Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Look - I found it.”

Ellie, hair knotted from the autumn wind and armed with the world’s most absurdly large churro squints through the streaky lights of the evening carnival to spot Joel’s gem - the two of them had been looking for the game for so long that Maria and Tommy had stolen JJ and Laura and left them to their own devices about ten minutes ago. 

But there it is, the booth punched out in large bulbs that streak in her line of vision: Shoot Out The Star! sparkles between a popcorn stand and something that involves several tiny multicolored rubber ducks. 

She takes her katana-sized churro and tips it Joel’s way. “Help me eat this thing,” she swings it over both his shoulders, pretending to knight him, “So we can play and I can kick your ass.”

He reaches over and pulls off a piece of the churro. “Not happening. You couldn’t even find the damn booth before me.” He wipes excess cinnamon sugar on her sleeve. “I’ll be surprised if you can even see the star to shoot out.”

She fakes a scowl at him as he steals another piece of churro. “I’m gonna claim my victory one star at a time. Absolutely Super Mario this shit. A show so stellar that the US army will be begging for my enlistment.”

“You’d never pass the psych evaluation.”

“Low blow, Miller.”

There’s a cacophony of sounds as they head to the booth: the slapping of mallets in whack-a-mole, the ka-ching of imaginary money, a distant banjo from some western-themed carnival game. But it’s the far-off sounds of a spooky clown laugh from the haunted house and the screams of children as they get their scares that send a bothersome shiver down her spine.

The employee sets up their game as Joel sheds his jacket and holds it up for her to slip her arms through. He’s not sure if the shiver was the haunted house or the cold, but he isn’t taking any chances. Ellie knows better than to argue, wrapping herself in corduroy that smells like sawdust. Her eyes are a little distant as he adjusts the collar and rolls up the sleeves.“I’ll tell you what -” He smooths his palms up and down her biceps as if to make her warm, and she blinks a few times, coming to life like the first spark of a fire. “If you put up a good fight I might consider letting you pick my prize.”

She scowls. “First of all,” Ellie says, waving the churro around. She takes another bite before forcing the rest of it into Joel’s hands. “Fuck you. Second of all - Get fucked. Third of all -” She nods to the line of plush imprisoned by zip ties at the top of the booth. “If neither one of us chooses that dinosaur, we’re dumber than I thought.”

Joel folds up what’s left of the churro and finishes it, this time wiping the excess sugar on her nose. He fights hard not to laugh when she tries licking it off. 

The game is simple enough. There are these cards hanging precariously by steel clothespins with these tiny little red stars in the middle. You get what’s basically a BB gun and a specific amount of ammo and you have to aim around the star to punch it out of the paper and win your prize.

But, because they’re Joel and Ellie, she’s already decided the task will be accomplished by them both - it’s just a matter of who can do it first. Now, he’ll give credit where credit is due: Ellie’s a fake it ‘til you make it kind of gal. She talks a big game and usually, with enough grit, she can get it done.

As it turns out, Ellie is no Annie Oakley.

But maybe he is.

“You dick,” Ellie pouts when Joel’s star falls out of the paper before she’s gotten halfway around hers, ammo depleted. She manages to turn her head to glare at him just in time to catch his little: what can I say? shrug. 

Her son rounds the booth just in time to witness the tail end of her defeat. He’s about to heckle her on her loss - he can see the mischief sparkling in his eyes - but then Joel diffuses the situation when he selects the dinosaur plush and hands it off to a delighted JJ. 

“Suck up,” Ellie scoffs.

He shrugs again, the same smug smile on his face.

JJ runs up to her then and instinctively, she holds out one arm straight as a board; he’s getting a little too tall for the game, much preferring Joel and Tommy these days, but he grabs onto her arm and she lifts at the same time he pulls up his legs so he can dangle, even if it’s a few inches off the ground. “Mom? Can I have some funnel cake?”

She nods to Tommy a bit in the distance, where he and Maria are trying to teach Laura about how to win one of the card scamming games someone has set up on a fold-up table by the Zoltar Fortune Teller. “Did Tommy already give you funnel cake?”

“No.”

She cocks an eyebrow.

 “...It was a fried Oreo.”

“Damn.” She sets him down. “And you didn’t get me one?”

“You were busy losing a shootout with Joel.”

Moments like this make him wonder if Ellie thinks twice about raising her kid with such sass. 

“Tell you what.” The words roll off her tongue slowly as she scans the carnival for another game.“You let me redeem myself?” She points down to the High Striker at the end of the lane. “And we can eat funnel cake and fried Oreos until we vomit .”

Joel comes up behind her and gently pokes a finger into the underneath side of her jaw. “Or your teeth fall out.”

She pretends to try and bite his finger. “Whichever God decides must come first.”

They all make it up to High Striker just in time to watch some twenty-year-old frat boy try and fail to reach the bell - it gets high, the colored light blinking out an 89 - but only 100s get a prize. 

Tommy decides to be a heckler. “Ain’t no way, kiddo,” he tells Ellie. He slaps both his hands on her shoulders and the feeling is poorly timed with the evil laugh coming from the haunted house. She shivers, again, and now Joel is certain it’s the clown noise; but Tommy thinks she’s cold and fiddles with her borrowed jacket, buttoning the top one at her neck from his place behind her. “Don’t tell me you’re already shakin’ with nerves, girl.”

“Never,” she wiggles away from him and bumps into Joel. “I’m just harnessing all the mystical powers of Mjolnir before I absolutely Hulk out.” 

Tommy tuts. “Hulk wasn’t worthy.”

“Okay, but I am. Don’t harsh the vibe, my guy.” She shoves the oversized sleeves of Joel’s jacket further up her arms when the carny beckons for her to come up for her turn. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a frat boy to humiliate.”

If Joel had a lot more hearing left, he’s pretty sure Tommy and JJ would obliterate it with how loud they cheer. Laura immediately covers her ears, as does Maria, and he watches as the two girls share fond, yet exasperated, looks. 

Ellie’s given the hammer and she twirls it in her hands a few times before she sets it down. She holds up a finger and mouths one sec exaggeratedly toward them and then proceeds to spit on her hands and rub them together. 

“Jesus,” Maria grumbles under her breath.

She rolls the knots out of her neck and does a few high steps before she picks up the hammer once more. Her face takes on something a little more serious as she sizes up both the black plate and the long multi-colored tower leading up to the bell. She heaves the hammer behind her and then, slam! Right in the center.

The bell goes up, up, up, and then - 

DING!

Because of course. It’s Ellie.

Once Ellie’s done striking her Herculean poses to egg on an already loud and cheering crowd, she makes haste to choose a prize; he thinks she’s going to choose the enormously large bear if only to make him or Tommy carry it around but instead, she returns with something small - an elephant with velvet soft ears.

Before he can get a word in, it’s thrust under his nose, literally. She tries to tickle his upper lip with it before she reaches on her tiptoes and tries to balance it on the top of his head to no avail. It slides off and lands on his shoulder; he manages to grab it before it takes one last tumble to the ground.

He tries to hand it back, but she shakes her head, hands clasped behind her back. “Keep it,” she says, rocking back and forth on her feet. “I got it for you.”

Joel fights a smile before he holds it up to his face. For a moment he feels thrown back in time to when he was twenty-five with Sarah in her room having a tea party with her stuffed animals. “What’s its name?”

She wrinkles her nose, amused. “It’s Ellie the Elephant. It’s an Elliephant.”

“You never stop, do you?”

“Nope.”

He tweaks her nose, somehow still dusted in cinnamon sugar, and prays she truly never will. 

“Mom,” JJ calls. “Time to make our teeth fall out!”

“Fuck yeah!”

Joel sees Tommy have a flashback of Laura losing her first tooth in the middle of a fair, powdered sugar dusting her face. “Now, hold on-“

Tommy’s alternatives are essentially vetoed as the bunch of them round the food cart again. JJ, despite his cries for more sugar, gets one whiff of a corn dog and is sold. He and Ellie end up huddled together, JJ ducking underneath the excess of Joel’s jacket as they share a corn dog smothered in mustard. 

His niece has seemed to swindle her parents into sharing one of those giant churros. Despite it being split in three, it’s still too much for her; she approaches him with a shy smile and an offer of half her share. It’s an offer he can’t refuse despite him being full.

“Uncle Joel,” she says between nibbles. “Will you go to the haunted house with us?”

Joel tries to be discreet as he looks Ellie’s way, some fatherly instinct in him waiting to see her flinch or cower, but she’s too enraptured by something JJ’s said. “I think I’ll pass, honey,” he says as gently as he can. “That clown gives me the creeps. Think I’ll ask Miss Ellie if she wants to try and win that giant Clifford-lookin’ dog instead.”

That is a sentence that her supersonic ears pick up on. “Where?” she asks, head turning like a bloodhound. 

“Mom,” JJ whines, gently tugging on her sleeve. “Come to the haunted house!”

“Sorry, spud. Go with Tommy and Maria if you’d like,” she says gently, carding her hand through his hair. “But now that I know there’s a couch-sized dog to be won in this godforsaken carnival, no vampire, witch, or grim reaper is going to stand in my way.”

To JJ’s credit, he doesn’t look too dejected - he seems more excited about the prospect of simply getting to go, no matter who takes him. Tommy gives them a thumbs up while Maria promises to keep the kids safe by physically pushing Tommy into all the scary stuff. 

Once they slip away to the long line of the haunted house, something bleeds out of Ellie’s posture, her breath long and loud as her shoulders sag. “Thanks,” she ends up mumbling to the ground. “I hate haunted houses.”

“I had a feeling that was the case.”

She simply hums in return, staring at the yellowed grass beneath her sneakers. When she finally looks up, she asks, “...Is there really a Clifford dog here?”

“Sorta.” He had seen it when they walked in, but she was too busy being dazzled by shinier things. “But it ain’t red. It was purple.”

“Bamboozled. Hoodwinked. Gypped. Bilked -”

“But there is a carousel.” 

It’s clearly the right suggestion if her expression is anything to go by. She pivots sharply, her grin Cheshire, and waggles her eyebrow. “Yeah? You gonna on it with me?”

“I wouldn’t have suggested it otherwise.”

She grabs his arm with both of hers and tugs. He plants his feet firmly on the ground and she nearly slips with the unanticipated resistance. Her laugh is short of a wheeze and she tugs a little harder and this time he slacks his posture; she yelps when he almost collides with him before she dissolves into a short fit of light laughter. 

When Sarah was a kid, he took her to one of these fairs. He remembers the carousel being crowded, a main attraction set in the center like a nucleus, constantly surrounded by people with a line that seemingly spiraled forever. 

But here and now, time has seemingly stripped away its enchantment. Parents and kids alike are a little more mystified by the big Ferris wheel, pop-up arcade games, and things doused in more modern technology - it’s abandoned in every sense of the word. Chipped paint on the horses, missing lights along the trim and crown, and dated music. It’s set up on the edge of the fairgrounds, only a scattering of people here to see it. Ellie and Joel are able to walk right up to it without having to wait in line. They pretty much have their choice of chipped horses; there are only four people - a father-daughter duo and two teenage girls, hands wrapped around one horse, whispering and giggling to one another. 

For whatever reason, the girls catch Ellie’s attention. Her gaze lingers, something sad in her eyes, and Joel gently pats the seats of one of the horses to grab her attention. “Side Saddle or Western?”

She blinks, takes a deep breath, and tears her gaze away with a smile. “Well, I am a lady -”

“Debatable.”

She hops up on the horse to sit side saddle. “Again with the low blows, Miller.” 

He thinks about standing next to her, hands wrapped around the pole above hers, but she’s not a little kid. She’s not Sarah. She’s Ellie, which means she’s gonna expect him to act as much like a kid as her. He looks at the horse beside him, lower than the one she’s chosen. “I think I’m a bit more of a cowboy,” he says, swinging one leg over the horse. 

He stretches behind him, setting Ellie the Elephant on a horse of her own. 

Ellie says nothing in return; she smiles softly, resting her temple against the side of the pole of her horse. 

He mirrors her position, a million questions swirling around in his mind. She’s not normally so quiet. “Whatcha thinkin’ ‘bout, kiddo?”

Her eyes shut, relaxed. It’s like she’s hearing the soft noises of a guitar rather than the old harsh distorted sounds of an organ. “Got my first kiss on a carousel,” she admits, She turns her face, mouth presses into the back of her hand wrapped around the pole. 

“Good day, huh?”

“Yeah,” she says into her hand. “The best.” Her brow furrows then and she turns back to face him, head temple to the back of hand. “Also the worst.”

“Get your braces stuck or something?”

Her laugh startles them both; she throws her head back, arms stretching as they keep her balance wrapped around the pole. “Shit,” she says to the ceiling of the merry-go-round. “That actually happens?”

“Ask Tommy.”

She whips her head up, stray hairs dancing wildly on her face. “Oh, I will.”

With that kind of smile, Joel begins to think he may have pulled her out of a complicated memory, but her face falls soon after, like a windshield wiper to her smile. Her frown is barely there as she hops off the horse and grabs the Elliephant, holding him like she hasn’t seen it in years.

Joel clears his throat. “Why did the Elephant get kicked out of the pool?”

She blinks and then turns the plush around, pitching her voice like she’s speaking through it. “Why?”

“His trunks kept falling down.”

The smile creeps back, faint, but there. “That’s so dumb.” She leans back on her carousel horse, crossing her arms across her chest. Her eyes drift up in thought. “What…do you call… a horse with no saddle?” She moves to pat the seat a few times.

Joel shrugs.

“Neigh-kid.”

“...That one’s not bad.”

“Of course. When will you learn,” she says, placing the elephant on Joel’s head. Despite the slow spin of the ride, this time, it stays on. “That I’m always funny.”

He plucks the toy off his head and holds it in front of his face. “Debatable,” he says, no change in the inflection of his voice.

She grabs the toy with a little more force than necessary.

“You know what?” Joel says, slow to get off the horse. He exaggerates his groan, knowing Ellie will get a kick out of teasing him about his age - which she does. “We got time for one more thing.”

“Before Maria returns, reporting the untimely death of your brother due to her pushing him into the walking dead?”

“Exactly,” he says. “Follow me.”

They end up back in front of a mechanical fortune teller. Like the carousel, it’s seen some things, but the stories it has are compelling. People have stuck stickers of all kinds - mostly astrological - to the side. The Z is so faded the machine basically says Oltar which makes Ellie laugh. 

“This is exactly what I need,” Ellie says, digging through the pockets of her - his - jacket for a few bucks. “I’m so goddamn tired of trying to figure out my own life. We should leave it to the divinely anointed animatronics.”

“As the universe intended,” Joel agrees. 

The first dollar that Ellie digs out of his jacket is so crinkled she ends up slapping it up against the glass in a shit attempt to iron it out. Eventually, the machine accepts it and whirs to life with some mystical music. His enchanted crystal ball glows with all the power of a low-watt, muti-colored bulb, and his head moves about before he gives his fortune. 

“Age is simply a matter of mind. If you don’t mind, then my friend, it doesn’t matter. Then go on, be carefree like a little baby. Go on, let Zoltar tell you more.”

Ellie’s quick to assign it to him. “See? Ain’t no shame in pushing 120. The creepy robot says you should ride carousels and eat candied apples until your teeth fall out.”

Joel snorts and fishes another dollar out of his wallet, shoving it into the machine. “By your logic, my teeth have already been replaced by dentures.”

The machine spits out a card, and Ellie is quick to nab it. “ You may be riding the winds of change, ” Ellie reads. “ Things may soon seem to be out of sorts. But be patient, as they will come down to a better order. Everything rises but to fall. Life has seasons. To make sense of it all, keep close the people you relate to. The bigger picture lies with them.” Her nostrils flare when she finishes, snorting out a breath. She gently flicks the card with two fingers. “Damn. Little ominous, don’t you think?”

“I dunno,” Joel drawls, tucking Elliephant under one of his arms as he grabs the card with the other. “Doesn’t say much of anything. I already know things change.”

Ellie hums her affirmation, and he can practically hear the unwanted memories of her past clawing to get to the forefront of her mind. She deflects. “I much preferred the part where he called you old.”

“That ain’t what it said.”

“Tomato, Tomahto.”

They stop by one more food cart for spiced cider just before the kids and Maria return from the haunted house - Tommy completely intact. Ellie doesn’t even have time to finish her joking dismay before JJ launches into a play-by-play of every single thing he saw in the haunted house. Ellie’s face gets a little green - he vaguely wonders how she handles Halloween, especially with it creeping up in a week or two. He subtly hands over the elephant toy for her to hold, and he’s pleased to see that it seems to visibly relax her. 

When JJ takes notice that Clifford is MIA, he pouts. “You didn’t win it?”

“How dare you insinuate my defeat. There’s no Clifford because it wasn’t a big red dog. It was purple. Joel didn’t think that distinction important.”

“Oh,” JJ deflates. “Yeah, not worth it.”

They both shoot him a look that Joel figures he’ll never quite understand.

“The fair is open again next week,” JJ tells her once he’s finished telling them about the man in the wolf mask that chased them with an imaginary chainsaw at the end of the house. “Can we go?”

“Can’t,” Ellie says around loud and dramatic sips of her cider - it makes Laura giggle. “We have to go to the corn maze next week.” She leans in and whispers, “I think we can finally manage to ditch Tommy that way. Joel said I wasn’t allowed to leave him at the top of the Ferris wheel.”

“He’s afraid of heights,” Joel says, deadpan, priding himself on not cracking a smile when his little brother snorts out a laugh and slaps his arm.

“Well,” JJ’s voice is quieter than it has been in the last five minutes. “Can I sleep over at Laura’s tonight?”

“My dad said we could stay up and watch Hocus Pocus.” Laura adds, quick to make their plea appealing. The pleas of children who don't want a fun night to end.

“Ten bucks says you fall asleep in the Miller’s car,” JJ dodges Ellie’s hand when she goes to ruffle his hair. “But you’re welcome to give it your best shot.” This time when her hand reaches out for him, he clings to her, ducking under her arm for a hug. “Take notes. The Sanderson Sisters are American icons. We should all aspire to be so camp.”

JJ beams at her. “I have no idea what that means,” he says plainly before he goes in for another hug. “But thanks.”

“Have fun. And behave,” Ellie tells him, swaying them back and forth. “Perfect house guest behavior. Which means you do the cooking, the cleaning, and the lawn mowing. Whole nine yards. Pun intended.”

“I’d like a lobster bisque,” Maria says.

“Wouldn’t mind a filet mignon,” Tommy adds. “Hey, what’s your fish of the day? Blue Cod? ”

“You do handmade ravioli?”

JJ puffs out his chest. “My specialty is Lucky Charms.”

“The trick is the slow pour of soy milk after he’s picked out the rainbow marshmallows. Really gives the oats the right consistency.” She smacks a kiss on his head before she gives him a playful push toward Laura. “Night, buddy. Love you.”

“Love you!”

The repeated, theatrical screams from the haunted house flank them as they leave, making Ellie on edge for a few moments. She’s still got the Elliephant, as well as the fortune card, the latter she keeps repeatedly smacking against her arm as they diverge in the grassy parking lot. 

“Want me to drive?” Joel asks.

Ellie sticks the fortune card between her teeth as she digs through her pockets for her keys. “Nah,” she says, unlocking the door and ripping the handle open with a little more force than necessary. “I got it.” 

She sets the Elliephant in Joel’s lap and the fortune card on the dash like a parking ticket. Her fingers drum against the wheel a few times and she mumbles something like a short pep talk under her breath before she starts the car and pulls out into the country roads.

They settle into the normal routine. Joel fiddles with the radio, slowly passing by each station so Ellie can hear what’s on and decide if it’s worth listening to. The static all the way out in the boonies is almost unbearable, even for him, but it doesn’t seem to bother her. “No,” she says as he turns. “No, No, No -wait.” He stops on a country song, but he doesn’t recognize it. Three or so notes more, and she does, nose wrinkling in distaste. “No.”

Eventually, Joel gives up. He piddles through her glovebox for CDs while Ellie rolls her window down, resting her left arm out. He hears her fingers tapping against the metal of her door.

All of her CDs are burnt CDs. They’re in flimsy multicolored cases, names written on top in sloppy scrawl. Joel knows Ellie’s handwriting like the back of his hand and while there are a few written by her, a lot of them seem to be gifted. 

One, in particular, catches his eye: “Finish These Songs, Not My Sentences <3”

“Heh,” Ellie smiles. “Uh, that one was from Dina. When we were dancing around each other, I apparently had a bad habit of cutting her off in all my nervousness to say something,” Her hand rolls around outside the window, catching in the wind. “Cool, I guess.”

Joel snorts. “You? A chatterbox? Unthinkable.”

She doesn’t rise to the bate. “There should be another one in there. Six. That one’s pretty good.”

He finds it and pops it in, but he’s suspicious when Ellie starts laughing before Track 1 even plays. When it does, though, he has to be honest: he does feel properly got.

“Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down -”

He hits skip to Track 2.

“ Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down -”

Then Track 3.

“Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down -”

Then Track 4.

“Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down -”

Ellie is nearly crying with her laughter at this point. “I’m gonna save you some trouble,” she wheezes, “And tell you that yes - she Rick Rolled me six times.”

“Why six -”

“That one - well, you had to be there.”

He pops the disc out and puts in a different one that she says is from Jesse titled  From: Mr. Handsome or Whatever. And he’s surprised to hear it’s just a collection of folky alternative songs from the last two decades or so. 

As the soft sounds of a banjo fill the car, curiosity gets the best of him. Ellie doesn’t object to him snooping, so he digs through all of her CDs, reading the collection of inside jokes they had over the years. It’s a time capsule, a window into the full life with them she once had, however short it was and long it felt. 

At the bottom is a CD unlike the others - it’s in a different case, scribbled with different handwriting. 

“Let’s Lose Our Minds.”

He says it out loud and Ellie startles - she doesn’t slam on the brake, but she lets up on the gas a little. “That’s.” She blinks rapidly, eyes deliberately on the road. Her right hand white-knuckling the wheel. “Uh.”

“Dina or Jesse?”

She’s silent for a long, long time. “...Riley. That one’s from Riley.” 

Joel hasn’t heard that name before. She has sprinkled in stories about Dina and Jesse on occasion, and he’s always marveled at how she basks in happy memories despite staring grief straight in the face. It’s something he’s struggled with when it comes to Sarah.

It’s something that Ellie struggles with here, with Riley.

The car comes to a rolling stop at a four-way intersection, surrounded by the edges of large acre properties at every corner. Telephone poles stand watch beside them. The light above them blinks red. 

Suddenly, the CD feels like contraband. He wants to shove it back in the glove box, pretending he never saw it, but Ellie is staring at it too intently for him to do that. Instead, he pops open the case, and the tiniest end of a photo booth strip flutters down to the center console.

A much younger Ellie and a girl, presumably Riley, huddled together with wide and silly smiles.

She looks at the picture like it’s an obituary. 

Ellie swallows thickly, grabbing it by its roughly torn edges. “Riley was my person when I didn’t have Dina and Jesse. She-” Ellie blows out a long, shaky breath before she leans over and tucks the photo back into the CD case. “She was my carousel girl.”

Her confession, heavy with both wonder and grief, leave him speechless. But he remembers the dreamy look in Ellie’s eyes when they were on that ride, and takes a note from her book - he smiles, despite it all.

And Ellie, her heart like a sunflower, chooses yet again to look at the bright wonder of it all and smiles right back.

The intersection is still empty. The light above them blinks red.

Ellie wipes her eyes with her sleeve before she lets her arm hang back out the window. “I want a drink. You want a drink?”

“I could have a drink.”

“It’s karaoke night at The Tipsy Bison.”

“....I could have a drink.”

“One day, Miller." She gently presses on the gas. "You’ll get up there and sing for me one day.”

Joel barely registers the headlights of the car speeding through the intersection before it slams into them on the passenger’s side, careening them across the road and pinning the driver’s side against the telephone pole.

His brain barely registers it all: the shattered glass, the warped metal, the smell of gasoline. He can still see the faint glow of the stop light blinking above. Ellie’s half out of her seat, her arm stuck between the door and the pole. He wants to reach for her but he can’t. His leg hurts. His head hurts. There's so much pain. He can’t do anything.

The last thing he sees is the fortune card still on the dash, covered in blood.

The last thing he hears is Ellie begging him to get up.

Chapter Text

“If that isn’t chocolate pudding, I’m throwing you out this eighth-story window.”

Tommy collapses with fanfare into the chair at Ellie’s bedside, propping his feet up on her bed, completely unmindful of her IV line, which she has to free from underneath his heel. A pudding cup is sloppily plopped on her lap tray, making friends with the terrible pile of magazines and crossword puzzles she hasn’t had the attention span to finish.

A pudding cup that is, very clearly, not chocolate.

She glares at him.

“I’m not too worried,” Tommy says as he settles in. The jacket he’s wearing is big, too big - it’s gotta be Joel’s. The collar starts to hunch around his neck when he slumps into the hard cushion. “Not sure you can really throw much these days.”

Ellie lifts her left hand - three fingers to its name - and thanks the universe she still has her middle finger to flip him off with.

“Does it look weird?” Ellie asks the moment she does it. She turns her hand back and forth, mouth slightly agape and eyes squinted as she studies her new and strange form. “I think it looks weird.”

“It looks a little weird.”

Ellie always wants honesty, but she doesn’t always expect it. But Tommy usually delivers. Her expression is a little hollow as her gaze lingers before she makes a mission of ripping off the plastic cover on her not-chocolate pudding.

“Christ,” she swears, getting a whiff. “Is this banana? You couldn’t at least spring for vanilla?”

She licks the foil lid before Tommy gets a chance to answer. “S’all they had.” He finally says.

“No spoons either, huh,” Ellie complains, already using the lid to scoop up the cursed treat.

“You got fingers, don’t you? I’m countin’ at least eight.”

She sticks her tongue out before she crumples the tiny plastic container and downs the rest of it like a jello shot. “At least it’s not butterscotch. No one likes butterscotch.”

Tommy’s smile is wry. “Joel likes butterscotch.”

“That’s because he’s, like, ninety years old.” She reaches over and tickles his ankle, swearing and laughing when he twitches enough to nearly yank out her IV and tumble to the ground. Still, he rearranges himself so his feet still lay propped up on her bed. When she reaches for him again, she’s softer, giving the top of his shoe a pat. “How’s he doin’?”

“You saw him four days ago. I had to listen to you guys talk over an entire season of The Amazing Race.”

Ellie shrugs. “We like to play along, and decide who would do what.”  

“You two would get lost on the first leg.”

“Wrong. We’d lose midseason when one of us had to eat something insane like snake skins. Or pecan pie. But hey, speaking of legs -”

Tommy sits up a little more properly in the chair, feet coming to the floor. “His leg is fine. He’s got his wheelchair when he needs it. Already whittling away at a cane. But, uh.” Tommy stumbles for a second, and Ellie’s heart monitor picks up in response. “S’not his leg I’m most worried about.”

Suddenly, the paper-thin blanket of her hospital bed seems very interesting. She twirls a loose thread around her left index finger tight tight tight, just like a tourniquet. "I can handle it."

She keeps her eyes down, deliberately avoiding whatever pained expression takes hold on Tommy’s face. But she still hears his sigh. “He’s my brother, Ellie. I can take care of ‘im.”

“I know,” Ellie is quick to amend. “It’s not that. It’s just -” This time she’s the one that sighs, letting go of the thread so as to avoid amputating another finger. “ I know you guys just got back to a good place. I don’t want that to get all fucked up.”

He’s so close to rolling his eyes. She can just tell. “Having Joel stay with me isn’t gonna -”

“He forgets.”

Such a simple, wispy truth - but it’s a heavy weight between them. Ellie watches as Tommy’s brows knit together, contemplating her words. 

“Even if it’s just a moment here and there. It adds up. Trust me, I know. He’ll get frustrated. And he’ll probably take it out on you,” Ellie tells him. “I don’t want to open any old wounds.”

Tommy sinks a little in the seat and curls a little more snuggly into his brother’s borrowed jacket. But Ellie knows he’s still anxious; His foot taps incessantly on the linoleum floors.  “I don’t want you opening any old wounds, either.”

Ellie tries a smile, but it comes out more like a grimace. “Joel isn’t sick like Dina was.” Tommy opens his mouth, a rebuttal on the tip of his tongue, and she charges forward. “I can do it. I want to do it. I don’t know if you know this,” she drops her voice like she has a secret. “But that geezer is kinda my best friend.”

Something soft twinkles in Tommy’s eyes. “Strangest two peas in a pod I ever did meet.”

“Damn straight. So please.” She adjusts her posture, fluffing her own pillows around her before she pretends to fix an imaginary tie around her neck. “Consider my application as Joel Miller’s Full Time Wrangler. I’ll feed him, I’ll walk him, I’ll teach him all the basic commands.” She winks. “He’ll be Amazing Race ready before you know it.”

She holds her hand out - the bad one, unconnected to her IV - and Tommy’s stare lingers a hair too long before he’s blinking out of his mini-trance and grabbing her hand; Ellie barks out a laugh when he dodges her fingers and reaches forward to grab her wrist, wrapping his fingers around it. She does the same, the sensation odd, and for a moment she almost sees all her fingers there again.

“I want the video of y’all eating the snake skins,” he jokes, and she mumbles out a promise of some kind. When he lets go, he leans in closer, cupping her cheek with his hand. “And, kid?”

“Mm.”

“Might do ‘im some good if you let him help you, too.”

Ellie’s acutely aware; she’s promised Tommy this whole setup isn’t going to reopen any wounds, and she hopes she isn’t lying to herself - but she knows the only chance she has is if she meets Joel halfway. “I know,” she tells Tommy gently, hoping the sincerity seeps through before she’s back to her sharp tongue. “He’s going to be the designated Top-Shelf-Grabber. Pancake Flipper, too. Come to think of it, I think I’ll just let him cook everything.”

“Joel? Cook? Man, he leaves eggshells in the scrambled eggs.”

“Perfect. No need to change my recipe.”

Tommy leans back in, grin crooked. “Not even the first leg.”

“Hey now -”

Despite his earlier teasing, Tommy manages to also spend an ungodly amount of time discussing their potential as paired television personalities. They quarrel about who would win when the nurse comes in to unhook her IV and have her sign her discharge papers, they bicker about if the two of them would make a better team than her and Joel as a nurse wheels her down to pick-up, and Ellie laughs about the probability of actually eating snake skins until Tommy leaves and returns with the car.

She’s only been in a car a few times in her back-and-forth trips to the hospital in the attempt and now certified failure to save her fingers. So far she’s managed to avoid anything even related to a post-traumatic stress episode, but she does insist the radio is always off and the windows are always up.

The drive from the hospital to her farm outside of Jackson is about thirty minutes. Tommy jokes that the drive from the bottom of her driveway to the top is just as long. Farm feels like a loose definition - her fields are sparse with a few free-range chickens and goats. A failed strawberry patch. A small stable that can hold four horses, but only has one - she looks and tries to find Callus somewhere out in the rolling hills, maybe munching on some grass, but she doesn’t see him.

Her wrap-around porch is littered with chalk drawings - some more faded than others, but as Ellie climbs up the steps she can tell that several have been added in her absence. Most of them are JJ’s and Frank’s, but she sees a few on the top of the steps that are distinctly Joel’s - butterflies, the only thing he knows how to draw. 

“JJ!” Ellie screams at the top of her lungs in lieu of knocking, ringing, or walking into her own home. “Come out here and see my new T-Rex hand!”

She barely dodges a broken nose when the storm door slaps open and JJ barrels out into the porch. “Mom!” He runs straight into her, wrapping his arms around her middle and burrowing his face in her stomach. 

“Hey, buddy,” she laughs lightly, voice already hoarse from her scream. JJ tightens his hold on her in response and says nothing. When she focuses hard enough she feels her t-shirt starting to dampen with his tears. “Hey, hey, hey,” she soothes, rocking them back and forth. “I’m okay, baby.” She plants a kiss on the top of his head. “C’mon, have a look.”

With a shyness he normally doesn’t possess, JJ carefully peels himself away, turning to look at her offered hand. Ellie goes the extra mile to emulate her best Jurassic Park roar. “How’s that? You think this’ll polish up my Dinasaurus routine?

He smiles a little. It’s probably scary to see a parent like this, but JJ’s a sweet and simple soul - if Mom’s okay with it, then he is, too. “T-Rex have two fingers. You still have three.”

She blinks once, twice before she throws her head back and screams “Fuck!” at the roof. It startles the keys out of Tommy’s hands and sends JJ into a more honest and relaxed fit of giggles. “They done did hecked me up. I specifically asked for the Cretaceous Treatment. We gotta go back, have ‘em cut off another.” She strains, reaching for the keys with her foot before Tommy picks them up and kicks them JJ’s way. “You drive.”

The storm door opens again, this time without nearly taking the hinges off. Bill squints at her, a half-formed scowl on his face. “What in hell’s name are you screamin’ about, girl?”

“Someone literally cut off my fingers.”

He rolls his eyes. “Well when the shock of the medical procedure you signed up for wears off, get your ass inside. I made your favorite,” and he props the door open a little wider, beckoning JJ to come inside. 

“You made a box of frosted brown sugar cinnamon Pop-Tarts?” She grins and playfully knocks elbows with an already snickering Tommy. “This I gotta see.”

She almost regrets the teasing once she walks into the house. The temperature is just on the edge of too warm, heated by the oven that’s been working overtime the past few hours; she smells a lot of things, mostly garlic, but when she sees the cobbler cooling on the counter she knows it truly is her favorite meal, dessert included.

“No way, I get Bill’s eggplant parmesan?” She heads over to the counter, right hand poised for the crime of a clean swipe. “I should guillotine my fingers more often."

Her wrist is given a light slap. She looks up to see Bill already paying her no more mind, busing himself with plating the meal. “Dinner first, Eliana.”

Frank comes to flank her on the other side of the island; his touch is gentle as he lays a soft hand on her shoulder. “Quick, grab a spoon, I’ll distract him.”

Her mind is temporarily flooded with being seventeen and sneaking pieces of pies, cakes, and cookies before dinner. Frank used to help her get elaborate with her methods - she’s pretty sure they built a pulley system one time. 

“No,” Ellie sighs dramatically. She fists her hands on her hips, ignoring the twinge of pain in her left. “Not yet. I haven’t sniffed out the vanilla ice cream.”

Bill snorts. “Ain’t got any.”

“What the fuck do you mean you don’t have vanilla ice cream to go with the cobbler -”

The screen door opens again. She hears the distinct scrape of a cane against her hardwoods before Joel's voice follows. “Don’t worry, kiddo. You can call off the hounds." Joel rounds the corner, a grocery bag slung over his shoulder. “I went and got your ice cream.”

Tommy was right - she had seen Joel just last week, but their accident has given her something a shrink might call separation anxiety. Their respective injuries had them toted back and forth to the hospital for the last several weeks - aside from the initial two weeks, they hadn’t been there at the same time. But the brain bleeds have stopped and the mangled dead limbs have been shucked - they can start to slip back into a new normal. 

Ellie waits for Joel to come to her, even though he looks a little tired and she has the intense need to give him a big bear hug. Maria follows behind, giving her a wink and a flash of her car keys to silently let her know he didn’t Tokyo Drift himself to the grocery store. 

He barely sets the bag on the counter before Ellie’s rifling through it. “Did you get -”

“Yes, I got the good vanilla bean.” 

“See!” She scoffs, gesturing loosely Tommy’s way. “It’s not hard to get vanilla.” She looks at Joel and pouts. “He gave me banana pudding.”

“ Pobrecita.” He gives the button of her nose a little tap. “But no worries. We’ll take him out back and give him the Old Yeller treatment.”

“Oi,” Tommy snaps.

She nods her approval as she pulls out the, yes, good vanilla bean ice cream. As well as a box of cinnamon Pop-Tarts. "The true favorite."

Joel just smirks. “I know what to get. I ain’t stupid.” It’s just a joke, harmless enough, but Joel’s had more than his recent fair share of bad days where he felt like his brain wasn’t good enough anymore for the lot of them. But before she can even defend him on his self-deprecating joke he’s reaching into his back pocket and producing a single, long-stemmed sunflower. 

“Welcome home.”

She takes the flower, bits of laughter bubbling out of her. “Where’d you get this?” she asks, twirling it in her good hand - Joel takes her other, surveying the doctor’s handiwork.

“The store.”

“Sunflowers aren’t in season.”

“Hmm. Then maybe I’m magic." He reaches over and kisses the side of her head. “You feelin’ okay? Any pain?”

Ellie lets herself lean into him and he lifts his chin, kissing the crown of her head once more before his knuckles rub gently back and forth along the part of her spine between her shoulder blades. “No pain,” she finally admits, which is true. She’s still marinating in whatever they had given her at the hospital. “But ask me again in a few more hours.”

He hums, knowing that truth all too well, before he starts to hobble over to where Bill and Frank are dishing up dinner. He tries to grab two plates - likely one for her - but Tommy gently takes one out of his hands and gives his brother a smile, nodding to the table for him to take a seat. 

JJ calls the chair across from Ellie and next to Tommy’s daughter Laura, who emerges from the back porch covered in chalk and promises that her masterpiece is finally done. They all disperse into the unclaimed seats, Joel taking the one on Ellie’s left. He sets the one plate Tommy let him have between them before he grabs her knife and fork and begins cutting up her eggplant parmesan.

“I can do it,” Ellie scoffs, but there’s no heat to it. She wasn’t lying about her hand not hurting all that much, but she knows as soon as she really works at using it, the pain and stiffness will come crashing back. 

“I know, baby.” But he doesn’t stop until it’s all cut up for her.

Dinner is a casual, loud affair - something Ellie loves. It’s a cacophony of overlapping conversations. Bill and Maria talk shop concerning whatever it is they do these days while Tommy keeps her, Laura, and JJ entertained with a vibrant play-by-play of the last little league game he coached. Joel and Frank bond over art - Frank is a painter like herself, but Joel likes to do woodwork and picks his brain for inlay designs and tricks on how to do finer details on chairs for a dining set he’s been wanting to make.

The thought of him using anything more powerful than hand drills and hammers make Ellie a little nervous.

“You should see his guitars,” Tommy says, a third helping of mac ‘n cheese making its way to his plate; he and Ellie are in a silent competition to see who can eat more, and Ellie, not keen on losing, grabs a little more to make her serving about three and a half. “The last one he made was real pretty.”

Ellie likes to think she’s been pretty up to date on Joel’s garage workshop - she’s seen desks he’s made, the birdhouses, the benches, and swings. But she hasn’t seen any guitars. “You make guitars?”

“Oh yeah,” Tommy says, stuffing a roll into his mouth. At this point, Ellie’s wondering if he would make the better Amazing Race partner. The dude packs food away like a black hole. “He’s been making them for like, what? Thirty years?”

Joel clears his throat. “Just about. But, uh, I never really made that many. Maybe a dozen. Only half of ‘em were any good.” He sniffs, eyes down on his food; but Ellie sees the hand not gripping his fork working the muscle of his bad leg. “I’d like to think I can play ‘em a bit better than I can make ‘em.”

She resists the urge to frown. He’s still never played for her. He’s mentioned it - definitely seemed shy about the whole thing - but she could tell he was never entirely opposed to the idea. In fact, he had once mentioned that he’d teach her how to play a song or two - they just needed to carve out the time.

And now, as Ellie glances at her hand, she realizes no amount of time can make that ever happen.

“Eliana.”

Her head snaps up at the sound of Bill’s voice rumbling out her name. To anyone else, he looks as stoic as ever, but she knows him well; the slight furrow of his brow, the sad little twinkle in his eye. He’s worried.

And when she surveys the rest of the table she sees that seems to be a universal feeling.

“Sorry,” she apologizes, even though she’s not really sure what for. She shines up her metaphorical red clown nose and oversized shoes, ready to deflect. “What shining achievement of mine were we talking about?”

Bill’s face returns to something more normal. “We weren’t.”

“Then you can understand why I spaced out.”

“Can’t exactly make a conversation out of nothing.”

Ellie mimes getting shot, going the extra mile to nearly fall out of her chair on impact - it gets the kids howling. “Joel,” she says dramatically, coughing up nothing. “Re-remember me…”

Joel scrapes his plate clean. “I’ll be sure to do that when I’m eating your slice of cobbler.”

“Wait,” she rights herself. “It was just a graze. I’m gonna live. Cobbler me.”

Tommy clears the table while Bill ends up dishing the cobbler - he rolls his eyes when she makes a loud buzzer noise when he only puts one scoop of vanilla ice cream on her slice. The bastard should really know better. After the second she gives him a thumbs up which he returns with a middle finger; she blows a raspberry when he sets the cobbler down in front of her.

“Remember to chew, you animal," Bill warns as she starts scooping up her dessert. 

“Fuck off,” she says, mouthful. It starts to dribble down her chin and Joel reaches over to wipe her face with a barely concealed grimace. “I haven’t had this shit in like.” She trails off and looks down at her hands, intent on counting on her fingers. “...I dunno if I have enough fingers anymore.”

Frank guffaws a laugh at that, and Ellie’s chest twinges with pride. “It hasn’t been that long, Ellie.” The sad truth is that it is, but neither of them wants to admit it. “Honestly, it feels like it was just yesterday we were in my sunroom painting the days away.”

Bill tuts his disagreement.``I wish that was all she was doing. I swear I’m still making repairs on my house from those years of havoc she wrecked on us.”

“Dude, you have got to get over the roof thing.”

“I will not.”

JJ spoons his cobbler with the same exuberance as her. Meanwhile, Laura’s got the face of a kid with a pressing question, she leans into JJ and whispers something; her son shakes his head in response. “They were her foster parents. She lived with them for like a year before she became a grown-up and moved in with my mom and dad.”

“You know,” Ellie says, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Frank wasn’t just my foster parent. He was also my middle school art teacher. He taught me everything I know.” She shovels more soupy cobbler into her mouth. “He’s the reason Savage Starlight is popular enough to be made into a high-production mini-series.”

Bill grunts. “We’re still waiting for our cut of the HBO check.”

“You want a new roof? I’ll buy you a new roof. I’ll buy you two new roofs.”

“I’m still waiting for her to buy a lawnmower.” Tommy gruffs. “All this land and that girl was using a push mower.”

“It works!” Ellie defends. “I tried one of those fancy riding ones but it’s broken. Besides.” She waves her spoon around. “I told you that you didn’t have to mow my lawn while I was in the hospital.”

“I’m a landscaper. I couldn’t watch your house with a lawn that looked like that.”

“Where’s the riding one?” Joel interrupts. “I can fix it.” 

Ellie adds an industrial lawn mower to her list of fears of the things she’s worried Joel will fiddle with and subsequently get hurt on. “Don’t worry about it right now. S’posed to snow this week.”

JJ throws both hands up in the air and hollers. “Whoo! Snow Day! I’m gonna build the biggest snowman ever. Or at least taller than Joel.”

Joel hums. “That so, huh? Well, I can’t wait to see it.”

As Tommy chimes in with a childhood regale about his greatest snow day creation (he claims it had all the likelihood of famed cryptid Sasquatch. Maria says if he had just one more working brain cell he’d realize that snow Sasquatch is literally the Yeti) Ellie becomes acutely aware that her hand is starting to actually hurt. A few more minutes and she’s not sure company will be a good enough distraction.

And the way that Joel is shifting in his chair and grabbing at his leg, she knows she isn’t the only one. 

But she doesn’t have to say anything - Frank is smart. And kinder than she deserves. “Well, it’s getting late - we best start wrapping things up.” Bill already moves to help Tommy with the dishes. “JJ, kid, you need any help getting ready for bed?”

“Nah, I got it,” he says. He then looks at her. “Mom? You need any help?”

Ellie squeezes at her wrist - as if that’ll do anything. But she likes pretending that she can cut off some of the blood supply to her hand and subsequently some of the pain. She’s got enough pill bottles that fill a gallon plastic bag thanks to all these surgeries but she doesn’t want to scare the kid. So she picks something else. “You want to put my sunflower in a vase in my room for me?”

He nods, happy for a task, and runs off. Joel is slow to get up, but he manages on his own, leaning heavily on his cane. “I think I’m gonna wash up and head on to bed if that’s alright with y’all.”

Tommy frowns at him. “Leg okay?”

His brother waves him off. “It will be. Just best be gettin’ off it for the day. Thanks, Tommy.” He pats Bill and Frank on the shoulder on the way out. “Let me know when you want to show me that inlay trick you was talkin’ about.”

“Will do, Joel. Night.”

He disappears around the corner and down the hall towards the guest room and bath she knows he’s been set up in for the last week or so. She trails behind, listening carefully for any trouble.

“I put a stool in there for him, so he can sit when he showers,” JJ says, seemingly appearing from nowhere. “And I lay out all his stuff for him every morning when he’s eating breakfast.”

"Yeah?”

Her son nods. “Yep! I’ve been feeding all the cats and chickens and goats. I get the mail and do the dishes. Laundry. Bill said not to mess with Callus though. Says Tommy still has to come over and do it.”

“Bill’s right,” she says, smoothing JJ’s hair back. “Callus is a nice horse, but he gets spooked by mice. And I don’t really like that you’re the perfect height for him to nail you in the face with a kick of his back leg.”

JJ leans into her, gently wrapping his hand around the wrist of her left hand. “Okay. But I can still do the other stuff. Promise. I want to help. I couldn’t help last time.”

Her heart twinges. JJ, in a lot of ways, is Jesse’s little clone. My friend’s problems are my problems he used to say. And even so young, JJ seems to have adopted the same credo. 

“Jesse,” she says, gently - his first name is the big guns. She wants him to know she’s serious. Her son looks up and she sees her childhood best friend’s face with the love of her life’s eyes. “You did help last time. Just because you were too young to feed goats or do dishes doesn’t mean you didn’t help. Seeing your face every day helped your mama hold on as long as she did.”

Much like earlier, he noses into the fabric of her shirt, trying not to cry.

“Hey,” she whispers. “Jay. Look at me.” When he whines instead she crouches to his level, gently lifting his chin up with two of her fingers. Red-rimmed eyes and puffy cheeks. “Joel doesn’t have to stay with us if you don’t want him to.”

JJ immediately looks stricken. “What? No! I want him to stay! Didn’t the doctors say he shouldn’t live alone anymore?”

“Yes, but he can live with Tommy, too. I don’t -” She breathes harshly out her nose and moves to run her arm up and down JJ’s arm. “This kind of stuff is hard. It can be a lot of work. I don’t want you to think that taking care of Joel is all up to you. I’ll do most of the heavy lifting. ”

“But I can help,” JJ whines again. “I want to help. Joel’s our  friend.”

And if that isn’t the same thing she told Tommy earlier. Maybe there’s a little of her in him as well after all. “Okay, okay,” she soothes, pulling him back into a hug. “But you gotta promise me if it’s ever too much, okay?”

He sniffs and nods. “Okay.”

“Jesse. I mean it.”

“I know, Mom. I will.”

“Good.” She smacks a fierce kiss on the side of his head. “Now, let’s go say goodbye to everyone before we get you to bed, okay?”

Turns out Bill and Co. had congregated out on the front porch. Ellie instantly wished it was summer - she misses the dusty nine o’clock skies and symphony of crickets. Instead, it’s brisk and she’s without shoes and a jacket.

“There’s plenty of food,” Frank tells her as he hugs her goodbye. “Shouldn’t have to cook for a week.”

“Yeah!” Ellie bounces on her cold, bare toes. “Joel brought Pop Tarts.”

That earns her a somewhat sharp but still harmless tug to her earlobe. She laughs and tries to squirm away, but instead, she’s pulled into a rare hug from Bill. “Finish the leftovers, Eliana.”

“I will, I will.” she hugs him back. “Thank you. For the food, and for watching JJ and -” she gestures helplessly to her house. “Everything else. I really appreciate it.” 

“Anytime. Really.”

One by one they all slip into the night and into the cars; JJ curls into her, shivering, and waits while they watch the pinpoint dots of their headlights trail down the long driveway and out into the country roads. He lets out two long, consecutive yawns as she hauls him inside and locks the door, so exhausted that she doesn’t even have to tell him to go to bed.

“Night, Mom,” he says sleepily, dragging his feet. “Love you.”

“Love you, three.”

“You mean too .”

“Two didn’t feel like enough. I’m sticking with three.”

He turns around to give her an exasperated smile unbefitting for his age before he runs up the stairs and into his room.

Ellie barely has enough time to consider stealing another piece of cobbler when there’s a bang that’s far too loud to be her son tripping up the last of the stairs. 

“Joel?” She calls, heading down the rest of the guest room and bath. She can still hear the shower running. “Joel, was that you?” When she doesn’t get a response as quickly as she likes she rounds the bottom of his bed and heads straight for the bathroom door. She gives it two loud knocks. “Joel, did you fall?”

There’s a grunt. “Yeah,” he answers. “Sure did.”

Ellie swears, gripping the handle. She wiggles it just enough to tell that, luckily, it hasn’t been locked. “Did you hit your head?”

“No.”

“Are you sure -”

“Just get Tommy."

“He left. If you're gonna stay here, you're gonna have to get used to me. I’m coming in, okay?” She jiggles the handle as some warning before she opens the door to a cloud of steam and one Joel Miller half-wrapped up in her shower curtain outside the tub.

“I tried grabbing it on the way down.” He says, the rod laying along his chest. “I’ll, uh, fix it.”

Ellie rolls her eyes. “I don’t care about the curtain.” She picks up the shower rod and looks the other way while she hands him his towel. “I just want you off the bathroom floor.”

It takes a minute but she manages to get him off the floor and back to the bed with his modesty mostly intact. He explains that it was a leg cramp that did him in while he was stepping out of the tub, a cramp that must still be there because once he’s managed to put on his pajama pants without her help, he sits helplessly at the edge of the bed, silently admitting he’s too tired to bother with a shirt.

So Ellie puts his shirt on for him, careful not to joke about it before she stands between his legs at the edge of the bed and starts to gently towel dry his hair. “It's getting long,” she says. Grey, too, but she keeps that part to herself. “You’re so lucky yours didn’t fall out from the anesthesia. Mine’s a mess.”

Joel frowns as he reaches out to gently grab at some of the shaggy edges of her hair sitting on her shoulders. “Doesn’t look it to me. Looks like how you wore it in middle school, remember?"

She takes a pause, a heavy frown engulfing her face. No, she doesn't remember. And he shouldn't either. "...Joel? You okay?"

He blinks at her a few times. He doesn't look lost. "Yeah, hon. I told you I'm fine."

She simply hums in response and gives his hair a few extra scrunches in the towel to wring out the excess water and using the opportunity to look for any new bumps on his head - there aren't any. “There. I think that’ll do.” She flashes him her best winning smile and she’s rewarded with a warm and soft one in return. He grabs her good hand and kisses the back of it before he squeezes it in a way that lets her know he wants to try and stand; she helps him to his feet and they hobble a few feet to the head of the bed where Ellie turns down the covers and helps him tuck in for the night. 

Joel sleeps on the left side of the bed - on the right Elliephant claims her spot on Joel’s second favorite pillow. “Aw, cute.” She takes a leap over him and crumples on the other side, crushing the plush elephant to her chest. “Did she keep you company while I was gone?”

He’s laying like a mummy in a sarcophagus, eyes closed and a shadow of a smile still there. “Every day.”

Her nose scrunches, amused and she rolls on her back, mimicking his position; she lays her hands across her stomach, left hand twitching. She flexes the fingers she still has but the uncomfortable tightness remains. It takes everything in her not to frown profusely.

But maybe she is. Or maybe her breathing is getting rough, or she’s sniffing too many times in a way that Joel knows by now means she’s about to cry because before she knows it Joel is reaching over, hand on her elbow, before his hand slides down to gently hold onto the fingers she has.

“You think my hand looks weird?” She whispers, eyes on the ceiling. It doesn’t have glow-in-the-dark stars on it like it does in JJ’s room. She should fix that. “I think it looks weird.”

“Babygirl," Joel breathes, voice on the cusp of sleep. “You look perfect.”

Ellie always wants honesty, and with Joel, she knows she gets it - she’s just always so surprised by how honest his love is.

She turns her head, not sure what the expect, but she sees his face slack and eyes closed. He’s almost gone. “Night, Joel,” she whispers, watching his face to see if he heard her.

He hums, the last bit of consciousness slipping away. “Night, love.”

Ellie falls asleep shortly after, staring at a hand that doesn’t feel like hers.

Chapter Text

“Wait, hold up, I gotta get this one.”

Joel digs his walking stick into the clay with a little more force as he comes to a halt. Ellie speeds past him, her left hand coming up to hold her sunhat on her head; she’s uncharacteristically worn a long, white doiley-lookin skirt in the spring heat, and she bunches it up, dirty hem and all, as she scurries down the side of the creek bed. 

“More mushrooms?”

“You bet your ass!”

Joel chuffs out a laugh as she splashes in the shallow water, red boots browning in the clay. She treks calf deep to get to a fallen log before she hauls one leg to straddle it like a horse before she plucks her sketchbook and pencil out of her knapsack and begins to sketch.

His leg has healed with the ease of someone twice as young and his mind, while not as sharp as it once was, hasn’t left him with as many gaps as he might have anticipated, either. He’s gotten around to doing a lot - fixed Ellie’s lawn mower, replanted the strawberry patch, started woodworking again. JJ even aided him in bringing in a few more animals - two goats, a rabbit, a duck, and a horse named Japan - onto the farm.

His current project is cleaning up the trails in the forest on the backend of Ellie’s property so they can ride the horses through. Normally, he just walks it - brings back rocks for her desk, flowers for her table, a feather to put in her hat. When spring peaks he tells her the wildflower field looks really pretty this year and she finally gets enough FOMO to temporarily ditch whatever new art project has her holed up in her workshop these days to come along.

This is maybe the ninth time they’ve stopped, but Joel doesn’t mind in the slightest. He finds a rock on the edge of the bank and settles in. Ellie’s not a slow sketcher, but she’s not that quick either, not when she’s trying to capture something specific. She leans down into the bark in a way that makes his own spine ache, nose almost to the top of the cap. 

“Gonna take a bite?” Joel jokes.

Ellie twitches her nose like a bunny. “I dunno. Do you think this is the put on pizza type or the take at an EDM concert type?”

Her nose keeps twitching. “I think it’s the outright poisonous kind, conejita .”

She looks up with a smile and a slight furrow of her brow; the dimples of her sunburnt cheeks are speckled in white paint - a little mushroom cap of her own. “Conejita?”

Joel simply scrunches his nose back in return, waiting for it to dawn on her. When it doesn’t, he puts one of his hands on the top of his head like a long ear. She lets out a soft ohhhh before she points to the mushroom and waits.

“Champiñón.”

She points to the water.

“Arroyo.”

She points to him and he snorts.

“Viejo.”

Ellie throws her head back and laughs, so much that she nearly falls off the log. She’s a fumbling mess as she catches her balance and keeps her hat on her head before she collects her things and starts to climb back up toward him.

He extends his walking stick for her to grab. She goes to use her left hand before she thinks better and uses her right, gripping the handle with the tiny hand-carved moose in it. She trips a little in his tug, slipping in the clay. It’s an awkward mess of her trying not to land on his bad leg - but it’s that or she takes a rock to her chin - so he shifts more and grabs her waist to yank her into him with a loud oomph.

“Sorry.” She hisses in sympathy out of instinct, but it’s not so bad. He’s survived worse. She rolls off his lap and settles on the rock right behind him, leaning over him like a gotdamn condor. “Wanna see?”

He tips his head back. Normally he’d see the sunlight painting the spring leaves lime green but instead, he sees Ellie’s pearly teeth and freckled face. This close he can see the faint smudges of lavender paint she has tried to smudge off her cheek. 

“I get to see the project?” he asks.

She nods, leaning over to drop her notebook in his lap. “You get to see the project.”

The notebook is thick and well worn - its pages have been made scratchy from days of wet paint drying, crinkling in a way that none of them fit together anymore. He starts at the beginning just as Ellie plucks his hat off and has them switch.

“It’s a new comic,” she explains as she adjusts the straw hat on his head. The brim of his stetson on hers casts a shadow over him. “About zombies. But the zombies are champiñónes.” 

She butchers the word. But he’s still intrigued. “Mushroom zombies?”

“Sorta.” He feels her lean into him, resting her forearms on the tops of his shoulders. “You’ll see. Flip, flip, flip.”

He does, greeted by sketches of mushroom-faced monsters of different intensities. He stares a little too long at the sketch of an old lady fresh on her little mushroom bite, tiny string-like tendrils spilling out of her mouth as Ellie dives into the science she’s using to describe a hostile humanity takeover via fungus.“I’m rightfully terrified, kiddo. Good job.”

Ellie snorts and reaches down to flip the next page for him. “It’s not all mushroom-infected people. Gotta have an immune heroine hellbent on saving the world.”

It’s a picture of two people: a young blonde teenage girl covered in grime and blood, with a wide smile on her face. Beside her, a tall lanky dude with long salt and pepper hair, his own smile more reserved. They look a bit like a father-daughter duo if he had to guess. 

“They’re gonna save the world from the apocalypse?” Joel asks, but he’s careful to make sure his tone isn’t mocking. He genuinely wants to know.

“They’re gonna try,” she says. “You’ll have to wait and see,” she sing-songs. 

He hands the book back to her over his head and waits for her to shuck her arms from his shoulders; instead, she shifts, throwing her legs over him, knobby knees at his ears. “Girl,” he gripes, a helpless smile crawling on his face when she laughs and scoots forward. He grabs her ankles. “Careful now.”

“You wouldn’t,” she scoffs, resting her arms this time on the top of his - her - hat. “You couldn’t.” A challenge. 

She shrieks when he stands up, scrabbling to find balance on his shoulders. He tugs her down, one arm bracketing both her muddy legs to his chest, the other gripping his walking stick. “Whereto?”

“Christ!” Ellie laughs. “A hospital, maybe? You’re gonna ruin your leg all over again.”

“Nah,” he grunts, but he still struggles a little until they get to the flat ground of the natural trail. “You ain’t even ninety pounds sopping wet.”

“How would you know -” She cuts herself off when he makes like he’s going to head back to the creek to throw her in and test his hypothesis. “No, no!” She knocks the straw hat into his eyes in her squirm. "Don’t!” She laughs.

“You’re blinding the driver,” Joel jokes, adjusting the hat. He walks them over to one of the trees he’s been meaning to show her. “Just relax.”

“Joel, I don’t want to hurt you -”

“Will you just hush and look?”

She sighs, but he can tell she’s concentrating when he gets her closer to the low branch of the tree. “They don’t usually nest so low,” he says quietly, shifting Ellie’s weight on his shoulders. “And they’re hard to find ‘cause they look just like the bark -”

“Oh,” Ellie gasps as he steps closer. He reckons she sees it now. At her height, she can grab the branch. “Baby birds!” she squeals softly when she sees the three heads popping up, looking for food. “Oh my god, what kind do you think they are? Hawks? Ostriches? Penguins?”

“Do you give anyone else this much grief?”

“No. Toucans?”

“Hummingbird. Calliope, if I had to guess.”

“So specific.” Ellie laughs, small and quiet. “You would have bird watching as a hobby, Viejo.”

He sighs, and she just laughs more. 

After Ellie’s had her look he backs up a few steps and takes a knee; she dutifully climbs off, but he manages to swipe his hat back and make the switch again. 

“Where’s this magical wildflower meadow? I was promised a magical wildflower meadow.”

Joel knocks the muddy end of his walking stick on the trunk of the tree before he uses it to point down the trail. “Thataway. Come on, we’re burning daylight.”

He hears Ellie gripe about how it’s barely noon but she follows at his heel nonetheless; she snakes one of her index fingers in his belt loop to keep up while her eyes are deep into her bag, rummaging for who knows what. He barely keeps a low twiggy branch from poking her eye out with a whack of his stick. When he looks back she’s got two pencils in her mouth, and one behind her ear. He whistles sharply. 

She looks up, mildly startled before she spits her pencils out in her hand. “What?”

He rolls his eyes but taps the last large tree trunk before the field behind the small wood. “We’re here.”

Ellie’s whole face lights up as she bolts ahead; there’s one last tiny hill they need to climb before they reach the field of wildflowers. She trips on the muddied hem of her skirt but before Joel can even belt out a worried, useless, and belated warning, she’s up on her feet again and disappearing over the hill. 

It’s her own little Sound of Music moment when he makes it to the top. She’s twirling and racing through the tall grasses and flowers. As he wipes the sweat from his brow he notices that the air is dotted with yellow specks flying all about - butterflies. 

“Hey, look!” Ellie cries holding out her left hand. One of the butterflies has settled on the shortened bits that used to be her pinky and ring fingers. 

He takes a step toward her - with all the flowers, the heavy breeze, and the haste of white fluffy clouds speeding across a brighter-than-blue sky, she feels miles away - but he gets close enough to see the details of the butterfly’s wings before it takes off again.

“Swallowtail,” Joel says. The word feels broken, a shell of something that couldn’t possibly be heard, but Ellie hears it. She always does. “They look like swallowtails.”

Ellie leans over, her hat falling on the ground to leave her auburn hair to catch the midday sunlight - streaks of gold, just like the dozens of wings fluttering in the forest. “Damn,” she pucks one of the flowers - long and purple - and twirls the delicate stem in her fingers before she plops herself among the tall grass. Joel has no choice but to ignore the ache in his knees and join her.

As he settles she gives him a pretty smile, twirling the stem a few more times before she gently reaches over and tips the front of his stetson down; she tucks it into the ribbon made of craft beads along the base of his hat. 

“FRIEND” Ellie reads, her hand ghosting along the purple glitter of the beads. “Am I right to assume this was the beginning of your craft era?”

“Oh, sure. Everyone starts with friendship bracelets. Sarah has the BEST. Didn’t feel right to bury her without it.”

Ellie hums before she sinks further into the grass, propped up by her elbows. “Jesse gave me a blue mallard feather when we were nine. I still have it.” She smiles at him, squinting slightly in the sun. “Try as I might, I’ve never managed to paint a prettier blue than that feather.” 

Another yellow butterfly flies by and grazes the top of Ellie’s head. For a moment, he thinks it might perch on the shell of her ear.

It doesn’t.

Joel adjusts his hat and lies down while Ellie clumsily toes her boots off. She barrel rolls in the grass toward him until she’s snug at his side, stretching over him until she’s looking up at him, chin digging into his sternum. “Hey,” she grunts, part of her shit-eating grin lost in the rumples of his t-shirt. “What do they call the leaders of the butterfly kingdoms?”

He catches on immediately. “That is so goddamn stupid.”

“I didn’t even finish it. You know the rule. You gotta complete the pun before you get to call it stupid.”

Joel sighs. “Monarchs.”

“Monarchs!”

Ellie laughs at her own joke for a moment longer before she resumes rolling around in the grass. Eventually, she finds space behind him, right above his head. He hears her ripping more wildflowers out before her hands pluck his hat off his head. She starts humming a song - one by Crosby Stills and Nash - while she tries to twist flowers in his hair. 

With his hat shed he can better see the clouds fly past. They’re large and fluffy, clumped together like scoops of ice cream. That’s what Sarah had always said they looked like.

Here and now, he can’t help but think of her. She was a midday kind of girl, always enjoying the sunshine and the full expanse of colors the world had to offer - she was adamant that it was the best time to see a butterfly. They’d always lived in Austin when she was a kid and while sunny days were in abundance, the butterflies weren’t. She’d tried to get him to plant a garden for them but the Texas heat killed it. Sarah hadn’t really minded - told her it just gave them another excuse to make a trek to Mexico.

“Sarah,” he says, a story on the tip of his tongue, but the weight of her name gives him a long pause. Ellie mistakes it for confusion and hovers over him, pressing her palms to both his cheeks.

“Hey,” she says softly. The back of her hand moves to his forehead. “You’re with me. Ellie. You okay?”

“Oh, hey, no,” he corrects. He’s not had an episode in some time. “I’m good, love. I was just thinking about something she taught me.”

“Got you to count past ten did she.”

“That and Monarch butterfly migration.”

“Yeah?” She resumes twisting flowers in his hair. At this point, he’s afraid to see what it looks like. 

“They travel thousands of miles,” Joel tells her. “Canada to Mexico and back. But what she loved was that when they were studied closely, they found they picked the exact same trees every year to make their pitstop. Just thousands of butterflies huddled in just a bundle of trees across the country.” He tilts his head back to find her face. “Her birthday wish every year from when she was six was that one day, the Monarch butterflies would choose the big tree in our front yard to set up camp.”

“Damn,” Ellie whistles low around a little laugh. “What a good fucking wish.”

“I was gonna take her one day. To the big monarch sanctuary in Mexico.” Joel had always planned it as a trip before she’d go to college. Every time he sees a monarch, he regrets waiting. 

“You should still go,” Ellie says, sprinkling his face with torn flower petals that didn’t make it into his hair; she even tries to stuff one up his nostril and he ends up slapping her hand away. “She’d want you to go, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know,” Joel admits. It’s the truth, to some extent. He thought about it once or twice: a mournful journey to go there and leave her ashes or some sort of piece of her amongst the butterflies as some sort of half-assed attempt at making up for last time. But he knows that isn’t what Ellie means - she wants him to go for the sake of wonderment, joy, and beauty. 

The reason Sarah wanted to go. 

“I do,” Ellie says back. “There’s no way Sarah would want you to pass up on that. I mean, a bajillion butterflies?” She stretches her arms out, gesturing to the meadows.“This isn’t even scratching the surface and it’s already so cool.”

He tilts his head up: fluffy marshmallow clouds haloed in golden light and the edges of Ellie’s smile: joyful, wondrous, beautiful. “Wanna come along?”

She answers so easily. “Oh, fuck yeah. We should all go. Pack the whole gang up and make the drive. If we’re strapped for room, we can tie JJ to the roof, he’ll love it. But.” Her smile takes on a taunting edge and she leans forward, her nose almost pressed to his. “I ask for something in return.”

“Lemme guess. The Kennedy Space -”

“- The Kennedy motherfuckin’ Space Center.” She pushes all her weight back and he hears her collapse into the grass, arms moving to make wildflower angels. “I have to make the trek for my lord and savior, Sally Ride. I just have to.”

Joel isn’t perfect, but he’s smart enough not to make the same mistake twice. He’s not gonna wait. He sits up and groans, ignoring Ellie’s quiet digs at creaky dinosaur bones. “Okay. We’ll go. I’ll take ya.”

Her face is a picture, hair tussled and covered in grass and petal carnage, eyes wide with surprise. “Wait, for real?”

“Pack up the whole gang up and make the drive,” he quotes her. “But if we’re strappin’ anyone to the roof, it’s Tommy. Fucker likes to sing 99 Bottles of Beer.”

Ellie clicks her tongue. “How annoying. 999 Bottles of Beer is definitely the way to go.”

He swallows his retort and simply slaps her straw hat back on her head. 

There’s a rustle somewhere in the distance and Ellie shows her profile as she whips her head to the side. Joel knows this area well and there isn’t really enough forest for anything of worry to come stalking out but her nose twitches like prey, her bag gripped tight under one hand.

At the end of the meadow, a tiny fawn appears. 

“Oh.” She crumples with the weight of the breath she releases. They both wait for a moment before Ellie asks, “Do you think it’s all alone?”

That, ironically, is something Joel thinks about before Ellie even says anything. He and Tommy used to go hunting all the time, something Sarah despised - they were careful not to mention the ducks and the doe they got but the big buck they bagged when she was ten was dinner conversation more than once. She had asked him how he could kill it not knowing if it had a deer family with little babies out there to miss him.

He heard her; sympathized in a way that parents do when kids learn about the circle of life. He and Tommy went hunting the next summer.

But he listened to her the day someone shot and killed her, leaving him all alone.

His hunting gear was sold before her funeral was finished.

Joel’s fingers twitch, a pang of guilt he hadn’t felt in some time making a knot of itself in his throat. His chest is tight as he watches the fawn come a little closer, intrigued by butter-yellow petals and wings.

But then he sees it.

It takes a moment, a bit of a Where’s Waldo situation, but there’s the doe, tucked away at the edge of the meadow. “Nah, baby, look.” He gently takes her hand and pulls her close to him, tucking her to his side. “It ain’t alone.”

“Good.” She lets her cheek fall to rest against his shoulder.

The deer don’t stay much longer, and neither do they. When the sky becomes tinged with lavender Ellie finishes pressing wildflowers into her journal and helps Joel to his feet, hands clasping at the crook of his elbow like she so often does. They’re barely back on the trail when she asks, “Be honest. Are you really gonna go to the Kennedy Space Center with me?”

Joel thinks of the fawns and the does, of the hummingbirds and their nests, monarch butterflies and trees. “You’re my girl. We’ll go wherever you want to go.”

He knows he isn’t lying to himself when she gives him her best smile. He’ll do anything for that smile.

“I guess that means I should start practicing.” Ellie clears her throat. “Ohhhhhhh, 99 bottles of beer on the wall -”

“Ellie.”

“99 bottles of beeeeeeeer. You take one down,”

“Ellie.”

“-pass it around.”

“Eliana.”

“98 bottles of beer on the wall. Second verse! 98 bottles of beer on the wall -”

At 87 bottles, Joel pushes her into the creek.

At 86 bottles, Joel gets dragged into the creek with her.

At 85 bottles, Ellie slaps their soaked hats back on their heads and laughs.

Chapter Text

The peak of summer always seems to be difficult for Ellie. The trees are dense, the air warm and sticky, the earth damp with mud, flowers sprouting in their wake. Summer is the peak of life, but all she remembers is the loss.

Riley died in the summer. Jesse, too. Dina’s last breath was caught in a winter fog, but her birthday was in the summer, often wrapped up in Independence Day celebrations: sparklers, barbecues, dips in the lake.

With every year that passes, it gets a little easier. First was the new memories she made with JJ. Then Joel was added to the mix. Tommy, Maria, Laura. Her new neighbor Eugene. Even Bill and Frank eased back into her life like a rising tide. Ellie felt cloaked in love. The memories of those gone, both good and bad, feel like her favorite flannel stolen from Joel’s closet: soft, worn, and comfortable.

But then summer rolls around and sweat prickles at the nape of her neck and the flannel no longer fits; it's itchy with holes, the collar stiff and fabric thick enough to give her a heat stroke.

It’s how after several warm nights of insomnia and staring at the fan spin on her ceiling that she caves and ends up at the foot of Joel’s bed, wrapped in a knit blanket like it can shield her from her own mind. “Joel,” she whispers.

He’s a light sleeper. He turns his head, eyes still closed. “Hmm.”

She rounds to the side of his bed before she reaches out to poke his foot with hers. “Scoot over.”

He sighs softly as he scoots further to one side, lifting the comforter at the same time in invitation. Ellie worms her way in, still cocooned in her own blanket, rolling in a way so she’s face to face with him.

His eyes are still closed, face slack with near-sleep. “What’s wrong, darlin’?” he asks. He blindly reaches for her, hand swatting uselessly a few times before it settles against her cheek; his thumb brushes up and down her cheekbone.

Ellie turns and leans into his touch. “Just need a sleepover.”

“Ah.” She feels the noise more than hears it, a soft rumble like thunder rolling over the hills before he opens his arms and beckons her close. “Well, c’mere then.”

She relaxes a little, letting go of the grip of her blanket so that her makeshift cocoon falls apart; Joel still grabs the blanket’s edge to wrap around her as she clings to him like a koala. She buries her face into his chest while her arms find purchase around his waist, fingers gripping the ratty material of his sleep shirt.

“Your hand ain’t hurtin’, is it?” he asks, resting his chin on the top of her head. His knuckles rub up and down along the knobs of her spine.

It does, a bit. It’s part of the problem. A summer storm is broiling a few miles down and the joints in her left hand twinge, a problem she never thought she’d have until she was at least Joel’s age. The phantom pain brings a lot of unwanted memories of when she was just a kid under David’s roof, scared and abused, resorting to violently cutting off his finger just to save her life.

So lost in her thoughts she doesn’t answer him, so Joel takes it upon himself to reach behind him for her left hand resting against the racks of his ribs. “You’re okay,” he tells her, holding her hand in front of them; his thumb presses into the meat of her palm and her three fingers spread out like flower petals - but it’s quite literally a wilted image and Ellie’s sigh is too heavy for Joel’s liking.

“You ain’t like him,” Joel tells her and she sighs again. Mindreader, that man. But his words are comforting. It’s like she’s been dragging around a heavy weight and he’s finally cut her free from it.

But there are more weights for her to drag around. The summer is still hot. The flannel is still too itchy.

“Hey,” She feels his thumb press into the space between her brow, trying to smooth out the furrow she didn’t realize she had. “Talk to me, kid.” His hand moves down to pinch playfully at her nose. “It ain’t a true sleepover if you don’t spill.”

Her mind wants to reach for a joke, one of dozens she has on reserve when she wants to shy away from the serious, but she squanders the urge. Instead, she wiggles a little more in his embrace, scooching a little up the mattress so they’re even, eye to eye. “It’s Dina’s birthday.”

Even in the dark, she sees the twinge of sympathy in his smile. He moves his mouth like he’s going to say something but instead, a sigh tumbles out of him and his hand finds its way to the edge of her sleeve, unrolling and smoothing out the ruffled edges of her t-shirt.

“There was this bakery in town,” Ellie says, clearing her throat when the words come out raspy with sleep. “Made this killer strawberry cake. Dina’s sister Talia got it for her birthday every year since she was like, six. When we were seventeen, the bakery relocated a town over. Fifty fucking miles,” she sputters out a laugh and Joel matches her toothy smile. “I tried to have Bill replicate it but Dina wouldn’t have it. Told me if the only thing I ever got her for her birthday for the rest of her life was that fucking strawberry cake, then so be it. So I borrowed Bill’s truck -”

“Stole.”

She hikes her cold toes up Joel’s leg, laughing when he flinches. “Borrowed Bill’s truck and Jesse and I went to that goddamn bakery for her goddamn strawberry cake.” Ellie burrows herself into his pillow feeling drunk on the memory. “We sang ABBA songs at the top of our lungs. Lost my voice.”

Joel chuffs out a laugh. “Dancing Queen?”

“Obviously. I’m not gonna let, like, Fernando wipe out these pipes. I’m quite seasoned with car karaoke.”

He laughs again, more like a hum, and he reaches forward to delicately pull a hair caught in her lashes - how he sees it she doesn’t know. “For Sarah’s birthday, we’d buy a pack of chocolate chip cookies and a tub of Neapolitan ice cream. Make ice cream sandwiches. Sarah used the vanilla, Tommy had the chocolate, and I-“

“-had the strawberry.”

Another hum, dipped in something somber. “Your girl Dina had some mighty fine taste.”

His hand finds its way back to her face, rough palm resting on her cheek. She doesn’t realize she’s crying until he’s brushing the tears away.

“Get some sleep,” Joel tells her, cupping her chin in his hand to try and find her gaze in the moonlight. “We’ll bake her a cake in the morning, yeah?”

Ellie hunches into him and tries to remember a recipe for strawberry cake as Joel scratches at her back until she falls asleep.

Ellie wakes up alone in Joel’s bed to the sounds of distant rustling and chatter coming from the kitchen. A particularly loud clash of two pans and JJ’s hushed-but-not-so-hushed, whoops, sorry, Uncle Joel has Ellie snorting ungracefully into Joel’s pillow.

When she turns her head she sees Joel has left the Elliephant on the nightstand to watch over her.

There are more sounds - the sizzling of a pan, the cracking of eggs, the soft hum of the record player Joel set up in the living room when he moved in.

When the music gets louder and their conversations turn into noisy, bright things full of Joel’s deep timber and JJ’s laughter, Ellie decides to peel herself off the mattress. She feels hungover as she ruffles through Joel’s closet in search of his green flannel, the best of his flannels, but she can’t find it. She has half a mind to go through his laundry basket just to reassure its existence when she sees that he’s already pulled it out. It’s folded on the top between two framed photos - one of him and his daughter, and one of him and her.

Her stomach flips and her eyes burn as picks up the frame. It’s from just one week ago when they wrangled up all the Millers and they went and took the kids to the rodeo. It was quite the night. JJ had declared that he was going to be a bull rider one day, which spurred Maria into admitting that she still holds the record back in her college town for staying on the mechanical bull the longest and JJ was very serious about asking her for tips. Laura and Tommy spent the better part of the night trying to give all the horses they saw better names - Ellie thinks Tommy’s pick of Harrison Fjord swept, but Joel was partial to Laura’s choice of Barbie.

They had all dressed up for the occasion: embroidered shirts, cowboy boots, suede jackets with tassels. And hats - Ellie had specifically bought her and Joel a matching set: oversized blue sequin stetsons covered in glittery white stars.

He had snorted out a single laugh when she slapped it on his head before he tipped it towards her briefly, called her ma’am, and then stole half of her chili dog - an exact moment that Tommy had managed to get a picture of.

Her eyes continue to burn until they shine, her lip on the cusp of becoming a tremble. There are a few pictures of Jesse and Dina up around the house, but she doesn't seem to have as much as there should be. Her relationship with grief has always been complicated, often tied up into anger and self-destruction, something Joel knows all the same. At first, she had to take the pictures off the wall, fold the ones on her desk down and tuck them away in the drawer. She slowly hung them back up over the years and it always left her heart chafed. It felt like welcoming ghosts or shells back into her house. An odd feeling, but one she felt inclined to embrace.

It’s been a long time since she’s had a picture framed of someone who is still here to love her.

Ellie ends up setting the photo down with a sigh before she glances at the picture of Sarah and blows her a kiss.

She moves through the house slowly, ears focused on trying to guess which record Joel put on. The beginning of a Jackson Browne song becomes more obvious as she pads quietly down the stairs. But it isn’t until she’s halfway down the stairs does she finally hear it.

“I have done all that I could, to see the evil and the good without hiding, you must help me if you can.”

Joel’s singing.

“Doctor, my eyes, tell me what is wrong. Was I unwise to leave them open for so long?”

Ellie rounds the corner with a little more purpose, clinging to the wall at the edge of the kitchen as she takes in the sight before her. Joel is singing - his voice is gruff and thrown slightly in a way that she can tell he’s not singing seriously, that it’s all a show for JJ. But he is singing. His shoulders bop side to side as he scrambles eggs with fanfare, looking occasionally up at an enraptured JJ on the other side of the kitchen island. Knees on the barstool, he’s stretched so far across the granite she’d be inclined to say he’s on the counter. But there’s a face-splitting grin on his face and stars in his eyes she doesn’t have the heart to call him out on it.

“Oh, I got this feeling, that it's later than it seems - oh.” He stops. Something in his smile changes before he even looks up from the stove. “There’s our girl,” he says to JJ before he looks up at her, a smile blooming into a grin. “Mornin’, honey.”

JJ is still beaming, readjusting to sit on the stool properly. “Mom! We’re making breakfast.”

Joel moves to another pan - potatoes - and holds out his arm without looking. Ellie pads across the cold wood floor and ducks underneath his arm just like she had last night. He gives her a big squeeze and a kiss on the crown of her head. “I see that,” Ellie says. Her eyes catch bowls of fruit out by the sink. It seems Joel’s washed the blueberries and raspberries he picked up from the farmer’s market the other day, but she sees a basket of strawberries that she knows must have been picked from the yard. “Strawberries finally worked, huh?”

JJ hops down from the stool and runs over to the coffee maker and pours a mug as Joel playfully hip-checks Ellie, nudging her to the table. “Just needed my magic touch, I suppose,” he sighs dramatically, but the wisp of a smile is still there. “They’re pretty darn perfect right about now. Just in time, too.”

“Uncle Joel says he’s gonna help us make a cake from scratch for Dina’s birthday,” JJ says, bringing her some coffee as she takes her seat. Her face does something funny, she knows it does, but JJ doesn’t catch it, he’s too busy setting the table for the three of them. “We’re making a strawberry one. I want to see if we can make one better than Grandpa Bill’s.”

“Let's just focus on making it good, huh, bud?”

JJ finishes setting the table before running over to the living room to grab a small step stool and a basket of hair ties and clips he keeps around. After the accident, Ellie couldn’t really do much with her own hair aside from keeping it brushed. Joel did little braids for her - taught JJ at his insistence - and now it’s an everyday routine for her and her son. Wake up, take care of the animals, make breakfast, do Mom’s hair. It’s a nice routine, one she usually relishes.

Today it bruises her heart.

“Mom,” JJ whines when Ellie starts to move her head too much, lost in her thoughts. “Stay still.”

"Sorry, kid."

From the stove, Joel snorts.

JJ keeps it simple - he untangles her hair and ties half of it up in a small banana clip that Laura left the last time she was here - it’s green and sparkly and not really Ellie’s style but JJ keeps using it because he thinks it looks pretty. “All done,” JJ announces and he hops off his stool and sets everything, but not before he nudges her coffee mug closer, encouraging her to get started.

“Take your time,” Joel says around his own mug. He starts turning off all the burners and plating with one free hand. “I gotta get through about three mugs of this before I can tackle that cake.”

“Mom,” JJ calls from the other room before he returns, sliding in his socks on the hardwoods. “How old would Dina be today?”

There it is. Her face is probably doing something funny again, but this time it’s not so drastic. “She was a year older than I was,” Ellie says. “So she’d be twenty-eight.” She sips at her coffee. Black. “Your dad was the youngest of us three, you know.”

JJ’s eyes go wide. “No way.”

“True story. I’m a whole six days older.” The three of them settle at the table, the record player spinning in the background. Joel’s singing has downgraded to humming. “We were basically twins.”

“Even though he was like a million inches taller and Asian?”

“Fraternal twins,” Ellie scoffs and JJ snorts out a laugh.

Her son pushes around some of his potatoes, chasing them in the ketchup Joel put on his plate before he asks, “Do you think I’ll be as tall as Jesse? Or am I doomed to be as short as you?”

She’s getting whiplash and what’s worse she doesn’t think JJ even notices what he’s doing. “I’m not.” She tries to bite her tongue, but it’s clearly not hard enough. “We’re not related.” JJ’s expression morphs into something wounded and she has the instinct to take it all back, to try and stop herself from rolling down this hill and inevitably crashing at the bottom. But there’s too much momentum. “JJ, Dina is your mother.”

Confusion is added to the hurt and JJ side-eyes Joel, obviously looking for a lifeline. “I know,” he squeaks out. “But Mom -”

Another bruise to her heart. It’s the Dina and the Jesse and the Grandpa Bill and the Uncle Joel and the Mom all wound up into one that’s making her unravel at the seams. “We can’t forget her. Or your dad. You’re throwing their names around like they aren’t your parents and I just -”

“Ellie,” Joel says, a little stern. “Take a breath. Before you say something you really regret.”

Joel’s right, she knows he is. She manages to heed his advice and just breathe, even if it is a shaky thing. “Sorry, buddy,” she chokes out after a few moments of silence feels like suffocation. “I was just surprised.”

JJ is frowning, but to his credit, he’s pretty calm. It’s pretty much just confusion etched into the features of his tiny face. “Surprised? Mommy -”

And he hadn’t called her that since he was three. Ellie stands up abruptly, chair legs scratching like nails on a chalkboard against her floors. “I’m gonna - just give me a minute guys.”

She rushes out into the back porch, silence in her wake; she nearly trips over one of the cats - Elvis Purrsley or Tommy Cat The Third, she doesn’t look long enough to tell - before she settles on the top step of the porch.

She holds her throbbing head in her aching hands and sighs.

Ellie doesn’t have much expectation of anyone following her, but she thinks she’s been sitting there a long while when the porch door opens. When she looks up, the sky is bright with midmorning sun and Joel has his shoes and hat on. “C’mon, baby,” he says gently. “We’re going for a walk.”

She glances at the door. “JJ-”

“I asked your neighbor Eugene to come over and watch ‘em for a few, he’s already inside.” At Ellie’s hesitation, he adds, “He’s alright. Ain’t mad or nothin’. Just worried ‘bout his mama. So am I.”

With another sigh, Ellie heaves herself up, even taking the hand that Joel offers to help her down all three steps of the back porch. She loosens her grip, ready to pull her hand away but then he moves her hand up his arm, having her hold him at the crook of his elbow like they often do for their walks.

“I’m sorry,” Ellie apologizes once they’ve passed the successful strawberry patch and towards the back of her property she hasn’t visited in ages. “That wasn’t my finest moment.”

“No,” Joel agrees slowly. “But it could have been much worse. Thanks for listening to me. I know it’s not your favorite thing to do -” She pinches at the skin of his elbow and he feigns great distress. “But I think I should apologize as well.”

“For what?”

He sighs. “I noticed JJ calling me Uncle Joel for the last few weeks, and I didn’t try to stop it. I’m sorry if I overstepped.”

Ellie noticed it, too. But unlike today, she didn’t mind the change, either. "I don't mind it. It's sweet, it shows he loves you, but -" But it does have her wondering. “Why didn’t you correct him?”

“Well,” Joel begins slowly. His boots kick up a little more dirt than necessary as he slows their pace. “I figured he’s just trying to make his family fit better for him in a way that makes sense to him. He goes to school with a lot of kids who have both mom and dad, brothers and sisters, cousins and uncles. After swapping stories and looking at his life I’m sure he thought, well, Joel sneaks me the same amount of ice cream as he does Laura. That must be what uncles do. I was…” he blows out a long breath. “Honored. If I’m truthful.”

Ellie knows Joel has a point. Their family isn’t typical - it’s a patchwork of people bonded by choice over blood. When Ellie was JJ’s age, she struggled the same way as she hopped from foster home to foster home. She craved stability and love, for an opportunity to grow up before someone who would care enough to let her call them mom or dad. She got close with Bill and Frank, but she was still licking her wounds from her year on the run and she only had enough room in her wounded heart to let Dina and Jesse all the way in.

But an even starker truth is that JJ knows exactly how she feels. She thinks of the photo Joel added of them on his dresser, right beside the one of Sarah and her heart aches. Every time Joel pulls her in for a hug or kisses the top of her head, a part of her younger self is healed. He’s a piece of her she never thought she’d find. Pieces JJ must be looking for.

But it just feels like it comes at a price.

“JJ shouldn’t have to have such a huge piece of his life missing. I guess when I heard him call them by their names instead of mom and dad I thought… It felt like they were being erased. And with Dina’s birthday and the anniversary of Jesse’s death coming up I just-” She pulls them to a halt to scrub roughly at her face. “It was just a lot. Sometimes.." She pauses to take a breath, the truth short but heavy on her tongue. "I miss them so much I don’t know what to do with it.”

“You bake a cake.”

She stops scrubbing at her face to look up at him. Joel’s eyes are on the apples of her cheek as he brushes stray hairs out of her eyes, but his own eyes are watery. They stand there, neither saying anything, and it’s only after Joel brushes away a few tears that have rolled down her cheek does she realize that maybe he’s already said it all.

“Okay,” Ellie chokes out. “Okay, let's bake a cake.”

Another kiss to her head. Another piece of her slotted into place. “That’s my girl.”

They make it back to the house after a long detour the to small sunflower patch that Joel planted several weeks ago. They pick a bundle of the best-looking flowers before they make it back to the house.

Ellie isn’t on the porch for more than five seconds before the storm dorm slams open and JJ runs into her arms, face buried in her stomach.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” JJ mumbles into her shirt. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

Joel carefully takes the flowers out of her hand and heads inside while Ellie squeezes her son back in the tightest hug she can remember giving in some time. “No, honey, you didn’t do anything wrong.”

He looks up at her with tears in his eyes. “I didn’t mean to disrespect Mama and Dad, I swear. I’m so sorry-”

“I know, I know,” she soothes, wiping her son’s tears away. “It’s okay, spud. Really. I’m the one that needs to apologize. Dina’s birthday is hard for me and I lashed out. It wasn’t okay for me to act like that. I’m sorry.” She brushes some of his hair out of his face and squishes his cheeks in her hands. “Kid, I don’t think you have a disrespectful bone in your body.”

“A miracle, considering there’s a certified gremlin raising you.”

Bill’s voice comes as a surprise as he opens the door for them to come inside. He’s got on an apron - one that she’s certain he brought here because her thrift find with the yellow daisies just doesn’t cut it - and a carton of eggs under his arms.

A lot about this picture is confusing. She starts with the eggs. “Dude, I got chickens. Why the hell did you bring eggs?”

“You want the perfect strawberry cake or not, Eliana?”

JJ and Ellie share a look. “Sir, yes, sir,” she mocks playfully, gently pushing her son first to go inside.

She walks into the kitchen, already warm from the preset on the oven and the other several people that have shown up at her house: Where there’s Bill, there’s Frank. Tommy and Maria are over, talking to Henry, who brought his brother Sam to play with JJ and Laura, who is currently very invested in a theatrical story being spun by Eugene.

“When’d y’all break into my house?” she asks with no heat.

"Joel texted us early this morning, but you were out when we got here." Frank reaches over and kisses both her cheeks in greeting. “Don’t worry, we only broke one window,” he jokes.

Bill snorts from his place at the island, working on cutting up the strawberries. “Consider it payback for my roof.”

“Okay, I gotta know,” Joel says, wiping some of the suds off his hands as he finishes the dishes. “What the hell did you do to the damn roof?”

Ellie throws both her hands in the air and feigns innocence. “You paint SEE ROCK CITY in big white letters on the roof and suddenly you’re a nuisance.”

Tommy overhears and absolutely loses his shit. “Ain’t no way you did that.”

“Oh, I sure did. Love Rock City. One of Tennesse’s finest gems. Thought Wyoming should know all about it.”

Tommy beams. “Please tell me you were in charge of your senior prank.”

“I would have. If I had made it to senior year. But I did give Jesse a great idea that was executed beautifully.”

“It was a classic,” Frank agrees easily. “Can’t go wrong with setting loose three pigs in the school halls labeled 1, 2, and 4.”

At the kids' confused faces, Maria reluctantly elaborates. “Took forever to catch them, because, well. They’re pigs. Then they spent the whole day looking for Pig 3. Which didn’t exist.”

“That’s funny,” Sam giggles.

“So good.” Laura agrees.

Ellie’s smile is big as she settles into one of the barstools and fishes for a strawberry; Bill slaps her hand away, leaving her to pout, but it gives Tommy enough time to sweep in beside her and steal one on her behalf. Bill rolls his eyes when she shoots him a smug look and stuffs the fruit into her mouth in one bite. “Hey,” she asks when she’s mostly chewed and swallowed. “Did you really come all this way to help bake a cake?”

“Yes. Joel texted me this morning and offered a challenge and I accepted. I remember that bakery.” Ellie snorts. “But…” He pauses and finally looks up at her. “Dina was a sweet girl. Real nice to you. I’ll bake her a cake every year if you want.”

Her eyes get misty, but Bill has the decency to look away and resume strawberry chopping.

Joel ends up refilling his coffee mug before he takes the stool on the other side of her. “After you came to me last night, well.” He shrugs. “I woke up early. Made some calls. I hope it’s okay, inviting everyone.”

As Ellie surveys the room, at the people she’s chosen as her family, she realizes it’s more than okay. It’s exactly what she needs.

“Yeah, old man,” she says, bumping her shoulder with his before she steals a sip of his coffee. “It’s okay. But I do have one question. Bill?”

He looks up and waits.

“When did I become a certified gremlin? Because as it stands my resume says I only have certifications in tomfoolery and I -”

“Jesus Christ, Eliana,” he grouses, throwing a strawberry that hits her square in the nose.

The rest of the day is more or less filled with the same snark and laughter. Bill bakes the cake - doesn’t let anyone help aside from Laura who he says has steady enough hands to decorate the top with the rest of the uncut strawberries. Eugene and Frank stay inside to chat while the rest of them float out into the backyard to toss frisbees and play tag and draw with chalk along the porch that Joel just washed off last week. JJ shows Henry and Sam all the animals and convinces Ellie to let them play with the baby goats. Midafternoon, Tommy sneaks out to his truck and returns with leftover sparklers from Independence Day and they light them despite the brightness of the day, just to make the kids shriek with laughter.

They light the cake and sing happy birthday. They let Ellie blow out the candles.

It’s not until dusk when the party is over and JJ’s conked out, does she get around to having a piece.

She’s in the hammock on the porch, soaking up the summer air that’s always just right around this time of night. Joel finds her there and thrusts a piece of pink fluffy cake under her nose.

“Don’t think I can eat it by myself. Think you can help me out?”

He waited to eat it with her. She just knows it.

The way they arrange themselves on the hammock is downright comical. They almost lose the piece of cake but they manage to squish themselves together without flipping the damn thing over. Joel holds the plate steady while Ellie mans the fork.

“Dude this fucks,” She says, scraping the plate clean. She holds up the last bite to Joel, who eats it without complaint. “I don’t know what Dina was on. Just as good as that bakery.”

“Well,” he grunts, taking the plate and leaning just enough to set in on the ground before his arms come to wrap back around her. “It’s hard to let go of tradition. Change ain’t easy.”

Ellie hums her agreement. “Zoltar was right.”

It takes Joel a moment, but he gets there. “Ah. The fortune we got.”

“It’s…been a really big year,” Ellie admits. “Definitely a lot of changes.” She looks down at her hand and immediately Joel notices it and grabs it, kisses what’s left of her fingers like he always does when he feels like she's about to get lost in her head about it. “But I like where I ended up. Fingers missing and all. Do you?”

It’s something she worries about, especially with his injuries from the accident. His independence was ripped from him and he had to be weak around her, had to lean on her, and had to learn how to work around the new way his brain operated. Part of her is waiting for the day she wakes up to find him packing up his things. But instead, he’s fixing her porch, mowing the lawn, taking care of the horses, and driving her son to school.

He could leave. But he hasn’t.

“Baby,” he chuffs out a laugh into her hair. “If somehow the lord gave me a second chance, I’d do it all over again. I wouldn’t trade this for anything. I'll stay as long as you'll have me.”

Ellie throws her leg over his and snuggles more deeply into him, resting an ear over his chest. He starts to him, softly, and it reminds her. “You know. I heard you sing in the kitchen for JJ this morning. Still waiting for my turn.”

“About that.” He taps her arm. “Help me get up. I got a surprise for you.”

It’s an even more comical sight to watch him get out of the hammock - Joel does end up on the ground for a moment, back pocket grazing the remnants of the cake plate, but he’s a good sport about it as he pokes his head inside and pulls something he’s set right against the wall beside the door.

A guitar.

“No fuckin’ way,” Ellie gasps, reaching forward to grab it. “Is this one of the guitars you made?”

“Sure is,” he says, hands hovering to make sure it is safe in the handout. “Made it just for you.”

She’s confused, looking at the guitar for some sort of clue and then, she sees it: a stark white moth etched into the fretboard, the same one tattooed on her arm.

"You...carved this?"

“I know you can’t play,” Joel says in lieu of an answer, settling into the large porch swing behind them. “So I’ll do it for you.” He fiddles with a few of the pegs before he strums lightly. “Whenever you need.”

Ellie’s smile feels shy on her face as she slowly settles beside him on the other end of the bench, careful to give him enough room to play. “So what I’m hearing is you’re taking requests.”

“That’s right. But there’s one I want to sing for you first, if that’s okay.”

She tucks her legs up onto the bench, drawing them close so she can rest her arms on her knees. “Yeah,” she says quietly. “That’s okay.”

He fiddles with the pegs once more before he clears her throat and tosses her a shy smile. “Don’t be laughin'.’”

Ellie’s smile blooms, excited, but she’s careful not to laugh out of pure excitement. “I won’t.”

As he starts picking at the strings, Ellie realizes two things: One, Joel is a very good guitar player. And two, Ellie knows this song very well.

“Helplessly hoping her harlequin hovers nearby - awaiting a word. Gasping at glimpses of gentle true spirit he runs - wishing he could fly. Only to trip at the sound of goodbye.”

His voice is warm, inviting. It’s got a folky twang to it - honest and rough around the edges - and Ellie finds she could listen to it all day.

But in the end, she can’t help but join in.

She mouths I’ll go up, pointing an index finger to the roof before he starts the second verse. She sees the confusion on his face but he keeps going, expression morphing into something more akin to amazement as she harmonizes with him, just as the original intended.

“Wordlessly watching, he waits by the window and wonders at the empty place inside. Heartlessly helping himself to her bad dreams - he worries. Did he hear a good-bye? Or even hello?”

He slows, slightly at the chorus and Ellie sits up, a little more focused. “They are one person, they are two alone, they are three together, they are for each other.”

His eyes get misty and his voice a little too rough to make it to the third verse, but Ellie doesn’t give him grief for it - she’s not doing much better on her end, either. “That was really beautiful, babygirl,” he tells her.

She stretches a leg out and gently pokes him with her foot. “You did all the heavy lifting. Thanks,” she nods to the guitar. “For singing to me.”

“Thanks for singing with me.”

Around them, dusk settles, leaving the sky tinged in violet. The fireflies come out in full force, blinking brightly in a way that reminds her of the carousel lights they saw way back when. One flies by her hands and she reaches out to try and catch it and -miraculously - manages to grab it, eight fingers and all.

“Look!” she gasps, keeping the bug cupped in her hand. She swears she feels another getting caught in her hair as she leans into Joel and sets it free. “I got ‘em. You know what that means.”

He raises a brow, waiting for her demand.

“You. Me. Karaoke night at the Tipsy Bison.”

Ellie waits for a groan, a complaint, but instead, his smile just goes sideways and he runs a hand through his hair in defeat. “Alright. You got it, kid.”

She nearly breaks him and his guitar with the hug she gives him, but judging by the kiss he presses to her cheek, he doesn’t seem to mind.

They spend the whole night playing guitar and singing songs. Eventually, they migrate to the hammock where Ellie gives an impromptu astronomy lesson in preparation for the space center. Joel gets bored and makes up his own constellations and spends fifteen minutes explaining why a particular bundle of stars over there looks like a coffee cup.

He ends up rocking the hammock and she falls asleep with her head on his chest, cheek cushioned by brown flannel. It's soft. It's comfortable. It's warm.

It's home.