Chapter Text
It began in the dining hall during breakfast announcements. This always drew on and on with everyone and their mother making their way to the microphone to announce their inanities of the week while Ellie Williams (Miller) rolled her eyes and made asides to Tommy Miller, both of them dodging Joel Miller and Maria Scott-Miller kicking them under the table.
Ellie was in the middle of giggling at a joke Tommy had made about Edward ‘Neighbourhood Watch’ Randall while he was berating seemingly the entire town about noise pollution. Edward was replaced at the podium by Estelle Hernandez, school principal and general do-gooder. She was so nice neither of them had a joke to make so she was able to make her announcement in peace and without any Miller or Miller-adjacent shins being bruised.
“I know you all know this already, but school starts back next Monday. Don’t forget, if your little one is five or turning five by the end of the year, they’ll be starting kindergarten in the big school building. For anyone new to town I haven’t met already—”
When she said this, Tommy nudged Ellie with his elbow. She blushed and stared at her oatmeal. Joel kicked Tommy hard under the table.
“— I’d love you to drop ‘round anytime this week so I can get you settled and ready for next week.”
Ellie aggressively scooped oatmeal into her mouth.
Tommy raised an eyebrow and was met with a curt shake of Joel’s head, so had the good sense to keep quiet for the rest of the meal.
Since their late-Spring return to Jackson, Ellie had filled her time apprenticing with Joel on construction crew, helping Maria with the new baby, and hovering around the stables until Michael the horse guy put her on the rota there. Joel had mentioned school one single time - casually, in passing - and it had gone over so badly - with Ellie locked in her bedroom on a hunger strike for three days - that he’d vowed to let her bring it up when she was ready.
With the new school year looming he had hoped that now might be the time she brought it up but it wasn’t looking likely.
“Ms. Hernandez is nice,” he said vaguely, calmly, as they wandered to their construction site for the day - the Jackson dry goods storage facility in dire need of an upgrade.
Ellie glared at him.
“El…” he said hesitantly. “We have to at least discuss it.”
“Discuss what?” she asked, staring firmly ahead of them with a fierce look on her face that told Joel she was being deliberately belligerent. The tension in her shoulders told him it was for a good reason.
“School,” Joel said, keeping his voice steady. “I mean… It made sense when we first came here since it was nearin’ the end of the year and we were gettin’ settled in and all.”
And you couldn’t get out of bed half the time and there was The Incident where that foraging group brought a whole stag back from their trip and you had a full-blown panic attack in the middle of the main street and you still sleep in my bed ‘cause otherwise you have nightmares so bad they make you puke , he didn’t say, although it crossed his mind. And, since she was at least ten times smarter than him, he was pretty sure it had crossed hers as well.
“...But you’re only fifteen. You have to stay in school here until you’re eighteen.”
“But I already know everything,” Ellie said, dumping his toolbag down on the ground when they reached the shed.
“She’s got you there, big brother,” Tommy laughed, playfully jabbing Joel in the ribs with a screwdriver.
“You do not know everything ,” Joel said, kicking the back of Tommy’s knee so it buckled. Ellie laughed.
“That kid Jesse said his favourite part of school is hunting, foraging and tracking. I can already do that,” she said firmly.
Joel shrugged. “Practice won’t kill you. And what about other stuff? Science and math. You said yourself FEDRA school was shit. You have to know science and math to be an astronaut.”
Ellie scowled. “I’ve had enough school.”
“Okay, but you actually haven’t,” he said. “Maria said every kid in this town does school until they’re eighteen. You were there when she said it.”
Ellie didn’t look at him, didn’t say anything, just grabbed a couple of tools from the bag and got to work.
“Ellie…” he began, not sure where he was going to go with it.
“Fucking drop it,” Ellie snapped, taking her anger out on the old shelves they were set to remove with wild swings of a mallet that had Tommy sheltering on the other side of the shed.
When there was a gentle knock on the shed door and Joel looked up to find the goddamn school principal waving cheerfully at them he strongly considered having a heart attack.
Ellie, drenched in sweat, with dust and chunks of half-rotted wood in her hair, looking even more like a feral dumpster raccoon than normal, glanced over her shoulder and glared at the woman. “Fuck right off."
“Ellie!” Joel hissed, his cheeks flushing as he put his work down and held out a hand to the principal. She took it, shaking it and somehow still smiling. “I’m sorry,” he said, glancing at the teenager over his shoulder.
“Not at all, I just wanted to chat with you, actually, Joel. Haven’t had much of a chance since y’all got here. D’you have time to take a walk?”
Joel didn’t miss the ‘y’all’ she’d slipped in there to butter them up. He also didn’t miss Tommy grinning at him. He’d caught Joel one time staring dreamily at Estelle while she’d made an announcement about school graduation at a town hall meeting three months ago and never let it go.
And Estelle was beautiful, stunningly so. Her curly hair, dark, threaded with silver, was always done up in these magical braids he could never figure out the logistics of. Her glasses actually suited her face and seemed to even be the right prescription which was more than he could say for himself and his grandpa glasses. She was way too smart for him, and extremely competent, and a pillar of the community, and Maria’s friend. And she was also going to be his feral dumpster raccoon’s teacher. So she strictly was off-limits .
“Sure,” Joel nodded. “Why don’t you two get lunch?” He said to Tommy, allowing himself a moment of smugness when Tommy looked more than a little intimidated at having Ellie all to himself.
Joel didn’t wait for an answer, following Estelle out into the sunshine and falling into step with her.
“I’m sorry about Ellie,” he said quickly. “She’s just… she’s really agitated about school.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty clear,” she said lightly. “Has she had bad experiences with school in the past?”
Joel shrugged. “Probably. She was in a FEDRA school in Boston.”
Estelle seemed a little confused by his vagueness. “But she never spoke to you about it?”
“Well it was before… uh… Have you spoken to Maria about us at all?”
She shook her head. “It wouldn’t have really been appropriate. I just assumed… Ellie wrote ‘Williams-Miller’ on her intake paperwork when y’all got here.”
“Oh,” Joel said quietly, to himself. “I didn’t know that.”
“Is that her surname?”
“I mean… sure if she wants it to be. I didn’t think…” he cleared his throat, his eyes misting up slightly.
Estelle placed a grounding hand on his elbow. “She’s yours, though.”
He nodded firmly. “Yeah, but… I only met her a year ago. She was at the military school, the orphanage, in the Boston QZ and she… I don’t expect she had a great time there. But she’s smart. I think she’s… really smart,” he said, as if he wasn’t quite sure what to do with that. And he wasn’t.
Sarah had been pretty smart, much smarter than him or Tommy. Of course he thought she was a genius. But Ellie . He was a little afraid that Ellie really was a genius, and not just in the way that dads think their daughters are.
“Oh, I can see that she is,” Estelle laughed.
“Look, I’m… I need to talk to her. And then… I’m hoping to get her there for the start of the year. Do you have a… curriculum I could show her? So she knows what to expect?”
“Sure thing, I’ll drop one round to you. Either of you can come by anytime if you have questions too.”
Joel nodded again. “Thanks. Nice meetin’ you properly, I… sorry again about…” he gestured vaguely back at the shed. “We’re working’ on it.”
Estelle shrugged. “If I was a fifteen year old growing up in a post-apocalyptic hellscape I’d probably be pretty similar. Don’t worry too much about her, Joel. She’s smart, she’ll be okay.”
“Ms. Hernandez is going to drop over some stuff for you to look through.”
Ellie glared at him over her mac and cheese that he’d made in a valiant attempt at a peace offering. “What kinda stuff?” she asked, her shoulders tense.
“They used to call it a curriculum. Just like… stuff about what you’d be learning at school.”
Ellie crossed her arms over her chest. “You can’t make me go,” she said, although she sounded a little unsure.
“I’m not going to make you do anything, I just think it would be good for you to go to school now you’re settled in.”
“What did she want with you before?” Ellie asked, picking half-heartedly at her food. “Did you guys make out?” she asked, a faint glint returning to her eyes at the mischief. She’d clearly been talking to Tommy about this.
“No,” Joel said, in a voice so firm he hoped it would put an end to that conversation.
“Hm,” Ellie shrugged. “So what did she want?”
Joel shrugged. “I think she was trying to figure out what the problem was. The thing is, I don’t know what the problem is and even if I did, it’s not mine to talk about.”
She looked up at him then, her eyes a little softer. “Does she think you’re like… my Dad or something?” she asked, in the way she always did when she was talking about their family, or Tommy being her Uncle. Distantly. Detached. Like if she said it too confidently, as if it was true, they’d rip the rug out from under her and put her back in an orphanage.
“I think she thought we’d known each other longer than we have, at least. Do you… how about we take a walk?” He asked, suddenly remembering what a surefire way it used to be to get Sarah to talk about something she didn’t really want to.
Everything from, ‘I want to try tampons’, to ‘I think I like a boy at school’, to ‘why didn’t Mom want me?’ had come out on casual strolls through the neighbourhood.
Ellie shrugged, still looking sullen but pushing her bowl away and standing up.
Joel followed her into the hallway, slipping his boots and jacket back on.
They were silent as they wandered down the street, Ellie kicking a little rock along the road.
“So…” Ellie said. Joel, surprised she’d instigated, looked up, trying to make his body language as open as possible. “Have you told anyone about like… Silver Lake?”
Joel shook his head quickly. “Only what happened to me, how well you took care of me.”
“But you’ve told Tommy, right?”
“No,” Joel said, as if that would have been ridiculous. “It’s not mine to tell, Ellie. All he knows is that I got stabbed, you saved my life and you saw some shit out there. I mean, he knows about… ah… your arm,” he said quietly. “He had to know that.”
Ellie frowned, sticking her hands in her pockets. “Why do you care so much?” she asked softly, her rock rolling into a puddle. “About school, I mean.”
Joel sighed. He picked at a scab on his finger. He tried, once again, to figure out why teenage girls didn’t just tell him what the actual problem was , instead of mentioning twelve other things first that he couldn’t keep up with. He decided to just try his best to keep up.
“Because you’re a kid. And… because you’ve missed so much of that because of all this bullshit that wasn’t your fault and so I want you to… have a chance to be a kid. You’ve already had to grow up too fast. But now you’ve got the opportunity to slow it down a bit.”
Ellie fiddled with a fray in the sleeve of her hoodie. “Did you grow up too fast?” she asked, a little accusingly.
Joel shrugged. “I left school when I was your age because our Mom started…” He sighed, the memory of it so distant now the pain had gentled slightly. “She started getting sick and she couldn’t work. It’s the whole reason I was a contractor, ‘cause I could get a traineeship that young.”
Ellie chewed on her lip. “What about your Dad?” she asked quietly. She’d never even heard about Joel’s Mom from him. Tommy had mentioned her a couple of times but clammed up when Joel entered the room.
He shook his head. “Our father was… We left him when Tommy was little. He was… he used to hit us,” he said simply.
“That sucks.”
“Then Mom died when I was eighteen. Tommy was only twelve. And four years later I had Sarah.”
Ellie flinched like she always did whenever anyone mentioned Sarah.
“Anyway, I… I’m sure you didn’t get much of a childhood in that orphanage. I just want you to have a chance to be a kid for a little while. Make some friends, you know? Get in trouble,” he shrugged.
Ellie frowned at that, but kept walking. “What would happen if I got in trouble?”
“With me?” Joel asked, then shrugged. “I don’t know. I tell you not to do it again and then you roll your eyes and cuss me out and do it again.”
She blinked at him. “What about at school?”
“Like if you get in trouble with your teacher?” Joel asked, making what he hoped was a natural-seeming beeline towards the currently-abandoned playground, sensing with his Dad Sense that this was a swing set conversation.
He sat on one swing, hoping he didn’t look too stupid. Ellie didn’t smirk though, so it must have been okay. She just sat on the other swing, pushing off the ground, her feet dangling in the air.
“I don’t know exactly but I figure it’d be more or less the same. Maybe detentions. Did you have those in Boston?”
Ellie thought for a moment, her small body tense. “Is that like where they give you lashes and extra chores?” she asked casually. Joel almost fell off his swing.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” he asked, his voice weak. He was thankful Ellie wasn’t looking at him, that her gaze was focused on her dirty Converses. He felt his cheeks redden, his eyes harden, his fists clench around the chains of the swing. “What do you mean ‘lashes’?”
“Um…” she said, looking at him for a second, then back at her shoes, like she was trying to think of a way to backtrack this conversation. Joel knew his face was still red, he wondered if he was sweating. “Like with a… they called it a switch. You know, they’d give you ten for like…” she shrugged. “Talking out of turn. Fifty for fighting. Lashes,” she said, like that was normal or acceptable or in any universe okay.
Joel wondered how long it would take him and Tommy to ride back to Boston, how hard it would be to get back into the QZ, the chances of them getting inside the facility to—
“Joel!” Ellie snapped.
He blinked at her. She looked a little worried.
“Couldn’t you hear me?”
“I was just thinkin’,” he said, staring at the ground.
“Did I say something wrong?” she asked quietly. She always asked it. Had no worries telling the school principal to fuck off. But always worried she’s said the wrong thing to Joel. As if a single word out of her mouth could drive a wedge between them.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Joel said like he always did. Quick. Gentle. Calm. “I was just wondering if it was feasible for Tommy and I to head back to Boston and beat the shit out of your FEDRA teachers.”
“Oh,” Ellie laughed. “I don’t think Maria would think that was a valuable use of your time and resources.”
“I think she might, actually,” he sighed. “That’s fucked up, Ellie,” he said seriously, she winced a little. “What you just told me about, what they did to you. That was fucked up and nobody should have ever done it to anybody, especially not a kid.”
Ellie stayed quiet, gently swinging back and forth, still staring at her sneakers.
“Detention is just… you stay in your classroom at breaktime, or for half an hour after school, and you do something boring like write lines or clean the desks or something. That’s it.”
“Oh,” she said again. She made a mental note to never tell Joel about The Hole.
“And you’d have to do something kinda bad to get detention. Most of the time your teacher’ll just tell you off. But not…” he thought for a moment, remembered he’d had to explain to her that she didn’t have to earn food rations to eat at home. “Nobody will ever hurt you there. They won’t touch you. Anybody does, you even think anybody might , you come straight to me or Tommy, and we’ll sort them out,” he said fiercely.
And she fucking believed him. She thought of the FEDRA soldier he’d beat to death with his bare hands for her six hours after they’d met. She thought of him killing Brian so she didn’t have to. She thought of him in the attic of a house, following her movement only in a sea of hundreds, picking off infected and soldiers and anyone else who came anywhere near touching her.
“Okay. And I can still sleep at your place, right?” She didn’t think there was space in the school building for dorms, but part of her also wondered if Joel was just trying to get his bedroom back.
Joel wished he’d had a drink or five before he’d brought her out here. “Yes. You’ll still sleep at our place ,” he said, in the firm way he always said it, because she could never believe him. “You’ll just get up in the morning, we’ll have breakfast, then I’ll walk you to school. Or you can walk yourself. And at the end of the day I’ll come get you. The school day’s like… eight thirty to three or something. You’ve seen the kids coming and going. I’m sure it’ll be in the curriculum.”
They swung some more in silence. Well, Ellie swung and Joel tried not to think about how bad his back was hurting. Eventually Ellie asked, “Can we go get the curriculum now?”
“Sure,” Joel said, probably a little too eagerly. He stepped off his swing and waited for her to send hers up high so she could leap off it in a way that made his breath catch. “As long as you don’t break your leg on the way.”
Ellie grinned. “Maybe you can ask Estelle out while we’re there,” she said placidly.
“Ms. Hernandez,” Joel corrected her. “And no I cannot.”
When they arrived at her house - a small cottage up the street from the school with flower beds along the front full of dahlias and chrysanthemums - Estelle was pulling her front door closed behind herself, a manilla folder tucked under her arm. “Oh, hey Millers!” she said cheerfully, giving them a wave, meeting them at the bottom of the porch steps.
Ellie shrank into Joel’s side, her bravado having spontaneously evaporated at the sight of the teacher. She sidestepped behind him, disappearing so suddenly Estelle had to bite her lip to stop herself laughing. “I was just coming over to yours,” she continued, holding the folder up.
“We were in the neighbourhood,” Joel said easily, ignoring the way Ellie popped her head around his side like a muppet when Estelle handed the folder over.
“Everything should be in there. This is our ‘high school’ curriculum,” she said with exaggerated air quotes. “For the kids fifteen to eighteen.”
“Great,” Joel said, flicking through the papers inside. “Ellie was wondering about the schedule. She’s kinda… the school she was at in Boston was boarding so she’s not used to being able to go home at the end of the day,” he explained, hoping Estelle would catch his drift.
The knowing look in her eyes said she did. “Normally, first class starts at nine, and last class finishes at three,” she said, trying not to watch Ellie step back around to stand beside Joel like she hadn’t just been hiding behind him. “You have recess and lunch breaks in the middle of the day too and the high school kids can go home or to the dining hall in those breaks if they want.”
Ellie’s face lit up a little, she snatched the curriculum out of Joel’s hands and flicked through it.
“ And ,” Estelle said, giving Ellie a gentle, meaningful look. “If you needed to go out at any other time, for any other reason, you would just let your teacher know, and it would be okay.”
“Okay,” Ellie said quietly, her eyes currently fixed on a page titled ‘Science Curriculum’. “Sorry I cussed you out before.”
Estelle smiled then, like she’d thought it was funny, the insubordination. “It’s okay, kid. If you have more questions, you two are welcome to come in. I can put the kettle on.”
Ellie looked up at Joel then, the mischief back in her eyes. “I have heaps more questions, actually.”
“Well you’re gonna have to hang onto them,” Joel said quickly, nudging her. To Estelle he said, “Thank you, but we don’t wanna impose. We’ll make a time to meet you with any more questions. Maybe at the school so she can see the place before we start. Besides, if we stay out any longer somebody will get out of doing the dishes.”
“Well, we can’t have that,” Estelle said with a smirk that made his knees a bit weak.
Ellie rolled her eyes.