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says, and thankfully he doesn’t push.
At home, they’ve got the ‘80s playing on an old boom box because they’re always in goddam trouble these days. They’re also lying on the floor in the common room (living room, Ellie’s brain automatically corrects in Joel’s voice) because they’re very well-adjusted people.
And it’s the middle of the goddam night. Again.
When she’s had enough of the music and the thoughts in her head, Ellie reaches over and shuts the tape off. “Her name was Riley. She was my best friend, and she was with me when I got bit. She got bit, too, and I had to be the one to…”
Joel waits patiently for her to finish that sentence, and when she doesn’t, he takes it upon himself to fill the silence.
“The first person I ever…” And it means something to her that he stumbles here, too, while talking about killing someone, just like she did. Like maybe they’re not as far gone as she sometimes thinks they are. “…was my 90-year-old next-door neighbor. Everyone just called her Nana. I never knew her real name.”
“Was she infected?”
“Yeah. It was outbreak day. We didn’t even really know what was going on yet.”
Ellie remembers Riley’s face twisting into something unfamiliar and almost other-worldly, and how that didn’t make it any easier to fire the gun. Beneath the bandage, her still-healing arm aches with both real and phantom pains. “Was it hard?”
“No. It was easy,” Joel admits. “That was the hard part.”
She knows that feeling, too.
Ellie’s gotta hand it to the Millers — they sure know how to add tension to a family dinner.
Nobody’s apologized. Nobody’s even referenced the fact that the last time they were all together was a massive fucking argument. And yet, here they are, crammed around the table in Maria and Tommy’s house, with a spread of potatoes, garden vegetables, sauces, bread, wine — which Ellie’s barred from trying — and meat loaf.
She’s gonna pass on the meat loaf.
Conversation is light, and dinner is mostly the sound of knives and forks against plates while Joel sneaks unreadable glances at Tommy and Maria’s baby, who’s throwing food all over the floor, and Tommy sneaks very fucking readable glances at the patch job on Ellie’s arm — looks that say Tommy’s hurt they couldn’t trust him to keep a secret, which Ellie thinks is his own goddam fault — and Ellie stares down Maria whenever Maria isn’t staring down Joel.
A good old-fashioned Miller family extravaganza, Joel will say later in a way that makes Ellie feel sorry for him and less sorry for herself growing up an orphan.
“Everything tastes great, Maria,” Joel says now. “Thank you.”
He then kicks Ellie’s leg under the table in a prompt for her to also compliment the meal. Ellie stares at him like he’s lost his mind.
“Not a fan of meat loaf, Ellie?” Maria asks.
Not since the cannibals tried to eat me, Ellie wants to say, which would probably not fall under the purview of politeness that Joel wants her to exhibit tonight. So instead, she responds by stuffing a forkful of potatoes into her mouth.
(“Your family’s fucking weird,” she tells Joel after.
His response is quick. “They’re your family, too.”
And that idea is also fucking weird, Ellie thinks. There are people in town who still assume they’re father and daughter, and while she’s never corrected them because yeah, sure, Joel is family, she’s also never called him dad, either, and probably never will.
It’s just too weird.)
“Joel, check it out,” Ellie says, sticking her arm under his nose. “It worked.”
He’s on the couch in their common room trying to fix a 25-year-old DVD player and is refusing to look at the now-healed burn scar marring Ellie’s arm and more than adequately covering up the bite scar underneath. “I’d rather not.”
She knows he hates it despite agreeing it was necessary. She knows it’s a physical reminder of pain that he couldn’t protect her from.
“Whatever, grumpy,” Ellie says, flopping down next to him. She has no idea why she says what she says next, but whatever part of her brain is in charge right now must think it’s important because she smacks the side of his head — where his scar is — for emphasis. “Now you know how I feel about that.”
Joel finally stops tinkering with the mess of electronics and turns toward Ellie like he’s never quite seen her before, almost making her want to shrink away from him. Like she’s revealed too much, her soul as bare as the scar on her arm.
She’s ready to fight about it, too, if he admonishes her for worrying about him. Of course I worry about you, fucker. You’re a huge fucking mess.
But when he does speak, after a long moment of silence, his words are as gentle as if he found her covered in someone’s else’s blood, shrieking in his arms. “That was a long time ago.”
Kindness from other people is something Ellie’s still not used to, even after all this time, and it disarms her completely.
Gesturing to her own scar, she assures him, “Someday this will be, too.”
The mess hall is buzzing with pre-dinnertime activity — this time, it’s for a couple of large bucks that returned with Joel’s patrol, which means he’s in the kitchen helping to prepare the meat while Ellie’s in the dining area with the guitar, trying to work out the chorus of that Linda Ronstadt song Joel likes so much and hoping nobody volunteers her for anything having to do with the dead deer, which is dredging up memories of another deer and another community and the cruel, sadistic smile of a man who...
“Ellie?”
Her head snaps up. In front of her is one of the girls from school.
One of the pretty girls from school. The same one that Ellie’s done a lot of staring at but never said a word to. She swallows hard and tries to sound nonchalant. “Yeah?”
“You’re good at that,” the girl says, and it takes Ellie a moment to realize she’s talking about the guitar. “Do you want to sit with us?”
“Why the fuck not?” Ellie blurts out, and she cringes at herself all the way to the table where her classmates are seated.
Ellie finds Joel holding Tommy’s baby and making noises that she’s never heard from him before. It’s pretty fucking surreal, if she’s being honest, and there’s a sharp pang of irrational jealousy that makes her want to do something completely unhinged like challenge a toddler to a duel (which she would fucking win, by the way).
Instead she says, “You’re pretty good at that.”
“Well it ain’t my first time,” Joel responds, and Ellie initially assumes he’s referring to Sarah, since Sarah — as far as she knows — would have been the only other baby from Joel’s life. But the smug, patronizing look he gives her indicates that while he might be thinking about Sarah, right now he’s talking about her, even though she was 14 when they met and could clearly wipe her own ass. Ellie’s about to lay him out with a very pointed and insulting comment about his mother when Joel abruptly changes the subject by asking, “Who were those kids I saw you with?”
Ellie rolls her eyes. With only 300 people total living in this town, Joel knows fucking well who those kids are. He just wants her to admit it. “They’re my fucking friends, okay? Do you have to be weird about everything?”
“You’re the weird one,” he retorts.
“Whatever you say, old man.”
(“You know ‘old man’ is another word for father, right?” Tommy says over breakfast.
Ellie almost spits out her juice.)
Nights are so much easier than days. Nights don’t expect them to be anything but their own fucked-up selves. They’re ambling down the street, taking one of Joel’s midnight walks, on their way to nowhere in particular. Jackson’s pretty peaceful when no one’s around, Ellie decides.
There’s a chill in the air that means winter is on its way, but above them, the sky is clear. That’s the thing about passing the night indoors — there’s no way to see the stars or the moon that humanity will probably never touch again. At least, not in Ellie’s lifetime.
“Why is it so fucking hard?” she says.
Joel doesn’t ask what she’s talking about. “I don’t know.”
“Was it this hard before the outbreak? Normal life?”
“Sometimes,” he answers, and she knows it’s the truth. She can also tell he has more to say, so she stays quiet long enough for him to finish his thought. “Listen, before, everybody kind of had their own normal. It wasn’t one size fits all. Nobody really knew what they were doing, and we all just had to make it up as we went along.”
Ellie used to believe her destiny was to save the world. It was easy. It was neat. It was a goal, and then it wasn’t, and nothing ever really prepared her for what would happen after.
A part of her, deep down inside, wasn’t totally sure there would even be an after.
(And it occurs to her, not for the first time, that Joel might be less made for the routine of an ordinary life than she is.)
“So what’s our normal? Sleeping in the yard? Staying up all night?” Ellie can’t help but snort a laugh at the absurdity of what their lives have become. “Listening to hits of the fucking ‘80s?”
He shrugs. “If you want it to be.”
And yeah, maybe she does.
Joel’s got the guitar this time, and he’s playing something folksy while Ellie props her feet up on the porch railing and watches the streetlights come on as the sun sets low over the hills. There’s another movie showing tonight, or maybe another community dinner, or maybe something else entirely.
Ellie doesn’t care. She’s content to pass the evening right here.
“People sure do like to fucking gather, don’t they?” she observes as the telltale fanfare of a crowd somewhere in the center of Jackson drifts into their end of town, mixing with the rhythm of Joel’s strumming. Joel gives her a look — he probably can’t hear the extra noise at all — and Ellie gives him a cheeky smile in return. “Don’t try to understand it. It’s just what they do.”
“And what do we do?” he asks.
Ellie makes the signs for endure and survive, and after everything, it feels like a goddam victory.