Archive of Our Own ^beta

Ellie is good at hiding. Good at hiding things. Good at hiding herself. When they played hide and seek at school, she was almost always the last one found. It did kinda make the other kids stop wanting to play with her unless she let them win sometimes, but you know. That was their problem, not hers.

Knowing how to hide helps with a lot of stuff at school. She gets caught less when she figures out the nooks and crannies that she can hide in at a new school. When you’re her size, you either need to get good at hiding or good at fighting. It’s that or people take advantage of you. She likes to think she got good at both.

She wonders sometimes if anyone ever found all the stashes of her stuff she’d had hidden around school. She hopes someone did, someone like her who was too good at hiding. It’s a nice thought, if nothing else.

The first time Joel shoves her in a hole, she almost bites him.

They’re somewhere outside of Boston. Joel seems to know where he’s going but she’s been lost since they left the city.

“What was this place?”

Joel glances at her, looking vaguely irritated. He looks like that a lot when she talks, and she’s been ignoring it and talking anyways. It’s kinda what she does. “Just offices, probably.”

“What did people do in them?”

“Mostly not much of anything.”

She opens a door in the hallway. It’s a small closet, just a few empty shelves. Nothing good. “What are you looking for?”

“I know some people who used to use this place as a cache.”

“We’re stealing their shit?”

“Trust me, they won’t miss it.”

Something screams and Ellie curses, pulling her knife out of her pocket.

Joel looks over his shoulder, then grabs her by the backpack and shoves her into the closet. “Stay here. Don’t come out till I tell you to.”

“I can help.”

“You can stay put. Last thing I need is some kid gettin’ in my way.”

She starts to argue, but he slams the door in her face.

Great.

She should have bitten him. Would have served him right. God, he’s such a fucking asshole.

Though maybe she shouldn’t… if she bites someone, can they turn? She has enough of the stuff in her to read as positive when they scan her. Does she have enough to make someone sick? Oh, shit, she’s not sure she likes that idea. No, she’s not sick. She can’t make people sick by biting them.

She can’t.

This also isn’t the most comfortable place she’s ever hidden in. She turns her flashlight on, but there’s barely enough room for her to turn around － and only if she takes her backpack off, otherwise it smacks into the shelves, loud enough to make her wince － and there really is nothing in here. She gets bored almost immediately and sits down on the floor with her bag on her lap.

She wouldn’t really choose this as a long-term hiding spot. There’s no room to stretch her legs out. It’s not great and she’s even more annoyed that she’s there in the first place. She hates not knowing what’s going on.

But she agreed that if Joel took her to the Fireflies, she’d listen to him. It’s only gonna be a couple days. She can put up with him for that long.

She flicks her knife open and presses the tip into the wall by the door, slowly carving her name into it. It might not be much of a hiding spot, but if anyone else ever uses it, they’ll know they weren’t alone.

When Joel opens the door, she seriously considers biting the hand he holds out to her anyways.

* * *

They bury Sam and Henry under a tree. It seemed like a nice spot. She wanted it to be a nice spot, even though she knows neither of them can care anymore. It just seemed right. She knows that’s what they used to do before the outbreak. And she knows it doesn’t happen much anymore. In Boston they just burned the bodies, or left them where they were.

She wishes she could have buried Riley. It didn’t seem right to leave her. Not that the Fireflies gave her a choice.

“Let’s go,” she says when they’re done.

Joel follows after a minute.

They don’t talk. She doesn’t want to talk. She just wants to get to the Fireflies and get this over with.

She’s surprised how tired she is by the end of the day. It’s probably about the same amount they walked from Boston to Bill’s town, but her arms and shoulders are sore from… from earlier and her backpack straps are digging into them hard by the end of the day.

“Ellie, here.” Joel leans over and passes her a bottle. “Take one of these.”

She turns it enough to read the label. Ibuprofen, nice. She traded three tapes, a bunch of protein bars and a pair of new socks for a bottle of these once － totally worth it. She managed to keep them hidden until they ran out. It made cramps so much more bearable.

“Where’d you get these?” she asks curiously.

“...borrowed ’em from Bill.”

She laughs despite herself. “You mean stole them from Bill.”

It helps, though. By the time she wiggles into her sleeping bag, the worst of the achiness has faded.

She tucks herself down into it, zipping it up as high as it’ll go, and then waits. When you spend your whole life with roommates, you learn how people breathe as they fall asleep. She’s had some good ones, but she’s had some really shitty ones, the type of person who would use your crying against you.

So she doesn’t let herself cry until she’s sure Joel is asleep, and even then she makes herself stay quiet.

“Ellie?”

She freezes.

“I’m － I am sorry about what happened.” He sighs. “Things like this happen and we have to… we have to move on. It’s easier if you try to keep movin’.”

She doesn’t say anything. Maybe if she stays quiet, he’ll think she’s asleep.

“Alright.” He sighs again. “Get some sleep.”

* * *

“This house is really big.”

“Mhm.”

She wanders around the room. “How many people lived here?”

Joel glances up from where he’s taping more broken scissors to a pipe. “Depends. This place is probably a hundred, maybe hundred and fifty years old.”

“Wait, really?”

She remembers Tess saying that about some of the stuff in the museum, that it was hundreds of years old. It’s hard to picture. She was bad at history in school. Everything is old, basically, besides the few things FEDRA still makes. What’s really the difference between twenty years old, or fifty years old, or a hundred years old?

“Yup,” Joel says. “So back then, one big family, but they probably had five or six kids and a whole bunch of staff.”

“Fancy.” Ellie throws her backpack a chair and stretches her arms over her head. She’s basically ready to go, and she’s bored. “How many right before the outbreak?”

“One probably.” He tears the tape off and puts the pipe away. “One very rich family with very bad taste.”

She opens the door. “Can I look around the other rooms?”

“If you want.”

There’s not much of anything. She guesses a nice place like this was picked over pretty fast. It was good for a night, though. Joel likes places where they can sleep on the second floor or higher. It’s easier to see people coming that way.

There’s a weird door in the hallway. She opens it and finds a… cupboard?

“Joel?”

“You okay?” he calls back.

“Why does this cupboard have buttons?”

He’s there a moment later, looking over her shoulder. “No, that’s a dumbwaiter.”

“A what?”

That can’t be a real word.

“It’s like a little elevator. It’s real old, original to the house. The servants would use it to send stuff upstairs.”

“Huh. Do you think I’d fit in there?”

“I think you’d probably get stuck.”

“Well, now I gotta try.”

“Ellie, wait,” Joel protests, but she’s already boosting herself into it.

She pulls her legs in and wraps her arms around them. It’s tight but she fits. “Okay, close the door now. I wanna see where it goes.”

“First of all, absolutely not.” He taps the buttons next to the door. “Second, no power. They must have retrofitted it to run on electricity. Some people would use them for laundry baskets, things like that.”

“Aw.”

“Could just leave you in there for a while, if you really want.”

She thinks about it. “Yeah, okay, I’m curious now. Close it.”

“You sure?”

She nods.

It’s dark, obviously. Tighter than most places she’d normally crawl into. Definitely not comfortable. It’s honestly kind of a letdown. It’d be cooler if she could actually ride it down.

“Okay, I’m done,” she says.

Joel doesn’t say anything.

“Joel?”

“Shh,” he says. “Stay there a moment. I heard something.”

She jolts. “Wait, let me come with you.”

“Just stay put.”

She reaches for the door, but apparently these stupid things weren’t made to be opened from inside. There’s nothing on the inside to open it, and she can’t get her fingernails into the edge enough to pry it open. What the fucking hell, Joel?

Then there’s a shot and Ellie freezes.

A moment later the door opens.

“We need to go,” Joel says. “Get your bag.”

She unfolds herself from the dumbwaiter. She’s considering biting him again, but she follows him out of the house and it’s not until they’ve put some space between them and the house that she turns on him.

“Hey, don’t ever fucking do that again.”

He actually looks surprised. “What?”

“That was a real dick move, Joel. I couldn’t open it. What if you’d gotten in trouble again and then I was just stuck in there forever?”

“Shit.” He rubs his face. “Ellie, I didn’t － I didn’t realize it didn’t open from the inside.”

“Well, it didn’t.” She turns and starts walking again. “You’re supposed to trust me.”

“Hey, hey.” He grabs her arm. “Hold on a second. I heard footsteps on the stairs and you were safe. I wouldn’t have just locked you in a box and left you there, you hear?”

She nods, slowly.

Her heart has stopped racing, at least.

“And I do trust you.”

He doesn’t sound particularly happy saying it, but Joel never sounds particularly happy saying anything, so she’ll take it.

* * *

There are a lot of things Ellie hates about dreaming about Riley. She hates that moment when she’s still half-asleep and she forgets Riley’s gone, for a moment, before fully waking up. She hates how it makes her miss Riley even more. She really fucking hates how much it makes her think about those last few hours and how they threaten to wipe out the good memories. She wants to remember the good parts.

One thing she really hates, though, is that Riley dreams often turn into infected dreams.

“Motherfucker.”

She shudders, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes. She’s sitting up on her sleeping bag, though she doesn’t remember that. It’s not the first time it’s happened.

“Ellie?” Joel sounds uncertain. When she looks at him, he’s got a gun in his hand. God, she wishes there was something for him to shoot.

She shakes her head. “Sorry, sorry. I’m fine.”

“Do you wanna… talk about it?”

He sounds about as excited to say it as Ellie was that time the dentist told her she had to get a filling.

“No.” She picks her knife up from where she dropped it on her sleeping bag, folds it, and tucks it back under the sweatshirt she’s using as a pillow. “I don’t.”

“Okay.”

She lies down again, leaving her sleeping bag open. She’s all hot and sweaty now.

She doesn’t want to close her eyes.

It’s stupid. She’s faced a bunch of them since then and she’s… okay, they still freak her out, but she handles it. And she doesn’t really even remember the moment when she got bit. There was so much going on and she was so freaked out that she didn’t even feel it. She can figure it out, looking back, but the exact moment it bit her isn’t really there.

But in her dreams, it is. It hurts in her dreams, down to the bone. And sometimes it doesn’t stop at the one bite and…

They just suck.

Joel sighs. “Alright.”

He turns the lantern back on and sits up.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“I can hear your mind racin’.” He opens his bag. “When we were kids and Tommy had nightmares, he always woke me up to sneak down to the kitchen for midnight snacks.” He pauses. “I’m assumin’ you don’t want midnight tuna.”

She sits up and scoots closer to him, sitting cross-legged in the middle of her sleeping bag. “Not so much. What would you guys eat?”

This is definitely weird, but she’s not going to be the one to stop Joel if he’s in a mood to talk about himself. She always wants to know more about him. She barely knows anything about when he was a kid, or his brother.

“Whatever our mother had baked recently, usually,” he says. He pulls out another can. “Split some peaches?”

“Sure.” She gets the dishes out of her bag and passes a bowl and a fork over. “Like bread and stuff? We used to get that on Sundays at school.”

“Seriously?” When she gives him a confused look, he elaborates, “Only Sundays?”

“Soldiers get first dibs,” she says around a mouthful of peaches. Joel kind of hates it when she talks with her mouth full but she gets eating and forgets no one’s gonna try and steal it. “Not enough wheat to go around. Plus I think some of it, you know, ‘gets lost’ until the whiskey shows up.”

“How the hell do you know that?” Joel asks.

She grins. “I eavesdrop a lot.”

“How much trouble you get in for that?”

“Not as much once I got good at it.”

He shakes his head, but he’s not really mad. She can tell. “Not usually bread, no. Biscuits and pies and cookies, that kind of thing.”

“I thought a biscuit was a kind of cookie.”

Joel makes a whole new facial expression. She’s seen him pissed and worried and irritated － especially at her － but this one’s new. It takes her a moment to realize that he’s offended.

“Not in this country,” he says firmly. “They’re a kind of bread, real fluffy and soft.”

“I’d try ‘em.”

“You would eat almost anythin’. Includin’ some shit you shouldn’t,” Joel says, and then empties the rest of the peaches into her bowl. “Here, you take these. Too late for me to eat these days.”

He does that a lot. He acts like he’s not hungry and gives her more. Especially when they’re low on food. Ellie’s pretty sure he doesn’t think she notices. She does, but she isn’t saying anything. It’s just kind of nice to have someone taking care of her. She’s never had that.

She finishes the last few slices and puts the bowl off to the side. She’ll wash them in the morning.

“Okay,” she says. “Weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten.”

“Bed now.”

She rolls her eyes, but stretches out on her sleeping bag.

Joel turns the lantern off and she listens to him lying down. It’s loud, because he’s old and shit. Sometimes in the morning it sounds like all his joints are cracking when he stretches. It’s kinda gross and cool at the same time.

“Kangaroo.”

She jerks up on her elbows. “What? How the fuck did you eat one of them? I thought they were in Australia.”

“They are.” He chuckles. “It was before. We used to ship stuff all over the world. I got a pack of jerky once at some store that had a bunch of weird crap in it. Kangaroo, crocodile. Some other shit I can’t remember.”

“Huh.” She checks to make sure her knife is where she left it, and rolls onto her side. “That’s cool, actually.”

“Mm. What about you?”

She makes a face even though she knows he can’t see it. “You made me eat that snake last week.”

“You shot it.”

“I said I was sorry.” She thinks for a minute. “Paper.”

“Why did you － do I even wanna know?”

“I got caught passing notes in class and my teacher threatened to read it to the class, so I just kind of… swallowed it.”

She’s not like super proud of it, but it’d been a note to Riley, and well. There was stuff she didn’t want other people to know in it.

“They still do that? Christ.” Joel’s sleeping bag rustles like he’s rolling over. “Well, I’ll be sure to keep the map away from you. Just in case you get hungry.”

“Fuck you, Joel.” She grins into the darkness. “Fuck you.”

* * *

Joel looks over his shoulder. “I want you to stay here and stay quiet.”

“Joel－”

“Shh.” He raises a hand. “I know, but you’re low on ammo and I’m not lettin’ you get into a fight you can’t win.”

She grits her teeth. “This is bullshit.”

“Listen.” He leans closer, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Sometimes the best thing you can do in a fight is not get into it in the first place. Do you understand?”

“No.”

“Then trust me.” He gestures at the desk. “Crawl under there and stay there while I deal with this.”

She blows out a frustrated breath. “Fine, okay.”

When she’s tucked underneath the desk, Joel shifts a bookshelf in front of it. She could shove it away if she needed to, but it blocks her from sight. If any of the clickers outside of this room wander in, they won’t be able to tell she’s there as long as she stays quiet.

She’s safe and she kind of hates it.

Joel’s right that the three bullets she has in her gun won’t go very far. And it’s not like she wants to deal with the fucking pack of clickers they stumbled into. But she doesn’t like waiting alone while Joel does it alone, either.

Also this is really tight. She had to take off her backpack to fit, and she’s really scrunched up.

By the time Joel moves the bookshelf out of the way, her legs are numb and tingling.

“That fucking sucked!” she says brightly and hobbles towards the door.

Joel sighs. “Ellie.”

“Well, it did.” She stops and wiggles her left leg for a minute. “Agh. I get… worried about you, man.”

“That’s not your job.”

“Still gonna.” She opens the door. “Oh, shit, that’s a lot of them.”

“No kiddin’.”

“I could have helped,” she mutters, picking her way around the infected bodies. Gross.

“You were safer stayin’ back. Hold up a minute.” He catches her arm. “Hey, I know you don’t like it, but if I think there’s a real chance you might get hurt, I don’t care if you’re pissed at me.”

She chews on the inside of her cheek. “Did... did you think that?”

“Yes,” he says flatly. “You have basically no ammo, you’re still favouring your wrist, and look around. What do you see?”

She does, reluctantly. “Lots of doors.” She sighs. “Lots of places they could sneak up on you. On me.”

He’s probably right about her wrist, too. She slipped four or five days ago on some wet leaves in the woods and jammed the hell out of it. Joel’s been making her keep it wrapped up, but it’s still kind of tender. It’s annoying when he’s right.

She’s still annoyed enough about it later that she lets him bribe her with extra beef jerky.

* * * 

“Careful,” Joel says.

Normally Ellie would say something sarcastic, but she can see the very sharp drop next to them and yeah, no, careful is good. She trusts him, but she hates it when he has to boost her onto something where there’s no wall or ledge to lean against. Right now it’s an attic door which, of fucking course, is in the middle of the hallway right next to the stairs. One wrong tip and she goes right over the railing.

Joel won’t let her fall, she knows, but it still makes the bottom of her stomach all weird and wobbly.

“Nice and slow,” he says, as she steadies herself. “Straighten up and then I’ll lift you the rest of the way.”

“Yep,” she agrees a little tightly.

She takes a deep breath, and takes her hands off his shoulders.

One good push and she’s pulling herself up into the attic, Joel’s hands pushing against her feet. She’s really fucking grateful when she’s firmly on the floor of the attic.

She’s not afraid of heights. But she thinks too much about falling sometimes.

“There’s a ladder,” she says when she spots it. “Hold on.”

She tips it down, and Joel winces at the thud it makes.

It’s not much of an attic, but it’s enough room to move around. Better still, the door closes and latches from the inside.

“Are we good?”

“For now.” Joel moves towards the tiny window in the middle of the attic. “C’mere.”

When she follows him, she’s not expecting to see as many people as she does.

“Oh, shit.”

“Yeah.” He’s close enough that she can feel him look at her. “So why am I making us hide right now?”

This is his new thing lately. She’ll ask why they’re doing something, and instead of just answering, he asks why she thinks they’re doing it. And he’s not just being a dick. He actually expects her to talk it through until she understands.

It’s both annoying and kind of nice.

“Because… Pittsburgh.”

She doesn’t need to say more than that for him to understand.

He nods. “There’s a lot of them, but they don’t know we’re here and we can keep it that way. We just have to be smart about it.”

“Okay.”

They’re not in the city proper this time. Joel’s a lot more paranoid now. They almost got spotted by a patrol, but they managed to stay unseen, so this is more caution than immediate danger, as far as she figures.

Of course he’s making it a lesson now.

“Ugh, why is it so hot in here?” she complains a while later. She’s lying on the floor quietly suffocating. “It’s not even that hot out.”

“Shitty insulation,” Joel says from his spot by the window. “Heat rises and the roof’s black so it absorbs it from the sun and there’s not enough ventilation to let the hot air out. I’d bet this was unfinished when the place was built and they added this floor later and didn’t bother insulating the walls.”

She pushes herself up on her elbows and stares at him. “How the hell do you know that?”

“Used to be my job to know that kind of stuff.”

“Really?”

“Mhm.”

“Huh.” She lies back flat on the floor. “I kinda figured cowboy.”

“That the only thing you know about Texas?”

“No.” She thinks about it for a long moment. “Oh, there was a place called Paris, like in France.”

“Oh, so you know two things.”

She lifts her hands and flips him off. Or she flips the bird in his general direction. Close enough. Fuck, it’s gross up here.

“Drink some water,” Joel says. “It’ll help.”

“I’m running out.”

“Here, take mine then.”

As a hiding spot goes, this one ranks in the middle. It’s big enough to walk around so none of her limbs are going numb, but it’s hot as balls. It’s dusty as fuck but there were some boxes in one of the corners and she scored some new shirts out of one labelled “Jack’s shit”. Plus, she’s with Joel.

If she has to hide somewhere, she’d rather hide with Joel.

* * *

Ellie misses showers so much. She really misses being even close to clean. She stinks like all the time now, so much that she can’t even smell it half the time. She’s just… gross constantly.

But getting not-gross is weird, too. Joel tries to find places that are more tucked away, and he disappears as much as he can when it’s her turn to get cleaned up, but it’s still getting naked in the woods. It’s weird. It’s better when there’s like a bathroom in a house or an old store or something, but that means less water and being less clean. If she wants to wash her hair, it usually means waiting until there’s a lake or pond or whatever.

She washes up as quickly as she can and pulls on some slightly cleaner clothes while her skin is still damp. Underwear, leggings, and tank top first so she’s not naked in the woods any longer than she has to be, then jeans for the pockets. She picks her gun and knife off the big rock she had them on － again, naked in the woods, she keeps them close － and tucks them into her jeans before sitting on a dead log to finish getting dressed.

She dries her hair until it isn’t dripping with an old t-shirt, then uses the damp cloth to wipe the dirt off the bottoms of her feet. Joel tells her constantly to keep her feet clean and dry. He makes her tape them up when she gets blisters, and the one time she asked why he was so fussy about it, he talked for like an hour about infections and trench foot and gangrene and a bunch of stuff she really didn’t want to think about because it was like super gross.

When she has clean socks and her shoes on, she knows she should keep getting dressed, but she stops and looks down at her arm.

For something that’s a part of her body, she doesn’t see the bite that often. She always has layers and layers on, even when it was hot, because like Joel says, if anyone saw it, they’d kill her.

Sometimes it’s weird thinking about the fact that she’s permanently wearing the imprint of someone else’s teeth. Like the rest of it is weird, too, obviously. It’s weird she got bit but didn’t get sick. But the fact that she has a mark from a person she never even know, forever, is just… strange.

They had a crooked tooth on one side. It sticks out from the curve of the others, just a little.

The other weird thing was that it didn’t hurt until Riley pointed it out. Even then, she barely felt it over the fear and the rage and the crying. And then eventually… well, she was hurting in other ways and her arm was the least of her concerns. It was only when the Fireflies locked her up that she noticed how much it ached because she had nothing else to think about.

Plus every time it closed, she opened it back up yanking on the chain. She split the skin on her wrist open a few times before they wrapped a bunch of fabric around the cuff, but even then she was bruised for days after. She can still see the mark sometimes, in good light.

Joel asked, once, if she did it to herself. It was right after Boston, when it was still red. Her sleeve slipped up when she reached for something. Not enough to show the bite, just the one from the handcuff and he saw it. She gets it. It looks like she could have and, well. Other people do.

She said no, and that was it. He didn’t ask any other questions and she didn’t want to answer them. She’s been more careful since then.

“Ellie,” Joel calls. “Hurry up.”

“I’m almost done,” she yells back and grabs a shirt. “Just getting dressed.”

It’s better when she hides her scars. Safer, at least.

* * *

Despite what her records said at school, she hadn’t actually ran away that much. There was nowhere to run anyways. It’s almost ironic that the time she for real ran away, it wasn’t even on purpose. She’s not even sure being kidnapped by Fireflies and then handed over like cargo to smugglers counts as running away. She wonders sometimes if someone put that on her record, or if they didn’t even bother and just threw it out when they realized she wasn’t coming back. If they just assumed she was dead somewhere.

It’s weird thinking about there being a version of her that’s dead.

Anyways, it’s not like she can go far. So it’s only kind of running away when she steals the horse.

But she hides in that house when she runs out of steam, and hides in that silly pink bedroom.

Joel demands, “What do you want from me?” and she hides what she really wants.

Because all she wants is for him to not leave without her. He’s stubborn and cranky and a little broken. He’s been mean to her and yelled at her and sometimes he pisses her off so badly she seriously considers punching him. He’s killed to keep her safe and he’s trusted people to keep her safe, which might be harder for him.

He laughs at her jokes, even though he acts like he doesn’t think they’re funny, he worries about how much she’s eating, he’s shown her how to make snare traps, he explains so many stupid things she’s curious about and she just － she cares about him. And she thought he cared about her.

She just wants to stay with him.

That was stupid. She was stupid.

And it’s just the humiliating icing on the humiliating cake that she can’t hide when she starts crying.

* * *

“Ellie? Ellie?”

She jerks, banging her head on the closet shelf. “Fucking － what?” she yells back.

A moment later, Joel’s boots clomp into the bedroom she’s in.

“The hell you doin’?” His footsteps stop. “Where are you?”

She waves a hand around the side of the closet door, then resettles herself to finish carving the last couple letters in the wall.

A moment later, Joel crouches in the doorway. His voice softer, he asks, “How long you been hidin’ in here?”

She shrugs. “A bit.”

“Can’t say I love it when you run off while I’m asleep.”

She carefully sits up and tucks her knife away in her pocket. “It was one room over.”

“I didn’t know that, did I?”

“Sorry.” She plays with her flashlight, clicking it on and off. “I’m not gonna run away again or anything. You don’t have to get pissed off.”

Joel’s face does something she doesn’t really understand. He hesitates for a moment, shifting his weight. “Do we gotta have this conversation in a goddamn closet?”

“Huh?”

He shakes his head and finally sits, groaning just a little. Bad knee day, she thinks. She’s never asked about it, but she notices he limps more when it’s damp and it stiffens up when he stays in one place for a while.

“Alright,” he says. “Do you understand why I got mad when you ran off back at Tommy’s?”

She really doesn’t feel like playing this game right now.

“’Cause it was stupid and I could have been hurt.”

“Yeah, you could have,” Joel says. “And I… I got angry because I was worried about you.”

She asked him what he was afraid of. And then she was kind of mean when she brought up his daughter, but she doesn’t think she was exactly wrong.

It’s weird. He’s scared of her getting hurt. But she’s never felt safer than she does with him.

“I’ll wake you up next time,” she promises.

* * *

Ellie stretches out on her sleeping bag after dinner, staring up at the stars. She likes the part of the evening when the stars first start to come out, especially when it happens when the sky is still purple and soft. Sometimes she sees paints in stores while they’re looking for supplies and she wishes she could take a set and try to paint the way the sky looks. They’d probably be all dried out, but… she wishes anyways.

“I’m gonna learn how to paint after they make the cure,” she says to the sky.

“Are you?” Joel asks from where he’s cleaning up. “You like that sort of artsy crap?”

She squirms, trying to get comfortable. “Yeah. I used to get in trouble a lot for drawing at school.”

“You doin’ it in class when you were supposed to be payin’ attention?”

“No, ’cause it was a waste of paper. We weren’t supposed to use it except for homework.”

“That’s… fuckin’ stupid.”

She sighs. “Yeah, I mean I thought so, too, but limited resource, they said.”

“No, it ain’t,” Joel says. She can hear him doing something, but she doesn’t want to twist to see. “You can recycle paper easy. All you gotta do is soak it in water and then press it into a window screen or somethin’ like that. Sarah made me do it a few times when she was little.”

“Oh.” She starts to shrug, then stops herself. “Well, FEDRA school. Surprise, it was shitty. Was it for fun or was there like a paper shortage or something?”

“Just for fun. She saw it in a book, wanted to try it. She put, uh, seeds in them once and gave them away to all her friends.”

Huh. That’s pretty cool, actually.

“Alright,” Joel says, suddenly closer. He crouches down next to her. “Let me see it.”

She raises her eyebrows. “What?”

“Ellie. C’mon.”

It would be easier to hide shit from Joel if he wasn’t so fucking observant sometimes.

“Okay, okay.” She starts to sit up, but can’t help the groan when her shoulder moves. Joel presses a hand under her back to help her up. “Okay, look, it’s not that bad.”

It’s just embarrassing. They deal with infected, other people trying to kill them, all sorts of bullshit… and she fucked up her shoulder falling out of a tree. It wasn’t even that far, but she had an armload of apples and she hit the ground funny. Between this and fucking her wrist up slipping on leaves that time… nature is just out to get her. She’s decided that’s the problem.

She unzips her hoodie and slips the arm off, wincing, then pulls the neck of her shirt over enough to show her shoulder.

“Shit,” Joel says. “Now how’d you do that?”

Ellie manages to glare at him. “I feel like you already know.”

“Was it doin’ somethin’ I told you not to do?”

“See, I was right.”

He just raises his eyebrows at her until she sighs. Then he presses his fingertips gently against her shoulder. “Well, it’s not dislocated. And it don’t feel like you broke your collarbone or anythin’. Can you move your arm if you try?”

“Yeah, it just hurts. When did you notice?”

He pulls away and she fixes her shirt so it’s not half-strangling her.

“Wouldn’t you like to know.” Then he pulls something out from behind him that she hadn’t noticed. “Good thing I picked this up today.”

“Okay. What is it?”

Joel looks a little surprised, then presses the weird rubber thing against her shoulder. Oh, it’s warm.

“Hot water bottle,” he says. “Feel a bit better?”

She sighs, holding it in place. “Oh yeah. Fuck, that is the good shit, wow. Thanks.”

He’s seen her shoulder, lectured her a little, and made her feel better, so she expects it to be done and for him to move away. They’ve been talking more since Jackson, but it just kind of seems like things are done.

But Joel hesitates. “Did you get in trouble for gettin’ hurt at school?”

“When I got hurt at school, I was doing something I should probably get in trouble for,” she says with a laugh. “But I already do dishes and you don’t have a truck to make me scrub, so I think you’re shit out of luck on that front.”

She lies down again, keeping the hot water bottle tucked against her shoulder. Seriously, that is nice.

“I wouldn’t － you’re not in trouble,” Joel says. “Not for bein’ hurt. I just want you to tell me if you get hurt.”

“Like every time?” Ellie asks. “Because I get hurt like all the time. I burned myself making the fire yesterday.”

He huffs and moves away. “Alright.”

“And I cut myself when I skinned that rabbit a few days ago and I scraped my arm when we had to crawl under that collapsed wall. Oh, and when I fell into that blackberry bush.”

“I get it.”

“I burnt my tongue the other day, too.”

“Go to sleep.”

She giggles to herself. She might actually be able to sleep now, though.

It was kind of dumb to hide it from him. He might have lectured her, but he would have made her feel better faster. He does that.

* * *

It’s one of the hardest choices Ellie’s ever had to make. She wants nothing more than to take Joel back to Jackson. They have supplies and food and Tommy and Maria would would help take care of him. She has Joel’s map and she’s pretty sure she could find her way back.

But it would take weeks, probably, at the speed they’re able to move, and it wouldn’t be an easy trip. She’s scared it would kill him.

So she’s on her own.

And she does what she does best. She hides.

She takes them as far away from the mall as she feels like she can. It takes a while. The storm covers their tracks, but it also makes it hard to travel and she keeps stopping to check on Joel, to make sure he’s not bleeding again or freezing.

She tries to wake him up. Stupid, considering the fact that he didn’t wake up when she sewed him up, but she tries anyways.

Eventually, she finds a small neighbourhood. It’s remote enough that there aren’t too many infected roaming around, but there’s enough houses that she can raid them for supplies. It’s what Joel would do, she thinks. The house she picks has two important things. A garage, so she can hide Callus, and a basement, so she can hide Joel. It’s not exactly warm, but it’s the safest she can make them.

When Callus is in the garage and Joel is in the basement, she’s fucking worn out and it’s dark and storming so hard she can barely see. She needs water and food and stuff to burn and all kinds of things, and she’s pretty much trapped.

Tomorrow, she promises, and lies on the floor next to Joel, using her backpack as a pillow.

“Please wake up,” she whispers. She doesn’t want to do this without him. She wants him to wake up and tell her things are going to be okay.

Things would be okay if he would just wake up.

* * *

Ellie knows how to hide. That was what Joel didn’t get when they argued about it. She knows the value of a good hiding place. She knows that sometimes it’s better to hide than to fight. But she didn’t want to leave him alone while she hid. She didn’t want anything to happen to him.

Now something’s happened to him and she has to leave him hidden alone to keep them alive.

Everything is so fucking hard. Finding food for herself is hard. Finding stuff she can try to feed to Joel is harder. Finding it for Callus is almost impossible. They’ve all lost weight. It’s so fucking cold. She’s freezing constantly. She worries about Callus and tries to put a blanket over him when it’s really cold, but it freaks him out. Even more, she worries about Joel and piles as many blankets over him as she can, including both their sleeping bags.

And she keeps having Riley dreams.

It’d be easier if she could sleep. She has so much to do during the day but when it gets dark all she can do is sit there staring at Joel. When she tries to sleep, all her dreams are about Riley. And they suck more than usual. Usually it’s the same thing, she dreams about Riley and eventually it turns into the mall and the infected. Since Joel got hurt, it’s… different. It’s Riley in Pittsburgh, Riley at the dam in Jackson, Riley at the university.

She feels haunted and she’s so fucking tired.

But all of that pales to how much she worries about Joel. He isn’t waking up and he’s been running a fever for days. She’s run out of things to give him to try and lower it.

The wound’s infected. And she knows it’s going to kill him.

“I’m really scared,” she whispers. It’s dark and she’s curled up in a ball on the floor next to Joel’s bed. She’s wrapped up in a blanket that isn’t doing much to keep her warm and she thinks she would be crying if she wasn’t so tired.

Joel doesn’t say anything, of course.

She keeps talking to him despite the fact it’s been weeks since she heard his voice. Part of him still hopes that if she talks enough, he might wake up. Part of her is angry he hasn’t.

“I don’t know what to fucking do,” she admits. “You’re supposed to be taking care of me.”

Oh. Apparently she isn’t too tired to cry.

* * *

Ellie wakes up and Joel isn’t there.

And she kind of freaks out.

She shoves herself to her feet, stumbling a little before she grabs the gun from next to her pillow. It’s Joel’s, technically. She used all her ammo so he gave her one of his.

Then the door opens and she spins towards it.

“What are you doin’ up?” Joel asks like she’s not pointing a gun at him.

She lets it drop to her side. “Where were you?”

Her voice shakes and she doesn’t know if she’s pissed or scared or what. Maybe all of it.

Joel gestures with the pile of wood in his arms, then goes over to drop it next to the fireplace. He adds another piece to the fire, then stands.

“It was gettin’ cold,” he says.

Ellie’s breath is still coming fast. It hurts when she breathes, a sharpness in her ribcage that she’s pretty sure means something is broken in there. Something’s wrong with her ankle, like she came down on it badly at some point. She doesn’t remember. She’s more bruise than not, her head is throbbing, and her throat feels like she’s been swallowing glass.

“You’re a dick,” she says.

Fuck it. Fuck it, if he’s going to scare her shitless like that, this is going to be a thing they do now. He started it anyways.

She crosses to him, limping a little, and hugs him.

“Oh,” Joel says softly. “Oh, hell. I’m sorry. I thought you’d still be asleep when I got back.”

“I wasn’t,” she says and presses her face into his shirt. She can feel herself shaking. She can also feel the way Joel presses his hand against her back, rubbing between her shoulders.

“Yeah, I know the feelin’.” He says it low, almost like he doesn’t mean for her to hear. “C’mon, you’re freezin’.”

She’s warmer than she’s been in weeks, actually. Joel found her some clean clothes, something she hasn’t bothered to do since she replaced her purple sweatshirt. Sweats, two pairs of socks, and a thick sweater. She normally needs jeans for her knife and things, but they’re not going anywhere for a bit so it’s fine. It’s nice, honestly. She hasn’t worn pajamas in months.

She nods and goes back to her spot in front of the fire.

She tries to pretend she isn’t glad when Joel sits next to her.

“How’s it doing?” she asks.

He looks down like he’s almost forgotten he was stabbed. “I’m fine, kiddo. You let me worry about you now.”

She exhales, pushing her hair out of her face. It’s dry now, at least. Joel had to help her wash it. There was blood and… other stuff… in it, but she couldn’t do it herself, between her ribs and how stiff her shoulder is. It’s the one she fell on months ago, and it didn’t appreciate being slammed into the bars of the fucking cage David put her in.

Joel was good at washing her hair. Careful with the sore spots on her head. She would have thought that strange, once upon a time, before she knew about Sarah. Knowing about Sarah makes a lot of things about him make so much more sense. She doesn’t really have a great picture in her head about what parents are like, but Joel… he seems like he would have been a really good dad.

She leans over, as carefully as she can, and pulls her backpack towards her. Her hair might be dry, but it’s a knotted mess and if she puts it up like that, it’s going to make her headache worse. She’s got a brush in her bag, buried towards the bottom. Joel found it for her after she got frustrated at combing the knots out with her fingers and just cut a chunk out. He said she’d end up bald if she kept that up.

“Your hair’s longer,” Joel says.

“It’s only been a few weeks,” she says. “Can’t be that much longer.”

“Maybe I just haven’t seen it down in a while. It, uh. It looks nice.”

She grins a little, feeling the split in her lip pull. “No, it doesn’t. I probably need to cut it soon.”

“I’ll let you keep the next pair of scissors I find. You don’t like it long?”

She shrugs and starts to brush it out. It helps, a little, to put herself back together. Washing it helped, too. When she gets… lost… she keeps making herself remember the way Joel touched her scalp, so carefully. It makes it easier not to think about the other fingers that dug into her hair.

“It gets tangled more when it’s long. I’m not good at braiding or anything so it just gets in the way a lot.”

Joel nods. “Tess used to use oil in hers.  Olive oil, usually. She said the FEDRA shampoo made it dry.”

“Yeah, that shit sucked,” Ellie agrees. “Did you get any from that time they made it minty?”

He makes a face. “Yeah. Smelled like a goddamn candy cane for months.”

“I got it in my eye once. It burned for like two weeks, I swear.” She scrunches her nose up, remembering. She regrets it immediately. It hurts so much it makes her eyes water, and she wipes her sleeve under them. “When did you get to Boston?”

She wants him to keep talking, to keep asking her questions and telling her things about himself. It helps to make her stop thinking.

“Uh, fifteen years ago, I think,” Joel says, but he’s leaning forward. He touches her chin, gently turning her face towards him. “Your nose broken?”

“I dunno.” She lets him keep touching her face even though it’s kind of weird. It’s a nice weird. It’s just new. “Do you remember like four years ago when we stopped getting eggs for like a year? Do you know what that was about?”

“Bird flu. Most of the chickens died.” He touches her nose gently, running his thumb down it. “It don’t feel too bad. Might be a slight fracture.”

“Okay.” She doesn’t really care. It just hurts. “We got so much fucking oatmeal after that. I got so sick of it.”

Joel smiles, just a little. “It’s better with some sugar.”

“You used to use sugar on oatmeal?” She sighs. “God, that sounds good.”

“When was the last time you ate?”

Her breath catches.

Joel’s looking at her, soft, worried. He’s been looking at her a lot since he found her, and he keeps touching her like he’s checking to make sure she’s still there. He washed the blood off her face last night when she was shaking too much to do it and rubbed her back until she fell asleep.

He found her. He split his hands open and probably opened his wound back up and she doesn’t know what else, and she doesn’t care, because he came and he found her and he saved her when she thought she would be lost forever.

She can feel the weight of that on her shoulders like a heavy jacket, warm and soothing, and she’s scared. She’s scared that if she tells him everything that feeling will go away.

“Yesterday,” she says reluctantly.

He flinches, just slightly.

“Deer,” she rushes to add. “I shot a deer.”

Joel leans forward. “Ellie, it wouldn’t － it wouldn’t be your fault, if you… had. Alright? None of this was your fault.”

Her eyes are watering again.

He touches her shoulder and she leans into it. “D’you wanna tell me anythin’ else?”

She’s said enough that she’s pretty sure he knows what happened. A lot of it he probably figured out from her being covered in blood and bruises. But she’s kept a lot of it inside of her, like a knot in her stomach, like something rotting.

After, her hands were covered in so much blood that it took three tries to do her jeans back up before her fingers stopped slipping off the button.

Ellie presses her fingers against her mouth. She feels like she might throw up if she says it. She thinks she might break if she doesn’t say it.

“He kept trying to convince me to join them,” she starts shakily.

* * *

She’s been keeping Joel’s picture a secret, hiding it in a book in her backpack to keep it safe. She’s been thinking about giving it to him a lot lately, especially when he was hurt, but after that, too. For a long time, she was afraid that he’d be mad at her for taking it. She just… she thought he should have it.

She found the picture of her and Riley weeks after she was bit, hidden in one of the pockets of her backpack. Riley must have snuck it in there when she wasn’t looking.

She cried when she found it. Sobbed big, ugly chest-wracking sobs in the shitty room the Fireflies had her chained up in, sobbed until her head hurt and her eyes swelled up. She thought it had been lost for good, thrown away when they cleaned out her dorm room. It was hard to look at, especially at first, but she’s so glad to have it.

Joel’s grief is different She does get that. But she thinks they’re not so different with how they treat their grief. He didn’t tell her about Sarah. She didn’t tell him about Riley. It’s a hard thing to talk about. You have to remember not just the part where they died, but the part where you loved them. Remembering that is almost as hard.

He’s been burying that for a long time and she didn’t think he was ready, but… he is now, she thinks. He talks about Sarah more, in little ways and big ways.

She’s thinking about telling him about Riley. But she’s going to give him the picture first. Today, before they get to the hospital.

* * *

When Joel tells her it didn’t work, she cries and turns away from him to hide it.

Jackson helps, some. She hates it, some. It’s really busy and there’s always something to do, but she’s somehow managed to get worse at being around people. She blames Joel once when she’s feeling grumpy about it. She calls him a bad influence and then, when guilt flashes across his face, keeps ranting that his grouchiness is wearing off her until he realizes she didn’t mean it.

She doesn’t actually think it’s his fault that she’s bad at people. That isn’t new. She’s glad when he grins and teases her back.

It’s not really that she hates Jackson. It’s… honestly kind of awesome. Joel says it isn’t exactly how the world worked before, but it’s so much better than Boston. He worries a lot, but people are so nice. People keep giving her clothes they don’t need anymore, or things for their house, just because they’re new and they don’t really have anything.

It’s weird, but it’s cool.

What she hates is how strange she feels here. She was already weird in Boston, but everyone was kinda weird in Boston. Maybe people are weird here, too, but she hasn’t gotten used to their kind of weird and she sticks out.

She doesn’t fit. She curses too much, laughs too loud in the canteen or at the movies, accidentally freaks some of the other kids out one time when she stretches and her shirt lifts up and shows the gun she has in her waistband.

She’s pretty sure the only person who gets it is Joel. He’s… trying. He’s definitely trying. He’s probably as out of practice as she is, though.

But they have a home. Together.

So she’ll keep trying too, for that.

And it is really cool seeing Joel, like, do stuff. Stuff that isn’t killing infected or fighting people trying to kill them or hunting food or obsessively taping scissors to pipes. He’s starting to teach her guitar, but there’s other stuff, too. Joel has hobbies now.

And people are nervous around him sometimes, but they keep asking him to do stuff and he just knows how to do it. Like fixing stuff, doors and steps and roofs, she gets, because he used to build houses. But there’s so much more.

Case in point, it’s two in the morning and they’re in the barn taking care of a sick foal.

“Here, tilt it up a little more,” Joel says and gently presses her arm until she’s holding the bottle how he wants it. “Good.”

“He’s eating a lot,” she says, barely above a whisper. The foal has basically climbed into her lap. It’s heavy where it’s leaning on her, but it was so cold. She’s just glad it’s warming up.

“Poor little fella was hungry.” Joel rests his hand on her back. “You good?”

“I’m good. Is he… is he gonna be okay? Do you think his mom will start feeding him again?”

He sighs. “I don’t think so, kiddo. It just… it happens sometimes.”

“But we’ll take care of him and he’ll be okay, right?”

“We’ll take care of him,” Joel agrees. “And… well, I hope so.”

The foal finishes the bottle and she lets it rest its head in her lap. Tommy said it was too small, and it picked up some kind of bug. It’s struggling. She knows the feeling.

“Has Tommy named him?” she asks, stroking the foal’s forehead. It’s so soft.

“Not yet. Your legs are gonna go numb,” Joel says with a grin. “C’mon now, let’s let him get some rest.”

Her legs are kinda already asleep. Joel helps her shift the foal over and then has to help her stand up.

She goes over to lean on the side of the stall and shake the pins and needles out of her legs.

“You got any ideas?” Joel asks. He’s cleaning up, putting a blanket over the foal and getting the stuff together.

“Hm…” She takes a step over to try and make her leg stop tingling, moving her hand along the top of the stall wall… and a splinter jams into her palm. “Ah, fuck.”

“Absolutely not,” Joel says without looking up. “You are not namin’ this poor horse fuck. His life is already hard enough.”

She giggles and pulls the splinter out with her fingernails. “Okay, come on, that would be a great name.”

“Everyone would definitely know you named it,” he mutters.

There’s a little storage room in the stables, for extra horseshoes and tack and stuff, and someone dragged a small couch into it. It’s not used a ton, but it’s nice for nights like this. They’re right next to the foal’s stall and they’ll check on him, but Ellie is glad to sit on something other than hay for a bit.

“Where’d you learn so much about horses anyways?” she asks, settling down next to Joel.

“Same place Tommy did. Our grandparents raised them. We’d spend summers with them.”

“That sounds cool.” She yawns. “Do I gotta go to school tomorrow?”

“Nah.” Joel reaches over and brushes her bangs out of her face. He lingers there, stroking her hair. She leans her head against the back of the couch and lets her eyes close. “It’s late and you’ve been up all night. You’ll just be annoyin’.”

She laughs. “Hey. Fuck you.”

“You likin’ it?”

She shrugs. “It’s not FEDRA school. It’s okay.”

“Your teacher likes you,” Joel says. “The other kids do, too, you know.”

“They think I’m weird.” She doesn’t mean to say it, but she’s tired and, well, it’s Joel. Joel makes her feel safe.

“Well, you are weird.”

She flips him off without opening her eyes.

“They don’t,” he says. “The way you grew up and the things you’ve done are just different. None of them travelled like you have. Bet they think you’re cool. I think you’re cool.”

“I think you have to say that,” she mumbles. It’s getting harder to follow the conversation. “’Cause you’re, you know…”

She can’t remember what the rest of her sentence was going to be.

* * *

It’s easier to hide her nightmares from Joel when she’s not sleeping two feet away from him anymore.

She doesn’t really know why she’s trying to hide them. It’s not like he didn’t see her having them for months. She just doesn’t want him to worry about her. Sometimes it seems like all he does is worry about her.

Ellie remembers last year, sitting in that stupid pink bedroom, and she remembers thinking how much she wanted this. Not the life the girl who wrote that diary had, exactly, because god she was never going to care about clothes that much… or boys like that at all… but the parts where she talked about her family. Being annoyed at her mom or embarrassed about by her dad.

She didn’t really care where it happened. She didn’t even care what it meant, if it meant Jackson or a cabin in the woods in the middle of nowhere, or never settling down. But she wanted to stay with Joel and be… well, a family.

And she knows Joel wants to give her as close to what he thinks a normal life should be. He thinks that’s his job or something.

She doesn’t even think he would want those things if she wasn’t there.

But she thinks maybe she’s not capable of being normal.

And she doesn’t want Joel to know.

It’s not that bad, anyways. It’s only a couple times a week. It’s only a couple times a month that she’s too scared to sleep. Maybe once a week.

It’s fine.

It’s fine.

It’s fine until Joel finds her hiding in her closet one night slightly hyperventilating and then it’s not fine.

“Ellie,” he says, still holding the doorknob.

She thinks it’s not the first time he’s said her name, but she’s struggling to hear anything over the blood rushing in her ears.

“Oh, baby girl,” he says and he hasn’t called her that in months.

Not since David hurt her.

He kneels down － bad knee day, she thinks instinctively. And the thing is, they spent a year mostly with just each other. She knows how he moves and how to read him. When he reaches for her, she goes easy into his arms, because it’s always easy when Joel hugs her.

She wraps her arms around his neck and presses her face into his shoulder.

“You scared the crap out of me, kiddo,” he says, but he’s rubbing her back so she doesn’t think he’s really mad.

“Huh?”

“You weren’t in your bed.”

She frowns. “You check on me at night?”

She usually sleeps with her door open. Joel installed a lock on it a little bit after they moved in, in case she wanted to lock it, but she likes it better when she can hear the house noises. And the Joel noises.

He chuckles, low and soft. “Yeah. Every time I get up.”

“Oh.”

“That don’t bother you, does it?” he asks uncertainly, like he’s second-guessing himself.

“No, it’s okay.”

Ellie stayed over at Maria and Tommy’s house once when Tommy and Joel were out of town on a hunting trip. She could have stayed home, but she knew it’d make Joel feel better if she wasn’t alone, and Maria said they could have what she called a “girls’ night” and that sounded fun, so Ellie agreed. And it was. They did hair stuff and Maria taught her how to make a tripwire and they watched a dumb movie.

But she caught Maria doing the same thing, looking around her door to check on her late in the night.

Maria had laughed, but her voice was a little sad when she said it was “a mom thing”.

“Think you wanna get out of the closet yet?”

She exhales. “No.”

“Alright, make room then.”

Her closet’s pretty big and still pretty empty. She has a lot more clothes now than she ever had at school, but that still isn’t enough to fill it, especially not when she also has a dresser.

There’s still not exactly a lot of room, especially not because Joel’s knee is definitely bugging him and he stretches his leg out in front of him as much as he can.

“You don’t have to stay,” she says, though she’s already leaning her head on his shoulder.

“I’m fine. Do you wanna tell me what happened?”

She’s glad it’s dark and he can’t see her face. “Not really.”

“This happenin’ a lot?”

“Sometimes,” she admits. “I’ve been － I’ve been having a lot of bad dreams.”

Joel smooths a hand over her hair. “Yeah, I figured.”

It’s kind of annoying that he knows her so well.

“Sorry to hear that, kiddo,” he says. “You don’t have to hide it, you know.”

“I don’t － I’m trying not to be weird.”

Joel scoffs. “Ellie, I barely slept for years. Tommy used to get twitchy when there were fireworks. Before the outbreak. Bill… well. He was Bill. Hell, Tess almost shot me once when I came home early from a job and surprised her.”

He doesn’t talk about Tess very often. Ellie can tell how much he misses her, and it’s hard for Joel to talk about the people he misses, even now. He does it more, especially with Sarah, especially with her, but it’s still hard for him.

“Look,” he says. “You don’t know what people used to be like, so you don’t see it. Everyone in this town － and outside of it － deals with this shit in different ways. I can promise you that you are not the only person sittin’ in a closet sometimes.”

“Could be worse, I guess.”

There’s a guy on their street who drinks like… a lot. He isn’t mean or anything, but he’s basically always at least a little drunk. Ellie drops food off for him sometimes. Once when she was eavesdropping, she heard Maria say he was drinking himself to death, little by little. She wasn't even being like a bitch about it. She just sounded sad.

“Yeah,” Joel agrees. “Used to know this guy who decided that the infected wouldn’t attack him if he didn’t shower.”

“Ever?”

“Ever.”

“Gross.”

“Mhm. So. How ‘bout you stop beatin’ yourself up for something everyone is dealin’ with?”

She sighs, rubbing her eyes. She’s so tired.

A few moments later, Joel shifts, groaning slightly. “If you’re fallin’ asleep, you think we could not be in your closet?”

“Okay.”

Ellie stands up and reaches back to help him up.

“Alright, bed.”

She gets back into bed, and Joel tugs at her blankets until they’re straightened out again. She doesn’t remember the tossing and turning, but they were all in a knot when she woke up. Mostly she realized because she was tangled in them, and when she tried to get out of bed, she tripped over them and ended up on the floor.

Then she couldn’t breathe and she was already on the floor and for some reason her closet seemed safe.

She’s not really sure about the logic, honestly. Maybe it’s just that if she closed the door, she knew nothing was going to be in there besides her.

“Joel?”

“Yeah?”

“Could you stay for a little bit?”

The mattress dips with his weight. “Was already plannin’ on it.”

Joel starts rubbing her back again. He’s good at that. Ellie tries to picture him with Sarah as a baby sometimes, because she kind of figures that’s how he got so good at it. It’s hard to imagine though. Not so much the Joel being a dad part － that makes more sense than anything she knows － but the baby part. She hasn’t spent like any time around babies and she’s not really sure how they, like… work.

“All my bad dreams are getting mixed up,” she says softly. “I was in the mall in Boston. The one I got bit in. Riley and I got attacked by one of them.”

She slips back into an old habit, calling the infected “them” instead of the names Joel and Tess taught her. It was always “them” or “those things” when she talked about them before she got bit. A lot of people at school did that, like if they didn’t say infected, they weren’t as scary.

“It jumped at me and I fell,” she says. “Like in real life, too. That’s when it bit me. You know what’s weird is I didn’t even feel it.”

Joel doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then, carefully, “It didn’t hurt?”

He’s never asked about her bite.

“Not at first.” She knows she brought it up, but she realizes she does not want to talk about that. “So in the dream, I end up on the floor. But then the infected isn’t… it turns into Sam. And I keep trying to get him off me but he’s really strong and I keep － I keep trying to scream but I can’t.”

Joel keeps rubbing her back as she talks.

“I can’t scream,” she says. “And then it’s － it’s not Sam anymore.”

She’s breathing too hard again.

When she dreams about David, when she wakes up with the feeling of hands on her wrists and against her stomach, the worst part isn’t him. That’s… bad. What he did to her was bad and she really hates dreaming about it. But the worst part is that every time she has a dream about David, in it, she knows, somehow, that everyone she cares about is dead. Everyone she’s already lost, Joel, Tommy, Maria, everyone.

In her dreams, he takes everything away from her.

It’s the thing she’s the most afraid of. It’s the thing David wanted. At first, he tried to make her feel special, like she was the only one who could understand him. When that didn’t work, he tried to make her feel like she needed him, like he was the only one who could protect her. He wanted her to be alone and so afraid she’d do anything he wanted.

She’s had a lot of time to think about it, which also kind of fucking sucks, but she thinks that the end of it wasn’t all that different from what he was doing all along. He tried to do something to control her, to break her down her down to nothing. She fought back and it pissed him off and he tried to punish her for it.

She didn’t let him and she’s not alone.

But when she wakes up, for an awful moment, it feels true.

It’s all wrapped up and messy in her brain now and it’s… it’s a lot.

“I’m sorry, baby,” Joel says.

“Can you tell me a story?”

She knows she’s probably too old to ask for someone to tell her stories after a nightmare. But she likes Joel’s stories and… well, no one really did that when she was little anyways.

“’Bout what?”

You, she thinks.

She sighs. “Hm. Something that’ll embarrass Tommy if I bring it up.”

Joel chuckles. “Well, that don’t narrow it down much. But did I ever tell you about him stealin' my truck when he was fifteen?”

* * *

For once, she isn’t trying to hide. She’s hanging out with the foal, sitting in the corner of his stall, when she hears Joel’s voice. She’s going to stand up and say hi, but she has a couple hundred pounds of foal flopped across her lap and she’s kind of pinned.

Then she hears Tommy say her name.

And, okay, she’s curious enough to eavesdrop.

“Nice to see Ellie settling in a bit,” Tommy says.

She presses back against the stall wall. Tommy is really nice, honestly, and she had kind of a hard time with that. When they first got to Jackson for real, he was always kind to her. But Tommy is Joel’s family, like for real family. There aren’t many of those around anymore. It kind of makes them special, she thinks. She kept having this thought that being around Tommy would remind Joel that she’s not family.

Joel snorts. “There a ‘but’ comin’ after that? She get herself in trouble again?”

Ellie would be more offended if she hadn’t just gotten extra KP duty for teaching some of the kids at school her knife throwing trick. She didn’t see the big deal. Only two of them had to get stitches.

“Not that I know of,” Tommy says wryly. “Just Maria and me, we noticed she don’t seem to be sleepin’ too well lately.”

Joel sighs. “Yeah. She’s been through… too much.”

Ellie flushes, ducking a little lower. She trusts Joel not to tell Tommy anything she wouldn’t want told, but being talked about like this is weird.

“Alright, I gotta say it,” Tommy says.

“No, you don’t.”

“I gotta say it once, and then I’ll leave it,” Tommy argues. “I think you should tell her the truth.”

The truth? About what?

“No,” Joel says immediately. “Tommy, she already blames herself for － for everything. If I tell her there’s no vaccine because she would’ve had to die for it, she won’t be able to live with herself. I won’t put that on her.”

Ellie stops breathing.

She hears them take a couple horses out of the barn, but she doesn’t move. She might not ever be able to move again.

She can’t － she can’t believe it. No. It can’t be true. Marlene wouldn’t have agreed to that. Or if she had, she would have told Ellie first. She would have said goodbye, at least, because it’s not like Ellie would have said no.

…she wouldn’t have said no.

She doesn’t think she would have said no.

Ellie covers her mouth with her hands. Maybe she could fix this. Maybe she could steal a horse and sneak out and find them again. Maybe they could still do it.

Even as she thinks it, though, she knows it wouldn’t work. The Fireflies wouldn’t have just let her go.

Whatever Joel did, it’s permanent.

She presses her face into the foal’s side and sobs.

* * *

Ellie is good at hiding things. She buries it, this secret she wasn’t supposed to know, and she pretends to be okay. She pretends she’s sleeping. She pretends she isn’t having nightmares when she does manage to sleep. She pretends she’s supposed to be alive.

“These are really ugly plates,” she says, holding one up.

“Ugly or not, they’re still useful,” Maria says, then actually turns and looks. “Oof, those are bad.”

She’s helping Maria set up a house for a new family in Jackson. They can pick their own stuff later, but they’re getting some basics now. Clothes, blankets, soap, that kind of stuff.

“Oh, Ellie, do you want these? They’re your size and those are getting pretty worn at the knees.”

Maria’s holding a pair of jeans

“Sure.” She takes them and lets them unfold. “How do you know everyone’s size like that?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you’ve never asked me what size I wear, but you give me clothes all the time and they fit.”

She’s even gone up a size in jeans since she got to Jackson. She lost a lot of weight over the winter, and she’s finally gained it back. And maybe a little more, which is… kind of weird still. She sorta has hips now, which she only noticed when she squeezed through a window and it was a lot tighter than it would have been a year ago.

Still no boobs, though. Of course.

Maria laughs. “It’s not a magic power or something. I asked Joel.”

“Oh.”

Right. That makes sense. He pays attention to those kind of things.

Ellie inhales shakily. “Hey, can I have those ugly plates?”

“Probably yes, but why?”

She considers lying, but Maria likes her better than Joel so she won’t tell if Ellie doesn’t want her to. It’s not that Joel and Maria hate each other or anything, but they rub each other the wrong way sometimes. They’re both a little stubborn. A lot stubborn.

“I kinda think if I smashed a couple dozen plates into a wall I’d feel better,” Ellie says honestly.

Maria walks over to her, takes her keys out of her pocket, and takes one off the ring. “Use the old pool. You know where that is, right? I’ll come pick you up in an hour.”

Besides some other garbage, there’s nothing much in the old pool building. Which means the echo is really loud.

It makes screaming as she smashes the plates a little more satisfying, weirdly.

By the time Maria comes into the pool building, Ellie’s worn herself out. She’s hoping it’s not super obvious she’s been crying for like an hour. It probably is.

Maria hugs her, but doesn’t ask any questions, and that’s nice. She’s not ready to talk about it.

She helps Maria drop the boxes off at the house the family will be moving into and then they go back to Maria and Tommy’s place. She could go home, but she likes hanging out with Maria, and Maria’s been busy lately.

Ellie is not expecting Joel to be in the living room.

“Hey, kiddo,” he says.

“Hey.”

He frowns a little.

Ah, crap. She’s hoarser than she realized.

Maria goes over to Tommy, who’s got the cradle next to him. “How’d the little man sleep?”

“Like a baby,” he replies, which makes them both smile. Ellie doesn’t really get it. The kid’s only a couple months old but from what she’s seen, babies don’t sleep particularly well. “He’s gettin’ hungry though.”

“Oh, are you?” Maria says to the baby.

Joel immediately makes an excuse to go to the kitchen. Tommy chuckles, squeezes Maria’s shoulder, and follows him.

“Can I stay?” Ellie asks.

“Sure.”

Ellie’s never really known anyone who’s had a baby. She knew a girl who got pregnant a couple years ago, but they made her leave school before it was born. She took the weird awkward class so like she knows what she’s supposed to know, but it’s different seeing it.

She didn’t realize it was so noisy when a baby ate. He’s almost as loud as the foal, with all the little grunting noises.

“Does it feel weird?” she asks.

“A little bit,” Maria says. “I didn’t breastfeed the first time. Formula was easier to get and I went back to work pretty fast. And I hated pumping when I tried it in the hospital.”

“What the fuck is pumping?”

Maria flashes a grin at her. “A machine that takes the milk out so you can feed it to the baby later or so someone else can feed it to them. They were good for a lot of people, but it didn’t work for me.”

That sounds weird as hell.

Ellie picks at her cuticles. “So what did you used to do with them all day? Because like… like you would go to work, right? And that was like far away from your house.”

“My husband actually stayed home with Kevin,” Maria says, stroking the top of the baby’s head. “We were just starting to send him to daycare a couple times a week.”

“Daycare.”

“Places where people would take care of kids. Like school, sort of, for kids who were too little.”

Ellie nods. “How come Jackson doesn’t have one of them?”

There’s a decent amount of little kids in Jackson and she doesn’t think they’re all in school yet. Plus school is only three days a week. People don’t have jobs the way they used to, she knows, but everyone has work to do and you can’t bring a little kid to everything that needs to be done, like patrol or farm stuff.

Maria raises an eyebrow. “Ask the council that.”

It takes longer than Ellie expects to feed a baby. Seems kind of boring to her, honestly. But then she’s bad at sitting still. That’s why her nails are always so fucked up. Though they aren’t actually as bad as usual. Joel keeps making her use this lanolin lotion at night and it helps with the hangnails and little cuts she gets from working.

After the baby’s done eating and doing the burping thing, Ellie leans forward. “Can I hold him?”

“Of course you can,” Maria says. “Do you remember how?”

It’s been a while. She held him when he was first born but he was really little then and honestly it kind of freaked her out. But he’s bigger now and she’s curious.

She nods, sitting further back on the couch. “Support his head.”

“You got it.”

He’s heavier than she expects. He’s getting a little belly and rolls on his arms, which Ellie thinks is kind of the best thing ever. All babies should be fat. She saw some of the babies in the FEDRA orphanage once or twice, and they didn’t look like him.

“Hey, there,” she says softly. The baby makes a sleepy noise and she grins.

Tommy comes back into the living room a moment later, passing Maria a glass of water. “Alright, I’m heading out for now. Want me to bring home dinner when I’m done?”

“Absolutely,” Maria agrees.

Having basically slunk around the door when he realized Maria was done feeding the baby, Joel leans against the arm of the couch. Ellie tries to pretend she isn’t amused by how awkward he is. She’s supposed to still be mad at him. She is still mad at him. She isn’t supposed to think him being embarrassed about boobs is fucking hilarious.

After Tommy leaves, Maria gives her a look.

Uh-oh. She knows that look. It usually means chores.

“Ellie. How much would I have to bribe you to watch him for thirty minutes while I shower?”

Oh, that’s not so bad.

“No, yeah, I can do that,” she agrees. He’s basically asleep anyways.

“There’s an extra bag of beef jerky in the kitchen with your name on it,” Maria says and practically bolts.

Joel chuckles softly, easing onto the couch next to her. “Negotiate higher next time, kiddo. I used to pay Tommy ten bucks an hour for baby-sitting.”

She glances over. “Was that like a lot?”

“It was when he was eighteen and all he did was fall asleep on my couch.”

She bends down a little and inhales next to the top of the baby’s head. “He smells kinda good.”

“Yeah,” Joel says. “They do.”

He looks kind of sad. Ellie thinks she gets it. It’s not that he isn’t happy for Tommy or anything. He is. He built the cradle in the living room. Ellie helped stain it, but it was all his idea. It made Maria cry when he gave it to them. And then she called him an asshole. And then she hugged him.

Pregnancy makes people weird.

It’s just it makes him remember Sarah. And it’s not just that he misses her. It’s that sometimes stuff makes him think about who Sarah could have been, like being a mom.

It isn’t exactly the same, but Ellie’s been thinking a lot about her mom since the baby was born. Maria’s a good mom. Ellie comes over and helps fold laundry and stuff like once a week －Joel’s idea － and she likes hanging out with them. But seeing Maria be a mom makes her wonder what it’d be like to have grown up knowing her mom. Especially when it came to things like getting her first period or kissing Riley or, you know, getting bit by an infected.

Or just being there every night. She has that now, and she’s glad. She’s way more than glad, even though… well.

So. She gets it, kind of.

The baby’s face scrunches up.

Oh shit.

“Hey, hey, don’t…”

And then he starts crying. Loud.

Oh, fuck, what does she do?

“Joel?” She turns towards him, not panicking as the baby cries even harder. “Joel!”

He chuckles. “Okay, okay. Give him here.”

Joel takes the baby from her, holding him easy.

“Sorry,” she says. “I’ve never held a baby before him.”

“You’re fine, kiddo.” Joel’s doing this little rocking thing, kinda like he does when he hugs her, and patting the baby on the back. The crying stops, thank god. “Been a few years for me, too.”

He hasn’t ever held the baby. Tommy asked, once, but Joel just shook his head.

Ellie pulls her knees up in front of her chest, resting her chin on them. “You’re really good at that.”

“Lots of practice,” he says, and it only sounds like it hurts a little.

She nods. “I think it’s gonna be cool when he gets bigger and can like do stuff. I can teach him stuff, right?”

“Everythin’ except that trick you do with your knife,” Joel says, which, seriously, it’s not that big of a deal. “But yeah, that’s somethin’ you get to do.”

“And when you sneak him treats I’ll pretend not to notice,” Maria says from the doorway. She’s got clean clothes on, and looks a lot more relaxed. “That’s what aunts and uncles do.”

Ellie looks between Joel and Maria. “Aunt?”

Maria smiles. “Well, cousin, technically, but you’re old enough that aunt is what I thought he could call you. That's what my family always did. Unless you don’t want to.”

“No!” She winces a little. She didn’t mean to blurt that out. “I mean, no, I think it’d be cool.”

“Want me to take him?” Maria asks Joel.

“Yes, ma’am.” Joel passes him over, a lot more smoothly than Ellie did. His hand lingers on the baby’s head a moment. “And we’ll get out of your hair for the day. Let you get some rest.”

Ellie puts her shoes on in the entryway, then starts to head home with Joel. She could find an excuse to leave, like she’s been doing a lot lately, but she just doesn’t want to.

Joel reaches over and snags her into a loose hug, pulling her in against his side.

“What was that for?” she asks, curious.

“Just glad to have you around.”

* * *

After Riley died, Ellie’s emotions were… weird. She’s not gonna apologize for that. Plus there was that thing where she kept waiting to die, which is a weird thing to live with, and to keep living with. There was a lot of yelling. The Fireflies threatened to drug her once if she didn’t stop screaming.

She thought it was strange that sometimes she’d be so fucking angry and then she wouldn’t be able to stop crying and then sometimes she’d just stare at the wall and feel empty inside. She was never able to tell which would come next.

That’s kind of what she feels like now.

Sometimes she just wants to break things. But she’s scared if she lets herself do that too often, it won’t be enough to break things.

She’s scared she might break herself.

Sometimes when her sleeves ride up, Joel looks at her wrists like he’s making sure she hasn’t put any new scars on them. That isn’t something she’s hiding, but she knows there are other ways to self-destruct. And sometimes she thinks about it. Wonders if that would make her less angry, less sad.

Then sometimes she isn’t sad or angry at all. Like when she’s holding Nicky. When she picks him up － and she’s gotten a lot better at it － he makes happy little noises and then immediately tries to yank her hair out. Sometimes he falls asleep with his cheek against her shoulder and she can feel him breathing.

She kinda loves the kid. She didn’t realize how much she would.

If someone tried to take him away, she would destroy them.

But she could have made the world safer for him.

She has a nightmare about him getting infected, and wakes up right as she launches herself onto the floor.

“Fuck,” she groans softly.

She rubs her hands over her face. At least she knows where she is. Joel got this little light for her room that comes on automatically when it’s dark. She’s pretty sure those used to be for way little kids, but it helps. She gets confused sometimes when she wakes up and it’s too dark.

“Fuck it,” she whispers and gets up.

She sneaks across the hallway and pushes Joel’s door open. “Joel?”

“What?” he asks groggily.

“Can I…?”

“Of course.”

She tiptoes across his bedroom floor and around to the other side of his bed. When she curls up next to him, Joel lifts his arm so she can slip in tighter against his side and put her head on his shoulder.

“You good?”

She sighs. “I’m good.”

She’s not really. But this is enough for now.

“I know what I want to name the foal,” she says.

“Oh?”

“Yeah.” She’s been trying different names, but nothing’s fit. “Duck.”

Joel is pretending not to be amused. It’d be more convincing if she couldn’t feel him failing to hold back silent laughter. “Because I said no to Fuck?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

He smooths a hand over her hair. “Alright. If you want him to be Duck, he can be Duck.”

“It’s a good fucking name.”

* * *

For the second time, Ellie accidentally eavesdrops. She’s in the pantry behind the door, looking for the pack of dried apricots she hid a while ago, when she hears Tommy and Joel in the kitchen. And she realizes very quickly they don’t know she’s there.

And they’re talking about her again.

“Did you tell her somethin’?” Joel asks.

“Of course I didn’t,” Tommy says and he sounds offended. “I made you a promise.”

Joel sighs. “Sorry. I’m just… worried. She seems off.”

“Well, I wouldn’t throw that in her face and leave her to flounder. You know I care about her. I wouldn’t do that to her.”

Ellie turns, thinking maybe she could see them through the crack in the door － and her elbow slams into a metal cannister, knocking it onto the floor and scattering dried beans everywhere.

Shit.

A moment later, Joel looks around the door. “You been in there the whole time?”

She grabs the container off the ground. “Um…”

Behind him, she sees Tommy quietly slipping out the back door.

Joel sighs and leans against the pantry doorway. “What did you hear?”

“Enough,” she says, holding the container against her chest. “I… I know.”

Joel’s quiet for a moment. “How long?”

“A while.”

“Alright,” Joel says. “Before you start yellin’ at me, do you want to get out of the pantry? Or are we going to have another fight in a closet?”

“Seems to be what we do,” she mumbles, but she can’t pull the rage to the surface right now. It’s there. It’s always there. But it’s not what’s going to drown her.

“Okay,” he says. “Don’t throw any of the peaches at me. You like those.”

He’s expecting her to throw stuff at him.

She can tell he’s really not expecting her to burst into tears and throw herself at him.

“Okay, okay,” he says as she sobs into his shirt. “I’ve got you.”

“It isn’t fair.”

She’s been trying so hard to bury this and be okay. She’s been trying not to think about choices and what she would have done if they’d asked her and that someone who was supposed to care about her was going to let her die without even saying goodbye. The things she did, the people she hurt, the people who died for the cure － for her. It’s so fucking much and she wants to scream at Joel and she wants him to make everything better because that’s what he always does.

They promised each other an after. She wanted the after as much as she wanted the cure. Maybe more, if she’s honest with herself. She wanted to make the world better so that she and Joel could make a life in it. A peaceful, normal life.

And she’s so fucking mad at Joel, especially for lying to her. But he’s been protecting her basically since he met her. She knows him. She knows why he used to the things he did - because he wanted to protect Tommy. She’s seen him beat men to death with his bare hands for her. He took people apart to find her when David took her. He didn’t tell her, but she saw the way his knuckles were bruised and split and the way his hand was sore for days after.

She hates what he did, but she’s also not surprised. He was never going to let her die.

It isn’t fair that she was supposed to ask him to.

He cups his hand over the back of her head. “No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t.”

Ellie thinks that Joel would tear the world apart to keep her safe. She thinks he might have. She wears the weight of that around her shoulders and some days it’s like a warm jacket. Some days it feels like it’s drowning her.

She thinks this might be what being loved feels like.

* * *

Jackson has fewer obvious places to hide, but Ellie’s always been good at finding spots she could slip away to. She hasn’t had to as much lately. She has a bedroom that’s all hers and Joel only comes into it without knocking when he hears her crying at night and only because she’s usually too out of it to hear him.

But she can’t be home right now.

The problem is she’s realized how much she loves Jackson. She loves her bedroom and the paint Joel scavenged to get rid of the ugly pink, turning it the softest blue that reminds her of the sky on soft summer days. She loves that she got to help save a baby horse’s life, that he got strong and healthy partly because her hands helped feed him.

She loves that she hasn’t been really, actually hungry in months. Maybe for the first time in her entire life. No one fights over food or makes other people feel bad for being hungry. She loves that she gets to help take care of people who can’t hunt or help with farming. It feels good, and Joel looks at her so proudly when she brings in a rabbit or pheasant or something to someone who would be going hungry in a place like Boston.

She really loves how proud Joel is of her, like, in general. It’s a little embarrassing how proud of her he is. Especially when she didn’t even do the actual special thing she was supposed to do. It’s silly that he should be proud of her for how well she hunts or her art or when she gets good grades. But he is, and he’s not even quiet about it the way she expects.

He brags about her when he doesn’t think she’s around to hear it. He has drawings she’s done framed on the walls in their house, in his room. He bonded with Maria talking about how helpful Ellie is and she didn’t think that would ever happen.

She loves Jackson and she doesn’t think she deserves it.

She was supposed to do more than this, wasn’t she?

Wasn’t she?

It’s not a great day, and she slips away from school at lunch. She slept badly the night before and the world is too sharp. She’s too sharp. She has too many broken edges and she’s afraid to let them rub up against the other kids. It’s not fair to them.

She thinks about going home, but Joel might be there, and she doesn’t want to rub her sharp edges up against him, either. Hurting him doesn’t make her feel better. It just makes her feel bad.

So she slips into one of her new hiding places － the old pool. She stole the key from Maria a couple weeks ago, and she’s been hiding here sometimes, especially when it’s cold or rainy. It’s both today.

She stretches out on one of the old benches and takes a comic out of her backpack. She just needs a little bit of time alone.

Honestly and truly, she doesn’t mean to fall asleep.

Someone touches her and she wakes up screaming.

“No, don’t, please don’t－”

“Easy, Ellie. Honey, it’s okay. It's just me.”

Tommy?

Slowly, she becomes aware of where she is. It’s a lot darker than she remembers it being and she’s a lot more on the floor than she remembers being.

“Ow,” she says petulantly, realizing her hip and elbow are throbbing dully.

“Are you okay?” Tommy demands, shoving a lantern in her face. “Are you hurt?”

She pushes his arm away. “Fuck off, I’m fine.”

“Then you sit your ass there and do not move,” Tommy snaps.

Wait, why is he mad at her?

While he walks away, she fumbles her way back onto the bench － the floor is fucking cold, man － and digs her flashlight out of her backpack. She’s fuzzy with sleep and it wasn’t exactly a graceful way to wake up. Normally when she has nightmares like that it takes longer to come back to herself and things have been very abrupt.

Also Tommy is like never mad at her. Tommy is easy-going and hard to ruffle and normally a really good ally in her quest to annoy the crap out of Joel. What is going on?

He talks into the radio for a while, too far away for her to hear.

“Did Joel tell you to find me?” she asks when he comes back.

“No, Maria did, because she realized you stole her key and we couldn’t find you anywhere else,” Tommy says. “What the hell, kid?”

“What?” she asks, confused. “I didn’t run away or anything.”

“Do you have any idea what time it is?”

“No?” She looks around. Okay, it’s really dark. “Did I miss dinner or something?”

“It’s after fuckin’ midnight, Ellie!”

Oh, shit.

Oh, shit.

She jerks to her feet and grabs her backpack. “Oh, fuck. I need to go home. Is Joel freaking out?”

Something about that makes Tommy deflate and he sits, hard, on the bench she was sleeping on. “I just radioed him that you’re safe.”

“Fuck.” She sits next to him. There’s no point in leaving, then. Jackson isn’t that big. Joel’s going to find her in a few minutes. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep.” She squints at the window of the pool building. “Why are all the lights still on?”

Usually by this late, they’ve shut everything almost everything down to save power and Jackson is a lot darker.

Tommy stares at her. “You went missing. People are out lookin’ for you. Did you hit your head when you fell off that bench?”

Okay, she’s going to ignore that jab because he’s like worried or whatever.

“Why?” she asks.

“God.” He scrubs his hands over his face. “You have no idea how loved you are, do you?”

It makes her breath catch in her chest. “Don’t be a dick.”

She already knows disappearing, accidentally or otherwise, will have worried Joel. She doesn’t need the extra guilt right now.

“Do you know why you’re immune?” Tommy asks suddenly. “Did the Fireflies even tell you that before they tried to cut your brain open?”

She jolts. “They knew why?”

He lets out a loud exhale. “I’m gonna kill Joel. He said they told him that they thought you’ve had cordyceps in you since you were born. There’s not a lot of ways that could happen. Do you get that?”

“No,” she says honestly. She hasn’t been able to ask Joel this kind of stuff.

“What we figure is your mother probably got bit right before you were born,” Tommy says, more gently. “And if anyone had known that, they would have killed you. You lived because your mama loved you so much that she kept that secret to keep you safe.”

“Oh,” she whispers.

She really didn’t know that.

“An entire town is worried about you right now,” Tommy says. “There are search parties outside of the wall in case you snuck off. Joel’s having a goddamn heart attack.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not yellin’ at you － okay, I am a little,” he corrects himself. “Because you scared the shit out of me and Maria, too. But what I’m tryin’ to say is you’re gonna have to get used to the idea that people love you, honey.”

She exhales and pretends she isn’t crying a little. “I really didn’t mean to worry everyone.”

Tommy bumps his shoulder against hers. “I know. Hey, it’s good practice for me anyway. I’m out of practice dealing with teenager drama. Gotta get used to it again before Nicky grows up.”

She tries to smile but it doesn’t really work. “Sarah probably didn’t have bullshit like this.”

It comes out meaner than she wants it to, and she’s glad Tommy’s the one who hears it instead of Joel. Ellie doesn’t like when she gets mean like that. It makes it feel like there’s something wrong in her, like the infection in her brain but worse, something dark that spreads and hurts people.

“She did,” Tommy says, surprising her. “Some of it was different, but we’ve all got shit. Her mom wasn’t around, you know. She left when Sarah was a baby.”

“But she had Joel,” Ellie says.

Tommy smiles. “Yeah. But back then everyone expected kids to have two parents. That was hard for her sometimes. And she didn’t really look like him. So sometimes people said stupid stuff and that bothered her.”

“People would say stuff?”

“Yeah, that they didn’t think she was his kid or other shit.”

Huh. That’s weird to think about. People usually do assume she’s Joel’s kid which is… complicated… but easier, in some ways.

It’s stupid anyways. Tommy’s son looks more like Maria, but she thinks it’s pretty obvious Tommy’s his dad. Tommy looks at him like a dad.

“Ellie!”

She’s barely on her feet before Joel is sweeping her up into a hug.

“Sorry,” she says into his shoulder. “I didn’t mean to.”

“It’s okay, it’s okay.” He’s shaking, a little, and holding her so tightly her ribs ache. “Are you alright?”

“I just fell asleep. Kinda feel like a fucking idiot right now.”

Joel chuckles, that kind of raw laugh she hasn’t heard in a while. “Good, you are one.”

She’s probably gonna get lectured later, she realizes, but she can feel the relief pouring off Joel like actual warmth.

Tommy might be right. She might have to get used to this.

It’s scary.

But maybe she can learn how to be loved.

* * *

Ellie holds Nicky up to the top of the stall door. “And this is Duck. You two are basically the same age. Hate to say it, but you’re slacking. Look at him. He’s already walking around. And you’ve got half as many legs to figure out!”

She’s baby-sitting for the afternoon. Maria and Tommy have suspiciously disappeared at the same time and she’s trying not to think about it too much.

“I’ll let you ride him when you get the hang of not falling over when you’re sitting up,” she says. “Probably gotta grow into your head a little more first.”

Joel keeps wincing every time she mentions his head is big. Apparently you’re not supposed to talk about that kind of thing. But Tommy pretends not to laugh and Maria talks about percentages and brain development and all that stuff that means his head being big is normal.

And like seriously, it’s funny. He can’t touch the top of his head. Sometimes when he’s sitting in her lap, she holds his arms up against his head and just stays like that until Joel notices and drops his face into his hand.

The next place she takes him is to the old fire station. They don’t really use it, but it’s got a cool little tower on top and it’s the tallest building in Jackson.

“You see that lake over there?” She points at it and the baby grabs at her hand. He keeps trying to steal the spare hair tie off her wrist. “I learned to swim there. When you’re bigger, we’ll take you fishing and you can learn there, too.”

She touches her thumb to his palm and he closes his little fist around her thumb.

“Yeah, you’re gonna like living here,” she says, nuzzling her nose against the little curls on his head. “Look, the school’s over there. I don’t think you’re gonna hate it like I used to. It’s way better than the one I went to. And if any of the other kids give you shit, I’ll beat their asses for you.”

Ellie pauses. He’s six months old and she doesn’t think they start talking that little, but… maybe she should ask Joel when babies do start talking.

“I probably shouldn’t curse so much around you,” she admits. “At least not until you’re old enough to not get me in trouble with your mom.”

The last place they go, because he is only six months old and naptime is coming up quick, is the orchard.

“I kinda think this is the coolest place in Jackson,” she says to Nicky. “We can just come in here and pick stuff and eat it and no one cares. Isn’t that the coolest fu-freaking thing?”

She grabs a basket from the shed and heads into the orchard, letting Nicky sit on her hip.

“Actually,” she says a moment later, realizing. “Maybe it’s cooler that you’re not gonna know that’s cool.”

This is just gonna be how he grows up, in a place where people help each other and care about each other. He’s not going to have to fight for food, or worry about rationing, or ever even once have to realize that sometimes people eat each other.

She tried to save the world. She didn’t, not by dying for a vaccine like she was supposed to.

But she’s here, helping to make Jackson work. And it does work, which still amazes her as much as it did when she was fourteen. She has this idea that maybe one day, maybe not even until Nicky is grown up, they could help other people figure out how to do this, too. It might be a dumb idea, but she thinks it could happen, some day.

Maybe there are other ways to save the world.

She’s trying to believe it.

She balances the basket on a kind of flat tree branch and fills it with peaches off the low branches. Sometimes she climbs up into the branches or on a ladder, but if she puts Nicky down he tries to eat grass and she doesn’t want to sit there and stop him today.

When it’s full, she carries it back to the shed on the edge of the orchard and sets the basket and Nicky on the little table in it. Then she pulls the canvas bag out of her backpack and fills it with the peaches so she can pack them into her bag without them getting all bruised up.

The last peach disappears into the bag and Nicky makes a distressed baby noise.

“What?” she asks. “Oh, do you want one of these?”

She takes one out and lets him have it. He immediately starts gumming on it.

“Good luck with that,” she says, grinning, and puts her backpack on. “I don’t think you’re getting that far with no teeth, kiddo.”

It keeps him busy, though, as they head back to the house.

“Hey,” she calls, kicking her shoes off. Joel should be home by now. He was out earlier working on a roof, but she doesn’t think he had too much else to do today. He always tries to be home early enough that they can have dinner together, whether they cook at home or go to the canteen. It’s important to him. Ellie isn’t sure why, but she thinks it might be a Sarah thing.

“Kitchen,” Joel calls back.

“Who’s that?” she whispers to Nicky. He grins around his peach. “Yeah, you know who that is, don’t you?”

Nicky likes her. Like a lot. He doesn’t cry like at all when she’s watching him, not even when Maria or Tommy leave, and he smiles at her all the time.

But Joel is probably his favourite person in the world after his parents.

As soon as he sees Joel, he drops his peach － Ellie catches it by instinct and immediately regrets it － and reaches out towards him.

“You two have a good time?” Joel asks. He wipes his hands on a towel and takes Nicky from her. “Well, hello to you, too.”

“I think so,” Ellie says, tossing the unnervingly wet peach onto the counter and washing her hands. She takes over chopping the vegetables Joel was cutting up for dinner. “There’s more peaches in my backpack. Less drooled on ones.”

“You angling for a cobbler for dessert?” Joel asks with a grin.

“Yeah, duh.”

It’s probably one of her favourite things he makes. She’d never had anything like that before they came here. They didn’t really do dessert at school. Hell, they barely got fresh fruit.

“You finish cutting those up for me while I put this little fella here down for his nap, and I’ll consider it.”

Which basically means yes. Ellie grins.

Joel takes Nicky into the other room, where they’ve got a little cot thing for him. Ellie usually takes him for a couple hours a week, and it’s nice to have when Tommy and Maria come over, even though they’re just across the street.

She’s just finished the vegetables when she hears Joel’s voice, low, from the living room.

He’s been teaching her to play guitar, but trying to get him to sing is like pulling teeth. He’ll hum notes or the melody of a song here and there, to show her what something is supposed to sound like, but he still thinks she’s going to laugh at him.

She wouldn’t.

Ellie goes and leans against the wall in the hallway, hiding just out of sight of the living room. He’s singing something soft, more mumbled than not. He has a nice voice. She’ll have to tell him that some day.

She exhales silently. She’s not okay all the time. She still has more closet nightmares than she wishes she did. Though now instead of ending up in her closet, she ends up in Joel’s room which is a whole lot better. She has regrets and anger and grief.

But she’s trying. And she’s going to keep trying. And this… this is home. This is where people love her and this is the life she wants. She doesn't have to hide any that more, especially not from him.

Because Nicky’s got the right idea.

Joel is her favourite person in the world, too.