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The first time is just so she’ll stop asking.
“-please, please, please, please-”
“Fine,” he snaps, mad at himself for breaking but unable to take it any longer. “One game, and then you shut up.”
“Deal,” the kid says sweetly, all sugar and spice and everything nice now that she’s getting her way.
Little brat.
“Do you even know what Uno is?” He asks dubiously, sitting back and crossing his arms over his chest.
“It’s a card game,” she says easily, fanning out the cards with a proprietary air and examining them with something like satisfaction. “Duh.”
“Duh,” he mocks, knowing it’s beneath him.
The kid ignores him and primly sets to shuffling the cards.
She promptly drops them, sending them fluttering in all directions.
*
Joel has to admit he’s at least enjoying the sight of the kid grumbling to herself as she hunts down all of the cards. It’ll serve her right, maybe teach her a lesson on trying to strong arm him into things.
“You missed one,” he calls helpfully when she goes to move to a new section of the floor.
She gives him a middle finger in response.
*
“Don’t give me a plus 4 aga- you fucker!”
“You’re the one who wanted to play,” he says with absolutely no mercy, already lining up another draw 4 for his next turn. “You brought this on yourself.”
The kid grumbles something like “fucking bring a fucking stabbing on you, old man” that he elects to ignore.
She is, predictably, turning out to be a sore loser.
She all but slaps down a card, glaring at him, so busy mean mugging him that she doesn’t pay attention to hiding the cards in her hand, almost all blue with only a couple of red and yellows. He decides to hold his plus 4. He won’t need it for now.
When he lays a green on top of the stack, he actually thinks she might attack him.
*
To the little pest’s credit, she plays to the end. He’d half-expected her to whine and complain and refuse to finish, the way Sar-
The way kids do when they’re not used to losing at things.
“You can quit anytime,” he reminds her helpfully, when he’s got 3 cards to what must be at least 20 for her.
“I’m gonna win,” she says stubbornly. “You just fucking wait, asshole. I can feel it. I’m gonna win.”
“If you say so,” he says in a tone meant to needle her.
From the glare she gives him, it works.
*
It’s possible he lays down his final card with a little less grace than might be desirable in a 56 year old man playing a children’s card game with a teenager.
Still, the sight of her angry face as she slams her own cards down with frustration is too good to feel entirely nothing about.
“Another round?” He asks in a deliberate attempt to provoke her.
The kid smacks the box across the room.
He’s learned a few things about Ellie Wiliams entirely against his will in the time they’ve been stuck together. She likes Chef Boyardee Ravioli, she hates whatever the fuck a green ration is, she talks like she’s fillibustering, and she has absolutely no respect for personal space.
Tonight he’s learning she’s a goddamn Monopoly shark.
“Pay up,” she says smugly, holding her hand out. “Rent’s due, motherfucker.”
He pretends he’s not nursing as much of a grudge as he is as he counts out mildly water-warped paper money, the box she found in an old store intact but not in the best condition.
He wonders if being a piece of shit landlord was a class for FEDRA brats or if the skill just comes naturally to her.
*
“Is this really how stuff worked?” She asks when she’s about bankrupted him. He would quit playing, but he thinks that might actually get him more backtalk than just riding the loss to the end. “People owned all the stuff and then other people had to pay ‘em?”
He snorts, amused despite himself, and he regrets it when he sees Ellie perk up with pleasure at amusing him.
“Pretty much,” he says, maturely not gloating when she finally lands on one of his few properties and has to hand back some of the cash she’s gotten. She hands it back over with a flippancy that says she expects it to be back in her hands soon enough, and he makes a mental note that tomorrow’s soundtrack for the drive will be classic rock and classic rock alone to teach her a lesson on winning with grace and respecting her elders.
Not that she’ll be his problem for much longer, but somebody should knock her down a few pegs.
“And people just…let it happen?” She asks, sounding mystified. “FEDRA owns all the shit now, and the Fireflies are always blowing their shit up.”
“You sound pretty calm about that for someone who was gonna grow up to be FEDRA,” he observes, gritting his teeth as he hands back over the money he just got, Ellie accepting it smugly and even counting it out in what’s clearly meant to make a point. When she’s satisfied she hasn’t been shorted, she sets her money neatly into its stacks and then looks up at him.
“You think I wanted to do that?” She asks, with all of the blase resignation of a government paper pusher 30 years deep. “I got dropped off at a fucking orphanage as a baby, man. The fuck else was I supposed to do?”
Fair enough.
“Didn’t seem to stop you joining the Fireflies later,” he observes, cursing when she narrowly misses landing on another of his scarce properties. “What?” He asks, not looking up and grabbing the dice for his own roll. “‘Upholding law and order’ didn’t do it for you? Had to get into recreational terrorism with the other-”
He fully startles when she rises, flipping the board as she does. She stands over him, fists clenched, face thunderous.
“You don’t know shit about me, asshole,” she spits. “So shut the fuck up.”
She turns to storm away, and he barely manages to recover enough from the unexpected explosion of teenaged temper to call out before she’s out of sight.
“Don’t go far,” he orders. “It ain’t safe.”
“Fuck you,” she shouts back.
Still, she only goes as far as a crumbled old wall before dropping down, her ponytail still in sight.
*
“Hey,” he calls over an hour later when he’s heated up supper, when she’s still resolutely sulking.
(And he’s absolutely not feeling a stupid niggling of guilt about apparently hurting her feelings.) (He’s not.)
(He just might as well give her a whole can of Chef Boyardee to herself.)
“Food’s ready.”
“Fuck off,” she calls back, still in her snit. He rolls his eyes.
“Gonna get cold, you don’t come and eat it.”
He doesn’t need great hearing to put sounds to the little flicker of a tantrum that prompts, but she pushes herself up and storms over, snatching the plate away. She drops to the ground and refuses to look at him before shoveling it in like a feral cat.
He eats his can of beans without comment.
*
She all but flings the plate back at him when she’s done, and that is too far to ignore.
“Hey,” he says sharply, and her chin rises defiantly. “There ain’t no sense getting pissy at me-”
“Then don’t talk about shit you don’t know about,” she says, glaring, which is rich coming from her of all people. His expression must convey as much, because her scowl grows darker. “I didn’t choose this either, dickhead. I got this,” she lifts her bitten arm, “and then I got fucking kidnapped and sent across the country with you. At least you got to choose to do this.”
He narrows his eyes just slightly, not entirely thrilled to be hearing just now that he might be partaking in trafficking.
“You said you were helping find the ‘cure’.”
“I am,” she says with a huff, bringing her legs up and wrapping her arms around them. “I just…” She looks down, anger apparently cooling. “I didn’t get a choice not to. There’s nowhere else I can go now. It’s the Fireflies or fucking nothing. I didn’t ask for this.”
The Neither did I that he’s reminded her of before is on the tip of his tongue, but inconveniently, he knows their circumstances aren’t the same. He hasn’t bothered to think beyond the delivery he’s been hired to finish, but it’s true. After he leaves her with the Fireflies, he gets to leave, period. It ain’t his freaky blood they need.
The kid’s the one who’s staring down the barrel of being a captive labrat for God knows how long.
“They’ll probably get it over as soon as possible,” he offers gruffly, collecting their dishes, and Ellie looks up at him, seeming surprised by the statement. “Annoying as you are, they’ll probably be begging you to leave in a week. You can go wherever the fuck you want after that.”
“Asshole,” she says, throwing a fistful of grass in his general direction.
Still, she looks lighter at the possibility that there’s an after for her, and he decides very firmly that it doesn’t make him feel anything at all.
*
“Alright,” she says after the dishes are done, dropping down in front of him with the Monopoly box. “Round 2. I didn’t get to finish kicking your ass last time.”
He should refuse. He’s not being paid to provide entertainment.
Instead, though, he starts counting out paper money.
“Anybody ever tell you about not counting your eggs before they’ve hatched?” He asks, tossing her money to her in a flutter of paper.
“Good thing we’re not playing with eggs, then,” Ellie says, unconcerned, already snatching up her top hat piece and putting it on the starting square. She gives his money a significant look. “Wouldn’t get attached to any of that, if I were you. It’s all about to be mine again.”
*
Justice prevails, and he wipes the floor with her on their second game.
The game is more elaborate than anything he would usually elect to play at Ellie’s
harassment
request, but as a “sorry you watched a kid be shot in front of you and then a grown man shoot himself in the head
also
in front of you” apology gesture goes after the shitshow of Kansas City, it’s kind of the least he can do.
It’s also the first time he’s seen her be truly interested in anything in days.
So. Catan it is.
If they can stop bickering over the rules first, that is.
“No, because it says-”
He snatches the booklet back when she tries to take it, holding it out of her reach with a forbidding arm to cage her back. She ignores the clear silent order to stop, leaning over his arm and stretching, almost overbalancing and saving herself only by grabbing his shoulder. He shoves her back up and then moves the booklet–torn, water-stained, and almost unreadable–back out of her reach.
“It says,” he says loudly, leaning back and putting a hand against her forehead to shove her back, “that you don’t put a number on the desert tiles-”
“But that doesn’t make sense!” She cries, ducking enough to slip loose of his hand and then managing to get her fingers on the corner of the booklet. “You can trade sand!”
“For what?” He scoffs. “You can’t do shit with sand.”
“Sand has silica,” she says, like he’s the densest motherfucker she’s ever had the misfortune to speak with. “Silica is used in electronics including microchips.” She says it like she’s repeating something she read, and he rolls his eyes.
“You must’ve heard wrong,” he says, using her moment of self-importance to slip the booklet back out of her grasp. “Ain’t no trading in sand.”
“Just put the number on the thing,” Ellie demands, giving up the fight for the rulebook and plonking down a number chip decisively.
He picks it up immediately.
“That ain’t how you play.”
They devolve into a staring contest battle of wills.
*
After he’s finally managed to get it through Ellie’s thick skull that he actually is capable of reading and understanding the rules for a board game, they start playing, and he barely resists the urge to snort at how unsubtly Ellie is jockeying for the longest road card, putting all of her focus on trying to steal it after he managed to earn it without meaning to.
He interrupts her latest branch of patchy infrastructure with another road section of his own and ignores the growl he gets for it.
*
“I’ll trade you an ore for a wood,” Ellie says on her next turn, with a meek sweetness that doesn’t remotely suit her.
Eyeing the two ore and two wheat cards she has ready to turn into a city, he gives her a look.
“Not on your life.”
“Two wood for an ore!” She counters, shoving them at his face. “C’mon, you need wood for a settlement.”
“And I’ve got plenty,” he says, batting her hands away.
“C’mon, man,” she wheedles. “You have all the fucking ore.”
“Should have paid more attention to the pieces than trying to build your roads,” he says without sympathy.
Ellie scowls, resentfully turning over four wood cards for an ore from the bank.
*
“I think Sam would have liked this.”
He looks at her sharply, half suspecting a very underhanded trick, but she’s looking at the cards like she’s looking through them.
“He showed me how to play something called tic tac toe.” She looks up at him then. “Do you know that one?”
It’s said so sincerely, as if there’s a chance that he doesn’t, that he almost wants to smile. It’s strange, still, finding the patches in her knowledge. She’s a little reliquary of bits and pieces of pop culture from Before, scraps gathered from God knows where, and she presents them like they could be new to him, like she’s offering to let him in on something interesting because she thinks he might like it.
It’s more endearing than he will ever be able to admit.
“Played it a time or two,” he says mildly, as if he and Tommy hadn’t spent more than a few church services as kids scrawling X’s and O’s on prayer request forms when their grandmother wasn’t looking.
“It’s fun,” Ellie says, but her tone doesn’t reflect it. “It’s not fair. That he doesn’t get to play it anymore.”
His reflex is to redirect, to tell her that not getting to play tic tac toe of all fucking things isn’t the worst thing a death can cause. She’s a kid. She hasn’t known the full extent of what pain can be just yet. She doesn’t know the way it can hollow a person right out, leave an aching, festering emptiness in them. She’s just a kid who lost another kid who might have been a friend.
But he’s silenced by the very same thing: she’s just a kid who lost another kid who might have been a friend.
That’s life, comes to him as a possible response. It’s true, after all. The world is shitty and brutal and unpredictable. She’ll have plenty of other people ripped away from her if she keeps insisting on trying to reach out to them. The only way to not have to feel what she’s feeling right now is to make her peace with being alone, or with choosing a very small number of people to care about and putting all of her energy into keeping them alive, with the full knowledge that even that might not be enough, that the universe could still reach out and rip them away.
But even in his own head, that’s too far, too cruel to put on a 14 year old who’s already had to see so much ugliness.
“Trade you a wood for an ore,” he says, holding the card out.
As condolences go, it’s shit, but it’s about all he’s got to offer.
From the small smile he gets as she takes the card, it might almost be enough.
“But what if we stack them up into threes?” Ellie asks, examining the board critically. “Then they could be emperors.”
He smiles at that slightly, unable to help it.
“Ain’t no emperors in checkers,” he tells her, jumping two of her pieces. “Just kings.”
“But why?” She asks. “We didn’t have kings and shit. We did presidents.”
“Pretty sure we didn’t come up with checkers,” he says. “And no,” he says, seeing the question coming, “I don’t know who did.”
“Probably some weird old person in Europe,” she says decisively. “And we told them to fuck off in the revolution thing we did. So we should get to play with whatever rules we want.”
“Technically, I think we only told England to fuck off,” he says, trying not to be as amused as he is by History Lessons With Ellie, which tend to employ more creative license than a history teacher might prefer. “They might not have come up with checkers.”
“Eh,” Ellie says with a shrug. “All the other ones had emperors. They’d think it’s an improvement.” Without waiting for further input from him, she puts a third checker on top of her king after making it back across the board.
Rolling his eyes, he decides playing along is probably his best course of action. They got snowed in at an old cabin right after crossing the border into Wyoming, and they’ll probably be stuck here for a few days yet. He turns one of his kings into an emperor as well.
“Alright then,” he says, sitting back. “Then what can an emperor do that a king can’t?”
Smiling, Ellie tells him all about it.
*
He will never tell her under pain of death, but playing checkers with emperor pieces is an improvement on the game, though they end up having to limit themselves to two emperors each. He does have to try and draw the line at necromancer pieces, though.
“How do you even know that word?” He asks, mid-argument about why a five checker stack shouldn’t have the ability to summon “dead” pieces back onto the board if they “kill” an enemy’s with a jump.
“Read it in a book,” she says dismissively. “And it’s a good idea! Wouldn’t it be more fun if you can bring ‘em back? We won’t get crazy. You get one necromancer, and you can still kill the necromancer by jumping over it.”
“How long are you trying to make this game last?” He asks with a raised eyebrow.
Ellie gives a significant look to the window, the outside a sheer blanket of white as the wind howls.
“You got somewhere to be, partner?” She drawls in her terrible impression of his accent. “‘Cause it looks mighty shitty out there to me.”
He sighs.
“Fine,” he says, definitively not smiling when Ellie perks up at once, delighted at getting her way. “But if it sucks, we’re going back to no necromancer.”
Ellie’s smile says she’s very confident in her suggestion.
*
Their checker game lasts so long that Ellie eventually drops off while they’re playing. She began drooping a good hour after introducing necromancer pieces, but in true kid fashion, she protested the entire time that she wasn’t “tired, Joel, some of us aren’t a thousand years old” even as she slowly ended up horizontal, her head cushioned on her arm. When her “thinking about” her next move stretches into her rolling to lay on her belly, very definitely asleep, he huffs an amused noise, pulling the board away before she headbutts a necromancer piece.
“Not tired, huh?” He asks her softly.
She doesn’t respond beyond a long sigh as she settles, burrowing her face into the crook of her elbow.
He rises, glad he doesn’t have a smartass audience as he grunts and stretches out his back. Jesus, but he’d kill for a real chair that isn’t full of mice. He staggers for the first few steps, far too old for sitting on the floor for so long, but once he gets going, he does a rotation of the cabin, peeking out of the windows. The storm has quieted down some, but the wind is still going, snowflakes drifting down. If he remembers correctly, it’ll be a new moon tonight, which means they should be able to have a fire at least for a while. He hears a soft noise and turns, but it’s only Ellie, her face crinkled with a bad turn in her dreams.
Before he thinks about it, he’s across the room, kneeling at her side and reaching out to rest a hand on her back.
He freezes.
This isn’t his role. He’s not here to pat her on the back if she has a bad dream. She’s cargo. He won’t make her suffer if he doesn't’ have to, but it’s not his place to-
She flinches in her sleep, letting out a soft, distressed noise.
“Sh,” he says without meaning to. “You’re alright.”
Her face smooths slightly, and hesitating for a moment, he pats her back gently, wondering if it’s even something she would find soothing. He hasn’t heard details about her past, but he doesn’t think that the average FEDRA orphanage minder would have the time or patience or incentive to sit with a kid having a bad dream.
She rolls, and he jumps slightly when she wraps around his leg, making a soft noise in her sleep before she settles.
Well, he thinks, realizing that leaving now might wake her up if he jostles her too much, which would raise the question of why he was so close in the first place, fuck.
In slow, slow increments, he sits down, straightening his leg out carefully so he won’t shove her away. She makes a soft noise of protest at any movement at all, but when he shushes her again, she settles, curled against his leg. When he feels a draft blow though, he reaches out for her sleeping bag, unlooping it and shaking it out before spreading it over her.
Resigned to his fate, he looks to the checkerboard, wondering if he can come up with a few innovations of his own.
Ellie finds it when he’s getting firewood, the first time she’s actually let him out of her sight in days, ever since they staggered away into the forest together after he found her bloody and dazed outside of a burning building. He has a heart attack at finding her missing now only to almost trip over her when he bursts into a room to find her sitting on the floor, a dusty and faded box in her hand.
“Hey,” he exhales on a breath in apology for startling her, though she doesn’t vocalize it, still eerily silent. “Sorry. I thought-” It doesn’t matter what he thought. There’s no point to fussing now.
Ellie holds the box up for his inspection, and he takes it. The lid is faded from so many years of sunlight, but the red and white striped letters are clear enough: Candy Land.
He looks back to her, more than slightly surprised that she wandered enough to find it. She’s been a silent little doll since he found her in that shithole of a town. He’s cleaned her up, tended to the wounds as best he can, and held her through her nightmares. Still, she’s just blinked blearily at the world, lost in her own head. He hasn’t mentioned it, hasn’t tried to make her talk if quiet is what she needs right now.
But Jesus Christ does he miss his little chatterbox.
“C’mon, you,” he says softly, urging her up. “Get back where it’s warm, alright?”
She grimaces when she rises, and he hates that he’s limited in how much he can help her. The antibiotics–and where in the fuck she managed to get them is something he’d desperately like the full story of–have helped, but a body likes to take its sweet ass time, and he hasn’t exactly had ideal conditions to convalesce in.
He and Ellie shuffle back down the hallway to the little main room, where the small fire in the fireplace is dying out, only a few glowing embers left, casting the entire room in shifting, unpredictable shadows. Even a week ago, Ellie would have tended it diligently, kept it burning, proud to be contributing and happy to play with fire with his permission, but for now, he counts it as a win that she’s present enough to heed a gentle nudge to her back to get her to settle down on the cushions they’re using as a bed on the ground. He eyes the rabbits he managed to catch as he feeds twigs to the fire to build it up again. One of his primary concerns is that he hasn’t been able to get food into her beyond a few granola bars he miraculously managed to find in the back of a cabinet. He’d gotten lucky with bringing down a bold deer that had wandered too close a couple of days ago, but Ellie had just looked at the meat and turned and vomited thin bile.
He’d left the carcass out in the woods for a very lucky scavenger to find, resenting every mouthful he wouldn’t be able to get into his kid.
*
In the end, he decides to try and boil up a broth. It won’t be anything to write home about, but she’s a kid who was raised on FEDRA rations, so it’s not as if her standards are that high.
Still, as he hands the little tin mug over, a few cubes of cattail tubers bobbing in the light brown liquid, he wishes he had something better to offer, something to stick to her ribs and get some meat back on her bones, something to give her body what it needs to start healing.
“Try and drink that, alright?” He requests softly.
Ellie just stares at the steaming liquid, and the way she swallows says she’s already fighting back nausea.
In a moment of desperation inspired by when he was switching Sarah to solids, he takes the mug from her, swallowing a mouthful. She watches him intently, and when he swallows, he hands it back.
“It’s rabbit,” he tells her, nudging her hands up, the mug cupped between them, warming her too-cool fingers. “I promise, baby. Just rabbit.”
Ellie takes a deep breath that shudders slightly on the inhale.
Still, when she takes a few careful sips, she manages to keep them down.
*
He sees Ellie overthinking the farther down the mug she gets, so he fumbles for a distraction, eventually settling on the faded box she carried with them from the room. He picks it up, holding it up for her inspection. She nods and shifts slightly to make room for him on the cushions, a silent request that he grants immediately. She watches him set the game up, taking small sips from her cup and even getting down some of the cattail cubes. He has no fucking idea what the calorie count is on them, but he’s counting on them being a starch to at least get something into her, the bones from the rabbit hopefully adding some nutrients as well.
He’s not sure if it’s based on half-remembered lessons from health class in high school or his own stupid hopes, but it’s all he’s got to go on just now.
“Youngest goes first,” he offers when the board is set up, in what he hopes will be taken as an opportunity to make fun of his age.
Ellie, though, just draws her card and then pushes her piece–the blue one, of course–two squares forward.
*
They don’t finish a full game, Ellie still too tired, but she manages to get down two mugfuls of broth. She drifts off quickly, head against his shoulder, and he’s careful not to jostle her as he slowly lays her down, curling her sleeping bag around her. The bruising on her face is still stark, and he can’t help but trace gentle fingers over the purple-black splotch over her cheekbone that stretches onto her nose, wondering exactly what blow caused the damage.
He wishes, with a fierce, merciless rage, that he’d been able to raze the entire goddamn town to the ground, the place that hurt his kid so badly, the place that turned his bright, talkative, friendly girl into this silent little shell, meek and obedient and distant.
Ellie making a soft noise in her sleep redirects him quickly, his wrath for the past forgotten in the need to be soft now. Useless as it makes him feel, she doesn’t need him to be violent, not now.
She needs the Joel he did his best to stuff away deep in a place he wouldn’t have to look at for 20 years.
He catches her before she rolls–she’s not still even in her sleep–gently pressing her back before she rolls onto the side she has broken ribs on. She makes a soft sound of protest, not waking up, but she settles quickly when he smooths a hand over her hair, letting out a long sigh and going still, her gingerbread game piece still in hand.
+1
He ventures back into her hospital room and finds her sleeping, the way she usually is when she isn’t fighting it. He’d only stepped out of the room at all to let the nurses help her change out of her clothes after she accidentally pulled her IV out and got blood everywhere, and he’s mildly surprised she fell asleep before he returned to her side. Though with how exhausted she is these days, perhaps he shouldn’t be. Automatically, his eyes flick to the monitors by her bed, the numbers and readings that were previously gibberish now old associates, little assurances that no matter how bad she looks, she’s still alive, still fighting, still with him. The volume on the heart monitor has been turned as low as it can go so it won’t disturb her already-fitful sleep, but he watches the beat of it and imagines the blip, the steady reassurance that she’s with him, that too-big heart of hers still going strong.
After seeing that line go flat last week, he thinks he could listen to nothing but that sharp beep for the rest of his life and still think it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever heard.
For want of something to do, he touches her hand to gauge her temperature. He’s pretty sure there’s a section of the screen that tells him that if he cares to look, but there’s something to the tactile satisfaction of doing it himself that settles something restless in his chest. Tommy used to tease him for still doing it to Sarah, a habit he carried from when she was a baby, back when he was constantly grabbing a tiny foot or pudgy little hand to make sure she was comfortable, back before she had the words to whine about the A/C not going below 74 in the summer or the ability to steal his jacket in the winter and strand him without one. Ellie’s not a baby, either, but helpless as she looks these days, it makes him feel useful, making sure she’s not too cool or tugging blankets over her if she is.
Today, the touch stirs her, and despite his attempt to shush her, she rouses, rubbing a clumsy fist over her eyes in a gesture that could probably get him to agree to just about anything she wants of him.
(He lives in fear of the day she discovers that fact.)
(As if she doesn’t get her way already.)
“Hey,” he says, smiling softly, keeping his voice low in case she still has a headache.
Ellie frowns, disgruntled as ever these days, her rest never good with how miserable she usually feels, adding a haze of exhaustion to the whole list of complaints she’s never fully honest about.
“S’time is it?” She mumbles, stretching until she hisses in pain from her back, sore from spinal taps.
“Afternoon,” he says on a guess. Time has taken on a loose quality here in the hospital, both of them trapped in this room where it doesn’t especially matter what time it is other than the times Ellie has to fast for a procedure.
“Fell asleep,” she informs him, throwing an arm across her eyes and sounding grumpy about it in a way that makes him feel horrifically protective of her.
“You didn’t sleep good last night,” he reminds her, and she grumbles a wordless protest, always so reticent to admit a weakness. “How’s your head?”
A shrug, which means it’s still hurting but not enough to make her hold still for fear of making it worse.
For her, that’s practically glowing health these days.
“Found something you might be interested in,” he says, and Ellie peeks at him immediately, a kid interested in a treat no matter how rotten she feels. He lifts the box and shakes it. Ellie tilts her head and squints to read it.
“Guess Who?”
“Yep,” he says, lifting a knee to sit on the edge of her bed. “Board game,” he says. “You try to guess who the other person’s person is by asking questions.” He pauses before he opens the lid, considering the idea that she might want to rest, not play with a dusty game because he’s near-desperate to give her a win after so many daily losses. “We can play it la-” He starts, but Ellie makes a noise of protest, biting back both a yawn and a wince as she pushes herself a little more vertical.
“No,” she says, her curiosity making her sound more like herself. “I wanna play.”
*
“Does your guy look like he would get stabbed with his own knife?” Ellie asks seriously, and he snorts, considering.
“Maybe,” he allows. “He definitely shouldn’t ever touch a gun.”
Ellie flips down a few panels decisively.
“I still ain’t said it’s a guy,” he reminds her, getting a dismissive noise in response.
“I can sense it,” she says confidently. “Your turn.”
“If you say so,” he says, amused. “Hm. Does your person…have a hat on?”
Ellie makes a disgusted noise, looking at him with exasperation.
“That makes it too easy!” She protests. “My way’s more fun.”
“My way is the way it’s actually played,” he says mildly, but when she still refuses to answer, he concedes. Given the fact that she looks more like herself than she has in weeks, he doubts there’s anything he would refuse her right now. “Alright, bossy,” he says, ignoring the face she pulls at him, “does your person look like they would lose a fight with a butterfly?”
Ellie snorts, grinning.
“Definitely.”
He flips down a few panels of his own. He has no idea if his guesses are right, but it’s not like it matters. He’ll give her a good game to make her feel like she’s earned it, but he’s already decided Ellie’ll be taking the win from this. When she doesn’t immediately answer another question, instead staring at one of the panels, he clears his throat, and when that doesn’t work, he actually speaks, voice gentle.
“You wanna take a break?” He offers, but Ellie shakes her head.
“N-no,” she says. “I just don’t like one of these cards. That’s all.” She seems to shake herself loose of whatever thought had hold of her.
“Get rid of it,” he suggests, and she looks to him. He shrugs. “You don’t like it, get rid of it. We can play with the rest.”
“I don’t think that’s how the game works,” she objects, but she still reaches for the panel.
“Show me which one, and I’ll get rid of it, too. We can make our own for that one if you want.”
She hesitates for only a moment longer before she slips it out of its frame and hands it over. He studies it as subtly as he can, trying to conjure a face to match the blonde, goateed cartoon man looking out at him from the card. If it’s anyone in the hospital, he’ll be making sure they don’t ever set foot in this room again. As much as he searches his memory, though, he can’t make anyone match it.
“He looks like…” Ellie trails off. He looks up at her, and she touches her throat gently, their own shorthand for Silver Lake, when her throat was so bruised she couldn’t speak without a rasp for a good couple of weeks even after she started talking again.
Immediately, he flicks the card to the side, and Ellie watches it land facedown in the corner with something like satisfaction. He hands his own over to her to do the honors, and he feels something almost like hope, watching the simple pleasure on her face of so easily getting rid of something that makes her feel unsettled.
Now if only he could convince her to leave the hospital so easily.
*
Guess Who? makes more appearances on Ellie’s bed after that day. It’s a simple game that’s relatively mindless even with Ellie’s insistence on profiling the cards, and on her worst days, she can play it laying down on her side, head propped up only enough to look at the board. The slot where the cards Ellie doesn’t like–both of them flung out of a window when she thought he wasn’t looking–are glaringly empty until the day they’re not, and he blinks in surprise to find them replaced with pieces of notebook paper with sketches of a nurse on them, recognizably the redhead he actually likes, a sensible woman named Rory who actually manages to remember that their labrat is a 14 year old girl.
“You draw these?” He asks, slipping his out of its frame.
Ellie shrugs, looking a little shy.
“This is great, kiddo,” he tells her, meaning it. He’s seen her scribbling now and then, but she’s been so furtive about it that he hasn’t picked at it. “I didn’t know you could draw like this.”
“They’re not that good,” Ellie says with a modesty that doesn’t suit her. “She just stayed still long enough so I could draw her when she was getting my blood today.”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” he chides lightly. “You got a real talent here, Ellie.”
The way she scrunches into herself at the praise tells him she’d likely be blushing if she weren’t too anemic these days.
*
The use of Ellie’s replacement cards means a few modifications to their game set. He finds some cardboard to act as a shield around where the selected card sits, and Ellie draws up four of each picture so their presence or absence on the board won’t be suspicious. They have a rotating cast, all drawn with more or less skill depending on how mad Ellie is at them on any given day. It’s his only sign of her frustration, the more cartoonish portraits of the coldest of the staff, so he eggs her on, and soon more than a few of them have horns, among other wildly unflattering details drawn with extreme artistic license.
The day Tommy’s face peers out at him with a mustache so big it takes up half the picture, he laughs so hard there are tears in his eyes.
Ellie settles against her pillows with satisfaction, smug.
He makes a mental note to get her to draw it on a proper piece of sketch paper later.
His brother could use a present after so many missed birthdays.
*
When they pack up to leave the hospital after the Fireflies finally get their goddamn cure, and he can finally tell them to fuck off with their ideas about more ways to torture his kid, their modified Guess Who? is one of the first things Ellie grabs, only out of bed at all on her wobbly legs because she’s stubborn and he wants to pack instead of argue. She holds it out to him imperiously, and he ignores the way she moves with all of the grace and stability of a newborn foal, obediently taking the box and packing it away.
If there’s anything she wants to take with her from this entire nightmare, he won’t deny her.
*
Ellie sleeps like a rock for their first few days back in Jackson. He’s not much better, honestly, not after so long of sleeping lightly in case any Fireflies got any bright ideas of trying to get around him while he was asleep, but when he peeks in on Ellie, he rarely finds her shifted from the position he last saw her in. When he pokes his head in to find her asleep with a noodle still hanging out of her mouth from the plate of plain buttered pasta she’s cuddling, he has to press a hand over his mouth to stop from laughing before he goes to take it from her, tucking her beneath her blankets again.
It’s on day five that she finally emerges, and he bites back the urge to tease her about being Sleeping Beauty. His amusement is measured against the way she moves stiffly, like she’s far older than 14. Still, she doesn’t complain, just sits down at the dining room table for the first time and eats the food Tommy dropped off, looking around with interest.
“You feeling better?” He asks, scraping some more of his potatoes to her plate when she finishes hers. She’s far, far too thin, and he’s looking forward to getting her weight back where it should be.
“I’m fine,” she says, the same answer he always gets when he asks, but this time, it might actually be almost true.
*
She doesn’t lay down again after she’s finished off supper and the pieces of pie he’s been saving for when she wasn’t too exhausted to enjoy them, and he lets her drag him out to their back porch. Ellie surveys their yard–overgrown but relatively pretty, flowers springing up from what must be perennials–with satisfaction, and it pleases him, the proprietary pleasure on her face. She’d talked about the house plenty in the hospital like a kid telling herself a fairytale, and he’s happy to see her getting to enjoy it now.
“Alright,” she says, sounding businesslike, turning to face him on their porch swing with only a slight wince for her hip, still sore from her last bone marrow harvest. “Time for some very important business.”
He snorts when she presents the Guess Who? box, shuffling back a bit to let her put it between them.
“Do they look like their house is as bitching as ours?” is Ellie’s first question right out the gate.
“Not at all,” he says with a grin, laughing when Ellie immediately begins dropping slots like a plague has overtaken the little characters, face serious despite the way he can see that she wants to grin.
He lets her win all four rounds they play before she starts drooping enough that he ushers her up to bed, her complaining all the way.
“We have time,” he tells her, herding her up to her room and ignoring the big puppy dog eyes he gets, despite the way she’s barely fighting back yawns. “We’re home now, kiddo.”
“We’re home,” she repeats, like she’s trying out the words.
When she turns and hugs him, he knows what it’s for.
He thinks it might be the best thing they’ve won yet.