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“When’s your birthday?”
Well, it was inevitable, Joel thinks to himself as he takes a bite of jerky, chewing slowly and swallowing without looking over. “Why?”
Ellie sits cross-legged, watching him with too much focus for his liking. “We’ve spent a hundred million hours together, dude,” she complains.
Joel pauses, doing the mental math. “That’s over ten thousand years.”
“Fucking feels like it,” she grumbles. “Fine, a hundred thousand hours.”
“More’n eleven years.”
She chucks a pebble at him, giggling when it bounces off his arm and he shoots her a look. “Are you some kind of math genius or something?”
The questions had tapered off for about a week after Henry and Sam before starting back up. Most of them have been mundane, but in the past few days Ellie has delved into more personal inquiries. This is the first one he genuinely doesn’t want to answer.
“Contractor,” he grunts. “Gotta know math.”
“The fuck is a contractor?”
For a second he thinks she’ll forget her original question, but then: “How many hours in a month?”
No such luck.
“‘Bout seven hundred thirty, dependin’.”
She nods, thoughtful, before throwing another pebble. It misses its mark and hits him in the head. Joel growls, “Quit it.”
Ellie rolls her eyes and picks up a stick, idly drawing patterns on the ground. “Okay, so we’ve known each other for like, seven hundred thirty hours and I know jack shit about you.”
Joel sighs, turning to Ellie and momentarily regarding her. “I don’t celebrate it,” he warns, holding up a hand when she opens her mouth. “Drop it.”
“But—”
“Don’t,” he snarls, standing with a grunt. “Let’s go.”
Ellie’s face falls and she scrambles to her feet, shoving her remaining food into her backpack with more force than necessary. Joel can sense the anger radiating off her in waves, but he doesn’t care. He can’t bring himself to care about much these days except for keeping her alive.
They walk in tense silence for hours, the crunch of their footsteps and the occasional distant cry of a bird the only sound. Joel keeps his eyes on the road ahead, scanning for threats, while Ellie trudges along behind him, her usual chatter conspicuously absent.
As the sun begins to dip below the horizon, Joel spots an abandoned gas station, walls and roof intact. “We’ll stop—” He has to clear his throat against the dryness he hasn’t noticed until now. “We’ll stop there for the night.”
Ellie doesn’t respond — she just glares and pushes past him, shoulder-checking him as she goes. He lets it go; best to pick his battles. They clear the area quickly, Joel quickly dispatching the lone infected hiding in the bathroom. He barricades the doors while Ellie sets her pack in the furthest corner from him, tearing into her jerky like she’s got something to prove.
Joel follows suit, consciously keeping his mind blank, but Ellie abruptly stands and digs her gun out.
“I’ll take the first watch,” she informs him coldly before stalking outside without waiting for his agreement.
When she’s out of earshot Joel sighs, rubbing a hand over his face. He should say something, anything, to break the tension between them, but the words won’t come. They never do when it matters. So he sits in silence, watching the darkness as his eyelids grow heavy.
Joel shakes his head and blinks rapidly, trying to clear the fuzzy fatigue threatening to claim him. How is it possible to be this tired? The exhaustion is debilitating at this point. Everything is slightly hazy, the world feeling vaguely distant and out of focus as he moves around in an approximation of a human. There’s only one thing — one person — that cuts through the haze.
Right now, she’s screaming her beautiful, blonde, two-month-old head off.
“C’mon, baby girl,” Joel murmurs, “Give Daddy a li’l birthday present, huh? Please?” He circles the apartment, slowly pacing and bouncing and shushing as he circles his room, the living room, the kitchen. At one point, he just stands in the bathroom, swaying as he prays that white noise from the running shower will soothe Sarah in a way he can’t ever seem to. It doesn’t.
Finally, she quiets, little fists stilling against his chest. “That’s it, baby girl,” Joel murmurs, pressing a kiss to her head as he moves toward her bassinet. Before he lays her down the crying starts again, somehow louder than before.
“Shoulda let Uncle Tommy take you tonight,” Joel mutters, freezing as guilt slams into him. Every morning, dropping her off at daycare twists his insides. He spends his working hours worrying about her – whether the caretakers are giving her the attention such a small infant needs, how she’s doing, if she’s achieving milestones when he’s not around. Picking her up at the end of the day is a blessing that gives him a moment to hold her close before carefully strapping her into the car seat.
How could he wish to spend even a second away from this little girl?
Sarah’s cries suddenly soften, and Joel blinks in confusion. The apartment shimmers around him, walls melting into the warm golden glow of Sarah’s nursery. He finds himself sitting in a rocking chair, cradling a sleeping toddler as the princess clock over her crib ticks into a new day. With his nose pressed to Sarah’s hair, Joel inhales deeply. “You don’t never need to get me a birthday present, baby,” he murmurs against her scalp. “Jus’ holdin’ you like this is better’n anything.”
He blinks and he’s in a park, walking toward a school-aged Sarah giggling as Tommy pushes her in a swing. As soon as she spots him, she shouts, “Daddy!” and jumps off right as it reaches the highest point. When she lands, she runs straight for him, the impact of her small body forcing him back a step. Joel scoops her up, peppering her face with kisses as he tips her backward, laughing when she erupts into giggles again.
When she’s back on solid ground, Sarah grabs his hand and pulls him toward Tommy. “Me and Uncle Tommy got you a cake for your birthday!” she exclaims excitedly before freezing and looking guiltily between Joel and Tommy, who’s trying and failing to stifle his laughter. “That’s a surprise. But we got you other stuff too! Surprise stuff.”
Joel chuckles as he meets Tommy’s eye, shaking his head indulgently at Sarah’s excitement. His smile is stretched wide as the world shimmers once more and now he’s looking at Tommy through tears of disbelief and desperation and begging, pleading, shouting—
Joel bolts upright with a strangled shout, his heart pounding frantically in his chest. Sweat drips down his face and back, his lungs squeezing all the life from his body as he struggles to breathe. He tries to force air in with one hand fisted in his shirt and the other pressed to his forehead.
Ellie bursts into the room, gun at the ready as the beam from her flashlight bounces wildly around the room. “What happened?” she demands as she sweeps the room and realizes it’s clear.
He hears the question but doesn’t register it, still trying to catch his breath, still trapped in a fucked-up symphony of agony.
“Joel?” Ellie’s voice cuts through the darkness, tinged with concern. He manages to wrench his eyes open just as she crouches next to him. The anger from earlier seems to have dissipated, replaced by genuine worry. Probably because he just scared the shit out of her by screaming for no damn reason.
Joel can’t bring himself to raise his head. Looking at a girl — any girl — is too much, so he tents his knees, brings his chin to his chest, and tangles his fingers in his hair. Joel forces himself to breathe through the knives spearing his lungs, fisting and unfisting shaking hands as he works through the lingering terror. “Nightmare,” he croaks shakily.
After a moment, she shifts to sit cross-legged in front of him. From his cowardly vantage point, he can just make out the way her eyes dart between his face and the floor. She’s fidgeting with the hem of her shirt, clearly uncomfortable but unwilling to leave as silence stretches between them, thick and strained.
Finally, Ellie clears her throat. “I’m sorry for being bitchy earlier,” she says softly. “We’ve spent every waking second together for, like, a month now, and we still have a fucking long way to go. I just…” She hesitates. “I wanna know more about you, okay? I can only ask so many questions about the shit we pass before it gets boring or you get pissed or whatever.”
Joel nods without looking up. His breathing is steadier now, but the remnants of the dream still cut through his usual detached mask. When he raises his head, he opens his mouth to speak but then shuts it, unsure of what to say.
They sit in silence for a while longer, intentionally avoiding looking at each other. Images from his dream blur with memories of the last birthday he acknowledged. Cradling Sarah, laughing with her as childish exuberance overtakes her… It seems impossible for those things to have happened, feels like it belongs to someone else’s life. Every true memory he has of Sarah is blood-stained, each one backed by a soundtrack of desperate panting and Tommy’s heartbroken, anguished Joel.
He can feel his chest tightening again, each breath growing harder as the last, terrible moments of his existence as a father come to the forefront of his mind. Before he can truly spiral, something whacks the top of his head. Joel jerks upright, his gaze desperately searching the room until he realizes it’s Ellie.
“Sometimes that snaps me out of it,” she murmurs when he meets her gaze, bottom lip clenched between her teeth when she isn’t speaking.
With a sharp nod, Joel takes a deep breath, then another, then another. The tension in the silence finally starts to ease right along with his heartbeat. He glances at Ellie occasionally, startled by the concern etched on her face.
After what feels like an eternity, Joel feels steady enough to speak. “When’s your birthday?”
Ellie considers him for a long moment, then shakes her head. “You’re gonna get mean again.”
“I won’t,” he promises quietly, surprising himself with how much he means it. “When is it?”
With a shrug, she gets to her knees and crawls to her sleeping bag, shimmying in with her back to him. “It already passed. Your watch.”
He blinks at her words. Word. It’s not what she meant, but he’s suddenly hyper-aware of the weight on his wrist, sodden with blood and absence. Joel bites his lip as he looks down at his watch — the last birthday present he received. Squeezing his eyes shut, Joel inhales deeply, ignoring the way it stutters slightly in his chest. “Outbreak Day. My birthday.”
Ellie goes still, the swish of her sleeping bag stopping. She doesn’t respond.
He sits for a few more minutes, posture rigid as he waits for her inquisitiveness to override her mile-wide stubborn streak, but the silence holds. Getting to his feet takes more effort than he cares to admit, his back protesting as he grabs the rifle. Just as he reaches the door, Ellie speaks.
“It was yesterday.”
Joel freezes, shoulders slumping. Guilt mingles with the ever-present grief and anxiety that weighs him down. He sighs and walks back toward her, stopping just short of where she’s burrowed into her sleeping bag.
He’s not the only one trying to hide tonight.
“Shoulda told me,” he says gruffly. “I’d have stopped early.”
The bedroll shifts as Ellie sits up, her hair disheveled as she looks up at him. “I was going to, but you were an asshole.”
Christ, he’s one sorry son of a bitch, and he’s not good at this. Still, Joel maintains eye contact as he takes one, two, three deep breaths. “Reckon I was. I, uh… I’m sorry.”
“Whatever.” She lies down, turning her back to him once more.
Joel stands there for another minute as the tension and awkwardness from earlier return tenfold. “Well. Happy birthday, Ellie.”
There’s no response.
With a sigh, he begins his patrol, guilt gnawing at him as he walks the perimeter. There’s no way to make up for being an ass, but there’s got to be something he can do or find to make things better. He’s never been good at connecting, at expressing himself, except with…
One of those damn indestructible comics would be good right about now. They always seem to lift her spirits.
As he circles the area, he notices an animal den nearby. Larger than a rabbit’s – a groundhog’s, perhaps. It’s not much, but maybe he can trap something for breakfast if he’s lucky. Give Ellie a hot meal and an easy day tomorrow to make up for a miserable birthday.
It’s no birthday cake, but it’ll have to do for now.