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Kansas City is two days behind them by the time Joel notices the gash on her palm.
Night’s coming fast, rain falling so heavy that the ground’s almost entirely turned to mud beneath their feet, and Ellie watches Joel’s back as he surveys the hollowed-out husk of an old 7-Eleven, deeming whether it’s safe enough for them to spend the night in.
Safe enough, because no place is ever really safe.
It’s something Ellie had been well aware of long before that first night she and Joel spent sleeping out in the cold. She’s seen enough violence living in the QZ that she knows most people… aren’t great, but still, with the terrified way everyone always talked about the infected, she’d guessed that they’d be the biggest threat if she ever wound up outside the QZ. According to Joel, she’d thought wrong. And Kansas City had made it pretty clear: infected or not, everyone out here wants her dead.
Busy keeping an ear out for danger, for anything he might not hear, Ellie’s holding her gun wrong, trying unconsciously to ease the ache in her hand. It’s not something she’s even aware of until she notices him noticing it, frowning at her slack grip. Ellie tightens her hand immediately, correcting her grasp on the pistol. But holding anything too tightly hurts, and she can’t help the wince that Joel definitely registers, his scowl deepening.
But he doesn’t say anything, and Ellie figures he doesn’t care. It’s far from the first time an adult has seen her hurting and hasn’t batted an eye, so she’s not particularly surprised.
Once he’s done scoping out the building, Joel deems it safe enough to make a fire, giving her an explanation about visibility and the rain hiding the smoke that vents out of the shattered back window. She’s usually a decent enough student when Joel explains things to her in that patient, factual way of his, but she only half listens now, too focused on the hunger clawing at the walls of her empty stomach, on the cans of food he’s setting up to heat over the fire while she unrolls her sleeping bag. The outside is soaked from nearly a full day of rain, but the inside’s mercifully dry.
She changes into her spare set of clean, dry clothes behind a collapsing shelf still laden with decades-old trash, coming out to find Joel rifling through his—previously Henry’s—pack. After a second, he pulls out a meager first aid kit, more empty spaces than bandages.
“Gimme your hand,” he says gruffly. Ellie hesitates, unable to gauge whether or not he’s angry with her, but obeys, plopping herself down next to him and slowly extending her hand. Higher-ups had often been angry with her when she got hurt back at FEDRA school. It wasn’t entirely unreasonable; her injuries had mostly been scrapes and fractures from when she snuck off to places she wasn’t supposed to, black eyes she’d earned because she couldn’t not talk back.
Nine times out of ten it had been her own damn fault in the first place.
And this wound—definitely her fault. Still, Joel hisses sympathetically through his teeth when he sees the gash bisecting her palm. It’s a clean enough slice, miraculously uninfected, but it’s still not a pretty sight, layers of fatty tissue visible where she’d cut the deepest near the base of her pinky. He wipes at the gash with the only alcohol pad they’ve got, holding her wrist firmly in place when she automatically attempts to pull away at the sting. It’s deep enough that it probably needed stitches, but they haven’t got the supplies for that.
“The hell happened, kid?”
He keeps surprising her. Despite his gruff exterior, all of the assumptions that she’d made about him at first, he’s almost… caring.
It had been nice—strange, definitely, but nice, in the fucked-up way every nice thing in this world seems to be—when he apologized to her after she shot that guy to save him.
It’s the first time Ellie can remember anyone ever really apologizing to her. Riley might’ve mumbled out a sorry when her teasing-joking sense of humor dipped a little too far into ridicule for Ellie’s comfort, but when it came to the more serious things… neither of them had ever been very good at talking it out. Riley’s apologies always came in the form of a keychain or a pun book, a scrounged can of peaches or a new cassette tape left on Ellie’s bed when she came back from class.
“Not sure,” Ellie shrugs, unable to meet his eye as he binds her hand with gauze, wrapping it snug enough to stay in place but not tight enough that it hurts. “Cut it at some point while we were in Kansas City.”
It’s not technically a lie, but there’s no way she’s telling him the rest of the truth. Her failure hurts more than any injury ever could, and if he knew just how she cut it… Joel might realize just how inadequate she really is. That any cure coming from her might as well be a lost cause, because Ellie’s only ever ruined everything she touched.
But his hands are shockingly gentle as he trims the gauze and tapes the edges, smoothing it over a few times with his thumb in a way she's sure can’t be necessary but appreciates all the same.
“Not too tight?”
Ellie shakes her head. It’s nothing like the clinical, overly rough way the medics back in Boston had patched her up. Rushed and impersonal, bandages almost suffocatingly tight, stitches started before the topical numbing agent they only rarely used even had a chance to kick in.
“You tell me next time you get hurt, alright?” Joel says, still holding her bandaged hand in both of his. Ellie’s never been great with eye contact, but Joel ducks his head to make her meet his gaze, looking at her that same intense way he had when he apologized to her. All stony-faced and stern, thick eyebrows pulled low over dark, sharp eyes. He’s somehow even more serious now, firelight casting harsh shadows across the planes of his face.
Ellie realizes after a too-long moment that it’s not anger she’s seeing. It looks a hell of a lot like worry.
“I will,” Ellie tells him, nodding, a little uncomfortable with the gravity of it all. He doesn’t look particularly convinced, tension lingering in the tightness of his jaw, the tense set of his shoulders. His skepticism, she supposes, isn’t entirely unreasonable—he’d told her not to touch the guns, to stay behind the wall, and both times she’d done the exact opposite. She’s always been terrible at doing what she’s told. “I mean it,” she adds, flippant, “I’ll tell you next time. Fireflies won’t pay for damaged cargo, right?”
Cargo. He’d said it himself. The word’s got edges, sharp enough that they draw blood each time she feels herself get a little too close.
Joel falters, grip tightening ever-so-slightly around her wrist. His breath hitches a little, jaw working like he’s gearing up to say something, and his mouth opens fractionally before he closes it again, suddenly seeming more unsure than she’s ever seen him. Ellie doesn’t really want to hear him agree with her, but she braces for it.
He remains silent, though, almost impassive, and she pulls away, turning her attention towards the cans heating on the fire and pretending like she doesn’t already miss the warmth of his hands on hers.
“I think the beans are burning.”
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“Fuck!”
Joel looks up immediately.
Fuck could mean just about anything coming from Ellie. Maybe she saw a shooting star or another really fuckin’ weird looking raccoon, Joel! (it was a possum); she could’ve accidentally dropped her glove into the fire again or seen an infected lumbering over in the distance.
“What’s wrong?”
She sighs heavily, giving him a look from across the campfire. Her eyes are unreadable in this light, guarded. “...Nothing.”
“Were you tryin’ to use your knife as a damn can opener again?”
There’s no response, but he sees her spine straighten, agitated, and he knows he guessed right.
It reminds him a little of when Sarah used to insist she could reach the serving platters he kept in the upper cabinets, adamant that she could do it herself by climbing hazardously up onto the counters. Stubbornly persistent even as her elbow started to swell nearly double in size, even through the tears that she could’ve reached it, that her reckless tumble didn’t even hurt, daddy.
It’s not something he knows how to bring up with Ellie. As much as something’s been flinging him towards her like a moon in orbit since somewhere in Kansas City (or longer, even—there’s no way anyone knows we’re here, right? Some long-dimmed thing had sparked to life at that), he’s not her father. He doesn’t know how to parent her, not when he wasn’t there to bottle-feed her or watch her take those first, hesitant steps, to number the weeks and months of growth on the door frame.
But it feels the same. And the last few days since leaving Jackson have been… weird. Good, really good, when Joel thinks of her cheek smushed against his back on the horse, when he remembers teaching her how to use the rifle, making her laugh, but…
He still hasn’t apologized for making her cry.
He told her about football, set up target practice, and hoped maybe it could be enough. Something in his bones tells him it’s not. He’s struck with some terrible sort of deja vu about the whole thing, remembering things he hasn’t thought of in decades: his own childhood, his dad taking him out to a football game after the first—only—black eye. The game had been nice enough, but the whole memory is tainted, ruined by all of the things his father could never bring himself to say.
Joel knows it’s not the same—he’d die before he ever hurt Ellie like that—but he still wishes he could be a little better with words. It had been easier to apologize to her for things that weren’t his fault.
“C’mere,” he says, lowering himself to the ground on his sleeping bag and taking out the practically empty first aid kit.
"It’s fine,” she grumbles, but she does anyway, laying her hand palm up with little hesitation. “Barely a scratch.”
It really isn’t, hardly deeper than a paper cut through the webbing of her thumb. Ellie’s looking at him like he’s lost his damn mind, but he figures it doesn’t really matter. Not when they’ll be at the university come morning.
He wipes the blood away and patches it up the best he can, wrapping the bandages around the back of her hand so it’ll stay secure. I’m sorry, Joel tries to say, but the words won’t come. I’m sorry, he thinks, hoping that with each nice thing he does for her, the sting of his words will ease. For a second, he gets the sudden urge to kiss it better the way he did when Sarah was little, when she fell off her bike or got herself hurt climbing things she shouldn’t have. It takes near-herculean effort, taping off the bandage without pressing his lips to it. He squeezes Ellie’s hand a little tighter and lets her go.
I’m sorry.
He thinks she understands.
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Most of her injuries seem superficial, Joel mutters to himself, calloused fingers feather-light against her cheek. It’s a personal sort of reassurance, one Ellie doubts he even intended for her to hear as he gives another quick once-over to her battered face, tucking bloodsoaked hair behind her ears and pulling his jacket a little tighter around her shoulders before he departs, moving around the cabin faster than her unbalanced mind can really register. Dragging furniture over to block the door, getting pails of snow, rooting around in the kitchen cabinets; it’s all a bit of a blur.
Considering how out of it she’s been since he found her, bloody and dazed, it’s a wonder she even heard that much. He’d talked to her as they staggered through the forest, a soothing litany of soft reassurances drastically different from his usual gruff tone. Now, curled up on a cracking leather couch in a cabin as far away from Silver Lake as they could manage, she can’t recall a single thing he said.
It’s a little hard to think right now, but Ellie knows regardless that he’s wrong.
She’s always been a talker, but she can’t find a way to tell him. Even when she had to be quiet under pain of death, the words had vibrated beneath her skin, impatient to get out the moment they were safe to speak again. Now, though… there are no words. There’s no way to think back on the events of the last few hours-days-weeks and string it all together into a sentence that’ll explain how non-superficially fucked she is right now, shattered so thoroughly that the brief glimpse she got of her reflection in the glass storm door might as well have been a stranger.
She can’t. Not without falling apart entirely.
Joel frowns, shining his flashlight in her eyes, and tells her he’s pretty sure she’s concussed.
That’s probably why.
It’s easier, Ellie thinks, if that is why she feels so far away from it all. A head injury and not the fact that some fundamental thing inside of her feels like it has broken.
She can’t seem to pry her eyes away from the deer’s head mounted on the wall across the living room. She feels like that a little: taxidermied. All glassy eyes and empty skin, like the important parts have been scraped out with a spoon, replaced with something wrong, something that doesn’t belong to her anymore.
She’s not sure if it ever will again.
Ellie shoves the thought away, tries to cram it into the dark, shadowy corners of her mind where she keeps memories of gnashing teeth and yellowed eyes, gunfire and bruises, the creak of a body swinging in gentle wind, the mildewy odor of a cramped, dark room with a locked door, one she knows won’t open no matter how much she cries, not until the time’s up.
No.
It’s easier to blame the concussion.
Either way—hit to the head or something worse, it’s hard to think, and even though she’s curled up in Joel’s jacket, objectively safer than she’s been in weeks, she can’t stop shaking. It’s not from the cold. Not entirely, at least. Joel’s getting a fire set up in the hearth, eyes flitting between her and the nascent flame the whole time like she might disappear if he looks away for too long.
It’s a look she’s familiar with, one she knows she’s worn more often than not these last few weeks.
He looks more scared than Ellie’s ever seen him.
It’s not a word she’d typically use for Joel, scared. Far from the first thing that’d come to mind if someone asked her to describe him. Scary, maybe, back when they’d first met, but even then Joel had never really seemed as threatening to her as he probably should’ve.
He’s asking her something, she thinks. His lips are moving but the words are distant, as jumbled as they were on their slow limp here. Like a wire in her brain has frayed, severed, her ears and brain stuck on separate wavelengths and struggling to make sense of the onslaught of external stimuli. The concerned crease between Joel’s eyebrows deepens, and he inches closer, carefully gauging her reaction.
The pail of snow between them and the fireplace is partially melted, and Joel uses the icy water to dampen a dish towel before bringing it up to her forehead. Ellie barely registers the cold. Joel’s diligent in cleaning her face, wiping carefully at the dried blood until it starts to flake away, staining the threadbare towel and tinting the water pink. One hand rises to cradle her face, holding her steady while the other scrubs at her upper lip, the twin rivulets of blood crusted beneath each nostril.
There’s anger there, obvious in the harshness with which Joel wrings the soiled towel, battered knuckles resplitting at the repetitive movements, and a fire rises behind his irises with each cut and bruise he unearths. It sparks from an ember to an inferno when he wipes at her neck. Whatever he sees there makes his face go dangerously tense, irate, a bottomless sort of anger she’s never seen on him before. There have been other angry men, the ones who left the marks there, and a tiny voice inside of her wonders if she should be afraid. The hand on her face, though, is no less gentle, thumb moving back and forth in a soothing cadence across her cheekbone, and Ellie knows—there’s no fear here.
She remembers the time she found a baby bird back in Boston, holding its fragile body in her palms after rescuing it off of the dormitory roof. It was a tiny thing, delicate, all hollow bones and downy brown feathers, and the realization that the fragile life in her hands could be so easily crushed had been almost overwhelming.
Joel holds onto her a little like she had that bird: careful, cautious. Like she’s broken a wing and he’ll keep her safe until she’s ready to fly on her own again.
At some point in the process, Ellie starts to come back to herself. By the time he’s moved on to cleaning her hands, the more tactile sensations have started returning. She can feel the warmth of his fingers, the chill of the water. The cushy leather of the couch beneath her, the smooth, velvety suede of his jacket. Whiffs of smoke, of the rosemary and mint soap they’d gotten back in Jackson. The distinct metallic taste of blood. Pain when she breathes. Pain when she shifts a half-inch to get more comfortable, jostling every sore limb and overexerted muscle. Pain, when he uncovers the shallow gashes littering her hands where the cleaver had slid in her slippery palms, new marks crisscrossing the faint line of raised scar tissue across her left from back in Kansas City. She winces a little, at that, and his painstaking ministrations somehow become even more careful.
“You hurt anywhere else?” he asks, shoulders bowing with relief when she meets his eyes and he can tell she’s actually hearing him now.
Ellie shakes her head, ignoring the sharp, aching shift of her ribs with every breath. “I’m okay.” It’s her first time speaking since their reunion outside the burning diner. Her voice doesn’t sound the way it used to.
He doesn’t look like he believes her.
Washing her hair is about as pleasant as pulling teeth. Besides the typical oil and dirt that’s accumulated in the weeks since the last real shower in Jackson, it’s as bloody as everywhere else, glued uncomfortably to her scalp. Joel’s as careful with her hair as he’d been the rest of her; making sure none of the soapy, incarnadined water drips into her eyes, untangling the knots with an ease that shouldn’t—but does—come naturally to his bulky fingers.
Still, it’s uncomfortable, lying with her neck craned over the edge of the sink while he scrubs bar soap into her roots, picking tiny pieces of flesh and bone out from where they’d gotten caught in locks of her hair and stopping periodically to probe with gentle fingers at the bumps and abrasions she’s gotten over the last few days.
“Okay,” Joel says when he’s finished towel-drying her hair. He looks her over pensively, as if ticking items off of a mental checklist. Wash her face: check. Hair: check. What’s next? Ellie’s certain he must be making this up as he goes.
He scrutinizes the legs of her jeans, denim damp and dark from where she’d stumbled and fallen at some point on the trek here. Ellie remembers it, but only barely: an untied shoelace, pitching forward to land on her hands and knees in the snow. The half-second maybe I can just lay here. Maybe I don’t need to get up, before he was hauling her upright again, keeping her moving.
“You should get outta those wet clothes.”
Ellie nods slowly, looking down at her lap. There’s a single drop of blood just above her left kneecap. She doesn’t know whose it is. Hers, dripping down from when her nose cracked against the bars? An errant droplet from the messy splatter that exploded from David’s head? There’s no way to tell.
Joel takes her arms by the forearms, helping her step down from the counter. His palms are warm even through the fabric of her sweatshirt, and she hates how utterly empty she feels when he releases her again. “Bathroom’s this way.”
He has to have looked over the house when she was too out of it to realize, because he knows exactly where they’re going, guiding her down the hallway to the last door on the left.
“Here,” he says, picking something up from the vanity and holding it out to her. “I, uh– found these in the other room.”
She eyes the stack of clothes in his hands, taking it with still-trembling fingers and inspecting his finds. Boys pajama pants, soft blue fleece. Some plaid boys boxers, a long-sleeved t-shirt, a gray hoodie not dissimilar to the one Maria had thrown out back in Jackson. Thick wool socks. It all smells a little musty, the way most scavenged clothes do, but still—they’re warm and intact and clean.
“And– here,” he sets the wet towel on the counter. “If y’need to wash yourself up some more.”
“Thanks,” Ellie tries for a smile, but the muscles in her face don’t want to cooperate; it feels closer to a grimace than a grin.
Joel nods, leaning hesitantly against the doorframe for a second like he’s not sure what to do with himself, like he’s scared to let her out of his sight, even if only for a moment. “I’ll… leave you to it.”
She shuts the door behind him, turning the lock for good measure. Joel’s mere feet down the hall, and she knows that he won’t come in, wouldn’t let anyone else either, but it’s an added layer of security she allows herself for the time being.
When she looks in the mirror above the sink, her reflection peers back, dull-eyed, through the spiderwebbed cracks in the glass. It’s eerie, uncomfortable. A little like the first time she got her picture taken for a Fedra ID and saw her face inverted in the grainy photo, flipped opposite from how it always looked in the mirror. It hadn’t been a massive change, but it was one obvious enough that it made her look at herself and think, uneasily: something’s off.
This is that times a thousand.
Most jarring is the gash splitting the bridge of her nose. The scab’s ugly and raw, irritated from Joel cleaning it. When Ellie tilts her head up to get a better look at the red-purple bruises starting to bloom along the column of her throat, his anger suddenly makes a lot more sense. They span from collarbone to just under her chin, the shape unmistakable. She brings her own hands up to her neck, resting trembling fingers on each of the larger, distinct imprints, pulling away when the action makes her shudder in revulsion, mouth flooding with the bitter taste of bile.
It feels… sore, definitely, but less than she’d expect looking at it. It should hurt more, she thinks. This whole thing’s a bit like that. Even though her ribs throb, the gashes on her palms and her nose stinging with every movement, she can’t help but feel like it should be worse, for it to have affected her the way it did. She’s been hit before, been kicked and concussed, had her nose broken more than once in Fedra schoolyard fights.
This is the same thing, she reasons. It’s just a little harder to bounce back from this time.
She doesn’t want to think about why.
Superficial, Ellie thinks, a little bit resentfully, and hates herself a little for it. Joel hadn’t meant anything, and he’d been right anyways. This is nothing time won’t heal.
Thorough as Joel had been, there are still traces of blood under her nails, a buildup on the inside of her nostrils. When she blows her nose, the towel comes away red. Easing out of her sweatshirt, she’s expecting the bruise on her side, but the sight of even more blood dried onto her stomach gives her pause. She’d forgotten about that. The gash she’d made on David’s side, though too shallow to do much real damage, had dripped down while he strangled her, scorching her skin where her sweatshirt pushed up in the struggle. She scrubs at it, rougher than Joel would’ve, and wonders if she’ll ever feel clean again.
Besides some general soreness and a smattering of purpling bruises along one pale shin, her legs at the very least appear relatively unscathed. By the time she’s done maneuvering soggy denim down her legs, throwing them across the bathroom to avoid looking at the torn zipper, Ellie has to stop for a minute, slumping exhaustedly where she sits on the edge of the tub.
A gentle rap at the door breaks her out of her thoughts. “Y’alright in there?”
“Yeah,” she says, clearing her throat when her voice wobbles. “Just a sec.”
Ellie pulls on the clothes Joel had picked out, ribs protesting when she bends down to change her socks. She’s not alright. The last few days have spun her entire world backwards, inside-out, but of this she is certain.
The can of tomato soup Joel offers goes uneaten, saved for tomorrow, but she manages some water before he gets her settled for bed in front of the crackling fireplace. The comforter he’d dragged into the living room is patterned with the different planets of the solar system, and she knows, distantly, that she should be excited by this. Ellie traces Saturn's rings, hating that she couldn’t even muster a smile when Joel laid it over her, tucking it securely around her in a way she’s only ever read about before.
She longs to curl up, draw her legs up to her chest and press her face to the divot between her knees in the way that’s always made her feel younger, sort of, but also safer. She could use a little extra safety right now, even if it’s just a stupid, little-kid sort of logic: if you can’t see it, it can’t hurt you. She knows better, but she still always feels more secure when she tucks herself away.
But she can’t. The position is agony to her ribs. She tries anyway, cramming herself into the corner of the oversized armchair and drawing her legs up as high as she can, wrapping her achy, overexerted arms around them. She’s still freezing. Even by the fire, bundled up in fleece pants and under a thick blanket, she’s frigid down to her bones.
She wishes Joel would hug her again, warm and safe in a way she’s never known. That’d be even better, but there’s no way she can bring herself to ask. They don’t do that, her and Joel, no matter how lonely or cold or whatever else she might be feeling right now. She’s cried herself silently to sleep across a campfire from him enough times to be sure of that.
Ellie peeks at him over the blanket. “Joel?”
“Hm?” He looks up from where he’d been assessing their supplies and pretending not to be watching her. His face is burnished bronze in the firelight, the rise and dip of his chest steady and even, hitching only when a too-careless movement pulls at the stitches in his side. Alive, she reminds herself, and looking worlds better than he did this morning, unmoving and ashen on that mattress.
The cabin’s silent, save for the whistle of the wind, the crackle of the fire, and she pauses, stays silent.
“Ellie?”
She can still feel the blood on her hands. Does this make me a bad person?
Ellie chews on the inside of her cheek, hesitant, looses a shaky sigh that hurts on the way out, and asks, instead—“No one’s gonna find us, right?”
She recalls the first time she’d asked him this, five months and two thousand miles ago. A lifetime ago, it feels like.
“I think–” his hand twitches, fractionally, like he wants to reach for her. Like maybe they are the kind of people who do that sort of thing. “Anybody was comin’ after us, they would’ve by now. We’ll be alright.”
She can’t tell whether or not he’s telling the truth. She’s not sure if she wants to know.
“And,” he adds, sounding surer even as his hands fumble with the zipper on his pack, “I’m here now. If anyone does come after us, I’ll protect you.”
Done rifling through the bag, he crosses the distance between them, careful when he eases onto the floor beside the armchair, angling himself to keep an eye on the entrance. Tentative, hesitant, she reaches out, and he takes her hand, careful not to put much pressure on any of her injuries.
Us.
It’s a far cry from Oh, it’s us now? It sounds nothing like cargo, or not my daughter, or come dawn, we’re goin’ our separate ways.
If you can’t find a way to trust me, then yes, you are alone, David told her through the bars of the cage. She knows now that he was wrong.
Us. It sounds like a promise.
I’ll protect you.
Ellie eases back against the weathered cushions, Joel’s hand warm in hers. It feels safer than anything has in a long time.
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September, to Joel, is a slow suffocation.
The first summer in Jackson is the kindest life’s been to him in a long time. His nephew is born, he teaches Ellie to swim, he starts to carve out a new life for the both of them. He gets through what would’ve been Sarah’s thirty-fifth birthday by burying himself in work, spending the evening sharing memories with Tommy in his brother’s living room. But September…
The leaves brown and wither on the trees as the nights start to get longer, colder. His own dreaded birthday creeps closer, inescapable. For two decades Joel’s spent the night at the bottom of a bottle as bruises darken on his fists, but he can’t do that here. Not when he’s got Ellie to look after. Especially not when he’s been doing such a bad job at it recently—the foreboding feeling he’s starting to drown in has rendered him short-tempered and irritable, patience paper-thin even on the better days.
It’s rubbing off on Ellie, too, he thinks. She’s walking on eggshells around him, her responses shorter, more withdrawn. She keeps sneaking off to the old water tower on the far edge of town, spending entire afternoons there instead of in class, not coming home or to the dining hall unless he goes and gets her, finds her with her legs dangling thirty feet off the ground, haunted gaze set permanently on something in the distant southeast.
He’s not quite sure what she’s looking for, and he doesn’t know how to ask. Not when every conversation between them these days feels like a minefield, exploding from normalcy to argument in the space of a single second.
He’s known Ellie for more than a year now. He knows her, he likes to think, better than anyone else ever has. And even though she can be defensive, toeing the line on rude when she overcompensates to avoid looking soft, she’s a good kid. He’s never known her to be mean, though. Which is why he—and everyone else—is so surprised when, over dinner at Tommy and Maria’s house, Tommy’s well-meaning “school alright today, kid?” is met with a nearly vitriolic “why the fuck do you care?” punctuated by a particularly aggressive stab at a piece of sausage she’d been shoving around her bowl to avoid eating.
“Ellie,” Joel says, voice low, admonishing. He feels, ridiculously, a little like when Sarah was small and prone to temper tantrums, meltdowns in the middle of the cereal aisle when he bought cheerios instead of rice krispies.
“What?” she cuts a glare at him, then looks back to his brother. Tommy’s smile slips, wearing thin around the edges. As hard as he’d tried, she hadn’t gotten along with him very well at first. Her usual distrust of most strangers had been amplified by Joel’s aborted attempt at leaving her with him last winter, but despite that he’d thought Tommy was growing on her recently. Somehow managing to slip his way through her defenses.
Joel doubts most other people would see it, fooled by his eternally untroubled persona, but he was there when Tommy was born. He was the one Tommy cried to when kids made fun of him at school, when his first girlfriend broke his fourteen-year-old heart with clumsy, careless hands, when he came home from the army all hollowed-out and haunted, like he left half of himself behind on the other side of the ocean. Joel knows what it looks like when his brother’s gotten his feelings hurt.
The remainder of the meal passes in a tense silence. Ellie pushes her pasta around her plate, spaghetti tangling in knots around the tines of her fork; Joel’s gaze drifts, unbidden, to the memorial in the living room, over and over again.
By some small mercy, they make it home across the street before the real arguing starts up.
“What was that about?” Joel asks, leaning down to untie his boots.
She doesn’t bother with her own shoes, making a beeline straight for the dining room. “Fuck off, man.”
“Hey,” he says, trying without avail to keep his voice level, getting up to follow her.
“Just– leave me alone,” she bites out, yanking her backpack off of the back of one of the dining room chairs so harshly that the chair tips over, clattering to the floor,.
“You can’t just talk to people like that,” he says, volume rising with each word, voice hitching higher than he thinks it ever really has when directed towards her. Ellie opens her mouth to respond, movements stiff and erratic as she gathers the mess of her colored pencils scattered across the coffee table, sending half of them rolling across the hardwood floor. He’s already talking, though, frustration getting the better of him—“What the hell is wrong with you?”
Ellie’s face shutters, closing off, something flickering, dying behind her eyes. She says, a little woundedly, shoving the sketchbook into her backpack so heedlessly the pages crumple and fold backwards, “I wish I fucking knew.”
Then she’s yanking her bag over her shoulder, making for the front door and letting it slam shut behind her with all the absolute finality of a gunshot.
Joel lets her go. Sinking onto the couch, he scrubs his palms over his eyes and lets out a long sigh. He goes through the day like flipping through the pages of one of her comic books, trying to discern what exactly went wrong. She’d seemed normal enough when he woke her up. Maybe she dimmed a little when they set out to the dining hall, seeing the thin layer of frost that made their exhalations crystallize like plumes of smoke and caused the grass to stand stiff, solid. She’d been off after that, he recalls. Had dug into her eggs and fried potatoes more hesitantly, with none of her usual verve. She was quieter than usual, too, though that’s been true for everyone recently. Not just him and Tommy and Maria—Joel doubts there are very many people here who didn’t lose someone with the outbreak. As the day gets closer, the circles have been deepening under everyone’s eyes, the dining hall more dim, subdued, the liquor cache and the armory watched a little more carefully.
He spends the better part of the next two hours tidying up the house, picking up the pencils scattered on the floor of the living room, folding sheets and towels, straightening the coats and scarves on the coat hook. She forgot her gloves, he realizes halfway through, and resists the urge to bring them to her like a peace offering, blinking away irrational visions of pale fingers, blue-tinged nailbeds and emergency amputations. It’s September. She’ll be fine.
Usually when they fight like this the best thing to do is be patient. To give her time to cool down, him time to ruminate in his regret. And he does. The gap in the shoe rack by the front door aches like a missing tooth. Shame is the sharpest knife.
What the hell is wrong with you? It’s a question he should be asking the mirror.
It’s only when the sun dips below the horizon, shadows stealing over the valley, that he sets out to get her. The town’s gone dark, illuminated only by the lamps in his neighbors’ windows, the strings of bulbs hanging off the edge of buildings like drops of sunshine.
It’s not a lot of light, but it’s enough that when the water tower’s in view, he can see Ellie clearly, crumpled and too-still on the grass at the base of the ladder.
Joel feels like he’s been shot in the chest. It’s an old and familiar fear, one that came to life somewhere in a hospital room in Austin, one he thought he buried there in his home state. One that fell, slowly, back into place somewhere between Boston and here. He thinks sometimes that if he went back, retraced each and every one of their footsteps, he could place it: this is where I taught Ellie how to make a snare. This is where she made me laugh. This is where my life found meaning again.
This, he realizes, horror surging through him like a strike of lightning, could be where he loses it again. Not to a horde or a cult or a cause he knows she’d choose over herself, but—
There’s blood in her hair, on her face, down the side of her neck. He’s careful at first, not wanting to move her too much, to displace a spinal injury and make anything worse. Could the doctors in Jackson even do anything for something like that?
“Ellie?” He keeps his voice soft, gentle. “Ellie, baby,” he says, brushing back blood-wet hair, cupping a cold and clammy cheek, “can you look at me?”
She does, eyes cracking into slits. She groans as she uncurls, trying to push herself up onto her elbows. Joel helps her the rest of the way up, and she whines in pain when it jostles her left leg.
“Ow,” Ellie mumbles, one hand digging into the grass, fingers scrabbling in the dirt.
“It's okay,” he tries to soothe, “you’re okay, baby.” Even as he says it, he’s not quite sure whether he’s lying or not. “You gotta tell me what’s wrong.”
She doesn’t. Her eyes slip shut again, and she struggles to open them back up to look at his face. Joel slides one hand under her shoulders, the other under the bend of her knees, and hoists her up as gently as he can manage. Still, she makes a low, pained cry, tucking her face into the front of his flannel as he starts to walk, each step jostling her ankle.
It’s sprained badly, the doctor tells him after a brief examination. Severe enough that it was starting to swell over the top of her sneaker, laces nearly cutting off the circulation. The marbling of indigo bruises spreads nearly down to her toes. She’s concussed too, but the gash on her temple isn’t severe enough to need stitches. Her shirt collar is stiff with drying blood, hair plastered to her forehead with it. Worry sinks its claws into Joel’s chest, squeezing his lungs until a deep breath is something he has to fight for instead of something that comes naturally.
She’d been coming home, she tells him through tears and hitching breaths, four rungs short of steady ground when her foot slipped, leg giving out from under her. It’s how she hit her head, too—smashing it on one of the bars just before landing hard on that foot.
The doctor cleans her wound and wraps her ankle, gives them a half-bottle of Fedra-grade painkillers and a pair of crutches that go unused in favor of Joel carrying her home. He hopes she doesn’t notice how badly he’s shaking, but she doesn’t seem to register it, even as he gets her to bed, crouching and fumbling with trembling hands at the lace of the sneaker on her uninjured foot. It takes three tries.
“Joel,” she manages to say, careful like she’s talking to one of the more easily unnerved horses. Joel just shakes his head, smoothing her bangs back to get a better look at her face. It’s pale and apologetic and unsure, fighting a futile battle against sleep. Her loose, damp hair fans out like a tangled halo across her blue pillowcase, her eyes unfocused, pupils made pinpricks by the pain medication, miniscule black holes collapsing in on themselves.
“We’ll talk in the morning, okay? Just get some rest.”
Joel lets her sleep late, dozing intermittently at the window seat as the moon crests and falls, sunrise coming all too quickly. He lets her sleep later than usual, slivers of golden light slicing through the gaps in the curtain as she tosses and turns, her brow furrowed and face troubled even in unconsciousness.
There’s a needling sort of twinge buried deep in the knuckles of his right fist, the part of him that itches to protect, but there’s nobody to fight, no one to be angry at besides himself. He can do nothing with his rage, his fear, nothing except change the ice packs every hour and make sure her foot stays elevated every time she shifts in sleep. He watches the rise and fall of her chest, wrestling all the while with the urge to pull a chair up close so he can hold her wrist, feel the jump of her pulse under his fingertips.
In the clinic, brushing the tears—and blood—from Ellie’s cheeks, he’d been yanked back in time to Colorado, wiping her face like she was a snotty-nosed little kid and not someone who'd just gone through a near-unimaginable horror. She’d seemed younger then, and it made him wonder what she was like when she was little, what could’ve been if he was there from the start.
He thinks of a world where he’s never had to feel his daughters’ blood dry against his skin. Imagines he’s never even touched it, not beyond a nosebleed or a scraped knee, the slow seep from a fresh gap between baby teeth. Some version of all this where Sarah didn’t turn to dead weight in his arms, where Ellie’s never had to feel someone’s pulse cease beneath her fingers. Some sort of alternate reality where their lives weren’t defined at every turn by blood and pain and the senseless sort of brutality that has everything and nothing to do with the infected.
That’s not their world, though, as much as he wishes it could be. He watches her sleep, watches her breathe, and feels the worry slowly start to ebb.
Knowing he won’t be getting any more sleep, he starts to get breakfast ready for when she wakes: jarred apples and scrambled eggs and toast, iced tea and two of the carefully rationed percocet she’d been given.
“You don’t have to do all this,” Ellie says, still a little drowsy when Joel brings the food up to her room, arranging the tray on her bed so she doesn’t have to get up.
He knows based on the sharp slant of her shoulders, the steel behind her tired eyes, that she’d been gearing up for a fight. He sits at the foot of her bed, takes in the bruising across the side of her forehead, and swallows the urge to give her one.
When she was ten or eleven, Sarah stopped wearing knee guards on her bike, embarrassed that she was the only one of her friends to still need them. She took a couple of nasty falls, scraping the skin clear off of one kneecap on the last one. In a series of events he’s still ashamed of, he’d snapped at her, taking in her bloody leg and red-rimmed eyes and asking, exasperatedly, why she couldn’t just wear the goddamn knee pads.
She did, after that, but the scar remained.
That same scared thing inside of him rears its head. He wants to yell at her for climbing up a metal ladder the night after a freeze, when the rungs were slick with patches of ice; to remind her of the number one rule for ladders that he’d practically drilled into her on the road—three points of contact at every step. He can’t. The words die in his throat before they have a chance to form. He feels himself deflate like a perforated balloon.
He doesn’t want to fight with Ellie, especially after the night they had. Besides, it never sat right with Joel, Sarah doing something less out of a desire to protect herself and more so he’d be placated, anxiety eased. She did that sort of thing more than he liked.
“Of course I do,” Joel says, because doing things for Ellie is as easy as breathing. Sometimes he forgets that, as good as she is at reading him, things like this are entirely foreign to her. She went fourteen years without an adult who wanted to take care of her and now the very idea is so incomprehensible that she doesn’t recognize it, can’t recognize it, even when it’s right within reach, hugging her close and making her breakfast, calling her honey and kiddo and baby girl as naturally as if it’s the name she was born with. “It’s my job to take care of you.”
Ellie looks away, chews on the inside of her cheek and drags a fingertip through the condensation on the side of her glass, drawing something indecipherable. It takes him a second to realize his mistake:
Cargo.
It’s hard, verbalizing. The father in him lay dormant for so long that he’s become rusty, worn with disuse. Some things—braiding her hair and taking the first bite at dinner and enacting violence upon those who would harm her—are simpler. This part’s not. “I want to take care of you,” he corrects, firm, and she nods, slowly.
“So you’re not… mad at me?” She cuts a brief glance to his face, and Joel falters.
“I was,” he admits, hating the way her face had drooped, crestfallen, at his hesitation. “Mostly I was just– real worried.”
He thinks the sight of her, limp and too-still, is something that’ll stay with him forever, archived somewhere in his mind beside vivid memories of Texas fields and Colorado winters. The clawing, squeezing thing in Joel’s chest tightens, vicelike, then slackens, his breath stuttering.
“I’m sorry,” Ellie says, wincing. He shakes his head, laying one hand gently on the knee of her non-injured leg, his other white-knuckling the handle of his long-cold mug of coffee.
“It’s okay,” he says, because he’s been angry for twenty-one years, scared for fourteen years longer still, and lately, it’s all been crashing down on him. It was hardly the worst argument they’ve had, but he’s too tired to keep fighting with her. Not after last night. “It was an accident. You don’t gotta apologize for that. Just eat your breakfast, okay? We can talk some more later.”
Ellie looks about as thrilled at the idea of that as he feels, but she picks at her breakfast, takes the pills, drinks the extra glass of water he brings. She’s yawning again by the time she’s done, and Joel would be lying if he said he wasn’t feeling the effects of a sleepless night.
“Stay with me?” she asks, tentatively, like she’s afraid he’ll say no. he nods, ‘always’ staying unspoken, trapped somewhere in the back of his throat.
He slides under the blanket of her twin-sized bed, staying still and careful on the edge of the mattress until Ellie tugs him closer, fits herself to his left side, under his arm with her cheek pressed to his chest. She fits there as perfectly as Sarah did on his right.
When they wake up, Joel will tell her why this month is so hard. He’ll ask what’s been going on with her, and she’ll tell him why she was so angry yesterday, at Tommy, at him, and he’ll try to fix it. When they wake up, he’ll tell her just how much she means to him.
For now, though, they just rest.