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In her fourth year of knowing Joel, she misses her period for three months straight.
The first month she writes off as stress and the rigors of surviving in the shithole their world is now. It’s not new, after all, her cycle skipping now and then. She eats better now because Joel’s a goddamn caveman about making sure her needs come first, so malnutrition is less of an issue than it used to be, but it’s not like life’s a fucking cakewalk, even with two Miller brothers to order around to do the grunt work.
So the first month Aunt Flo doesn’t visit, then, she figures the bitch just skipped town because they’re in between main contacts for smuggling, and every last waking hour is currently consumed by finding another one.
(Hard to network when so many of their sources and buyers end up swinging, after all.)
The second month, she doesn’t even notice until two weeks after it should have happened because she’s putting laundry away and happens to look at her cloth pads (something she used to chalk up to hippy dippy types reeking of patchouli but an element of this new life that isn’t quite as godawful as she’d thought it would be). She sits back on her heels, frowning at the neat little bundles in a row and counting back, double and triple checking in her memory and feeling her heart rate increase.
The third month, she wills herself every fucking morning to wake up bloody. It would be worth the extra laundry for the sake of knowing she’s not completely fucked. When she’s absolutely sure Joel isn’t around, she presses a hand over her lower belly, like she can do some reverse reiki and convince it to go ahead and give up the ghost on waiting for a baby.
There’s no fucking way she can have a baby.
It’s not even something she’d had to worry about before she left the Fireflies and went into business smuggling for no one’s interests but her own in the company of tall, dark, and emotionally constipated. Back in the early days after the outbreak, it’s not like she and Marlene were at risk of knocking each other up. That hadn’t been a concern until she and Marlene had finally called it quits on their on again/off again situationship and she and Joel had become whatever the fuck they are, and it had been one she’d taken care of immediately with one of the IUDs FEDRA always has in supply for the sake of population control.
Food? Hard to come by.
Uterus sticks? Available at any FEDRA clinic and heavily encouraged.
She’d made Joel go with her for the dual purpose of making sure no fuckers tried to take advantage of a closed room and no pants and to make sure he fully appreciated her contributions to the cause of risk-free fucking.
He’d taken her home (almost carrying her because “little pinch” her fucking ass, goddamn), and she’d basked in the gruff spoiling of being tended hand and foot for a few days. He’s not good with words, but Joel’s certainly good at making a lady feel taken care of. It’s one of the reasons she doesn’t mind that he can’t meet her where she is, where she wishes they could be. Joel takes care of her as best he can. She accepts that.
It’s why he’d been careful even after the IUD, no matter her reassurances that it was fine. She knows how he feels about babies in the new world, and it’s not like she disagrees. Pregnancy and childbirth was hard enough when she had things like prenatal vitamins and lamaze classes when she was pregnant with Charlie; she’s certainly not looking to experience the apocalypse version. No epidural? No thank you.
Apparently, though, despite his admirable pull-out game, she and Joel have created a new bun currently baking in her oven.
God- fucking -damnit.
*
Joel’s far too much a gentleman (or far too aware of his own mortality) to comment on her cycle or lack thereof. He ignores the soaking bucket for her pads under the bathroom sink and occasionally scrubs out the sheets without complaint when it sneaks up on her. Beyond putting down two towels on the nights they get frisky when she’s on the rag, he doesn’t acknowledge it beyond asking if she needs anything when her cramps get bad.
What these manners mean now, though, is that she doesn’t know if he suspects what she’s almost certain of or not.
It’s not like she doesn’t have options. Abortions are accessible now because apparently all it took to stop the Jesus freaks camping out around clinics was the end of the world. One shitty afternoon, and her problem is over. She gets her IUD switched out because apparently this one isn’t up to the task, and she goes home and bitches at Joel until she feels better. Easy.
Easy except for the part where she’ll have to tell Joel, that is.
*
“Hey,” he says that night when they’re sneaking out for a new pickup of pills from a source they haven’t used before, “we’ve checked this guy out. He’s good for it.”
It takes her a moment to realize why the fuck he’s telling her this when she’s the one who found the guy in the first place.
Then she realizes it’s because he thinks that’s what’s had her quiet all day.
“Yeah,” she agrees, with a small flicker of a smile. “And if he isn’t, I’ve got two Millers to fuck him up.”
Joel never smiles, but she thinks she traces the slightest hint of it around his eyes.
*
She lays in bed next to him that night and thinks about bringing it up. The job went well, nobody got hurt (well, a fucker who tried to cop a feel on their way back got his arm broken and his jaw dislocated, but he doesn’t count), and now she and Joel are back in bed, him playing little spoon as ever. It’s as close to peace as they ever get, this kind of moment.
I’m pregnant.
Two little words.
Two little words that could wreck the delicate balance of their lives.
She doesn’t want to keep it, not really. Her memories of her little boy are still too fresh for her to even consider giving motherhood another shot, and this is not a life a child deserves. She knows without asking that Joel feels the same. He can’t even look at children. He won’t want this one anymore than she does. They’re on the same page.
But the idea of looking him in the eye and hearing “Get rid of it” keeps her silent.
*
She gets her period four days later.
It was stress, that’s all.
She gets Joel to toss her a pad through the door to the bathroom, and she goes about her day.
And she doesn’t feel disappointed at all, not even slightly.
They’re a unit, the three of them, her, Joel, and Tommy, efficient and brutal.
There’s no space for a new mini-member.
*
The fight between Joel and Tommy is a thing of legend. It’s almost inspiring, seeing Tommy–the man who’s practically a golden retriever when he’s not in slaughter mode–get vicious. He can be as brutal as Joel, but when he’s not in the middle of a job, he’s amiable and sweet-natured, and she enjoys his company. In the moment, though, he’s operating off of pain and resentment, and there’s not a trace of his usual pacific nature. Her impulse is to jump in, to remind Tommy that his brother’s not the only one who’s done more than a few fucked up things over the years, but one glance from Joel says her intervention isn’t needed or wanted, and she ends up retreating to the bedroom to give them relative privacy to hash things out on their own.
Listening to them hauling out dirty laundry from years before they even met her, she’s more than slightly glad for it.
*
Joel doesn’t cry when Tommy leaves, of course not. His brother comes by with his bag already packed and a stony quality that says he’s already decided. Hugging him feels like hugging a statue, but she does it anyway. Life’s too goddamn dangerous to risk regrets later.
Joel, pointedly, remains where he is on the couch.
He doesn’t break down after Tommy’s slammed the door after a terse promise to call, doesn’t turn to her with a silent request for comfort, doesn’t really seem to register that Tommy’s made it seem like this is a forever kind of deal.
He just drains his glass, stands, and asks if she’s ready to go for the three person job that’s now down to two.
*
They don’t talk about it, but that night he touches her like she’ll be ripped away if he doesn’t as he helps her strip out of her clothes in a way he never does unless she’s too injured to do it herself. He’s never brutal with her, but on that night, he’s something almost like tender as they fuck. He doesn’t even finish. He brings her off because he’s a gentleman, and then he slumps against her, head against her bare chest. She freezes for the briefest moment, feeling like an animal who just found its foot in a snap trap, but slowly, she brings one hand up to rest on his back, heaving still from effort on her behalf, and threads the other through his hair, moving her fingers in slow, gentling strokes. It’s a bit like trying on an old dress, being this kind of together with someone. It pulls in a way that says it hasn’t been worn in a while, and she can’t quite be sure it still fits, but he doesn’t move away, seeming almost to try and press tighter, still between her thighs but the moment anything but sexual.
She doesn’t speak. The energy of the room is such that words would shatter it. She knows instinctively that Joel needs her silence right now far more than he needs to hear her voice.
She just holds him until he falls asleep, head over her heart.
It’s the two of them now.
They’ll just have to be enough for each other.
*
Joel giving her a look like she had something to do with their fugitive FEDRA orphan is what means he signs up himself up for playing toddler taxi all the way home when they get to the section of the journey too big for little legs. He can glower all he wants. He’s still gonna be the one hauling the kid around until he checks the attitude.
She wonders if he feels what she sees: how very naturally he holds the kid, how easily he accommodates her weight and how thoughtlessly he adjusts to work around keeping hold of her.
The kid suits him, she realizes in little glances over her shoulder, in a way she’s never seen anything else ever suit him.
She has absolutely no idea what the fuck she’s supposed to do with this information.
*
Joel almost throws the kid, he sets her down so fast when they get home. Clearly unaccustomed to being carried in the first place, Ellie doesn’t protest, but she makes sure to hip check him into the dining table under the guise of a stumble. She’s gotten used to him being a grouch, and it’s not like she’s any more pleased than he is at having a rugrat for the night, but there’s no need to be a dick to the kid. She crawled into the backpack because little kids are curious and no one was watching her. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s a lackluster nursery worker’s.
“Be nice,” she hisses to him before she leaves.
He gives her a middle finger in response before she shuts the door, and she makes a mental note to make him pay for it later.
*
It’s wildly disorienting, watching Joel with a kid.
She knows from drunken stories from Tommy only told when his brother wasn’t around to get scowly about it that Joel was apparently a hell of a dad. She’d dismissed most of it as rose-tinted glasses and the benefit of time and loss, not that she’d ever told Tommy as much. She knows Joel would have protected and taken care of his daughter because that’s just who Joel is, but she can’t quite make it fit, the idea of him as someone gentle and loving with a child, her partner who can smash skulls in patiently letting a little girl put bows in his hair and glitter in his beard. It’s one of the reasons she’d known during the scare that having a baby wasn’t an option. She knows Joel would never hurt one, but she wouldn’t be able to watch him be gruff and cold with her–their–child.
Watching him with Ellie, however, feels like observing a stranger driving Joel’s body.
“What?” He asks more than once, clearly self-conscious when he catches her staring.
“Nothing,” she always says immediately.
She doesn’t know how to tell him that things are clicking into place for her about him, watching how he parents. Even still determinedly grumpy, he’s gentle like he can’t help it, sweet with Ellie in a way that makes her eyes sting a little bit. He’s firm on rules and still acts a bit like a dick because he can’t admit that the kid’s cute and endearing, but she watches him negotiate naptime and stick hot food into the freezer to cool it down for a little mouth and sit on the floor to color and get bossed around playing imaginary restaurant, and all she can think of is that she feels like she’s really seeing the true him for the first time, the full scope of the man she’s only gotten to know through the cracks in the walls he’s built. She’d thought she’d done good work chiseling a way in over the years, but seeing him with Ellie makes it clear that there was a gate she was never going to be able to get through on her own.
Now that she’s gotten a look at how much better Joel is with a kid in the picture, however, she doesn’t know how the fuck they’re going to be able to go back to not having one.
*
“Are you my mama now?”
The words, so innocently asked, feel like a punch to the gut.
She stares at a little face looking up at her with so much trust, so much hope. Ellie wants the answer to be yes. Guarded as she is, she doesn’t have an ounce of guile about her. She’s opened up too much to hide what she wants. She’s settled with them, has clearly started to feel like a little family with them.
But theirs isn’t a family. It’s two smugglers and a kid they accidentally borrowed.
She lets her down as gently as she can with a line about how her real mama would be sad if someone else used her name.
She tries not to notice how badly Ellie hides her disappointment.
*
They don’t end up returning their borrowed orphan.
She was already in motion to take her back–Joel’s decisions be damned–when her partner gets there first, handing over a sobbing Ellie.
“I’ve got you, honey,” she soothes quietly, while Joel kills the fucker who dared to hurt the little girl trembling in her arms. “You’re okay.”
She will be.
Ellie’s in her arms now.
There’s no fucking person on earth who’ll take her away again.
*
Joel teases her about being a heavy sleeper, but as far as she’s concerned, they don’t need two watchdogs on alert because someone sneezed three miles away. Her being a heavy sleeper just means that one of them is reliably well-rested, which is an advantage to them as a unit. She doesn’t need to know the details of how she wakes up to a child in their bed who wasn’t there when she went to sleep. She opens her eyes most mornings to a little face scant inches from her and counts her blessings at her kid close and safe and warm.
It’s a mom instinct, though, that has her awake one night at the lightest tap on the door about two weeks before they’re set to leave for Jackson.
She sits up at once as a little head pokes around, hair still in the pigtail braids Joel put in that evening. She doesn’t even have a reason for why she shoves the covers off and stands at once, but the hitch of Ellie’s breathing when she’s close tells her it was the right move, even without knowing anything else.
“Hey, honey,” she says softly. In the dim light of the room, she can just pick up tear tracks on Ellie’s face. She pulls up the hem of her shirt to wipe them away as Ellie sniffles but doesn’t stop her. “You have a bad dream?”
She’s distantly aware of Joel at her back, crouching down to be at their kid’s level as well.
Ellie shakes her head.
“You sure?” Joel asks. Ellie still hides it sometimes, not wanting to talk about her dreams.
“I…” Ellie hesitates, pulling into herself. When she speaks again, it’s almost a whisper. “I’m sorry. I throwed up.”
She almost has to resist the urge to laugh, it’s such a classically child thing to say. She thinks it must be a late night statement that every parent in human history has heard. Ellie is so clearly miserable and afraid of consequences for the great sin of getting sick, however, that she pushes it down. She reaches out and picks her up, and she frowns when Ellie’s sweaty little head settles on her shoulder. She lifts a hand to press it to her face, looking to Joel when she does so.
“She’s warm,” she says, and at once, Joel is reaching to feel her temperature as well, frown matching hers.
“Think there’s a thermometer in the first aid kit,” he says, bending to kiss Ellie’s hair and then rising.
“Poor little bug,” she says to Ellie, the words coming out before she registered them. “Bug” is what she called Charlie. It’s not something she’s said in years. To her surprise, though, it doesn’t feel wrong, using it on Ellie.
Maybe Charlie wouldn’t have minded having a second bug in the family.
“Your tummy hurt?” She asks, picking Ellie up and settling with her on the bed, her kid curled up close to her chest. She adjusts her until her head is resting on her sternum, and she can see her well enough to stroke sweat-sticky strands of hair off her warm face.
Ellie nods, and she bends to kiss the crown of her head.
Joel comes back then, and they have a brief round of hostage negotiations to get Ellie to put the thermometer in her mouth. She has a moment of wishful thinking for the days when she could have done something like send Joel to a CVS for an aural thermometer while she stayed with their kid. After spitting it out twice, Ellie finally gives up and slumps against her while obediently keeping the thermometer in her mouth, and Joel rubs her back while they wait, hand big enough that it almost spans the entirety of it. When it beeps, Ellie pulls it out and all but tosses it at him, and he gives her a look at the silent sass before he reads the screen and holds it up to let her see the backlit screen as well.
101.9.
Fuck.
*
She leaves Ellie with Joel while she makes a trek over to Bill and Frank’s house to get Frank’s opinion on medicine options. They have medication that they’d brought with them as part of their selling point to being allowed to stay, but neither of them really likes the idea of risking expired medication on a sick kid. Frank’s gotten into herbalism. Better to try plants first.
Bill greets her at the door with a gun in hand like she’d known he would, and it’s only after he’s nearly blinded her with a flashlight that he sets it aside, scowling.
“What?” He snaps.
“Ellie’s sick.”
Those two little words cut the attitude quite nicely. He can act as gruff and grumbly as he wants, but Frank has a polaroid of Ellie on Bill’s lap and both of them asleep in his recliner that says Bill’s a fucking liar about not caring about the compound’s only resident child. Ellie’s too endearing. Poor fucker never stood a chance.
“What kind of sick?” He asks before grumbling at being shuffled to the side when Frank appears from behind him out of the darkness of their living room. “Told you not to come out until I gave the all-clear.”
“I didn’t hear gunshots or screaming and took a chance,” Frank says lightly before he turns to her. “You said Ellie’s not feeling well?”
“She threw up and her temperature’s 101.9.”
“Poor thing,” Frank says sympathetically before stepping back and ushering her in with an arm he rests around her shoulders. “C’mon, let’s find a few things to help.”
*
She returns to their house with a basketful of bottles and vials and a sheet of instructions on dosages and timing. She’s still not sure she trusts in the power of plants more than she wishes desperately for children’s tylenol and pepto, but she also doesn’t really have another option.
She sees the light on in the second bathroom and taps at the door before she pushes it open, finding Joel sitting on the floor next to Ellie in the tub, her pajamas now in a corner of the bathroom and the scent of stomach acid in the air.
“She threw up again,” Joel says quietly, and it’s terrifying, how listless Ellie is when she responds.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to,” she responds, rolling her head to look at her instead of lifting it from the edge of the tub. Her face is too-rosy from fever and her eyes are glassy, but they still go shiny with tears.
“No harm done, baby,” Joel says, reaching out to cup her face in one hand. “It happens.”
“That’s what washing machines are for,” she puts in before she sits on the edge of the tub and puts the little basket on her lap, pulling out the instructions again. She notes the lack of steam from the bathwater and dips a hand in, finding it lukewarm. “To get her fever down?” She asks Joel, and he nods.
“Figured she would have to change her pjs anyway.”
She has a moment of remembering old friends from Before who used to complain about their husbands being useless with their sick children and feels a brief moment of gratitude for the luck of ending up with two good men as life partners to parent a kid with.
Ellie whines when she’s presented with a dropper of medicine, a fussiness that’s unusual for her. Given how warm she still is to the touch, though, it’s not wildly unexpected. Trying to slip the dropper into her mouth just leads to her and Joel both getting soaked with angry splashing, but she’s too drained to keep it up, and she quits after only four good slaps to the water, little mouth pursed in a grumpy pout.
“Alright,” Joel says dryly, rising and flicking water off of himself, “plan B.”
She raises an eyebrow in question but doesn’t ask as he leaves the bathroom. Ellie slumps over to press her face to her thigh, and she tries not to get anxious about the fact that she can feel the heat in her little cheek through the material of her pajama bottoms. She reaches to set the basket on the edge of the sink–giving up the fight until she has backup again–and rests a hand on Ellie’s head, stroking lightly over her hair.
“I don’t feel good,” Ellie whines quietly.
“I know, bug,” she says sympathetically. “That’s why you gotta have some medicine. It’ll make you feel better.”
“No,” she says obstinately, turning her face in like she’s hiding her mouth. “And I’m not a bug.”
“You’re my little bug,” she says, twirling a ringlet of baby fine hair around one finger. “Is that okay?”
Ellie’s quiet in thought a moment and then she presses her face a little tighter.
“Yeah,” she says, nearly inaudible. “I can be your bug.”
She feels a rush of affection fill her chest so strongly it’s a miracle her ribcage doesn’t expand with it.
*
Joel returns with a plastic bowl with applesauce, and she lifts her eyebrows. He tilts his chin to indicate to keep Ellie’s head down, and she does, gently pressing when she goes to lift it. She doesn’t know what her partner’s up to, but they’ve worked together long enough for him to deserve a little trust.
Instructions? He mouths.
On the paper, she mouths back.
He nods and then quietly adds doses into the bowl he’s holding, while she keeps Ellie from seeing. When he’s dropped in a serving from four bottles, he stirs the applesauce until it’s all combined and then kneels by the tub. Ellie lifts her head to look at him, eyeing the bowl warily. Joel scoops up a spoonful and then extends it to her.
“Here, baby,” he says.
“I throwed up,” she says, like he’s forgotten.
“I know, but you might feel a little better with something in your tummy now. Just eat a little bit for me, okay?”
The “for me” is the magic phrase for a kid as eager to please as theirs, and she opens her mouth. The fact that she doesn’t complain about being a big girl and not a baby as she’s spoonfed speaks volumes about how rotten she feels, and she ends up dropping her head back to rest against her thigh, just opening her mouth and swallowing when needed. She wrinkles her nose a bit at what must be a slightly off taste, but she loves applesauce, so she holds her peace on it until the little portion is gone.
“Good job,” Joel says, cupping the back of her head and kissing her forehead. “I put her in soon after you left, so she’s probably about ready to get back out now,” he says to her.
She nods and takes the towel she’s handed as Joel collects the bowl and the little basket of medication. She picks Ellie up and wraps her up in the towel, and she goes easily, head on her shoulder, as she carries her to her room.
“You feeling any better?” She asks.
Ellie shrugs.
She sets her on her bed and then digs through her drawers until she finds a shorts and tank top pajama set. The bath has her feeling a little less warm, but better to keep her cool as possible still. Ellie is floppy as she redresses her, giving none of her usual insistence that she can do it on her own. She’s just sliding her second arm through when Joel joins them, a bucket and a bottle of what looks like juice with ice cubes in hand.
Ellie accepts a small sip of the juice but wrinkles her nose.
“It tastes funny,” she says, turning to her with imploring hands until she’s picked up again.
“It has a little salt in it,” he says, obeying the hand that extends to him and curling up next to them both, settling with his back to the headboard, her back against his chest, and his arms around both of them. “It’ll make you feel better.”
“It makes my tongue feel icky,” she complains, and she tilts her head back to exchange an amused glance with him, though neither offers a comment of their own.
*
Ellie keeps the applesauce down, but her fever spikes at 5 in the morning to 103.8. She’s tired and exhausted and doesn’t feel good, so she cries when they start filling the tub again, clinging to Joel as he tries to lower her in. Trying to change her out of her pajamas led to a screaming fit, so they’ve given it up as a loss, but now she’s clinging to Joel with her little hands fisted in his shirt, and she can see the pained expression on his face as he tries to get her loose.
“You’ll feel better, ba-” He tries to reassure her, pulling gently at one tiny wrist.
“No!” She shrills. She shrieks again when Joel gets one hand loose and bends to try and lower her in, turning fever-bright eyes to her. “Mama, no! Please!”
The beseeching plea goes right to her heart, and without even thinking, she kicks her slippers off and steps into the tub, still fully clothed. Joel looks at her like she’s lost her goddamn mind until she reaches for Ellie.
“C’mere, bug,” she coaxes.
Ellie does, wrapping her legs around her waist and her arms around her neck. She whimpers in protest as she sits down, but she keeps a hand on her back, rubbing slow strokes. Ellie tries to wriggle her way up like a cat avoiding water, but she slumps until she’s in up to her breasts, her kid on her chest and belly like a little otter pup.
“Cold,” Ellie complains quietly, but she doesn’t let go or try to fight.
“I know,” she says, kissing her sweaty head. “It’s just for a little while.”
She looks up to find Joel watching them with a peculiar expression she’s never seen before, and she tilts her head in question. It seems to snap him out of it, and he just shakes his head once before he leans in to kiss her, a brief, chaste press of lips.
*
She and Ellie share their wildly unpleasant bath experience until the water has moved beyond tepid to starting to get uncomfortably cool. Another check with the thermometer after a struggle shows that her fever’s down to 102.1, so while not back in comfortable territory, it’s at least not in a dangerous range anymore. She hands Ellie up to Joel and feels helplessly charmed by the way he both holds Ellie to his chest at once regardless of how it soaks his t-shirt and by the way he offers her a hand so she doesn’t slip.
“Why thank you, sir,” she says in her best attempt at a drawl, making him roll his eyes.
“My pleasure, ma’am,” he says with a tip of an imaginary cowboy hat.
She leaves him to get Ellie into dry clothes while she changes her own, squeezing out the end of her ponytail where it took a soak along with her. She snags one of his t-shirts from the closet and helps herself to his sweatpants while she’s at it, rolling the waistband so they won’t slip off of her hips. She tosses her soaked clothes into their tub with a wet plop to deal with them later.
She finds Joel sitting on Ellie’s bed with her plastered like a little octopus to his chest, him talking to her in a voice too low for her to catch the words until she’s close.
“-ride a horse. You can be a real cowgirl.”
She smiles as she settles beside them. Ellie’s been a little anxious about the idea of Jackson, a totally new place with a large number of strangers, so they’ve started telling her things as a bedtime story to make the idea seem a little less scary. Given how much she loves animals, they’ve been saving the horses for a bad night, and being sick is certainly bad night material.
“Wanna be like Billy the Kid,” Ellie mumbles, and Joel snorts, still keeping up a slow stroke of his hand along her back.
“That so? You gonna be Ellie the Kid?”
“Uh-huh. Grandpa Bill says you gotta stick it to the banks cause they’re all thieves who’ll steal every penny you’ve got.”
Given that Ellie absolutely has no familiarity with banks or pennies, she’s clearly just parroting Bill, and she makes a mental note to cover appropriate and inappropriate topics with him later. She can get behind some stick it to the man mentality, but she’d prefer if her kid didn’t get them in trouble with doomsday prepper speak in the future, especially when they’re about to settle into a new town full of people who aren’t likely to appreciate the sentiments.
“Maybe you should listen to Grandpa Bill a little less,” Joel says, though he smiles faintly as he says it.
“Grandpa Bill says when people can’t handle the truth, it’s because they’re sheeple nursed on the-the-” She picks her head up, frowning. “I don’t remember.”
“Probably for the best,” she puts in, guiding Ellie’s head back down. “Grandpa Bill probably shouldn't have said it in the first place.”
*
Bill and Frank stop by later that morning with some chicken soup and crackers that Bill hands over with grumbling and insistence that they just happened to be extras they had laying around. Frank hands over some candied ginger and mint tea and the assurance that Bill’s been up since 6 cooking.
She laughs and thanks them both.
“Oh, and Bill?” She calls when they’re already off the porch. He turns. “Stop turning my kid into a fucking prepper.”
A brief moment of surprise and then she sees the faintest flicker of amusement cross his face before he’s back to being stoic.
“Someone around here needs to know what the fuck to do,” he says, unapologetic. “It’s a better education than she’ll get in any of those books you have her working through.”
She rolls her eyes and shuts the door.
*
Ellie’s convalescence has been relocated to the living room, and she finds her and Joel where she left them, Ellie slack and tired on his chest, Joel half-dozing through their second cartoon movie of the day. With another serving of drugged applesauce, Ellie’s fever is down to 100.7, and she’s kept down their DIY pedialyte and a piece of dry toast. She still looks pale except for the feverish flush on her cheeks, but she looks better than she did during their 3 am wake up.
Joel rouses when she picks Ellie up, hand moving to secure her like she’s falling, but he lets go when he sees it’s just her. She settles on the other end of the couch, sitting criss-cross and resting Ellie in the cradle of her lap, an arm behind her back. She hands over a mug of chicken soup and keeps a hand beneath it as Ellie sips.
“Bill?” Joel asks, straightening and stretching, sending out a few pops from his back.
She nods.
“Any good?” Joel asks Ellie, leaning forward to tuck back a stray strand from her face. Ellie pauses from her sipping long enough to respond.
“Mhm. It’s good ship.”
“Good,” he says, amused, before he rises. “Gonna go ahead and throw things in the wash,” he tells her, squeezing her knee in passing.
It’s incredible, how his ass looks even better when she’s watching it walk away to do laundry.
*
By that evening, Ellie’s temperature is down to 99.7, and the long night catches up to her, knocking her out cold by 7 pm regardless of her catnaps that day. They get another bowl of drugsauce into her and make her brush her teeth, and then they tuck her into bed, a bucket on either side just in case. She still lingers in the doorway when they go to leave, and she feels Joel step close behind her, an arm around her waist.
“She’s okay,” he says quietly.
“I know,” she says, leaning back. Solid as ever, he doesn’t move at all, taking her weight easily.
Despite the assurance, Joel doesn’t rush her, tucking his chin over her shoulder and waiting with her while she lets the slow, even rhythm of Ellie’s breathing reassure her that she’ll be alright. For the sake of tonight, they even set up a baby monitor they took from the nursery, so she knows logically that they’ll hear if Ellie needs them.
Still, she can’t help but think of how many nights their little girl spent sick with nobody there to look out for her. It feels wrong, leaving her now.
“Think of her FEDRA days?” Joel asks, moving his head enough to kiss her shoulder before he settles again with his cheek pressed to hers.
She smiles, faintly, reaching up to cup the back of his neck.
“Mind reader,” she accuses softly, making him hum a laugh.
“She cried when you left to get medicine because she thought she was going to get in trouble for throwing up,” he says, she can hear the same simmering wrath in his voice that she feels flare to life inside her at what this says about Ellie’s past. “I’ve been thinking about it all day, what it must have been like when she was sick before.”
Ellie makes a noise in her sleep, and at once, they both look to her like hounds sighting a rabbit. Their kid’s just a chatterbox even asleep, though, so after a heavy exhale through her nose in response to whatever she’s dreaming about, she settles again.
“Do you think there was anyone there who really took care of her?” She asks, the thought she pokes at like a bruise. She wants to believe there was, wants to think that their little girl knew at least one person before them who wasn’t a fucking monster.
But then Ellie does things like hide in a kitchen cabinet for an hour because she broke a plate, and she feels certain that even if there was, they didn’t do enough to even begin to offset every fucker who’s hurt their kid.
“It doesn’t matter,” Joel says after a moment. “She’s got us now.”
She closes her eyes and leans back against him a little more. It still makes her head spin a little, hearing things like this, commitment from a man who took a fucking year to even call her his partner after they met. She pulls away enough to turn, resting her arms on his shoulders. He responds by circling his loosely around her waist, an easy, comfortable hold.
For a moment, she just looks at him, this man who’s hers, hers and Ellie’s. How impossible it would have seemed even six months ago that she would be here one day, in a house that’s theirs, with a kid that’s theirs, with a life that’s theirs. Joel Miller, her life partner.
Joel Miller, the father of her child, of their child, of the perfect little girl she never imagined she’d have one day.
She thinks back to the version of herself terrified at a missed period, sure that a kid would wreck the delicate balance of her life. Oh, sister, just you wait, she thinks a little wryly.
“You’re a good dad,” she says softly, and she smiles at the surprise and then the pleasure that crosses his face.
“We should find five more just like her,” he teases, and she leans forward to muffle her laughter against his shoulder.
“Think I just saw a racoon near the compost heap yesterday,” she says.
“Might have to put different color headbands on them. Think I’ll mix ‘em up otherwise.”
“You’re mean,” she says fondly.
“It’s only mean if I say it behind her back. I’ll tell her to her face she’s a feral little raccoon.”
It’s even harder to resist the urge to laugh when this statement is followed by him immediately moving to pick up Ellie’s t-rex when she shoves it off the bed in her sleep, carefully tucking it back beside her and leaning to kiss her head again.
What a big softie, she thinks.
God, she’s so lucky to have him.