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They’re supposed to be leaving. Ellie parroted Joel’s jackass rules back to him and was ready for her first experience in a real, honest to god car. Or truck. She still couldn’t tell if they were the same thing or not.
Regardless, they’ve got it loaded with toilet paper and canned goods without a single dent or bump, all due to her superior skills. Joel says the journey will be much quicker with some wheels but that it was still going to take a couple of days. She wonders how they’re going to put up with each other for another 48 hours when he’s bothered by everything that comes out of her mouth and she finds no greater pleasure in life than getting under his skin.
There’s a gun buried in her backpack and something like burgeoning hope in her chest. Honestly, what else are you supposed to feel when someone looks you dead in the eye and says you're the key to saving all of humanity?
Especially when her options right about now were either hope or grief. She’d stick with the weak, flickering hope, thank you very fucking much.
Unfortunately, Joel doesn’t get that there are really only two options. He doesn’t understand that life is actually kind of fucking terrible and surviving the thing that’s killed almost everyone else in the world actually kind of sucks. Sometimes she wishes it had been him who was bit and Tess was the one at her side right now. Tess says Ellie has balls. Tess didn’t vote to kill her. Tess talks about Ellie like she has some sort of life in front of her.
Well…talked.
But that’s not how things ended up. Instead, she’s got Joel with his asshole voice and hate for every good joke in the world. Instead, she’s got some guy who looks at her like she’s infected. Which, like, okay, fair. But still.
The battery is supposed to be done doing whatever batteries do soon. Ellie has been sent down the hill in the backyard to assess if there is anything around the back of the house that might be worth taking with them. She’s excited about the prospect of finally leaving and sitting passenger side in a real actual car. Or truck. At some point, she would ask Joel the difference.
It’s easy to get distracted when doing menial tasks, but maybe she should have paid slightly closer attention. Her foot slips out from beneath and she slips, losing her footing and going down. Hard.
Popping back up almost immediately, Ellie scans behind her to make sure Joel hasn’t caught that. She’d never convince him to let her have a gun if she can’t even walk down a hill competently. In the clear, phew.
She sets off and grunts in surprise at the pain that shoots up her right ankle.
“Fuck.”
It’s okay, Ellie decides. She can play it off. They were just going to be sitting in a car anyway. All she had to do was make her way back up the hill. Easy peasy.
For whatever reason, her ankle doesn’t agree.
She goes down with a muffled cry.
Joel comes around the corner twenty seconds later.
From the top of the hill, he stares down at where she lies, sprawled in overgrown, green grass. Pushed up on her elbows so she can watch him, Ellie lets her weight flop down and just accepts the face full of dirt and grass that meets her.
Either a cloud or Joel blocks the sun that had previously been warming her back. “What are you doing?” he asks with that incredulous tone he always used.
“Oh, you know. Working on my tan.” It’s an aim for levity. Because Ellie, clearly, did not pull that off so well. And Joel had just decided to bring her along all of ten minutes ago. Now here she is, a liability. Not a great start to their not yet established, yet reluctant, partnership out on the road.
Working off assumptions alone with her face still pressed against the earth, Ellie figures Joel has noticed what is probably a rapidly swelling ankle. She hears a quiet, “Jesus Christ,” come from above her. She wonders if he’s praying that someone makes her go away already.
The FEDRA teachers said that a lot, too, in response to her. Ellie was pretty sure they weren’t praying. (But they did want her to go away.)
She flips her body around so she’s lying on her back, looking up at the man staring down at her with clear disdain.
Joel bends down, and Ellie’s muscles all tense at once when his hands reach out towards her. “What the fuck are you doing?” she says louder than she meant. But it was fine; this was probably the most well-protected place in all of Massachusetts (maybe the whole world).
“You hopping all the way back up that hill?”
And okay, it’s not like Ellie thought he was going to kill her but hey, what does she know. He got what he wanted, and she’s quickly proven to be a problem. She’s heard of people getting killed for less.
When he hefts her into his arms, she feels the effort he’s putting into holding her body away from his. For several seconds too long, Joel does not move at all.
There’s a faraway look in his eyes, and Ellie wonders if he remembers he’s holding her at all. “Joel?” she asks as a cloud passes overhead, a bird cawing in the distance.
He looks down at her, almost in surprise. She doesn’t hold herself to him, just tries to keep her muscles tight enough that she’s not dead weight in his arms. Silently, he treks upwards.
“Careful,” she says a few steps in. “It’s slippery on that hill.”
Joel doesn’t laugh. Ellie’s starting to think he just…never does. She thinks she’s funny at least. And hey, if you’re gonna be stuck with yourself forever, you might as well get a chuckle or two out of it.
Instead of propping her in the truck, Joel takes her back inside Bill and Frank’s house (tomb?) and sets her rather gently down on the couch. More gentle than she was expecting. She thought it’d be more of a toss, if anything.
“Stay here,” he grunts at her as he heads towards the door and shuts it behind him.
“Hey, motherfucker! You could at least leave me with something to do!”
No answer.
Fine, Ellie could entertain herself. She drops to the floor and scoots her body along the hardwood to reach the bookshelf in the corner of the room. There’s a piano in here too. Ellie wonders which one of them knew how to play. She wonders if they played for each other. It’s a romantic sort of notion, at the end of the world, making music for somebody. If someone made music for her, Ellie’s pretty sure she’d fall in love with them.
That takes her down a dark road of thoughts, about Riley and the tape and the masks and the dancing and how happy everything was before it was really, really bad.
Back to the books.
The case is full, double stuffed. She pulls books off the shelf and flips through a few pages before setting one aside and moving onto the next. None of them seem a bit like Savage Starlight, but it’s not like Ellie’s taste isn’t varied. She just isn’t terribly interested in the complete works of Robert Frost or something called 9/11 conspiracy books.
Some of the books are just notebooks, and Ellie stares at those the longest. Filled with drawings, just pencil and lined paper. Maybe it’s all that was left, by the end of things.
Drawings of the piano at Ellie’s back and the front of the house covered with snow and a man’s face. A caterpillar. A bottle of wine with two glasses. Tess.
Fingertips smudge the lead, and Ellie pulls her hand back like she’s been burned. Oh well, no one was left alive to see how she’s ruined something else.
The front door bangs against a wall as, presumably, Joel swings it open. Ellie slams the front cover of the notebook and shoves it into the middle of the pile so Joel doesn’t ask to see it. Not talking about Tess was a rule. Can’t just be whipping her picture out all willy-nilly when this guy is probably contemplating the very tempting option of ditching her.
A pair of metal sticks clang to the ground next to her.
“Let’s go.”
Crutches, the old-world kind. They had plenty of these suckers around the QZ. People who lost their feet to infection or their legs to raiders or their toes to frostbite. Kids who cornered each other in the dorms and broke a leg to teach a lesson. Idiots like her who fell and twisted shit so bad there was no hope in walking on it.
Pushing against the plush, brown rug, Ellie stands with all of her weight on her good leg and then situates the crutches into place. “What’s that?”
Joel’s got some more items tucked beneath his arm, but he just gestures for her to get moving, so she does. The crutches aren’t quite at the right height. If she stops to fix them, she assumes Joel will officially leave her behind. Ellie clumsily picks a path back toward the front door.
A long-suffering sigh. Better saddle up, bucko. It was time to learn Ellie was pretty consistently a long-suffering sigh emitting sort of kid. “Give ‘em here.”
In an attempt of subtlety, Ellie leans against the wall for balance as she passes over the crutches. In a matter of minutes, Joel passes them back over. The height is perfect now.
“Thanks,” she says, grateful that he hasn’t called her an idiot and walked out the door without her yet.
Ellie’s preparing to prop a crutch while opening up the front door when she hears Joel ask, “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Uh, the garage?”
“Go sit on the damn couch already.”
“O-kay,” she draws out, redirecting towards the destination she was supposedly just intended to assume he wanted her to go. For all he seemed to doubt her, he apparently thought she had mind-reading capabilities.
She sits and Joel groans as he rests next to her. He motions for her to give him her ankle so she props it tenuously in his lap.
The sight of it is actually pretty gruesome. Probably should have taken her shoe off before the swelling got this bad, in hindsight. It’s three times the size of her normal ankle, fat and purple and pissed off looking. “Is it broken?” she asks as Joel stares down at it with her.
“Let me just grab that X-ray machine outta my pack.” Alright then, excuse her for asking a question. “This is gonna hurt.”
“I’m fine,” Ellie insists with a wave of her hand. “I don’t even really notice anything be-” A sharp inhale cuts her off as Joel begins to tug her sneaker off. “Okay, maybe that hurts just a little.”
Joel just kind of hums and goes back to his newfound torture technique. “Stop that. You’re going to hurt yourself.”
He’s probably commenting on the way Ellie’s biting down on her lip, but she just kind of glares at him in response. “It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?”
Another hum.
The shoe gives with a strangled cry from Ellie, and Joel tosses it to the floor with her sock following. At least her feet haven’t had a chance to get sweaty and gross again since her shower.
“Why are we wasting time on this?” Ellie asks, hating the way Joel’s analyzing her injury and poking at the swollen skin like it’s something to be watched with caution. “We should get going.”
Another sigh. “You can’t go anywhere like this.”
Her heart beats faster. Well, here it is. She might as well start figuring out what the plan’s gonna be. Maybe she could learn to find 9/11 conspiracy theories entertaining if it’s all she’s left with.
“It’s not that bad.” Joel moves her ankle the slightest bit. “Fuck, man!” She snatches her ankle from his lap, tears coming to her eyes despite her determination against them.
“You can’t walk on that.”
“We’re going to be in the car,” Ellie rushes to say because even though she doesn’t really like this guy and he’s hurting her and doesn’t laugh literally ever, it’s either that or she’s left in a town with nobody else in it. Well…a ghost town, maybe, would be more accurate. “Who needs to walk.”
Joel seems to at least consider her offering, but then he says, “Yeah, and when it breaks down or we get ambushed or…” Something dark clouds his face. It’s like now someone is hurting him. “No, we’ll wait a few days and head out when you can walk again.”
The “we” settles something fluttering and fearful in Ellie’s chest.
“Now, gimme your leg back. I’m gonna wrap it.”
Hoping he doesn’t hurt her again, Ellie props her ankle in his lap and prays it’s enough to keep him from leaving her behind.
//
“We aren’t staying here,” Joel says, throwing his pack over his shoulder. “The guest house across the street will do.”
“The guest house?” For a brief moment, Ellie dreams about having a town that is safe enough and full enough that she could have extra houses to store people in. She thinks she would invite them to stay, if people bothered to come. She thinks she wouldn’t want them to leave her at the end of a visit.
“Get your crutches.”
They’re easier to use now that they’re at the right height.
“Hey, Joel?”
He grunts in acknowledgment.
“Is it because they were your friends and now they’re…still in there? Is that why you don’t want to stay?” It’s an obvious question with an obvious answer. She’s getting desperate here. Give her something , dude.
Joel holds her backpack for her as she hobbles out. “They were business partners,” is how he answers the world’s easiest question. “Not friends.”
“You don’t really do friends, do you?”
Joel turns his gaze on her, and it makes her want to shrink back. She holds her ground.
“No.”
Besides Tess, Ellie finishes for him mentally.
//
The guest house is a lot emptier.
Joel makes a few trips between the two, stocking them up with food. For dinner, he makes pork chops with meat from the freezer. (That’s a bonus of staying, Ellie doesn’t say. They get to eat all this good food instead of letting it go to waste.)
“You ever play Uno?”
She sits up a little straighter. “No, but I learn quick.”
He doesn’t offer to teach her.
//
They sleep in the living room. Her on the couch. Joel on a mattress he drags down from upstairs. Ellie wants to tell him she doesn’t need him to sleep downstairs with her, it’s not like she needs a babysitter, but when they turn off all the lights, and there isn’t supposed to be any more talking, Ellie finds she can’t stop looking at the door and waiting for someone to bust it open and come to kill them.
Joel’s asleep, so Ellie stares at him instead. She drifts off knowing he’d stop anyone who came through that door to hurt them.
//
“Where are you going?” It’s not meant to come out whiny, but it does a little anyway. Her leg hurts, and she’s tired of sitting, and there’s nothing to do in this damn house, so her only source of entertainment is bugging Joel.
He looks over at her like the nuisance she’s been making herself all day. “A walk.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do?” She knows he’s going to tell her to figure it out and the response makes her pout in advance.
Sigh. “I ain’t carrying you, that’s for sure.”
She hobbles through the town. Joel walks slowly enough that she’s only a few paces behind him.
//
“Looks like it hurts.”
It hurts like a bitch, but Ellie isn’t one so she just shrugs. “I’ve had worse,” she says with bravado to suggest that she has.
Joel walks away. He comes back with a bag of frozen peas and an extra pillow. “Here.”
She lets him arrange the pillow and the icy-cold vegetables, and it feels so nice she sighs in relief. “You’re good at this,” she tells him.
For a long minute, Joel just looks really fucking sad. And then he says, “Not like it’s hard to come by injuries at the end of the world.”
“Right.”
//
“Hey, Joel.”
“What.”
“What did the fibula say to the tibia when it got caught misbehaving?”
He stares.
“Don’t pa-tell-a my mom!” She’d come up with that one on her own so she laughs extra hard with pride and amusement.
He shakes his head and walks out of the room.
//
On day four, her ankle hurts less until she tries to put any weight on it. Joel hadn’t technically told her to try, but it’s been long enough now that she’s pretty convinced he’s going to be taking off at any minute if she doesn’t pull it together.
Once again, Joel’s gone to collect something from somewhere else, but Ellie’s starting to think he’s just using that as a means to escape her. She can’t take it anymore. It was bad enough that they only had each other until he could get her wherever she was supposed to go, but now they weren’t even making progress. They were just sitting. Well, she was. Joel got to do whatever the fuck he wanted to. Except for leave, she guesses.
Of course, he comes back in while she’s still trying to figure out a way to dupe him into believing that she could actually walk; thank you very much. Now, let’s get this show on the road.
“What the hell are you doing.” If she didn’t know better, Ellie would almost say he sounds worried.
“Testing it out,” she says point blank. “Feels better.”
The look on his face suggests he does not believe her for a single second.
“What’s that?”
There’s something hefty in Joel’s arms, and he sets it down on the piano bench before coming over and guiding her back to the couch. “You’re going to hurt yourself,” he says like he did that first day.
“Too late,” she quips back.
She sits. He fluffs the pillow for her leg and goes to the kitchen to pull out the seventy-fifth time frozen peas. “Might as well not make it worse.” He doesn’t comment anything else, no mention of leaving or even a snide comment about the amount of time she’s costing him. He just strolls back over to whatever he’d carried in. “Thought some music might be nice.
A record player! Now Ellie wishes she could get up so she could observe him setting it all up. She cranes her neck to try and get a decent view. Shortly, it begins to crackle and sputter with the promise of music to come. The record pops and then there it is. Music.
Ellie doesn’t think about the last time she heard music. No point in thinking about that.
The voice is pretty, deep and soullike and nice. It’s completely different from any of the stuff Ellie listened to on her Walkman.
“This is good,” she says after the second song.
Joel turns, and she swears he almost smiles at her. “Yeah, it’s not bad.” That’s probably how this man says it’s his favorite song in the world.
“Hey, Joel?” No answer, but his eyes turn to find her and that’s more than she sometimes gets, so she knows he’s listening when she says, “Thanks.”
He doesn’t say you’re welcome.
//
Joel wraps her ankle up. He says if it’s not healing yet, it’s probably broken or a really bad sprain. So he makes a splint, and Ace wraps everything together to hold her ankle in place. One time she read a book where a kid broke his arm and everyone signed his cast. She looks at him with her biggest, most pleading eyes and asks, “Will you sign it?”
There’s a black Sharpie in the kitchen drawer. He looks all over his wrap job and says, “Well, shit, I don’t know if there’s any space left,” and Ellie reaches out to smack him in the shoulder. In the end, he signs it right above where her ankle is at its most swollen. A lovingly penned Motherfucker now inscribed along her makeshift cast.
//
“Have you ever had pancakes?”
“Oh yeah, FEDRA loved making us delicious breakfasts.”
“Come on, smartass. I’ll show you how it’s done.”
She sits up on the countertop beside Joel and watches him mix and measure and pour. He holds the pan for her so she can flip the first one as the bubbles begin to appear in the center of the batter. It’s a perfect golden brown.
There are still blueberries growing on a bush out back and there are chocolate chips Joel finds in the pantry. He tells her to go to town. She decorates one for each of them. Two blueberries for eyes and a chocolate chip smile for her. A frowny face for Joel.
“Guess which one is yours.”
He plucks the smiley faced one right out from under her. “Wrong!” she shouts as he makes his retreat for the living room. “You are the frowniest man alive, motherfucker!”
She can almost imagine him laughing.
//
Two weeks. Joel doesn’t even let her try and walk again, just takes down her cast every few days and palpates along the swelling and gently twists her ankle this way and that, instructing her to point and flex her toes. It’s getting easier.
“You still can’t run on it,” Joel mutters, and he gets that faraway look in his eye again. She wants to ask him why it matters if she can run, why he cares so much all of a sudden, but she decides against it.
“Hey, have you ever seen Star Wars?” he asks her.
//
Joel carries over the working television, the VHS player, and an armload of tapes. “You’ll like these,” he says, even though he inserts Episode 4 when she can see 1 from all the way over on the couch.
“Do you like them?” she asks when he comes and sits beside her. Her ankle rests in his lap so that she can keep it propped up. It helped with the pain.
His hand rests on her knee. “No. I think they’re goddamn stupid.”
He’s right, though. Ellie loves them.
//
“Hey, Joel?”
It’s late, but it’s hard to be tired when she spends so much of her days sitting around doing nothing. Joel takes her on daily walks with her crutches, at least. And he lets her help in the kitchen. They made brisket, a Texan classic. Tomorrow, he was going to teach her how to fry up a hushpuppy. She watched another Star Wars today.
“Yeah?” His answer is alert enough that Ellie knows she didn’t wake him.
The question sticks in her throat. It doesn’t break any of the rules. It’s not about Tess, and it’s not about their pasts before they met each other, but it feels like a dangerous question anyway. It feels like the kind he won’t want to answer.
“Why didn’t you just leave me here?” She spits the question out like it tastes bad.
“What.”
Ellie clears her throat, propping herself up on her elbows so she can stare down at him on his mattress on the floor. Three and a half weeks later and he still didn’t leave her on her own at night. She didn’t always have to keep her eyes on him until she fell asleep, but sometimes she would cast one last glance in his direction before dozing off.
“I just mean, like, you have your truck and your battery, and you know where you’re going…why not leave me and my bum ankle here?” She was a bargaining chip, which had been obvious from the get go as Marlene offered Joel and Tess whatever they wanted because they were “capable” of things. But now he got what it sounded like he wanted so…what was the point? “Is there something else you want now?”
Long-suffering sigh. “You don’t know the code to the gate,” he says like it’s a real answer. “Didn’t want you to die of electrocution trying to escape.” The sentence drops off in a way that suggests the conversation is over.
“Hey, Joel?”
Silence.
“Thanks.”
It was nice, she couldn’t help but think, not being left behind.
//
“Wait, that’s his dad?! You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me!”
Joel laughs for real.
“Can’t remember the last time someone was surprised by that,” he says in response when she stares at him like he’s crazy.
//
“Hey, kid. Wanna learn how to play Uno?”
//
She walks without her crutches. It’s still achy but not so bad.
Joel says they’ll leave any day now.
It almost makes her sad. He might not have been her choice, but she feels like maybe they’re building something here.
She thinks maybe they’re bringing a ghost town back to life.
//
“Is there anywhere else like this?” Ellie asks. She doesn’t always wait for it to be dark outside to ask questions now. “Anywhere this…safe?”
Joel doesn’t sigh, but he does take a long, long time to answer. “Nowhere is really safe, Ellie. Not anymore.”
Ellie stares at Joel, who’s rewrapping her leg, just the ACE wrap these days. No splinting anymore. She watches him replace the bandage on her leg, smoothing out the wrinkles and propping it up on a pillow when he’s done, and all she can think is, “ Except with you. ”
She doesn’t say it.
//
He actually makes her jog on it. Still wrapped up, they go slowly through the neighborhood.
He keeps telling her to slow down, and Ellie isn’t sure if it’s because he’s worried about her getting hurt all over again or because he can’t keep up with her. She teases him for being slow. He rushes up behind her and shoves her, grabbing her arm before she can actually fall.
She laughs, warm and content in the autumn air.
//
Bags packed, toilet paper rolls stacked in the backseat, a stack of books hidden beneath the canned goods and bottled water.
Joel half pulls the seatbelt around her, and she smiles, unable to ignore how it feels like a freshly tended to injury and a game of Uno and a third rewatch of Star Wars.
She buckles in, turns up the music, and watches the town fade away behind them.
A part of her expects to be sad, scared, maybe. Instead, she looks towards Joel and dares to hope that everything might just be okay.
//
“Hey, Ellie.” He doesn’t wait for her to reply. “I knew a guy who sold candy canes.”
She’s smiling before he even gets to the punchline.
“They were all in mint condition.”
She forgets to be scared as the town vanishes from view.
She forgets to do anything besides laugh and sing along to the tape, window down and hair blowing behind her.
They’re in their spaceship, together. Headed towards the future.
The hope almost swallows her whole.
"So what's the difference between a truck and a car anyway?"