Archive of Our Own ^beta

The first time Joel learns the lesson, he’s too young to comprehend it.

He learns it when the cracked, dried knuckles of his father’s fist break through drywall before it slams just as hard into the side of Joel’s mother’s head. He’s a child as he watches his mother crumple to the ground—soundless, lifeless, boneless. He’s a child when that same man takes an open palm and a strangling grip and that same choking fist and turns them to Joel himself.

He’s no less a child when Tommy’s born, no older or wiser when he gets left home alone with a little brother who had diapers to change and an applesauce smeared mouth to feed. Barely older when he watches the taillights pull out of the driveway and disappear around the corner, and it’s all he can do to pray the bastard doesn’t come back and spread rain at their doorway again.

The lesson’s really drilled in when his momma’s working three different jobs, and Joel’s trying to keep a splintered family from fracturing all the way apart. He’s trying to keep his kid brother out of trouble, in line. Because Joel already has a hard-earned lesson etched into the crevices of his mind, the same one his brother just somehow manages to keep missing, the one that never manages to sink in no matter how much it seems obvious, has been proven.

They live in an uncaring universe. Adjust accordingly. 

//

He’s seventeen years old when the reminder comes in full force. A baby. He’s going to be a father to a newborn baby. 

Joel was just old enough to have formed memories of a truly infant Tommy. Of the red-faced screaming baby who could simply not be soothed, the deep look of exhaustion etched across his mother’s face, the hardships that come with life when it’s that fresh and new and fragile. 

The news comes, and Joel knows what he’s going to do. He’ll do it because it is the right thing. He’ll do it because it was the values he was raised to have. 

Seven months later, he cradles a fresh, six-pound life in his arms, and Joel knows he’ll do it because it is exactly what he wants to do. Create a world for this baby, his daughter. Raise her up with hands that work hard, sun-drenched days but come home just as soft, just as gentle as they are cradling her to him here in this delivery room. 

The cries ring out, and they aren’t how Joel remembers. Not as grating, not as piercing. Right now, it’s the sweet music of his child’s life and the assurance that it was strong, vital.

Three months later, Joel cries with the baby on the floor of his daughter’s nursery. She’s crying because she’s hungry; Joel was always good at telling her cries apart in a way her mom hadn’t quite mastered. 

But there’s a lot that Joel can try and provide for her, but food isn’t one of them. And nine and a half hours ago, Sarah’s momma had left nothing more than a note and an overdrawn bank account and abandoned their daughter with no one but a high school dropout who had been mistakenly titled “Father” and had no idea what to do.

Lifting his daughter from her white crib, he’d painted it with tiny pink flowers, Joel tries to soothe the rooting infant against his chest, shushing and rocking and crying right along with her.

It isn’t right, how unjust this world can be, leaving a three month old baby without a mother. Joel had spent a few too many years with a father who wouldn't just leave, knew it was better when the sorry old bastard finally left them behind, but Sarah would never know, a blessing and a curse all on its own. His daughter would always feel this part of her missing, the gaping hole left behind by a parent skipping out. It would never be something Joel could provide her.

Not much later, Tommy comes by after the eighth grade lets out. Their momma had told Joel to get out ‘bout six months back. She’d told him that any boy who spat on all she’d done for them, spat at the feet of God Himself, could get the hell outta her house. And Joel didn’t have it in him to argue. He’d known that he had messed up, he’d acted foolishly, immaturely. But now he was going to do what was right. That was what mattered in the end, wasn’t it? Having the courage to clean up the messes you leave behind you?

Tommy was fourteen years old and had already left a strewn of disasters in his wake. He didn’t much care for cleaning ‘em either.

But he stopped by most days after school, worked on his homework and helped with the precious little blob of life that had commandeered Joel’s entire being as her own. 

Wordlessly, Joel passes Tommy the letter. There’s one more pre-pumped bottle of breastmilk in the fridge. Joel heats it with a mewling infant in the crook of his arm.

The whole time she suckles, he weeps. 

In under an hour, his momma’s at his apartment door.

She gets him signed up for government assistance, to help pay for the formula Sarah will now require. He’s already got the pediatrician on speed dial and has figured out how to swaddle her tight enough that she won’t break free and scream that heart-wrenching cry of devastation Joel couldn’t help but respond to, no matter how many parenting books told him to allow her to self-soothe. 

But his momma, the same one who wiped his tears and patched his skinned knees and iced the bruises left behind by his father, the same one who had said get out of my house, get out of my life, she sits beside him on the couch. She takes her granddaughter into her arms for the first time in three months and six days. She teaches him what to do when the hiccups won’t stop and which diaper cream will clear up the rashes the fastest. She gets Sarah to take her pacifier for the first time in her little life and draws gummy little smiles out of a child who has no idea what has been taken from her by the same person who’d given her life to begin with.

It’s a broken thing, their family, but his daughter, who’s already been let down and kicked aside, she would not yet know the truth. She would not yet learn that the universe they live in is entirely, utterly uncaring. She would not yet know because the circle that surrounds her is strong, impenetrable. 

When Sarah is a few weeks shy of her fourth birthday, with endless, unbridled energy and teenager-sized sass out of a toddler-sized mouth, he gets a call from the hospital.

Sarah’s bundled in her jammies with her favorite Minnie Mouse blanket tucked around her body as Joel stumbles through emergency room doors at two in the morning. Tommy’s there. His eyes are red.

Joel says, “What is it? What’s happened? Is she…”

But she’s not. She’s alive. 

Almost six months ago, she’d first gotten the news. Cancer. Lung. They’d given her the number of specialists to follow up with. They said here’s a script for a PET scan so they could stage it. They said to stop smoking. 

His momma had said she didn’t have the money for any of it. Not the tests, the treatments, the quitting.

So she’d just gone on living. She’d just kept living while knowing that every day it meant she got a little closer to death. 

There’s fluid in her lungs. They’ll need to drain it. It will probably come back shortly after. At one point or another, it was likely to kill her. 

Joel holds a sleeping little girl to his chest as he sits in a hard-backed chair at a hospital bedside and hears all the ways his momma is most likely to die in the coming weeks.

It’s two days, that’s all it takes.

She goes home with a prescription for morphine and a bright red DNR sticker across her chart. She’s too weak to hold Sarah. A month ago, his daughter had been giggling from the bottom of a slide where her Meemaw had caught her, scooping her up and kissing those plump, rosy cheeks. 

Now, he dresses his little girl in black despite her protests. “I want pink, Daddy!” with a stomp of her constantly growing foot. He could barely keep her in shoes. 

“Today ain’t a day for pink, baby.”

And she’s so young, hasn’t yet learned about death, about loss, about a world that is uncaring in the way with which you are treated. So she furrows her little brows and declares, “Meemaw likes pink, Daddy!”

It breaks him down, and, for the sake of not falling apart in front of his child, Joel puts her in a pastel pink dress and sparkly too-small-for-her shoes and sends her off to wait by the front door to join a funeral procession. 

//

Not even a month later, Tommy’s enlisted.

“What a bonehead move.”

And Tommy’s never been anything like their father he’s never had the misfortune of forming memories of. He doesn’t anger easily, not towards those he cares about. He’s all smiles, all good times. 

Unfortunately, Tommy is like the good-for-nothing sperm donor in that a couple of drinks in, he’s ready to throw some punches towards anyone who he thinks deserves it.

Luckily, for this conversation, they’re both stone-cold sober.

“I’m gonna make a difference, Joel.”

And Joel doesn’t have the heart to tell him that the only thing he’s gonna make is a point that’s already been driven home a few dozen times. 

“It’s an uncaring world, hermano .”

And Tommy shakes his head. He smiles. He’s so young, so stupid, so desperate. “Then don’t you think someone oughta care?”

//

It’s not something new, not a truth Joel hasn’t already learned over and over again.

But the world ends. It ends in fire and death and disease. It ends with the only parts of it that matter clinging tight to his chest as he runs as far and as fast and as hard as he can. To get them to where the end cannot reach them. 

It is an uncaring universe. Joel has long since understood that.

He cradles his daughter’s bloody, lifeless corpse. Seconds before, her cries had carried her out of this world as strong and urging as they’d welcomed her in. 

The silence comes. 

It is an uncaring universe, and Joel has nothing left to care about in its stead.

//

Twenty years, that’s how long Joel’s head is underwater for. 

Twenty years, that’s how long Joel has yearned for death to take him too. 

A million and one things could kill him every damn day.

It is an uncaring universe.

He lives through it all. 

//

There’s a teenage girl who’s somehow ended up in the care of him and Tess. She talks too much, smiles too easy, cusses like a goddamn sailor.

All he’s gotta do is get her outta the QZ.

But then the scanner turns red.

Then the museum is overrun, and she gets bit, and Joel doesn’t know if he can put a bullet in the forehead of a teenage girl, even one who annoys the shit out of him. 

But then the bite gets better.

Then Tess has angry, infected red crawling up the line of her neck, right to the beautiful mind of hers he’d always cherished but never quite managed to love. 

He drags a kicking and screaming near-stranger of a girl behind him, her shoes tractionless from years of wear and tear so that she slides behind him like Sarah sliding in her socks on the hardwood floor. Those happy little giggles don’t belong playing in his memory as the backdrop to, “Fuck you, MOTHERFUCKER! We aren’t LEAVING her!” but somehow, the two coexist at once. 

All he’s gotta do is get her to Bill and Frank’s.

Except their dead. And Tess is dead. And Sarah is dead, dead, dead. 

And this world is so unforgiving, unloving, uncaring. 

There’s a teenage girl small enough to be swallowed by a dining room chair waiting for him when he comes back inside. 

Joel looks at her, and he thinks she knows. Despite the jokes and the chatter and the hope that interlaces this mission. There’s also a hardness to her eyes and a taut line of her shoulders and a scar embedded in the skin of her forearm that lets Joel feel relatively assured. This kid knows the world is not forgiving. It’s what makes him look her in the eye and say, “If you’re comin’ with me, there’s some rules you gotta follow.”

At least if she knows, there won’t be any time wasted with lessons hard-earned.

//

On the way to Bill and Frank’s, the stubborn kid had insisted they walk right past an unburied graveyard. Just collections of skeletons, some bones light and small enough that they’ve eroded away with time, caught in the wind or the rain. Whereas others, the skulls and the femur bones and the rib cages, stayed right where they had fallen, tethered to the earth by the plants and flowers that sprouted up out of it, new life entangling itself around the dead and gone. 

There’s a parent holding a baby, laid bare there. Joel’s watched over the years as their clothes have disintegrated further. 

He ain’t gonna tell her, but Joel wanted to lead her around from seeing something this gruesome, this ugly. He ain’t gonna tell her, but he and Tess used to do the same, whenever they had the luxury of time. 

Today, Joel and Ellie stood beneath an unrelenting sun and stared at piles of bones left behind by an army cruel enough to decimate entire populations. 

Today, just like every other day, Joel stares at that parent and their infant, and he thinks to himself, I hope they shot the parent first. But he already knows they didn’t. He already knows that for them to have fallen the way that they have, so that the baby's head is still resting on its mom or dad’s chest, they’d already been close to the ground, holding tight, grip refusing to release even in death. 

He already knows they didn’t because this world has never been so kind as to offer such mercy.

//

“Man…I shot the hell outta that guy, huh?”

Lungs burning, heart pounding, life just barely still Joel’s to hold on to, his head swivels around and finds a girl with shaking hands and wide eyes, pupils blown in fear and adrenaline. 

Joel’s soaking wet. He hauls himself out of the puddle of water, spitting a collection of blood and whatever cesspool he’d gotten a mouthful of while he was down there. “You sure did,” he grunts as he goes to stand.

Meanwhile Ellie lowers herself down onto the edge of a box, her breathing getting faster and more uneven as she declares, “I feel sick.” 

Seeing her sitting there, trembling and pale and so goddamn scared, the anger rises up out of Joel. “Why didn’t you just hang back like I told you?” He snatches the weapon out of her hand. Her hand that was barely big enough to hold it, her finger only just strong enough to pull the trigger.

“Well, you’re glad I didn’t, right?” Her voice doesn’t sound all that sure.

They live in an uncaring universe, and Joel wasn’t about to teach her otherwise. He looks at her, at Ellie, small and unsteady and always looking to him for approval, for assurance, for survival. “I’m glad I didn’t get my head blown off by a goddamn kid.” He can’t look at her as he says it, busies himself dealing with a corpse in the water and looting the motherfucker for supplies.

It’s ain't right, what she had to do. It’s not how it should be. She’s just a kid, and moments before, she’d been shaking and overwhelmed and looking at the blood seeping out of the man she had just killed because Joel wasn’t strong enough to fend him off. 

“You know what? No.” He doesn’t hear her approaching footsteps, doesn’t know she’s right behind him until he turns his head. ‘Cause he’s half goddamn deaf, and the only sounds he can hear right now are his heartbeat thrumming in his ears and his breaths that are still coming ragged and panting and the voice of a kid who had just placed herself directly in harm's way to save him. “How about, ‘Hey Ellie, I know it wasn’t easy, but it was either him or me, thanks for saving my ass’?”

When Joel stands up, he’s staring down at her. She’s a kid. She’s just a kid. 

“You got anything like that for me, Joel?”

And she’s asking him for something here. She’s pleading with him for something he can’t give her. He isn’t going to. Because he’d thought she knew the truth, that he could trust her to have figured some things out, but instead, Ellie looks at him like he’s going to save her, like things are going to all turn out okay. She’s gotten to this point of trusting him, he knows, and he don’t deserve that trust. He’s no force against the whole universe, and he isn’t about to let her believe otherwise. 

“We gotta get going,” is all he’s got for her instead.

There’s a second or two of delay, and Joel puts in the conscious effort not to envision the hurt flickering across her face. Because he needs her to learn. He needs her to understand. He needs her to just stay the fuck alive between here and Wyoming, and Joel doesn’t think she appreciates the sort of forces he’s working against to make that happen. 

When her voice answers him, it’s bitter, laced with teenage sass that’s been layered with hard-earned anger. “Lead the way.” 

He does.

//

Joel feels bad about it after. 

In an effort of peace offering, he passes her a handgun and tells her to show him how she holds it. 

It’s wrong, no surprise. There’s a comment on the back of his tongue, something sharp and harsh and ugly about how he really was lucky she hadn’t shot him point blank, but he bites it back.

Just because he ain’t care doesn’t mean he’s gotta be cruel.

Joel corrects Ellie’s grip, shows her how to hold a deadly weapon the proper way. When he goes to tug it from her grip and she holds fast, the giggles ring clear through the dingy little room they’ve stopped in.

The laugh leaves him aching. The joy buries itself somewhere beside grief, next to failure, along with loss. 

There had been a moment when this kid had decided between doing what she was told and going out and saving Joel instead. There was a single decision that she had made, a split second that Ellie must’ve decided she cared enough to risk herself by disobeying him for the sake of him.

It makes him angry, her prioritizing his safety. It makes him sick, thinking she might care about him enough to stick out her neck like that. It’s not gonna land her anywhere good; Joel knows that much. So he’ll just have to be better, stronger, smarter. He’s just gotta keep them both safe, keep ‘em both alive. 

The very concept wears heavy on his shoulders, presses something deep within the cavity of his chest.

They keep going.

//

A couple of kids. Henry is a man, for all intents and purposes, but he’s talking about escape and freedom and this hair-brained plan, and he looks at his little brother with this belief that everything’s gonna turn out alright. So, no, Henry is a kid, too. At least in Joel’s eyes.

They’re sitting in a bunker within the confines of a sewer. It’s dry where they are, the smell still permeates, but it’s less harsh and stringent here, doesn’t sting the back of his nose or cause his eyes to water.

Ellie’s playing with this kid. They’re laughing, running and jumping and cheering. Somehow, they’ve found a soccer ball. Joel remembers his kid out on a field with a dozen other pint-sized girls. Her little legs propelled forward as she drove the ball to the goal. Joel, who hadn’t ever given a single damn about soccer, standing in the bleachers and cheering her on with all he’s got, radiating pride as the ball zips right past the goalie’s open, outstretched palm. 

Watching Ellie now, Joel don’t see his daughter. He sees some other kid who, quite frankly, is pretty damn awful at soccer. 

Henry says, “You might not be her father, but you were someone’s.”

And Joel looks over at this kid so fast a flash of pain shoots through his neck, reminding him of how old he’s getting. 

He looks at this kid, the one who talks about his brother’s cancer, and his deafness, and the unbearable, undeniable childness of him. Joel sees a kid raising a kid. Joel sees a kid who refuses to acknowledge the truth, that he’s only inching himself closer to disappointment, to loss, to death. Because the odds of them both surviving are so damn low. No one gets that anymore. It’s not how life works.

And either that little boy is going to meet a terrible fate before his watchful brother’s very eyes, or Henry himself wasn’t gonna make it. And then that child, the one who’s survived starvation and crazy ladies and goddamn cancer in the middle of the goddamn apocalypse, was going to be taken down by the fact that he was a deaf kid in a world that wasn’t the least bit kind.

Joel hopes they’re long gone from these two before that happens, before the grief hits and the loss permeates.

All at once, he wants to bundle this kid he’s been saddled with and cart her away to someplace where maybe the evil of the universe won’t be able to reach them.

Joel watches her play, awkward and fumbling and happy, and tries not to face the music of what is going to transpire, sooner or later. 

//

The world ain’t forgiving, and neither are a couple of brothers who high tail it out of a tight spot and leave Joel and Ellie stranded on a goddamn bridge with a goddamn hole blown clear across it.

Hunters are coming their way, and they’re moving fast. There’s no chance Joel can take them all. He’s going to get her killed. And he’ll probably have to watch. Because that’s the way things always go. They’re gonna take a minute too long to shoot him, and he’ll be stuck there watching the life leave her eyes, hearing the resonating silence left behind after her cries of pain have dulled, feeling the limpness in the grasping hands pleading him to-

“I’m going to jump.” She’s shouting over the rain, her body leaning forward like she’s ready to take flight.

“No the fuck you ain’t!” Joel shouts back, already reaching to grab her. “You can’t swim.” Not to mention the water is raging beneath them. Not to mention he might try and follow her and not be able to grab ahold. Not to mention-

“You’ll catch me!” Damn kids and they’re damn blind trust.

The shouts of the men and women pursuing them are only getting closer. 

“Ellie! You get behind that car, and you do not get out until I say!” It’s non-negotiable. That was the rule. She does what he says when he says it. And she doesn’t jump off any goddamn bridges. He was making an amendment right now, adding that on. 

“It’s okay.” She’s stepping away from him, away from the car that was going to provide her cover. If she jumps in that water, there’s no certainty that he’d be able to pull her back out. “You won’t let me drown.” She looks him right in the damn eye as she says it.

Next thing he knows, her body’s vanishing over the edge of the bridge.

“ELLIE!” Her name comes tearing past his lips, ragged and rough and desperate. 

It’s instinctual; she’s gone, so he follows. Doesn’t even glance behind him. Doesn’t even spare it one more feeble thought. He’s over the side and heading towards a raging river before Ellie’s even broken the surface. 

When she does, she goes down like a rock. 

He hits next, feet first when you can’t see the bottom, just like his momma taught ‘im. And then he’s diving under, searching beneath the white-capped waves for a skinny, smart-mouthed kid who looked him dead in the eye and said, ‘You won’t let me drown’ as if she had some point of reference. And he knows, knows he can’t let her drown. Knows that if he does, he’ll go down too. 

She ain’t much to him, maybe, but she’s all that’s left. And he’s not going to let her go out of this world like this. Not when she was so certain he wouldn’t let it happen. 

There isn’t much more than a flash of pale skin, but it’s all he needs. Limbs slicing through, carbon dioxide bubbling out his mouth, vision going darker than it should. His hand clasps around a skinny little forearm, and he hauls her up to him. 

Fighting with the one arm he’s got free and both legs kicking toward the surface, Joel breaks through and has just enough time to gasp in some desperately needed oxygen before the waves threaten to take him down again. He can’t ask Ellie if she’s alright, but she’s hacking forcibly so at least she’s breathing. At least he can feel her breathing. 

The choppiness of the water drags them under and over. Joel doesn’t stand a chance of matching the power of the waves when he’s got a fourteen-year-old held fast in his arms, but he does his best to keep her head above the water. He tries the most he can to keep her in a position where she’ll be able to breathe. He does his best to keep her alive.

‘Cause there isn’t anyone else out here to do it, is there? No one else to give a shit. No one else to try. And no universe that owes him a damn thing. 

There’s no fighting water like this. The rock is coming at them fast. Ellie’s head is gonna clip it first if Joel doesn’t move. Without a second thought, Joel swings her around in front of him, wraps her tight with both arms, and turns his back to take the brunt of the blow.

There’s sharp, blinding pain.

And then there’s nothing.

//

If Joel had been made to bet on his odds of survival, he would’ve gone all in on a big, fat No Chance.

But he wakes up hacking. He wakes up with the sun in his eyes. He wakes up barely able to breathe. He wakes up.

That motherfucker Henry is who’s standing over him.

And sure, the pain is bad enough to cause Joel to double over, but there’s something to be said for the power of unadulterated, undeniable rage. 

Joel comes up swinging. The kid should be grateful Joel wasn’t in better condition to take him out then and there. 

There’s not much input that’s actually being processed through his brain right now, but he hears Ellie. He hears her, so he knows that she is blessedly, gloriously alive. “They saved us!” She jumps to the kid’s defense without stepping directly between him and Joel, as if she doesn’t trust Joel not to plow right through her to take out the miserable son of a bitch who deserved this wrath. As if she’s not entirely certain that Joel will not put his hands on her. As if he didn’t just damn near get his spine cracked in two trying to save her.

It’d be easy, to turn on her and lay into her for that stupid, impulsive, life-threatening decision. But much like her handling a gun to save his life, Joel knows he ain’t getting through to her. Not when everything’s worked out, and his certain death has now been converted to ongoing life. 

“Joel!” 

It’s the only thing that breaks through, the only thing that even alerts him to the fact that he’s got a gun in his grip, and it’s pointed in the face of somebody he isn’t entirely sure he wants to kill but right now all he can think is that this motherfucker put Ellie at risk and that leaves Joel blind to anything else. 

“He left us to die out there.” Joel’s voice comes out rough, hardened. He’s angry, but that girl’s got a hand on his shoulder, and it settles something frantic and violent and ugly, calms it before there’s nothing else left.

Henry’s on the ground, hands up, surrendering. “You had a good chance of making it, and you did. But coming back for you meant putting him at risk.” Henry points to his little brother. There’s still paint on the kid's face, a superhero’s mask. It tugs at something in Joel, but he ain’t sure what yet. “If it was the other way around, would you have come back for us?”

The answer isn’t some grand secret. Going back would’ve put Ellie at risk. Henry knows a thing or two. He knows there isn’t anyone else in this universe left to look out for the kid in his care. He knows that when everything else falls away, there can be only one top priority. No one else can matter.

Joel knows it. Joel understands it. Joel also knows this piece of shit put his top priority right in the line of fire. And he doesn’t know when she became that; he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s supposed to do about it, but he does know that he can’t stand for anything that risks her like that.

“I saved you,” Henry says, looking Joel right in the eye and saying it like a promise. 

The gun’s still pointed in his direction when Ellie steps back into Joel’s space and says, “He saved me, too.” Which gets him looking at her, not at the traitors who left them behind. “We would’ve drowned,” she tacks on for good measure. Joel knows it’s true. He knows that he was down and out the second his back took that impact. He wasn’t conscious to keep her afloat. He wasn’t alive to protect her. 

There’s no one else in this world to do it.

Joel throws the gun at Henry’s feet and stalks away. Sam’s on top of his brother at once, shooting Joel mistrustful little eyes with no words to express them. It’s alright, though. Joel knows exactly how that kid’s feeling.

//

The little boy must’ve scraped his knee at some point. 

Joel certainly hadn’t noticed. Henry either. They’re too focused on moving forward and getting the fuck outta KC. But there are beads of bright red blooming on the kid’s jeans, and Ellie catches it.

She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t ask for help or tell them to hold up. One second, she’s half a step behind him, always just a little too far into his personal space, and the next Joel’s heart is in his throat as he pans the sewer for sight of her.

There she is, flashlight glimmering as she crouches on the damp, dirty ground and dabs at another kid’s wound with the edge of her sweatshirt.

Joel should intervene, tell Henry to at the very least. Instead, he just stands there and watches this kid patch up another’s injury. She digs through her backpack, takes some of the precious bits of clean gauze they have, and wraps the cut with proficiency. 

Considering the kid can’t hear, Joel’s assuming she must pull a face or maybe poke his side, something to get the stilted laugh out of the boy. 

It’s been a long time since Joel’s been swallowed by the laugh of children. It’s been even longer since he’s seen someone drop to their knees and patch up the hurts of borderline strangers. 

Ellie extends her hand to the boy once she’s back on her feet. They walk forward with palms pressed together. They walk forward like they’re in this together.

//

That little boy is on top of her, thrashing and rabid, and Ellie is screaming his name, and Joel isn’t thinking about anything but getting her safe and getting to her. There’s the business end of a gun directly in Joel’s vision by a big brother who was still just a kid that loved a kid younger and smaller and needier than him so bad it’s going to break him straight in two. 

The trigger pulls. The gunshot rings out. The silence that follows swallows them whole. There’s the faint sound of liquid running, oozing—saturating old motel carpets. It turns something even in Joel, who is used to death, has carried dozens of half-grown human bodies to the pyre and watched them burn. It withers something inside of him bad enough that he steps to Ellie, frozen on the ground with tears in her eyes and disbelief spelled across her face. 

But then the gun is pointed away from a body that is no longer teeming with life and instead is pointed back towards Joel. Grieving people do crazy things, and the universe owes him nothing because it’s never cared one lousy bit, but there’s a gun trained on Joel and a dead kid with his brains slipping from his head along with pints of blood and all Joel can think is, keep it on me. Just keep that goddamn gun trained on me. 

The barrel goes to a child in the body of a man’s temple. 

Joel’s cry of, “Henry, no!” layers with Ellie’s scream.

They’re left in the silence of the after, breathing in gunsmoke. Liquid runs. Death chokes.

A child sits on the floor with hair falling loose from her ponytail and tears threatening to fall. 

Joel does not go to her. Joel does not let the shock rock through him.

It’s the world exactly as he knows it. 

The one small thanks he can offer is that she sits there, unharmed before him.

//

Cordyceps was exactly what the world was always going to suffer from. The sort of death and destruction that was non-negotiable. You get bit, you’re dead. Plain. Simple. Neat.

It’s ugly, violent. It’s loss and destruction. It’s not an argument to be had, not a choice to be made. Someone else is deciding for you. Someone else’s teeth marks embedded in your skin. Like a heart attack, a stroke, cancer. Humanity doesn’t get the last say, not anymore. Disease, bacteria and virus and fungus, will rule the world in the end. Nature will take its course. Humans get what’s left over for them to claim.

It’s the way of things now, even with social structures falling into place and people rising into a power system that seems more arbitrary and contrived than ever before. 

You get bit, you die. 

Plain. Simple. Neat.

Ellie’s got two bites on her right forearm.

She keeps them covered, keeps them clean. 

The two of them are on their way to the Fireflies, to create a cure. They were going to eliminate that hard and fast that has come to govern humanity. The universe did not care if humans lived or died. The universe would continue to exist regardless of which power rose the fastest, the highest, the strongest. 

Joel’s got a kid breaking the goddamn laws of the universe trailing behind him with tired, weary footsteps. The world owes her nothing, owes him even less.

Ellie’s been spared twice over.

Some nights, when the darkness is encroaching and the terror is circling, all Joel can think is that she shouldn’t be here. She should be dead in some mall, all alone with no one to bother looking for her body. And that is if she wasn’t turned, overtaken by a disease so strong she would cease being the smartass, cursing, angry little street urchin he’d come to know. He never should’ve met her, never should’ve known her. 

Joel never should have had to come to terms with the concept of losing her, how it wasn’t so unlikely in a world such as theirs. 

But instead, she’s a fourteen-year-old girl turning her face to drink in the rays of sunshine breaking through low-hanging clouds. Instead, she’s telling him another bad joke, voice all wrapped up in the punchline so it comes out halfway to a laugh. Instead, she’s needling him with questions and tripping over her own feet and having bad dreams that wake her up and leave her scooching closer to him. 

This kid shouldn’t be alive.

Instead, she’s found a universe willing to forgive and has pushed forward within it.

Joel lies awake and thinks of how her luck is bound to run out eventually. Joel looks over at her through the licking flames of a dwindling fire and thinks how unfair it is that her luck might slowly end up tethered to his.

//

Some days, the last worry on his ever-growing list is Infected. There’s a lot to stress about, plenty to worry over.

She gets sick. They’re in the wilderness. No shelter, a meager water source, dwindling food, and a sick kid. Gone are the days of grape flavored liquid Tylenol, where Joel’s biggest concern could be whether or not he could prevent Sarah from spitting it back out all over the bathroom counter because it’s “icky.” Dead and buried are the times of warm blankets and puke bowls and cool washcloths with designs of mermaids and starfish decorating them. No more movies to entertain feverish little minds dozing in and out of consciousness. No more mashed bananas on white toast. No more lullabies to soothe a restless, fitful sleep.

Joel’s done the best he can with what they’ve got.

Ellie says, “I’m fine. We can keep going,” but she’s swaying on her feet, and her eyebrows have only edged further together in discomfort and distress. She pukes in a bed of ferns with arms wrapped around her waist and knees that threaten to cave beneath her.

So Joel finds them some form of a building that he expects was most likely in disrepair even before twenty years of an apocalypse had rained upon it. 

For all that she never shuts up most of the time, Ellie don’t complain once.

She all but falls to the dusty, rotting hardwood and lays face down, forehead resting on her forearm. In moments, she’s asleep. It’s a testament to how bad off she must be. 

Joel had made her go too far. He had pushed her too hard. He had no choice but to do exactly that. 

The backpack is still strapped to her. He unhooks the sleeping bag they’d found some time ago and rolls it out, takes his own, too, so that she’ll have a little more cushion beneath her. He knows she’s got a fever, can tell by the flush of her cheeks and the haze that had cloaked her gaze. 

“Ellie, c’mon. Wake up.” She mumbles something unintelligible. 

There were times that Sarah would get fevers high enough that she would hallucinate, talking ‘bout flying turtles and dancing elephants. It scared Joel the first few times her toddler mumblings turned into childish sentences, and he learned she was truly seeing things that were not there. Those moments became few and far between as she got older, turned more into disheartened teenage grumbles of discomfort. 

“Jus’ a little more sleep, Joel,” comes Ellie’s pitiful plea. 

He clears his throat, denying himself the urge to brush a hand along her back and soothe the hair off her forehead. 

“What’d’ya think the sleeping bag’s for?” Joel grunts out. Instead of gentle pats, he bats against her shoulder, nudging her hard enough to force her attention to him.

“‘M fine here.” Always arguing, even when half asleep. 

It’s a losing battle. Joel handles her a little roughly, turning her onto her back despite audible squawks of protest and fighting off her backpack and jacket, lest she soaks herself through with sweat and land that much closer to hypothermia. Her eyes are glazed over, vision unfocused and blinks long and lingering. He thinks of her stumbling along beside him, not behind when she’s like this, and her insistence that she could keep going. He thinks of how wrong she’d been, how hard she must have fought.

“You’ll be more comfortable this way, Ellie.” And there isn’t any soft mattress to ease her body into or fluffy duvet to tuck up around her shoulders, but there’s something akin to muscle memory that helps Joel wrestle her into a sleeping bag and bundles his own jacket up beneath her head as a pillow. 

It worries him, seeing her like this. There isn’t much he can do to fix it, not that there had been much before. But before, there had at least been pediatricians whose number was saved to speed dial and emergency room waiting areas and 24-hour pharmacies with lines of thermometers and medicines and ice packs and $5 DVD bins with an arsenal of movies just bad enough that you wouldn’t feel guilty falling asleep twenty minutes in.

Looking at Ellie now, Joel knows he’s got nothing to offer to ease whatever virus is attacking her worn down, malnourished body. He can only hope she has the reserve left in her to fight it off. 

His hand goes to her forehead, unsurprised to find it hot but shocked all the same at the intensity of the burn. She’s too old for febrile seizures, right? Sarah hadn’t ever had one of those, but Joel remembers reading about it. He remembers grappling with the fear of what to do if she did. 

But Ellie’s completely still. 

It does not reassure him.

It’s no easy task getting water into her over the next few days. At the same time every morning, her fever breaks. She sweats through her clothes, shoves her way out of her sleeping bag, and looks at Joel with this owlish, angry expression. As if it’s his fault that she’s overheating. 

Joel takes to swapping her clothes out for her, hanging the sweat-drenched ones to dry as she stumbles into her extra pair of jeans and buttons up his flannel. 

Her hair’s greasy, which ain’t exactly new, but there’s a different sort of gloss to it. One day, Joel takes the time to visit the waning creek and fills enough canteens to create something of a wash basin out of a bucket. When her fever’s low enough that she can process the world, Ellie washes her hair and then her body.

Joel waits outside. The weather’s gotten brisk. It’s gonna be winter way too damn soon. He doesn’t want to imagine the hardship of leading a kid through the harsh winter of Wyoming. They ought to start hunting for some snow shoes, might not be too hard to come by in this area. 

Back inside, Ellie’s still in his flannel. “I didn’t get all gross in this one yet,” she says. There’s a life to her gaze. Joel thinks maybe she’s been spared; maybe this is the end of whatever had been tormenting her.

So he makes her food. They’ve got a can of beans he’s been saving and some fish he’d managed to catch a little further up the way in that creek. They’re small, small enough that twenty years prior, they would’ve been tossed into the lake, ruled as being more work to clean than they’d be worth to eat. But now nothing’s too much work. Now Joel will sit and pick tiny, fingernail sized chunks of bone from white fish meat and overcook it in the name of avoiding food poisoning. 

Ellie makes a face eating it, probably turning her stomach, but she does eat. She drinks, too. She’d keep going if Joel didn’t lower the canteen from her hands and remind her to, “Pace yourself,” with a tone more gentle than he remembers his voice ever previously going. “Don’t wanna get sick.”

With a snort, Ellie unzips her backpack. He already knows what she’s gonna pull out. “Too late for that.” And then, “What did the green grape say to the purple grape?”

She’s told this one before. 

“No.” He thinks part of the joy she gets out of this comes from a deep-seeded desire to annoy the absolute hell outta him.

“Breathe, dammit!” She’s snickering to herself. There’s color in her cheeks and life in her eyes. 

Out of habit from these last few days, Joel drops his palm against Ellie’s forehead and feels for warmth. 

“What the fuck are you doing?” She doesn’t jerk away, doesn’t even spew the words. It’s just an innocent inquiry, like she’s never had an adult press their oversized hands to her little baby face and assess for signs of anything amiss.

There’s still a bit of claminess to her skin, but Joel drops his palm, confident that the worst has passed. “Checkin’ your temperature.”

Her face scrunches up, that little scar in her eyebrow distorting. Joel fights the urge to reach out and smooth it over. “Why?”

What he should say is, “To see when we can start covering some ground again.” What he does say is, “To make sure you’re getting better.”

No hospitals, no medicine, nothing Joel could do if she wasn’t. Her appendix could burst tomorrow, and he’d have no way to save her life, no way to keep her safe. He’d just have to hold her hand through the pain and wait for the infection to take her. It’s a cruel world, the one this kid has grown up in. Not right, not fair. There should be freezer pops to soothe sore throats and heating pads to ease aching muscles. There should be a hand willing to press itself against the face of a child to check for sickness, hope for health. 

“Good as new.”

He still lets her sleep in come morning. He still keeps her within reach. He still checks for signs that they’re falling back to where they’d been the day before.

This time, she gets better. This time, they get to keep moving forward. 

//

It’s not sickness that seizes him but a tiny little wound on the palm of his hand. A fall, crossing the river. The rock he stepped on had moss. He slipped, caught himself on another rock that instead had sharp angles. 

Ellie’s face pales when she sees the blood.

“Dude, are you okay?” 

“Be careful.”

She’s sloshing through water that’s moving a little too fast for his liking, wading into depths up past her knees. He can’t risk her taking one wrong step and getting swept away by the current.

“C’mon, give it here.” He’s snatched his hand away from her eager, gripping hands. 

Joel steps forward, dragging the drenched denim of his jeans out of the water and making his way to the shore. As anticipated, Ellie follows on his heels. 

“It’s fine,” he snaps at her, taking the edge of his shirt to dab at the puncture wound. 

But Ellie just sizes right up next to him, shoulders back and chin high. “You wouldn’t let me walk around with that,” she argues at once. Annoyingly, she’s correct. 

Face pinched and teeth digging into her bottom lip, Joel reads her for what it is. Worry.

“Alright,” he says, extending his hand to her. “Fix it up for me, would ya?”

There’s a flash of a memory, her hunched over on the wet ground of a sewer and rooting through her backpack, just as she does now, to pull out fresh, clean gauze and bandage a little boy’s scraped knee. 

She does the same for Joel.

Out come supplies they really shouldn’t be wasting on him as Ellie dabs the wound with the edge of her shirt. It comes away bloody and leaves dirt in its path. He doesn’t tell her she’s just making it worse. 

‘Cause then she’s taking a bit of stark white gauze. It’s halfway dirty, Joel realizes, but she takes the clean edge of it and douses it with water from her canteen. He wants to tell her that’s a waste, but there’s a fast-flowing stream only feet from where they’re standing, so he saves his breath.

Eyebrows drawn in, tongue sticking out in concentration. Joel’s looking at that little notch in her right brow. Maybe it’d been clipped by the edge of a sharp-cornered coffee table. Maybe she got it from running too fast on chubby, toddler sized legs and tumbled before she could catch herself. Probably, Joel knows when he’d rather not; it was from a fight with another FEDRA brat. Or, worse, an over-tired, power hungry guard who’d listened to too much lip for the day and took it out on the girl in front of him. 

The idea flares something inside of him. Joel doesn’t deceive himself in believing there’d been someone nearby to hold pressure and reassure her that everything was going to be okay. It’d probably been a deep gash, from the looks of things. Doesn’t look like anyone had bothered to ensure she got stitches. 

Now, Ellie tends to his wound with careful precision and hawk-eyed focus. There’s an ache inside of him, wanting to ask how she’d ever learned to care this way. He hopes there were hands that had treated her with kindness in that orphanage. He prays there’d been someone to soothe her hurts and ease her fears. 

Before he knows it, Ellie’s ripping a strip off her own shirt and tying it around his hand, carefully ensuring the cut is entirely concealed. It’s a waste, but she’s already gone and ripped it so he ain’t gonna tell her that. 

“There,” she says, backpack swinging into place up on her shoulder again. “Now we can keep going.”

It’s the same fashion he tends to her wounds with—a moment of tenderness and then back to business. 

“Thank you,” Joel says against his better judgment. He doesn’t need this kid thinking she ought to stop everything to tend to him, doesn’t want her ripping up her clothes to help him. But she’s already done it, already stopped everything in its tracks to fix him up despite his protests otherwise. 

It’s not hard to see it for what it is. Ellie’s got a big heart. She may try and hide it behind the ‘motherfuckers’ and poker face of indifference. It’d been clear from the start, the act she’d been putting up. Joel sees her for what she is. Soft, giving, caring. It leaves his bones trembling, his chest aching, to see a little girl demonstrating that sort of tenderness, affection, to a world that would never offer it in return. 

Hand clenched into a fist tight enough to send a spark of pain flaring to life, Joel nods once in her direction as he says, “Let’s get a move on.”

He sets off first, pausing just long enough to be sure he hears her footsteps following behind him.

//

The snow isn’t deep enough yet to cause a true issue, but Joel is already trying to prepare a game plan for when it does. Who knows when he’s going to stumble upon his brother in this desolate, wasted stretch of land. So far, it’s mostly been coyotes, a variety of possible “death rivers,” and an elderly couple that have no business living such a quiet, domestic life in this day and age. 

The logistics of what they’re going to do as the weather worsens is what’s got his mind occupied as Ellie follows behind and tries to whistle or trots her way up to his side and dips just so into his personal space. It’s where his thoughts are as she dozes off beside a fire they’ve got no choice in lighting these nights. Her eyelids fluttered shut, and sleep claimed her after long, endless days of walking more or less aimlessly. 

It’s what he’s pondering when the horses come tearing in their direction. 

At once, out of habit and practice and a still-alive instinct, Joel grabs ahold of Ellie’s hand and moves to tug her behind him, into some realm of safety. Except the riders are coming at them from all angles. She’s no safer behind him than she is beside. Joel’s clenching her hand a little too tightly, his eyes panning as he jumps to negotiation measures in hopes they’ll respond and let them go. It makes him miss Tess, knowing she’d take control of this situation with ease and spin it until these pursuers were joking and laughing and fully believed she was a friend, not an enemy. Joel’s too good at making himself an enemy.

They force Ellie to step away from him. His heart shudders even as he gives her a nod of reassurance. Her hands are raised in unwavering surrender. Her cheeks are red from the biting cold wind, tongue darting out to lick along her chapped lips. Her hair’s in disarray beneath her hat. She’d just shoved that beanie on when she woke up this morning and started bundling her sleeping bag together. It makes her look so young. 

A barking dog approaches Joel, sniffs him, and turns back with a general air of unimpressed attitude. 

That thing can’t go near Ellie. Joel can already envision teeth sinking into the soft, pliable flesh of her too-skinny body. It would rip her to pieces, smelling the infection that hadn’t quite managed to seize her but lived within her regardless. 

When they send the beast out to her, Joel’s got nothing. No ideas, no solutions, no hope of protecting her from this vicious, ugly, dangerous world that owes her everything but will give her nothing. It will do nothing but tear her apart, limb to limb, until she is bloodied and gasping and not even within his arm’s reach to comfort her. As if there was any comfort to be offered.

His whole body is frozen, no air in his lungs and no blood pumping through his heart. He stands stock still and closes his eyes in anticipation of her desperate, pained cries. There’s no way he can save her. There’s no way he can protect her. There’s no way-

Laughter, lilting and joyous, triggers him to turn and look in her direction.

Sure enough, she’s crouched in the snow, the same creature who Joel was certain was going to murder this little girl, now licking her face and knocking her back in an excited launch of affection. The giggles erupt from her as mittened hands reach out and pet the dog. Eyes cast up to catch him, and Joel takes his first inhale of fresh, icy oxygen in what feels like more or less a lifetime. 

She stands, brushing snow and ice from her jeans, and it takes everything in Joel not to go to her at once and gather her in his arms, just to reassure himself that she’s okay. Because that’s not what this is; it’s not what they are. 

Ellie’s okay, no thanks to him. He gives her a nod and turns back to the woman, who asks for his name again, redirecting his attention to the promise of finding his brother.

Joel will not waste another second thinking of what that four-legged creature could’ve done to the kid who’s been at his side for almost three months now. It don’t matter. He doesn’t care, just like this world. He cannot extend that piece of himself, not even to her. He doesn’t care.

//

“Do you give a shit about me or not?”

She’s shouting at him, an old diary thrown to the seat as she pushes herself harshly to her feet, gearing up for a battle with nothing to protect her besides this blind trust she’s placed in him not to hurt her.

Joel’s not even thinking, not even considering, when he shoots back, “‘Course I do.” It’s plain as that. It’s been three months of bad puns and dinners huddled around a fire and brushing the hair back from her sweat slicked forehead and learning the fit of her small hand wrapped within his own. Three months of impressing upon her what to do when Infected descend upon them or raiders are off riding in the distance. Three months of knowing there’s no promise that either of them is getting a tomorrow and being given one over and over again regardless. 

“Then what are you so afraid of?” she demands of him.

There are a million answers to that question.

A flash of a memory, bloody and begging and bleak. A girl in his arms, sobbing and grasping and dying. 

And then nothing. No more fight left to her. No more tears spilling from her eyes. No more life in the body Joel refused to set down.

It wasn’t until she’d stiffened, rigor mortis setting in, that he’d had the capacity to comprehend that she needed to be buried, that no amount of her daddy holding her would be enough to soothe this hurt, erase this pain. 

Joel looks at Ellie now. He’s working at something in his jaw and fighting against clutching at something within his chest. He looks at her now and he sees a dog tearing her apart. He sees an Infected ripping her to pieces. He sees a raider putting a bullet through her fragile, precious skull.

A million answers.

Only one that matters. 

And Joel knows, he knows that there is no one in this world to care about this kid in front of him besides himself. He knows that he’s the only one. He knows he’s done the caring before, been the protector and the savior and the father, and he had failed.  

They live in an uncaring universe, and no amount of him caring is going to eliminate that fact; no degree will protect her from what else is out there.

So he lays it out for her, spits words to cut her deep and sever any burgeoning tie that might be forming between them, some broken tendrils of himself still reaching out to her, hoping to tether something until he’s not just this free floating, floundering man alone in this world. 

The world don’t care about her. Joel can’t afford to either.

//

It takes a long time to fall asleep that night. 

Once he does, Joel dreams of dead girls in his arms. He wakes up gasping, clutching his chest, fighting to breathe.

He falls back asleep and dreams of alive girls wrapped just as tight, laughter and light and life ringing out from them both as clear as a bell. 

When he wakes, he shoots up at once, looking for what he already knows is not there. And then he buries his face in his hands and sobs for a world that will never be.

//

It goes south, just like he always knew it was bound to. The only thanks Joel can offer is that he’s the one bearing the weight of these consequences and not her.

He’s laid out on a threadbare mattress. He don’t remember how he got here. Ellie’s not big enough to carry him. She’s so small, so thin. But he’s staring up at the rafters of an unfinished basement with mildew stinging his nostrils and a deep, lacerating pain erupting in his side.

It’s not a question. Joel is going to die.

For twenty years, he’s been waiting for this moment. He’s got a kid waiting for him on the other side. He’s been trying to get to her all this time, just kept on surviving in a world that took so many like some twisted, jagged joke. 

And now, the fear of death strikes him. Not for himself, for the hell that might very well be awaiting him on the other side, but for the girl who’s kneeling over him with her trembling, icy fingers peeling the shirt away from his body and her thin, chapped lips whispering words that he just can’t quite cling to.

If he’s not here to protect her, who will? If he’s not here to care for her, who is going to take his place?

Because this world is unforgiving, it takes children from their fathers and mothers from their daughters and brothers from each other. This world has no sense of morality, of justness, of promise. And Joel wasn’t meant to care for this girl, but she’s got no one else, and she tells god awful jokes, but they’re always punctuated by her bright, brilliant laughter. She wraps flesh wounds with the attentive precision of a surgeon and draws stunted giggles from scared, deaf little boys. She gently runs fingertips down the muzzle of a fillie and scratches behind the ears of a dog who was threatening to tear her to pieces only moments before.

 It was all he had left to do in this life: protect her, provide for her. He was supposed to sing for her. That’s what he’s thinking just before his hands reach out and push her away. She was going to save the fucking world, and the least he coulda done was sing her a song. 

“Go.” The word is a grunt. It costs something he does not have to send her away. Though it would only make it harder, to die with her hand still clutched in his own. To hold tight to it just like he had when he was pulling her away from threats, from danger, until his grasp weakened and his mind faded, and there was no part of him left that could guard her from a single hurt in this broken, shattered world. “You go to Tommy.”

That’s the most he can hope for, that his brother will take her in and do what Joel could not. Just as he’d been Sarah’s godfather all those years ago, he would know. Joel would trust no one else with his child. That hasn’t changed now. 

And she’s always fighting with him, always arguing. But maybe there’s some common sense winning out for once because not long after he’d heard her body hit the hard, unforgiving cement floor, he caught the footfalls of her disappearing up the creaky stairs and leaving him to die alone.

Of course, this was always how it was going to end. And now she’s out there alone, a five day trek back all by herself. And even with the pain in his side demanding the little attention he can still stand to cling to, the rest of his focus going hazy and edged with darkness as the blood continues to drain from him, what he ends up focusing on is the fear of the horse getting spooked and throwing her from his back or raiders tracking her down or a hoard of Infected running her down and pulling her apart. She’s out there all alone in this violent, cruel world, and there is no longer a violent, cruel man left to help her navigate through.

If nothing else, though, Ellie’s resourceful. He’s seen her fight her way outta enough situations, smart enough to know when to hide and when to jump in. He taught her how to shoot. That’s what hope he clings to as the world blurs further out of reach. Thank god he taught her how to fucking shoot.

Tommy’ll take her in, keep her safe within the walls of that little commune. He can’t sing for shit, but maybe he could teach her guitar. Joel should’ve been teaching her guitar instead of how to shoot a rifle. 

It’s the useless sorta skill he would’ve taught her in another life, another world, the sort where maybe every waking moment wasn’t some existence to fight for the right to continue suffering through.

In another life,  Joel closes his eyes, feels the beginnings of unconsciousness calling for him. He would have tucked her into bed at night, would have shown her the Grand Canyon and taken her stargazing. Hell, he would’ve taken her right to NASA. They could watch the spaceships launch. She’d love that shit. 

In another world, Joel would have Sarah. She’d be a grown woman, but he could only ever envision her as the fourteen-year-old girl she’d died as. Thick as thieves, that’s what those two would be. He wouldn’t have stood a chance against them both. He already knows that much. Two girls to protect, to guard, to love. A soft sort of life, movie nights and too much take out and not enough structure. Ellie and Sarah couldn’t be more different, they’d never agree on matters like films or pizza toppings, but they’d make it work. Joel would figure out a way to make it work. It’d be the greatest goddamn privilege of his life, to love them, to hold them, to care for them.

But Sarah’s dead. Ellie’s gone.

Joel’s alone, waiting for the Grim Reaper to make an appearance already.

He thinks maybe the bastard has when there’s a clomping on the stairs. Time is uncertain. It may have been hours. Sun still streams through the dugout windows. 

It’s not death coming to visit him, but a kid in a really fucking eggplant coat falling to her knees and lifting the edge of his shirt. Her hands are trembling. It’s hard to see much, but there’s the glint of a needle, and Joel understands what she’s about to do all of three seconds before she does it. 

A piercing through his torn, sensitive flesh. His hand grasps out and wraps tight around her working, fragile wrist. He has to fight himself from stilling her hand and pushing her back away. 

This kid, this funny, stubborn, foul-mouthed, caring kid, is trying to save his life.

He should tell her to get out of here. He should tell her to save herself. He should tell her to let him die.

But he breaks through the black spots of his vision to see a tight, tense expression cast across her face, the little notch in her eyebrow drawn inward and the edge of her tongue poking out between her lips.

Joel doesn’t stand a chance at sending her away, not when the only thing that could give him comfort now is to draw her nearer.

//

Ellie comes and goes, much like Joel’s consciousness. He’s not sure how much longer he’s going to last, and he wishes he had the strength to tell her what he should have told her before. He wishes he had the grit to apologize for what he’d said back in that room in Jackson. 

Sometimes, he’s sure he’s already gone. 

But then there’s her head resting upon his shoulder, and her hand settled steadily over his chest. She’s convincing herself he’s still alive, he realizes. What she doesn’t know, is that she’s convincing him of the very same.

//

A knife pressed within his grasp, her fervent, urging whispers to kill anyone who comes near him, and all Joel wants to ask is what about anyone daring to come near her. But she’s gone, off as fast as she came. 

“Don’t fall asleep.” That had been her last command to him, her parting words.

His vision darkens, sleep calls to him. Why hadn’t he answered her? Why hadn’t he sent her away to safety? Why hadn’t he been strong enough to keep her safe when the rest of the world just kept posing more and more danger?

//

Joel does exactly what she asked of him. Even with his strength faltering and his life dimming, Joel forces his body off the bloody, sweat-soaked mattress at the sounds of heavy footsteps on the floor above him. Ellie’s footsteps don’t sound like that. 

Furniture scrapes against the hardwood above. Joel’s got a knife in his hand and stitches tugging at his side. Joel’s got a heart that broke twenty years prior and a kid who was reaching into his chest cavity and pumping it back to life through sheer determination. He thinks he’s more dead than alive. He thinks he’s lived a lot of his life that way. But now he’s got a reason to persevere. Now he’s got something, someone, to fight for. 

Because that girl had been raised in a world that did not care, did not love, did not soothe. And she had stared it back in the face and said, “It won’t stop me.” She stitched together wounds and broke through the mournful hum of grief with fervent, wreckless joy. And the world couldn’t afford to lose someone like that. There wasn’t enough of it, not now and not before. 

A man comes downstairs. Joel kills him. He knows there are more. He knows they’re his only chance of finding Ellie. 

Something long withered and buried writhes up out of him, determined and aching and yearning. It’s funny, Joel’s at his most violent, most rageful self. Deadly. It comes out of him with ease. It comes to him before he’s able to recognize the battering, determined emotion hammering against his chest wall. It’s what he lets drive him, forcing the undeniable, desperate surge of care back down, afraid this violent world will choke his reason for living out of existence, afraid that this care that’s been nurtured deep beneath the cloak of apathy and disinterest is going to be the very reason something else precious is pulled from his grasp.

//

The snow and the wind are near blinding. Joel follows the bloody knife mark on the map like a hopeful, promising beacon. It’s all he has to go on. And he doesn’t know what he will find when he gets there. He doesn’t know what those sick bastards will have made of his girl. 

There’s a heartbeat in his throat, in his shaking hands, in his aching side. Adrenaline is the only thing that pushes him forward, slow, staggering miles to this town that’s marked with a half-fallen apart sign and largely dilapidated buildings. It’s not a town at all, just some old resort that’s been repurposed as such. There are no signs of life, which has Joel holding his breath that there are also no signs of death. 

In a barn, he discovers their horse—strung up and dead. Along with bodies, hanging by their feet. The heads have been cut off. Joel knows what he’s looking at, and he does not breathe as he glances at the naked, mottled, decapitated bodies and prays none of them are the size of the last ounce of good this earth has left in it. 

A backpack. One with wings and a NASA pin and a little Ninja keychain. Joel’s spent months staring at this backpack, watching Ellie dig in it for a book of horrible puns and a small collection of comics and half-used squares of gauze to patch up the people she so openly cares about despite an entire existence telling her to do otherwise. 

Carrying that bag, Joel feels a little like he’s carrying a piece of her. 

It’s a sign, one he’s eager to take. Back outside, he tries to fight through the swirling snow that blinds and the howling wind that deafens the one good ear he’s got. 

He thinks maybe he sees it more by chance than anything else, but plumes of smoke are rising in the sky. 

Ellie.

God, let it be Ellie. 

There’s no reason that he should count on her being delivered back into his arms safe and unharmed. There’s no evidence to suggest that such a miracle has ever been a possibility, but it’s the last thing he has to hold onto, the last bit of hope that can push him forward. The universe owes him nothing.

Joel just has to believe that it knows Ellie deserves so much more. 

A vacant, expressionless, and bloodied Ellie comes stumbling out of a burning building. Joel stumbles with relief and fear and exhaustion.

He doesn’t dare let himself go down, not yet. First, he’s got to get to her. There’s no volume in his voice to call her name, so he just keeps pressing forward, grabbing ahold of her bicep before she can wander outside of his reach again. First, he needs to feel her in his arms; he needs to hold her the same way she’d held onto him on those murky, uncertain nights on a basement floor. 

It’s immediate—she’s screaming, body folding in on herself as if she’d prefer to fall to the snow-covered ground and curl into the fetal position, as if it’s the very last defense that remains within her. 

“It’s me. It’s me.” The words come over and over again as he turns her to face him, begging her to see him. “Look,” and his voice is as fractured and weak as he is right now. He thinks that might be the beginning of tears encroaching into his voice. “It’s me.”

And this time, she seems to recognize something. Her fists stop their pitiful, relentless onslaught of defense, and her eyes widen, pupils blown with the epinephrine flooding her system.

Joel takes her face between his chapped, murderous palms and holds her with the cautious desperation that he’d once cradled his newborn daughter with. Blood is speckled across Ellie’s face, just like freckles once had been after weeks drenched in the autumn sunlight. 

Eyes flitting, searching, seeking. Joel doesn’t know what to give her, what to say to make this better. But for as little her expression betrays just now, he identifies the recognition, the relief. 

“He…” she starts, still taking him in. “But I…” The words are failing her. 

They’re moving together, Ellie collapsing into Joel’s waiting, opening arms. He holds her against him, holds her to him like he knew just moments before there was a chance he might not ever hold her again. “It’s okay, baby girl,” he finds himself whispering, the endearment falling past his lips without thought, without the energy needed to refrain from offering it. “I got you.” 

Eye falling closed, her weak, stuttering cries muffled where her face is pressed against his shoulder. He thinks she might be pulling herself even closer to him, uncaring of the beating her face had clearly taken.

Joel can’t consider what comes next, can’t worry about what it is she must have just lived through. All he can do is hold this child to him, shut his eyes from the onslaught of the world and all its angry, vicious demons, and promise her, “I got you.” All he can do is thank whatever force had the kindness to return this girl to where she belonged. 

All he can do is feel the beating of his heart, the tensing of the muscles in his arms, the ease with which his lungs exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide. All he can bother to think about is how fucking much he cares.

//

Ellie’s not herself. 

Joel hasn’t got a clue how to bring her back to him.

The stitches popped in all that effort, splitting apart with the force required to murder men in cold blood, punishing them for daring to hurt the only reason Joel’s got left to live. Splitting open with the force of holding his child to him and refusing to let her go.

It’s the only thing that draws Ellie out of the heady, relentless fog that seems to be hanging over her. She spots the fresh blood soaking through Joel’s shirt, bright red instead of the deoxygenated brown the original stain had faded to. 

She don’t say a thing; just pushes him down, pulls his shirt up, and threads a needle.

His girl ain’t really herself, but she sutures him back together with the same careful tenderness Joel’s come to recognize in her.

Thankfully, she cleans the needle this time, too.

//

For weeks, Joel’s convinced the nightmares are just taking their time in making an appearance. He figures Ellie must be too exhausted, too worn down, for them to be able to infiltrate her mind. When he dozes off each night, slumped against the door in the feeble form of protection he can manage to offer, he expects to wake to her wretched, horrified screams.

It’s never her that wakes up screaming, though.

When she presses her small, frail body against his, Joel feels the shame of a child comforting a grown man. But then he feels her shivering muscles and her trembling bones. But then he understands this comfort is not only for him to consume but an offering for them both to revel in.

Joel holds her against him. He tries not to think about the almosts, the near misses. Ellie doesn't tell him much, but there’s a faraway look in her eyes and a mural of bruises painted across the canvas of her skin and a button missing from the waist of her jeans.

There ain’t much to be said that Joel can’t deduce on his own. 

She’s almost silent most days. That’s what worries him most, speaks to the trauma encroaching on her mind more than purple stains across her ribs or grimaces of pain passing over her face. And no kid should have to just push through, force onward. The life of a child should not depend on their resilience to withstand hardship, suffering, neglect. But that’s how Ellie’s gotten where she is, even if the marks of agony are still embedded like notches dug into bone by the sharp end of a knife. She had always carried it with her, the roughness of the childhood she’d stumbled through, but she wasn’t yet acknowledging the weight it had placed upon her shoulders.

Now, she simply could not stand beneath the weight of it any longer.

Joel does not know how to take the load for her.

It's weeks they end up hiding out. He’s too frail; Ellie’s too withdrawn.

They leave just long enough to hunt. Joel attempts to teach her some snares, a concept that would have enthralled her only weeks before now has her feebly holding wire between her fingertips and staring lifelessly down at it.

So mostly, she follows him. She can’t stand to be alone. He can’t yet stand to let her from his sight.

Joel finds ways to fill the silence, to pray that something he says will draw her out, drag her back. 

On the evenings when neither of them has anything left, he digs out one of those bent, ripped, misshapen comics and reads to her from it. The first time he adds some flare by coming up with different voices from the characters, it startles a laugh right out of her. Stilted, broken, surprised. It reminds Joel of Sam all those months ago. 

Ellie laughs for the first time in almost three weeks. Joel cries into the crown of her head with the relief of it. 

She never does ask him what he’s crying about, just ends up joining him. 

It’s a strange little world the two of them have built out here, all alone. Foreign, unexpected.

Because it’s Ellie and it’s Joel, and it’s a deep, thread-through string of caring that tethers them together and anchors them to the shore of one another. It’s a world Joel has never known, has never expected to find. The universe is only him and this little girl, and it is saturated with the cloaking shield of care. 

//

“What do you care?” Ellie asks the question with harsh edges and stinging accusations as she shrugs his assessing hands away, standing from the tumble she’d taken in slushy, icy snow and stomping off.

And Joel doesn’t know how to tell her, even now, even after crying from fear when she wouldn’t eat and reading from the same four comic book volumes night after night and bundling her in coats so they could sit outside and create constellations in the night sky. He still hasn’t figured out how to put words to the things he attempts to speak through actions.

It’s not like he’s a damn fool, not like he can’t understand why a girl like Ellie might need to hear the words that are cheap as opposed to believing the costs of his actions. 

There were words he’d undoubtedly left ringing in that mind of hers. Words he couldn’t take back, ones he didn’t mean even as he was speaking ‘em. Words that were cheap ‘cause they didn’t even hold the truth. 

“Don’t give me that shit,” is what he shoots back with because neither of them are good at this, even after everything. Joel doesn’t know how to allow himself to dwell within the familiar rush of caring, affection, love, he feels for this child, even when it threatens to overtake every other ounce of his life.

At once, she turns in his direction. The narrowing of her eyes in a suspicious glare is interrupted when her boot goes sliding out around her in the slushy snow yet again. Joel’s closer this time, grips her bicep before she can topple over. He don’t let her go after the fact, either. Just wraps her against his side. He doesn’t think about that snowy nightmare all those weeks ago. Really, he doesn’t. At least, not for long.

Clearing his throat, Joel doesn’t bother with words that clog up his throat. 

Ellie seems to receive the message as it’s intended. She lets him lead her forward with a steadying arm wrapped ‘round her shoulders.

//

Even when the words do come, they don’t manage to come out quite right.

He hasn’t cried in front of her since that day with the comic and the laughter and the hope. He doesn’t want his weaknesses to rest so heavily on her shoulders, to be something she had to stare at and accept every damn day.

But right now, as they sit on an old cement barricade in an abandoned, ravaged triage lot, Joel feels about as close to tears as he feels to the kid at his side. So he starts with, “I was the one who shot and missed,” and finishes with, “It wasn’t time that did it,” and just prays this girl can read between the lines and understand the heft of the words he’s thrusting in her direction. 

When he looks at her, there’s a gloss to her eyes. Her lips are thin with how tight they’re pressed together. 

It wears another layer off of him, like sandstone being smoothed down, worn away. Ellie had found a book about geological formations almost a month ago now. Some nights, he still read aloud to her. She made him do voices even for the goddamn textbook she’d been hauling around.

There’s not much left that he can imagine getting out around the sticky tangle of emotions all caught up in his throat. So he pushes on, moves forward, tries to get that cracked-open look on Ellie’s face out of his head because if he thinks too long on it, Joel will turn around and give it all to her, plain and simple. She’s the best damn thing to happen to him in twenty years. She’s the only reason he has to keep going. She’s as good as his, if anyone were to ask him. 

All he wants ain’t some damn cure. It’s to take her to Jackson, to make a home. She deserves that twice as much as Joel believes he doesn’t. Ellie deserves a home and a life and a family. She deserves to feel safe and certain and to never question that there were people in this world who loved her, to never again hesitate when considering that he wanted to protect her. Because she was right. She was so goddamn right.

It was all that mattered to him now, caring for this girl. It’d be the mission that got him up in the mornings, got him living life each day. Making a life for Ellie, helping her see they could move forward even when it feels like the universe has dumped them at the end. There was still life to be lived. There was still love to be claimed. 

Joel loves her, didn’t even know it was possible to love someone in equal amounts as he’d loved Sarah. Though, Joel supposes, that’s the thing about having more than one kid. And that’s what Ellie is, ain’t it? 

There’s no words for it. But he’s gonna sing for her, teach her how to play Boggle, make sure she feeds a hundred more giraffes if it elicits that bright, sunny laughter again. 

In time, Joel will show her.

//

No more than three hours later, they tell him she’s halfway to dead.

“Take me to her.”

Marlene keeps talking, her men keep stepping forward with each move Joel makes. But he doesn’t care ‘bout any of it. All he hears is that they’re going to take Ellie’s brain from her skull, and the rest of the world has narrowed. 

They were gonna kill her. This whole time, Joel’s traversed more than half the country to hand-deliver her to scientist murderers. This whole time, Joel grew to cherish this vivacious, buoyant, vibrant kid, to see her as his own, only to dump her at the feet of people who meant her nothing other than harm.

All they’d been through, everything Ellie had done, Joel knows it eats her alive. He’s seen the skin picked from her cuticles and the deep purple circles beneath her eyes. How she watches the sky overhead late at night and stares at the constellations above like they might stand a chance at holding the answers to questions she don’t even know how to ask.

The cure was the only thing that had kept Ellie going those first several days after Silver Lake. Joel would beg her to eat, to drink, and no matter how much he murmured, “You gotta, baby. You’re going to get sick if you don’t.” No matter how much he pleaded, “Just one bite. For me, Ellie. Take one bite for me,  honey.” None of it worked. None of it meant anything.

And then, finally, almost seventy-two hours after, Joel was weary and exhausted and so, so afraid that he hadn’t saved her at all, just kept her alive long enough so that he could have a front row seat to watch her waste away to nothing. And then it came to him. It was the same dirty form of manipulation he’d been trying in various formats for days now, but this time, Joel tries, “You can’t make a cure if you die before you get there.”

It withers something inside of him that it’s then she eats. Not for herself, not for the person who cares about her so much it aches. But when she’s reminded of what it is that she can provide the world. He hates that he knew it would work. He hates that it did.

Ellie eats a half-portion of peaches and three bites of canned beans. She drinks a nearly full canteen of water. She follows him blindly in the snow. She washes her hair and lets him tend to her wounds, and Joel watches her come back to life not because she gives a damn about herself, but because she cares about this vicious, god-forsaken world. 

There’s no chance of him letting her see it, but when she sleeps that night, Joel lets himself out on the porch and sobs for the lack of self-worth that he’s got no clue how to instill in her. 

And now, that same thing that had been what kept her alive was going to be the very same to kill her.

“Take me to her right NOW!” 

Joel’s down with a grunt.

Marlene speaks with precision, clean and emotionless until she reaches the very end. 

The switchblade Ellie had lunged at Joel with in their very first meeting is pressed into his palm. A memento, like the watch ‘round his wrist. Another thing to remember his second deceased, lifeless child by.

They live in an uncaring universe; it’s all Joel can consider as he’s led towards the exit by a couple of army brats with guns they don’t bother to train well enough to be a deterrent for what comes next. 

Descending the stairs without seeing ‘em, Joel considers how this world never, ever cares. How it had kept this precious girl alive just to have her deposited in the grip of death mere months later. How it was wrong. This whole damn universe is shattered, torn apart beyond repair. Any world that keeps fracturing the steady grasp of laughter-filled girls and dragging them beneath the rolling waves of death is not one worth existing. 

It’s not really a decision. There’s a watch around his wrist and a switchblade in his palm. 

Joel gets his hands on a gun. He shoots to kill.

//

“You can’t keep her safe forever.”

He’s staring down at the unconscious, sleeping face cradled in his arms. She’s sturdier than a newborn, but after months on the road, it ain’t by much, not what it should be. Joel thinks this is the first time he’s held her proper like this. His fear spikes at the thought that it may be the last. 

“No matter how hard you try, no matter how many people you kill, she’s gonna grow up, Joel. And then you’ll die, or she’ll leave…” Marlene’s got a whole diatribe going, gun pointed in their direction. She won’t shoot, though. Joel’s sure of that much. Not when he’s got Ellie this close, not when their precious cure could get caught in the crossfire.

The parking garage is dim, more than half the lights burnt out, and only a spattering of cars to be spotted. Joel’s scanning, assessing what holds promise to get him and his girl to safety. There’s one with the trunk open; supplies are either half in or half out, doesn’t really matter. Looks street-legal to him. 

“How long until she’s torn apart by Infected or murdered by raiders?”

The concept haunts him, no point pretending otherwise.

“Because she lives in a broken world that you could have saved.”

Marlene’s voice is trembling, either with anticipation of being so close to the thing she wants or the fear of facing the reality that it’s being pulled out of arm's reach.

“Maybe,” Joel answers. He knows she’s not wrong. He’s known before the world well and truly went to shit that it was broken, cursed, a hating and ugly thing that would never owe the people within it one damn bit of fairness, of rightness, of assurance. And it’s not gotten any better. Not this world that lets mothers leave, and brothers die, and children suffer. Not this world where people turn to monsters, lose their minds and hunt for the sake of surviving. Not this world where the infected minds are still not the worst thing out there, where little girls still show up with blood across their face and buttons broken off of the waist of their jeans. 

It is a broken world, an uncaring one. Always has been. 

“But it isn’t for you to decide.”

“Or you,” Marlene shoots back, shoves the words at him with a useless, unused gun still pointed in his face. “What would she decide?” A tilt of her chin in Ellie’s direction. Joel can’t stop himself from looking down at her, at Ellie. The last good and precious thing on this Earth. The only one who deserved more than all the rest to survive. There was no bringing Sarah back, or Tess. But there’s Ellie. Ellie, who’s alive in his arms right now. Ellie, who’s alive with the gleam of her smile and the press of her palm against his chest and the lilting laughter at near dinosaur like creatures tearing leaves from her gentle, caring grip. 

“Because I think she’d want to do what’s right.” There’s emotion in her voice now, tears. It ain’t fair. “And you know it.” Head nodding, body shaking.

Joel’s not looking at her, too busy looking past her, too busy thinking of what he’s gained and what he’s lost and what he can’t afford to give up any more of. 

When his eyes do fall on her, Marlene’s transitioned back to a soldier, a fighter, a leader. “It’s not too late, even now.” The gun falls away. She’s feeling confident, like she’s gained traction in this debate. Like it’s any sort of debate to be had at all. 

Like he would ever consider Ellie’s life something available for discussion. 

“We can still find a way.”

His gaze drops. First to the floor, then to the girl in his arms. Joel knows what it is Ellie would want. Joel knows what she would choose if she woke in his arms right now. 

Ellie would choose the world—in all of its ugly brokenness. She would choose the people who had failed her, and the systems that had let her go hungry, and the man who tried so hard to protect her but had fallen short time and time again. That’s who she was. He knows it, staring down at her peaceful, sleeping face. 

Between the world and herself, Ellie would never choose herself. Not once. Wouldn’t even consider it. 

There’s a gun falling to Marlene’s side, an open palm held in faux surrender. 

Joel’s looking at Ellie; he’s looking at Marlene. The woman advances half a step forward. He shoots.

They live in an uncaring universe. That’s what he thinks as Marlene crumples to the ground,her  body hunching from the impact of a bullet buried in her belly. 

He carries Ellie over to the car, lays her gently down in the back seat, keeps that hospital gown pulled down as far on her thighs as it will go. His hands are dirty, bloodied from stripping still exsanguinating bodies of their weapons to wade his way further into a warzone and salvage a child from the rubble. 

One second, that’s all that Joel allows himself as his rough palm brushes back the soft, smooth hair from Ellie’s forehead. She’ll hate that it’s loose. He’ll have to find her something to hold it back, outta her way. 

Staring in at her, that’s what Joel thinks about. The clothes she’ll need to be comfortable, the shoes for her feet so she can run if needed. The hair tie that will let her look like herself, feel it, too, he hopes. 

And then there’s a pained grunt drawing his attention away. 

Marlene is writhing on the ground. Except, no, she’s not writhing at all, just working her way towards the gun that lays out of reach. It’s admirable; Joel’ll give her that. Bleedin’ out and still fighting.

The car door was closed. He’d made sure of it. Joel would rather Ellie didn’t hear the next gunshot. He wishes he could hang back and cover her ears, offer her comfort from the ugliness that is himself. 

First, he’s got to protect her. Then comes the next parts, the softer ones. He’ll do what he needs to get them there, get her somewhere that ain’t about survivin’ or fighting or running. Somewhere that they aren’t reminded, again and again, how unjust this world truly is. 

“Wait. W-w-wait.”

Still pleading for her life. Joel can’t blame her, but he can’t say it sways him. Marlene is a threat to Ellie. Way he sees it, her death was inevitable the moment Joel learned her true motivations.

“Let me go.”

Maybe if Joel didn’t have so much practice with pleading, desperate cries. Maybe if he wasn’t so attuned to final bargaining and urging attempts of letting the ending remnants of miserable life fade over slow, agonizing hours, if for no other reason than avoiding the unknown emptiness of death just a little bit longer.

If not for those factors, it might be harder for him to do what he does next.

But good thing, he’s well-practiced in this.

“You’d just come after her,” he says like the truth it is before placing a bullet right between the eyes of the threat.

Joel stalks back to the car, gun in a hand that’s just starting to shake and a heart that’s only now stuttering into a panicked, out of sync rhythm.

Ellie’s still sleeping in the backseat. Eyes closed, lips just barely parted. She looks peaceful, at ease. Her breaths come steady and certain. Thankfully, the sedative hadn’t taken enough effect to stop her breathing.

They live in an uncaring universe. The key slides into the ignition, the engine revs to life. Joel’s watching the road. Joel’s watching Ellie sleep in the backseat of an SUV. 

The streets are more clear than not in this area, the landscape dry, arid desert with the cropping of red rocks appearing in clusters, not at their full display this far north in the state. He’d take I-80 until it branched off to Route 189. He’d pray for no ambushes, for twenty year old gasoline to keep a twenty year old engine churning along. Hoping all the while that they would make it, that the claws of death would release their hold on his child, still resting, unconscious and unaware of just how close death came to her. 

Sure, the universe might not care. Not about them, not about what they’d done or where they’d come from or what it had cost. But Joel did. Joel cared about that girl in the backseat, cared about her in a way he hadn’t cared in over twenty years. He didn’t need the fucking universe to give a shit in order to keep her safe. He’d take care of that all on his own. There wasn't a chance of stopping him.