Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"Where do you see yourself in 30 years? Draw a picture and write a short response.”

The first time Sarah ever saw a question like that was on a paper her 2nd grade teacher handed out, on the second-to-last day of the school year.

She’d squinted at the question, doing some quick math in her head. She was 8, then. 8 plus 30 is 38 years, she figured out. And 38 years old is a grown up. Even older than her dad.

After a minute of careful thought, she put lawyer, spelled loyer as she sounded it out before scribbling it down. Dad always said she should be a lawyer, usually during the times she was being particularly sassy, or was trying to convince him they should go to the park or the library. 

Her teacher told them to go around the room and share after. There were some interesting answers.

“Where do you see yourself in 30 years?”

I’m going to be a firefighter, a police officer, a superhero. A veterinarian. A preacher. A dragon (?). A doctor. A ballet dancer.

Evan Rosen drew a tombstone and wrote, "dead.”

They all laughed.

Sarah sees Evan now, as their truck jerks around the corner and she holds onto the back of Joel’s seat. He’s running outside a building, blood running down his face in steady streams from a wound on the top of his head. 

Just as Tommy turns the truck around another corner, she sees a man run out of the building behind Evan.

Sarah swallows and looks away. 

Her ears are buzzing. She feels like she’s stuck inside her body as people scream in front of them, and fires burst out, and Joel and Tommy yell and fight, trying to figure out how to get them all out alive. 

People run in front of the truck. She can hear shouts. Helicopters. Wails of pain. 

Her head pounds.

A man knocks another man over. A woman trips on the ground. Someone is stumbling and weird and Sarah’s stomach twists and turns. 

The sound of the wrench against Nana’s skull rings in her ears. It won’t stop. 

“I can’t drive through ‘em all.”

“Are you serious?! Just keep goin’!”

The car backs up and she twists around to look behind them. Briefly, she wonders where her friends are. Her teachers. Her soccer coach. Some of them live in this area, are they -

Something’s falling from the sky. 

“Dad?!” She turns back to face Joel and Tommy. 

Someone knocks someone else over. People run away from the crashing plane. 

Sweat runs down her arms. She can’t look away anymore. Her gaze is fixed on the chaos in front of them. 

The plane explodes.

When Joel pulls her out of the wreckage of their car and lifts her into his arms, she thinks maybe we can get through this. 

He’s held her like this before more times than either of them can count. When she was a baby, even though she doesn’t remember that. When she pitched fits as a toddler and he scooped her up and carried her out of Abuela’s church, or the grocery store, or the library. When she gets home from her first day of school each year, one of the few days he usually gets off. When she’s sad. When she’s lonely. When she’s scared.

She’s 14 now. She knows that her Dad’s a person, just like everyone else. Sometimes she’s painfully aware of it, with all the little hurts that add up over time. But, somewhere in the back of her mind, the superhero she thought he was when she was little is still there.

She doesn’t think that ever goes away.

He holds her in his arms as he runs, and she grips onto him as hard as she can. 

She’s terrified. One of those things is chasing them. Her heart is beating so fast she can practically hear it dully ringing in her ears.

But she still has him. And she holds on. 

And she dies.

It takes her a few seconds to realize what’s happened, after she falls from his arms and rolls down the side of the hill. 

She opens her eyes and sees the stars and the moon, shining down on her. She sees fireflies, brushing against the edge of the tall grass and glittering in the distance.

“They’re puttin’ on a show just for you, babygirl,” Joel said to her one cool summer night, as they sat together in the grass and watched the little bugs flit around.

The fireflies blur. The sky blurs. And something slimy rises in her mouth. 

She takes a breath. Then another. And another.

Nothing fills her lungs. 

And then she feels it. A pinch. Then a burn, slow and steady, creeping up her abdomen. Her world is burning. And her world is hot and sticky and blood, pooling into the grass beside her body. 

She tries to breathe again, her chest rising and falling. Air comes in, but it doesn’t stay. 

And her lungs begin to heave. 

The burning around her stomach spreads higher, reaching her chest. She gasps. 

And then there’s Joel, wrapping his arms around her. 

“Move your hand, baby. Move your hand.” 

His voice sounds like it’s from far away. Vaguely, some sense of relief floods through her body. Dad can fix it. Dad can always fix it. 

She pants, gritting her teeth as a wave of pain sends shadows speckling across the edge of her vision. She cries out. 

“Don’t look down, look up, look up.” Sarah looks up.

Her father is what she sees. Her father is her world. He’s lifting her. Blood trickles down her pants and pools. Everything broken shifts inside of her. 

Shadows.

The pain goes away. She doesn’t need to breathe. She’s okay, falling into this sea of nothing, slipping away from the world. 

And she dies.

She should have put a tombstone, on that 2nd grade worksheet. 

Dying is nothing and dying is everything. Dying is the universe, the stars, and the secrets. Dying is drifting past it all, moving without a body and thinking without a mind. 

She’s still there. There’s a part of her still remaining, a part of life that can never burn away.

She cannot be created, rather, she was always there, somewhere. And she cannot be destroyed. 

Everything is glowing, right here. Everything is beautiful and alive and far away. She has no body to curl, but she shifts something. Draws something closer to herself. 

Memories play through her mind. Trees swaying in a thunderstorm. The smell of the river she went to as a kid, mud and dying leaves. The feeling of Joel’s hand, wrapped around hers, the knowledge that Dad and Uncle Tommy are right with her, keeping her safe.

Other things rise to the surface. Things she could never remember, if she wasn’t here. Learning how to crawl, one hand after the other, pull her little body behind her. Joel cradling her when she was tinier than his arm.

Her Mom walking out of that hospital room after she was born, going far away from her. 

Joel crying. Holding her when she’s so small. 

“I don’t know how to do this. I’m sorry.”

He learned. She’s sorry that she’s gone. 

Abuela comes, after some time. Sarah feels her presence. Her laugh rings from somewhere, younger than Sarah’s ever heard. Less weighed down, less weary. 

They brush their essences to one another, and Abuela goes up, climbs higher and higher until she disappears back into the darkness she descended from. 

Sarah focuses on it. It feels safe.

The darkness above whispers a name at her, a name a mouth couldn’t form. A name that is not Sarah. But it’s hers. It’s the name nature gave her, calling her home.

She could follow Abuela, if she wanted to. She could go back to that place of beauty. She should go, it’s calling her. 

It’s voice pulls at her, willing her to draw herself up further, to reach out her empty space and cling on. Others around her do so. Others around her are happy and at peace, and those who aren’t soon give in. 

But she’s hesitant. 

His face flashes in front of her. Pale. Gaunt. Dead without dying. He’s clinging. He’s pulling her back down. She can’t go any higher than this. And she doesn’t want to.

She stays. 

There are others around her who stay too. A lot of them are kids. 

So many kids.

She catches glimpses of their last moments, as their souls tumble by. 

At the end of the neighbor’s gun, mistaken in the dark.

The car crashes. Dad shouts. Fire.

Eaten, head to toe.

Stumbling forward, shrieking. Mama lifts her gun and sobs.

Almost out, almost out. Bullets come down like rain. 

They all died the same day she did, she realizes as more come, finding their way up towards home. They don’t seem to mind. Sometimes, she hears the echo of their laughs.

And then, after some time, someone speaks. Or, expresses an idea that she hears in words, the only way she knows how. 

“Mommy?” Their voice is tiny. So tiny. It trembles at the end, sending ripples through the empty air. 

Sarah focuses and answers, “I don’t know who your mom is. Sorry.”

“M’kay.”

“What’s your name?”

The kid pauses for a moment, saying something to themself that makes no sense. Crap, they’re really little. “Uh, s’Kevin.”

“Kevin?”

“Yeah! Kevin!”

Someone brushes by them as they pass. Sarah focuses on sensing them, as they go up, up, and out of her range of focus.

“Hi, Kevin." She refocuses her attention on him. “I’m Sarah.”

There’s someone still clinging onto this child in everything they do. It’s a different sort of cling than Sarah feels from her own family, though. While just as sorrowful, just as changed, it’s lighter. There’s a sense of responsibility, a sense of purpose.

A will that remains.

“Um… goin’ up,” Kevin says, and Sarah knows, somewhere, that he’s reaching towards his home. 

“Okay. Have a good time.”

He laughs and it lingers, bouncing off of invisible walls. And then he’s gone, lifted off towards something unknown.

And Sarah stays. 

She stays adrift in her memories, as more and more souls come and go. Sometimes so many that she can feel them on all sides of her, until she ducks under. Because there’s always more space. Space doesn’t run out. 

She’s waiting for them, she decides. She’s not moving on until Joel and Tommy are here with her, until they’re a family again. It’s all she’s ever known, and she can’t leave it behind.

And then They awaken. 

She doesn’t know who, or what, They are. Only that They were asleep somewhere up high, and They shelter everyone who has ever been in Their stars. 

The space around her doesn’t feel so empty anymore. It folds and crumples like paper, sending out cracks of noise that would rupture her eardrums if she still walked. The stars around her grow brighter, then wrap across her body. 

For a moment, she sees everything. 

Then she quickly forgets, as They wrap around her head. They’re amused. She can feel it. 

And there’s also a sorrow, somewhere in there. A deep one. It’s kept carefully under the surface, small and gentle when it bubbles up. 

Sarah is wrapped carefully in life’s hands. The night sky is her blanket, she rests her head on clouds. 

They touch her with the greatest care. And something begins to glow. It’s not until the light is nearly overwhelming that she realizes it’s her . 

In a flash, everything changes. 

She’s on solid ground. She’s there, sort of. More solid than she was before, less solid than she was when she was alive. She looks down, and she can see through herself. Her body glows and burns as it begins to trace out her shape once more. 

“Am I a ghost?” She asks no one. She doesn’t feel like one, whatever they’re supposed to feel like. The ghosts in the old movies she used to watch were always mad. She’s not mad. Well, maybe she is a little, at the soldier for killing her and at her dad for clinging on, and at herself for leaving her family. 

But she’s not mad in the way that movie ghosts are. She’s not vengeful. She doesn’t want to hurt anyone. She’s never wanted to hurt anyone, besides a stray push as a preschooler, or those self-indulgent fantasies of whacking Leo Myers in the nuts with a dodgeball. 

She can’t feel her body’s placement in the room, only it’s internal features. Which makes it quite difficult to move. After some time, she figures it out, though. She focuses on her eyes and they close. She focuses on her legs, and they lift, a little too high.

“Oh, crap!” She goes to the top of the little room she’s in. Is it a room? It feels like one. The walls are rocky-ish. It’s dark. She doesn’t see an exit.

It’s a cave, she decides, because that makes her feel better about the whole thing.

She wills herself back down, spending a good amount of time trying to get into a proper sitting position. 

She feels him as she settles. He’s cold and angry. She barely recognizes him. 

He’ll be happy when he comes here, she decides. Because he is coming here, right? Why else was she put here, if not to wait for him? Maybe whatever is up there, if They really have a hand in things, does this routinely, to keep families together.

Yeah. That makes sense. 

She sits and she waits. And she waits some more. The scenes of her life keep playing in front of her, over and over again. She’s sick of most of it by now. 

She figures out how to pace, and she does it obsessively, spending quite some time trying to get her transparent feet to walk in a perfect line.

She practices old soccer drills with an imaginary ball, replaying her coach’s words in her head.

Mostly, though, she thinks. There’s something blocking a part of her mind, probably keeping her from going insane. She doesn’t care. If anything, she’s glad for it. She thinks her mind is growing. It progresses from a naive, emotional state, to one that’s a little wiser. And a little more volatile. 

Joel stays the same, whenever she senses him. Until he doesn’t.

One day, or night, or whatever it is, he clings on even tighter. And it hurts. 

His feelings wash over her, strong waves that slam her against the walls of her room (prison?). 

His sorrow is a pit, dragging her down through its core. It clings onto everything bright, wraps its tendrils around everything alive. And it chokes. 

His anger is bubbling beneath the surface, escaping in brief bouts of red-hot fire before sinking back into nothingness. 

His exhaustion is the worst. It keeps her pinned to the ground, pressing against her with a heavy, hiding weight. Like it wants her to melt into this space forever and never leave. 

And then, once again, it changes. 

The tiniest spark of hope shines through. It’s warm against her skin, which is starting to feel again. 

Her heart fills with it, the tendrils creeping back from her body. The waves of intensity start to soothe themself, lapping at her feet instead of crashing into her side. There’s something else there, though, something creeping forward with every pull and follow of the tide. 

Fear. Old fear that has been hidden in the depths for so long. It comes surging to the surface, wrapping itself around that little spark and clinging. 

At least it’s not focused on her anymore, even if she can feel its power somewhere not far from her. She stands and walks her old lines, legs far more confident under her body. 

She can’t see through herself anymore. She’s something solid. Something real. 

The grip around this cave, fortress, prison she’s been held in begins to ease. She walks across the ground as the walls crumble away to join the stars again.

Light reflects off of surfaces she can’t see. It wraps itself around her once again, stroking her face and soothing her mind. 

She closes her eyes as it grows brighter. 

And she’s taken away by that blinding, beautiful light.

Sarah takes a breath for the first time in a long time. The air stings as it enters her lungs, cool and crisp. 

She sees the blue expanse of the sky as she rolls onto her back, looking up. The land beneath her is rough and dusty with rocks. There’s a bubbling, rushing sound in her ear. 

She takes another breath, inhaling as deep as she can. 

Her heart beats in her chest. 

Sarah digs her elbows into the gravelly ground beneath them, pushing herself up. She coughs a few times, drawing her knees to her chest as she sits.

She’s on a river bank. 

The sun glints across the surface of the water, making it glow. She stares at it as she pushes herself onto unstable legs.

Stares at it. With her own two eyes.

She’d almost forgotten just how bright life is. Just how full and beautiful. 

She takes a few steps forward, her legs wobbling underneath her. She feels like the baby giraffe she’d seen in a nature documentary, once. Shaky, new, and entirely uncertain as to what she was doing in the waking world, after living in darkness for so long. 

She trips over her own feet, throwing her arms out in front of her before she can fall face-first into the rocky ground. “Shoot!” she says.

Her voice comes out croaky and worn, like she’s one of the old bullfrogs who used to make a racket outside of her window at midnight.

With a slight groan she continues forward. The air stings her skin, icy and fresh. It was still summery outside when she was last here. Not quite the blistering heat of August, but still warm and pleasant. She’s not where she was before.

She wonders if she’s even still in Texas, as she walks parallel to the riverbank and the woods beside her. Trees sport brilliant shades of red and gold, brown, curled-up leaves crunching beneath her feet as she walks. 

A squirrel races by from the treetops, another chasing after it. Birds sing from a distance, some flying overhead. The river, ever present, splashes and sways. It reminds her of when she used to go hiking with her father, taking every opportunity to scamper up a tall rock, or complain that she was tired, just to see the fond way he rolled his eyes.

Her father. She has to find him. 

He has to be close. Why else would she have been sent back, if not for him? 

The river’s wind and flow are her only real sense of direction as she continues forward, Joel and Tommy at the forefront of her mind.

Memories pulse at the back of her head, threatening to spring forward and consume her all at once. She pushes them down. There’s a terror associated with them. A biting fear that’s taken hold in her stomach even now, as she struggles to recall what there is to be afraid of at all. 

She remembers parts of her last day. Flashes of fire and flesh. But some of it has blurred. And some of it is locked away by the rest of her mind. 

A small cabin stands still in the distance as she walks further up the side of the river. It’s nestled into the edge of the woods, vines tangled together as they climb its sides. The branches of a tree crack through the roof. 

Unease curls in Sarah’s stomach. She quickens her pace, passing by the cabin in a sprint. 

The wooded area clears out the further she walks. She lets out a sigh of relief as a bridge finally comes into view, connected to a long section of road. 

She can see cars as she gets closer. Three of them, lining the edge of the road. They’re silent and still. And no one gets out as she steps over the railing, standing on the pavement. Said pavement is cracked beneath her feet. Grass grows through it.

“Hello?” she calls, eyes trained on the cars, “is anyone there?” Nothing moves outside of a squirrel that scurries by. “Hello?”

She crosses her arms to her chest, her breath hitching. There has to be someone, somewhere. Her dad has to be close by. She doesn’t know what she’ll do if he isn’t.

She walks up to a car with shattered windows, peeking through one of them. 

The back seats look like they’re covered in old coffee or something at first. Scratchy and rusty brown. Then she looks down. And she immediately reels back.

There’s a skeleton on the car floor, skull pressed against the bottom of the seats. The arms are splayed forward, like reaching for the door was the last thing it ever did. And it's surrounded by that brown coloration, pooled around their abdomen especially, gathered in clumps. 

Her mouth tastes sour as vomit stings the back of her throat.

And everything comes flashing back. 

Nana. The blood. The car. 

The look on her dad and Uncle Tommy’s faces.

Dying. The stars.

And now she’s here.

She takes a few big steps backwards, tripping over her own feet. The person in that car died. The people in the rest of the cars probably did too. And the cabin.

Maybe they were among the souls she felt, in that resting place that’s already beginning to fade from her mind.

Maybe everyone’s gone.

She turns around and runs. 

Her feet thump against the pavement, her legs crying out as she pushes herself, faster, faster, faster . She runs by a white car with one of its doors wrenched open, a skeleton hanging out of its front. Past crows who pick over an old shirt one of them had dragged onto the highway from god knows where. Past beautiful, untouched fields, exploding with nature and life. 

She only lets herself stop once she reaches an old, cracked sign facing away from her. She takes a step behind it, looking up.

WYOMING 22 TETON PASS

NO TRAILERS NOVEMBER 15 - APRIL 1

“What the heck?” Sarah whispers to herself. She’s never been to Wyoming before. She’s barely ever thought about it, to be honest. Wyoming was more of a concept that vaguely existed than a real place. And now she’s stuck inside of it without another soul in sight. 

She wraps her arms around herself as a shiver wracks her body, goosebumps rising on her arms. She needs to find somewhere inside. Maybe if she loops back to the cabin she passed by earlier? 

As she stands there, trying to figure out what to do next, she hears a few popping noises in the distance. Almost like fireworks. 

And a hand appears out of the ditch on the side of the road. It claws at the ground, trying to get a grip.

Sarah is frozen. Her instincts scream at her to walk over and help whoever it is up. It’s the first person she’s seen since she got here, after all. 

But the memories of her last night keep her rooted in place, eyes trained on the hand.

It finally clings onto a good place on the ground, another hand swinging up to join it. 

The person’s sleeves are covered in grime and dirt, the faintest hint of blue flannel visible underneath of it. Towards the upper arms there’s strange growths, blotchy green and yellow slicing through the sleeves, staying rooted through all the movement like they’re attached to -

A head pops out. Split by large plates of fungal growth. 

They don’t have eyes.

Sarah’s heart pounds in her chest, her instincts doing a 180.

Get away, get away, get away.

A small gasp escapes her.

With a noise that reminds her of the squawk of a bird, their head whips in her direction, directly facing her. A clicking noise emanates from their mangled mouth, somewhat fresh blood dripping off the ends of their exposed teeth.

They charge out of the ditch.

She gasps. Then, finally, she runs.

Her feet pound against the ground, sending jolts through her legs as she cuts through the forest. The trees pass by in a blur. 

She can hear the creature following behind her, occasionally letting out more rattling clicks. She looks behind her, once.

Their arms are swinging as they run.

Sarah’s a good runner. She’s got the long legs for it, the lean build. She was one of the fastest on her soccer team. But even as she begins to tire, that creature doesn’t slow down behind her. 

They’re going to catch her. 

The even, leaf-covered ground breaks to a steady downhill descent up ahead, and she braces herself as she reaches the top of the hill.

And then her shoe gets caught on a root.

She falls forward, throwing out her arms to try and keep herself from bashing her skull into the ground. It does the trick. But the trip was all the momentum she needed to start tumbling down the side of the hill. Judging by the broken screech from close behind her, the creature has done the same.

Rocks dig into her skin and cut into her side as she rolls over them. She brings her arms up to her head, trying to protect it.

It doesn’t take long to reach the bottom. The air is knocked out of her as her back slams against the ground. 

The thing, not a human, not an animal, lands beside her. They’ve pushed themself to their feet before she’s taken a single breath. More clicks ring out through the otherwise quiet air and they fixate on her again, charging forward.

She’s never going to see her father again. 

She squeezes her eyes shut, resolving to struggle as much as possible as the creature does whatever it is they want to do. Probably eat her. 

And then she hears a rhythmic thundering in the distance.

The creature hears it too, judging by the way they snap to attention in the direction of the sound.

BANG

The creature stumbles to the side, letting out a squawk and making that same clicking noise again. 

BANG

They don’t get a chance to continue their sequence. The side of their head almost looks like it burst as a bullet tears through it. A sickly brown blood seeps over the fungal plates, dripping down their face. They fall to the side, a puppet with cut strings.

“Oh my god.” Sarah pushes herself up to her feet, her breath coming in gasps. "Oh my god, oh my god.”

She looks up to the top of the hill. There are four horses there, all a reddish-brown color. Two have white stripes down their foreheads. And there are people sitting on them. People with guns pointed directly at her.

Sarah’s body snaps to attention, because this, at least, is something she’s been prepared for. Her dad’s hammered it home multiple times, what she does if someone’s pointing a gun at her. That was usually in the context of cops, though. But still, this seems close enough.

She raises her hands in the air, keeping them open and visible. 

She gives herself a moment to examine the people in the distance. It’s hard to see them clearly, but they all seem to have normal heads, unlike the guy who’s currently laying in his own liquids a few feet away from her. 

They have to be okay. She doesn’t know how much more of this she can take.

“I don’t have any weapons!” she calls up. "It’s just me. I’m alone!”

The people all seem to startle at the sound of her voice, one of the women lowering her gun,

“Holy shit, it’s a kid.”

Relief strikes through Sarah’s heart, sharp and fierce. People. Actual, living people. How long has it been since she’s experienced that?

“The Infected get you?” a man calls down.

“What?”

“Did it bite you?”

“No!” She cups her hands around her mouth to amplify her sound. 

The woman who spoke before gets off of her horse. She begins to descend down the hill, using a steady trail off to the side that Sarah had completely missed.

She scans Sarah up and down once she reaches the bottom, eyes sharp and calculating. She doesn’t look friendly, per say, especially with the rifle slung over her shoulder. But the expression on her face is calm, and she doesn’t make any move towards her weapon.

The woman gives Sarah a nod after a moment. "It’s just you?”

Sarah nods.

“You’re a long way out to be traveling alone, kid. Why’re you here?”

“I’m… looking for someone,” Sarah says slowly, her eyes flitting down to her feet. "My dad. It’s been a while since I’ve seen him.”

“Alright, then. I’m Mabel. That up there is Caleb, Farzan, and Bonnie. We’re part of a settlement a distance away. Maybe someone from our place will have information about your father.” She reaches out a hand. Sarah takes it, letting herself be guided in the direction of the trail before Mabel lets go.

All of her dad’s lessons on “stranger danger,” play through her head. Along with the quite horrifying tv specials she’s seen about it too (“A week later, kids, they found Little Jimmy’s body parts in 5 different places!”).

But, well. Sarah briefly looks behind her, back towards the dead creature. Bile rises in her throat. 

She’ll take her chances with the people.

Both of the men have dismounted from their horses by the time she arrives. Farzan gives her a nod, Caleb narrowing his eyes. 

“We sure she isn’t bit?” he asks, “I mean, look at her.”

She looks down. She’s wearing the clothes she wore the day she died. They’re in pretty rough shape. Bloody as heck. Her pants are a little tight, coming down a few inches above her ankles. Did she… grow while her body was stitching itself back together?

“She says she isn’t,” Mabel says, walking up to the horse she had been on previously, “we’ll find out when we get back.” She takes a canteen from the satchel on the horse and tosses it to Sarah. 

“I still say we check her.” Caleb takes a step towards her, Sarah taking a quick step back. Mabel snorts,

“The hell you suggesting we do? Strip her?” 

Caleb opens his mouth to respond, Farzan throwing a hand up.

“We’re going to follow protocol, boy, be quiet," he says.

Sarah takes a sip of water, the liquid pleasant against her throat. She hadn’t realized how dry it was. Mabel turns to Farzan, 

“You and Caleb go back, tell the people at the gate to be ready. You might be able to make it by sunset. Bonnie and I will take her to the nearest lookout and head out to town tomorrow.”

Farzan nods, getting back on his horse. Caleb lets out a huff, but does the same. They turn around and ride off, Sarah watching them disappear into the distant forest. A shiver creeps up her spine and courses through the rest of her body.

“Sorry about Caleb,” Mabel says, shrugging off her coat and draping it around Sarah’s shoulders. "He’s new at this. Though, to be fair, so is Bonnie.”

“He’s just an idiot,” Bonnie comes in. 

“What’s your name?” Mabel rearranges the satchel on her horse, looking over her shoulder and back at Sarah.

“Sarah.”

“Alright. You know how to ride a horse, Sarah?”

She doesn’t. She’s been around them, sure, but she’s never been allowed to ride. 

The next ten or so minutes consist of Mabel and Bonnie helping her up behind Mabel, making sure both she and the horse are comfortable. 

Sarah holds onto Mabel for dear life as they begin to ride, the horses going at a nice, slow pace. Mabel lets out a quiet laugh, 

“He’s real even-tempered, this one. Don’t worry.”

Sarah is still worried. She likes horses. Likes them a lot, actually. But seeing them in fields and actually being on one’s back are two entirely different things. 

“Everything’s gonna be just fine. We’ve got protocols for this sort of thing. We’ll see if anyone’s got a connection to your people once we bring you back.”

Sarah nods, holds on tighter, and lets herself hope.

The lookout is nice. For an old barn and farmhouse, anyway. Sarah’s just relieved to be inside a building. 

Neither Mabel nor Bonnie talk much once they arrive, getting right to work. Mabel fills out the logbook while Bonnie starts going through the kitchen, looking for something to put together into a meal. 

Mabel tosses Sarah new clothes and sends her upstairs to put them on. 

The upstairs is almost completely empty. There’s scrapes on the floor from where furniture had been moved around at some point. Most of it seems to be downstairs now. 

Sarah changes into new clothes in what might have once been a bedroom. The white paint on the walls is chipping, one side of a wall having a splattering brown stain in the middle. Lovely. 

She spends the loneliest night of her life on an old, springy sofa on the bottom floor of the farmhouse. She doesn’t sleep. She can’t. Everytime she closes her eyes, it all comes flashing back. She smells blood again. Hears scraping metal and gunshots. Feels that bullet, tearing through her abdomen.

So her eyes stay open. And she stares at the ceiling.

Mabel takes first watch, climbing onto the roof of the barn next door, rifle careful and ready. She switches with Bonnie halfway through the night. 

Sarah rolls to her side to look at Bonnie, who’s pretending to sleep. She’s not very good at it. Out of all four of the people she’s recently met, Bonnie makes her the most uncomfortable. Caleb is just a jerk boy, she’s met plenty of jerk boys before. Bonnie, on the other hand, is a girl. She’s young, doesn’t look a day over 20. And she’s so… comfortable. She’d looked down at the corpse of the dead creature without any fear. She handles her rifle like it’s an extension of her body. She lays easily on the floor, hat over her eyes. 

Seeing someone close to her own age approach things like she does is weird. Sarah doesn’t know if she knows a single kid from her own life who could. She certainly can’t, her heart felt like it stopped at least three times today.

Morning comes with the singing of the birds and golden trails of early sunlight, streaming through the timeworn windows of the farmhouse. 

There’s barely any time to choke down the canned beans Mabel gets out before they’re already up on the horses again, heading through twisting trails in the woods.

Sarah wonders just how much time has passed since she’s been gone, as they go by another run-down cabin. She briefly considers asking, but decides to keep her mouth shut. She’ll figure things out once she finds her dad. No use in making some random people think she’s insane. 

They ride for a long time, taking a few breaks in between to sit down in the grass and take a quick drink. 

Everything hurts. Sarah is never getting on a horse again once she finds her dad.

Just as the sun is at its highest point in the sky, they break from the woods and go uphill. There’s a town in the distance. 

Sarah squints, trying to make it out clearly. All in all, it looks… normal. Other than the big wall surrounding it on all sides.

“This is it, kid,” Bonnie says from the horse behind them, her hat crooked on her head, “just another ten or so minutes now.”

She feels a slight surge of irritation at being called a kid , like she has since she was 10. She can handle herself. She’s always handled herself, especially when Joel had late shifts and Tommy was busy having his own problems (that he usually put himself in). 

They ride down to the clearing, the horses slowing as they approach the wall. 

There are people up there, Sarah realizes. 

“Open it up!” 

With a groan, the front gates creep open, one of the men from the wall climbing down a ladder and standing in the entryway. A woman comes up behind him, a leashed dog trotting forward in front of her. There are some people in the background who stop walking to watch.

Mabel gets off the horse and helps Sarah down beside her, taking a few steps back. “You’ll be alright,” she says, “we just need to make sure you’re not infected. If you are, just tell us right now. It’ll be quick. Otherwise, the dog’ll tear you apart.”

Sarah swallows, leaning back against the horse. “I’m not sick.”

“Okay.” Mabel nods to the woman with the dog, stepping back to Bonnie. They hold their rifles carefully by their side instead of wearing them on their shoulders like before.

The woman from the gates lets the dog off its leash, the dog walking forward. It looks her up and down, briefly sniffing at her legs. Its tail wags. It turns away after a minute, bounding back over to the woman. 

Mabel and Bonnie shoulder their rifles again. 

The man from the wall motions them inside, looking up once they are. "Alright, close em’ up, Stan!”

Sarah feels the panic in her chest begin to settle, now that she’s in an enclosed area that almost looks normal. And she realizes just how cold she still is. And hungry. And thirsty. And how much her side hurts, from where she had scraped it against the ground as she was tumbling down the hill.

Mabel and Bonnie talk quietly with the man from the wall for a moment, occasionally looking back at her. Bonnie finally nods, breaking off from the other two and walking over, 

“Mabel’s gonna go give our council a full debrief on everything that happened and try to get someone to come talk to you. I’ll take you to the clinic, we’ll make sure everything’s good on that front. And Mike here is gonna take the horses to the stables. Alright?”

Sarah nods, wrapping Mabel’s coat tighter around her shoulders. There are people who’ve stopped, further down the street. They’re staring. She looks away.

“This isn’t a show, people, keep moving!” Mabel calls to them before walking off. Bonnie motions for Sarah to follow, leading her through the town. 

People leading horses walk by as they pass what looks like stables. A man sits outside of a house with a guitar, giving everyone a cheerful greeting as they pass. A woman reads a book outside of a long building to a small group of children, who sit and lay in the grass. 

All around her Sarah hears voices and hoofbeats. Rhythmic clangs and hammering from people hard at work. 

Just the sounds of everyday life. Like the world outside of their walls isn’t stricken with monsters.

Once again, she wonders just how long she’s been gone.

The clinic looks like a normal doctor's office, for the most part. The wait’s a lot shorter than she remembers it ever being, though. She and Bonnie are led back to a room by a doctor who looks like she’s in her mid-fifties, maybe early sixties. 

Bonnie takes a seat at the doctor’s gesture, the doctor turning to Sarah. “Mabel and Farzan’s patrol group found you yesterday, I understand?”

“Uh… yeah.”

“What’s your name?”

Sarah crosses her arms to her chest, looking back over to Bonnie, who gives her a nod. “Sarah.”

“Okay, Sarah. I’m Dr. Carroll. How old are you?”

She blinks. She doesn’t know what time it is. Do all of her years away still count? Just the time in the cave? None of it? Did she count as alive when she was coming back to life? What if she’s technically, like, 60 years old now?

“I don’t know.” Bonnie and Dr. Carroll exchange a look. “I’ve been on my own. There are some gaps.” She hopes that sounds somewhat believable. 

Dr. Carroll seems to take it as truth, giving her a full exam. She cleans the wounds on Sarah’s side, along with a scrape down her leg that she didn’t even realize was there. Once she’s done, she scans Sarah over, head-to-toe. "You’re a little different than what I usually see, with new arrivals. Clean bill of health, just a little beat up. Not starving, not dehydrated. No scars, good teeth, clean hair. How long have you been on your own?”

“A while now.” 

“Well, you’ve done a top-notch job taking care of yourself.” Dr. Carroll looks like she wants to say more, but she’s interrupted by a knock on the door. She looks over at it, “come in.”

Mabel walks into the room, followed by a new woman. “Talked it through with the council,” she says, her eyes focused on Bonnie as she speaks. "They decided it won’t hurt to ask around, see if anyone knows her dad. We’ll probably have to do the asking, though.” She pauses a second, then looks over at Sarah. “Hey, kid. This is Maria, she’s from the council. She wants to ask you a few questions. That okay with you?”

Sarah nods, sitting down next to Bonnie. Maria walks further into the room. She has a strong, commanding presence. The other women look at her with clear respect. Her eyes are kind, though, as she looks at Sarah.

“Is she alright?” She asks Dr. Carroll.

“She is. Probably should get a meal into her sooner rather than later, though.”

“Of course, this won’t take long. Can you three step into the hall while I talk to her?”

Dr. Carroll, Mabel, and Bonnie all leave, closing the door behind them. Sarah is left alone in a strange room with a strange woman. She swallows, looking forward. Maria pulls one of the chairs in front of Sarah and sits down in it, so they’re facing each other. 

“You’re part of the council?” Sarah asks.

“I am,” Maria says, a slight smile forming on her lips. They stare at each other for a few moments, Maria speaking again, “I heard you’re looking for your dad?”

“Yeah. I lost him a while ago. I think he’s around here.” 

“How did you two get separated?”

“Soldiers.”

White-hot pain. Shadows in the corners of her eyes.

“Come on, babygirl. Come on.”

Blood pools over her shirt.

“There was a soldier. He fired at us. We got separated then.”

Maria nods. "You must have come a long way, then. There aren’t any QZ’s nearby.”

What the heck is a QZ?

“Uh, yeah.” Sarah grips at her pants. Maybe this is a dream. All of it. She’s going to wake up any moment now and Joel will be sitting at her bedside. He’ll tell her she just had a nightmare, everything’s okay, he’s right here. Tommy will come over after a few hours with a movie he rented for that night, because it’s one of those rare days both he and Joel have no work, and -

“- Sarah?” Maria is looking at her, the slightest hint of concern in her eyes.

“Sorry, what?”

“I was asking what your dad’s name is.”

“Joel,” she says, “Joel Miller.”

A million things flash over Maria’s face at once, her brow shooting upward. She takes a moment to school her expression back to a neutral once. Sarah can still see just how wide her eyes are. Well. At least she looks like she’s heard of him. “Your father is Joel Miller. And your name is Sarah, correct?”

“Mhm. I have an uncle too. His name’s Tommy.”

“I’ll be right back.” Maria practically runs out of the room. Sarah can hear her talking to Mabel and Bonnie in the hallway with hushed voices.

Dr. Carroll steps back into the room after a minute. “I don’t know what you said to her, but she and the other two just took off mighty fast.” 

Briefly, Sarah wonders if the people here do know Joel, and they have something against him. She dismisses the thought rather quickly, though. Things here seem pretty normal. Like things were back home. And her dad is nothing but a goof. She can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t like him (other than that one cashier at the grocery store near their house, but that was its own story). 

“Is that good?”

“Well, they didn’t look all that stressed, so I reckon so. You’re not some kind of wanted woman, though, right?”

“Um, no.”

“Good, I didn’t think so.”

Things are calm, for the next ten or so minutes. Sarah waits in one of the chairs, tapping her foot against the ground. The only sound in the room is the scratching of Dr. Carroll’s pencil. 

And then everything happens all at once.

The door is thrown open. Dr. Carroll jumps to her feet, Sarah shrinking back. 

Tommy is standing in the doorway. A much older Tommy. His hair is longer than she remembers, the ends of his dark curls reaching his shoulders. His eyes are weary, but light. He looks like someone who smiles a lot. There’s a weight there too that she can sense. A difficult one. But one he draws strength from. Purpose.

He’s different. All grown and level. Dr. Carroll looks at him in a similar way she does to Maria. 

But it’s Tommy all the same.

He stands frozen in the doorway. 

For the first time in a long time, Sarah feels completely safe.

“Uncle Tommy?”

His chest heaves. 

“Uncle Tommy, it’s me. Sarah.”

Tommy surges forward, hands cupping Sarah’s cheeks before she’s even registered that he’s moved. He tilts her head up to face him. Scans her up and down. “I’m dreamin’,” he whispers, “I’m fucking dreamin’.”

Sarah pinches him to reassure him that he isn’t.

He winces slightly, a laugh bubbling up from his chest. “Oh, honey.” He pulls her into his arms. His grip is tight around her, his hand going to rest on the back of her head, then her shoulder, then her head again. She squirms after a moment, 

“Uncle Tommy, I can’t breathe.”

“Right, right, sorry." He lets go of her, his hands lingering on her shoulders. He rubs his thumbs over her shirt, like he’s confirming to himself that she is indeed real. All solid and breathing and alive. “I don’t even -” he starts, cutting himself off with another sharp heave of his chest, “- I don’t know how - You didn’t…” He pulls her back to his side.

His hands are trembling.

Sarah chooses her next words carefully, mindful of the fact that four of the people in the room likely have no idea what her previous life status was, and probably shouldn’t be informed. “It’s a long story. I’m here now. I was looking for you, and - wait, Dad. Is he here?”

Tommy lets out a shaky laugh, “yeah, baby, he’s here.”

“And he’s okay?”

“Yeah, I reckon he is.” Tommy sits down, pulling her beside him. He takes a moment to steady his breathing. Then he begins to laugh. And he doesn’t stop until tears prick in his eyes. Maria puts a hand against his shoulder and he leans his head back, smiling up at her.

Tommy’s always had an epic smile. One of the ones that you can’t help but grin back at, no matter what kind of day you’ve had or what kind of mood you’re in.

“If he’s here, then where is he?”

“He’s on a patrol right now,” Maria says, “he’s due to be back in a couple of hours.”

“Oh.”

Dr. Carroll sits back behind her desk. "Listen, as touching as this all is, I need my office back sooner rather than later.”

“Of course.” Maria scans the room, “Mabel, can you go back to the council building? Explain to them that we’ve found her family already.”

“Will do.” Mabel gives a dramatic tip of her hat. She smirks at the raised eyebrow Maria gives her, before looking to Sarah, “I’ll see you around, kid. Good luck.” She motions for Bonnie to come with her as they leave the room. Tommy stands up once they’re gone, 

“Well, I guess we need to talk about some things, huh?”

“Uh, yeah.” 

They leave the room with Maria after Dr. Carroll gives them a warning look. A small sheep darts by as they step outside, a harried-looking man chasing after it. Tommy and Maria talk back and forth in low voices, Sarah straining to try to hear what they’re saying. She gives up after a minute, sitting down and looping her fingers through the grass that sits in patches outside of the clinic. 

“Alright,” Tommy says to her after a long minute, “we’re gonna take you over to our place while we wait for your dad to get back, okay? It’s right across the street from his house anyway.”

Sarah blinks. "What’d you mean our place?”

“Oh, right. Maria’s my wife.”

A half hour later, and Sarah is still mulling this new information over, as she sits at Maria and Tommy’s kitchen table, a warm mug of tea in front of her. She’s never really been that into tea before, but Maria had offered and it seemed rude to decline. 

She watches Maria and Tommy move around in the kitchen, stepping out of each other’s way and passing things over to one another without even looking. 

It sits awkward in her stomach.

She’d asked a few times, when she was little, why Tommy didn’t have a wife or kids, around the time she started to notice that her family looked very different than her friends. Joel had just said that he was destined for bachelorhood with the way he acted. Which is a little ironic, looking back.

“Just haven’t found the right person yet, sweetheart,” Tommy had told her, when she'd asked him directly.

Still. This feels strange. Tommy feels strange, even if he’s still the same in so many ways. 

The man she once found asleep on top of their kitchen counters now navigates around his own kitchen with ease. The man who used to take her to the park to briefly flirt with the local women (and on a few occasions that she’s pretty sure she’s not supposed to mention, men), now wraps an arm around his wife’s waist and presses their forehead together, so eager to share his joy as it spills to the surface. 

Sarah averts her eyes from the couple, looking around the kitchen. 

Something begins to sink in, something she had missed when she had first walked into the house, so overwhelmed by everything that had happened in such a short time. 

There’s a couple of bottles on the counter. Baby bottles. She’s sitting next to a high chair. A few stuffed animals are scattered around the doorway to the kitchen. There’s a hoodie draped over the back of one of the seats, too small to belong to an adult. A couple of comic books are spread out in front of it, one of them open to an… interesting scene of a person being impaled.

Her heart skips a beat.

She’d always wanted cousins. Especially when she was younger. As much as she’d loved the way her family was, it had always sucked a little, being the only kid, even if her dad and uncle were usually willing to play with her, or talk about things she knew bored them out of their minds. She loved little kids too. They laughed and smiled so much easier than adults.

“So… uh. How old are your kids?” she asks, trying to keep her voice level. Maria and Tommy exchange a long glance, long enough that she’s pretty sure they’ve just conducted an entire conversation in their heads.

“We’ve got one,” Maria finally says, “James. He’s coming up on five months now.”

Sarah shoots Tommy a wide smile, getting one in return. Briefly, she wonders what the hoodie and comic books are doing at the table, if their only kid is a baby. She dismisses the thought when Tommy speaks up, 

“I’m just gonna get right into it now. What the hell happened?”

Sarah takes a sip of tea, wincing at its bitter taste. “I don’t really know. It’s already kind of… fading. I died, I guess. I remember most of that.”

“Yeah. Yeah, you did. We buried you, honey. Right in that field.” Tommy sits down across from her, reaching out and squeezing her hand. He doesn’t let go of it after. She doesn’t pull away either. 

“I went somewhere. I remember some of that too. And then I was by the river, and that thing came out from beside the road, and Mabel and Bonnie’s group found me.” Her stomach growls. Tommy stands up, taking a container from the fridge and sliding it in front of her,

“Here, leftovers from last night. Chicken and salad.” 

She gives him a grateful nod and opens up the container. “So, yeah.” 

Maria comes back after having briefly walked out of the room, sitting down next to Tommy. Their fingers entwine under the table. “Your father should be back in another hour. He’s actually supposed to be the one to stop and pick up James today, the timing worked out.”

Sarah tries to imagine her dad being an uncle to another kid. He probably isn’t a whole lot like Tommy, but she can see him doing it in his own way.

“Anyway,” Tommy says, “I reckon you have a lot of questions. I think most things you should probably talk through with your dad, though, instead of us tellin’ you.” His leg is bouncing so hard that it shakes the table. 

“Okay. Can you answer one question, though?”

“Sure, honey. What is it?”

“How long has it been since I… y’know?”

Something flashes across Tommy’s face. Something haunted. Close to the way he had looked when he had gotten back from deployment when she was so young, whenever something reminded him of the things he would never talk about. 

“21 years.”

21 years.

The world falls out from under Sarah’s feet, her stomach dropping like she’s jumped off a ledge and is plummeting into the darkness below.

She knew, somewhere, that it had been a long time. She’s not an idiot. But vaguely realizing something and hearing it spoken in plain words are entirely different things.

Everyone she knew has been touched by time in her absence for 21 years. Her dad’s been without her for 21 years. The world’s been dying for 21 years. 

And this is normal to everyone except her. 

“Do you remember the thing you saw today?” Maria asks. She nods. “That was a human infected with cordyceps, a fungal infection that manipulates the brain. It grows through people’s bodies and causes them to go insane. They only have one goal in mind. To spread the infection.”

“Maria -” Tommy starts. Maria holds up a hand.

“She’s already seen one before. Multiple times, if she remembers Outbreak Day. Letting her brain fill in the blanks is going to cause her far more fear than telling her the facts.”

Tommy doesn’t argue with that, his gaze flitting down to the table. He takes a deep breath, “most people died from that. Or all the other stuff that happens. Y’know. Those of us left have learned to live with the way things are now, for the most part.”

Sarah closes the container of food. She doesn’t have much of an appetite, suddenly. She takes a moment to let the information process through her brain, her mind racing. 

“My friends. All of the people we know. Are they gone?” Her voice trembles at the end.

Emily, Melissa, Nicole, Brittany, Eliza. All of the people who passed her in the hallways. Her many teachers, the good ones and the bad ones. Coach Morgan. The old man who sat outside the grocery store and played his guitar. The crossing guard, Keith, who remembered everyone’s faces. Mrs. Melford, the librarian who always volunteered to come to the elementary school and read to the kids. 

“We got no way of knowing, sweetheart,” Tommy says, “but probably. You remember Nicole, though?”

“Yeah.” 

Of course she does. Nicole is… or, was, one of her best friends. Joel always said that she was so nice and polite, which Sarah found hilarious considering half of the things she’d heard come out of the other girl’s mouth when they were alone.

“I saw her six or so years ago by chance, out in South Dakota. She was connected to a group I used to be a part of. She had one of her sons with her, little fella was practically attached to her leg.”

Jesus. The last time Sarah had seen Nicole, she was a head shorter than her and spent most of her time complaining about her little brother.  

She’s 35 now.

Is she 35 too? She doesn’t feel very 35. And judging by the way adults have treated her, she probably doesn’t look very 35 either. 

Her head feels like it’s spinning.

“Anyway, yeah. There’s probably a lot of stuff you’re gonna want to go over with your dad,” Tommy says again, rubbing the back of his head. “Don’t go tellin’ this stuff to anyone outside of the family, okay? Far as they need to know, there ain’t any gaps in your time alive and you just got lost a couple of years ago outside of some QZ.”

She still has no idea what a QZ is, but she nods anyway. Maria takes her now empty mug of tea and washes it out.

Neither of them speaks much for the rest of the hour. Sarah elects to look at the table, tracing her fingers over the wood. She looks up after a little while, watching people pass by the windows. They all look happy. 

She wonders if the younger ones even knew a world like hers at all. 

More and more kids start passing by, school presumably getting out, or something like that. A couple of them chase each other down the street, their laughs carrying out into the kitchen and covering up the sound of Maria and Tommy talking from the other room. 

The front door opens with a creak from the other side of the house.

Sarah stands up. Maria and Tommy come back into the kitchen, Tommy resting a hand against her shoulder. 

Her dad walks into the room. There’s a baby in his arms, with wide eyes and little dark curls. Tommy steps over and takes him, as Joel stands and stares. 

She stares back.

She can see that he’s older. She can see the lines under his eyes and the light scar on the side of his forehead. 

And absolutely none of it matters to her. Because he’s here.

Tears well in her eyes before she can stop them, streaming down her face. No matter anything that’s happened in the past, no matter how many years it’s been, her anchor is here now. And she can crumble. 

She runs to him, wrapping her arms around his middle and burying her head into his shirt. His chest sinks as he lets out a quiet gasp. She can hear his heart thudding unevenly, as her ear presses against him.

After a second, he wraps his arms around her, his hand rubbing her back like it has a thousand times before. 

“It’s alright, babygirl,” he says, and she sobs even harder at the sound of his voice. He doesn’t have any idea what’s going on. She’s shown back up after 21 years. She can feel a tremor running through his body as he holds her. But he focuses on her. Holds her close and reassures her, before doing anything else.

Some things haven’t changed.

He presses a kiss to her head, his hands sliding up to her cheeks as she lifts her head up. He cups her face in his hands and brushes away her tears with his thumbs, meeting her eyes. 

For what feels like forever, it’s just her and him in the room, as far as she’s concerned. Then he pulls her closer, looking over to Tommy, who’s tugging the collar of his shirt out of the baby’s mouth. 

“Long story,” he says upon noticing Joel’s look.

“Explain.” Joel sits her back down at the table, sitting beside her. His eyes don’t leave her, one of his hands sliding back down to her back, rubbing soothing circles against the center. 

Sarah doesn’t pay any attention to what Tommy says. She wipes her eyes on her sleeve, looking over at the baby. Her cousin. She gives him a smile, getting a wide, gummy grin in return, that reminds her so much of Tommy, before he returns to now trying to eat Maria’s shirt.

She leans her head back, letting everything soak in. The low sounds of her father and uncle’s voices. The feeling of sitting in a chair with solid ground beneath her feet. The shelter of a house and a room and everything familiar. 

It’s when she sits back up that she sees it.

There’s a girl standing in the doorway.

Chapter Text

The girl is staring right at her. Her gaze is piercing as they lock eyes.

Sarah casts a quick glance across the room. None of the adults are focused on the girl. None of them seem to have noticed her at all. Or if they have noticed, they haven’t reacted.

She looks back over, scanning the girl up and down. She’s scrawny. There’s a leaf in her pulled-back hair and her arms are stained with dirt. She has an old backpack slung over one shoulder. Huh.

For a moment she wonders if she’s hallucinating her, as Joel and Tommy’s conversation continues and Maria keeps bouncing the baby, her brow furrowed. Then, finally, Maria’s eyes dart over to the girl. She gives her a smile. “Ellie, come on in.”

Joel and Tommy both go quiet.

The girl, Ellie, walks into the kitchen, hopping up to sit on a countertop like she owns the place. She glances from Sarah, to Joel, then back again. “What the fuck happened?”

Her voice, high and young, is jarring paired with her language. 

None of the adults bat an eyelid, though, at the random kid cursing in their kitchen. 

Joel takes in a loud breath, a smile twitching at the ends of his lips. Tommy elbows him and he snaps to attention. “Right. Sarah, this is Ellie. Ellie, Sarah.”

None of that answers the million questions rattling around inside of Sarah’s head. Not for the first time, she wishes adults would just upright explain things in general, instead of always leaving them mysterious and open-ended. 

Briefly, she wonders if the kid is Maria and Tommy’s, before realizing that doesn’t make much sense. They’ve already said that they only have one kid, and while genetics are crazy, the likelihood of them having a mayonnaise-white child is probably pretty low, she figures.

“So, is anyone going to explain anything, or?” Ellie asks, hopping down from the counter. There’s a slight edge to her voice, one that makes unease creep through Sarah’s gut. “I mean, isn’t she supposed to be, like, dead?”

“I came back,” Sarah says.

“That doesn’t fucking explain anything.”

Sarah opens her mouth to reply, Tommy coming in before she can, "we don’t know what happened, Ellie. Apparently one of the patrol groups found her a little way from the bridges near 22.” He turns his head towards Joel, raising an eyebrow.

“Ellie’s family,” Joel says, “she lives with me.”

“You…” 

Multiple things click all at once in Sarah’s brain. She’s been gone for 21 years. There’s a random kid who isn’t Maria or Tommy’s in their family now. The kid lives with Sarah’s father -

“Wait. Did you have a baby after I died?”

Joel flinches. She’s not sure at what. He leans back in his chair, taking a few moments before speaking. “No. Ellie ain’t… she ain’t biologically mine. I met her about a year and a half ago.”

Ellie is moving back towards the doorway now, inch by inch. 

“So… you live with a random 12-year-old?” Sarah raises an eyebrow.

“That’s not quite how I’d put it -” Joel starts, Ellie throwing her hands in the air.

“I’m 15!” She walks out of the kitchen at that. Sarah hears her shoes pattering against the floor, then the creak and slam of the front door. 

“I’ll get her,” Tommy says as the noises are followed by the sound of feet darting down the porch steps. 

The baby lets out a few whines once Tommy goes after her, reaching his hands out in the direction his father went. Maria bounces him, rubbing a finger down the side of his chubby cheek. He shrieks in response, throwing his little head back and starting to howl with a volume Sarah didn’t know someone so small could achieve. 

“He’s past the time for his nap anyway,” Maria says as Joel shoots her a sympathetic look. “I’ll be right back.”

With that, it’s just Joel and Sarah alone in the kitchen.

“We’ll head over to our place once Tommy’s got Ellie,” Joel says, keeping a hand against her shoulder as they sit. She moves her chair closer, until she can rest the side of her head against his chest once more. She’s never going to take touch for granted again. Or the feeling of having someone else beside her, warm and alive.

“It’s the one right out the window, right?”

“Mhm. The white one.”

She can see it pretty well from where she’s sitting. It looks just like any other house from the outside. Large windows, a nice wide porch. Grass dying from the chill. A garden hose someone’s neglected to put away haphazardly snakes its way across the front yard.

And yet she can’t imagine her Dad living there. She can’t imagine him living anywhere other than the house they’ve always lived in since she was four. Cul-de-sac. Grass bleached from the heat rather than the cold. Cars in driveways and lawn mowers in the front. That’s Sarah’s world. 

Not whatever this is.

“See that fenced-off patch with the plants in it?” Joel points out the window. “We started a little garden over the summer. We’ll try and grow berries next season.” 

He says it like it’s something to marvel over, so she forces herself to smile. “Oh. That’s nice.” She’s quiet for a moment, shifting in her seat and lifting her head up from his side. She takes a deep breath. “Dad, where did that girl come from?”

She can feel him tense from beside her. He’s quiet for a long moment, his eyes glazing over. The look on his face is something new. Because it’s hardly a look at all. He’s never been the most expressive person, but she’s always been able to tell what he’s feeling just by looking at him. 

But right now, his face is stone-cold. Impenetrable. The face of a stranger.

She’s never seen someone look so much like nothing before.

The expression clears up as soon as it appears, though, his eyes softening and a slight smile twitching at his lips. “I ended up settling down in the Boston QZ a while ago.”

There’s that word again. She drums her fingers against the table. “What’s a QZ?”

“Quarantine Zone. The government had them put up in most cities, if they had enough men. Then the main government fell and pockets of the Federal Disaster Response Agency ended up bein’ the ones in charge in most places. Lot of them are gone now, though, died out or switched to somethin’ a bit… different. There ain’t a lot around these parts.”

“Oh. What were they like?”

Joel’s fingers are also drumming against the table now, to the same rhythm as hers without a thought. “They ain’t great. The people in charge take the best for themselves. There ain’t ever enough to go around for the common folk. They execute people real quick if they break the rules too.”

Sarah tries to imagine herself living in that sort of place. Just the thought of it makes something hot and heavy grow in her chest. Her internal sense of justice, carefully cultivated by her world, bubbles beneath the surface. It’s not fair to eat while your people starve. It’s not fair to execute people without a trial, or with a corrupted one. It’s not fair that her dad and her uncle and whoever else is alive in this new world has had to live in a place like that. 

Joel reaches out, cupping his hand overtop of hers. Her thoughts shift back to reality as she savors the feeling of skin against skin. “Jackson ain’t like that,” he says, “we’re run by a council we voted on, and there’s ways set up so that people can speak up if they’ve got strong opinions about what’s goin’ on. Even if they’re idiots.”

She giggles. “Okay. So, what does the QZ have to do with the girl?”

“There were a couple of groups in Boston. Each of them had different ideas on how things should be run. One of the groups needed Ellie. So we… made a deal that we would bring her to them.”

“Who’s we?” she asks with a tilt of her head.

“What?”

“You said we made a deal. Who were the other people?”

Sarah regrets asking right away, as she sees the look in her father’s eyes. A flash of old, weary pain brought right back up to the surface. 

“Her name was Tess. She was the only person with me for a while, when Tommy was out doin’ his own thing.”

She doesn’t press the topic any further.

“Anyway. Some stuff went wrong. We had to go a lot further than we thought we would. Deal fell through in the end, and Ellie and I came here around late March. Been here ever since.” He looks down as he finishes, scrubbing a hand across his face.

“Jeez.”

She can tell there’s a lot he’s leaving out. But she doesn’t know if it’s intentional, or if it’s just from his usual succinctness. She decides to leave it alone for the time being, because at least some of her questions have been answered. 

Maria comes down from upstairs, sitting across from them. “He’s asleep,” she says, folding her hands on top of the table.

“Think he’ll stay asleep?” Joel asks.

“Hah, no. He barely slept last night. That usually makes him worse with naps somehow.”  

Joel lets out a quiet laugh. “He just wants to see the world.” Sarah decides then and there that her father is indeed made to be an uncle. 

“He’d see it a whole lot better if his eyes weren’t constantly drooping shut.”

There’s a creak as the front door opens, followed by the sound of quiet voices. Tommy and Ellie walk back into the kitchen after a few seconds. Ellie comes to a halt by where Joel’s sitting, scuffing her shoes against the floor.

“Y’all gonna go over to your place now?” Tommy asks, “show Sarah around?”

“That’s the plan.” Joel keeps his hand against Sarah’s shoulder, rising to his feet with a slight groan. 

Tommy nods. He leans back with his hands dropping against the counter, tapping a foot against the ground. His eyes are fixed on Sarah. 

“You want to come with us?” Joel asks.

Tommy immediately straightens up. “Yeah, sure.”

“James and I will meet up with you all at dinner,” Maria says, “and I’ll talk with the council about the situation this evening -” she pauses as Joel noticeably tenses, “- leaving out what needs to be left out, of course.”

“Appreciate it,” Joel says. 

They leave the house and cross the street. There aren’t any people out and about in this area right now, although Sarah can hear the shouting and cheering of a group of kids from somewhere nearby. Joel pulls the hose from the grass before they go inside, wrapping it back up on its reel. 

Stepping through the front door feels like stepping into a stranger’s house. 

Ellie kicks off her shoes once she’s inside, leaving them inches away from the shoe rack. Joel kneels down and unties his own boots. They’re caked in mud, a thin line of blood running over the top. 

Everyone had said he’d been on patrol when she had first arrived.

She tries to picture him among the ranks of the patrol she had run into, him sitting on the back of a horse and aiming a rifle without a second thought. 

Nana tears through the front yard, growling and flailing. Joel lifts up the wrench, and -

“Sarah?” Joel is looking at her, head tilted to the side. Sarah blinks, realizing she’d been staring off into space. 

“Sorry! What’s up?”

“You wanna see the house?”

“Yeah!” She internally winces at how unnaturally perky her voice sounds as she forces it out of herself. Joel doesn’t seem to notice. She takes a few deep breaths, trying to center herself. There’s a familiar feeling under her ribs as she scans the entryway, one she can’t quite place. Ellie scurried off somewhere the moment her shoes were off, so it’s just Joel and Tommy with her right now. Just the three of them for the first time in a long time. 

They lead her into the living room first. She half listens to them talk about how they got the old tv to work again, or how the windows “seal the heat in real well in the winter.” What she does pay full attention to, though, is her physical surroundings.

There’s comic books spread out over the coffee table, a sketchbook sitting off to the side. The ugly throw blanket over the back of the couch feels like a staple for any home. But the fuzzy green blanket beside it isn’t. There’s little dinosaurs patterned across it. 

She scans the DVD collection. Her dad’s favorites are there, just like back at home. Added to it now, though, instead of the teen dramas her dad could barely stand (and The Lion King, always The Lion King), there’s Apollo 13. The Exorcist. Jurassic Park. Lilo and Stitch. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. National Geographic: Built For The Kill.

And, oh, wait, The Lion King. She smiles when she sees the familiar title, pulling it out from the stack. She scans over the back, flipping it over to see the front. 

There’s a note stuck to it with a big, “NO," written across it in red. Whatever the heck that means. 

They go into the kitchen next. There’s a couple of papers on the table. The mug next to them makes her smile. Old and chipped with a little owl painted onto it. She knows it’s her father’s. 

Then she lays eyes on the fridge.

She and Joel used to use their fridge to communicate, back when he was working extra late or extra early (so, all the time). A purple sticky-note on the fridge was always her good morning for the day. Sometimes it was her “I love you,” too.

There’s no sticky notes on this fridge. What there is, is drawings. Lots of them. Most of them are of people, like Tommy with James at his hip. Some boy and girl Sarah’s never seen. Maria with her head tilted back in a laugh. Joel sitting on the porch, a guitar on his knee. Parts of a life people have been living. A life Sarah didn’t live to see.

There’s a couple polaroid pictures up there too, all of Ellie and James. They’re the ones held up by the little heart magnets.

What looks like an English report hangs off to the side, an A+ written on the front. A little white slip of papers hangs next to it. Sarah squints to read it.

Mr. Miller,

Please remind Ellie that it’s not appropriate to challenge other students to duels, even if we’re learning about it in class.

Thank you!

Miss Laura

It hits her all at once.

Right now, Sarah is standing in another’s girls house, looking at pieces of another girl’s life. More than that, she’s in her dad’s house, looking at pieces of her dad’s life. A life he’s built without her, with a girl who isn’t her. 

Ellie isn’t just some random orphan her dad took pity on and kept around as a roommate. She’s a daughter. Not from infancy, and certainly not from flesh and blood, but through the way he treats her. Through this house, with a dinosaur blanket, DVDs, and pictures on the fridge. Through this life that she’s so firmly a part of. 

If Ellie’s something like a daughter to her father, then what does that make them? Sisters? Can you be sisters if you’ve never even met before? If one of you didn’t know the other when they were a tiny wriggly baby? If you don’t have the same blood coursing through your veins, or the same life you’ve lived together?

“I know the place is kind of a mess.” Joel’s voice snaps her out of her thoughts, and she turns her head to see him leaning against the counter. Tommy is rifling through the cabinets. “I had an overnight patrol and a couple of early ones back-to-back, haven’t had much time to clean like usual.”

“It looks fine to me,” she says. Her voice is stuck in the cheerful tone she forced earlier. It makes her cringe. 

“Mess gives a place character, right Sarah?” Tommy says, closing the cabinets.

“Yeah, sure.” She gives him a fond roll of her eyes. Tommy grins in response. 

Tommy and Joel show her the rest of the downstairs, then head up.

Ellie doesn’t make a reappearance. 

Sarah looks out the window in the living room as the direct sunlight of the afternoon begins to fade out, replaced with a dimmer light as they approach the evening.

People walk down the street outside the house on their way home, frequently stopping to talk to someone they run into, or wave to someone standing in a yard or on a porch. Someone brings a group of dogs by in the opposite direction, going back towards the main part of town. 

True to her word, Maria walks into the house just as Joel and Tommy start talking about dinner, the two of them sitting on the couch near the window. They haven’t let Sarah out of their sight since she’d entered the house.

“Hey, beautiful,” Tommy says, looking up at Maria. She leans over and gives him a kiss, passing him the baby. 

“When do you reckon you’ll be talkin’ with the council tonight?” Joel asks her from beside Tommy, offering his hand to James as he reaches for it with his own tiny ones outstretched.

“I already did, actually. Smith’s patrol came back and reported early, I had extra time.” 

Joel straightens up. “What did they say?”

“Well, because she’s connected to a family here and she’s a minor, she’s automatically allowed to stay. You’re going to need to go through standard procedure with getting her into school and such, though,  pretty much just do what you did with Ellie again.”

Sarah listens intently as Maria speaks. She’s never been the kind of kid who could just zone out when adults were talking about important things. Otherwise, as far as she sees it, she’ll never figure out how to do things herself. 

“How do I register for school?” Sarah asks. Maria looks over, speaking directly to her now without a moment of hesitation.

“It’s not difficult at all. Your father will just need to go to the teacher for your age group and have a discussion with her, fill out a few things.”

“He and Laura are already real tight anyway,” Tommy says with a smirk. 

Joel shrugs. “If that’s how you want to put havin’ long conversations about my kid climbin’ on the roof or punchin’ someone else’s kid, sure.”

My kid.

It slips so easily from his mouth. 

“Ah, maybe. She adores that girl, though.”

“Ellie’s does have a real talent for wormin’ her way into people’s hearts.”

Sarah looks back out the window, watching more people go by. There’s a sudden sharp feeling in her heart. A deep longing that she’s never known before. She wants to go home. She wants her family to go back to normal. If anything changes, she wants to watch it change, not just wake up to find her entire world shifted.

She curls into herself, pressing her cheek against the cool glass window. 

Mabel walks by the house. Bonnie follows close behind, flipping around to walk backwards. She laughs at something the older woman says before they disappear from view.

They look happy. 

Sarah looks across the living room, at Joel, Maria, Tommy, and little James. The adults are talking and laughing. Making plans for dinner. They’re happy. James is looking up at his father with wide eyes, making small cooing noises like he’s trying to contribute to the conversation. He’s happy. 

Shame pours over her, icy and dripping.

Her family is safe. Her family is happy. She’s seeing them again, after thinking she never would. And they’re doing fine. So she’s doing fine, and she’s happy. She can adjust, and she can do so with a smile. Everyone else did. 

It’s her responsibility. 

An hour later, she has quite possibly one of the strangest dinners she’s had in her life as she sits on the living room floor next to Joel’s chair. The rest of the family (her family) is scattered across the living room.

The floor is cold against her ankles, which poke out through the pants she’d put on at the farm, still just a few inches too short. 

Maria, Joel, and Ellie are all quiet. And there’s some tension in the quiet that Sarah can feel against her skin like it’s a chill in the air. Everyone’s tired and processing new things. 

Tommy does his best to fill in the silence regardless. That’s always been his go-to method of defusing tension, talking and talking until someone either snaps at him or cracks a smile.

Normally Sarah would help him out with it, back when it was just Joel in a surly mood or too tired from work to do anything more than shovel food into his mouth and stumble off to bed. Because, well, that’s what you do. You chatter mindlessly through your problems, your fears, your feelings, or you sit in silence. The grownups keep what they’re really thinking to themselves, and Sarah writes her own thoughts down in her diary, or waits until the right moment to tell her dad, because he does his best to listen when he’s not falling asleep on his feet.

It’s their system. It works. 

But right now, James seems to have taken her place in that regard, filling in the silence with his own high-pitched sounds. Tommy holds a hand to his chest to keep him steady as he sits against his father’s upper leg, leaning back against his stomach. 

James lets out a loud, “babababaBA,” and Tommy snorts, hitching his hand up a bit higher as he squirms.

“Yeah, tell me about it, dude.”

The silence from the others breaks. Joel laughs quietly, balancing his plate against his knee. Maria threads her fingers through her son’s curls. Ellie shifts closer to Tommy from her place on the floor beside the couch he’s on, pushing herself up and whispering something into his ear that makes him laugh. 

Everyone else has their own system now. It looks like it works. Good for them. 

Pink and orange begin to streak across the sky as the time passes, the sun’s last light growing soft and golden as it spills through the windows, pooling across the floor. Tommy and Maria disappear into the other room to talk, James being deposited into Ellie’s arms.

Sarah watches the baby, her little cousin, closely. He looks up at Ellie and lets out a long string of unintelligible noises, kicking out his feet. He rolls his head to the side after a moment, staring directly at her. 

He lets out a loud, “ummmm,” then gives her a gummy smile. She beams in return. 

“He’s talkin’ to you.” Joel stacks the assortment of dirty plates in the living room into his arms. Sarah jumps up to help him, Joel shaking his head. “I got it, baby.”

James lets out a shriek, Sarah’s head whipping in his direction. He giggles once he’s gotten her attention, turning his head into a more comfortable position in Ellie’s arms. 

“You’re new and excitin’,” Joel says once he’s come back from depositing the dishes in the kitchen, sinking back down into the beat-up armchair he was in before. “He’s real good with strangers so far. Kinda makes sense, growin’ up in a place where everyone is always in everyone’s business.”

Stranger.

The word strikes sharp against something inside of her. 

The baby, her flesh and blood relative, is currently the arms of someone who is not, looking at Sarah with wide, curious eyes. Because she’s something new, something to investigate. Not a regular part of his life, in the way the rest of his family is. The way Ellie is.

Sarah swallows, moving to sit against the side of Joel’s armchair. 

James shrieks again as her attention is diverted. Joel laughs, 

“Ellie, you want to give him to Sarah for a minute?”

“Yeah. Fine.” Ellie carefully pushes herself up with the baby still in her arms, walking over to Sarah’s side and sitting down. She holds him out, then pauses, pulling him back to her chest. “Do you know how to hold a baby?” 

“Of course I do,” Sarah snaps. It comes out a little more aggressive than she intended. James whimpers, snuggling closer to Ellie. Said girl meets Sarah’s eyes.

Her gaze is cold and guarded, in a way that sends that same tendrils of unease from before snaking through Sarah’s stomach. Ellie tucks James closer to her, bouncing him a few times. She’s soothing him from Sarah’s voice. 

“Try and keep your voice a bit softer,” Joel says, and with that the unease in her gut shifts to a hot shame, burning all the way up and across her cheeks. She nods, reaching out and stroking a hand across James’s cheeks. 

His skin is soft and pleasantly warm beneath her fingers. He blinks a few times at her touch, peering up at her through his big, dark eyes, framed by his long lashes.

He coos.

Ellie slowly holds him out again, keeping a careful grip on him as he’s passed between them. And then he’s with Sarah, little, warm, and a welcome weight in her arms. It feels right to hold him. She can see Tommy in his smile, Tommy in his face.

They’re a part of each other, she and him. Just by being born.

Like he’s been summoned, Tommy walks back into the room. He pauses as he catches sight of her, his face shifting into a warm smile. He and Joel exchange eye contact, seeming to have an entire conversation between them with a glance. Then they look back at her and James.

Ellie takes the opportunity to slip out of the room.

“We’re gonna head out in a few minutes,” Tommy says, crouching down and reaching for his son. Sarah gently passes him over.

“If you wanted, you could stay the night,” Joel says. 

“Nah, y’all are already short on beds with just three, don’t need you to worry about fittin’ me in too.” He shifts James to his hip, the baby babbling to himself. “Where’d Ellie go off too?”

“Upstairs.” There’s a creak from upstairs as he speaks, followed by the gurgling sound of water streaming through the pipes in the walls. “She’s showerin’, I guess.”

“Alright. Tell her we said goodnight.” His gaze shifts to Sarah. “Goodnight to you too, honey.”

Sarah watches him and Maria leave the house and cross the street through the living room windows. “Uncle Tommy got old,” she says.

Joel laughs and joins her on the couch. “Yeah. He did.”

“You did too. You in those diapers yet?”

She hears the sharp intake of air he gives. That expression from before, that cold, detached one, flashes across his face. And, once again, it vanishes in a heartbeat. He shrugs and scrunches up his face in that goofy way he does, the way that used to make her burst into fits of giggles when she was little.

“If I am, you’re the one who has to change them.”

“Gross!” She elbows his side. He shoves her lightly in return. There’s a moment of silence between them, before they both start laughing.

And they can’t stop.

She laughs until her throat aches and tears prick in her eyes. She laughs as all of the pain comes surging forward, mixing in with this simple, overwhelming joy at just being here again. Just belonging to another person as they belong to her. 

She feels empty when she stops. A strange sort of empty. Like all of the stress of the day has bled out of her, and she’s left with nothing but bone-crushing exhaustion. She feels how heavy her eyelids are, all of a sudden. How shaky her limbs have become. She doesn’t suppress the yawn that develops, leaning back against the couch. As far as couches go, it’s pretty comfy. She wouldn’t mind sleeping here.

“Tired?” Joel’s voice breaks through her thoughts, soft and low. 

She drops her head against his side. “Yeah. I didn’t really sleep when I was in the lookout building with Mabel and Bonnie. They didn’t sleep either. I think they were waiting to see if I was going to turn into one of those… sick things. Infected, I guess.”

Ellie suddenly reappears in the doorway, changed into a different grey t-shirt and shorts. Her hair is wet, sticking to the back of her neck. 

“Quickest shower I ever heard of,” Joel says. 

“Whatever, man. I got in, I got wet, I got out. Shower.”

Sarah can feel her father’s chest rise quickly with a hidden huff of laughter. He doesn’t say anything more to the other girl, motioning her over instead. 

Ellie walks towards the couch in a manner that reminds Sarah of the stray cats her abuela used to feed on her porch. Slow, calculating, and clearly willing to flee at any minute. She sits on the opposite side of Sarah, putting a few inches of space between her and Joel. Sarah picks her head up from his shoulder.

They’re alone for the first time, all three of them. There’s no Tommy and James to defuse the tension and punctuate the silence. No Maria to put things into perspective in a level, logical way. It’s just them, in all of their newness and uncertainty. 

“We only have two bedrooms, technically,” Joel says, “we’ll figure it out later, but for now I was thinkin’ -”

“- I can sleep in the garage,” Ellie cuts him off. 

“You’re not sleeping in the -”

“- I can sleep there,” Sarah comes in, “since I’m the one who just showed up without a warning and all.” 

Ellie opens her mouth to reply, Joel holding up a hand to quiet both of them. “No one is sleepin’ in the garage. I was gonna say that I can sleep on the couch tonight, and Sarah can have my bed.”

Sarah scans him over, tilting her head. If it’s been 21 years since she last saw him, then he’s 57 now. 57 . He’d always been one of the youngest dads among her classmates' parents. Now he’d be one of the oldest ones. Freaky. 

Even at 36, though, she remembers him complaining about his back or his neck whenever he ended up falling asleep on the couch. She also remembers Tommy’s smirk, speaking through a mouthful of cereal. “It’s what happens when you get ancient, Sarah-girl.”

“I can take the couch,” she says, “I like it. It’s comfy.”

“Sarah -” Joel starts. She shakes her head.

“I’m serious, Dad.” She flops onto her side to demonstrate, stretching out her arms. She can see a couple of small socks wedged between the cushion and the arm of the couch. Ew.

Joel pulls the throw blanket off of where it’s draped over the back of the couch, handing it to her. He takes the fuzzy dinosaur blanket Sarah had seen before from the floor beside the couch as well, tossing it over to Ellie. 

“We got extra pillows in a closet somewhere,” he says, “I’ll go get them.” 

With that, he leaves the room. Ellie leaves seconds after he does, going back upstairs. Sarah decides to do her best to have a real conversation with her tomorrow. It’s probably important to try to get to know her, if they are indeed sort-of-sisters. 

Right now, though, the only thing she’s focused on is the couch, soft beneath her stomach, and the throw blanket that fits around her shoulders so perfectly. She curls up on her side, letting her eyes slip shut. 

She’s asleep before Joel comes back with the pillow.

She wakes up to streaming sunlight across her face, almost blinding as she opens her eyes. Briefly, she remembers the flashing of another light even more blinding, a light that would burn her eyes out if she saw it now. As soon as she remembers, though, she forgets again. She pulls the throw blanket more tightly around herself as she sits up, a breeze from the open window in the room stroking her face with its icy fingers.

She doesn’t know how late it is as she squints through the sunlight to look out the window. It’s definitely not early, that’s for sure. 

Joel’s socks are balled up beside the coffee table, because apparently the living room is the dumping ground for everyone's socks. They weren’t there before, though, meaning he must have been in here last night while she was still sleeping. 

There’s a rich, appetizing scent in the air and she stands up, curious. She can hear a tapping noise from the kitchen, followed by the flow of the sink. Voices too. Joel and Ellie’s.

“I told you to gently put the eggs away, not throw them in the back.”

“Eh, don’t worry. I’ve eggs-amined them, they’re all fine.”

She hears her dad let out a long, dramatic groan. “It ain’t that hard, see? Pick em’ up, set em’ down. No need for throwin’ anything.”

“I’ll try and follow your eggs-ample.”

“Girl.”

“Thank you, thank you! We’ll be here all night, yolks.” Ellie’s words are followed by a series of laughter and another one of Joel’s sighs. They’re not his real sighs. They’re ones he gives to hide his own laughter. The ones Sarah’s only really heard him use with herself and Tommy.

She walks into the kitchen after a moment of listening from beside the open door. Joel is in the middle of making scrambled eggs, Ellie already eating a piece of toast while watching him from the table.

They both turn their attention to her as she enters the room, a smile spreading across Joel’s face. “Mornin’, honey.”

“Mornin’.”

Ellie says nothing, focusing on her toast.

The clock on the wall reads 7:30. Not terribly late. Earlier than her father would usually get up on the rare days he could sleep in, actually.

It’s a strange sight seeing her dad making breakfast. He can cook a little bit, with varying results depending on the meal. But she’d started making her own breakfast around the time she was 10, out of her desire for something a little more than poptarts, burnt toast, and occasionally bacon (although to be fair, she usually wound up eating something of the sort anyway).

“You want toast?” Joel asks. “It’s gonna be another couple of minutes before this is ready.”

“I’m good.” She sits down across from Ellie at the small table. “Do you need any help?”

“I’ve got it, baby.”

“Okay.” She twists around in her chair, looking out at the backyard. The grass is a little less well-kept than it was in her house back in Texas. Trees frame the fence, one of them having a rope hanging down into the yard from a thick branch.

The only thing out of place is the… raccoon, walking through the center of the yard. It’s an absolute unit of a creature, waddling through the grass with its head perked up in alert. 

“Uh, Dad, there’s a -” she starts. Joel answers her without even looking over from the stove,

“Raccoon, yeah, I know. It lives under the porch. Tommy and I will remember to shoot it one of these days.”

“His name is Albert, and if you shoot him all of your left shoes will go missing,” Ellie says.

Albert seems to notice them from outside, looking over at the window. “He’s kinda cute,” Sarah says after getting a better look at him, “isn’t he like, a major rabies risk though?”

“Not many occurrences of rabies around these parts. But, yes.” Joel takes three plates out of a cabinet, taking a moment to stare at them laid out together before he starts putting food on them. “Which is why no one is supposed to touch him. Ever. Ain’t that right, Ellie?”

“Sure.”

Sarah takes an experimental bite when Joel places a plate down in front of her, blinking back surprise. He’s not a spectacular cook or anything. But he’s better than he was before. That’s for sure. Joel sits down beside her and she glances across the table, to Ellie. 

Said girl is currently eating another piece of toast. It takes Sarah a few seconds to realize that she’s folding it in half and eating it straight through the middle, which… okay. She quickly shifts her gaze when Ellie looks up.

“Alright,” Joel says after a few minutes of the three eating in silence. “I’m gonna go to the council today, get things sorted out. Sarah, far as anyone needs to know, you and I got separated in the Boston QZ, alright? You and a group made it to Denver and you left most of them there. You followed 25 into Wyoming, got lost from the rest of your group once you hit Snake River and followed it here. You didn’t know I was here at all, it was just chance.”

“Well, that’s not convoluted at all.” Sarah dangles her fork in her hand. 

“I know it sounds like a lot, but there’s a lot of things we gotta consider with it. Kids don’t usually survive all by themselves, and since there might be a bit of a learnin’ curve for you comin’ in, we don't want to raise any suspicion. Folks are also gonna be concerned if they think a random little girl can find Jackson all the way from Boston. It’s gotta be a chance thing.” 

“I thought this place was safe.”

“It is.” Joel leans back in his chair, crossing his arms to his chest. “It’s about as safe as it gets, baby.”

It’s a week later when Sarah wakes up to the sound of voices. She’s still on the couch, for lack of a better place to put her. Joel says they’ll figure something out. 

She rubs sleep from her eyes, wondering for a moment if she’d been imagining the voices, before they start up again. She sits up. She’s not particularly tired. It’s not like she’s been doing anything all week other than sitting off to the side at the work sites Joel’s been on (Joel having gotten the month off from patrols), or reading a book in the living room. Joel, for the most part, won’t let her out of his sight. And while she understands why, it’s starting to feel a bit stifling.

She can’t make out the voices very well from the couch. She slowly pushes herself up, willing her feet to be quiet as they hit the cold wood of the living room floor, sending a chill up her spine. She can’t see anything other than the streetlights through the living room windows, the sky pitch black. But she can hear the light pitter-patter of rain against the glass.

She creeps forward to the other side of the living room, pressing her body flat against the wall. The voices are coming from the kitchen. 

Briefly, she wonders if it’s a bad idea to eavesdrop, as she leaves the living room and crawls in the hallway, sitting on the bottom step of the staircase to shield her from the view of the kitchen. Then she decides that it’s not a problem, because if people are speaking loud enough to be heard from the staircase, then it’s not her fault if she happens to overhear them from said staircase.

“We’ve been through all of this before.” That’s Maria’s voice. It’s much clearer from Sarah’s new position. “You remember how much better Ellie started doing once she was on a schedule? Once she knew what to expect?”

“They ain’t comin’ from the same situation, though,” Joel comes in. His voice is low and tired. “I think she needs a little more time.”

“She needs a little more time, or you need a little more time?” There’s a moment of silence. Sarah hears shuffling from the kitchen, followed by the streaming sound of someone pouring water. “Listen.” Maria’s tone softens. “I’m not saying you need to do everything right now. I wouldn’t recommend putting Sarah in school until next month, actually. I’m just saying that you need to start preparing yourself. And her. Let her meet her teacher, properly show her around town, that sort of thing. This situation is new, but it won’t be new forever. The sooner you get her, and yourself and Ellie, into a new normal, the better.”

“I know. God, I know. I’ve just been thinkin’, y’know, how weird it probably all is to her.”

“I would imagine it is.”

There’s more silence for a minute, followed by the sound of boiling water. Joel speaks again, “you talk to Laura about all of this yet?”

“I did. She said that she’s excited to meet her, and you can come by any day this week after the kids get out to let her look around.”

“Okay. Hey, uh, there is somethin’ I wanted to ask you, by the way.” 

“Yes?” Maria says. 

“Well, I’ve been tryin’ to figure out where Sarah can sleep, and we’ve only got the two bedrooms, and, well…” This piques Sarah’s interest. The couch is comfy enough, but she’s been curious about where she’ll end up in the future. It also feels just a little bit… impermanent. Like she’s a visiting guest who’s bound to go back home and sleep in her own bed at some point. Sometimes she likes that feeling. Sometimes it scares her. 

“You wanted to get a woman’s perspective on it?”

“Yes ma’am.” Joel’s fingers tap against the table, loud enough to be heard from the stairs.

“What are you considering so far?”

“My room’s large enough that, with some time, I can divide it into two. While that’s in progress, though, I could either have her with me, have her in one of the larger closets that’ll fit a bed, or put her in with Ellie.” 

Maria seems to take a few seconds to consider it, Sarah listening with rapt attention now. “Have you asked her about it?”

“No.”

“Well, there’s your first step. Personally, I think all of the options are fine.”

Sarah considers them herself, sliding closer to the wall side of the stairs instead of staying peeking through the railings. Sharing a room with her dad for a bit would probably be a little annoying in the long run, but it wouldn’t be weird. The closet sounds claustrophobic, but at least there would be no one else there. And sharing a room with Ellie is… probably a no.

Sarah’s gotten the feeling over the past week that the girl doesn’t like her all that much, with her going out of her way to make herself scarce.

“I don’t want her to feel uncomfortable with whatever we end up doin’,” Joel says. “Sharin’ a room with me would probably annoy her after a bit, I think. Closet would probably be too small for a girl her age. And with Ellie… y’know.” His voice drops in volume. Sarah has to strain to hear him. “She still gets nightmares, sometimes. Sarah don’t need to see that.”

Sarah frowns.

Maria takes a good second to respond to that, her voice careful as she continues. “I agree that Ellie’s privacy on those matters should be protected. But I don’t think phrasing it like that is correct. The things that Ellie went through… some of them are unique to her. But some of them aren’t, Joel. This is Sarah’s world too, now, as much as it’s yours, or mine, or Ellie’s. She needs to know what’s out there.”

“Jesus, Maria. She’s been back a week.” 

“I know. And, again, I’m not telling you to do any of this now. I’m just telling you to prepare for it. Because she’s going to have questions, and she’s going to need you. Ellie’s going to need you as well. Think about how complicated this has all been for a child like her too.”

“Yeah.” Sarah hears Joel let out a long sigh, followed by the creak of someone’s chair leaning back. “She’s been pretty skittish lately.”

“Mhm. Ultimately, you know your kids. You’ll figure it out. Just… don’t take things at face value, okay? Not with anyone, definitely not with teenage girls. Let them know that you love them. Tell them. They need it.”

Their voices lower to something closer to whispers, the conversation dying off. Sarah squeezes her eyes shut, leaning back against the steps behind her. She’s already been able to put together a pretty good picture of this new world in her mind, from everything she’s seen and heard so far.

It doesn’t seem like a nice one.

She’s about to sneak back into the living room when she briefly looks up to the top of the staircase. 

Ellie’s up there, sitting on the floor. Her eyes peek through the railings as she leans forward. She was listening in too. Okay, then.

They lock eyes for a moment, Sarah rubbing the back of her head before shooting the other girl a shrug. Ellie turns away in response, crawling back towards her room, the one place in the house Sarah has yet to see. She’s completely silent as she does so. 

Sarah tries to follow in her example, slinking across the hallway and into the living room, putting down as little weight as possible with each step. She crawls back onto the couch once she’s in, pulling her blanket back over herself. 

She doesn’t fall back asleep. 

Joel seems to take part of Maria’s talk to mind. Over the next week he shows Sarah around the town, pointing out everyone he knows by name and describing each building they pass. There’s pride in his voice, as he talks about the community. Respect too. He’s a contributor to this place, just like he was back at home. 

It’s strange, having people recognize him, but not her. 

Seeing the town isn’t very stressful. Visiting the school for the first time is. Joel tells her ahead of time that they’ll be going on Friday in the afternoon. And Sarah spends the week dreading it.

The feeling isn’t unusual, at least. It’s the same constant drop in her stomach she used to get before every new school year, as she anxiously waited to see what her teachers would be like and which friends would be in her class. She’s good at school. Really good at some parts of it. But knowing so isn’t enough to chase away the creeping fear. 

“You ready, baby?” Joel asks her, poking his head into the living room. Ellie is currently at school, just about to be let out for the day. It’s just Sarah and her father right now. It’s nice. She prefers it that way. 

“Yeah.” They head to the door together, Sarah shrugging on the coat that had come with the box of clothes and hair products Maria had given her a few days after she’d arrived. The temperature’s dropped a little more since then, and the coat has come in handy.

She and Joel step outside, the afternoon sun shining directly onto her face. She squints through it, placing a hand horizontally over her brow to shield her eyes from its glow.

A couple people wave to them as they walk by. Sarah waves back, even if she doesn’t quite remember everyone’s names. 

They’re just in time as they arrive at the school, the front doors opening and a stream of kids rushing out. Some of the smaller ones make their way over to parents waiting at the line of trees toward the end of the schoolyard. The older ones break off into their own groups, scampering off in different directions. 

Sarah sees girls her own age walk by. Her gaze drifts down to her feet.

Ellie is among the kids exiting the building. She makes her way over after waving goodbye to a girl who was walking beside her. 

“Hey, kiddo,” Joel says, reaching out and placing a gentle hand against her head in greeting. “How was your day?”

“Fine.” Her gaze falls on Sarah as Joel motions for her to shrug off her backpack, swinging it over his arm as they walk back towards the school building. “Guess it isn’t over yet, huh?”

“Guess not. This should be quick, though. Sarah just needs to meet Laura and see the classroom. Ain’t that right?” Joel is looking at Sarah now. She gives him a thumbs-up in response.

The sick feeling of fear in her stomach comes to climax as they walk up the steps leading to the school. It looks like any old building from the outside, she guesses. Brown bricks all neatly placed together. Not much like a school. 

And then they step inside. 

The entrance room is simple enough, a desk on one side with an older woman sitting behind it. There are pictures hung up over the walls of presumably different drawings kids have made. Some of them aren’t that great, just a few scribbles over a crumbly piece of handmade paper. Others are actually pretty good, a few landscapes of fully-flowered fields hanging alongside hyper-realistic sketches of trains and… guns. 

The woman behind the desk gives them a wide smile, her eyes settling on Ellie. “Back already, dear?”

“I was forced.”

The woman lets out a quiet laugh, turning her gaze towards Sarah and Joel. “You must be Sarah. We’ve heard a lot about you over the past week. I’m Miss Hazel. I’m somewhat of a mix of an office worker, a nurse, and a counselor.”

Sarah frantically wracks her brain for the manners her father spent so long imparting to her. “Oh. Uh, nice to meet you ma’am. That’s… a lot of things.”

“It is, but we make it work.” She gives Joel a nod. “Laura is waiting.” She motions them to the doors leading to the main hallway. Joel says a few words to her that Sarah can’t hear, then pushes the hallway door open. 

The walls of said hallway are bursting with color. Instead of there being mostly art hung up by kids, although there is still some of that, the walls look like they were flat-out painted by them. Little multi-colored handprints are spread out across the vibrant figures and shapes. 

There’s a couple of doors on each side of the hallway, a coat hanger and shoe-rack outside of each one. Joel had briefly explained to her how the classrooms worked. There were four. One for nursery, one for elementary, one for middle, and one for high.

He said the system worked for them. But Sarah can’t imagine going to school in the same building as kids who are closer to her knee than her head in height. And she also can’t imagine being in the same classroom as people who would have been seniors in the old way of doing things. Practically adults.

“Ellie, knock -” Joel starts as they reach the last door in the hall. Ellie wrenches it open. She steps inside, Joel following with a sigh. Sarah ducks in behind both of them.

The high school classroom is larger than she expected it would be, just from looking at the outside of the building. It’s not quite as childish as the office and the hallway looked either, although there’s still a few… interesting projects on display across the room, one of them being an arrangement of animal skulls spread out over the top of a bookshelf. 

The desks are larger than they were in her old classrooms, a little more spaced out. There’s an ancient beanbag in the corner, a few patches scattered across it that tell the story of some hasty repairs. 

It’s a little less decorated than some classrooms Sarah’s been in. But it’s clearly been full of young, active human beings, who have made this space their own.

She wonders what her school back in Texas looks like now. Maybe it’s like the cabins she saw, all worn down and choked with ivy? Or could it be like the lookout, old and rough-around-the-edges, but still functioning? Still there?

Is there any part of her left behind?

Sarah snaps to attention as Joel approaches the woman at the front of the room, who’s currently facing away from them as she wipes off the blackboard. 

“Ma’am?” Joel says.

She spins around to face them. She looks around the age Sarah thought she would be, somewhere in her middle years, with some creases across her face that come from stress and others that come from laughter. Her hair is tied up, the skirt she wears coming to a stop just above her ankles.

A wide smile grows across her face as she scans over all three of them, her gaze settling on Sarah. She extends her hand, Sarah awkwardly giving it a shake. “Hi, there. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. I’m Miss Laura.” 

“You too. I’m Sarah.” 

Miss Laura steps back and sits on the top of her desk, Joel taking a rag and finishing cleaning the blackboard for her. “I’ll just get right into it. You seem like someone who would appreciate that. I understand you come from a FEDRA public school. Boston, right?”

Sarah quickly goes through the story her father had made her memorize in her head. “Uh, yeah.”

“Okay. I’m sure your dad’s talked to you about it, but our school here looks a little different than FEDRA ones. The days are shorter and much less rigid. Wednesday you don’t come into the classroom at all, it’s a work day. You’ll have your choice of where you go then, but we’ll worry about that later. How are you liking Jackson so far?”

Out of the corner of her eye, Sarah sees Ellie walk over to one of the bookshelves, picking out a book and sitting down on the floor to read while they talk. She shifts her attention back to the teacher. “Um, it’s… different. A lot better than being out in the woods.”

“I would imagine so. Have you seen the whole town yet?”

“Yeah, pretty much.” Sarah’s fingers make their way to the edge of her shirt, and she twists at the fabric with them. “I like walking by the kennels. The dogs got really excited.” 

“They love having visitors.” Miss Laura’s gaze briefly shifts to Ellie, then sweeps the room, probably a natural motion for someone who spends most of her day keeping an eye on a classroom full of kids. “We go over to the kennels sometimes, if someone here has been wanting to, or if the workers there request it.”

“Wait, really?” Sarah’s hands drop from her shirt. 

“Mhm. It works for everyone when we do things like that. You guys get to see something you're interested in, the workers get to show off what they’ve been doing, and Jackson gets kids who are further prepared for adulthood. There’s a lot of options here. It’s my job to help you explore them all.”

Sarah’s not quite sure what “a lot of options” looks like in this world. Before, she wanted to be an ambassador, or maybe a lawyer (“And rule the world on the side,” Joel had always added). Somehow she doubts either of those careers are still viable. 

Maybe though, as long as she doesn’t have to fight those creatures outside the wall, she can find something to settle into.

Laura goes over a bit more of the classroom expectations and how she can catch up to her peers, exchanging eye contact with Joel when she’s done. “Well, I’m going to have a quick chat with your dad now. Ellie, why don’t you show your sister around?”

Sister.

There’s that word. The one Sarah’s kind of been dreading. She winces as Miss Laura says it, the book in Ellie’s hands snapping shut.

Ellie stands up, putting said book back on its shelf before turning around. “I mean, what’s there to show? It’s one fucking room.”

“Ellie,” Joel says, looking mortified.

“Ellie,” Miss Laura says in a level tone, raising an eyebrow. 

“Okay, jeez!” Ellie walks to the back of the classroom, motioning Sarah over. Miss Laura stays where she is from across the room, beginning to talk quietly to Joel, the man leaning against the wall with his arms crossed to his chest. 

“What are they talking about?” Sarah asks in a low voice, once they’re out of earshot of the adults. 

“Your needs, how you’ll adjust, shit like that,” Ellie says. She spins around in a circle, looking over the back of the classroom. Then, she points to the beanbag. “Beanbag.” She moves her finger to the wall. “Wall.” Then the window. “Window.”

“I know what a wall is.”

“I know. I don’t know what to show you.” 

“How about that?” Sarah motions to the collection of animal skulls on top of the bookshelf.

“Oh, yeah.” Ellie proceeds to climb the bookshelf in response, grabbing one of the skulls. Sarah’s gaze nervously shifts back to the adults. Joel catches her eye, then looks over at the bookshelf. 

“Ellie!” He scrubs a hand across his face. “Get down.” 

She drops down from the shelf, skull still in hand. “It’s a buck,” she says once she’s on the ground, holding it out. “Joel got it. Sometimes the classroom gets the skulls after a hunt so that we can study them.”

“That’s… nice.” Ellie is still holding it out. Sarah swallows, reaching out and taking the skull. Her hand dips slightly under the unexpected weight. It’s smoother than she thought it would be. She strokes her fingers down a groove on its side, her face twisting into something half-way curious. 

“You should see the skull Tommy got when he fought that bear.”

With no context to that, Ellie walks over to the large windows in the middle of the room, peering through the glass. She turns around after a second, looking back toward the adults. “I’m going to show Sarah outside.”

Joel takes a long moment to respond. He looks outside for a long moment, and Sarah can see his grip against his shirt sleeves from his crossed arms tighten. Finally, he says, “alright. Don’t leave the schoolyard.”

Sarah follows Ellie back through the colorful hallway and the art-filled office, taking a deep breath once they step outside. The air is cold against her skin, and she takes her coat from where she had tied it around her waist, putting it back on. 

“C’mon.” Ellie leads her around the side of the building. 

The actual schoolyard is bigger than she thought it was through the windows, and she stops as they reach the middle of it. 

Most of it is just a long field with a copse of trees in the back. Sarah can spot a few homemade swings hanging from some of them. The grass is even more bare than it is in Joel’s yard right now, probably the result of so many little feet pounding against it day after day. It reminds her of the yard outside of her old elementary school.

Ellie starts dragging some of the crates that are scattered across the side of the large, surrounding fence, settling them down close to the back wall of the school building. 

“What’re you doing?” Sarah asks.

Ellie doesn’t give her an immediate response, beginning to stack the crates instead. Once they’re organized in a satisfactory manner, she climbs onto them. 

And pulls herself onto the roof. 

She peeks over the edge when she’s done. “You want to come up?”

“Uh, no, I’m good.”

Sarah can feel her heart pound in her chest as she watches the other girl scale the side of the uneven roof, arms held out for balance. 

“Maybe you should -”

Before Sarah can finish her sentence, Ellie begins to run, taking a flying leap off the edge of the roof and gripping onto the branch of a tree off to the side of the building, climbing down to a less leg-breaking height before she jumps to the ground. 

Jesus freaking christ. 

“You can’t do that when the teachers are watching, so sometimes we come back later.” Ellie moves the crates back to their previous positions.

Sarah doesn’t even want to know who the other people involved in we are.

They go back inside after a few minutes, and when Miss Laura asks if she likes the building, all she can do is numbly nod. Truth be told, it doesn’t look terrible. But it’s different. So different. And it doesn’t have her teachers, or her friends, and when she starts thinking about all of that her chest feels so tight and weird and -

Nope. She’s alright. She’s fine, her family’s fine. 

She forces herself to smile. 

Sarah ends up sleeping in the downstairs closet. It’s only just large enough for a bed to be put in, and if she moves a few inches in any direction, she inevitably smacks into the wall. Joel offered to put a light in, but she declined. As a result, when she closes the door behind her, she’s covered in darkness. 

Sometimes she loves it, being alone in that little space, with no bright lights or sounds or colors. Other times she gets lost in that darkness, feeling its invisible hands wrapping around her neck, choking her. 

But for the most part, she’s okay. She follows Joel around to his work sites, still, it having been decided that she’ll start school in December. He lets her help with a few things now, explaining to her what everyone’s doing as they work. 

She has something of a routine. Something akin to familiarity.

And then they hit the end of the month.

She had almost forgotten it was November, the month seeming far less relevant than the year when she’s accidentally slipped through time. But the end of it approaches all the same, quick and slow all at once, and the topic of people’s everyday conversations starts to follow a common theme. After hearing the millionth discussion about where the local groups of turkeys have wandered, or who’s going over to whose house, she remembers.

Thanksgiving. 

Sarah scans the handwritten calendar in the kitchen one morning and zeroes in on the date, twirling around to face her father, who’s making breakfast. “Jackson does stuff for the holidays, right?”

“Sure does,” Joel says, squinting at the carton of berries that have been mysteriously disappearing over the past few minutes and putting it on a shelf out of Ellie’s reach. “Folks here just seem to like celebrating anythin’. Guess that makes sense.”

“What’s Thanksgiving like?”

“Dunno. I haven’t been here for one before.”

Right. Sometimes she forgets that her dad and Ellie are both still relatively new here.

As she lays in her closet that night, she thinks about all of the Thanksgivings she’s ever had in her life. The earliest she can really remember is probably from when she was about four. It was Uncle Tommy’s first year back from deployment. They didn’t have a table, for some reason, maybe it had broken. So they ate dinner while sitting on the floor. Now that she looks back on it, they were probably eating food that came from the local church’s donations for the, “less fortunate on this lovely day of togetherness.”

She remembers the feeling of Tommy’s tears against her head the most, though, after she climbed into his lap. Looking up at him, seeing them streaming down his face. 

She doesn’t remember what he had been crying about. But she remembers Joel putting a hand against his knee and keeping it there.

She remembers the three of them, always. 

Sarah lets out a long breath, staring into the surrounding darkness of her closet. It feels so familiar to something locked away in her brain, something that only comes in vague, dream-like images.

She remembers other Thanksgivings. Turkey hand-art, feathers or fingers colored in every color she could find. Going to go get the turkey with Tommy every year, Tommy giving her a wink and a quiet, “ssshhh,” as they go little off course and maybe end up getting cupcakes too. Wearing one of her dresses, like she does every holiday, waiting for Joel to compliment it and for Tommy to spin her around so that it swishes in that satisfying way. The feeling of perfectly-cooked turkey against the roof of her mouth, rich and flavorful, followed by mashed potatoes that are somehow too hot on one side and too cold on the other.

And, most recently, squinting over cookbooks herself. Wondering if there’s something she can contribute.

That was Thanksgiving for her. She doesn’t know what it is now.

Tommy brings it up during dinner in the dining hall one evening, bouncing the baby against his leg as he speaks. “So. I guess I gotta start thinkin’ about gettin’ that turkey, huh?”

“Mhm,” Maria says from where she’s sitting beside him. “Better bring back a good one.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Sarah knows her dad is hiding a smile behind his piece of bread. He takes a second to collect himself, then looks up. “You still plannin’ on takin’ Ellie?”

“Hell yeah,” Tommy says. Ellie pumps her fist in the air, shooting him a grin. 

Sarah always used to be the one to get the turkey with Tommy, during the Thanksgivings before. It makes sense though that she's not included now, she guesses. Actually going out to shoot one in a land full of monsters isn’t the same thing as picking one up from the grocery store. She understands that.

But she still can’t help the slight sting that pierces through her heart every time she thinks about it. 

Tommy and Ellie do indeed go out to get the turkey, heading out three days before Thanksgiving. Tommy takes her at the crack of dawn, just before Sarah wakes up. 

Sarah looks through the clothes Maria brought for her, which are currently sharing a space in Joel’s closet for the time being. There’s one dress among the bunch, long and eggshell white. It’s not her usual style, but she can work with it. Maybe one tradition can still continue. 

She puts it on the day before Thanksgiving when she and Joel walk over to Tommy and Maria’s. Maria looks up at them as they cross into the living room, currently sitting on the edge of the couch, watching James try so hard to pull himself off of the mat she’s set him down on. 

“He’s gettin’ closer,” Joel says as they hang their coats up on the rack in the corner of the room, “gonna have a crawler soon.”

“Oh god, I know. Can’t wait for him to start getting into everything. He’s already trying.” Maria lifts James off the mat, bouncing him a few times as he whines. He looks around the room, zoning in on Sarah. Maria notices and holds him out to her after a moment, Sarah gently taking him into her arms.

“Hey, little buddy,” she whispers. James drools against her dress in response. She definitely should have saved it until tomorrow.

Joel crouches down and folds up the mat the baby was on, pointing to the closet and putting it there at Maria’s nod. “I ever tell you about the time our mother found Tommy suckin’ on a bulb of garlic he found on the floor, right after he learned how to crawl?”

“Don’t even,” Maria laughs.

They walk into the kitchen and Sarah follows, baby still in her arms. Joel had said they were going over to start making some of the food for tomorrow, and she’s more than ready to feel like she’s contributing something. 

Maria takes James after a minute and puts him in his wrap, washing her hands after. She and Joel get started together with minimal words, Maria giving Sarah directions as she slides potatoes in front of her to peel or vegetables to chop. 

It’s quiet without Tommy and Ellie around. Sarah can hear every tap of a knife and clink of a spoon against a metal bowl. Then Joel goes to the record player in the living room, putting something on before walking back in. 

Sarah doesn’t recognize the song. It sounds like one of those ancient ones her dad used to play at night on his guitar for an hour straight, before she (or Tommy, if he was over) threw a pillow at his head. 

Maria starts to hum along and James perks up, staring up at her with wide eyes before starting to squirm. Maria takes him out of the wrap and holds him in her arms after washing her hands again, Sarah letting out a laugh as he kicks out his legs repeatedly. 

“Is he dancing?”

“As best as he knows how,” Maria says. She walks away from the counter and into the middle of the kitchen, starting to bounce him to the rhythm of the song. James lets out a shocked shriek, before beginning to giggle. Sarah’s never seen someone laugh with their entire body as well as a baby can. 

Joel leans against the cabinets, smiling widely. He takes the baby as Maria passes him over with a spin, James letting out another fit of giggles. 

It’s adorable, and Sarah knows she should be happy about it, because it’s her family being happy. But her mind wanders. She wonders, not for the first time, about the people in those dilapidated buildings she’d seen. About the people who are in QZ’s right now, or wandering through the woods. The people who are skeletons.

Or creatures.

And here they are just being normal. Or, almost normal. 

Sarah knows that there’s things the adults aren’t telling her. She can feel it, a shiver from her heart to her stomach. 

And she wants to go home.

But she pushes the feelings back. Forces herself to smile. 

Because what else is she supposed to do?

Tommy and Ellie arrive back the morning of Thanksgiving, coming into Maria and Tommy’s kitchen, where Joel, Maria, and Sarah are continuing their work from yesterday, the baby napping in his old pack n’ play in the kitchen. 

Coming into is too mild of a way to put it, actually. More like they burst into the kitchen, soaking wet, bleeding, and carrying the biggest turkey Sarah’s ever seen. It’s strung up by the neck, dangling from Tommy’s gloved hand. 

She swallows back the bile that rises in her throat. 

Maria lets out a long whistle. “Damn. That’s the biggest bird I’ve ever seen.”

“It better be,” Tommy says. “Tracked this fucker through what felt like half the forest before we finally got a clean shot. Kid did the honors.”

Joel eyes the turkey for a long moment, then gives them both a nod. “Fine lookin’ turkey.” He digs through the drawers after, Maria opening the drawer closest to her and tossing him a handkerchief. He pulls Ellie closer and brings it to the side of her face, wiping away the blood that’s dripping down from a cut above her eyebrow. “Why’s she bleedin’?”

“Tree branch,” Tommy says without a moment of hesitation. “Whacked her in the face when we were goin’ through the woods.” 

Sarah catches the wink Tommy gives Ellie when Joel turns away. And she catches the wide grin Ellie gives Tommy in turn.

Maria also seems to catch it, and doesn’t do anything except roll her eyes, taking the turkey from Tommy. “You two need to go clean up. You smell like outside. Also, you’re dripping water on the floor. Why are you wet anyway?”

Tommy and Ellie both hurry off in different directions.

They have dinner that day in the early evening, before the sun’s even begun to go down. Sarah changes back into the dress before they do, helping Maria and Joel with setting the table before she’s shooed to the living room.

James is on his mat again, Tommy dragging a little stuffed dinosaur just out of his reach. Ellie lays beside the mat on her stomach, watching with rapt attention. Sarah comes to sit down on the other side.

“I think he just growled at you,” Ellie says as James starts to fuss, reaching a hand towards the toy.

“Probably.” Tommy moves the toy a bit closer, ruffling James’ hair with his hand. The baby’s curls are sticking up when he brings his hand away, and both Sarah and Ellie giggle at the same time.

“Why don’t you just give it to him?” Sarah asks.

“I will in a second. I’m just tryin’ to see if he can reach it himself. He’s almost there.” 

The baby doesn’t seem to think so, his light fussing turning to wails. Tommy moves the dinosaur a little bit closer again, just close enough for James to clumsily grab at it as he stretches his arm out as far as it can go. A smile breaks out across the baby’s face and Tommy lets out a cheer, his head snapping up as Maria calls him from the kitchen. “You two mind keepin’ an eye on him for a minute?” he asks. Ellie scoops James into her arms in response, Tommy smiling and walking off.

Ellie kisses James’ cheek, the baby letting out a giggle in response. Sarah scans them both over. James is dressed in blue overalls, his face currently dripping with drool, which is lovely. Ellie is in a worn-out flannel, along with jeans with multiple non-intentional rips in them and dirt stains around the knees.

That’s one way to dress for a family holiday.

Words come to Sarah’s mind before she fully thinks them through, and she asks, “do you ever not dress like you’re homeless?” 

Ellie freezes. Then she scans her over, narrowing her eyes. “Do you ever not dress like a child bride?”

That makes absolutely no sense, considering this is the first time Sarah’s ever worn a dress while being here. Before she can tell the other girl that, though, Tommy calls them into the kitchen. 

Dinner is good. Great even. Better than some of the ones she’s had in the past. James tries a little bite of mashed potatoes, which he immediately spits out and smears into his hair. Tommy and Joel argue over how to carve the turkey, Maria eventually doing it herself while they’re distracted, pausing partway through to help Ellie give it a try. 

Joel says her dress looks nice, and that’s normal at least. 

And she sits there. For a little while, it feels like everything’s moving in slow motion around her, like she’s stuck in some kind of wavy expression of time once more (because for a while she was, wasn’t she? Even if she forgets and remembers and forgets again). 

She passes the mashed potatoes. Her ears ring. 

Ellie kicks her from under the table, maybe on purpose and maybe on accident. She wants to go home. 

She wants to be four again and sitting on the floor, paper plate with canned cranberry sauce she devours and green beans she refuses to eat right in front of her. Tommy and Joel beside her. Calm and quiet.

She shakes her head a few times, trying to snap out of it. 

She, Joel, and Ellie return to their house later that evening, bellies full and spirits high in two out of three cases. She lets her father put a hand against her shoulder and ask how her day was, and she hugs him in response, savoring the feeling of being safe with his arms wrapped around her. And then he goes to Ellie and rests an affectionate hand against her head, and asks her if she had fun, and listens to her ramble.

Sarah slips away to her closet after giving Joel an early goodnight, sliding her back against the wall and closing herself into the darkness of the small space. Her breathing quickens. She drags her hands down her face, trying to get a hold of herself. She tries to smile. 

But this time, it doesn’t come.

Tears prick in her eyes, hot and heavy. Her stomach crashes and rolls. She’s lost in this storm of uncertainty, this storm her own stupid mind has created. 

She closes her eyes, tears sliding down her cheeks. And she slides down against the wall until she’s sitting, pulling her knees against her chest. She swallows, her throat feeling like it’s closer around itself, like the fists of the darkness are closing around her neck.  

She doesn’t have any right to be like this. Not when things turned out so well. Not when she’s supposed to be strong. Not when her family is safe and happy.

But that desperate ache surges forward until it consumes her all the same, and she lets it bleed out through her tears, her arms and legs shaking and pricking with goosebumps. 

She wants to go home.

Chapter Text

Sarah’s abuela used to refer to Joel and Tommy as “the boys” far more than she referred to either of them by name. Sarah thinks there was a pride in that, a recognition that her sons were still together, still looking out for each other. And they’d continue to do so even once she was gone. 

She’s never been part of a collective like that in her family. There was never anyone to group her with, other than a few second cousins she occasionally saw. Now there is. It’s still weird every time she hears it.

“Hey, Joel, how’re the girls?”

“I’ll come if I can get the girls out the door in time.”

“I’ve got the girls, don’t worry.”

She’s not just Sarah anymore. She’s not just the only child of a tiny family. She’s part of something larger, something far more important to this messed up society than her family had ever been back when things were normal. Inside her family, she’s one half of “the girls.”

She’s never realized it more as she walks to her first day of school in Jackson. Joel walks by her side, his hand on her shoulder. His grip is strong, and she feels a bit like a toddler on a leash as he tries not-so-subtly to keep her beside him. She doesn’t protest. It’s better than him trying to hold her hand or something. 

Ellie struts on ahead, stopping every now and then to crush the ice that’s formed overnight with her foot. Some people wave as they walk past, a few calling out cheerful greetings to Joel. It almost feels normal. 

And then they get closer to the school. 

She’s aware of the eyes trained on her the moment they pass the first group of kids, younger ones walking themselves to the schoolhouse. Their loud chatter fizzles down to whispers as they catch sight of her. She hears snippets of their conversation as they pass.

“Oh, shit, there’s another one?”

“...Maria’s niece -”

Ellie turns around once she’s on the front steps of the school, giving Joel a quick wave and darting inside. Sarah moves to go after her, Joel holding out an arm. “You sure you’re up to this?”

She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

“Cause if you’re not, you can always ask them to get me or Tommy, and you can leave. If you ain’t ready, that’s alright.” He moves his arm from in front of her, reaching out and letting his fingers graze the side of her face before resting them against her cheek.

“Dad, it’s just school. I’ve got it.” 

He was never this… whatever this is, about her going to a new school before. She can still remember when he’d dropped her off at middle school for the first time, Tommy in the passenger’s seat and the radio blaring. He had gotten out of the car, given her a quick kiss on the forehead, and said, in earshot of other parents, “Leo Myers starts givin’ you any trouble, go for the nuts.” And that had been that. 

Although, according to Tommy, he’d spent a good minute crying once they drove away. 

This is something different. The hug he pulls her into isn’t the same as it was when he scooped her into his arms before her first day of kindergarten, peppering her face with kisses until she giggled. He’d been nervous then, despite his happy front. She’d heard the erratic beating of his heart as her ear was pressed against his chest. But he’s beyond nervous now. 

She hears his heart again, head against his chest. It’s racing. His hands are damp with sweat as he presses one to her neck and the other against her back, pulling her into him like someone’s going to try to yank her away. 

She steps back after a minute, because she’s almost certain people have stopped to stare at them again. He lets her, a hand coming up to cup her cheek again. 

“I’ll be waiting right here when the school day’s over, baby girl. Listen to your teacher, be safe, and if anythin’ happens, you can go to Miss Hazel and—”

“—Dad. I know.” 

They meet each other’s eyes. His face is currently showing what she's taken to thinking of as his “stranger face.” Expression tense, whites of the eyes flashing. Something that feels almost animal. Like one of the lionesses she’d seen in the nature documentaries, scrambling forward, hoping desperately that she’ll reach her cubs before the hyena.

Sarah doesn’t know him when he looks like that. She tries not to care.

She throws her arms back around him after a moment and gives him a quick squeeze, looking up. “Today’s gonna be fine. I love you.”

“I love you too.” He presses a kiss to her head before letting her go. 

She can feel his eyes trailing her the entire way into the building, only gone once she steps inside, where his gaze is, of course, replaced by numerous others. 

They probably don’t get many new students, she guesses as she walks down the hallway, past the colorful walls and the doors to other classrooms. The smaller kids turn from hanging up their coats to watch her, eyes burning into her side. The older kids are more subtle about it. She doesn’t know if that’s better or worse.

Her hand comes up to the doorknob as she reaches the last room in the hallway, taking a deep breath. This’ll be just like her first day of high school. Sort of. At least back then there were hundreds of other ninth graders starting with her, though.

She opens the door.

The classroom looks different with other kids inside. About half of the desks are filled up, kids twisting around to talk to each other. It’s very clearly a mixed-age class. One of the boys has a full beard. Huh.

“Sarah.” Miss Laura gets up from her desk, walking over. “I’m so glad to see you. We’ll get started in ten minutes. Why don’t you go take a seat beside your sister?” 

There’s that word again. It still feels awkward. Wrong. Like a shoe that doesn’t fit, no matter how much she tries to squeeze her heel through the back. She listens to Miss Laura, though, walking to the middle of the room where Ellie is sitting. She slips into the empty desk beside her. 

“Wait, is that her?” The girl on Ellie’s other side leans forward. Ellie nods. “No way!” The girl’s gaze shifts to Sarah. Her eyes are friendlier than any of the others have been so far. But there’s still something sharp to them. Something different than most of the kids she had been around in her own time.

“Uh, hi?” Sarah says. 

“Hi, I’m Dina. I’m Ellie’s best friend.”

“Jesse’s my best friend,” Ellie says, Dina elbowing her in the ribs. Ellie lets out a laugh, sliding her chair closer to Sarah’s and out of elbowing reach. “He is right now. He let me copy his history homework yesterday.” 

“Okay, yeah, fair. Jesse’s my best friend then too. He gives me the strength to put up with your dumb ass.” 

“I’m not the one who got beat up by a sheep last week.”

“I didn’t get beat up! It was a draw! And it was a ram, for the record.”

“It’s the same thing!”

They’ve turned their attention completely away from Sarah at this point, trading insults and jokes. She looks away.

There’s a flash of something dark in her stomach. A slime threading its way through her gut and sending everything plummeting for a few quick seconds. She thinks of Brittany and Eliza goofing around behind her seat. Nicole slipping her a note from the table beside her, an eyebrow raised as she goes to open it. Evan Rosen giving her a smile from across the room. Her giving him one back.

It feels like it was a month ago. It feels like it was forever ago. 

It’s been 21 years.

She looks down at her desk. There’s a sketch in the bottom left corner of a stick figure in a hat, pointing a gun at another stick figure with twisted fungal plates sprouting from its head. She takes her eraser out of her bag and rubs at it. The image smears and smudges, the end of her eraser going gray. The stick-figure with the gun disappears altogether, lost in a cloud of smoke. The one with fungus on his head doesn’t, no matter how many times she pushes the eraser against it. 

“I want to say we’ve heard a lot about you, but we really haven’t heard much.” It takes her a moment to realize that Dina’s talking to her again. “You’re from a QZ, right?”

“Yeah, Boston.”

“Cool. Guess you traveled pretty far, then? Like Ellie.”

“Yeah, it was… far.” 

Dina motions to the empty seat beside her. “Jesse usually sits there, unless we all get separated for being disruptive or some shit. He’s on an early patrol, though. He’ll be back in the afternoon.” 

She thinks about the patrol that had brought her in, and the way they handled the Infected without a moment of hesitation. Their guns held out in a steady, trained manner. The horses they rode, giant hoofs clipping against the ground and crunching through the leaves.

“They let kids go on patrol?”

“Only really close ones,” Dina says. “And you have to be at least 16 to even start. Not like the QZ’s with child soldiers and stuff.” 

Jeez. Sarah thinks about any of the kids she’d known before killing things on horseback. They’d probably accidentally shoot themselves before they hit any target. 

Miss Laura starts the class from the front of the room and they all shut up. Sarah sits up straighter, fingers tapping against the side of the desk. It’s just school. She’s done school before. 

It takes her less than an hour to really get a feel on this school.

The basic subjects they’re going over are just that. Basic. She learned some of this stuff in middle school. She flies through the arithmetic problems the teacher goes over, writing out her work on the crumbly, homemade paper that was passed out. Miss Laura reads a chapter of Jane Eyre to them, which Sarah already read last year. Or 22 years ago. Whatever. 

There’s a little more talk about farming than she remembers school having before. As well as an intensive focus on local geography. Other than that, school is school. She’s always been on top of it. At least that hasn’t changed.

The kid in front of her accidentally knocks against his backpack while they’re working independently on labeling the maps in front of them. Sarah has absolutely no idea how to label anything and has been partnered with Ellie as a result. The other girl doesn’t do a very good job of explaining things, though, just slides the map towards herself and starts adding labels. 

The kid’s backpack falls onto its side. Something falls through the opening, landing on the floor with a clatter. 

It’s a gun. 

Her muscles seize up at the sight, the air leaving her lungs. There was only one reason someone would bring a gun into school. It didn’t matter that her dad had always turned off the TV whenever people on the news would start talking about it. She knew what it was.

The boy scrambles to pick it up, Miss Laura catching sight of it from the front of the room. She walks over in a calm, unhurried manner. 

None of the other students even look up.

Miss Laura kneels down and picks the gun up, checking it with practiced hands. She says something to the boy, soft enough that Sarah can’t hear. Then she puts the gun in one of her desk drawers and walks him out of the room. 

“Where’s he going?” Sarah whispers. Ellie doesn’t respond, Dina jumping in after a moment.

“Who?”

“The boy with the gun.”

“She’s taking him to Miss Hazel,” Ellie says without looking up from their map. “They’ll get one of his parents to take him home and have a talk about acceptable behaviors and “adjusting” and all that shit.”

“Yeah.” Dina smirks. “Ellie would know.” 

“Shut up.”

This leads to a brief kicking-fight under the desks, Sarah’s legs getting caught in the crossfire. 

The school breaks at noon and the students file out of the building, stepping into the freezing air. It’s going to snow soon, Tommy had claimed. More than just a few flurries too. She’s kind of looking forward to it. There was never much snow in Texas.

Most of the little kids stay in the school yard, negotiating game rules with the seriousness of global leaders discussing nuclear war. Sarah follows a few paces behind Ellie, cutting through the groups of kids and heading towards the street. 

There’s a clicking noise from behind them. It’s light but guttural, the sequence of sounds disjointed. 

She freezes.

Ellie’s hand goes to her hip, reaching for a weapon that isn’t there. She’s not the only one who does. Within seconds, there’s a crackling tension. 

The sound rings out again, this time easily pinpointed to one of the younger kids, who’s darting on and off of the play equipment by the school with a few other kids his age. The adult closest to them walks up, an eyebrow raised. “What’re you doing?”

The boy stops midway up a wooden ladder. “We’re playin’ clicker tag. I’m the clicker. Again.”

“Your clicker sounds are very good, but not everyone wants to hear them right now. Could we try and make a different noise?”

“But clickers click! What else am I supposed to do?”

“Couldn’t you just say it out loud?”

The tension in the area has fizzled out, and Ellie turns and walks away again, Sarah following. Just before they’re out of ear-shot, she hears a yell of, “click, click!” Followed by a laugh and a shriek of, “KILL HIM!”

Just normal kid games. 

Dina sprints over and comes to a halt at Ellie’s side, the two speaking in low voices, impossible to hear from behind. They leave the street and cut through a few yards until they reach the wall, walking alongside it. 

“Where are you going?” Sarah finally asks. Ellie and Dina turn around, exchanging a look. Dina nods, Ellie shaking her head. 

“The gap,” Dina says.

"Dina,” Ellie hisses. 

“What? Everyone in our class knows what it is, she should too.” Dina turns her attention to Sarah. “Up on the east end of the walls, over in the area with all the trees, there’s a little gap, just large enough to get through. It’s covered by tree branches on the inside and bushes on the outside, so if you ever need to slip out for any reason…”

Sarah has absolutely no idea why anyone would voluntarily slip outside of the walls. Not when there are creatures in the woods. She’s not sure she feels entirely safe knowing that there’s a gap in the wall either. 

It feels familiar, though, like the door inside the janitor’s closet back at her high school, the one that led to the roof. All of the kids had known about it, but none of them ever told an adult that they knew. It was fun to keep it a secret.

“You can’t tell anyone,” Dina adds.

“Okay.” She traces an X across her chest with her finger. “Cross my heart and hope to die.” 

Both Ellie and Dina give her a blank look at the phrase, then turn around and continue walking. She doesn’t follow. She navigates her way to the dining hall instead, getting lunch and sitting down under one of the trees in the schoolyard, watching the younger kids play. 

They’re still doing that clicker game. There’s a lot of dramatic tackling and fake-stabbing. The physical play gets rough to the point where it would have been forcibly broken apart at her old elementary school. None of the supervising teachers seem to care, though, continuing to calmly sit and talk as a little girl falls off the edge of the play equipment and scrambles back up to her feet.

The academics are similar here. But the kids are different. 

And Sarah is the odd one out.

Joel goes on his first overnight patrol since she arrived at the end of the week. And he’s even worse than he was on her first day of school.

She doesn’t get much sleep the night before, waking up over five times to the creak of the closet door as he opens it to check on her. She can hear him grilling Tommy from the top of the stairs that morning after she goes up to brush her teeth, Tommy sounding more amused than anything. 

“Y’know, I’d like to think I’ve got a good track record with this kinda thing, Joel.”

“You’ve lost Sarah twice and Ellie once.”

“Okay, two of those times were 30 years ago, and 3 times out of a thousand ain’t bad.”

Sarah sits down on the top of the steps, not wanting to interrupt… whatever this is. She remembers similar, albeit less intense conversations that happened when she was little, and Joel acted like Tommy spontaneously forgot everything about childcare in between having her each time. Tommy would always soldier through the conversation, then wink at her once Joel left, usually following it with, “alright little punk, lets party” (partying meaning, of course, watching questionable late-night shows and eating a pint of cookie dough ice cream).

“Just… keep them safe, okay?”

“Of course. Both your girls will be returned with all the limbs they came with, big brother. Maria and I have got this. You be safe out there.” 

“I will.”

And that’s that.

Joel leaves for the stables an hour later, pulling her into a hug before he does that squeezes her ribs so hard she thinks they might break. Her hand lingers in his, pulling on it slightly despite herself when he turns to leave. Heat rises across her face and prickles to her ears as he turns back around, cupping her face in his hands. 

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” he says. “I promise.” 

She lets go of his hand. She trusts his word. 

Sarah and Ellie are moved to Maria and Tommy’s house for the rest of the day, and after not even an hour of them sitting and reading on opposite sides of the couch, trying to avoid eye contact, Tommy pokes his head into the living room.

“Get your jackets on, we’re goin’ outside.”

“Outside where?” Ellie asks, but Tommy’s already walked off. Sarah can hear him talking to Maria in the kitchen, their voices a low continuous hum, occasionally punctuated by James’s squeals. 

“Are James and Aunt Maria coming?” Sarah asks when he comes back into the living room, Ellie now in her jacket and Sarah in her hat.

“Nope. Sarah, jacket. Ellie, hat.” 

Sarah shrugs her jacket on. She hates it. It’s highlighter orange, tight and heavy around her arms. Ellie said she looked like a traffic cone the first time she’d put it on. But it’s what Joel got and it’s what was available, so she doesn’t complain. Externally, anyway. 

“You’re covering my ears!” Ellie says as Tommy pulls her hat further down her head. 

“That’s the point, darlin’.” 

Ellie and Tommy go back and forth on the issue as they step outside, Tommy walking onto the street. He’s got guns, she realizes. Three of them. He passes one to Ellie, keeping the other two with him as they continue walking. 

They’re heading towards the front gates. 

She swallows. “Are we going outside the walls?”

“Mhm.” Tommy waves to the man on the platform, the gates creaking open in front of them. “Not far, don’t worry. Target practice is easier without having to worry about kids dartin’ in from nowhere, or old people gettin’ mad at you for all the noise.”

Target practice. Oh. 

She’s shot a gun before. Once, sort of. She barely remembers it, but knows she couldn’t have been older than five. Abuela had let her do it in her backyard after showing her how. The kickback had been intense, and the sound had rung through her ears long after it was done. She remembers sobbing afterwards. She never did it again. 

“Aren’t there Infected out here?” she asks as they walk through a well-worn trail in the woods. The bare branches of the trees look like crooked fingers against the sky.

“Not this close to town,” Tommy says. “Everything up to about five miles out is always watched, nothing makes it up here. And even if they did, someone would make quick work of them soon.”  

They continue down the trail they’re on, the only sounds the sporadic chirp of a bird or the thud of their feet against the ground. She hasn’t been outside the wall since she had arrived. It’s kind of nice, when you’re not running for your life. 

They emerge from the trees and onto the slope of a ridge, brown grass crunching under their feet. A breeze cuts across her face as they reach the top, and for once she’s grateful for her stupid orange jacket. 

“Look.” Tommy spins around from in front of them, pointing into the distance. She follows him with her eyes.

Jackson is visible from here, nestled between the trees and the open plain, mountains vast and blue behind it. It’s nothing like looking out at the city before, where everything seemed so big and full, the shining concrete and steel star. 

Jackson is small. Alive. Just another part of the landscape. She takes a moment to watch the river, easy and playful as it steers its path into the earth. 

They cross over the ridge and wind up in a smaller, flatter clearing, with multiple targets set up on logs or ancient, rotting chairs.

“Alright,” Tommy says. “We’re here.”

She turns in a circle, examining the area. They can’t see Jackson from here. The land is open enough that she isn’t worried about something sneaking up on them, though. She can hear the clipping of horse hooves from a distance. 

“Does Dad know about this?”

Tommy shrugs. “More or less. We’ve talked about it before, though, you learnin’ how to handle things and defend yourself. Timing just worked out today is all. You remember anythin’ we’ve gone over before?”

“Don’t point a gun at something you don’t want to shoot?”

“That’s a good one.” Tommy holds a rifle out for her, motioning for her to back up a step as she takes it. “That there is a .22 bolt-action rifle. It’s fine for startin’ with. You ain’t gonna be able to easily kill a person with it, but it’s good for squirrels and such.” 

It feels weird to just be handed a gun. Joel had mostly kept her away from them before, and had given firm warnings to both Tommy and her abuela about keeping their guns out of her reach. She thinks he might have had one. She’s not sure where it would have been, though.

“They ain’t loaded, we gotta do that first. You never point it at anyone while we’re doin’ it, you understand?”

She nods.

“Attagirl. Here, watch your sister do it first, then I’ll walk you through.” He gives Ellie a nod. 

Sarah grits her teeth. 

She watches the other girl clear the chamber and reload the gun with a practiced ease, lifting it up after. “Can I shoot?”

“Go ahead. We’ve only got four rounds each, though, so make it count.” 

Ellie looks out at cans and logs set up in the distance, before pulling the bolt-handle of her rifle up, then forward. It’s not as loud as she thought it would be when Ellie finally pulls the trigger. Nothing like whatever she had been holding in abuela’s yard (probably illegally, she thinks as she looks back on it). 

Tommy squints in the distance, a grin spreading across his face. “You got a can. Nice shot, honey.” He reaches out and taps a gentle hand against Ellie’s head before turning his attention back to Sarah. “Alright, so that’s about what you want to be doin’ overall. It’ll take some time, though. Here, let’s get it loaded and try a shot.”

They do.

She misses. Terribly.

She’s not used to this, as Tommy talks her through pulling the handle up and trying again. She’s not used to the way her fingers feel heavy and clumsy as they try to perform a basic task. She’s not used to someone beside her doing better. She’s not used to not knowing what to do. 

The last time she can remember feeling like this was during dance class, which she had tried for exactly one month when she was nine, before quitting in disgrace. Soccer was definitely more of her style than dance.

Shooting doesn’t seem much of her style either.

“It’s normal to miss when you’re just startin’ out,” Tommy says “You’re doing a good job, honey-girl. Want to give it another go?”

She does it twice more. She doesn’t hit a single target. Her arms ache from holding one position for so long.

Ellie casts a glance towards her before taking the rest of her shots. She hits a can every single time. Tommy ruffles her hair once she’s done, knocking the girl into his side. “Gunnin’ to take over my spot as the best sharpshooter in the family, are you?”

“I don’t have to.” Ellie sets down her gun, flashing him a grin. “Joel’s already got you beat.” 

“Oh, does he now?”

“Uh huh. You didn’t see it, there was one time he was sniping from the top of a building in this neighborhood that was like, flooded with Infected after they came out of the ground. There were people too. Everything was fighting and people were on fire, but he still got us through. Or, he got me…” she trails off. 

There’s a sudden weight to the situation. Tommy’s hand falls to Ellie’s shoulder, his thumb rubbing over her shirt. He doesn’t say anything in response, the smile on his face faltering as he looks down at her. She moves away after a moment, propping her gun against the log behind them. 

Sarah tries to imagine her dad in the chaos of the scene Ellie had described, with his face illuminated by flames and his fingers clutched around the stock of a gun. Her dad shooting Infected. Shooting people. 

“Well, he’s gettin’ blinder everyday.” Tommy breaks through the silence. “Reckon I could take him on anytime. And I always could, for the record. I ever tell you about the time we were shootin’ bb's' as kids, and he got so mad that I kept hittin’ the targets that he turned around and shot me in the ass?”

Sarah’s heard the story a million times. He always liked to bring it up whenever he and Joel were fighting. Apparently, over 45 years and one apocalypse later, it’s still incredibly relevant.

“You probably deserved it,” Ellie says, and she’s upside down within two seconds, her hat falling off as Tommy dangles her. 

He used to do that to Sarah, whenever she said something particularly sassy. Even after she started getting too big to easily pick up. She had shrieked each time, shouting about the blood going to her head and child abuse, and how he was a dick if Joel wasn’t around to hear her cuss. 

Sometimes the words had been hard to get out through the giggles that were coursing through her body.

“Let me down, asshole,” is all Ellie says, the end of her words caught in a small laugh. Tommy flips her back over and sets her on her feet, looking over at Sarah. 

“Something to be said for fightin’ practice too. If a guy’s runnin’ up to you with just his hands, you gotta know what to do.”

“Kick him in the balls,” Sarah and Ellie say in unison. 

Tommy falters for a moment, raising an eyebrow. “Well, yeah. But then what?”

“Stab him,” Ellie says.

“Run away,” Sarah says.

“What if he grabs your hand and takes your knife?” Tommy reaches out and takes one of Ellie’s hands, holding it up. She pulls back, shoes skidding against the dew-wet grass. He’s not even using half of his full strength, Sarah can tell. But the other girl can’t break free. He lets go of her hand, looking to Sarah. “What if he’s faster than you?”

She shrugs. “You just die, I guess. I already did that.”

Something flashes across Tommy’s face. Like Joel’s stranger expression, but shorter. He takes in a breath. “Yeah. Yeah, you did. That’s why this is important.” He takes Sarah’s wrist this time, his hold burning against her skin. “There ain’t much form or practice to the way a girl has to fight.” He pulls her closer as she tries to yank her wrist out of his grasp. “It’s good to learn how to punch and all without breakin’ your thumb. It’s good to learn how to take a hit. But most men you come across are gonna be way stronger. So you have to do anything. Sarah, twist your thumb towards the opening between my thumb and the rest of my fingers. Lock your elbow into your body while you do it and turn yourself to the side.” 

She does so. Her arm slides free from Tommy’s grasp. 

“Good. Now you’re free. You can’t run, I’m faster. You can’t stab me; you don’t have a knife. What can you do?”

“Kick you in the balls?”

He gives her a fond roll of his eyes, pretending to stagger forward. “Say you do kick me in the balls. Then what?”

She shrugs.

“This,” Ellie says, picking up a particularly large rock from the ground and turning it over in her hand. She runs her finger along the sharp edges. 

“That’s good thinkin’,” Tommy says. “There’s usually gonna be something lyin’ around you can hit someone with, you just gotta get to it fast. Your goal here is to get the other guy so hurt he can’t come after you again, or at least give yourself a good head start. You can do it with your fists too, if you know what you’re doin’.” 

Sarah half-listens as her uncle walks through different ways to knock someone out, first, then advances to ways to kill someone. She tries to imagine the feeling of killing someone with her own hands. Of someone’s life draining out underneath of hers.

She wonders how the soldier felt that night, as he lifted his gun to her and her father. Was he scared? Dreading? Or did he think about it the way Tommy’s talking about killing someone now? Cold, detached. Just another part of life. 

She’s snapped out of her thoughts by Tommy grabbing her again, pulling her into his side. She can’t help the shriek of laughter that rises up inside of her. She hasn’t laughed like that in a long time. 

“What’re you gonna - oof -” He staggers forward a few inches as Ellie comes up behind him, taking a flying leap onto his back. Her arms wrap around his neck to secure herself, her feet swinging in the air as she tries to draw them up to wrap around his torso. “Well, now I just got a barnacle stuck on me. Only way to get it off is by shakin’ it, I reckon.”

Tommy lets go of Sarah and spins in a quick circle, Ellie scrambling to keep her grip as he does so. He ducks forward to try and throw her off, and she finally wraps her legs around him, letting out a cheer. 

“Not today, motherfucker!” 

Sarah takes the opportunity to cling to one of Tommy’s arms, digging her heels into the grass and dropping her full weight towards the ground. 

He groans. “Now I got a barnacle and a limpet. Better keep shakin’.” 

He spins in another circle, pulling her across the grass. She relaxes into it. This is the Uncle Tommy she knows. This is a game she knows. 

Having another girl doing it too almost makes it more fun. 

“Girls.” Tommy suddenly freezes, then points into the clearing. “Look.”

She lets go of his arm and squints into the distance. He’s pointing to a rabbit. A large brown one, currently turning its head from side-to-side as it examines the open space. It leans its head down after a moment, presumably crouching to eat whatever’s hiding in the dying grass. 

“I’m surprised it came out with all the noise we were makin’,” Tommy says in a hushed voice. He looks at the rabbit for another minute, then takes one of the guns from against the log. “We got two rounds left. Sarah, you wanna give it a shot?”

“Shoot the… rabbit?” Her heart thuds sluggishly slow in her chest, each beat reverberating through her ears.

“Uh huh. You can cook rabbits, they ain’t bad.”

Ellie places a hand over her eyes to better see the creature through the weak but prevalent afternoon sun. “She’s just gonna miss.”

“She won’t know it until she tries.” Tommy lifts the gun, carefully offering it out.

She takes it.

“Alright. Do everything we were goin’ over before and keep a good eye on the rabbit. It’s stayin’ real still right now.” 

She pulls the bolt-handle up and forward, taking a deep breath. Her finger hovers over the trigger. 

“That’s it, Sarah-girl, go on.” 

The rabbit lifts its head. It sees her. And it takes a hop forward. To it, she’s far enough away to be harmless. It doesn’t know what a gun is. It doesn’t know bullets. It doesn’t know that death can come from far away. 

Her arms tremble. She lowers the gun. “I can’t.”

Tommy reaches out and takes the gun from her, giving her a nod. “Okay. That’s okay, honey.” She hates the way he’s looking at her, a flashing fear covering the usual twinkling of his eyes. The expression he’d had when she had tried to dart into the road as a kid, or held a fork near a socket.

He passes the gun to Ellie, who takes it eagerly, taking a second to get into position. 

She shoots.

The rabbit falls. 

She cheers. 

Sarah watches as the other two cross the distance, Tommy lifting the rabbit up by the ears. It swings limply in its hand when they walk back over, stomach red and fur ruffled. 

Sarah bends over and vomits into the grass.

It starts to snow.

She and Ellie sleep in Tommy and Maria’s guest room that night. In theory, there’s enough space for both of them. The bed in the middle of the room is large enough for one of them to sleep on each side. 

In practice, Ellie chooses to sleep on the floor rather than share a bed with her. 

It’s weird, sleeping in an actual bed instead of a closet. She guesses she should get used to it. Her father’s already started the process of dividing his room in two, she’ll have her own bed again soon. 

Ellie falls asleep quickly, curled up under a blanket in the corner of the room. She’s dead-quiet as she sleeps. No snoring. No shifting. 

Sarah closes her eyes, trying to pretend it’s a night from before, sprawled out across the spare bed in Tommy’s apartment because her father’s out of town. She hears the rumble of Tommy’s voice and the thud of his footsteps as he and Maria go to bed in the room across from the nursery, where James is asleep. It’s almost similar enough, but sleep doesn’t come. 

She remains there with her eyes closed, a shiver creeping up her spine. The memories still come with renewed ferocity, like they always do at night, whether she sleeps or not. 

People on fire, running out of a building and onto a street she’s walked down before. 

Her seat belt pulling taut as her body slams against it. Glass cutting into her temple.

The soldier lifting his gun like she was a rabbit. Pulling the trigger.

Her heartbeat pulses dully in her ears. She digs her fingers against the quilt she’s curled underneath, sweat dripping down her face. She opens her eyes, staring at the ceiling. It doesn’t stop the memories. Doesn’t stop the panic. 

Someone screams. 

Someone is screaming. Her heart skips a beat as she rolls onto her side, the screaming continuing. It’s joined by the wails of the baby from the other room, and the sound of footsteps down the hallway. 

Oh. Ellie’s screaming. The other girl throws her blanket off of herself, her screams growing louder as it gets caught between her legs. She kicks. Flails. Hits her body back against the wall again and again. 

There are words between screams. Words that she can just barely make out. 

“No.”

“Get off of me!”

“Please. Joel.”

The door is eased open, a wide strip of light falling across the floor. Sarah squints. 

Tommy steps into the room, Maria lingering in the doorway with James in her arms. The baby’s hair is matted against his head from sleep, tears trembling on his eyelashes. 

Tommy takes another step forward, Ellie flattening herself against the wall the way Sarah had once seen a terrified cat do when a dog had chased it to the side of her house. He goes back to the doorway, taking James. 

“You’re gonna need to take this one, love,” he says to Maria.

She takes his place in the room just as Sarah closes her eyes again. She can hear her gentle murmurs, blending together with Ellie’s choked whispers. Maria says something about getting water, and two pairs of footsteps leave the room. Sarah rolls onto her back.

A hand rests against her shoulder. Her eyes shoot open. 

“Hey, honey.” Tommy is standing over her, baby at his hip. His eyes are still glassy from sleep, his hair sticking out in a million different directions. “Did she wake you up?”

“No. I was already awake.”

“It’s late.” He bounces James around as he starts to fuss, shifting the baby to his chest and patting his back. “You havin’ trouble fallin’ asleep?”

“I guess.”

He lightly shoves her side. “You guess, huh? Scooch.” She sits up and moves to the opposite end of the bed, pulling her knees to her chest. He sits down beside her, the baby letting out a mumbling noise and dropping his head against his father’s chest. 

They sit in silence for a minute. She leans back against the headboard, trying to collect her thoughts. “Is that… normal?” she finally asks. 

“Sort of. It’s normal for her, anyway.”

“Why?”

She’s never heard another kid sound like that before. She’s never really heard another person sound like that, period. Desperate. Terrified . The only thing that really comes close is…

“That’s for her to tell when she’s ready.” He reaches out, cupping her cheek. “Outside of here, though, it ain’t a pretty picture. You’ve gotta remember that. A lot of folks have been through things that just ain’t right. It messes up your head, especially once you’re safe and you’ve got time to think about it all again.”

“Is it like that for you?”  

His smile fades into something sadder, and his gaze strays down to his little son. He rubs his hand down the baby’s back. “Yeah, sometimes. I reckon it’s like that for most people, now. It’s better in Jackson, though. The kids here will have good lives.” He flicks her forehead, grinning as she goes to bat his hand away. “Includin’ you.” 

She’s not quite sure what a good life entails anymore. But he’s smiling again, so she smiles, slouching back down against her pillow. 

“Night, honey.” He kisses her forehead, holding out the baby so that she can do the same to him. And then he’s gone, closing the door behind him, and she’s left in the darkness of the strange room once more.

Ellie doesn’t come back to the bedroom that night.

Snow is weird. Back in Texas, it happened every once in a blue moon, just a little sprinkle of white that had her dashing around her yard with glee when she was little, head angled up towards the sky. 

Here, it’s different. The snow from the end of target practice sticks about an inch to the ground. And it hasn’t stopped since.

Frost clings to the window panes, staining geometric patterns into the glass. Her toes are frozen and numb every morning unless she wears her shoes to bed. The air makes her nose run and her lungs sting, her breath puffing out in little clouds. 

Sarah watches snow fall in flurries through the living room windows a week after Joel gets back, fingers pressed against the glass. 

“It’s something, ain’t it?” She nearly jumps as she hears her father’s voice from behind her, turning her head to the side to meet his eyes. He’s got a mug in one hand, the one with an owl on it. She thinks it’s his favorite. 

“Yeah.” She looks back outside. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this much snow at once.”

“Takes some gettin’ used to. It would snow a lot in Boston too. Spent a lot of time shovelin’ it off the walkways for a few ration cards.”

That’s… lovely. She sinks deeper into the couch, staring up at the ceiling. It’s Sunday, so she doesn’t have school. Joel doesn’t have a work rotation today either. They’ve already eaten breakfast. She’ll probably spend most of today reading books while tangled in blankets, trying to stay warm. 

Like he’s reading her mind, Joel’s gaze strays to the window. “Long as you and Ellie bundle up real good, y’all can go out in this.”

She perks up. “Really?”

She’s rarely done the things she’s seen in movies before, like making a snowman, or having snowball fights, or creating a snow angel that actually looks like a snow angel. Looking outside now, there should be more than enough snow to do all of those things. She wishes she had Nicole with her. Or Eliza. They would have loved this. 

She has her dad, though. Her number one person. This will be fun. She takes one of his hands and gives it a squeeze before scurrying off to find her coat. 

He’s still in the living room when she comes back downstairs, her scarf in one hand. “Frostbite comes fast. You need to be as covered as possible.”

It takes three layers for her to get Joel’s approval, and she can barely zip up her traffic-cone jacket over the two thick sweaters she has on underneath. The gloves he got for her are a bit too big, and they fit awkward around her hands. 

Ellie’s come downstairs in the time it takes her to make the final change. She watches the snow through the windows, curled up at the end of the couch. Her face is pale. 

Joel goes to sit beside her while Sarah pulls on her boots. She can’t make out what he’s saying, his voice too soft. But she knows that look in his eyes, when he finally looks back over at her. It’s the same expression he used to wear whenever he had to miss a soccer game because of work, or leave dinner because Tommy got himself into another scrape. The one she had hated as a kid, and grown used to as a teenager.

“Ellie and I are gonna stay in today, alright? You can go on out, just don’t leave our street. You could see if Tommy wants to come out.”

“Why’re y’all staying in?” she asks, finishing tying her second boot and standing up.

“Just some hard things.” He reaches out, brushing Ellie’s hair away from her face.

Yeah. She knows.

She pulls her hat over her head and opens the front door before Joel can say anything else, stepping outside. 

Snow changes things fast. It looks like a whole different world as she darts down the porch steps, spinning around to see the footsteps she’s already tracked. It’s impossible to tell the road from the grass, all of it blanketed in snow. The roofs are covered in white. Icicles cling to the gutters. A kid who she vaguely recognizes from school runs by with a snowball in his gloved hand.

Normally, she would stay on their street like Joel said. She should stay on the street, she knows she should. But something inside of her feels like it’s… choking. It needs new air. Something different than their houses or the backyards, or the path to school. It’s not like he’ll notice anyway. He’s occupied.

She turns the corner at the end of the street.

Jackson’s bigger than she had realized. It still has nothing on Austin, but the streets still seem to stretch on and on, and the buildings around her shift from familiar, albeit snow-covered, to something new. The butcher, the church, something that looks like a store. Someone is skinning a chicken outside, which is pretty gross. 

Most of the kids from the middle school class have created a fort at the end of one of the roads, one of them waving around a piece of blue cloth as the others try to catch him. Some people wave as she passes by. She doesn’t really know them. They probably know her from Joel. Or Tommy and Maria. Or Ellie. 

She reaches one of the walls after ten minutes of following the streets, pressing a hand to it. It’s steady beneath her touch. 

The gap, she suddenly remembers Dina saying. There’s a gap somewhere on the wall. It has to be close to the school, if Dina and Ellie were able to slip there and back during lunch break. 

She follows the wall in the direction of the school, the guards overhead barely sparing her a glance. She just looks like another scarf-clad kid wandering around in the snow. 

Eventually, a few trees begin to border the wall, followed by dead bushes and climbing ivy ivy that grow alongside them. This has got to be it. 

She reaches through the brush, wincing as sharp, tiny sticks poke into her jacket. Her hand doesn’t touch solid wall once she’s managed to reach through. There’s just… nothing. This is the spot. She pushes the rest of her body through the branches and twigs, closing her eyes as she struggles against them. 

For a brief, second, there’s nothing, and she feels just like she did before. Ripped from life and given to death. Cast out from death and given to life. Sliding from one to the other, her breath escaping her in a gasp.

This is different, though. She can see outside, the wind picking up the swirling snow that covers the entire land and blowing it about. Honestly, it looks about the same as inside the walls, just without the buildings and the people. 

She sits in between something and something else with her knees pulled to her chest. And it feels good. It feels familiar. 

A monster could come and get her right here, maybe, even if Tommy said that they never make it this close. It could see her or sense her in the gap and squeeze itself through, clicking and shrieking, drool sliding down a fungus-ridden face. 

Maybe that wouldn’t be a bad thing. Maybe if she dies here, she’ll go back to her home. Her real home, with her real family and her real world. 

She thinks of Joel’s face, though, when she was in his arms that night the sky shone brilliantly above her, blood pooling at her abdomen. His pleas as her insides shifted and spurted and succumbed. The look on his face when he saw her again. 

She couldn’t do that to him. Or to Tommy. She couldn’t leave them again. She has to stay.

She crawls out of the gap and back through the poking brush, rolling over her previous footsteps before she gets back to her feet to cover up the tracks leading in. 

It hasn’t been that long since she left. She turns back to her street once she reaches it, purposefully walking by the windows of her house in case Joel has been trying to catch sight of her.

She feels eyes against her back.

Maria is staring at her from her porch when she turns around, James at her hip. Both of them are bundled up, James’s little face just barely visible under his fluffy hood. “Are you supposed to be staying on our street?” Maria asks with a raised eyebrow as Sarah approaches. She must have watched her turn the corner when she got home from wherever she’d been. Shoot. 

She bites her lip. Tommy used to say that she “ain’t got a lyin’ bone in her body.”

“Uh, yeah.

Maria smiles. “Girl, come here.” 

She crosses over to Maria and Tommy’s house, following Maria inside. Her boots track water on the floor, and Maria passes the baby over briefly while she goes to get a towel for drying off her snow clothes.

“I know your father.” She lays the first towel down, motioning her forward. “And I know the heart attack it would give him to think of you wandering around by yourself. So we’ll keep this between you, me, and James. Do you want tea?”

“What?”

“Tea. I was just going to make some.”

She nods, following Maria to the kitchen and taking James back the first chance she gets. He snuggles into her arms, his eyes following her hands when she helps him out of his jacket. Those topsy-turvy feelings that are always crashing through her stomach briefly calm at the sight of his chubby little face.

She momentarily thinks about what it would be like to have a brother. Probably better than having a sister. If they’re different from you, then it’s not like they took your place, right? Brothers don’t steal your clothes—or the names your father calls you: those whispered honeys and sweet things and babygirls. 

“I’m surprised Joel wasn’t out with you himself.” Maria slides a mug in front of her. She leans her head in closer, breathing in the steam. It fills her lungs much easier than the biting outside air does. “He’s been pretty excited about you seeing your first big snow.” 

“Ellie was having problems or something.” 

“Ah.” Maria pours herself a mug of tea, sitting down across from Sarah and reaching out to ruffle James’s curls. “I get it. I had four younger brothers. It seemed like they were always getting into something whenever I had plans with my parents.”

“Yeah?” 

“Mhm. They were my biggest cheerleaders, though. I used to do track. I could hear them screaming their heads off at every meet.” 

Sarah takes a hesitant sip of her tea. It burns the tip of her tongue. She quickly spits it back out. 

“What do you think of the snow?” Maria asks. 

“It’s… something.”

“Different from Texas, huh?”

“Yeah.” She holds James closer to her chest, pressing her chin to his head. He fits so perfectly in her arms, his little body pleasantly warm from being previously bundled up. They have the same eye color, she thinks. Joel says they have the same noses too. 

“Tommy spent his first couple of winters here complaining about all of the snow,” Maria says. “He looked like a wet puppy every time he came inside, dripping in the doorway with those big eyes.” 

She can’t help the laughter that bubbles inside of her chest, escaping in a few light giggles. Tommy had always started complaining any time the temperature dipped below 50 degrees. “It ain’t fuckin’ Alaska. I’ve got standards, sweetheart.”

“And you still married him.”

Maria waves a hand, her eyes sparkling. “He’s got his ways.” She takes a sip from her mug, her eyes fixed on the window. After a moment, she looks back over. “What was Texas like in the window?”

Sarah’s heart skips a beat. She’s talked about Before with Joel and Tommy a handful of times. Usually as an offhanded “remember when we…” Other than that, it’s just been her, and the memories swirling inside of her head. 

Maria knows what Texas was like in the winter. She probably knows most of Sarah’s life from back then. Tommy likes talking, he needs it. But she still asked, and she’s still looking at her with open eyes, like she wants to hear. 

So Sarah talks. 

She tells her about the slight relief from the beating sun that came with winter, but the retained heat from before. Running around in a t-shirt and shorts. Hiding the light jacket Joel got her in 1st grade, because everyone else had Ariel or Cinderella on their jackets and she had Belle, and the other kids kept teasing. The occasional cold front that rolled in and took everyone by surprise. Watching it snow in all of the Christmas movies with confusion when she was younger, and amusement when she was older.

Her memories of winter bleed into memories of her friends.

Melissa sneaking them some of her older sister’s make up after Christmas because she “got a bunch more and won’t even notice.” Eliza, Emily, and Brittany dragging her to the mall to skate. And Nicole. Always Nicole. Watching the weird claymation Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer over and over again in Sarah’s living room. Giving Evan Rosen a codename when they talked about him, Sarah stressed over if she should get him anything for Thanksgiving or Christmas or Valentines.

She takes in a long breath once she finishes talking. Her head feels… floaty, now. Like a bunch of things have come loose inside of her and are turning into clouds, fogging up her mind. 

It’s not a bad feeling. 

“It was good,” Maria says, having listened attentively throughout all of her rambling. And, yeah, that sums it up pretty nicely.

She nods. “It was good.” 

Maria stands up and takes James, shifting the baby to her hip. She gives her son a fond look. “It’s going to be James’s first Christmas this year. Ellie’s first real one. Your first Christmas here.”

“Lots of firsts,” Sarah says, tracing a line on the table with her finger. 

“Lots of firsts,” Maria echoes, shooting her a smile. “We’ll make them good ones.” 

All Sarah has to do is keep smiling. Help out where it’s needed, avoid adding any more weight onto her father’s shoulders after everything she’s already caused. 

Maria’s right. Things will be good. 

She’ll make them good.