Archive of Our Own ^beta

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.”

Chapter Text

The house across from Tommy and Maria’s was waiting for them when they got back to Jackson. They’d ditched the car when, with one enormous gasp Ellie proclaimed sounded like a Dad Sneeze—yet another thing she teased Joel for, though he always just countered with a boast about his superior lung capacity—it rolled to a stop and refused to go any further. Walking had been nice, anyway, since they’d found Ellie new clothes and a good pair of boots after raiding a few shops in a tiny town with an antler kink.

But while the house was ready for them, Ellie didn’t quite seem ready for it.

For the first three weeks, she refused to sleep in her own bed, in her own room. He’d thought she might want the privacy, the time away from him, but she only went through the motions of getting ready for bed before, without fail, she snuck into his. On their fourth night in Jackson, after she fell asleep slumped against his shoulder on the couch while they watched a movie, he’d simply carried her into his room to do away with the pretense altogether. It wasn’t like he minded it. It settled something in him, the knowledge she still felt safest when he was only an arm’s length away.

After his month of parental leave—he’d forever be indebted to Maria for finagling that, though he had a feeling it had more to do with the way Ellie had clung to him when the topic came up at dinner in the mess hall—he started work building. The city council didn’t quite trust him enough to send him on patrols yet, but a hammer, nails, and planks of wood seemed innocuous enough.

He certainly didn’t mind stretching the contractor muscles again. It was still summer, so Ellie came along with him when he went to build a trio of trellises for the community garden; a cluster of dining tables to make room for new residents; a shed by the stables after one patrol returned with new horses and tack. But it wasn’t long before he had his own little clientele, projects for people rather than just the city council.

The topic of school wasn’t broached until he was building a desk for the new math teacher who arrived from the Los Angeles QZ a few months before Joel and Ellie showed up. Joel had converted the house’s garage into his workshop, since it wasn’t like he’d ever have a car to park in it, or enough shit to box up and store out here. And while he sanded the desk, Ellie rolled around on her stool, stomach flat to the seat cushion, pushed along by her feet. With the glee on her face, he figured this was as good a time as any to bring up a topic she’d protest about.

“School’s gonna start in August,” he said, casually, keeping his gaze on the desk.

“Poor fucks,” Ellie said.

“You’d probably be a sophomore.”

“The fuck’s a sophomore?”

“Second year of high school.”

Her spinning stopped, though she had to crane her head to see him around the trunk he was in the middle of building. “Okay?” she said, drawing out the vowels.

“You should go,” he said. “Be good for you to learn the truth about the world, rather than FEDRA’s fascist propaganda. Math could be useful, too. I use it every day.”

“Two plus two equals four.” She rolled her eyes and disappeared back behind the trunk. “I’d be willing to bet I know more than any of those other kids.”

“Bet with what, air?”

“Rabbits and hogs and elk, if you’d ever let me go hunting.”

He wasn’t about to touch that topic with a barge pole while trying to get her past the brick wall that was school. “When kids turn sixteen here, they start learning a trade, start going on patrols in groups to learn how it works. But you have to be in school for that to happen.”

“I’m already learning a trade, Professor Joel,” she said and zoomed toward him on the stool so he had to roll his own out of the way. She laughed in glee up until she slammed into the wall with a solid thud. Rubbing her head, she glanced over at him, not in the least bit bashful. “You’re teaching me how to build shit.”

He snorted. “Bob the Builder you ain’t just because you know a Phillips from a Flat-head.”

She squinted at him. “I’m not who the what?”

“You’ll have just a year in school,” he said, not allowing himself to get sidetracked. “Just a year and then you’ll never have to go again, but you’ll have gotten to know the other kids your age, you’ll know about shit FEDRA didn’t deem important better’n I could teach it, and you’ll have your pick of jobs because people’ll know you.”

“They already know me because they know you.”

“Ellie, you know what I mean.”

She sat up at last, folding her arms over her chest. It didn’t quite seem like stubbornness; more like she needed to hold something, lest she give away her anxiety by fidgeting. It made him set aside the sandpaper, made him roll his stool closer until their knees collided. Her hair was twisted up in a bun Maria had taught her how to do, flyaways caught beneath a half-dozen sparkly barrettes all over her head, so not even a one could tickle her skin. He’d had to trade a bottle of antibiotics stolen from the Fireflies for them, but it was worth it for the calm it brought her.

“I’ve got three reasons,” she said.

He nodded. “Lay ’em on me.”

“Reason number one: I hated school back in the QZ,” she said, raising one finger. “I never fit in there, and I sure as shit wouldn’t fit in here.”

“You don’t know that,” he said.

“None of these kids grew up like I did!”

“The Wilsons down the road?” he said, angling one thumb in their direction. “All four of those kids were born in a QZ before their mama left with them. Ms. Barajas’s daughter was taken from her and tossed into FEDRA school before she managed to get her out and escape. The eldest Simms sister was in FEDRA school before she broke out, found her sisters in toddler daycare, and snuck out with them on her back. Mr. Colson’s son—”

“How the hell do you even know all that?” Ellie interrupted, her eyes wide.

He smirked. It had taken effort, relearning how to talk to people like they were ordinary people in an ordinary town, not survivors trapped in a QZ who would sooner shoot you for your ration cards than chat you up while standing in line for dinner in the mess hall. But like the muscle of parenting, all it needed was a bit of stretching to remember how it worked. “While you’re busy daydreaming, I’m talking to people. It’s easier than you think. Just takes a little practice.”

She huffed, rolling her eyes, but raised a second finger. “Reason number two: What if someone sees my arm?”

It was hot out, seeing as it was early July, but she still wore long sleeves. It was safer all around if no one ever saw the bite; they'd both agreed on that during the hike here. Joel wasn’t sure if Maria knew, but he had a feeling she didn’t, or they likely wouldn’t still be in Jackson.

“You don’t think your sleeves will be enough?” he asked, plum out of ideas that might work to get rid of it. It had kept him up at night their first week here. People were more likely to shoot and ask questions later if they saw something that so boldly screamed of an encounter with an infected’s teeth.

“I mean, sure, but they won’t always stay down, Joel. Like if I raise my hand to ask a question.” She raised her hand to demonstrate. The sleeve slipped down her arm but stopped shy of her scar, keeping it hidden.

He arched a brow at it, then at her. “You sure about that?”

She huffed again and shook her arm, forcing the sleeve down to her elbow. “Don’t think you’d take kindly to someone seeing that and putting a bullet—”

He covered her mouth with one hand, sawdust and calluses and all. “Don’t even fucking joke about that, Ellie.”

Gripping his wrist, she pulled his hand away to wrap it in both of hers. “But you get my point, right? People wouldn’t ask questions before doing what neither of us want.”

Sighing, he looked down at their hands, hers so fucking tiny around his. With her personality, it was sometimes easy to forget just how small she was. “Maybe Tommy will have some ideas.”

She made a choking sound in the back of her throat, though when he glanced up, she looked more frustrated than anything else. She knew Tommy was aware of her condition—she’d overhead Joel telling him, after all—but that didn’t mean she was particularly eager to talk to him about anything, if at all. Not yet, anyway. Joel could see Tommy working at it when they sat down for dinner every night. It always made his chest hurt, the knowledge his brother wanted to be an uncle to Ellie. One look, and he’d known who Ellie was to Joel. He’d welcomed her with open arms without Joel even needing to say a word.

“Third reason,” Joel said.

Her grip tightened on his hand, nails digging in almost to the point of pain. He said nothing, only covered her hands with his free one, brushing his thumb over her knuckles.

“Davidwasateacher.”

The words bled together, she said them so fast, but he didn’t need her to repeat herself. He closed his eyes, clenched his jaw, and wished again that he had been the one to kill David, if only to make sure David felt as much pain in the process as possible. It had helped Ellie to be the one to kill him, to reassure herself that he was truly dead. But it didn’t stop Joel from wishing he could have been there to prevent the need from ever arising.

“We can make sure your teachers are women,” he said, opening his eyes to find her staring at him with laser focus. “And Mr. Garcia, the new math teacher? He’s transgender. It means he was born a boy in a girl’s body.”

Ellie blinked, losing some of her intensity, and glanced past him to the desk. “I didn’t know people could do that.”

He smiled. “Maybe not in a QZ, but here? He’s safe to be who he is.”

“Huh.” She smiled, small and fragile. “Learn something new every day.”

“And you’ll learn even more in school.”

With a groan, she zoomed away on her stool.

# # #

In the end, it was Tommy who convinced Ellie to go to school by introducing her to a few of the kids her age. One girl, in particular, seemed to catch Ellie’s eye, made Ellie’s entire face go bright red before she ducked her head and pressed herself up against Joel’s side, as if to hide behind his bulk. Joel’s gaydar went off like it hadn’t since he met Bill and Frank for the very first time, before the two of them had felt comfortable enough around him and Tess to even look at each other for longer than a second.

Joel didn’t press. They didn’t keep secrets, so Ellie would tell him when she was ready.

The morning of her first day of school, Ellie changed her shirt a dozen times before deciding on a dandelion yellow one he hadn’t expected her to choose when they raided that antler-loving town. She’d raised her brows at him, but he’d shaken his head, said, “Not my yellow.” With an eyeroll, she’d stuffed it in her pack all the same.

The sleeve of it bulked around the sweatband Tommy had found for her to wear over her scar, but if anyone asked, she could simply roll up her sleeve to show it off. Tommy had given her nine, each with a different planet on them. Today’s was Pluto.

“It’s a Pluto kinda day, Joel,” Ellie had said when he asked.

Ellie had slept in Joel’s bed with him last night, for the first time in just over two weeks. The hours she spent at school would be the longest they’d be apart since they met, and he knew he wasn’t alone with the separation anxiety. So while she was tying her shoelaces, he fetched his little pocket notebook from the drawer in the kitchen and flipped through his notes.

Then he poked his head into the foyer. “Want me to braid your hair?”

She paused, the bunny ears of her shoelaces pinched between her thumbs and index fingers, and looked up at him. Her jaw was clenched, her lips pressed white, and he was reminded all over again of dropping Sarah off for her first day of preschool. Sarah had been loud about her fear of him leaving, but it was no surprise Ellie suffered in silence.

Dropping her gaze back to her shoes, she completed the knot. “Sure.”

The nonchalance was obvious in her voice, but he only smiled and gestured for her to turn around on the bench he’d built with the cubbies for their shoes. “Haven’t tried this one before, but should be easy enough. Hold this.”

She raised her hand, catching the small notebook between her fingers, and then blinked at it in surprise. “The fuck is this?”

“Notes. Hold ’em where I can see ’em.”

“The fuck you have notes for?” she asked, even as she let him angle her hand so he could see what he’d written down.

“To braid hair. This one’s a fishtail.”

“No shit, Sherlock. I can read.”

“Do you even know who Sherlock is?”

She shrugged. “Maria said that to Tommy once.”

Joel snorted. “Promised I’d learn how to braid your hair, didn’t I? Now hold still.”

She was silent the entire braid, her fingers flexing on the notebook but leaving it where Joel had put it. It was only as he was looping the hair tie around the end that she said, “So you’ve been asking people for, what, tips?”

“Yep. All done.”

She raised her free hand to her hair, brushing her fingertips over the braid with her head bowed, so he couldn’t see her face. “But…why?”

He plucked the notebook from her hand and rested his palm on her head, fingertips brushing her forehead. If he couldn’t see her frown, he could at least feel it. “Because that’s what dads do for their daughters, kiddo.”

With a shaky inhale, she whirled to hug him, pressing her face into his hip. He rested his hand on the back of her head. Sooner or later, she’d get used to him referring to her like that. She’d had this same reaction when he let her look over her school registration forms to find he’d put her last name down as Miller and marked himself as her dad.

Sure, he sometimes still got misty-eyed about it, but he was better at hiding it.

“You ready?” he asked when she finally let out a long sigh, pushing away to scrub at her eyes. They were a little damp, but not enough for anyone else to notice.

“Are you sure I can’t just go to work with you like over the summer?”

Tommy knocked on the front door before he could answer, hollering about Ellie being late for her first day, but Joel let him stew in favor of kissing her head. “Positive.”

“You’re no fun.”

“I’m plenty of fun.”

Scoffing, she tore open the door to Tommy and Maria waiting on their front porch, Maria looking about to pop. Any longer and she might have to be induced. Sarah’s mama had, though at least back then they’d had the good drugs.

“Do you think Joel’s fun, Tommy?” Ellie asked, marching out the front door so quickly she forgot her backpack. Joel scooped it up and slung it over his shoulder, smiling at Maria as he shut the door behind him.

Tommy guffawed about Ellie’s question, predictably. “Ain’t ever heard Joel’s name in the same sentence as the word ‘fun’.”

“When would I have had the time to be fun while mucking up your messes?”

“I was only trying to be an example!”

Chapter Text

With the temperature dropping, construction work slowed down, which meant Joel was given more patrol rotations. Ellie insisted up, down, and sideways that she’d be fine—she could, after all, spend nights with Tommy and Maria and their daughter while he was gone. But as winter approached, with it came nightmares.

Most were yellow. The first red in months came with an early snowfall in October.

The next morning, after seeing Ellie off to school—she’d declined his offer to play hooky, since Mr. Garcia was handing out graded geometry tests and she had a bet with a friend to see who’d get the better score—Joel made an immediate U-turn back for his street to talk to Maria about rearranging his patrol schedules. He hadn’t told her exactly why Ellie needed him at home when she was, and Maria hadn’t asked. From the bits and pieces Ellie had shared over the months, Maria knew enough to understand winter would naturally be a difficult time of year for her. Especially this first one in the wake of Silver Lake.

Now, Joel was only gone when Ellie was at school, and if anything happened, Mr. Garcia knew to call for Tommy or Maria.

But it wasn’t until December that Joel began to feel like Ellie might learn winter didn’t have to be nothing but bad memories and worse nightmares. Predictably, she’d gotten the idea for a Christmas tree from Tommy, so now Joel trudged through three feet of snow with a saw over one shoulder and a hyper fifteen-year-old dragging him along by the hand.

“You just had to teach her that song,” Joel muttered.

Tommy shrugged, hands tucked in his coat pockets. “Never got it to take with Sarah. Think she had better ideas for pestering you than even I could come up with.”

“Shit!” Ellie whirled to face them, cheeks pink, eyes bright. “I lost count!”

“You were on fifty-six,” Joel said.

“Suppose you’ll have to start over,” Tommy said, grunting when Joel elbowed him.

“Well shit, guess you’re right!” With a wink, Ellie whirled away. “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer!”

Joel managed to get through finding a tree without shoving his brother into a snowdrift or dumping snow down the back of his kid’s jacket, but it was a near thing. And by the time the tree was decorated in the living room of their house—the lights provided by Maria, the decorations collected by Ellie and Tommy somehow from somewhere—he’d decided not to mind it. Not when Ellie inhaled deep every time she saw it, smile big and toothy.

# # #

“You ain’t gonna be late, y’know,” he said, leaning in the doorway of her room while she dug through her closet with a near-frantic speed.

“Psh, I know that. I want to be early.”

He smirked, watching her whirl toward her mirror to hold up a green sweater, then a red sweater, before tossing them both away with a muffled screech. Sarah had had a few crushes over the years, but she hadn’t gotten to the dating stage before she died. The rule had been that she had to be able to legally drive herself before he’d feel comfortable with her going on dates, whether that be age sixteen or age twenty-five. Joel figured the apocalypse made that rule null and void, so he’d made an exception. Besides, Ellie and Dina wouldn’t be alone, and Ellie deserved to experience something normal.

It still hurt, sometimes, to know Sarah would never reach the stage where she panicked over what clothes to wear on a date, never reach the stage where she watched her own kids do the same. But like with most things, Ellie softened the pain.

She finally decided on a honey yellow sweater, though he’d told her it wasn’t his yellow, either, when she found it in the donations bin. While she glanced over her selection of boots, he plucked his notebook out of his back pocket and flipped to the right page.

“What’re you doing with your hair?” he asked, all casual.

“Haven’t decided,” she said, tucking it behind one ear. It had gotten long in the half-year they’d been here, just past her shoulder blades now.

“Want me to braid it?”

Plucking up a pair of black boots with shiny silver buckles, she plopped onto her ass to tug them on, eyeing him all the while. “You got more tips, didn’t you?”

He shrugged one shoulder. “Never know when they might come in handy.”

“Hmm.” She looked down to lace up her left boot. “What’s this one called?”

“French rope, apparently.”

“Lame.”

“Yeah, could be named better.”

“The French,” she said the way Brits used to say “Yanks.” “Did I tell you Mrs. Holloway taught us about the Dancing Plague yesterday? Fuckton of people in some region of France just started dancing and didn’t stop until they died.”

He raised a brow. “Pretty sure dancing ain’t a plague.”

“That’s what I said!” She yanked on her right boot. “Imagine if infected just up and started dancing. Fucking freaky, man. But nah, really happened. People blamed the devil. History's so fucking cool.”

“No wonder FEDRA didn't teach it, huh?”

She snorted. “What’s the braid look like?”

“I wouldn’t even know how to describe it.”

Lacing up her boot, she glanced at the clock on her nightstand. “If it sucks, I still have time to do something else.”

“Ye of little faith, daughter of mine.”

“Nay, old man of mine,” she said, cheeks going red. An improvement, at least. He’d started calling her his daughter more, hoping she’d get used to it. Hoping she’d realize he truly meant it. “I have exactly the correct amount of faith in your sausage fingers.”

Rolling his eyes, he waved for her to sit down at her desk and gave her the notebook to hold up. The youngest Simms sister had let him practice on her hair while the eldest talked him through the steps, but he still worried about fucking it up. At least Ellie didn’t fidget, content as ever when he was doing a Dad Thing. In the black screen of her computer, he could see her eyes close, a smile curling the corners of her mouth.

And this time, he’d brought a hand mirror. When she turned to her floor-length mirror, he held it up so she could see the back of her head. Neat, tidy, and pretty, by any standards. When Ellie met his gaze in the mirror, a tiny grin on her mouth, he grinned right back.

Tommy was waiting right where Joel had left him on the front porch, but now he had Simone with him, wrapped up in her winter onesie and tucked into the carrier on his chest. Tommy grinned when he saw them, ducking his head to Simone’s ear to sing-song, “Look at your little cousin off on her date.” Simone, predictably, gummed a smile at Ellie, latching on tight when Ellie offered her index finger and shaking it like a maraca of cracking knuckles.

“What’s she doing here?” Ellie asked, kissing Simone’s head in distraction as she pulled her finger out of harm’s way.

“Maria had to run to the neighbor’s,” Tommy said as he fell into step beside them down the road. “Told her I couldn’t miss seeing you off on your very first date, Ell’s bells, and when Simone heard that, she insisted on accompanying us.”

Rolling her eyes, Ellie looped her arm with Joel’s and tucked her hands into her pockets. She hadn’t ever come out to Joel, not the way another teenager might have. Certainly not the way Joel had in ye olden days. Ellie had simply come home the other day, announced Dina had asked her on a sleigh ride Christmas Eve date, and asked for permission to go. That had been that. 

“Did Sarah find you this annoying, Tommy?” Ellie asked.

“Yes,” Joel said right as Tommy said, “No.”

Tommy covered Simone’s ears. “No disparagement in front of my child!”

Joel shrugged. “She should know her father’s crimes.”

Ellie tried to stifle a snort, but didn’t quite succeed.

Eyeing Joel, Tommy reached into his coat pocket and held out a sprig of mistletoe to Ellie. “For you and the little miss.”

Ellie slowly took it with a frown, looking from it to Tommy, then up at Joel. “I think he might be lapping you in the run for oldest man in Jackson, Joel.”

“Again with the disparagement!”

“You just gave me a bunch of leaves, Tommy.”

“That’s mistletoe, kiddo,” Joel said.

With a yelp, she hit a bullseye on the back of Tommy’s head.

Chapter Text

“Does Ellie know?” Tommy asked while they sat in his living room playing cribbage, Simone happy in her Inner Sanctum, as Ellie called the baby activity center with its bouncy seat. Maria still wasn’t back, but she’d sent word she would meet them at the dining hall for dinner, seeing as it was Christmas Eve. The first for both Simone and Ellie full stop, and the first for Ellie and Joel here in Jackson.

The first for Joel since Sarah.

The sleighs were due back soon, now that the sun neared the horizon. Joel could admit he was starting to feel antsy. This was Ellie’s first time outside Jackson without him. Sure, she was with five other people in her sleigh, and her sleigh was one of eight that went beyond the walls, and she had her pistol in the holster on her belt, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t worry. There was a constant thrum of it every time she was out of sight. Sometimes it was just louder than other times, like when she was outside Jackson without him for the very first time.

“Know what?” Joel asked, trying to focus on the game and limit his peeks at the clock to once every minute. Every thirty seconds was excessive, even he could admit that.

“About you?”

“Nah, hasn’t come up yet.” He’d originally planned to come out to Ellie when she came out to him, but seeing as how she’d never officially done so, he’d never gotten the chance.

“Not even with her date today?”

He smirked. “My kid doesn’t believe in coming out speeches, Tommy.”

Tommy clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Should’ve expected that, knowing her.”

“I’ll say it when I say it. See no need to blurt it out ’fore there’s a point. Not like I have plans to date anyone here, man or woman.”

“Dunno,” Tommy said, in that little chiding tone he liked to use when he knew something Joel didn’t and couldn’t wait to spill the beans. “I see the way Martin looks at you.”

Joel squinted at him. “Mr. Garcia?”

“You know any other single Martins in town?”

Sighing, Joel glared back down at his cards. “Ain’t looking for it, Tommy. It’s barely been a year since T—Well, since.”

That seemed to take the wind out of Tommy’s sails, to Joel’s relief. Joel hadn’t been with Sarah’s mama very long before she left, giving him full custody of a four-month-old baby. He’d been with Tess from nearly the start of the pandemic. There were still nights he rolled over in bed, thinking he’d find her when he reached out. There were still nights he woke up feeling the phantom touch of her spooning him.

An hour later, Joel left Tommy to see to Simone’s diaper and made the walk to the front gates alone but for the other families drifting out to collect their people. He knew plenty of them by now, but beyond vague pleasantries, he wasn’t in the mood for chatting. All he wanted was Ellie back here, safe and sound.

The sleighs returned solo or in pairs, four, five, six, seven. Minutes passed while parents greeted their kids, listened to excited chatter, led the way to the mess hall. Joel, Dina’s parents, an uncle of a couple boys, Mr. McMillan’s spouse, and Ms. Barajas’s daughter waited, and waited, and waited, and by the time Tommy and Maria caught up, the sun had set.

“Where’s Ell’s bells?” Tommy asked, clapping Joel on the back in a way that might have sent him stumbling were he not braced for impact. What that impact was remained to be seen.

“She ain’t back yet,” he said, willing the gates to open. The guards on the wall scanned the land beyond with binoculars, but when they all shook their heads at their commander, Joel didn’t wait for the announcement.

He sprinted to the stables, yelling at Tommy to grab the rifles while he saddled the horses. By the time Tommy was back, Maria had found him to say she’d scrambled the search parties, but Joel didn’t wait for them, either. He simply took the rifle from Tommy, swung up into the saddle, and heeled his horse out the gates.

Maps of the sleighs’ paths had been passed out to all the families going on the rides, and Joel had memorized Ellie’s the first night she brought it home. The paths had been plowed, made clear by volunteers in the week leading up to the rides, but the packed snow was just thick enough that he could make out the sleigh’s trail. Distantly, he could hear the search parties in his and Tommy's wake, fanning out under some kind of sweep in case the sleigh had gone wildly off course, but Joel just relied on instinct.

It took him all the way to the missing sleigh, now empty, the horses who’d pulled it gone. When his horse threw up her head, he reined her to a halt and dismounted, his stomach dropping when he saw blood splattered on the snow and the straps that had held the sleigh’s horses ripped apart. As if the horses had bolted.

Heart in his throat, Joel knelt to find the blood frozen. Several hours old, at the very least. “Shit, Tommy, it’s—”

“I know,” Tommy said, face pale. “We’ll find her, big brother.”

Yeah, they would. Joel would accept nothing else.

Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath, trying to calm his racing heart, and stood back up. He knew what the treads of Ellie’s boots looked like, but Tommy found the prints first.

“This way!” he called to Joel, leading his horse by the reins as they pushed into the pine trees, snow growing so deep it was near impossible to walk in just their boots. To Joel’s relief, it led them in the opposite direction of the largest blood patches, though droplets of red led them right up to the first clicker body.

“Fuck!” Joel kicked it to its back, finding a bullet hole in its forehead. That was Ellie’s handiwork. Ms. Barajas had a rifle, not a pistol.

“Another two over here,” Tommy said, ten yards away. “How the hell did they even slip past the scouts? We’ve been sending people out here every day to maintain the paths.”

The lump in Joel’s throat wouldn’t let him speak when he found another cluster of footprints, the group heading south. If he remembered correctly, there was an old cabin this direction, a place to seek shelter. From the trail of blood amongst the footprints, it seemed they’d need it. Joel didn’t even wait for Tommy before he took off as fast as the deep snow allowed.

Ellie had to be alive. If she wasn’t, he wouldn’t be long for the world. He could not outlive two daughters, not even for Tommy.

And Tommy likely knew it, since he spoke to Joel, rambling about nothing, or perhaps something. Joel wasn’t really listening, the rumble of Tommy’s voice nothing against the frantic beating of his damn useless heart.

Finally, the cabin appeared, faint flashlight beams coming from beyond the grimy windows. Joel dropped the reins, tore up the front stoop, and kicked open the door, reeling to a halt at a rifle pointed right in his face. When Ms. Barajas recognized him, though, she immediately swung it away, gasping his name.

“Where’s Ellie?” he demanded, scanning the faces for his kid. He saw a pale, shaken Dina, two boys he recognized from Ellie’s grade clinging to one another under a blanket, and Ms. Barajas herself. No one else.

“She—” Ms. Barajas cut herself off when Tommy stepped in after Joel, swallowing hard. “Mr. McMillan was bitten, so I shot him. Ellie volunteered to bury his body in one of the old trapper holes, since I couldn’t leave the boys—Henry broke his ankle, and Peter might have a concussion—but she hasn’t come back yet.”

“Which direction?” he asked, storming back out the door.

“East!” she yelled after him. “She went east. You can follow the trail there!”

“Joel!” Tommy shouted, trudging through the snow after him. “Careful around here. There’s old trapper holes all over.”

If he’d wanted to spare the time, he’d have whirled to shake Tommy by the lapels. He settled for snapping, “You didn’t cover them up?”

“You think we’re fucking idiots? Of course we fucking did, but the wooden lids might not be strong enough to hold two hundred pounds of panicking dad, so just step carefully.”

When Joel found a drag mark through the snow, a body hauled along by a too-small girl, he almost felt sick, but vomiting would take time he didn’t have to spare. Of all the fucking sleighs to get caught by a trio of clickers, it just had to be the one carrying his kid. No, he didn’t want any other parents to have to deal with the fear rotting in every fiber of his being, but Ellie needed a goddamn break. Not a fucking attack on her first fucking date in the one fucking place that should have been fucking safe.

“Ellie!” he shouted, following the trail. It was unlikely she’d want to put Mr. McMillan in a hole too near the cabin so the other kids wouldn’t see. He swept his flashlight back and forth, heart pounding so fast his hands shook even as he took every step carefully, feeling the ground before he put his weight down. “Ellie! Where are you?”

“Ellie!” Tommy yelled right along with him, their voices echoing in the too-quiet forest.

And then there was a sudden break in the snow, twenty feet ahead, a perfect circle of dark earth. Joel left his heart behind as he walked as quickly as he dared, shouting her name. But when he made it to the hole in one piece, he nearly leapt in without a second thought at the sight of Ellie. She was as bundled up as when he waved goodbye hours ago, and still shivering, but she looked dead to the world.

It was only Tommy’s grip that kept him from jumping in. “Be fucking sensible!” Tommy snapped. “You’re no use to her if you fall in and break your damn leg!”

“Then help me in!” He dumped his rifle in the snow and looked around, hoping to find something he could use to lower himself in.

“Just don’t fucking jump,” Tommy said, catching Joel’s eye long enough to make clear the unspoken threat. Folding his arms over his chest, Joel turned back to the hole, listening to Tommy trudge back through the snow for their horses. The time it took was time Joel didn’t think Ellie had to spare—he had no idea how long she’d been lying in there—but he let Tommy tie the rope tight around his chest, under his armpits, and secure it to his gelding’s saddle horn. Then he rappelled in, landing on a stiff body he realized might be Mr. McMillan. The man was hardly larger than Ellie, skinny as a string bean.

He stepped right off him to kneel by Ellie’s prone form, tearing his glove off with his teeth and shoving aside her scarf to find her pulse. When he felt it under his fingertips, he felt like a puppet with cut strings, dropping his head and sucking in as deep a breath as he could manage. They didn’t have time for fucking tears, so he blinked them away and plucked off Ellie’s earmuffs to smooth his fingers over her skull. She had a nasty bump, but that wasn’t what made his heart stop.

It was the chunk of wood buried in her abdomen, the blood soaking her honey yellow sweater still warm, which meant it was likely still seeping out. It had begun to drip down her sides, clumping in the dirt below her.

“Joel, is she okay?” Tommy said, enunciation suggesting this wasn’t the first time he’d asked. 

“No,” Joel said, brushing her hair out of her face. Her skin was cold, her breathing thready. “No, she’s bleeding. Still shivering, though.”

Tommy swore, low and sharp. “Okay, she’ll be okay. Pick her up and hand her up to me, and then I’ll pull you back out.”

“You got bandages? I wanna keep the wood from moving.”

“Lemme check.” A clink of a saddlebag buckle, and then Tommy said, “Here.”

Joel caught the wad of cloth, fixing his gaze on Ellie as he unrolled it. “You’ll be all right, babygirl,” he murmured, hating to move her because he knew it’d hurt, but he had no choice. At least the wood hadn’t gone all the way through. “Just hold on, I’ve gotcha.”

As soon as the bandage was as tight as he dared make it, he wrapped her in his coat and scooped her up. She had gained weight since they settled in Jackson, but not enough, in his opinion. Wordlessly, he stepped right back onto Mr. McMillan to use as added height to give Ellie to Tommy, who had to flatten onto his stomach to reach her. Ellie made a low, pained sound when Tommy took her, though Joel could see how carefully his brother handled her. As soon as she was safe on level ground, Tommy returned to help Joel climb up out of the hole, too.

His mare had followed Tommy’s gelding, but the snow was too deep for Joel to feel safe riding her yet. He tossed the reins to Tommy, scooped Ellie up, and held her tight against his chest as they made their way back to the cabin. Tommy veered off to let Ms. Barajas know what was up and reassure her they’d send the search parties her way, but Joel didn’t wait.

Not with his girl in his arms, too small, too cold, and too damn still.

# # #

The return trip was a blur of snow and blood as Ellie's wound bled through the bandage, dripping on the saddle, soaking through the glove he pressed to her belly as hard as he dared. A blur of whispered promises to Ellie and reassurances from Tommy at every turn. His brother's voice was a buzz in Joel’s ears, a gnat he wanted to swat, even though he knew why Tommy did it. No, Tommy didn’t want to lose his brother, but neither did Joel want to live in a world without Ellie. There were no third chances for him.

The gates were already opening when Joel and Tommy reached them, a doctor waiting on the other side, who introduced herself as Dr. Carson as they dismounted their horses and handed the reins off to a couple boys. Dr. Carson explained the guards on the wall had seen them coming and called ahead for her. The clinic was already prepared, since she’d figured there might be injuries to see to from the missing party. Tommy explained what had happened, but Joel didn’t slow his pace to the clinic even as Dr. Carson did her best to examine Ellie on the move.

The nurses startled when he barreled through the front doors, though a single word from Dr. Carson sent them running to their posts. Joel laid Ellie down on an examination table in the first prepared room, taking her gun out of its holster and helping her out of his coat so Dr. Carson could better see the wound. It took Tommy hip-checking him to realize he was in the way, though it took every bit of mental fortitude he possessed to move aside.

Still, he didn’t go far, watching the rise and fall of Ellie’s belly until she was hooked up to the heart monitor, and then he watched nothing but that. The doctor’s words were lost to him until he realized a nurse was wiping Tommy’s forearm with an alcohol swab. As she inserted the needle, Tommy’s eyes met Joel’s, and he smiled.

“Type O,” he said.

The wood was removed, splinters picked out, the wound cleaned and stitched up. They hooked the bag of Tommy’s blood to Ellie, the needle seeming huge in her skinny arm. A nurse saw to her head, inspecting the bump, unraveling her braid to get a better feel of it. He was offered a chair by the wall, but he shook his head, standing post just a few feet from Ellie. If any of them tried to remove her sweatband, he had to be ready to stop them from pulling a gun.

By the time Maria arrived, a bundle of clothes in her arms, Tommy was beside Joel, sipping juice with a smile at his wife. Joel offered nothing, gaze glued on every hand that touched Ellie, making sure none strayed, none lingered—until, finally, the frenetic pace in the room slowed.

“She’s stable,” Dr. Carson said, peeling bloody gloves off her hands and tossing them into a nearby trashcan. “She’ll be fine, Mr. Miller, now that she’s had the transfusion.”

Swallowing hard around the lump in his throat, Joel nodded. “Thanks.”

Dr. Carson smiled at him, then at Tommy and Maria, and slipped out of the room, likely to wait for the others to return from beyond the gates. Joel waited until they were alone, nurses gone, before he turned to Maria and said, “What I’m about to tell you can’t go beyond this room.”

Maria blinked, glancing to Tommy. Tommy looked surprised, but he nodded at Maria all the same.

“All right,” Maria said, wary.

“If you’re gonna change her clothes, make sure you keep her sweatband on her arm. If anyone saw what’s beneath it, they’d shoot without asking questions.” He held Maria’s gaze but shifted his stance, ready to block her if she tried to run out of the room to raise the alarm. “There’s a bite scar on her arm. That’s why she wears the sweatband everywhere she goes. That bite scar is nearly two years old, and she hasn’t turned. I’ve seen her get bit myself. She’s immune. That’s why we came out here in the first place, so the Fireflies could make a cure.”

Maria closed her eyes, a muscle working in her jaw, before she said, “I know.”

Joel flinched, looking at Tommy, who shook his head, hands raised. “I didn’t say a word, Joel, not to anyone.”

“Ellie told me,” Maria said. “Simone spat up on her sweatband a couple weeks ago, and I offered to clean it for her. She showed me then.”

Joel looked at Ellie, lying still on the hospital bed, wrapped in a blanket from the warmer. It didn’t make sense she wouldn’t have told him about that, but maybe she’d worried he’d be upset. One of the rules they had agreed on during the hike back had been to tell no one about the scar or about her immunity. Maybe she thought he’d be angry she broke that promise.

“Okay.” Joel nodded, turning on his heel to step out of the room. Tommy joined him, leaning back against the wall and accepting another cup of juice from a nurse come to check on him. Joel said nothing, but the looks Tommy gave him spoke volumes.

“You doing okay?”

“Will be soon as she wakes up,” Joel said, straining to hear Maria inside the room while she changed Ellie out of her old bloody clothes.

“She will,” Tommy said. “She’ll be fine. I gave her as much blood as Dr. Carson would let me without telling on me to Maria.”

Joel inhaled through his nose, exhaled through his mouth. “Thank you, Tommy.”

Tommy nudged him with his elbow. “Any day, brother. I love the little demon.”

Maria opened the door, poking her head back out. “She’s ready for you, Joel.”

He shouldered right past her with a brisk thanks, finally allowing himself to drag a stool closer to the bed. Ellie wore one of the long-sleeved shirts she'd stolen from him and a pair of pajama pants printed with moons and stars. When Joel felt for it, he found the sweatband on her forearm and breathed a sigh of relief. Then he fetched another blanket from the little warmer in the corner and draped it over her, tucking it tight.

It was a miracle, really, that the doctor hadn’t insisted they remove the sweatband, even after Joel had ordered them to leave it be and use her other arm for the IV. He wouldn’t want to kill his way through another hospital, especially not here in their home, but he would if Ellie had needed it. Distantly, he heard Tommy and Maria settle into chairs by the wall, talking quietly about Simone with her babysitter, but Joel pushed them from his mind.

“Hey, babygirl,” he murmured, brushing his hand over Ellie’s cheek. It wasn’t quite as cold as it had been, some of the color having returned with the warmth of the blankets and the transfusion. Her hair was damp from snow, but it was surprisingly free of blood. The nurses had sponged off her abdomen, so at least she wouldn’t wake up crispy.

“Scared the shit outta me,” he said, pressing his forehead to her temple. She smelled like a hospital. Swallowing against the bile in the back of his throat, he dug into his pocket for a hair tie. “You want me to braid your hair?” he asked, but Ellie did nothing but breathe.

Sighing long and slow, he rolled the stool around the bed to her head, gently pulling her hair out from under her and combing it with his fingers. It would hardly be the prettiest braid, but at least she wouldn’t feel it tickling her neck in her sleep and wake up screaming. In the grand scheme of life on the whole, it was the little things that made all the difference.

# # #

Joel woke to a gentle touch on his temple, a fingertip tracing back and forth over his scar. With his head pillowed on his folded arms, he opened his eyes to find Ellie’s face turned toward him. She still lay flat on her back in the hospital bed, but her eyes were clear despite the drip of pain medicine in her arm.

“You still talk in your sleep,” she rasped.

He smiled, blinking against the tears that welled up at her voice, and straightened just enough that he could press one hand to her cheek, smoothing his thumb over its apple. “You really scared the piss outta me, babygirl.”

She smirked. “Time for a diaper, old man.”

It was bittersweet, that joke from two daughters twenty years apart. He tipped forward, kissing her forehead, pressing his nose into her hair. She wrapped her hand around his wrist, squeezing tight. Hardly at her usual strength, but better than the limpness he’d carried through the night, trying to fight off flashbacks.

“What happened?” she asked.

Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Tommy asleep in his chair against the wall. Maria had gone home to relieve the babysitter, whispering a goodbye to Joel and asking him to send someone for her if anything drastic changed. It hadn’t surprised Joel that Tommy stayed. Tommy had been glued to his side the night Sarah died, had been the one to protect Joel after his failed suicide attempt. He’d been the one to press the gauze to his head, drive him to the army medical camp, and light into him about staying for family.

Joel didn’t often feel like he deserved the loyalty and love he had, but he had long ago decided to do everything he could to make sure his people didn’t regret sticking with him.

“Joel?” Ellie asked, squeezing his wrist.

Clearing his throat, he met her eyes again. He’d leave the full breadth of his fear out of it. She didn’t need that on her right now. “You fell in one of the trapper’s holes.”

She blinked. “That was dumb.”

He tried a smile on for size. “Better not do it again.”

“How’d you even find me?”

“After the sleigh didn’t return, Tommy and I went looking. Search parties did, too. I’d memorized the path your sleigh was supposed to take, and we found it around where the horses bolted, then tracked you to that cabin. Ms. Barajas told us where you’d gone.”

“Shit.” Ellie rolled her head to stare at the ceiling. “Are the others okay?”

He’d heard the others from her sleigh arrive in the clinic sometime before he’d fallen asleep, though he hadn’t left Ellie’s side to investigate. Given there weren’t any sobbing family members, though, he would assume they’d all survived. “Yeah, they are. Dina, too.”

She audibly swallowed. “I thought I’d shot the clicker before it could bite Mr. McMillan.”

He raised his free hand to her head, brushing his fingertips over her hairline, her temples, her nose. “You did the best you could, baby. No one could ask more of you than that.” He was glad it had been Ms. Barajas to shoot Mr. McMillan. Ellie had enough on her shoulders for a fifteen-year-old. Time to let an adult make the tough decisions.

“Still.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand, then frowned at her clothes. “The fuck am I wearing? Smells like you.”

Joel smirked. “Maria brought you some clothes. She’s home with Simone, but Tommy’s over there, sleeping off the blood transfusion.”

“The what?”

“You’ve become part-Tommy, kiddo. A Tommy-droid. ’Fraid he’s your dad now.”

She gagged despite her giggles. They didn’t last long, though he didn’t know what made the new sadness fill her gaze until she asked, “Did I ruin Christmas?”

“Oh, babygirl.” He brushed his fingertips over her forehead again, tracing the scar in her right eyebrow. They matched, scars on the same side. “You never could.”

“But I’m stuck in the hospital on Christmas Eve.”

“Yes, and? Still got twenty-four hours of the day to go.”

“And what if I can’t leave until the day after?”

“Then we’ll bring Christmas to you.”

She squinted at him. “What, carry the tree on your back all the way across town? And the presents? How would you manage that?”

“I walked across the country for you, didn’t I? You think a jaunt through town would stop me, even with a trussed-up tree on my back?” He smiled, but her bottom lip wobbled, so he thunked his forehead against hers just hard enough to make that wobble vanish in favor of a grin, however small. “And I’d just make Tommy carry the presents. ’Bout time he pulled his weight around here.”

“Heard that,” Tommy mumbled, sounding half-asleep still.

“You were meant to,” Joel said at the same time Ellie retorted, “Good, you cretin!”

“This is the thanks I get,” Tommy grumbled, though Joel could hear his grin. “Glad you’re alive, you little muskrat. I encourage better ways of making Joel’s hair go white. What happened to that idea I told you?”

“What idea?” Joel asked, looking at his brother, who shrugged, all innocent. Ellie, meanwhile, dissolved into giggles, though when she winced and reached for her belly, Joel caught her hand and gave her a look. “Let's wait ’til you’re better ’fore you decide I’d look prettier with a makeover, you hear?”

She saluted off her forehead. “Aye, aye, captain. I’ll leave Operation Chimney Sweep until I can walk on my own two feet.”

Shaking his head, he kissed her forehead. “Miscreant,” he said, though it sounded far more like “babygirl.”

Chapter Text

With spring came a summons.

Joel had tried to think about the Fireflies as little as possible in the year since he’d escaped from Salt Lake City with Ellie. He’d known they were still out there, known Marlene wouldn’t give up on trying to find a way to create a vaccine. But with every day he and Ellie woke up safe in their house, it was easier and easier to forget there was someone out there who knew the truth of her condition, and would do anything to use it.

Ellie stuck close to him for weeks after her attack on Christmas Eve—first due to his request that she stay within eyesight, and then of her own volition. No matter her blustering, he could tell that night had shaken her. Killing someone you knew before they could turn was new for her. Ms. Barajas had told Joel she’d herded the kids inside the cabin and shut the door behind her while she and Mr. McMillan went outside, obeying Jackson’s rule to kill before turning. But the gunshot wouldn’t have been muffled, even if Ellie had stuck her fingers in her ears. At least it wasn't something new to give her nightmares.

And then Tommy returned from a hunting trip out west grim-faced and quiet until he pulled Joel aside to let him know Marlene had found him. Joel was tempted to keep it from Ellie, to never let her know that Marlene was looking for her. He knew Tommy would have ensured Marlene wouldn’t know where they were, but keeping Marlene’s summons a secret would be tantamount to lying. Joel and Ellie didn’t lie to each other. Honesty was the core of who they were.

So Joel waited until his next day off and took her fishing. She usually found it boring, preferring hunting for game rather than waiting for it to come to her. But since Christmas Eve, she’d had more patience about the little things, seeming to bask in the moments when it was just the two of them like it had been their entire trip west.

The sun filtered through the trees, dappling them with patches of gold, winking light off the lake. Ellie sat in her chair beside him, her head tipped back in mimicry of his own position just moments ago.

“Marlene found Tommy,” Joel said, not quite sure how else to word it. Better to just rip off the Band-Aid.

Ellie opened one eye to look at him. “When?”

“On his hunting trip. She requested you and I meet her in the Calgary hospital at our 'earliest convenience'.”

She sucked in a long breath, tilting her head to look back out at the water. “You think they’ve come up with a way to make a cure?”

“A vaccine, maybe. Don’t see why else they’d want you there.”

“Then we should go.”

“We don’t have to, kiddo. They don’t know where to find you. You’re safe here. And I’ll love you even if you choose to stay.”

Fingers flexing on the armrests of her chair, she said, “Mr. McMillan might still be alive if we’d made a cure already, or a vaccine. Tess and Riley and Sam deserve me finding a vaccine. What if, next time, you or Tommy or Maria get bit? What if, when Simone grows up, she gets bit? If I didn’t let them at least try to find a vaccine, I’d hate myself for the rest of my life.”

Sighing, Joel reached out to take her hand, lacing their fingers together, and smiled when she gripped back tight enough to hurt. “I know, babygirl. And you know I’ll be with you every step of the way.”

“You go where I go,” she said without an ounce of doubt.

“Number one rule I live my life by.”

“And I go where you go.”

He smiled, squeezing her hand. “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

# # #

The night before they were set to leave Jackson, Ellie slept in Joel’s bed. She didn’t wake up from any nightmares, but she slept on top of him the entire night. He mostly dozed, blinking into awareness at every little twitch she made. He would miss this, the quiet moments of just the two of them together. He had no idea how long it would take for the Fireflies to do whatever they had planned in search of a vaccine, but it would likely be months before it was just Joel and Ellie, Ellie and Joel again. Sometimes, it was still hard to believe he had this. That he was a unit with a kid again.

A woman in Jackson had found a polaroid camera on a patrol and started trading photos. After Ellie found out about it, she’d dragged Joel with her out into the forest to hunt for game over the last long weekend. They’d returned with a dozen rabbits, a fox, and even a deer, all of which were traded in exchange for two dozen photos. They hadn’t taken them all yet, since Ellie wanted to go slow, give herself time to come up with good ideas. But he had three up on his wall of just the two of them, and one of the two of them, Tommy, Maria, and Simone.

His favorite he kept on his nightstand: Joel making a goofy face at the camera—Ellie had instructed him to pinch his ears and puff out his cheeks while crossing his eyes—while Ellie looked up at him with a toothy grin, arms crossed over her chest. It was that photo, above all the rest, that proved they were stuck together, no matter what or who tried to tear them apart.

In the morning, after Ellie’s shower, he poked his head into her room to find her sitting on her floor, doing last-minute rearranging in her backpack. It spoke volumes to her anxiety about leaving, so he said, “Want me to braid your hair?”

Without looking up, she nodded and shifted toward her bed so he could sit on it. She raised one hand, but he said, “Nah, got this one memorized.”

“That still possible at your age?” she asked, a little bit of tension easing out of her shoulders as he combed his fingers through her hair, dividing it in half to allow for two braids.

“Amazing, ain’t it? Can even feed myself, too.”

“Will wonders never cease.”

He couldn’t see her face from here, but he knew her eyes were closed, knew she was smiling. It was tempting to tell her they didn’t have to go again, to remind her he’d love her even if they stayed. But he knew she’d say no, and that it would frustrate her to have to repeat herself. What she needed from him was unflagging support, unwavering protection, not more doubts.

“All done,” he said, tucking the two braids over her shoulders.

As expected, she raised her hands to trace them all the way down, and tipped her head back to grin at him. “Clever, clever sausage fingers.”

He flicked her nose for that.

Tommy and Maria were waiting for them by the stables, where Tommy had already saddled their horses. Simone was now in the carrier on his chest, kicking her tiny feet. Joel wasted time checking the saddles’ girths while Ellie got her hugs and goodbyes before he accepted his own from Tommy. When Maria hugged him, too, it was surprise enough he almost blurted out a question.

Simone balanced on one hip, Ellie sliced her hand over her neck to keep his mouth shut. He rolled his eyes at her but hugged Maria back. He wasn’t sure what he’d done to make her view of him change, but Ellie likely had something to do with it.

“She’d better not walk or talk while I'm gone,” Ellie said, glaring at Tommy like he’d be able to even stop it from happening.

“Likely not,” Maria said, tugging on the end of one of Ellie’s braids. “She’s still a bit young for that.”

“Good.” Ellie ducked her head, meeting Simone’s big brown eyes. They had that in common, and Joel knew Ellie took no small amount of delight in it. “You hear that, cuz? No walking or talking ’til I’m back or we’re gonna have words.”

Simone merely headbutted Ellie.

Laughing, Ellie returned her to Tommy and rubbed her forehead as she turned to her horse, Davey. He was a sprightly little gelding, a dusty dun color, but Ellie had gone horse whisperer on him after he was brought back from an outpost with a dead rider on his back. Now, he would let no one else ride him. Joel gave her a leg up into the saddle, flicking Davey’s reins over his head and wrapping her hands around the ends.

“Go raise hell, Ell’s bells,” Tommy said after Joel had mounted up and reined his mare around to face the gates.

As she passed, Ellie held out her fist to Tommy, who bumped it right back.

# # #

If they were lucky, it would take just two weeks to get to Calgary. They’d be able to travel further each day since they were both on their own horse, but Joel was in no hurry to get there, so he decided to take their time. Ellie pestered Joel with questions about the world Before as they rode—often enough that he began to suspect she’d come up with a whole list of them in anticipation of this trip—and did her homework by firelight when they stopped for the night. He helped where he could, since geometry, at least, was useful in construction.

It was biology that left him stumped, which gave Ellie new fuel to roast him with. He kept her humble by beating her at every race when they gave the horses their heads to gallop.

“Can I say something weird without you making fun of me for it?” Ellie asked while gutting a fish by the fire, the sun kissing the treetops to the west.

“Oof, dunno, kiddo,” he said. “That’s a tall order.”

She flicked a fish scale at him. “Well, maybe if you’d let me stand on countertops, I’d be tall enough to make it.”

Rolling his eyes, he stuck his fish on a spit. After the first time he’d caught her climbing the counter to grab a plate, he’d moved all the dishes to the lower cupboards so she wouldn’t have to go monkey to reach them. Sarah had been tall almost from the get-go, so it had slipped his mind that Ellie might find it difficult to reach what he easily could. And while he liked being there for her, he wouldn’t mind not needing to be fetched every time she wanted a glass of water. It was just easier for him to stoop to get whatever he needed than it was for her to risk breaking her neck.

“Cross my heart,” he said, offering her a spit, too. They sat cross-legged side by side, their knees colliding.

Eyeing him while she arranged her fish over the fire, she seemed to take him for his word and said, “I’ve missed this. Not, you know, heading toward the Fireflies so they can poke at me with needles or whatever the fuck, but…this. Just you and me, going someplace together.”

He leaned back on his hands, tilting his head at her. “That why you keep asking to go on patrols with me?”

She shrugged. “One reason, anyway.”

Smiling, he nudged her with his knee. “I’ve missed it, too, kiddo. Granted, I’d rather this just be a patrol we were on, but when you’re old enough, I’ll see what I can finagle. Patrols are usually more than just two people, but with our reputations, never know what we can manage.”

She perked up at that. “Really?”

“Yeah, really.”

“You mean it?”

“Said it, didn’t I?”

“You promise?”

Giving her a look, he raised one hand and made an X over his heart. “Cross my heart.”

After one more long moment of eyeing him, as if waiting to see if he’d break and admit it was a lie, she nodded and turned back to her fish. They sat in silence for a while, the sun setting, the fire crackling, Ellie rotating both spits. Joel had packed spices, too, since they were both a bit spoiled with Jackson’s good food after a year. 

“Hey,” he said. “Did I ever tell you I had a girlfriend?”

She whipped her head around to look at him. “Since when?”

“Well, I did. Then I lobster.”

She blinked, then blinked again, and finally spluttered a laugh. “Oh my God.”

“I think I flounder the other day, though.”

“I’m going to burn your fish to a crisp.”

“Are you angry enough to krill someone?”

“I mean it. I will burn your fish.”

“Yeah, you’re right, that’s enough fish puns. I think I should scale back.”

“Joel!”

“You think you can do any betta than this?”

She leapt at him to knock him to his back, seeking out his ticklish spots.

“Aw, come on,” he said, trying to catch her slippery hands. “I think those were fintastic!”

“Gah!”

# # #

They reached the Canadian border while Joel was in the middle of explaining the plot of The Princess Bride. He’d seen it once in the Jackson rental store and had plans to show it to her when they got back, but she’d demanded an explanation all the same.

But at the sight of that cheery sign welcoming them to Canada, his voice trailed off and Davey danced a few steps until Ellie loosened her grip on the reins.

“Been thinking,” Joel said as they continued down the I-15.

“It was bound to happen sooner or later.” 

“We should make some rules for them to follow when we get there,” he said, not letting himself get sidetracked.

She glanced sideways at him. “For them to follow?”

“Yep. If they’re gonna do this, if we’re gonna let them do their tests, they need to know they can’t boss us around.”

She clicked her tongue against her teeth. “All right. You have ideas?”

“In fact, I do,” he said. They'd been percolating in his mind for days now. “When we get there, I want to meet every single doctor they’ve got working on this. If any of them so much as look at you the wrong way—if any of them seem like they're the type to decide a sacrifice is worth it for the greater good—they’re out of the program, full stop.”

An exhale slipped out of her, followed by a breathy “Good.”

“They’ll have to tell us every single thing they wanna try, in detail. Nurses, too. You’re gonna feel shit enough as it is; we don’t need a nurse who can’t find a vein.”

“Agreed.”

“I’ll be with you the entire time. You won’t be alone for a second.”

Another breath of relief. The fact she didn’t even joke about it proved it had been worrying her more than she let on. “What if they try to separate us?” she asked all the same.

“Then we’re gone. Marlene can keep looking until she finds doctors willing to respect the fact you’re a living, breathing person, not a science experiment.”

She nodded. “All right.”

“Good.” He glanced at her, now. “You got any rules you wanna suggest?”

She threaded the ends of the reins through her fingers, jaw screwed to the side as she thought. “I want you to let me do the talking. Like, if they have questions, I wanna be able to answer them. If they get annoying, I want to be able to tell them to leave. If they don’t listen to me, obviously, you do your Dad Thing about it, but—” She took a breath and looked at him. “If they’re gonna treat me like a person, they’ve gotta hear me act like one, y’know?”

“Fair enough.” He held out his hand.

She reached back, but hesitated just before gripping his. “And I don’t want you to try to stop me from agreeing to something that neither of us likes, so long as it won’t permanently hurt me. If they want to, like, take that cerebrospinal stuff Marlene mentioned last time, you gotta let them do whatever it is they need to so they can get it.”

It didn’t surprise him she knew he’d object to invasive procedures, nor did it surprise him she’d want to go ahead with them anyway. It left him sick to his stomach, but if this was what Ellie needed from him, he wouldn’t fight it. “Agreed,” he said.

Her eyes flicked back and forth between his, and then she smiled, however small, and shook his hand. “It’s a deal, pardner.”

“Terrible accent," he said. "You literally live with a Texan. How can you be that bad at it?”

“’Cause I love that offended look you give me.”

“Just wait ’til Tommy hears you.”

“Oh, he hates it, too. Y’all are united in being offended by my superior accent skills. And just you wait until Simone can speak.”

Somehow, it hadn't occurred to him that Ellie might teach Simone the ways of roasting. Miller girls. “Great, there’ll be two of you.”

“Double trouble, Joel. Double fucking trouble.”

Chapter Text

As expected, Joel hated every damn second they spent in the Calgary hospital.

It was an improvement from the last solely because these doctors weren’t eager to cut open Ellie’s skull to inspect her brain on the off-chance it would be what held the secret to her immunity. He’d made sure of that the instant they arrived, ordering Marlene to bring each and every doctor into the room where they’d put Ellie so he could interrogate all of them. A few didn’t care to have Joel demanding explanations for every little plan they had to try to find out what caused Ellie’s immunity. But after the first time he had to throw a doctor up against the wall with a gun to her temple, demanding she stop telling him the research was classified if she didn’t want her brains repurposed as wallpaper, they all fell into line pretty quickly.

Nurses were next, though his interrogation of them mostly happened when they were showcasing their ability to make painless blood draws. The few who made Ellie so much as wince were summarily barred from ever putting a needle near her again. The one nurse Joel liked above the rest was a woman named Thao, who saw Ellie eyeing her dinosaur-print scrubs and went out of her way to find some that would fit Ellie. To Joel’s relief, Ellie seemed much more comfortable in those over the hospital gown. And any doctors or nurses who complained about a lack of easy accessibility either fell into line or were marched out with a gun to their back and ordered to not show their face again until they agreed to his rules.

After all, Joel wasn’t here to make friends.

By the time the staff were as familiar with Joel as he was with them, the real work began. Each morning, he demanded a full list of everything they planned to do. There was little he could say no to, but at least he would know exactly what was about to happen each day. At least Ellie wouldn’t ever be taken by surprise.

But no matter the care with which the nurses handled Ellie when they poked her with needles, repeated blood draws still left a wealth of bruises up and down her arms. And there was nothing Joel could do to protect her from that, however much he wished he could take her place on the hospital bed, under the constant scrutiny.

For two weeks, little else happened but blood draws of various kinds for various purposes. Joel acted a vulture, standing post behind her bed with his arms crossed, eyeing each nurse who entered and watching every single thing they did while they were in the room for the slightest discrepancy, the slightest deviation from what they’d explained. Sometimes medication was given to do certain things to Ellie’s blood; sometimes she had to fast, which left her cranky and irritable, more likely to lash out at anyone who dared set foot inside the room; sometimes she wanted to see anything beyond the four farm-painted walls and the window overlooking the city.

Marlene really should have chosen a better day to finally show her face again. She hadn’t since she led them into this very room after greeting them at the hospital’s front doors.

She wanted to talk to Ellie about her mom. Ellie wanted her to fuck off.

“She said leave,” Joel said, speaking up for the first time. He'd kept true to his agreement with Ellie, to act the bouncer and let her do the talking. But the instant her wishes weren’t respected, he was more than happy to step in.

“She’s important to me, too, Joel,” Marlene said, hands on her hips. She didn’t look much changed from the last time they were in a hospital together. Maybe a bit more well-rested. A bit less guilt-ridden.

“And she’s asked you to leave,” Joel said. “Go consider her important somewhere else.”

Marlene opened her mouth, but Joel arched a brow, daring her to try it. He had a reputation here, and he wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. He was, after all, the one who’d had to help Ellie deal with one more thing that gave her nightmares. Joel couldn’t scare those off, however much he tried, but he could sure as hell scare off their physical manifestation.

Clicking her teeth together, Marlene turned on her heel.

“Fuck,” Ellie gasped as soon as they were alone, taking her first real breath since Marlene entered the room. “Thought she’d never go.”

“You want a break?” he asked, shifting to look down at her face.

“Why?” she asked, looking too small in the hospital bed. “You have a place in mind?”

“Well, seeing as how we haven’t painted your room back home yet, I thought we could raid the Home Depot here.” He wanted to take her before she became too weak to walk, since he had a feeling the doctors would soon move beyond simple blood draws. Overheard mutterings of spinal taps and bone marrow harvests had left him feeling helpless. Ellie would agree to all of it, and he would have no choice but to go along for the ride.

“Fuck yes,” she said and shoved back the sheets.

# # #

The doctors weren’t too thrilled at the prospect of Ellie leaving hospital grounds, but Ellie had perfected the puppy dog eyes and Joel had perfected the general ambience of—as Ellie put it—silent but deadly, so they were given leave to go. He even got a car, so Ellie wouldn’t have to walk the distance, but it had been stripped of all manner of siphons and left with just a quarter tank of gas. As if they worried he’d up and leave.

It was a bit mollifying to know they knew him that well.

Calgary had once been a QZ, as far as Joel knew, before the Fireflies took over. Some people still remained, but they were few and far between, and largely only allied with Marlene. It meant the roads were largely clear, the Home Depot parking lot all but empty. He found a faded orange shopping cart and lifted Ellie into it, since repeated blood draws had left her shaky-legged as a newborn foal. She didn’t mind it, since she got to order him around, and he didn’t mind it, since he got to hear her laughter when he got a running start and hopped up onto the lower tray to let them soar down the aisles.

It wasn’t especially well-stocked, but the paint chips were in decent order, so he let Ellie go to town picking them out, holding up each blue and declaring yea or nay. Eventually, though, her gaze turned to the shades of yellow.

“Who the fuck came up with these names?” Ellie asked, looking between one named Unmellow Yellow and another named Laser Lemon.

“Hell if I know,” he said, glancing over the greens. Simone would need a real bed sooner than later, and he’d already promised to build one for her.

“The hell is a ‘siesta’?”

“Spanish for nap.”

“Oh,” she said, uptilt at the end of it. “This your yellow, then? You love naps.”

“I love restin’ my eyes. Learn the difference.”

“Well?” Unperturbed, she waved the chip in his face. “Verdict?”

“You think that’s my yellow? Fucking beige, not yellow.” He scoffed, flicking the paint chip right out of her hand. “Trust me, you’ll know it when you see it.”

She scoffed right back. “Golly, you’re picky.”

As soon as she was content in her selections, he wheeled her down the aisle. A few of her choices had to be discarded, the cans either missing or the paint so thick as to be unusable, no matter how well-stirred or thinned. To Joel’s relief, her number one choice—named, fittingly, Planetarium—had three cans in decent condition. Together, they chose a selection of greens for Tommy and Maria to pick from, and found a good number of other shades to bring back to Jackson to trade with. It’d be unlikely anyone there would ever have the chance to collect new cans of paint themselves, so they could be a good commodity. Joel would just bum a packhorse or two off the Fireflies to carry it all.

When Joel returned from hiding the cans so they could collect them when they left Calgary behind, he found Ellie back at the yellow paint. They’d only taken a few cans, since Joel figured yellow wouldn’t be overwhelmingly popular.

“What’re you thinking?” he asked, kneeling to glance into the can she stirred with a paint stick.

“I like this color,” she said. “For Simone, I mean. I thought we could paint sunflowers on her walls or something, and then matching ones in my room.”

“Oh?”

She shrugged one shoulder, gaze glued almost studiously on the paint. Like she wanted to avoid his gaze. “I was just thinking…I mean, I’ve never had a sister, and sometimes I think it’d have been nice to have an older one. Like, if Sarah had still been around. And I know I’m not—I’m Simone’s cousin, not her sister, but I’d like to think an older sister would do something like that for me, paint her walls to match mine, so I wanna do something like that for her.”

Sometimes it was still shocking how very much she could make him feel like she’d taken a whisk to his insides, so it hurt to breathe in a good way. He swallowed hard around the lump in his throat, trying to come up with something to say to that. But he must have taken too long, since she glanced up at him with a furrow between her brows, as if worried he’d think it lame.

“It’s—”

“A great idea,” he said before she could make herself feel bad or talk herself out of it. “Tommy and Maria will love it.”

“You think?”

“Kiddo, I know.” He tucked loose hair back beneath one sparkly red barrette. “And you’ll be a great older sister.”

“You’ll tell me if I do something wrong, right? I've got no idea how sisters work.”

Why she thought he did was beyond him, but he promised all the same.

# # #

It was their last good day for a while. Skin biopsies, urine samples, blood draws, and grillings became as regular as the rise and fall of the sun. Why they thought Ellie would know anything about her family history was beyond Joel, but at least Marlene remembered a bit. Through unspoken agreement, they kept more of the intimate details out of Ellie’s earshot—she didn’t need to know who her father was, nor why he hadn’t been there for her mom; Joel could fill in the blanks well enough to know he’d been less than exemplary—which was, to Joel’s dismay, easily done. The constant stream of tests and medications kept Ellie listless when she was awake, and restless when she was asleep.

At the two-month mark, the spinal tap finally happened. Joel scrubbed up and sat with Ellie in the operating room, right by her head as she lay prone on the table. She was awake, though a bit drowsy through the morphine, so he distracted her with stories of Tommy’s escapades as a kid. She giggled at everything when she wasn’t wincing at the pressure of a needle being inserted into her spinal cord, however numbed up she was down there.

For two days afterward, Joel only allowed nurses in to see to the IVs, check her vitals, and bring food, since he didn’t dare leave her room when she was feeling so poorly. When one nurse appeared with a collection of vials to draw blood, Joel barred entry and grinned a dare at her to try it. She threatened to get Marlene, so Joel shrugged and said, “Go ahead, see how my answer will change.”

Smartly, Marlene never showed her face, and neither did that fucking nurse.

On the third day, when Ellie was feeling a bit better, Joel withdrew the box of Boggle he’d packed without telling her. Her eyes lit up when she saw it, though she wasn’t nearly at her usual fighting strength, when she'd ordinarily have creamed him. But it was a nice distraction for her, and she perused the dictionary often to poke holes in his words. Thao even joined on her off-duty hours, bringing apple slices and homemade caramel dip that left Ellie a grinning, sticky mess.

The MRI should have been painless, but the contrast dye gave Ellie a piercing migraine that left her snapping at everyone and everything. Including Joel, even as she demanded he get into her bed and let her use him as a recliner. He did without argument, letting her snap until the fight went out of her, and shushing her apologies when she felt a bit better after the drip of pain medicine finally kicked in.

The next day, he declared another sick day and took Ellie to the riverside with a picnic Thao had packed for them in a little brown basket. Ellie dipped her bare feet in the water, eating apple slices and caramel dip until she felt sick. When she flopped to her back and grinned up at the cloudy sky, she found his hand and brought it to her head, an unspoken request for him to play with her hair.

“This is the life, Joel,” she said, eyes closed like a cat in the sunlight.

How he wished he had that polaroid camera right then. To think she could find joy, could find reason to smile, in the midst of all this bullshit. He simply forced his eyes to stay open as long as they could, memorizing the sight instead. “Sure is, kiddo.”

# # #

It wasn’t until the doctors wanted a bone marrow harvest that Ellie finally let the nerves show. The instant the doctor declared she’d have to be sedated for it, her heartrate skyrocketed on the monitor and Joel chased every last nurse out of the room, locking the door behind them. They had a key, but it was the principle of the thing.

Then he kicked off his boots and climbed into the bed with her, letting her octopus around him. He brushed a hand through her hair, freed from the bun after she’d gotten a headache from the most recent round of blood draws, and held her until she stopped shaking. It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her she didn’t have to do this, but he didn’t let the words escape. She knew that, but she would do it anyway, however much it scared her.

“They think this might be the very thing they need to make a cure,” Ellie said. "My stem cells or some bullshit." 

“Vaccine,” he said.

“Same difference.”

“Not really.”

“Joel.” She thumped her head against his chest. “I want to do it, I do, I just…”

“Don’t want to be put under.” He sighed, resting his cheek against her head. “Knowing what I do of bone marrow harvests, you won’t wanna be awake for it. And you know I’d never let them do anything to you. Marlene won’t even be allowed in the same room. Hell, I can have her barred from the building while you’re under. S’not like she’s needed for an operation like that.”

Ellie laughed, weak and watery though it was. “I’d love to see you try that.”

“Happy to.”

“Can you ask—Can Thao be there? With me, I mean. When they put me under.”

“’Course,” he said, and Jesus help any doctor who tried to stop them.

# # #

The morning of the harvest, Joel woke to Ellie giggling while her fingers tugged at his hair. He peeled one eye open, seeing nothing but her teeth in a grin, her attention fixed upward. A soft click told him all he needed.

“’M I pretty as you now?” he asked, squeezing her hip where his arm was still hooked around it. As expected, she'd arranged him on her hospital bed to her exacting standards last night.

“Pfft, as if.” Cheeks pink, she wrinkled her nose at him. “But your hair’s getting too long, so the barrettes will keep it outta your face. We gotta make sure you can actually see me through the fringe, after all.”

Rolling his eyes, he said, “Thanks,” and tilted his head to the clock on the wall. The nurses would be along any minute to prep Ellie; they wanted it done early, since she had to fast for the operation. “You ready?” he asked. She’d had a helluva time falling asleep last night, and likely hadn’t slept very long if she’d managed to wake up before him.

“Will you braid my hair?” she asked instead of answering, though the quaver in her voice told him enough.

Smiling, he kissed her forehead. “Absolutely, babygirl.”

He rolled out of bed to grab his notebook, flipping through his notes until he found one that might suit. After giving it to Ellie to hold, he brushed out her hair with a comb from his backpack and set to work, narrating his movements as he went, as always.

“Braided space buns,” she said at the end, brushing her fingers over them. “Like Leia.”

The joy of showing her Star Wars was unmatched. Seeing a tiny girl like her kicking ass in space had made her watch the entire trilogy, back to front, a dozen times in a row. “Pretty as a picture,” he said, unable to resist kissing her temple. He had his own nerves wrangled tight, but touching her reminded her—reminded himself—that she was safe. He was here, and while he was, nothing bad could ever happen to her.

When Thao arrived, she bit back laughter at whatever Ellie had done to Joel’s hair, but complimented Ellie on hers. Joel slipped out so Thao could help change Ellie into the hospital gown required for the operation. While he waited, he glanced into the mirror in the nearby bathroom, finding his hair sticking up in some kind of barrette-made fauxhawk. It looked absolutely ridiculous, but when he stepped back into the room, Ellie giggled at the sight of it, so he’d sooner chop off his own arm than remove the barrettes.

The sedative kicked in while they were wheeling her to the operating room. One second she was holding Joel’s hand tight enough to hurt—asking him who a chicken’s favorite composer was, then proclaiming, “Bach, Bach, Bach!” to which he asked, “You even know who Bach is?”—and the next her grip went wholly slack. It sent his heart through the roof, so he pressed his fingers to her pulse the rest of the walk to the OR. He only moved away when he had to leave to scrub up, but he kept his gun in its holster while he watched through a window as the doctors got to work.

Thao was in the room with Ellie, but she was just one nurse amongst many. And sure, these doctors were ones Joel trusted—insofar as he could trust anyone using Ellie as a Petri dish—but the second anyone looked even remotely shifty, he wouldn’t hesitate.

For Ellie, he’d tear down the fucking sky.

# # #

Ellie woke up groggy, in pain, and furious. It was by the skin of his teeth that Joel managed to stop her from tearing out her IV, though she fought him over it, weakly moaning for him to get away from her, until she finally recognized his voice.

Then she deflated, squinting at him with bleary eyes. “Dad?” she rasped, and had Joel not already been sitting on the stool by her bed, he’d have fallen to the floor. As it was, he was glad she was so groggy, since she wouldn’t notice the mist in his eyes as he tipped forward, kissing her head as gently as he could. He had to clear his throat twice before he could speak.

“Yeah, s’me, baby. How you feelin’?”

She made a fart sound.

“That so?” he asked. She reached for her hip, but he caught her hand before she could make contact. “Touching it’ll make it worse,” he said, smoothing his thumb over her palm.

“Fuuuuuuuuuck meeeeeeee.”

“Mmhmm. You thirsty?”

Wordlessly, she opened her mouth like a baby bird waiting for a worm. Rolling his eyes, he reached for the cup on the side table and poked the straw between her lips. When he pulled it back before she could make herself sick, she gave a token protest, but her eyes had slipped shut again. Her braided space buns were still pretty tidy, so he let her hair be, brushing his fingertips over her forehead until she fell back asleep.

The nurses came and went, crossing off shit on her chart, adjusting the IVs, checking her vitals, asking him questions about how she was when she’d woken up. It still took a week before she felt up to getting out of bed on her own, though she moaned and groaned about it, roasting him all the while.

And it took another week before the doctors reported a success. Ellie cried. It was a near thing for Joel.

# # #

Joel declined a vaccination until he saw, several times and with his own eyes, that it worked. He kept to himself that the Fireflies tested it on captured FEDRA soldiers, since Ellie didn’t need to know that. He’d known all along that Fireflies, while not the fascists that FEDRA was, were hardly the cream of the crop. Sure, they’d kept Ellie alive here, but so had FEDRA when she was in school. It was like what Henry said, way back in Kansas City: treat people like shit, they'll treat you like shit right back.

The pair of doses had to be administered two weeks apart, so Joel didn’t get his first until late summer. Ellie, although weak from continued blood draws—he’d heard tell of Fireflies wondering if it were possible to make a pseudo-cure, administered shortly after someone was first bitten to prevent the infection from ever reaching the brain—held his hand while he sat on the little stool by her hospital bed. Thao cleaned his bicep with alcohol, explaining everything to Ellie as she went. He tried to catch Ellie’s eye, but she refused to look away as Thao inserted the needle into Joel’s arm.

“You might feel a little rough in the next few days,” Thao said as she was cleaning up. “Headache, chills, sore arm, that kind of thing.”

“You got yours, right?” Ellie asked even while she poked and prodded at Joel’s bicep. The Band-Aid was in the shape of Mars. Ellie had picked it out herself.

“I did,” Thao said, rolling up her sleeve to show her. “Only my first, though. I won’t be here tomorrow, since that’s when I get my second.”

“I’ll be fine,” he said, more to Ellie than to Thao, who smiled and shut the door on her way out. “Baby, I’ll be fine. You’ve seen the other doctors and nurses.”

Ellie gripped his arm so tight her fingertips were bleached white, squinting at the Band-Aid like she’d be able to will the vaccine into working. “I don’t care about the other doctors and nurses, though. I care about you.”

“And you made this vaccine yourself,” he said, catching one hand to squeeze it. “You wouldn’t give me something that would hurt me.”

Heaving a sigh, she finally released his arm and dropped back in the bed. “Life would be so much easier if the world hadn’t gone to shit.”

It was a familiar sentiment. Smirking, he reached for the book on her side table. She looked about ready to drop dead, skin wan and undereye bags dark, so it wouldn’t be long before she finally gave in to her heavy eyelids. “’Cept I wouldn’t have met you, so. Evens out.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Terrible argument.”

“Psh, no it’s not. Now scooch. Time to read.”

# # #

True to Thao’s warning, he did feel a little rough the first couple days after his first dose. Ellie watched him like a hawk when she was awake enough to do so, and when she wasn’t, she made him lay on her bed with her as if believing she’d wake up if something bad happened.

The second dose was much easier. He felt fine each day after, though Ellie insisted they stay in the hospital until three weeks had passed, when the vaccine should have taken effect. While Ellie slept off another round of blood draws, he negotiated regular pick-ups of the vaccine in exchange for shipments of Ellie’s blood so research about the pseudo-cure could continue. He’d rather patrols from Jackson travel up here to collect the vaccine and deliver the blood than the Fireflies come anywhere near the settlement.

After bumming a couple packhorses from the Fireflies, Joel loaded up the wooden trays he’d built around Ellie’s operations to carry the cans of paint. Ellie was up on her feet again, if not a little wobbly from residuals, though he sat her down on a stack of wooden pallets in the makeshift stables and refused to let her help. The emergency room had been sectioned off into stalls, where they’d put their horses when they arrived. Joel had checked on them off and on, getting a look at the Fireflies’ horses to figure out who’d be best to take, but Davey was beside himself when he saw Ellie again. She’d come away with a full head of horse slobber.

They didn’t see Marlene again until the night before they left. She knocked on the door to Ellie’s room while Joel was double-checking everything in his pack, including counting the vials of the vaccine he’d requested. It would hardly be enough for Jackson’s entire population, but it was a start. Proof that they’d accomplished what they set out to do.

“What do you want?” Ellie asked, voice sharp enough Joel looked up from his list. When he saw Marlene leaning in the doorway, he immediately walked to Ellie’s side, hand on her shoulder. Marlene grimaced at the display, but she didn’t back away.

“I came to give you this,” Marlene said, holding up a photograph with frayed edges. Only when Ellie held her hand out for it did Marlene cross the distance. “It’s your mom, Anna. I don’t have many pictures of her left, but she was pregnant with you here, so I thought you’d want it.”

Joel angled his head to look down at the small, brunette women holding a rifle in one hand, beaming at the camera, the swell of her belly obvious in her white shirt. The one and only picture Ellie would ever have with her in the vicinity of her mom. “You look like her, kiddo.”

“You think?” she asked, voice tiny.

“Yeah, you got her chin, her nose. Even her hair.”

Ellie sniffled, then looked up at Marlene. “Thanks.”

Marlene smiled. “She was my best friend, and I know she’d be proud of the young woman you’ve become. She kicked every bit of ass you do.”

After one last, long look, Ellie tucked the photo into her math textbook. Marlene nodded at Joel, then turned to go, but Joel said, “Thanks,” before she could. She froze mid-step, glancing over her shoulder at him, brows furrowed. “For finding other doctors, I mean. We got a vaccine now thanks to that.” He’d never be glad Ellie went through all that pain, but he was glad it hadn’t been pointless. There were more people than Ellie alone he wanted to keep safe.

Marlene opened her mouth, then shut it. “Thanks for trusting us enough to let it happen.”

He snorted. “Was all Ellie, not me.”

“I figured as much.” With a sardonic twist of her lips, she was gone.

“That was big of you,” Ellie said when they were alone again.

He shrugged and returned to his pack. “It’d eat at me otherwise. Niceties and politeness and all.”

“Ugh! Texans.”

# # #

Rain delayed their leaving by a day, but they were out bright and early the next, packhorses trotting along behind them. They couldn’t ride as long or hard as they had on the way up, with Ellie still recovering, but they put in a good deal of distance the first week that Joel felt comfortable slowing the pace.

“You know what, Joel?” Ellie said as they bedded down for the night and Joel collected the paraphernalia to set up rabbit snares. They had plenty of supplies from the Fireflies, but the forests of late summer promised a decent bounty. He’d rather catch what they could now so they wouldn’t have to stop later. And it’d be good to keep the nonperishable stuff for a rainy day.

“What?” he asked, glancing over at her as she read her history textbook.

“Country borders are weird.”

He snorted. “Yeah, guess they are.”

“Just some obligatory line saying, ‘No, we’re somehow different from you, so nyeh.’”

“Suppose it was to keep things orderly.”

She wrinkled her nose at that. “Fuck orderly.”

“You’d say that, what with how you organize your room.”

“I have a system.”

“Organized chaos, I know.”

He left her to her spluttering, heading out into the forest to set up the snares. They hadn’t come across any infected on the way north, so he trusted they wouldn’t on the way south, either. There was a town a mile or so away from their little clearing, but it was small enough he doubted it’d have much in the way of offerings for infected to draw them near.

“You wanna do anything for your birthday this year?” he asked when he got back to find Ellie had set aside her textbook in favor of cleaning her pistol.

“We didn’t last year.”

She hadn’t wanted to, still spooked from the trip west and the escape from the Fireflies. Still not quite sure where she fit in with the Millers she was now part of, let alone Jackson on the whole. “No reason we can’t this year, though. You have friends who’d come.”

She paused, rag to the barrel of her pistol, to eye him as he settled down beside her with his own gun to clean. “What would we do? Like, I know birthdays have cake and shit, but—”

“I vote no on the shit. Think that’d discourage people from attending.”

“I—” She stopped, looking down at her gun, not even seeming to register the joke. “Maybe just us this year. You and me, and Tommy, Maria, and Simone. Just—just family, first.”

He smiled. He knew Tommy and Maria were already coming up with some kind of gift for her, having asked Joel her belt size. “They’d like that.”

“And maybe we can get Helen to take a photo of all of us on the day. We’ve still got thirteen in the bank.”

“Sounds like a plan. You want a cake?”

“Do you know how to bake a cake?”

“Flour, eggs, sugar. Voila. Can even make icing.”

“Okay, then a cake.” She inhaled deep, then exhaled slow, and leaned heavily against his side. “Thanks for, you know, everything.”

He smirked. “You mean in the grand scheme of things or acting the bodyguard while in the hospital?”

“Both.” She turned her head to look up at him, propping her chin on his shoulder. “Of all the smugglers to take me, I’m glad it was you. Not everyone would’ve done what you did.”

He hated that she knew that from experience, that she knew you couldn’t trust everyone you were told to, or trust everyone who asked you to. He kissed her forehead, lingering, and was glad to find she smelled of lavender soap. Not a whiff of hospital to be found. “Of all the kids for me to take, I’m glad it was you, too.”

“And—” She scrunched her face up. “Well, I get what you mean when you said it wasn’t time that healed all wounds. I don’t think I’m—I know I’m not back to one hundred percent yet, but I’m closer now than I was last year this time. And that’s only thanks to you.” She paused. “Well, you and everyone else, but mostly you. Eighty percent you.”

“Only eighty percent?” he asked through a throat gone tight. He'd hoped she'd get it, why he did everything he could to try to draw the true Ellie back out in the wake of Silver Lake. It had been what Tommy tried to do for Joel; what Tommy had failed to do. Knowing Joel had helped Ellie heal as much as she'd helped him was worth every sore foot, every uncomfortable bed, every night gone hungry.

“Eighty-one, if I’m feeling generous.”

“For shame.”

“Don’t be greedy.”

He snorted, thumping their foreheads together. “With you? I always will be.”

She jabbed him with her fist, but she was grinning. “Yeah, me too.”

# # #

Joel took second watch so he could be preparing to leave by the time Ellie woke up, though she was still asleep when he went to check the snares. He left the moka pot of coffee bubbling—he’d swiped bags of coffee beans and the moka pot from the Fireflies’ kitchen, but they’d had plenty to spare and more pots than just the one—knowing she’d come to at the smell of burnt shit and gripe about it. Not every snare had caught a rabbit, but seven was a decent start. Stringing them up, he looped them over his shoulder and started back toward camp.

The runner came at him from the right.

“Shit!” He rolled with its momentum, its teeth chomping at the air as they crashed through undergrowth until his back slammed into a tree trunk. He got his arm up right before the runner could reach his neck, holding it back and trying to detangle himself from the rabbits. The runner scrabbled at him, clawing his clothes, his chest, his back, before he finally got his revolver up and shot it in the head.

“Shit,” he gasped again, deflating under its corpse just long enough to take a breath.

Then he heard a gunshot and Ellie scream his name. He kicked the runner off him and sprinted through the trees back toward camp. Though Jackson horses were trained for infected attacks, all four had spooked, but with their legs hobbled there wasn’t far they could go. A runner was dead by the edge of camp, as if Ellie had shot it while scrambling out of her sleeping bag, but another had Ellie on her back.

It was the thing of an instant. One second, she was screaming and the runner was screeching. The next, they both fell silent under the echoing ricochet of Joel's revolver.

He shoved its corpse off her, hauling her up and into his arms, burying her against his chest as he sucked in air and scanned the forest around them. Silence answered his unspoken question, and after several minutes passed with sounds of the forest returning—birdsong, insects buzzing, the distant hoot of an owl, squirrels darting through the trees—Joel finally let himself breathe.

“Let’s go,” he said. “Pack up.”

Nodding, Ellie wordlessly leapt into action. Joel spared just a minute to return to collect the rabbits and snares, blessedly clean of infected brain, and then went to round up the horses.

Ten minutes later, they were leaving their camp behind. Ellie kept Davey as close to Joel’s mare as Davey would allow, though he seemed glad for the herd after the surprise attack. Adrenaline still racing, Joel kept his rifle in hand, scanning the trees for the slightest movement that might suggest more infected. They didn’t stop until they reached a stream, but when he reached up to help Ellie down out of her saddle, she froze, her gaze glued to his forearm.

“No!” She threw herself off Davey, hauling Joel down to her level and ripping his flannel shirt open, heedless of the buttons, then tearing it off to expose his arm. “No, fuck! Joel! Fuck!”

Right on his wrist—the bit of skin that’d have been exposed with his sleeve having slipped down from how he held the rabbits—was a bite. Adrenaline had kept him from feeling it, surely, despite the blood trickling down his skin. He’d shrugged it off as sweat, more concerned with keeping an eye on the world around him than on his person.

“It’ll be okay,” Joel said, catching Ellie’s face with his free hand, tilting her chin up so she had to meet his gaze. “I’m vaccinated, baby, it’ll be okay.”

“But what if it doesn’t work? What if—”

He closed his eyes at the way her voice broke, his hands shaking badly enough it was a wonder he didn’t rattle right off his skeleton. Inhaling deep, he glanced up at the sky, finding the sun, and then glanced at the stream and surrounding forest. As good a place to stop as any.

“We’ll know by nightfall,” he said. “So we’ll stay here ’til then. You’ll—” He cut himself off, looking down at her. He knew, now, that her mom had held a knife to her jugular while she waited for Marlene to find her, just in case she had to kill herself before she could harm Ellie. Joel would have done the same with Sarah. He’d do the same with Ellie now.

“You’ll tie me to a tree," he said. "Just in case.”

She closed her eyes tight enough it looked like it might hurt, and then buried her face against his chest, arms wrapping around his waist like she could squeeze the infection right out of him. He knelt so he could hug her properly, blinking back the burn in his eyes.

“If it goes south—”

“No!”

“Ellie—”

“No! I know what to do, you fucking idiot, but I won’t have you say it! Saying it might summon it, so just shut the fuck up.”

Sighing, he gently knocked his head against hers, kissed her cheek, and forced himself to stand. He’d see to the horses, set up their camp, make sure the guns were loaded and in easy reach, and then pick a tree. At least there were plenty to choose from.

Ellie did everything he asked without protest, looking at him every few minutes, as if to make sure he wasn’t about to leave her, or shoot himself, or turn. Hours passed in relative silence, nothing but the burbling stream, the huffing of horses, the distant wildlife. The coffee was cold, but he drank it anyway, glad for the caffeine. He didn’t want to fall asleep tonight.

Then Ellie found the rope from one packhorse and tied him to a tree with a nice view of the stream, the sun to his right. He felt no different, no lines of fungus growing up his arm, but he knew neither of them would trust it until the night had passed. He wasn’t in the least bit hungry, but he ate what Ellie brought him all the same, unwilling to reject what little comfort she hoped to bring him. It'd only make her feel worse.

“Ellie,” he warned when she tried to sit down with her back to his chest.

“Shut up,” she said and forced her way in. “I’ve got my gun, so just—

“Shut up, I know,” he said when her voice broke again, glad for her weight against him all the same. Glad he could press his nose to her hair and breathe her in while she alternated eyeing the forest around them and glaring at the bite mark. He’d cleaned it, since even if he didn’t get infected with cordyceps, he didn’t want the wound infected the natural way, but it didn’t look any prettier.

They didn’t talk much as the sun neared the western horizon. What was there to say that hadn’t already been said, really? He still would’ve liked more than a year with her, but saying that would only make her angry at him, and he didn’t want those to be her final memories.

“Look,” he said, pointing with his good arm. “Fireflies.”

She whipped her head around, then exhaled sharply when she saw the bugs, not the people. They danced over the stream, blinking their lights at each other, doing whatever the fuck fireflies did on a night out. Something about attracting mates, if he remembered documentaries correctly.

“You hungry?” he asked when it was almost full dark. If he had calculated the time right, he’d be coming up on turning shortly, and he wanted her far away from him just in case. He felt fine, but feelings could be deceiving.

“Not really,” she said, gaze glued to his bite mark again.

“You should still eat something.”

“Only if you do.”

“All right, fusspot.”

Sighing, she got to her feet and glared down at him, jabbing one finger. “Don’t you dare fucking move.”

“Ain’t going anywhere,” he said. “You tied it good.”

With a harrumph, she stomped over to their packs of food. While she grumbled and griped over anything and everything, he tipped his head back against the tree and glanced at the forest around them. Nighttime wildlife was up and about, so he trusted that meant no infected were around. Still, he felt for the revolver on his hip, reassured by the bullets in the cylinder.  

He’d shoot himself, if it came down to it. He wouldn’t make Ellie be the one to kill him.

When she returned, she shoved the jerky into his right hand and the wedge of cheese into his left. He murmured his thanks and shifted his legs so she could sit tangled up with them while they ate, her gaze flicking from his face to his arm and back.

By midnight, Joel still hadn’t turned. Ellie had fallen asleep against his chest, her hand wrapped around his wrist, palm to the bite as if to physically stop it from spreading infection. He didn’t wake her, didn’t move, though his ass had long ago fallen asleep and he could no longer feel his feet. The tree wasn’t doing his back any favors, either, but he’d passed worse nights. He didn’t allow himself to fall asleep, though. Ellie had watched over him during the day. Now it was his turn to do it at night.

He knew the moment she woke up, since she whined about it, turning her face into his chest as if to block out the grey light of dawn. And he knew the moment she remembered what had kept them here all day and night, since she bolted upright and looked straight into his face.

“Hey, babygirl,” he said.

She wailed, “Dad!” and burst into tears, throwing herself against him. He held her back as best he could with his arms still trapped against his sides, letting her get her sobs out, the tension she’d held in herself all day and night finally easing away. His shirt was soaking by the time she finally wore herself out, slumping with her head on his collarbone, her arms around his neck. He had to piss something terrible, her knee digging right into his bladder, but he didn’t protest. He wouldn’t move until she was good and ready to let him. As he hummed whatever songs came to mind, she shifted to press her ear to his chest, as if to feel and hear him both.

“Oh,” she said at last when sunrise bloomed across the sky, her gaze glued on the clouds whose bellies were painted bright. “That’s your yellow.”

Smiling, he said, “Yeah, that’s my yellow.”

They didn’t move until sunrise was well and truly gone, the horses growing restless for their breakfast. Ellie gave his bite mark one last look before she finally freed him from the rope. She had to help him to his feet, legs so numb it was a wonder they hadn’t died under him, but she only leaned against him while they waited, her arms around his waist.

“Let’s go home,” he said when he could stand on his own at last.

Smiling, she tipped her head back to kiss the scar on his forehead. “Let’s go home.”