Chapter Text
Not long after Silver Lake, Joel had Ellie start labeling her night terrors by color. It’d been his idea, a way for him to know exactly what Ellie needed so he didn’t waste time asking questions she was in no frame of mind to answer.
If she said green, it meant she wanted to talk about what she’d dreamed of. If she said red, she wanted to be held, but not talk at all. Yellow meant “hold me until I can breathe enough to speak.”
Red was one he’d had to figure out on his own. Ellie didn’t like talking about reds even after the fact.
And she didn’t really understand the color association. It wasn’t like the Boston QZ had had a wealth of functioning stoplights. After he’d explained it, she’d only laughed at the absurdity that a bunch of adults would obey colored lights when in the driver’s seat of a three-thousand pound machine with a speedometer that went up to one hundred and sixty miles per hour.
But when all she had to say was a single color in the wake of a nightmare, trusting Joel would take care of everything else, it seemed to give her a sense of security. A concept in such short supply that he’d do anything to help assuage her fears, up to and including killing an entire hospital’s worth of Fireflies before threatening their leader into letting them leave.
After Silver Lake, Joel had almost been able to tell time by the regularity of Ellie’s screams, put there in her throat by what David did to her. And the further they got from that fucking resort, the warmer the temperature became while spring left winter behind, pushing sense memory into the background. The ease with which Joel found himself donning the mindset of a parent—of a father protecting a daughter in a world with more dangers than infected alone—certainly helped.
But their second night away from Salt Lake City, Joel woke up to a scream.
Ellie’s back was to him on the flattened backseat of the car he’d stolen from the hospital. She’d arranged him to her liking when they settled in for the night, her back to his chest, his arms seatbelt-tight around her, as if she feared she could be plucked out of them as easily as had been done on the sidewalk in Salt Lake City. His arms were around her still, but when he put a hand gently on her head, she screamed anew and tore herself away from him with such speed she nearly slammed into the window.
“Ellie, baby, it’s just me! It’s only me,” he said until she finally seemed to hear him, catching his reflection in the glass inches from her face.
Her breath shuddered out of her, and with it came tears. She looked tiny in his shorts and shirt, but he hadn’t been willing to stop at any towns they passed today. He was all too aware that the Fireflies might have time to catch up. Sure, he hadn’t seen any in the rearview mirror, but he didn’t trust Marlene as far as he could throw her. He’d only been willing to stop at all when the sign welcoming them to Wyoming came into view.
He still wasn’t sure what he’d do if the Fireflies reached out with some idea for a cure. But now wasn’t the time for his fucking worries, not when his kid was panicking.
“Babygirl,” he said, hands hovering. Usually, she had no trouble recognizing him. There hadn’t been a single moment since he rescued her from that goddamn operating room that she’d flinched away from his touch, but maybe something had changed as the drugs wore off.
Maybe it was only just now sinking in what he’d done.
Then she sobbed, “Joel,” her gaze glued on his reflection in the glass, and every worry fled. He gently took her by the shoulders and pulled her toward him as she rolled to bury her face against his chest, her hands gripping fistfuls of his shirt. With a quiet sigh, he wrapped his arms around her and held her tight, giving her a soft back scratch, the way he’d taken to doing after Silver Lake. It hadn’t come as a surprise, the realization that she’d rarely ever felt a gentle touch. But it had shaken him when he realized she wanted those gentle touches from him.
A drastic change, given their first meeting.
“What color?” he asked when her sobs had faded to simple gasps.
She wiped her nose on his shirt, but he didn’t say anything about it. It wasn’t like they had a wealth of tissues on hand, and snot was hardly the worst thing he’d ever had on him.
“Yellow,” she managed at last, watery and thin.
With a hum of acknowledgement, he carried right on with what he was doing, her breath hot and damp on his chest. “I have some ideas for our house,” he said into the quiet. Sometimes, when she said “yellow,” him talking first helped bring her back. It was only during a red that she wanted nothing but for him to sing.
That had been an accident, her witnessing him singing. He’d thought she was asleep while he kept watch, resting his hand on her back when she’d seemed to be slipping into a bad dream. Singing, he’d thought, might help stave off the nightmare.
It had, just not in the way Joel had planned. It wasn’t like he’d wanted her to wake up.
She hummed, uptick at the end proving it her yellow version of a question.
“Yeah, in Jackson,” he said, gaze returning to the window. He wished the moon weren’t so bright; it made it hard to see past their reflections to the night beyond. “We can start with your room, paint it whatever color you want, build some shelves for all the pun books you’ll write. Doubt that old computer would still work, but if it does, I can teach you to play Minesweeper. Tommy used to get pissed I was always better at it than him.”
She made a sound that could be called a laugh, if he was feeling generous.
“Yeah, he was just too impatient about it, clicking squares too fast. You could be good at it, f’you put your mind to it.”
Her hands finally loosened their grip on his shirt, a breath shuddering out of her.
“You don’t like purple, I know,” he continued, remembering her complaints about the coat Maria had found her in the early days of his time on that mattress in the basement. He’d been fading, and he’d known Ellie knew it since her ramblings had taken on new speed, words falling out of her mouth almost too fast for him to understand. Like she hoped that, the more she talked, the longer he would hang on. He’d certainly tried. “Or ‘super fucking eggplant.’ Not really sure what Jackson has in the way of paint options, but I’m sure I’ll be stuck on patrol sooner or later. Could poke around in some Home Depots.”
“Could I go with you?” she asked.
It figured the first thing she’d talk about would be going on patrol with him. He wanted her in school, but that conversation could wait. “We’ll see,” he said.
She was quiet, her hands flat to his chest, breathing in time with him. It seemed to calm her, though only sometimes did she seem aware of her mimicry. “I like blue.”
“Blue it is,” he said.
“Do you like blue?”
He hummed. “Ain’t bad. I like yellow best, though.”
She tipped her head back to squint at him. “Yellow? Seriously?”
“Hey, no dissing ’til you’ve seen it.”
“I’ve seen yellow before, Joel.”
“But not my yellow.”
“Sounds like a piss joke’s in there somewhere.”
“Oughta scrub your mouth out with soap for that one, kid. Yellow’s a good color.”
Rolling her eyes, she shifted around until she was comfortable, muttering under her breath about weird old people and their weird old people colors. Only once she was situated, all but a burrito in his spare shirt, did she finally take a long, deep breath.
“It was Marlene,” she said. “Not D—not Silver Lake.”
He was pretty sure his heart stopped beating for a too-long moment. “What about her?” he asked, voice gone too even. He knew Ellie noticed, since she started patting his sides, as if trying to calm a spooking horse.
“When they wanted to take me back for the operation,” she said, matching his voice and its evenness, likely without noticing. She really was picking up too many tics from him. “She pushed my hair aside to tie the hospital gown on, and then stuck me with the drug while my back was turned. She didn’t even tell me why, and refused to answer when I asked where you were. Even said I wasn’t your concern anymore.”
“Not my fucking concern,” he muttered. If he wasn’t so eager to get the hell away from Salt Lake City, he might just turn around to shoot her.
“It was the stupidest thing she could’ve told me,” Ellie said, so he forced himself back into the car with his kid. “I knew it was a fucking lie.”
He pressed a kiss into her hair, pressed his nose to her skull. She smelled like the hospital, but he had no clue where her backpack with her lavender soap was. It had been nowhere to be found in the hospital, though it wasn’t as if he’d looked especially hard for that when Ellie was who knew where doing who knew what at the time. “Good.”
“In my dream I could feel her moving my hair again, and this time I knew what was coming, but it was like she’d already drugged me. It was like I was paralyzed.”
He moved his hand to her hair, gently combing his fingers through it. “Could’ve been your hair tickling your neck in your sleep that made the dream come.”
She inhaled through her nose and held it, then said, “That makes sense,” on a sigh. “But God, talk about fucking lame.”
“Ain’t lame,” he said. “It’s your brain processing shit it shouldn’t have to.”
“I wish it would hurry the hell up.”
He snorted. “A ponytail might bother you, since the hair would tickle your neck, even during the day.”
“I’m not leaving my hair down. Sounds like a recipe for disaster, Joel.”
“Then we could—”
“I’m not cutting it short, either.”
“Wasn’t gonna suggest that. How about we try braiding it?”
After a moment of silence, she tipped her head back to look at him again. “You know how to braid with your big sausage fingers?”
Rolling his eyes, he tucked her head back against his chest. “See if I even bother now.”
“When did you learn how to braid? Tess teach you?”
“No,” he said. “No, I learned how to for Sarah. Granted, I’m probably out of practice, and your hair’s a bit different—her mama was Black, so Sarah had really curly hair. Be a bit of a learning curve with you, but if I could learn once, I can learn again.”
The silence this time was contemplative, so he let her sit on the idea, watching the night outside the car. With where the moon sat, they’d hopefully have at least a few more hours before dawn, when he’d planned to drive the rest of the way to Jackson. If the car made it that far, anyway. Its engine had been unhappy most of yesterday. Back in ye olden days, he’d have fixed it, but a thorough search of the car had proven there was little in the way of tools anywhere in it. It hadn’t even had a jack.
“Okay,” Ellie said, breaking the quiet. “I’m kinda curious to see how epically you fail.”
Snorting, he patted her back. “You’ll have to sit up and turn around. It might tickle your neck at first, but let me know if you need to stop.”
Nodding, she sat cross-legged and rested her hands on her thighs while Joel shifted to sit on his knees. It wasn’t exactly comfortable, his head bent forward in the crush of the ceiling, but he’d sooner apologize to Marlene than complain about a crick in his neck.
“Tilt your head back a bit,” he said, guiding her the way he had a few times after one gory experience or another, when she had too much blood in her hair to get it all out on her own. When he peeked, he saw her eyes closed, corners of her mouth curled in a tiny smile. The kind of expression she typically wore while he did a Dad Thing, as she named them. She never called him out on it in the moment—likely because she enjoyed it too much to risk making him stop—but the teasing was relentless after the fact.
It wasn’t like he minded. He’d spent twenty years believing he’d never get to do Dad Things again.
By the time Sarah was fourteen, she’d learned how to do her own hair more often than not, and didn’t always want it braided. And while he’d encouraged her independence, he’d always savored the moments she asked for his help when she had a mind for something new. From box braids to cornrows, fishbone braids to beaded Fulani braids, if she wanted it, he learned it.
For now, he’d start simple with just three sections, the kind he’d watched Tess give herself, her fingers flying over her hair. Sometimes he’d felt compelled to ask her if she wanted his help, but he’d never allowed the offer to escape.
There were a lot of things he regretted with Tess, but now was absolutely not the time.
He went slow, narrating his movements so Ellie wouldn’t ever be surprised. While she flinched from time to time as he weaved the three sections down her back, while hair tickling her skin made her hands flex on her thighs, she never asked him to stop. Never even opened her eyes. At the end, he reached into his pocket for a hair tie. After Silver Lake, she’d once gotten vomit in her hair when he hadn’t been fast enough to pull it out of her face, so he’d taken to carrying extras on him. Just in case.
“All done,” he said.
She reached back, hand drifting from the top of her head down to the hair tie. He’d left as little hair at the end as possible, catching up all the baby hairs at her neckline that he could. It’d be easier if he could get his hands on barrettes, but there’d be time to find some.
“Thanks,” Ellie said, her eyes catching his in the glass window, just briefly enough he could see her smile. Then she focused on her own reflection, turning her head this way and that. “Not bad for a rusty old shovel like you.”
With a snort, he tugged on the end of the braid, making her grin. “You’re welcome, you little miscreant.”