Archive of Our Own ^beta

Settling into Jackson is…weird. 

Good, and a relief after the shitshow that was the latter half of their cross country adventure, but still. 

Weird. 

By virtue of still recovering from being a medical guinea pig, she misses the first couple weeks of it, too busy sleeping more than any person really should and whining at Joel waking her up for stupid reasons like eating and drinking. Her saving grace is that she’s still in too much pain for him to risk being rough with her–not that he really would get that rough to start with–but there’s still only so much having a spoon poked at her mouth she can take until she has to admit defeat and consent to eating under her own power. After a fun chicken noodle fiasco that soaked her and her sheets with scalding hot broth, he eventually stops bringing her soup until she can be trusted not to fall asleep mid-chew, but still. He really hits his stride as Nurse Joel and doesn’t look back. 

It’s week three (she thinks) before she’s ready to get up, and even then, she can’t quite manage on her own just yet. She holds onto Joel’s hands as he helps her down the stairs, her body rebelling after so long playing invalid, her hips especially screaming at her after bone marrow harvests. She had gotten out of bed with firm resolutions to prove that she was perfectly fine again. 

Instead she gets set up in an overstuffed armchair like a princess, remote in reach and about three different beverages surrounding her because it turns out Joel doesn’t do very well with inaction. She falls asleep on her throne about three hours later and stirs only slightly when Joel gently picks her up and carries her back upstairs. 

“I can walk,” she protests, not bothering to move at all. 

“I know,” he says softly, pressing a kiss to her head. 

Her piece said, she graciously lets him tuck her back in. 

*

By week five, she’s recovered and trusted enough to start taking short walks on her own, though she doesn’t miss how Joel almost always “happens” to be on the porch when she gets back, always giving her a quick once-over as if she’s gotten into something dangerous in the ten minutes she walked around without him. She rolls her eyes at it and grumbles to keep up appearances, but she can’t help liking it, just a little bit. She went three days of being so sick that she was unable to leave her bed in FEDRA when she was nine without anyone noticing. Now she thinks she’d be lucky to get a sneeze under the radar. It’s a lot, kind of, having someone so attentive. 

…but it’s also pretty fucking nice. 

Less nice is trying to find her feet in this new life, which requires all sorts of things she never knew she didn’t know. 

Such as cracking an egg, apparently. 

She stares at Joel’s back, bowl of eggs in hand, thinking for a moment that he’s making a joke. The dining hall offers breakfast, so they don’t usually eat at home, but it’s pouring outside and their neighbor had gifted them eggs for Joel’s help repairing a fence and another had sent her home with bacon after she watched the kids in her yard for an hour for her to go help her sister with a leaking pipe. The bacon is already cooking, making her swallow against the way her mouth waters at the smell, but the eggs are still whole and uncracked. 

And left to her to figure out, apparently. 

He had been casual about asking her to crack the eggs into the bowl, and she doesn’t know how to tell him that she doesn’t actually know how to do that. Eggs had been rare in the QZ, and whenever they had been served, they’d always arrived on her tray already scrambled into fluffy golden goodness. Through the window into the kitchen of the dining hall here in Jackson, she’s seen a couple of the kitchen volunteers cracking eggs, so she knows the process in a purely academic sense: hold egg, smack it against something hard, drop egg insides into receptacle. Easy.

In theory. 

She feels a little squirm of unease in her stomach at the idea of having to ask Joel to do something so fucking basic, something he clearly already thinks she should know how to do. Hell, she knows the little kids at school do basic cooking practice because she’s walked by the preschool and been handed cookies before, so apparently even people who haven’t mastered not pooping their pants have got egg cracking down pat. She and Joel have a pretty open line of communication after everything they’ve gone through together, but something about this, about having to fess up to not knowing how to do something he thinks she does, makes her feel like she’s failing. 

She takes her bowl and walks over to the counter with determination. She can figure out eggs. She’s killed people. She’s fought infected. She can crack open some eggs. Nothing to it. 

“Any day now,” Joel prompts, and she looks over to see him smiling over his shoulder at her. “C’mon, slowpoke. Bacon’s almost done.” 

“Can’t rush perfection,” she shoots back, an automatic response to being teased. 

He snorts, turning back to the stovetop. 

“It’s eggs, not the Sistine Chapel. Chop chop.” 

Right. 

She turns back to the eggs. She figures a good first step is removing the eggs from the bowl. The implication, after all, had been for her to crack them into the bowl. Once that step is over, though, she pauses again, one egg in hand. She studies the shell, a smooth, solid brown with little freckles here and there. She gives it a gentle testing squeeze, trying to work out exactly how thick and hard the shell is. She knows eggs are apparently kind of fragile, but she’s also seen their neighbor’s toddler collecting them, and if Gigi is anything, it’s not gentle. She also knows for sure that they have to be hit against something, so maybe it’s like an exoskeleton? They’re soft at first to get out of the chicken, and then they harden? That seems to make a certain amount of sense. Alright then. They’ve had these eggs for three days. From her theory, they must be pretty hard by now, the same way bread gets. Good solid thwack then. She thinks she’s only seen them cracked against a countertop, but surely cracking it against the cabinet would mean it could drop right down into the bowl without the risk of it falling on the counter? That seems like a safer option for someone who's never cracked one before.

Plan made, she puts the bowl into position, holds the egg firmly in hand, draws back-

And lets out a squeak of surprise when slapping the egg against the cupboard door ends with a spray of egg innards all over the cabinet, her hand, and her clothes. And, she thinks with a wrinkle of her nose, her hair, to judge from the yellow dripping into her vision. 

Before she can say anything, Joel’s there, turning her with a hand at her shoulder. She expects laughter–she must look fucking stupid right now–but instead he just looks concerned, tilting her (eggy) chin up and pushing her (also eggy) bangs back. 

“What’s wrong?” He asks, and she blinks in surprise. “You get dizzy?”

The question seems like a lifeline, an easy way to get out of this fuck up without admitting that she’s too stupid to do what a preschooler can. All of the Firefly blood draws left her anemic, so she’d spent her first few days back on her feet reaching out for things (and Joel) to steady herself against. She’s been subjected to torture including eating liver since then to get her iron back up, but it’s a work in progress. 

Right now, it’s also an easy out. 

“Yeah,” she says. “Sorry.” She feels more than a little guilty at making him worried, but she’d rather a worried Joel than a Joel realizing that the 14 year old he’s ended up with has less skills than a garden variety Jackson 3 year old. 

“Alright,” he says, voice gentle. He boosts her up to sit on the counter in a rare treat she usually gets fussed at for and then retrieves a dishcloth from a drawer, wetting it in the sink. It means her ass is getting egged, too, but fakers can’t be choosers. 

“I can get it,” she protests as he starts wiping at the mess on her head and hand and, well, everything, apparently. Still, she doesn’t stop him. She thinks, absurdly, of the barn cat she’d seen cleaning its kitten the other day, the way the cat pinned the baby down and set to licking it until it was damp all over. It’s how she feels right now, like she’s being groomed against her will. Joel sees the slight curve of a smile and smiles in return, pausing for a moment. 

“What?” He asks, amused even without knowing the punchline. 

“Nothing,” she says, about to shake her head before she remembers that she’s supposed to be dizzy. A thought occurs to her then, and she grins in truth. “Hey Joel.” 

“Mm?” He says absently, pulling a strand of hair from where it had been tucked behind her ear and running the cloth over it gently. 

“How do chickens stay in shape?” 

He groans, immediately knowing where this is going. 

“Don’t-” 

“Eggs -cersize,” she says, not managing to avoid laughing as she says it. 

She gets a dishcloth to the face for it and a stern “-1/10,” but she doesn’t miss Joel’s smile as he turns back to the bacon, sending her off to shower now that she won’t drip egg everywhere. 

An all-around success as far as she’s concerned. 

*

Joel waits until she’s showered and changed before he cooks the eggs so they won’t get cold–a thoughtfulness that makes her feel warm inside–so she plays it cool as she watches him, feeling herself flush a bit as she watches the light tap against the counter that proves more than enough to crack the eggs open. She watches the entire process intently as he adds a little splash of milk and whisks them up with a fork, resolving that the next time he asks her to help make eggs, she’ll be a goddamn eggs-pert. 

Grinning into her apple juice, she can only regret that her lie means she won’t get to tell Joel such a good pun. 

(She still judges breakfast with a satisfied “that was eggs-celent” that gets her carried out of the kitchen to be tossed gently onto the couch with a grumble of “Jesus, you’re the worst” that still does nothing to dim her pride in herself.) 

*

She feels slightly less guilty about the lie when it means a renewal of liver consumption, which feels like cosmic penance for fibbing. She hadn’t been able to choke it down at first, the iron-y taste too similar to blood and bringing bad memories to the forefront. The first time she’d had a bite at dinner, in fact, she’d had to bolt out of the dining hall to puke behind the building, Joel following her out and holding her hair back, her convinced that the same thing that had happened in Silver Lake had happened here until he talked her down until logic could take hold again. 

It had still been three days of cheese toast before she’d been ready to try again. 

Since then, she’s developed a system of drowning her piece in hot sauce provided by Tommy and Maria, who handed over a bottle at dinner one day without a word of judgment. It helps drown the taste out so she can choke it down, especially when she folds it up in bread and eats it like a sandwich, but she still isn’t a massive fan. 

Now, though, she chokes it down without complaint. 

As the price for not admitting that she didn’t know how to do something as basic as a crack an egg, it’s one she’s willing to pay. 

* 

Egg fiascos aside, she learns that she can mostly monkey see, monkey do most of Jackson’s oddities. Coming back to town and being sequestered away under the excuse of illness means she gets a pretty wide period of grace, any missteps chalked up to her still recovering. They’d timed the vaccines they’d brought back with them carefully so they wouldn’t be linked directly to her, and they only started being distributed last week. Joel already got his in the hospital, and while she was passed out upstairs on day 2, he’d strong-armed Tommy and Maria into getting their dose before he would tell anyone where to meet up to get the next round, but it was kept a secret until they’d settled in enough to hopefully not be anyone’s first guess as a source. The excuse had been that Joel and Tommy had run into a Firefly outrider during a patrol they’d split off during, and if anyone has suspicions, they’re willing enough to accept the miracle of a cure to keep their thoughts to themselves. 

There’s been two people already saved by their vaccinations, an older woman named Violet and a trainee patroller only a few years older than her named Jace. Apparently an early spring has meant the emergence of more infected than usual, and the bites had happened within two weeks of each other. They’d been quarantined in the jail for 72 hours just to be sure, but neither had been infected. When she’d asked, Maria had told her that scar tissue like hers had crept up around the bite, but that it had halted before going any further. 

Each time she sees Violet and Jace, she feels a small thrill of giddy disbelief. She did that. Because of her, two people survived who wouldn’t have otherwise. She watches them with their families in a way that she knows would be creepy if anyone saw her doing it, but she can’t help herself. 

They’re her reminders when she wakes up from nightmares, when her back twinges with pain from a botched spinal tap that she hasn’t fully fessed up to Joel about it still bothering her, when she eyes the teachers and wonders what they do when no one is watching, when she feels her past trying to claw her back in a hundred ways. 

Violet and Jace, the people who are alive when so many of her people have died, the first two who will live because she was strong enough to push through and make sure a cure happened. It was worth it, everything she had to do, for the simple miracle of Violet and Jace and everyone else who will live because of what she and Joel accomplished. 

Still. 

Secretly being the source of the cure doesn’t really help with her feeling like she’s missing things in how to fit in in Jackson. 

She takes as many cues as she can from Joel and Tommy. Joel still hasn’t completely settled–something that makes her feel a little better about herself–but she can see it happening day by day. He’s happy here, she can tell. He smiles more, and he talks to people, and he regularly spends time with Tommy, them usually migrating to one or the other’s porch at the end of the day. She likes to sit on the floor next to Joel during these evenings, leaning against his leg, head against his knee. She doesn’t always understand what the fuck he and Tommy are talking about when they start to reminisce about Before, but she likes the energy of it, Joel loose and relaxed in a way she’d never seen him before they settled here. 

Tommy tends to be more reliable as someone to copy. She’d been suspicious of him at first, especially after Silver Lake, but his friendliness is different than David’s trap. David had been working towards a goal, trying to get her to let her guard down so he could-

So he could trick her. 

Tommy, though, just seems like he’s friendly to be friendly. When she can be on her feet for longer than twenty minutes at a time, she wanders over to his house when he motions her over one afternoon and spends a good hour with him on his porch playing cards. She’s on edge at first, sure he wants something, but all that happens is that she kicks his ass at something called Go Fish until Joel comes over to investigate where she’s wandered off to. The day repeats itself, and soon it’s nothing for her to go see what he’s up to, trailing him if he’s going on a job Joel won’t freak out about her helping with or gathering a treasured collection of embarrassing stories about Joel when he was younger. 

(Joel retaliates by sharing stories about Tommy’s exploits, but stoic, tough guy Joel getting stuck in a fence half-naked after going skinny dipping is objectively more hilarious than fun-loving Tommy doing any number of shenanigans.) 

(It’s just science.) 

Also, his past misadventures aside, Tommy is reliably a good person to copy for working out how the fuck she’s supposed to act in Jackson. Everyone seems to like him, and no one gives him weird looks, so he seems a safe role model until Joel has worked things out enough for her to copy him. 

He also, thank God, doesn’t make fun of her when she asks a question she doesn’t realize is weird until she doesn’t get an immediate response. 

Today’s “So who decides what the kids all do when they turn 16?” for example, is followed by a few seconds of surprised silence that tells her at once that this is another Ellie Issue, her personal term for the things she thinks of as normal that make Joel’s face go funny or the people in hearing distance give her strange looks. 

She has a growing number of Ellie Issues, much to her discomfort. Making a joke about belts being worse than electrostaffs because the hurt lasts longer apparently doesn’t go over well and makes Joel go almost painfully gentle with her for a good two days. Who knew? 

“That how FEDRA worked?” Tommy asks, holding a branch back for her. She’s wary about it being a trap so he can let go and hit her with it, but he’s a perfect gentleman, even offering a hand to help her climb up over the rocks when they prove unstable. 

They’re out of the walls together today, a rare treat. She knows from overhearing it that the kids her age in school go on foraging practice in groups, but school doesn’t start for a few more weeks. Even getting to go out with Tommy had been a long campaign, and she knows Joel trusts Tommy more than anyone. 

She’s pretty determined that nothing catastrophic will happen today to fuck that up. 

“Is that not how it works here?” She counters. That seems like a safer bet than a straight yes. If Tommy looks bothered by the idea, she can just hedge the truth and say she thought it was a Jackson thing. 

“Is that how you were expecting it to work?” Tommy returns, and she narrows her eyes slightly. She wasn’t expecting the redirect. 

“Based on my observations?” 

Tommy snorts. 

“Joel’s gonna be fucked if you hit a rebellious stage,” he says fondly. “He always broke me into confessing, but I think you might actually have a chance of holding out.” 

Given that the idea of disappointing Joel makes her stomach swirl with nausea, she has her doubts about that, but she’ll take the compliment. 

“Maybe you’re just shitty at rebelling,” she suggests, eyes darting to him briefly to see if the joke is too far. She’s still working out the limits between teasing and being misunderstood as being mean. It’s one of the things she’d struggled with back in the QZ, one of the things that made it hard for her to make friends. So much of growing up in FEDRA school was about rank and power dynamics, and it had been hard to work out the limits of the kind of familiarity allowed. Jackson hasn’t proven any easier, but Tommy’s generally good practice. She’s yet to say anything that really seems to bother him, but she judges “acceptable for most people” by whether it actually makes him laugh or not. 

Today’s is a smile and a shake of his head, so that would seem to be a “not for anyone not as chill as Tommy” kind of comment. Noted. 

“You better watch it,” he says, hip checking her gently and then grabbing her backpack at once to pull her back upright when it almost sends her into a bush. “You’ll be hitting the fun stage of life where you wanna stick it to the man soon. You’ll need somebody to cover for you.” 

“Missing being a teenager that bad, huh?” She asks, trying and failing to hip check him in return. “Trying to relive the glory days through me?” 

“Fuck no,” Tommy laughs. “Words of wisdom: being a teenager is fucking awful. Don’t listen to anybody who tells you it’s the best time of your life. They’re either delusional, or they peaked in high school.” 

She doesn’t know what part of school high school is, but she does feel a little reassured by the rest of it. Being a teenager has largely been a shitshow until now. 

It’s nice to imagine that it might not just be a her thing. 

(Well…not completely, at least.)

*

The biggest Ellie Issue yet happens on her first fucking day of school. 

Based on her luck in the past, she thinks it’s about par for the course. 

The day starts fine. She’s nervous about being away from people she knows all day, but she’s good at school. It had been one of her strongest redeeming qualities back in Boston. She might not have been so good at ass kissing and playing nice with others, but she can set a curve. 

Joel “happens” to be heading the same direction as her when it comes time to walk to the school, and she doesn’t comment on it. He’s been admirably collected all morning, though he’d checked her backpack twice before they left the house and also insisted on making sure she had a “good” breakfast. It’s still an adjustment, someone caring about her this much, and while she sometimes chafes at the foreignness of it, mostly she just revels in it. 

“Guess this is it,” she says when they make it to the courtyard. There’s a group of children playing on some equipment nearby, and she watches with raised brows as not a single adult nearby tells them to keep it down. There’s two women she knows as nursery minders nearby, but other than kissing an injury from a fall, they seem unbothered by the gleeful chaos happening. 

Tentatively, she starts to feel a little flare of hope that this might actually be enjoyable. 

“Got everything you need?” Joel asks, and she nods. 

“Yep.” She rocks onto her toes and then back down to her heels. Her instinct–one that’s only recently started developing–is to go for a hug, but Joel hasn’t initiated, and she’s still not totally clear on how to. The only other person she remembers hugging is Riley, and those had been spontaneous things, almost always offered by Riley, and usually limited to a quick side hug that had still left her tingling everywhere they’d touched. The closest she’s gotten to asking Joel for a hug is pressing against him because it always makes him wrap his arms around her in response, but she’s a little shy about doing that in front of a bunch of witnesses in broad daylight. 

Before she can figure it out, Joel cups her head briefly and then slides his hand down, squeezing the back of her neck gently. He pushes her between the shoulder blades with a fraction of the strength she knows he’s capable of. 

“Alright, go on now,” he says. “Go get some education.” 

“One of us has to,” she teases, darting out of reach before he can get retribution. 

She pauses on the stairs to the building, looking back just once more. She’s half-afraid that he’ll have already walked away, but instead she finds him still waiting. She lifts her hand in a wave that he returns. She still wants to run back over and get a hug, one last little bit of comfort for the road, but there are more people gathering in the courtyard now, and a quick look shows that other people about her age aren’t hugging their parents. Hell, about half of them didn’t walk to school with an adult at all. 

With that in mind, she gives Joel one last wave and smiles at the thumbs up she gets in return before she takes a deep breath and walks inside. 

*

Her morning starts fine, and she forgets about not getting a hug as time goes on. The other kids are a little wary, but apparently being from somewhere else, especially a QZ, makes her exotic enough to be interesting. It’s a little overwhelming, frankly, people asking questions that she’s only really comfortable answering about half of the time. 

“Alright guys,” one girl named Dina finally says. “She’s not going anywhere. Let the girl breathe a little.” 

The wink the girl gives her makes that last bit a little hard to actually accomplish, but she at least manages a quick flicker of a smile that doesn’t feel like it looked too weird. 

(...hopefully.) 

The day goes fine until the last period before lunch. They’ve already done English and science, and both of those had gone fine. She’d worried about being behind everyone else, but she keeps up with almost everything they cover, and both teachers take her aside after class to offer to help her do extra work to catch up. Apparently being in a town made up of people who arrive throughout the year means they have a pretty solid system for getting everyone up to date in classes. 

The reassurance that at least she won’t be the only person who might need to play catch-up is a relief, and it sets her at ease as they move into third period. 

Her ease dissolves when a man walks in and writes MATH in big block letters on the board. 

“Howdy y’all,” the man says with an easy smile. 

She clenches her hands into fists on her lap. He shouldn’t be here. She’d asked Maria. She was supposed to have all female teachers. It had been one of the things that had set her mind at ease about the idea of school. 

He shouldn’t be here. 

“I’m sure you’ve all heard Ms. Garcia is expecting a little one,” he pauses for nodding around the room, “well, she’s decided she needs to take some time to rest before the baby comes. She should be back in the saddle by the second semester, but until then, I’m afraid you’re all stuck with lil ole me.” He gives them all a smile at the playful groans and jeers. 

Her ears start buzzing faintly. 

I was a teacher. Math. Taught kids about your age. 

“I hear we’ve got a special guest with us this year,” the man says brightly. 

Don’t look at me, she wills him. Don’t mean me. Don’t look at me. Don’t-

“Ellie?” 

She swallows. 

“Why don’t you come on up and tell us a thing or two about yourself?” He suggests, leaning casually against the desk. His smile feels too wide now. Too many teeth showing. She can’t decide if it’s genuine or not. 

She doesn’t really trust that she can tell the difference, not anymore. 

“No thanks,” she says, voice a little rough. “I’m good.” 

“Oh, come on now,” the man cajoles with apparent good nature. He pushes himself off of the desk and wanders closer. 

She grits her teeth so hard her jaw aches. 

“Just a fun fact or two,” the man says, squeezing between desks on his way to her. 

“I’m not that interesting,” she says flatly. Jesus, please make this stop. She tries to look around, tries to judge if this is normal or not. Are the other kids concerned? Do they find this strange? Is this just an Ellie Issue, or is this man taking too much interest in her? She can’t make a judgment call. She doesn’t know the faces around her well enough. She can’t tell. She can’t-

“Well now, you’re just being modest,” the man says, far too fucking close now. She can feel her heartbeat in her throat. “I’m sure you’re plenty special-”

The word special hits at the same time as a hand lands on her shoulder, large and foreign and all too capable of-

In the next moment, she’s out of her chair, driving her elbow against his chest hard enough to knock him back into a desk, feet flying into the air as he tips over. 

She doesn’t wait to see anyone’s reaction before she bolts. 

*

She gives herself a bloody nose because of fucking course she does, banging facefirst into a glass panel door that was so clean she didn’t realize it was closed. She curses and cups a hand over her face, feeling the hot rush of blood and tasting the copper of it in her mouth, but she doesn’t stop. 

She doesn’t even know where she’s going. 

She just knows that she’s going. 

She hears a couple people call out her name, but that just pushes her on faster. Gotta get away. Gotta get somewhere safe. Gotta keep going. 

She’s at the house before she realizes she was planning on going there, and in her scramble, she trips and falls on the stairs onto the porch, going down hard and feeling a flare of pain all the way across her shin before she lands, a lightning strike of pain shooting up from her knee. She hisses at it but shoves herself back up, only distantly recognizing the smears of blood she leaves behind from the hand she’d had over her face. 

She feels like a bird flying into a window as she lands against the door, turning the knob only to find it locked. For a moment she thinks she’s stuck outside, but she only then registers that she somehow ended up wearing her backpack. She’s not totally clear on how she achieved that. 

Still, it means she can swing it over one shoulder and dig frantically for her key, taking about five tries before she actually manages to grab it, dropping it twice before she gets it into the knob. The moment it’s open, she darts inside and slams it shut behind her, locking it. She takes one moment to catch her breath before she’s in motion again. She’s inside. She’s home. 

But still. She doesn’t feel safe. 

Without even thinking about it, she goes to Joel’s room, pausing in the doorway. It’s as neat as ever, the only mess a book and a water bottle on the side table and a pair of jeans halfway out of a laundry basket. Even the sight and smell of it starts to cool the panic roiling in her gut, and she takes a second to breathe, trying to calm and center herself. 

“C’mon, Ellie,” she tells herself, trying to be stern. “Get your shit together. Come on.” 

Her gaze lands on the darkness of the space under the bed. It looks, in the moment, so wonderfully secure and safe, this little pocket of enclosed spacethat no one bigger than her can fit in. 

She grabs the quilt folded on the end of Joel’s bed and tugs it off, crawling under the bed and curling up around it, pressing her bloody face into the fabric and slowly soothing herself with the smell. When she wraps it around herself tightly, it almost feels like a hug. 

*

The calming darkness of her bolthole lets her finally get her shit together. 

At once, she has several regrets. 

She presses her face tighter into the quilt, feeling absolutely humiliated. Jesus, the other kids must think she’s a fucking freak. 

She also assaulted a teacher. Different standards of conduct or not, she doesn’t see that going well. 

She wraps her fists around the material of her cocoon, feeling the fear in her gut slowly get replaced by creeping anxiety. Where the fuck does she go from here? How would fucking anyone come back from this? How is she supposed to-

“Ellie?” 

She squeezes her eyes shut tight. Please let that be a figment of her imagination. Please don’t let Tommy be inside this house right now. She hasn’t figured out how the fuck she’s going to explain what happened yet. This isn’t failing to crack an egg. Vertigo isn’t going to save her. 

“Kiddo, I need you to answer me.” 

She can hear the strain in his voice, and she squeezes her eyes shut. God, he’s probably so angry right now. He hasn’t said it to her face, but he’s overheard him call her his niece before, something that only started happening within the last week. He accepted her enough to tell people she’s part of his family, and then she goes and acts like a goddamn crazy person at school. 

She’ll be lucky if he’ll even admit they’ve passed each other on the street now. 

“Ellie, I’m serious. I need you to tell me you’re okay.” 

She doesn’t want to do that. She wants to remain in the safety of her bolthole until the earth finally swallows her whole. She wants to stay here until Tommy and Joel can both forget they ever met her. They accepted her into their little family, and she goes and embarasses them by- 

She jumps out of her goddamn skin when there’s suddenly a face looking at her from the side of the bed, and it isn’t until she’s banged her head backing up against the wall that she realizes whose face it is. 

“Hey,” Tommy says, voice soft like it was when one of the mares got injured and was freaking out last week. “You’re alright, kiddo. Just me.” 

“Hi,” she manages, voice croaky. 

Pathetic as it is, it makes his smile a little less strained. 

“Hi,” he says, lowering himself until he’s laying on the floor, too, head on his arms. “Wanna tell me what hurts?” 

She frowns, confused. What does he mean-

“You’re pretty bloody, darlin’,” he says. The petname is new, and she can’t even decide if she likes it or not, not right now. 

She has far bigger fish to fry. 

“Think you can come out from under there?” He asks gently. “Let me take a look at you?” 

She doesn’t think she can manage that right now, actually. Under the bed is safe. Not under the bed has people and teachers and classmates who saw her lose her shit over what she’s realizing was absolutely nothing. 

It also has Joel, who’ll probably be asking her to move out as soon as he gets home. She can’t blame him. She’s been enough of a burden to him. He won’t want a kid who embarasses him in public, too. 

The thought makes her eyes sting and her throat go tighter. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, a woefully insufficient apology for what she’s done. 

“Don’t worry about that right now,” Tommy says, reaching out a hand she doesn’t take. He doesn’t push, doesn’t try to touch her. He just rests it in an offer. “I’m more worried about making sure you’re okay. You left a bit of a horror show downstairs.” 

She did? The entire getting inside the house process was a bit of a blur. 

“Do you know if you hit your head?” Tommy asks. 

No? She’s not totally clear, but she thinks no. She shakes her head, and Tommy nods encouragingly. 

“Good, that’s real good,” he says. 

“You sound weird,” she observes, voice a little flat. She doesn’t know if she has inflection in her at the moment. 

“Sorry,” he says. “You’ve got me a little worried, to be honest. Think you can come out from under there for me?” 

“I…” She starts. Part of her wants to obey, wants to prove she’s okay. 

The other part of her rebels at the idea of leaving her little quilt nest in her safe darkness. 

“Why don’t you get just a little closer, then?” He asks. “You can stay under there if you want, but-” 

“Ellie?” 

She shuts her eyes tight at the sound of her voice. 

Joel. 

Fuck. 

“Baby, answer me,” he calls, and she can hear his boots on the floor downstairs as he looks around. “Ellie, baby girl, I need you to tell me you’re here.” 

She’d rather not. She’d prefer to pretend she hasn’t fucked everything up for a little while longer. 

“We’re upstairs,” Tommy calls. “We’re just-” 

Immediately, she hears boots pounding on stairs as he runs, and she jumps at the way the door slams open. 

“What are-” 

Tommy pushes himself up, and she misses whatever silent signals he gives, but Joel doesn’t finish the question. Tommy gets to his feet, and she hears the low rumble of voices as they talk. She shuts her eyes tight, so fucking embarassed. Jesus, how pathetic. 

“Hey kiddo.” 

She opens her eyes to find that Joel’s taken Tommy’s spot. She pulls the quilt up over her face more in an instinctive urge to hide, childish as it is. 

“Hi,” she says, voice muffled by the material, only her eyes visible. 

“You wanna come out from under there?” 

No. 

He reads her silence for what it is, and she barely picks up the sigh he clearly tries to restrain. She sees him subtly testing if he can fit, and beneath the cover of the quilt, she smiles, just slightly, seeing his consternation that he absolutely cannot. 

In compromise, she wiggles slightly closer. 

“Can you tell me how bad you’re hurt?” He tries again. 

She does a quick catalog. Her leg and knee are throbbing, and the sticky heat of her jeans against them tells her she’s probably bleeding. She thinks her nose has at least stopped bleeding, and though it’s sore, she doesn’t think it’s broken. 

“Ran into a door,” she says, having to repeat herself when she’s too quiet the first time. “It-when I was leaving school,” leaving being a mild lie of what was absolutely more fleeing like a fucking idiot, “I ran into a door.” 

She simultaneously does and does not want him to laugh. She wants to break the awkward tension of the room, but she also doesn’t want him to think she’s stupid. 

She already knows she is, but she’d rather he didn’t figure it out, too. 

“Been there,” he says sympathetically, and despite herself, she feels her muscles lose their tension just slightly. “Anything else?” 

“Tripped on the stairs on the porch,” she admits. She bundles the quilt up enough to free her legs and then extends the one that hurts, wincing at the sting. Definitely bleeding, to judge from the way it feels like she’s pulling newly-clotted blood away when the material shifts. 

Joel reaches out slowly and wraps his hand gently around her ankle. 

“May I?” He asks. 

The lack of expectation is what gives her the final push to stop hiding like a fucking child. She’s pretty sure Tommy’s already left, and this is Joel. He’s seen her more pathetic than hiding under his bed. She extends a hand that he takes in his own, and she leans into the brief fun of getting slid across the floor, the glide made easier by the quilt. She sees a flicker of worry cross Joel’s face when he gets a look at her, and she sits up, back to his bed, moving to touch her face before he stops her with a gentle hand around hers. 

“Let’s get you cleaned up a little first,” he says, standing with a stifled groan and then offering his hands to her. 

She takes them and lets him pull her to her feet easily. 

*

She’s absolutely not showing her face outside after this–maybe not ever again–so when Joel pushes her gently towards her room while he grabs their first aid kit, she changes into sleep shorts, wincing as she peels off her jeans. She hisses through her teeth when she gets a look at the damage, a long gash next to her shin, and she makes a frustrated noise when she sees the holes left in her jeans where whatever scratched her got through the denim, too. She tosses them across her room right as a knock comes at the door. 

“Come in,” she calls, bouncing down onto her bed and bracing herself as Joel enters. Here it comes. Here comes the “what the fuck is wrong with you” talk that she won’t have an answer for. She grits her teeth as he crouches in front of her, setting the first aid kit down at his side. Fuck, she can’t even figure out how to be a normal fucking person for one day-

She flinches slightly when he reaches out, a reaction she can’t help, and he stops at once. 

“You alright?” He asks, and she only then registers the cloth in his hand. 

“I-yeah,” she says. It’s not true, but she doesn’t want to get into it right now. 

“Alright,” he says softly, taking her chin between thumb and forefinger gently and turning her head, dabbing carefully at her face. “Stop me if it hurts, alright?” 

With the limited motion she has, she nods, and then closes her eyes, focusing on the sensation of Joel carefully wiping away the evidence of today’s fuck-up. 

*

When she’s been de-grossed and her leg wrapped, Joel sits back on his heels, and she has to look away, his face is so earnest and open. Jesus, she doesn’t understand him. How the fuck is it possible for someone to look at her like that? Like she’s the most important thing in their whole world? 

Still, she can’t help but take a quick look again. 

“You wanna talk about it?” He asks, voice soft, as he rests an arm across her knees. 

Everything about him welcomes confession, encourages her to lay bare the things that weigh on her. It’s the polar opposite to how he was when she first met him, when everything about him read as “I only know your name against my will.” 

She wonders if she looks different now, too. Part of her wants to ask. 

The other part of her fears that the answer is yes, that she’s a worse version of who she used to be. She thinks of herself as a different person sometimes, the Ellie who had set out with optimism, the Ellie who had thought the world was full of wonders who couldn’t wait to see it all. 

The Elie she is now knows that the world is full of wonders, but it’s also full of things that rip a person apart to their bones. 

“No,” she says, shaking her head. She looks down, focusing on his arm instead of his eyes. He moves to squeeze her leg gently, and she watches the movement of muscle beneath skin. So much strength in those arms. 

Arms that still make her feel safer than anything else in the goddamn world. 

She slips forward until she can hug him, and he lets her, sitting back and taking her with him. She kneels on one knee, her injured leg extended to the side slightly so she won’t put weight on it. One of Joel’s arms goes around her waist, and the other presses along her upper back, his hand cupping the back of her head, pressing it to his shoulder. It makes her feel so fucking tiny, being held like this. 

And, illogically, it makes her feel safe. 

“You can tell me anything, baby girl,” Joel says softly, but it’s a reminder, not a reprimand. 

It’s a reminder she’s gotten before. One that she has yet to really take advantage of. 

She still hasn’t told Joel everything about Silver Lake. She told him a version in which hunters traded for penicillin and then tried to fuck her over to rob them. It’s a safer story. Anyone could get fucked over by a supposed ally getting greedy. He can understand that. It’s happened to him before. She doesn’t know if he believes her or not. 

She just likes to think he does. 

The truth feels too shameful. How fucking stupid, to think that she could deal with people the same way Joel does, lay out her demands and expect them to listen. She’s 14 and small for her age. She should fucking know better. She should have had them stay facing away, should have made sure they couldn’t see her, should have done a better job of hiding her tracks, should have hauled Joel up and moved them after she got the medicine, should have done any one of a dozen things that would have kept them safe. 

And the other element of it, what David wanted from her, fills her with a shame she doesn’t even have words for. She doesn’t like the idea, Joel knowing that other men want her like that. She doesn’t fear it from Joel–even immediately after Silver Lake, she’d known he was safe–but it makes her feel disgusting, dirty, the knowledge of what David wanted. 

The knowledge of how close he came to getting it. 

“I…” She starts. She could do it. She looks pathetic right now. If there’s any time to confess, it’s this moment. 

But it’s also not something she can take back. ‘Hey Joel, I finally learned firsthand what you were talking about with people wanting way worse, and now I don’t know how to act like a fucking person, and I don’t know how much of it is Silver Lake and how much of it is just that I fucking suck now.’

There’s no return from that kind of thing, no take backs. She’s done a pretty good job of faking it–well, with today as a massive fucking exception–so it’s possible to pretend that he hasn’t noticed. They can just bury this, can treat it like one of the other things they don’t talk about, one of the things still too painful to confront even with each other, like the way she knows how heavy a dead body is from helping to move Henry. 

No. She can fake it. She can do this. Today was a rough patch, but she can stay the course. 

“I don’t wanna talk,” she says quietly, tucking her face tighter against him. 

She feels him badly suppress a sigh, but he doesn’t push her away. 

“Alright kiddo,” he says, rubbing a hand along her back. “That’s okay.” 

*

They settle on the couch after that, watching a movie marathon while she ices her knee, which is quickly purpling to a degree that she finds pretty interesting if she’s being honest. The massive scape along her leg is less awesome, but she’s certainly had worse. Her nose is thankfully not broken, but she certainly doesn’t turn down the second ice pack Joel hands her for the bruising. 

Tommy drops off food for them, and she–like the coward she is–remains hiding in the living room while Joel answers the door, curling up around a blanket so she can pretend to be asleep if she needs to. She shuts her eyes when a shadow moves close to the door to the living room, but she knows at the first touch of the hand to her hair exactly who it is. 

“C’mon, kiddo,” he says quietly, brushing her hair back. “Get something in your stomach, and then you can conk out for the night if you want.” 

Sounds like a plan to her. 

*

She doesn’t ask before she goes to his room that night, curling up on what’s become her side of the bed and waiting patiently. She can hear the shower running, so she gets comfortable while she waits, paging through a book on Cleopatra. Tommy’d mentioned in passing once that Sarah had thought ancient Egypt was cool, so while it’s never been something she’s been excited about, she’d been trying to learn a little more about it. She doesn’t fully know why she’s doing this, but it feels right, somehow, like she’s trying to get to know Sarah a little more. 

Joel would like that, she thinks, her and Sarah getting to know each other, learning about each other’s interests. Sarah could have told her all about Egypt, and she could have told her all about space. 

It’s impossible, obviously, and she’d never actually say it out loud for fear of hurting him, but she’d said something about the pyramids the other day, and he’d gotten a strange, surprised look on his face. She’d had an internal meltdown, afraid he was about to tell her that he didn’t want to hear anymore, but his expression had softened then, and he’d sat back, body language easy and relaxed. He’d listened to a whole explanation about how they made false chambers to hide bodies and treasure–which is sick as hell, and something she’s glad she learned, thanks Sarah–and at the end, he’d cupped the back of her head and kissed her temple, lingering a heartbeat longer than normal. It had been a positive experiment, so she’d decided to do it more. As it turns out, the girl who would have been kind of like a big sister had good taste. The Egyptians knew some cool shit. She’s just finished skimming a section about ole Cleo meeting Marc Antony on a golden barge with silver oars when Joel comes out of the bathroom in pajamas. 

It says a lot about their dynamic that he doesn’t even look surprised to see her. 

She shuffles over a bit to make room and then hands her book over without a word. He glances at the title before he obligingly puts it on his bedside table, and she feels a little flicker of affection at the way his face softens when he registers what she’s been reading. He settles on the mattress and then reaches out to shut the light off. She lets him get comfortable before she presses close, resting her head on his shoulder. At once, his arm comes up to thread through her hair, twirling it around his fingers in a way that makes her feel like her bones are made of jelly. She closes her eyes to enjoy, giving herself a moment to enjoy it before she does something she doesn’t really want to: figure out what the fuck she’s supposed to do after causing a scene in school today. 

“Is the teacher mad?” She asks after a while. She doesn’t even know his name. She’d been too focused on his existence at all to catch it. She imagines Joel will still know who she means. 

“Nah,” he says, moving his other hand to hold hers where it had been resting in a fist on his chest. He squeezes it gently. “Maria talked to him and made it right. One of the kids told Tommy he touched you and that’s when you reacted?” 

Reacted is a pretty sanitized term for what she did, and she appreciates it. 

“I-yeah,” she says, shifting slightly, uncomfortable with where this conversation should go. It’d be pretty hard to miss that she’s iffy with touch outside of him and Tommy and sometimes Maria, but it’s not something he’s ever brought up before. 

“He shoulda kept his hands to himself,” Joel says, and she shuts her eyes against the relief of hearing the thread of heat in his voice. She tucks her cheek a little tighter against him. 

“He probably didn’t mean anything by it,” she makes herself say. It’s true, after all. The other kids seemed comfortable with him, and no one else seemed bothered. 

“Still shoulda been smart enough to see you weren’t comfortable with it.”

“Might not have noticed,” she points out. She’d like to think that someone judged worthy of joining Jackson wouldn’t be someone dangerous. 

She doesn’t believe it, not really, but she’d like to. 

“You’re not one to just throw a punch for no reason,” Joel says loyally. “He had plenty of warning.” 

He sounds so sure about it, so confident that she’s not at all in the wrong, that she pulls her hand loose gently just to lay it across him in a hug. Fuck, she’s so fucking lucky. 

“I’m gonna have to say sorry, huh?” She asks after a moment. She doesn’t really want to, doesn’t want to address it at all. “I doubt they’ll want me at school otherwise.” 

“About that,” he says, and she tries not to feel anxious at the way she can tell he’s been thinking about whatever he’s about to say for a while. “What would you think about taking a break for a bit?” She shifts back slightly. “We’re still settling in, and you’re smarter than any of the other kids anyway. This’ll give ‘em the chance to catch up with you.” 

She turns her face in against him, trying to will herself not to cry. He doesn’t know if she’s stupid or smart. 

But still, she can hear the conviction in his voice. After so many years of being reminded of exactly where she fails compared to other kids her age, having someone who seems to genuinely believe that she’s the best is something she’s still figuring out how to navigate. 

“The other kids all go to school,” she says quietly, feeling like she needs to point it out. She’d been anxious about starting class at all, but she’d figured it was something necessary to fit in. 

“Well, the other kids aren’t the savior of humanity,” Joel teases, tugging a strand of her hair playfully. “Consider it an immunity privilege.” 

“I think not eating raw carrots should also be an immunity privilege.” 

“Denied.”

Well, it was worth a shot. 

*

Sure enough, she doesn’t attend class after that. The council meeting building is right next to the school so Maria brings her her assignments, but she completes them on her own and sends them back. Her teachers will write notes–and some of them are so kind, she’s embarrassed–but she doesn’t actually talk to them. There’s no word on when she’ll be going back, but no one tries to push her on it. 

The knowledge that she’s doing something weird, though, means she doesn’t venture out of the house at all, at least not during the day. Depending on their patrol schedules, she drags Joel and Tommy out sometimes to look at the stars in the empty lot down the street, and she’ll wave to any neighbors on their porches, though she doesn’t stop to talk and she does her best to drag the adults with her so they won’t either. 

This is far easier with Joel than with Tommy, and they more than once abandon him to chit chat while they beat a hasty retreat. 

(And if she gets the sense that Joel’s using her as an excuse to avoid talking to Cara Baker three doors down who she’s pretty sure has a crush on him, well, she’s too relieved at not facing the risk of sharing him with someone to mind being a scapegoat.) 

Playing the Boo Radley of Jackson–a reference she knows through an English assignment she turned in on week 2–does get boring after a while, it has to be said. Tommy and Joel do duty bringing her books back from the library, and she has a whole little collection of drawing and painting supplies that’s growing bit by bit, but she’s not someone used to staying indoors for so long. 

It also makes her feel like she’s not remotely pulling her weight in their little unit. Desperate to feel like she’s at least contributing something, she starts vacuuming and cleaning the kitchen and bathrooms, but by the third day of her doing it when he finds her scrubbing at the grout with an old toothbrush for the second day in a row, Joel takes her aside to make her stop. 

“I appreciate the effort,” he says, handing her a plate at supper, the food brought back for her benefit so she can continue hiding like the social failure she is. “But I’m starting to feel like we live in a lab.” He pokes her head gently. “I’m also worried about what the fumes are doing to your brain.” 

She swipes at him half-heartedly, but that means one less thing she can tackle during the day to take up time and feel less like the burden she knows she is. 

*

It’s when Joel hands over her jeans–repaired by the seamstress five doors down so well she can barely see the smaller holes, the largest one covered by some pretty sick t-rex print material with the head peeking through the denim–neatly folded on top of some clothes brought back from the laundromat, that a new way to at least do something right occurs to her. 

She can take over laundry. 

She might not be able to do school like a normal person, but she can wash clothes, can take one thing off of Joel’s plate when he’s always taking so much on for her. From walking by, she knows it gets pretty empty around mid-day, and if a machine is designed to wash clothes, then it must be pretty self-explanatory. FEDRA had never let them use the washers at school, clothing instead being collected and distributed by size under communal ownership, so she’s never actually seen one, but if the people from Before were willing to make a whole building full of them for public use, then they can’t be that complicated. She can be like one of the other teenagers carrying their family’s laundry there. 

She might not be able to do school just yet, but surely she can handle that much at least. 

*

She’s nearly giddy the next few days as she waits for their laundry baskets to fill. This feels right, like the first step of proving that she can do this. School was a set-back, but if she can do something that other teenagers do, then maybe Joel will be willing to forget the fumble. She can even play it casually, can go and get the job done, and then Joel can return to a house that she’s been stealth cleaning to a neatly folded pile of perfectly clean clothes on his bed. 

Finally, the day comes. 

“What’s got you so excited?” Joel asks, amused, as he kisses her head in goodbye before he goes on patrol. 

“Nothing,” she says as innocently as she can. 

“Oh yeah?” He asks, raising his eyebrows as he sits to lace his boots up. “‘Cause you seem happier than a hog in a wallow.” 

“I have no fucking clue what that means,” she tells him judgementally. “And if you keep interrogating me, you’re gonna be late, and then what kind of example will you be setting for me, an innocent, impressionable teenager?” 

He snorts, and she gasps in mock offense. 

“How dare you,” she accuses. “I’m a fucking lamb.” 

“Yeah, okay,” he says, kissing her head once more for luck before he goes. 

The door has barely shut before she’s upstairs in pursuit of their laundry baskets. 

*

It takes longer than she planned on to actually do the laundry. She doesn’t want any witnesses while she works out what the fuck she has to do to make the machines work. She’s been keeping a low profile so people will hopefully forget The School Incident, but she doesn’t think not immediately knowing how to work a washing machine will help her cause. With this in mind, it’s nearly lunchtime until her casual stroll for reconnaissance shows an empty laundromat. 

Fucking finally. 

She combines all of their clothes together in the same laundry basket. Joel usually keeps their stuff separate, but speed is the name of the game, so she’s thinking a one load system will be essential. Her luck holds as she makes it to the building, and she only barely resists the urge to lock it. That probably wouldn’t buy her many subtlety points if someone found themselves locked out, and besides, she just needs some alone time long enough to figure out how to turn the machine on. 

Easy peasy. 

*

It turns out washing machines are neither easy nor peasy. 

Washing machines are fucking bastards. 

“Oh, c’mon, you fucker,” she says, hitting the side of it. “Don’t fucking do this to me.” She casts a nervous glance over her shoulder, but there’s still no one there. 

It’s as much a relief as it is a complication, meaning that she has no one to copy. 

She’d thought she had the mechanics down. From casual observation while walking past, she knows that the basic process is putting the clothes in, putting soap somewhere, pushing one of the buttons, and then watching with victory as it does its thing. 

Simple. 

In theory. 

She stomps her foot with frustration as she takes a step back, crossing her arms across her chest. She eyes the fucker in front of her, trying to work out what its problem is. With all of this time, the labels on the machines have been worn away, so studying it isn’t really helping, and her intuition is proving lackluster. She got up to step 2 with no real problem. She doesn’t know how much soap is supposed to go in or exactly what slot it goes in, but she kind of got a hint with the little scooper next to the soap. Jackson makes its own detergent and there’s a little scoop thing in a basket next to the big jar of it, so logic would dictate that one scoop=one load of clothes. Her and Joel’s clothes get pretty dirty, though, so she goes with two and a half scoops to be thorough, rounding up to three for good luck. She also doesn’t know where the soap is supposed to go, so she plays it safe and fills each little compartment she sees, figuring that a machine that can wash clothes on its own can work out how much soap it needs to use. 

“Oh fuck yeah!” She says, lifting a fist in victory when the machine finally starts making beeping noises and water starts pouring in. She has no fucking idea which button she pushed to make it start, but that’s a problem for future Ellie when she does this again. 

Current Ellie gets to kick back in a chair with her book like the goddamn laundry champion she is. 

*

She gets approximately ten minutes of feeling very victorious and smart. 

…and then she looks up and sees a mountain of bubbles pouring out of the machine. 

“Oh God,” she says, freezing for a moment, feet still up on the dryer she’s next to. She watches the froth bubble up to cover the floor before it starts creeping up to consume the machines on either side. “Oh God, oh shit.” 

She tosses her book to the side and scrambles up, almost busting her ass when she gets close, only barely saving herself against another machine, banging her wrist against it in the process. For a moment, she curls forward around it, growling and hissing and cursing. She hit right on the fucking bone and goddamn does it hurt. 

She’s refocused rather abruptly when the machine starts making slamming noises and walking itself out from the wall. 

“Please stop!” She says, hands out wide like when she’s helping to corral the sheep. “Oh God-please-just stop! How do I turn you off!” 

The machine doesn’t respond other than to walk forward with more purpose, and she squeals through her nose, retreating for a moment before she gets her shit together. 

“Okay,” she coaches herself. 

She still doesn’t move. 

“Okay,” she repeats. “C’mon Ellie. You got this. You’ve fought infected. You can beat a stupid machine. No problem.” 

*

She’s getting her ass kicked by a washing machine. 

Pretty fucking completely. 

How in the fuck did people Before do this? How do people in Jackson do this now? 

Her face feels flushed and her eyes are stinging and she’s about to cry in frustration but she’s trying not to but she’s failing and the machine won’t fucking stop doing bullshit. 

She swipes an arm across her eyes when she feels the first tear fall and then immediately curses when they start burning like a motherfucker. 

Right. She has laundry detergent all over her from trying to shove the bubbles back into the machine. 

She blindly gropes her way over to the sink in the corner and splashes water over her face until the burning stops, and then she shakes her head like a dog so she won’t have to touch her eyes again. 

When she looks back to the washing machine, the bubbles appear to have doubled in size. 

She wonders distantly if she can just drown herself in them and call it a day. 

*

Through sheer panic, she finally manages to make Satan’s playtoy turn off by yanking the cord out of the wall, made easier by the way the machine was straining against it like one of the patrol dogs against a leash. 

The sudden silence after so much noise is a relief, and she has about two seconds of enjoying it. 

And then she gets to take in the full scope of her latest fuck-up. 

Her throat gets tight as she surveys the damage, the entire floor flooded with soap and water, making it slick as ice, and the machine out of line with the others, also covered in bubbles. She heaves against it, trying to at least get it kind of where it should be, but it’s heavy as fuck, especially full of water, and she has no traction on the floor at all. 

When she slips and falls, going down hard on her still-bruised knee, her vision blacks out for a moment, and she comes back to awareness covered in soap. She flicks it off of her arms, but she can feel it in her hair, dripping down her back, soaking into her jeans. She surveys her surroundings, a scape of white like a snowstorm has come through. It’s a mess, a complete fucking mess. 

And it’s all her fucking fault. 

*

Her breath comes out in choked little would-be sobs as she tries to corral her mess with towels and a broom. The bubbles are slowly popping, but there’s still far too many for her supplies, and she’s trying very hard to fight down the panic of what’s going to happen when someone walks in and sees that she’s flooded the laundromat and probably broken one of the machines, something she’s sure has to be a crime. There’s no factories building new machines. These are all they’ve got. 

And like the fucking idiot she is, she’s probably just broken one of them. 

The thought makes her bite her lip hard as she curls up, a hand pressing to her stomach where she can feel shame making a home for itself. Her breath comes in sharp little pants, and she tries desperately to keep it together. Crying won’t fix anything. 

But she’s also not sure she can stop it from happening. 

God, she’s so fucking stupid. She can’t figure out eggs or how to be a normal goddamn person. How the fuck did she imagine that she’d be able to work out a machine from Before? It was pure arrogance to think she could manage. Joel thinks she’s so smart, but surveying the full scope of what she’s accomplished in failing at something that everyone else knows how to do, she knows he’s going to figure out how wrong he was soon. 

This isn’t the sort of thing she can keep from him, after all. 

A cold realization settles over her that this is going to involve punishment that might not even come just from him. Laundry machines are communal property. Everyone needs them. 

And she just fucked one of them up. 

Fuck. 

She doesn’t even know what punishments Jackson doles out. From observation, she gathers there’s no Hole and teachers don’t use belts or electrostaffs, and it occurs to her that maybe she doesn’t know because every other kid is normal enough that it’s not necessary. 

In a town full of people, after all, she’s the one goddamn idiot who broke a washing machine. 

This has to be a banish-able offense, at the very least. She can’t be trusted with Jackson’s things after this. Who knows what else she could break? She can’t even argue that she won’t do it again. She doesn’t know how everything works, after all, and she’s already proven she can’t be normal in school. 

She doubts she’s going to be allowed to get a third strike against her record. 

“Ellie?” 

She shuts her eyes tight, hand going white-knuckle tight around the broom she’s still holding. 

Of fucking course Joel would be the one to find her, of course the one person she least wants to see her fuck up in situ would be the person who gets a first look. 

She doesn’t respond, stabbing at the bubbles in front of her with her broom. 

They blow away merrily, like they’re mocking her. 

She gives them another stab, teeth clenched. 

She jumps when a hand touches her lower back, gentle as it is, and at once, the hand is gone. She squeezes her eyes harder for the briefest moment and takes a breath before she faces the music and turns. 

She tilts her chin up as best she can, looking Joel right in the eye. 

“I fucked up.” 

Her voice comes out wavery, and she squeezes her broom harder, so fucking ashamed. God, she can’t even just fuck up. She also has to be a crybaby about it. If she were back in FEDRA, she’d be getting extra punishment just for that. 

She flinches again when Joel reaches out, expecting a slap she knows she deserves, but Joel just freezes for a moment before he resumes moving, slower this time. Gently, he pushes foam away from her face, flicking it off and returning to get more. 

The whole time, she stands still as a statue. 

“You wanna tell me what happened?” He asks when she’s no longer at risk of detergent in her eyes. She sees his gaze flicker to the hand she has on her broom briefly, and then he reaches for it, carefully loosening her fingers. 

“I fucked up,” she says again, voice tight. The gentle touching has just made her worse. She doesn’t deserve it. Joel could slip his belt off right now and beat her with it, and he’d be in the right. It’s what she deserves. 

How stupid, to think she could ever be worthy of being his kid. 

Her vision goes blurry, and she looks down at once. She doesn’t want to cry at all, and she certainly won’t subject him to watching her do it. She’s had enough instructors tell her they’d give her something to cry about to know that adults don’t care for tears after a mistake. They don’t fix anything. 

And this isn’t the sort of thing she can fix anyway. 

Against her will, a wheezing sort of breath escapes her when Joel tugs her into a hug, and without even realizing she’s going to do it, she wraps her arms around him in return, clenching the fabric of his shirt in her fists. The embrace shatters whatever little bit of control she still had over herself, and she’s helpless against the tears that start. 

“I’m sorry,” she chokes out. “I’m sorry I fucked up.” 

It’s woefully insufficient for what she’s done, but it’s all she’s got. 

“Sh, kiddo,” he says, and she feels the aborted gesture as he goes to kiss her head and then realizes she’s still covered in soap. “You’re alright.” 

She’s not. 

She’s not, and she won’t be, and she’s so fucked. 

But for the moment, she just lets him lie to her. 

*

She’s snotty and sniffly by the time she finally gets some control over herself, and her inhale as she steps away is absolutely disgusting. She goes to wipe her face on her shoulder and realizes it’s still covered in soap and then does the same thing with the hem of her shirt. Embarrassed and frozen with lack of options, she doesn’t even move at first as Joel unties the bandana still around his neck from patrol and wipes at her face, tilting it up with his fingers under her chin. She resolutely looks down at first, but finally she can’t help herself. She has to see how bad it is, has to get a read on exactly what’s coming. 

When she looks up, though, she doesn’t see disappointment or anger or disgust. 

She just sees Joel looking at her with the same softness as ever, focusing on wiping her face off after this, her crowning achievement of fuckery. When he starts wiping at her nose, her embarrassment overcomes her freezing, and she takes it from him, doing it herself. 

She’d like to think she can avoid being that pathetic, at least. 

Looking around at her kingdom of bubbles, though, she thinks that ship might have already sailed. 

She feels empty after crying so hard the way she always does, but she has none of the lightness she usually would, no real sense of relief and release. She’s just tired and ashamed and pathetic.

And still so very deeply fucked. 

“You wanna tell me what’s going on now?” He asks, voice so patient that she almost feels like crying again. 

“I…” She shifts her weight and then lets out a muffled squeal when it makes her foot shoot out from under her. Joel reaches to catch her at once, and the momentum of it takes them both down. 

Flat on her back, head cushioned by Joel’s bicep as he groans, she wonders again if she can just drown herself in bubbles and call it a day. 

*

Holding onto each other and stepping carefully, she and Joel manage to get clear of her bubble monstrosity, though they slip on the way, nearly going down again. 

Each near-miss just makes her duck her head further. 

Jesus, she thinks, surveying the damage that looks even worse from the outside of the epicenter, what’s a girl gotta do to get the earth to swallow her whole? 

“Hey, I was wondering where y’all-well damn, what happened here?” 

Tommy moves from just poking his head in to actually entering, hands going to his hips as he surveys her fucking bloodbath of a laundry attempt. He whistles, low. 

Death, she thinks, death would be pretty fucking great right now. 

“Think the machine must’ve been acting up,” Joel says, and she looks to him so sharply she feels a twinge in her neck. 

What?

Joel, though, is looking at Tommy, and they have a silent conversation she has no idea how to read. 

“Juliet down the road did say one of the machines seemed to be acting up when she was in here yesterday,” Tommy says.

Oh, she realizes with a flush of shame. They’re babying her, making up a lie like she’s dumb enough to not realize what she did. 

“It was me,” she says, looking down and staring resolutely at her sneakers, scuffing at the floor with her toes and wincing at the squeak of soapy rubber against tile. 

She jumps slightly at a hand touching the top of her head, but when she looks up, Tommy is already moving on, making his way carefully towards the machine, cursing when he slips slightly. She looks to Joel for an answer of what the fuck is going on. Tommy’s been here even longer, he’s the one who advocated for them to stay, the one who arranged their house and everything. What she’s done reflects badly on Joel, but it looks even worse for Tommy. There’s no goddamn chance he isn’t pissed that she’s put him in this position. 

Joel, though, doesn’t answer her silent question. He just cups the back of her neck gently and squeezes. 

“You wanna go home?” He asks softly, and she frowns, incredulous. 

“I just fucked up the whole laundromat,” she says flatly, looking over her shoulder briefly when Tommy shouts, going down with a curse into a pile of bubbles. 

“You alright over there?” Joel calls, sounding amused. 

A middle finger emerges from the froth in response, and Joel snorts before he looks back to her. 

“It happens, kiddo. We can talk about it later. Now, you good to stay and help de-bubble, or you wanna go home?” He must read that she’s searching for the trick in the words because he squeezes her neck again gently. “Seems like you had a rough time of it,” he says, soft enough that the words won’t carry. “If you wanna go home, that’s fine. I’ll be back later.” 

“But I’m the one who fucked up,” she says, eyes stinging. Jesus, is this some reverse psychology bullshit? Make her point out what she’s done so she understands whatever punishment he decides on? 

“You do it on purpose?” Joel asks evenly, and at once, she shakes her head. 

“No!” She says immediately, desperate for him to understand that she’s not trying to be a troublemaker. She would never do something like this on purpose. Fuck, doing it on accident and disappointing him already makes her feel like she’s going to puke. “I was trying to help, and I just…” She feels her face heat. For it to have gone this catastrophically terrible, she had to have fucked up several steps along the way, and she doesn’t even know what to lie about to try and minimize it. 

“Then it’s all good,” Joel says, dropping his hand from the back of her neck. “Shit happens sometimes, kiddo.” 

She stares at his back as he ventures back into the fray. 

Shit happens. 

Like it’s just that fucking simple. 

Feeling like she’s walking into a trap, she trails him back into the bubbles. 

*

Cleanup goes well until a brief interlude of Tommy getting Joel with a palmful of bubbles to the face that has Joel wrestling him down. Tommy just laughs, struggling to get back up. He and Joel are fairly evenly matched, but Joel got the upperhand early, and he manages to pin his brother, holding his wrists behind his back with one hand and using the other to shove bubbles in his face. 

From her place watching from the sidelines, Ellie kind of feels like she might be having a stroke or something. Is that a symptom? Imagining adults not only not being fucking pissed about a screw-up but enjoying themselves in the process of helping clean something up that they didn’t cause? That seems pretty specific, but after her experience in the hospital, she thinks nothing’s really off the table. 

“Little shit,” Joel grumbles, but he’s smiling as he lets Tommy go, using the slide of the detergent to shove him across the floor like a hockey puck. 

“It was an accident!” Tommy says, grinning, as he catches himself against the wall and gets back to his feet. 

“Like hell it was,” Joel says back, throwing a cloud of foam that doesn’t get anywhere close to actually hitting Tommy. 

“Ellie,” Tommy calls, and she jumps at being addressed. “You saw it. Tell your old man he’s just getting paranoid in his old age.” 

She looks between them, trying to decide what the course of action should be here. Her loyalty is to Joel above everyone, but at the site of this kind of fuck-up, would it be better for both of them if she sided with Tommy to stay in his good graces? Before she can decide, Joel snorts and moves to put an arm around her. 

“Don’t tell my kid to perjure herself,” he says, shaking her slightly. 

“Ain’t perjuring if it’s the truth,” Tommy says, taking a jab at Joel’s feet with his broom once he’s in range again. “Ain’t that right, Ellie?” 

She would really like to be excluded from whatever this is until she can work out what the fuck is going on. She’s saved from responding by Joel trying to trip Tommy with his broom, and the scuffling that causes lets the moment pass without a response from her. 

As a trio, they scrape all of the soap together where Tommy says there’s a drain in the floor, and then she and Joel wait while he goes to get a hose. The silence between them is awkward, but she doesn’t know how to break it. 

“Hey,” Joel calls, and she looks up only reluctantly from where she’d been trying to stare the bubbles into disappearing, “you okay?” 

“I-yeah,” she says, nodding her head with too much vigor. “I’m okay.” 

Joel nods in response, once. 

“You’re not in trouble,” he tells her, “so you can stop looking like you’re waiting on an execution.” 

She presses her lips together for a moment before she speaks. 

“How?” She asks. 

“How what, kiddo?” Joel asks, moving to shove back a bit of escaping foam moving in the air current from the overhead fans. 

“How the fuck am I not in trouble?” She demands. Her nerve is breaking under this waiting game. She just wants to get it over with. “This would have had me in front of a discipline panel back in FEDRA. I’d be lucky if it didn’t escalate to a cull panel.” This is–maybe–a bit of an exaggeration, but she would definitely have been beaten within an inch of her goddamn life for this barely a year ago. 

Now it’s just her and Joel and Tommy and them fucking laughing and joking while cleaning up the scene of the crime. 

She doesn’t know how to make both of those facts exist together. 

Joel’s face goes dark for a moment before it softens, and he steps closer, moving slowly as he cups her face between his hands. It’s not the first time he’s done this, but it’s still a little overwhelming, such strong hands holding her head. He could snap her neck in a second if he felt like it. 

And yet he’s nothing but gentle. 

“This ain’t FEDRA, baby,” he says seriously. “You’re allowed to make mistakes. That’s part of growing up.” 

She bites the inside of her lip for a second.

“I think the machine is broken,” she says, almost a whisper. Against the bubble-pocalypse, she doesn’t know if they’ve thought about it yet, but the noises it made sure fucking sounded broken. “I did it.” 

“We can fix it,” he says with a shrug.

“And if we can’t?” She demands. “There’s no fucking-fucking washing machine store now. That’s communal property, and I fucking broke it.” 

“I’m sure it’s fine,” he says, but reading her protest before she says it, he continues, “and if it isn’t, we’ll make it fine. Rosa three streets over used to do appliance repair. I’m sure she can fix it up, and if it needs new parts or something, I’ll just keep an eye out on patrol.” 

“That’s not fair to you,” she says, eyes burning. Jesus, she tries to help, and instead she causes trouble and gives him more shit to do. There’s fucking nothing she can do right. An instructor had told her once that it was good her test scores were so high because she’s almost more trouble than she’s worth, and now Joel can see that for himself. “You shouldn’t have to do extra shit because I fucked up.” 

He releases her face, but only to pull her into a hug. Her cheek squelches a bit against how soaked his shirt is, but his arms around her are so warm and familiar that she doesn’t recoil. 

“You’re my kid,” he says quietly, rubbing a hand between her shoulder blades. “Something happens, we take care of it together, alright? You come and get me, and we’ll figure it out. Almost nothing’s un-fixable, and even if it is, you still tell me. I’ll figure something out.” 

She shuts her eyes, squeezing her arms around him just a little tighter. 

“You shouldn’t have to do that,” she says. “You already do so much for me. It’s not fair for me to create more shit for you to solve. Other kids don’t do that.” 

He snorts, and she pulls back, frowning. His face is amused, and he pinches her cheek gently, making her scowl on reflex and barely resist the urge to bat at him. 

“Trust me,” he says, pushing back a soaked piece of hair from her face, “other kids have done way worse than this.” His face softens. “You’re not a burden, Ellie, not to me. Not ever. There is nothing in this entire goddamn world more important to me than you.” 

As her eyes water, she thinks distantly that he’s not playing fair. How the fuck is she supposed to not cry when he says shit like that like it’s gospel truth? Like it’s just obvious and not something she’d only fucking dreamed about growing up? 

“There’s nothing you could do or say that could change that, baby girl,” he says. “Trust me on that. I don’t ever want you to be afraid of telling me something. We’re a team, kiddo. Always.” 

She looks down and hugs him again, partially out of affection and partially out of a desire to hide her face. 

“I love you,” she says, a little hoarsely, the first time she can ever remember saying it. 

Joel goes stiff for just a second, and for a moment, she’s afraid she’s fucked it all up, no matter what he says. But then, a hand comes up to cup the back of her head, and she feels so small and precious and protected that she squeezes her eyes shut, trying to memorize it so she can hold the memory close on bad days.  

“I love you, too,” he says. “More than you could ever know, kiddo.” 

*

The talk means that when Tommy gets back, she’s a little more willing to match Tommy’s energy, and in a playful burst of mischief, she holds him hostage with the hose, finger on the trigger. 

“Don’t you even think about it, little lady,” Tommy says sternly, though she can see how hard he’s trying to not smile. “I mean it. I’ll make you go pick a switch.” 

“Nah,” she says, grinning. “I don’t think you will.” 

Tommy wrestles her down to get the hose back, but she gives him a good fight for it. From his place scraping out the bubbles they’d forgotten behind the machine, Joel just shakes his head and refuses to intervene. 

“Joel!” She calls, breathless with laughing as she tries to pry Tommy’s fingers off of the hose. “Save me!” 

“Oh I think not,” he says, looking at them and raising an eyebrow. “You picked this fight, little lady. Finish it on your own.” 

She squeals when Tommy manages to get the nozzle of the hose down the collar of her shirt, sending cold water down her back.

“You shady ass motherfucker!” She shouts, resorting to hair pulling to get loose. 

Still, she can’t quite stop smiling. 

*

The bubble army dies a quick death under the hose, all of it going down the drain. The floor is still slick as fuck, so all three of them grab some mops and get to work, but in shorter time than she’d feared, the mess is all cleaned up. 

“Well damn,” Tommy says, putting an arm around her shoulders with an ease that makes something warm flare to life in her chest, “if that don’t look pretty. Guess the place needed a good washing.” 

“That was my vision all along,” she says solemnly, biting the inside of her cheek to keep from grinning when Tommy snorts. 

“Yeah, okay,” he says, using the arm around her shoulders to flip her soaking ponytail over her face before he steps away, fending off a fake punch to his stomach. “Alright,” he says, holding her away by her head as she takes joking swings at him, “now let’s see if we can get this washing machine back in order.” 

They haul the soaking laundry out and carry it over to the sink, her staggering a bit under the weight. Goddamn, wet clothes are heavy. 

“Really think we should probably relabel these,” Tommy says, squinting at the buttons like that’ll make the faded writing easier to see. 

“Might be a manual somewhere,” Joel suggests, which kicks off a hunt through the building’s office. 

She’s the one who finds it in the end, tucked away in the bottom of a filing cabinet she’d needed Joel to help her pry open, sending both of them sprawling on their asses when it gave way all at once. With a look to each other, they agreed at once to never mention it to Tommy, and Joel had left her to search through the papers while he looked through the desk. When she finds it, she lets out a cheer of victory, and Joel gives her a proud smile. 

“Good finding, kiddo,” he says, taking it from her. 

She practically glows from the praise. 

Using the diagram, they find a part of the dial that says “Rinse,” and she watches carefully to see which button Tommy presses. She eyes the machine warily as it rumbles to life once more, but it behaves itself, and soon enough, it makes a click that apparently means it’s done. They run it on Rinse one more time for good measure, playing cards while they wait with a pack they found in the office, and she’s kicking both Miller brothers’ asses at Sergeant Major by the time it’s done. 

They haul the wet clothes back over and toss them in, and she watches like a hawk to work out how to do this in the future without flooding the entire goddamn building. She resists the urge to cringe as she watches Joel measure out half a scoop of detergent and sprinkle it in instead of putting it in any of the compartments. 

“I’d normally use a full one, but I think a half’ll do it on this one,” he says, as if to himself, though she gets the sense that it’s more for her benefit. 

She commits it at once to memory. 

She’s not quite brave enough for a rematch right now, but one day she will be. 

And on that day, she’s going to be a goddamn laundry master. 

*

Joel teases her a bit about the event afterwards, but it’s done with enough obvious affection that it doesn’t sting. He doesn’t mention what he said, though, just teases her about being a bubble goblin. 

As the days go by, however, she thinks about it. 

I don’t ever want you to be afraid of telling me something, he’d said. We’re a team, kiddo. Always.

She thinks about what a relief it was, to have Joel know, to have him help her. It had seemed like an impossible thing to fix at the time, but after she’d had everything out in the open, it had turned out to be fixable. Easily. 

She’s not naive enough to think that her memories of Silver Lake are the same as fucking up the laundry, but still. She can’t stop thinking that maybe Joel could help her start to fix that, too. 

Maybe, just maybe, it’s worth a shot. 

*

She picks her night about a week after The Bubbling, and even then she almost pussies out more than once, walking up to Joel’s door with confidence only to slink away as soon as she reaches it. She has to get her shit together soon if she’s actually going to do this. Any longer, and she’ll risk Joel already being asleep. 

She really just wants to get it over with. 

“C’mon, you fucking baby,” she tells herself under her breath, raising a fist to knock. 

She’s barely lifted her fist from the first one when she hears a “Come in.” 

Face heating, she realizes Joel could likely see her shadow under the door each time she got close, something she definitely didn’t think about when she could have avoided embarrassing herself with it. 

She makes herself refocus. No time for that now. The cat’s eating the bag or whatever the fuck Tommy said the other day. 

“Hey, kiddo,” Joel says, putting a finger in his book to serve as a bookmark and then resting it on one leg. “What’s up?” 

She climbs onto his bed before she responds, tucking her legs up under her and putting her back to the wall. 

“Can I…” She hesitates. Last chance to back out. Last chance to not have to say any of this, to go back to curling it into a tiny ball inside her, shameful and secret and private. 

But she’s so fucking tired of carrying it on her own. She doesn’t know how this is going to go. She doesn’t know what it’ll mean long term. 

But she knows she wants to try and find out. 

She swallows, pulling herself a little straighter. 

“Can I tell you about Silver Lake?” 

Her mouth goes dry after the words are out, and her instinct is to follow it up with a “Nevermind, this was stupid” and retreat. He probably doesn’t want to know this. It’s probably the reason he hasn’t asked. It’s not as if he doesn’t put up with enough of her shit on a-

He shuts his book, not bothering to mark his place, and then he tosses it onto his nightstand. When he’s done that, he pats the place beside him, an offer, not a demand, and one that she accepts, tucking herself against him. She wraps herself around his arm, resting her cheek against his bicep. With his other hand, he reaches over and rests it on her knee, squeezing gently. 

“Whenever you’re ready, baby girl,” he says softly. “Go ahead.” 

Taking a deep breath, she does.