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It figures that of every possible moment for Joel to knock on her door, it would be when she’s already set up to slice her bitemark into a cut and sew it up. She shuts her eyes and tries to run the numbers on if he’ll give up and go away if she doesn’t answer.
She doesn’t have to calculate long to know it’s not going to fucking happen.
“Goddamnit,” she hisses under her breath, yanking her shirt back down. “Alright, alright, I’m fucking coming,” she grumbles when the knocking comes again.
She whips the door open, in a mood, and she doesn’t realize until too late that the motion will also pull at the bitemark.
Not until she winces and she sees Joel catch it.
She sighs and steps back, knowing from the look on his face that she won’t be evicting him until he’s seen the damage. He enters and shuts the door, never looking away from her, and she rolls her eyes even as she pulls her shirt up. He hisses in sympathy.
“Infected?” He asks, leaning over a bit to get a better look.
“No, Jesse just got sick of telling me what to do and tried to bite me about it.”
The look he gives her in response to the sass is so unlike the kicked-dog hope he usually has these days that she almost wants to mouth off about something else just to see it again. She doesn’t know what to do with meekness, doesn’t understand it, doesn’t like it.
She wonders sometimes if maybe they could get over all of the fucked up things between them if he’d just man up and yell with her about it, and then she gets mad at herself for thinking it because it means that she wants it, and she can’t want it. Not that. Not with him.
Not anymore.
“Could probably-”
“-cut it,” she finishes for him. “I know. I was about to do that when you decided to break my fucking door down and interrupt me.” It’s a hint she knows she should give.
She refuses to let herself feel the relief when he doesn’t take it.
*
“I already sanitized that,” she says, when she’s been bullied into sitting in a chair, and he’s gone to collect her supplies from the bathroom, pouring a fresh round of alcohol over her knife.
“Yeah, and then you set it down in a sink, dumbass. You wanna get sepsis? ‘Cause that’s a damn good way to get sepsis.”
She bites back the urge to say that he of all people would know that given how his dumbass self almost died on her from it.
But she can’t, can’t poke at those days.
It’s one of the many things that has to live between them like a ghost in these days.
He hesitates when it comes time to change the bite into a knife cut, and she snatches the blade out of his hand and does it herself, her bravado letting her get through it, though her hand shakes slightly when she’s done, setting the blade down on her table with a snap. If Joel notices it, he doesn’t mention it.
She hates herself for the fact that she appreciates it.
“You wanna tell me about this infected you and Dina decided to lie to the council about?” Joel asks as he carefully guides the needle through her skin. She winces but doesn’t flinch, breathing through the pinprick of the needle each time it pokes through. “They clocked that immediately, by the way.”
“Council sessions are confidential,” she says dryly. “Privacy privilege to ensure honesty.”
They both look to the other and exchange a mutual raised eyebrows look about how that tends to go in practice given how quickly gossip spreads in Jackson, and for a moment, a single wonderful, fiercely addictive moment, they're a unit again. She's fifteen, she can tell herself he's never lied about anything except her birthday treat to keep it a surprise, and the only tension between them is the words they haven't put to what he is to her.
But the moment pops like a soap bubble, and she's nineteen and angry again, and the contentment fizzles to nothing like a sparkler burning out, leaving her blinking at black spots in the absence of its light.
“Ellie?” Joel asks, and it’s the same tone he used when he caught her skipping class after they came back to Jackson, when the math teacher smiled just a beat too long, and the only thing she could hear was a tempo of Dav-id, Dav-id, Dav-id in her head. It doesn’t demand an answer, that tone, but it expects one, offers her up an altar to lay her sins on.
The thought of sins ruins the last trace of softness between them in the moment. As if she’s the one with the biggest sin to apologize for.
As if he didn’t damn the entire fucking world for the least important person on it, orphaned Ellie, death to everyone around her.
Not useful enough to even die when she’s supposed to.
“It’s like I told the council,” she says, voice cool, removed. “It acted weird, but it was all the same as fucking always.”
“Ellie,” Joel says, tying off the last knot, and now he just sounds tired. “I know-”
“Know what?” She asks, and there’s something mean in her now, something angry, something that wants blood because maybe it’ll be fucking something to fill up the fucking nothing inside of her. “Know more than me? Easy to do when you just fucking lie when it’s convenient.”
“You’re misdirecting your anger-” Joel starts in a tone that tells her he’s repeating someone else.
“Seems to me I’m directing it just fucking fine,” she snaps, and she shoves herself to her feet. “Go home, Joel. I don’t need you.”
She stalks to the bathroom, slamming the door shut, and she braces her hands on the counter, breathing heavily, fiercely willing her eyes to stop stinging.
It’s a long, long few minutes before she hears the sound of Joel standing, walking to the door, and shutting it behind himself. She presses a hand to her mouth and presses back the noise that wants to escape. It terrifies her, the noise that lives behind her teeth these days. It could be a scream or a wail or a demand for someone to fucking tell her why she’s even still here.
She used to know, back when she was 14 and 15 and 16 and stupid, stupid, stupid.
Stupid enough to think that someone like her would be able to settle down in a miracle town in the middle of Wyoming and finally have a pare-
With a muffled whimper of rage, she sends her bar of soap flying across the bathroom, and it bounces off the wall to come back and nail her in the shin. She curses, leaning over to press at it, and she curses again when the movement pulls at her stitches.
Pain no matter what she does, she thinks darkly.
Isn’t that just the fucking story of her life?
*
She wonders fuzzily if it’s possible to get a contact high from kissing someone.
Even if it isn’t, she thinks she might be the first, when she pulls back from Dina and has to hold onto her when it feels like she might float away if she doesn’t.
Naturally, this is when Seth has to run his mouth and ruin it.
“The fuck did you say?” She demands, stalking towards him, heedless of Dina pulling at her arm. She’s so angry and so tired and so goddamn lonely even in this bigass town and along comes this asshole who has to take the one good thing she’s had in fucking months-
She swings before Dina can stop her, and it connects with a satisfying noise of her fist against his cheek, knocking him over.
So high on the joy of it, though, she doesn’t see the returning kick coming.
Not until it connects right against the fresh stitches on her side.
Her vision whites out with pain, and she grits her teeth and tilts her head back in an instinctual seeking of air when she slams onto her back, trying to make it easier to breathe-
When the ringing in her ears clears, she hears someone calling Joel’s name, of all fucking things. With Dina’s help–half-apologetic in her mind as she tunes out whatever she’s saying–she manages to look up-
-and finds Tommy and another man trying to pull Joel off of a still-prone Seth.
A still-prone Seth who looks significantly bloodier than the last time she saw him.
“-enough! Enough!”
It takes Tommy getting a hand in Joel’s hair and yanking him back to make him stop, and even then, Tommy and the other man physically get in the way, just in time to prevent Joel lunging right on back.
For a hall full of people, Ellie isn’t sure she’s ever heard a silence so heavy.
“Joel,” she says, and in the complete quiet of the dance hall, it lands like a brick through glass.
Still on his knees, he turns towards her, expression dropping its fierceness in an instant, and again, that same double-image of memory over reality. The days after Silver Lake, she remembers, when he always approached on his knees or crouching, like he wanted to be smaller so she could feel bigger. When he wiped the blood off her skin and gently tilted her head back to wash bits of brain out of her hair, when he poured water into her mouth and gently encouraged her to swallow.
When he took over everything so she could drift in her head until she was ready to come back.
She never thanked him for that, she realizes now, stupidly, never thanked him for keeping her alive when she would have just laid down in the snow and died if he hadn’t.
“The fuck is wrong with you,” she says, instead of absolutely any of that.
Using Dina’s shoulder to help, she shoves herself to her feet, feeling every pair of eyes in the building on her back as she walks away.
*
The kick ripped her stitches, she notes with a distant kind of irritation, as she feels the hot stream of blood trickling down her hip and soaking into the waistband of her jeans. She gets back home without quite knowing how, and on autopilot, she almost walks to the wrong fucking door, having to backtrack at the last fucking minute just as she’s about to step onto the porch. Annoyed with herself and the entire fucking night–Happy Fucking New Year indeed–she kicks it, and the flare of pain in her toes is a nice brief distraction from the burning-hot pain in her side.
She slinks back to the garage, her rage abandoning her to make her feel small and stupid and so very, very alone.
*
The stitches she puts in after pulling out the tattered remains of Joel’s aren’t her best work. She’s tired, and she’s in pain, and her anger has deserted her and become exhaustion instead. She puts in enough thread to keep herself together, and then she calls it good enough, slapping on some salve and wrapping a bandage around the mess.
The salve and the bandages were dropped off in a box at her doorstep right before she left for the dance hall.
She doesn’t have it in her to think about the obvious deliverer of such a goody box.
She checks the locks on the door and pauses when her eyes land on the walky-talky on the shelf above her keys. It was Joel’s condition, the walky-talky, back when she moved out here, after she told him that his options were help her turn the garage into a living space or never see her again because she would find a way out of Jackson and take it. It had been a child’s threat, that, she can see with the benefit of hindsight. Mad or not, she was a FEDRA kid for too many years to give up a safe place to sleep and a reliable source of food. Joel used to tease her about being a stray back when she stuffed her face after they got back, threatened all the time that he was going to teach her some “home training” one of these days if she didn’t stop acting so feral.
Still, when she’d reached for thirds or fourths or sometimes even fifths, he’d always passed her the bowl of whatever she wanted.
This is my condition, he’d told her her first night out in the garage, handing her the walky-talky. You keep this with you. You need me, you call me, alright?
He’d made her promise it, promise it on her knife as clearly the first thing he could think of that was important enough for her to mean it. She had, angry as she’d been at him. She’d promised she would call him, knowing even then that she didn’t mean it. She’d put it here on this shelf, and she hasn’t touched it since.
Refusing to let herself think about why, she snatches it down now and presses it to her chest the way she’s seen little kids do with stuffed animals.
You need me, you call me.
Such a simple, heavy thing.
She curls up around the walky-talky, still pressed to her chest.
It’s a long time before she falls asleep.
*
No one gets in trouble for the dance hall brawl, a pithy title she can’t even be amused by when she hears someone say it at breakfast one morning a week or two after New Year’s. Apparently enough witnesses decided that calling her a dyke meant Seth had an ass beating coming, especially after he started the same shit after two men got married a month ago and he complained about it being held during the daytime “where anyone could see this crime against nature.”
She wonders darkly exactly how bigoted he’s going to have to get before someone finally decides to shut him up permanently.
God knows she’d certainly be hopping in line.
Apparently Joel got a good “talking-to,” to judge from what gossipy ass Brenda Havenshem says as Ellie passes by to return her tray. She eats alone most mornings, and if it gets her some looks now and then, it at least makes meal times faster. Joel got told not to beat people up again, but apparently Ellie throwing the first punch and Seth returning it enough to knock her flat on her ass made most people consider it all square. No one likes a fight in the middle of a party, but apparently no one likes a homophobe getting to run his mouth unchecked, either.
She catches Joel’s eye when she passes by as he’s joining the line for food.
He pauses.
She doesn’t.
She welcomes the cold air as a wake-up call and makes her way to the stables, hoping she can hop on someone else’s patrol route.
It would do her some good, getting to kill something.
*
Instead of a patrol, she gets Tommy already in the stables and looking after a horse with a pulled muscle.
Because God forbid any Miller in a two mile radius doesn’t make her life harder.
She doesn’t even get to about face and avoid him, because he looks up as she enters, and despite herself, she feels herself softening when he smiles. It’s so rare someone’s happy to see her these days instead of pitying or vaguely uncomfortable about her downer energy.
Joel always used to smile when she got home, she remembers, always greeted her with a “Hey kiddo,” always looked like-
“You feeling alright?” Tommy asks, and she snaps herself back to the present.
“I’m fine,” she says. “Anybody looking to trade out of their patrol today?”
“Blizzard coming in,” Tommy says. “No patrol today for anyone.”
She drops back against the door and groans, and she hears Tommy snort.
“You looking to get out there and freeze your ass off that bad?”
“Looking to do something,” she says, rolling her head back to look at him.
He lifts a curry comb in a silent suggestion, and she sighs, even as she pushes herself off the wall and accepts it as she passes by.
“Hey, beautiful,” she says to one of her favorite horses, a gorgeous Palomino named Butternut. It’s the horse Joel always rides, and it’s a point of silent agreement between them, the way Tommy doesn’t bring up how she always takes care of Butternut first when she’s on stable duty. She leans her head against Butternut’s warm neck for a moment, closing her eyes. It’s stupid, she knows, missing gentle touches so much, missing the simple joy of a hand on her shoulder or an arm around her, but if all she can get these days is pressing against a horse in a truly pathetic display of weakness, she’ll make do.
She made it on less before, after all.
She knows she can do it again.
(Even if she can’t quite remember how, no matter how hard she tries.)
“You feeling alright?” Tommy asks, and she glances from the corner of her eye to see him watching her.
“Yep,” she says shortly.
“‘Cause it seems like Seth knocked you down pretty hard,” he continues like she didn’t answer. She rolls her eyes, even as she focuses on brushing out Butternut. She’s already well-tended–she always is, and despite herself, she’s wondered before if this particular horse is the unwitting conduit between two people who would rather throw themselves to an infected instead of actually talk anything out–but Ellie brushes anyway.
And if it’s mainly to avoid looking at Tommy, he knows her well enough to not mention it.
“Been hurt worse,” she says, and Tommy huffs a laugh.
“No doubt,” he agrees, and she wonders if he knows how annoying it is that he’s so goddamn hard to argue with, always so chipper and friendly. She’d asked Joel about it before, back when they first got back to Jackson, and he’d told her he’d been like that since he was a baby, always smiling and happy to see anybody. She’d teased Joel that he took all the grumpy in the family, and he’d called her a little shit, but he’d smiled, too. It makes her throat tight now, remembering that smile.
Remembering how long it’s been since she’s done something to earn it.
“You wanna fess up to something else on that patrol that would make a kick draw blood? I know Seth ain’t that goddamn strong.”
Ellie groans, but Tommy isn’t dissuaded, just keeps in his same spot, head resting on his folded arms like one of the bloodhounds when they’re at rest.
“Got a little…” She trails off, miming a biting mouth with her hand. As much as she’s been accused by Tommy and Joel of being reckless, she does have some survival instincts.
…most of the time.
“Bad?” Tommy asks, and she rolls her eyes, deciding on the path of least resistance and tugging up her shirt, pulling the bandage down enough to show the stitched area. It looks like shit this morning because Seth’s kick left a bruise, but it’s not oozy like Joel’s was when it got infected, so it seems good enough to her.
Tommy, though, just hisses through his teeth the same way Joel did, and the similarity has her yanking everything back in place even as he enters the stall, clearly wanting to coddle in a way she has no patience for.
“Those stitches are a fucking mess,” he tells her. “Should probably go to the clinic.”
“I’m not going to the fucking clinic,” she says flatly. “They’re keeping the inside parts in. They’re good enough.”
“Hard head,” he accuses, reaching out and shaking her head gently.
She lets it happen even as she cuts her eyes at him, and she pretends that she doesn’t regret it when he lets go.
“He was worried about you, you know,” he says, voice low like they’ve got eavesdroppers, and Ellie doesn’t need to know what name is going with that pronoun.
“I’m fine,” she says, and she gives Butternut an apologetic pat when her irritation makes her use her brush a little too hard, the horse stomping in protest. She gentles her strokes immediately. “Popped the first ones, so it looks a little ugly right now. It’ll heal. Why?” She asks, looking to him. “You worried I’m gonna get all bite-y and infect the town?”
“Don’t joke about that,” he says, looking around at once, like there’s guards with guns waiting around the corner ready to shoot her through the face.
(It terrifies her, in a way she can’t face, how little she feels about that idea these days, the idea of it just all being…over.)
“What?” She challenges, feeling reckless in the way that makes her take the risks no one else will on a patrol. “Joke about me getting bitten by an in-”
The look he gives her is so much like Joel that her mouth shuts sharply enough that her teeth clack together on reflex.
“I gotta worry about you?” He asks her seriously, in a way that Tommy is never serious, and it’s this that tells her he means it. He shifts his weight. “You know, if you’re…” He trails off, waving a vague hand. “You can talk to me. Me, or Maria, if that’s easier.”
“I talk to you everyday,” she observes, looking only at Butternut. “Can’t get away from talking to you.”
“Ellie,” Tommy says, reaching out to squeeze her shoulder, and his voice is gentle, too gentle.
Gentle enough to shatter her in a way she can’t afford to be shattered.
Not if she’s going to have to pick up all the pieces on her own in the way she knows she will.
Who else is there to help her now, after all?
The one person who would have done it without her even needing to ask is busy slinking around looking apologetic far too late for it to mean a single goddamn thing.
“You ain’t alone, kiddo,” he says softly, and the kiddo is the final straw, too much, the final blow to knock her right the fuck down if she doesn’t bail before she succumbs to it. She feels her lip wobble, her final “get the fuck out of this situation” warning, and she turns on her heel, tossing the comb to him over her shoulder.
“Gonna go get some target practice in,” she calls back to him.
She doesn’t wait for him to manage a response.
*
She avoids Tommy after that, just like she avoids Dina. She can’t do it, can’t do people who feel like they can ask her if she’s okay.
It makes it too hard to ignore that she fucking isn’t.
She manages to get herself on a patrol a week into sneaking around Tommy. Apparently he hasn’t bothered telling anyone that he’s joined the list of Millers she’s not currently on speaking terms with, and her association with him and Maria is still good enough to get her what she wants.
What she wants, right now, is a target to take the ugly things inside herself out on.
And wouldn’t you know it? Five seconds of Jesse looking away on patrol gives her the perfect opportunity.
*
She can sense the irritation from the patrol party when she’s managed to squeeze herself into the abandoned building with no one catching her in time. They haven’t cleared it yet, and they also haven’t ridden out this way in a while, so it’s not safe for them to yell for her.
Which was part of the appeal to hopping on this route, frankly.
She kills two infected with almost irritating ease. They were fresher, these two, enough that their minds were gone but soon enough that the cordyceps hadn’t finished working out the fine tuning of controlling them like puppets. Even when the second rushes her before she’s finished with the first, she doesn’t even feel like she was in danger. She stands over them, panting and frustrated and still wound up. Anyone could have taken them. No one would have been at risk.
And if she isn’t here to take the risks no one else can, then what fucking point is there to her still being here at all?
“Fucker,” she says to the second body, kicking at the arm it clipped her across the cheek with to see if it’ll make her feel better.
It doesn’t.
“Ellie.”
She looks over when her name is hissed and finds Jesse glaring straight murder her way, still separated by a door that’s padlocked shut but propped open just enough for someone her size to squeeze through.
But not his.
Feeling reckless and angry and purposeless, she gives him a sunny kind of smile, waving her hand still holding a knife.
He doesn’t seem remotely amused.
“Get your ass over here now,” he snaps, trying and failing to shove the doors apart. “Fucking knew I should have left you back in Jackson.”
The threat makes her angry, and she turns at once to go deeper in the building, ignoring the threats he sends at her back about how she won’t even be in charge of watching the preschool when he’s done with her insubordinate ass. She looks over her shoulder to taunt him as she goes to shove her way through a door-
-just in time to miss the hole in the floor that sends her dropping down into nothing, too fast for her to even scream.
*
“Jesus. Jesus fuck. Ellie, Ellie, wake up. Ellie wake up right now.”
She very much does not want to obey the voice, but there’s a hard hand patting at her face, and her options for not listening seem to be limited.
“I’m up,” she groans, trying and failing to swat at the hand. The movement pulls at something in her side in a way that feels viscerally wrong, and she pries her eyes open, finding Jesse kneeling beside her. He gives her a flicker of a strained smile when she does, but she knows him by now, knows that smile doesn’t mean anything good. When shifting slightly means another wrenching pull that feels wrong, she looks down.
“No, fuck, don’t-” Jesse’s voice fades to distant buzzing in her ears.
It seems rather less important than the two feet of bloody rebar sticking out through her stomach, after all.
*
The whole getting de-skewered and back to Jackson process is a little hazy.
From how much it fucking hurts, that might be a blessing.
“You’re alright,” Jesse tells her from his place behind her on the way back, his hand pressing down tight over the actively bleeding hole in her side. She bobbles like one of those big-headed toys on springs, and she can’t even feel the indignity of it because she can’t really feel anything beyond the fucking ouch of her side. “Don’t touch,” he tells her when she manages to get enough strength to try and press at it. “And don’t you dare fucking die on me, Ellie. I mean it. I’ll bring you back and kick your ass.”
She thinks she makes some kind of dismissive noise at this, but she isn’t sure. She starts to give into the tempting urge to close her eyes and not open them again, and she yelps when Jesse uses his hand still holding the reins to grab the end of her ponytail and yank.
“Don’t even think about it,” he says, and behind the order, she can hear fear.
It doesn’t fill her with confidence.
“I swear to God, Ellie. You die, and Joel will kill me. You want that on your conscience?”
She doesn’t, really.
But the decision about not falling asleep is taken out of her hands when she loses consciousness despite her attempts not to.
Sorry, dude, she thinks distantly before she succumbs completely, the blackness swallowing her whole.
*
The first thing she sees after waking is all white, which kind of makes her reconsider both her stance on religion and her view of herself within a religious context, because if someone like her managed to sneak into heaven, God knows who els-
Then the scent of antiseptic and the beep of a monitor sinks in, and she has the last couple of context clues she needs to understand that where she’s landed is very much not in paradise.
The sharp pain in her side also helps her finish working it out.
Confused and muzzy-headed and faintly grumpy from both of those things, she goes to push herself up, only to jump when a large hand presses against her shoulder. She’s just working herself up to the punching portion of a response to something like that when the voice associated with the hand registers, and she goes slack again.
Tommy.
“-lucky if you ever get out of the walls again, you little shit,” he tells her as she tunes into the end of what she was being told, and she blinks a few time to clear her vision before she bothers turning her head to look at him.
“Hi,” she says, voice raspy, and his face does a very interesting thing in response that she does not have the space or brainpower to work out right now.
“Hi,” he says, still a strain to his voice but gentler, now, like her being pathetic is gaining her a little leeway in how pissed she can see he is. “You ever been grounded? Cause you’re fucking grounded.”
“Happened?” She manages, barely resisting the urge to smack her mouth with how dry it feels. Moving her arm makes something in her peripheral vision swing, and she tilts her head enough to see an IV line with blood flowing from a bag held up on a rack. She blinks, confused, trying to work out its connection to her.
“We’re blood related now by the way,” Tommy says, holding up his arm to show a bandage wrapped below his elbow.
She frowns, unable to work that out. He huffs even as he rolls his eyes.
“Yeah, they gave you some heavy stuff when they were sure the transfusion was gonna keep you earthside. Said it should be kicking in soon.”
“Who’s kicking?” She asks, and he smiles faintly even as he drops his head on an exhale, shaking it before he looks back up at her.
“You’re damn lucky you’re cute when you’re high as a kite, you know that? Otherwise I’d be wringing that skinny little neck.”
She thinks she maybe should be either offended or threatened by that, but she can’t quite manage either.
When a warm wave of sleepiness rises up, she lets it take her under.
*
She wakes again to raised voices, and even before she registers the specifics, she knows the loudest one being familiar means it’s no threat to her.
And then the name that goes with the voice registers, and solving that puzzle lets her focus her eyes enough to see the man himself.
Joel, carrying on a very loud conversation while standing halfway through the door into the room she’s in, apparently deep in an argument with whoever is unlucky enough to be on the outside of the door.
She should tell him to go away. It’s dangerous, how much of a relief it is that he’s here despite the quiet little whisper in her head of too much trouble who would bother only ever a fucking problem for him to fix why would he come see you like a pare-
“You came,” she says, voice a rasp.
His head snaps to her so sharply she thinks distantly that he’ll be feeling it for a day or two, but he doesn’t complain, doesn’t seem bothered, just crosses the room very quickly to sit on the mattress at her hip and takes his hand between both of his, hers lost instantly with how much bigger his are than hers. That always made her feel better after Silver Lake, putting her hand in his, feeling the differential. Her hands are small, too small to do much, but even hers were enough to kill. With hands as big as Joel’s, she had felt like nothing could ever possibly get past him to her, not if she just tucked herself behind him, out of the way.
“Ain’t too shabby with yours, either,” he says, voice rough, and it’s only then that she realizes her stream of consciousness was less consciousness and more words out loud that other people can hear.
She maybe should feel embarrassed about that, she thinks distantly. In the moment, though, she’s too floaty.
“Thought…” The words floats away from her for a second, and Joel lets her find them again. Or maybe he doesn’t. All she knows is her hands in his, big big hands, warm warm hands. Her hands would have been cold, she thinks, more than they’re normally cold anyway because she always forgets her gloves because Joel used to remind her but she and Joel are enemies now, so now her hands are cold.
“Ain’t enemies, baby,” Joel says, and oh. It looks like her words came out without her mouth again. Oops. Joel closes his eyes tight, moves her hand up to kiss it, once, twice. That’s nice, she thinks distantly, and this time she thinks it stays in her head because he doesn’t respond like she thought he would. “Ain’t ever been enemies, and won’t ever be, neither. You hear me? I don’t care what you do, Ellie. Ain’t ever gonna drive me away. I don’t care how bad it is.”
She doesn’t know what she feels about it, that combination of words, but it seems like her body does because she realizes her face is wet when Joel pulls the end of his sleeve over his thumb and wipes tears away that have ended up on her cheeks somehow, her skin cool when he’s dabbed at it. Evaporation, that’s called. Water evaporates through the energy applied by heat, taking the heat with it, and leaving behind the cool.
“Out of your mind and still smarter than me, huh?” He asks, and now he’s only holding her hand with one of his, and she’s disappointed until he uses his free hand to cup the top of her head gently, stroking his thumb along her hairline.
“Ancient Egyptians used evaporation to cool their houses down,” she tells him solemnly, and his face twists in a strange way that looks like happy-pain, though he settles on a smile.
“They got you on the good stuff, huh?” He asks, voice warm, and she closes her eyes to enjoy the warm voice-thumb rubbing combo. It’s a good combo, she thinks.
Stay? She asks or thinks to ask or just thinks. Unclear.
Still, one way or another, Joel seems to hear her, because she hears a very familiar voice say “allways, kiddo.”
And the answer is enough to finally surrender herself to sleep once again.
*
When she wakes, the pain is back.
And so is the anger at the man sitting next to her.
“The fuck are you doing here, Joel?” She asks, startling him out of the half-nap he appeared to be taking.
He blinks, clearly reorienting himself, and then his face goes infuriatingly blank.
“Jesse sent someone to tell me you went AWOL on patrol again and got your ass half-killed doing it,” he says, and though there’s a thread of heat to it, it’s still even, reasonable.
It makes her want to shake him to see if she can make the blankness crumble apart.
“Why are you here?” She repeats herself. “I’m not your problem anymore.”
Finally, she thinks, when it makes a muscle near his eye twitch. Finally something other than that fucking humility. It makes her vicious, that little taste of success, hungry for more.
“Wouldn’t have been your problem at all,” she says, knowing even as she says it that it’s mean, a taunt, poking at something that hurts both of them, “if you’d let the Fireflies do what they needed to.”
“Ellie-” He starts out, and it’s a warning tone now, and it lands like warm bathwater, soothing in its something-ness, so different than the version of Joel that cringes away from a fight with her.
“You killed the whole fucking world, Joel,” she says, mean and inaccurate but so fucking satisfying to say.
“You think I give a fuck about a world without you in it?” He asks, and she grits her teeth together. That’s not what he’s supposed to say, goddamnit. She isn’t ready for that kind of argument. She wants a good, old-fashioned blame game, wants him to hit back, wants him to get mean, too.
“It wasn’t your call to ma-”
“You wanna do this? Fine. You were fourteen, Ellie. Wouldn’t have been your choice Before. Sure as hell shouldn’t have been your choice now.”
“And you get to make that call?” She sneers, barely resisting the urge to bare her teeth like a feral thing. “You get to decide whether the rest of the world lives or dies?”
“I got to decide if you lived or died,” he says, voice final. “And I did. I’d do it again, Ellie. Over and over. I’d kill that entire hospital a hundred times over if it meant you made it out. You want me to apologize for that? I won’t.”
“It would have meant something,” she says, words nearly a snarl. “Would have meant more than it does now, when-”
“It would have meant you were dead, Ellie,” Joel says, and there’s a fierceness to him now that she hadn’t realized she’d missed until it’s suddenly there again. No more sad-eyed, moping Joel here. No.
This is on-the-road-Joel.
This is a Joel she knows how to deal with.
“And it would have meant other people weren’t,” she snaps, savoring it. “What happens on the day it’s you who gets bitten? Or Tommy? Or Maria? Or Benji? What happens then? I’m still gonna be worth it when it means one of them dying when they could have lived?” She laughs, a mean thing.
Joel doesn’t.
“That what all this rule breaking’s about?” He asks, sitting back and crossing his arms over his chest.
“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” she accuses. “I can take the risks other people can’t. That means I’m the person who has to take them.”
“You think your immunity does anyone any goddamn good if you die with it?” He demands, lifting his eyebrows. “You think that helps anybody?”
“If it means they make it home,” she says defiantly. “I take a bite, I walk it off. You take a bite, somebody shoots you in the fucking face. You chose that, Joel.” She lifts an eyebrow. “You think about that when you were killing the people trying to save the world?”
“You think that’s what they were doing back in that hospital?” He asks, voice too even.
“Yeah,” she says, stubborn. “I do. I think they were putting me under to save the goddamn world until you fucking ruined it.”
“And after they did?”
She blinks, startled into stopping before she can launch her next attack, unsure what he means by the question, not expecting a question instead of another thing to fight about.
“After they did what?” She repeats dumbly, wary.
“After they knocked you out without asking, strapped you down on that table, and cut your brain out on some half-baked idea that it would do a single goddamn thing. What then, Ellie? What comes after that?”
“They would have had the cure,” she says, ignoring her suddenly tight throat, ignoring the way she’s asked herself the same question and refused to pursue an answer.
(Ellie knows science, is the thing. In another world, she would have tried to be a scientist, if that was something people could be anymore. She loves science. She’s read biographies about scientists. She read textbooks even from the grades above her back in school. A good experiment requires a few things, she knows: a hypothesis, a control, repeated experiments.
And yet they had their only sample in the world for about thirty minutes before they decided the best next step was killing her.
It’s forbidden, that thought, the thing she can’t let herself pursue.)
“They said it was in your brain and only your brain,” Joel says, and there’s a firmness to him that manages not to be hardness, just force enough that she can’t lie to herself like she knows she has to so she can keep believing the essential things that keep her life together. “How would they know? You think they took the time to do it right? On equipment that was already old and God only knows how reliable?”
“If they thought it was in my brain-” She starts, but he interrupts her.
“If they thought, Ellie,” he says. “That’s the whole damn problem right there. They thought. They didn’t know.”
“They knew that…” she starts, resisting the way she wants to clamp her hands over ears, wants to block out these words, wants to never hear this logic. It’s good logic, she knows, forbidden logic.
Logic she has to accept as lies.
“They knew that sometimes saving other people requires sacrifi-”
“Not you,” Joel says, and now there’s almost the edge of a growl to it. “You’re worth more than a fucking guess, Ellie.”
“I’m not more important than every other fucking person on the planet, Joel.” This is her trump card, the thing she tells herself when her thoughts turn to what Joel is saying, and she has to shut it down so she can look at herself in the mirror the next day and not know that she’s the most selfish person on Earth.
“Okay,” Joel says, crossing his arms across his chest and sitting back.
Immediately, she’s wary. Nothing about the confidence of his posture seems like it means good things for her.
“Let’s call it a one in a hundred million shot that killing somebody and cutting their brain out might give someone an idea about how to end cordyceps. Choose someone. From here. In Jackson.”
She frowns, confused about what the fuck he’s looking to do here.
“Go on,” he insists. “Pick one. Pick someone in Jackson who deserves to die for a maybe. It’s so worth it. You don’t even know everyone here. Pick a stranger if you want. Pick a random person sleeping in their bed tonight and decide that a hunch is worth putting them under and cutting their brain out without ever giving them a chance to agree or not.”
“I would have,” she says, and she stares straight up at the ceiling now as her eyes sting. She won’t cry. She fucking won’t. She can’t listen to this, can’t remember the fear, can’t remember yelling for Joel as two strangers held her down and another pushed a mask over her face and Marlene stood over her and went I’m sorry, Ellie. It’ll be over soon, I promise. There isn’t another way- and all she wanted was Joel Joel Joel, needed him there with her, needed him to make everyone stop for a second so she could fucking think because everyone was acting real fucking permanent about what was meant to be something she checked off of a fucking list and then moved the fuck on about-
Her breath leaves her in a rush, and her next inhale is a shaky, whistling thing, as all of the things she’s refused to let herself think demand her full focus after years of pushing them away.
She didn’t remember all of the details when she woke up in that car, not at first. She was fuzzy on the drugs, still, confused and then afraid at waking up without her clothes on. Her head had felt like it was stuffed with cotton, and Joel’s story had been so tempting to believe. Even if it hurt, it wasn’t her fault, wasn’t anyone’s fault except for some raiders who killed the whole world with their greed. She hadn’t remembered it until later, Marlene being there, the Fireflies wrestling her down as she screamed for Joel and no one would answer her when she demanded to know where he was and what was going on and why they wouldn’t let her up, and she knew. She knew. Even if she told herself afterwards that she didn’t. Even if she couldn’t let herself know it. She knew then how it ended, back in that hospital, how it all ended, her pinned down by strangers and put under, and she knew in her bones that they didn’t plan on her waking up again. And she…
She…
She didn’t want it.
She didn’t want to die, she thinks with a wave of shame so powerful it feels like a brick on her chest. There it is. The thing she couldn’t tell herself before. The thing she couldn’t let herself even think. The thing she had to tell herself Joel wasn’t lying about when he said she wasn't special, that there were dozens of others just like her. It had to be raiders and then it had to be Joel, because otherwise she would have to admit that if she’d been asked, there’s a non-zero chance she would have said no. She didn’t want to die. She wanted to live. She wanted to live with Joel. She wanted the after, wanted the goddamn happily ever after that people get when they do the shitty stuff and push through anyway. She didn’t want to die.
It’s why she can’t let herself want to live now, her penance for the crime she couldn’t even put words to in her head.
She goes to push herself up, to flee, to run from this horrible thing about her, this evil selfishness inside of her-
She doesn’t even have time to register the pain of the sudden motion when Joel’s there, his arms around her, holding her up. With a little gasp of a breath, the last of her reserve breaks, and the tears start in a way she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to stop.
“Easy, baby girl,” Joel says, one arm holding her up, one hand pressing against her head. “You’re alright. I’ve gotcha.”
“I didn’t want to die,” she all but wails, and her shame is like bile in her throat. She barely resists the urge to gag on it. She has to tell him, has to let him know that the girl he’s hugging like a precious thing is a horrible, unforgivable coward. “I didn’t want to die.”
“Shhh, baby,” he says, and she registers through her crying that he’s shifted enough to be rocking her gently, tiny little sways. Scenes from Silver Lake again, this gentle motion, back and forth and back and forth. It was the first time someone ever rocked her, those blank, broken-doll days.
It hits just as hard now, too.
“I didn’t want it,” she says, shaking her head. “I didn’t want it I didn’t want it.” She sounds like a fucking kid, and she knows it, but it’s like popping the lid on the secret means she has to get it all out of her, like the time she watched people near the bar open beer that sat a little too long, one great rush of foam to just get the pressure of it out.
Joel doesn’t bother with more words, just rocks her, back and forth and back and forth. She cries until she can finally stop. He lets her.
In this moment, it’s only her and him.
And for him, she knows, it will always be about her.
*
She’s embarrassed, in the aftermath of her breakdown–who the fuck wouldn’t be? Jesus –but Joel doesn’t comment, just helps her lay back down on the cot before he uses the edge of her sheet to dry her face. It occurs to her to protest or to feel embarrassed because she’s nineteen and not five for fuck’s sake, but she just doesn’t have it in her. She’s too tired, too drained, a blobfish released from the pressure that was giving her her shape at all.
“Did you know?” She asks, voice hoarse.
He doesn’t answer immediately, just reaches for a pitcher of water and helps her take a sip out of a cup with a straw, setting her head back down gently.
“Know what?” He asks after, voice gentle.
“Know it wouldn’t work? What they were planning?”
He considers her for a moment, and then he shrugs.
“Knew it would kill you,” he says. “Worked the rest out later.”
She swallows, hard, drawing a breath, in and out, slow and steady.
“I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to do now,” she says, looking away from him to the ceiling because that’s far fucking easier. “I was supposed to help save the world. And now I’m just…here.”
“Lotta people can’t say the same,” Joel says quietly. “Seems like it’s worth more than you think it is, still being here.”
She considers that, rubbing her thumb against a seam of stitching in the blanket that he’s straightened back over her.
“Heroes die to save people,” she tells the ceiling. “That’s kind of their whole thing.”
“You think a fourteen year old should have to be a hero?” He asks, toneless again but in a way that says he already has a clear answer and is just waiting for her to catch up.
“Marlene thought it would work,” she says, knowing she has to.
“You think Marlene didn’t have her own angle to work?”
She does look to him now, turning her eyes towards him without turning her head.
“You trusting a drink a stranger hands you?”
She does turn her head to him then, frowning.
“What?” She asks, but he remains calm.
“Stranger walks up, hands you a drink. You chugging it?”
“No?” She asks, sure of her answer but not sure why she’s being asked the question. He nods.
“You hand a stranger a drink, and they toss it back in one. What do you think that says about them?”
“That they’re fucking stupid?” She offers on a guess. “Or they’re thirsty and just despera-” She stops, understanding where she’s being led. “They had a whole set-up,” she tells him. “They had plans.”
“They had ideas,” Joel corrects. “That they acted on within an hour of you getting there. That sound reasonable to you? That sound like they had a long term plan beyond a desperation play?”
“Marlene said they had to,” she offers, the first time she’s actually told him that. “When they…” She trails off. She knows he understands anyway. “She said it was the only way.”
“Why?” He asks. “Only way according to who? Some half-starved rebel cult that uses teenagers like cannon fodder?”
She clenches her teeth together. He knows the full story of Riley now, got the whole ugly thing when she woke up out of a nightmare a couple weeks after they returned to Jackson. It’s another thing she hasn’t been able to let herself think about: if they were willing to sacrifice one teenager without blinking, would two have been such a stretch?
“Then it was all for nothing,” she says flatly. “All the shit we did. None of it fucking mattered.”
“We’re here. You think that doesn’t matter?”
“The shit we did-” She starts, but Joel interrupts her, leaning forward.
“The shit we did got us here. Trust me, kiddo, people do worse for way fucking less.”
“It could have been more,” she says through the way her throat has gone tight again.
He shrugs.
“Could have been less, too. Ain’t no could, though, Ellie. It is or it isn’t. And this is what we’ve got, right here. Me and you and what we’re gonna do from here.” He shifts slightly, and she can see that he’s doubting what he’s about to say even as he opens his mouth to say it. “We go on for family, Ellie.”
“And cargo?” She asks, desperate to break the weight of the statement.
“Ain’t been cargo in a long, long time, baby,” he says softly, and yep, that’s it. That’s her final bit of tolerance for this particular conversation.
She shuts her eyes, and he lets the discussion drop.
When she slips her hand out from under the covers and flexes her fingers, though, he takes her hand in his.
They sit together silently until she falls asleep once more.
*
When she’s finally released from the clinic three days later–sooner than anyone there wants but long enough that she felt herself going crazy if she didn’t have an immediate exit to look forward to–Joel walks her home, slow, stilted steps that he takes with her, an arm around her for support.
He doesn’t even bother entertaining the idea of steering her towards the garage, just guides her right up to the front door of the house. He unlocks it and reminds her not to trip over the threshold. She sasses him about not knowing what the fuck that is, a little grumpy about being in pain and still tired, and he tells her he knew she wasn’t fucking listening when he was teaching her how to put in a door when they first got back.
The bickering about her being a good student or not gets them upstairs, to the room that was hers until it wasn’t.
Joel drops her off at the bathroom attached to her (?) room and digs through the dresser–she wonders if he ever thought about that, her leaving clothes behind in the house like an anchor as an excuse to get back in if she needed it–grabbing up a t-shirt and some sweats. It occurs to her to argue because she’s not a little kid and doesn’t need him to pick her clothes out for her, but even the walk back to the house has drained her, and she’s already trying to summon her energy to shower.
“You gonna make it?” He teases when he returns, setting the clothes on the counter by the shower and reaching up to grab a towel.
“Yeah,” she says, stubborn. “I’m fine.”
He gives her a slightly dubious look, but after a squeeze to her shoulder, he’s gone, telling her he’s going to go grab some food from the dining hall but that he’ll be back soon and to wait until he is if she thinks she might fall. Through sheer force of will, she shoves herself up and staggers over to run the water. She’s been told–and retold and retold again –not to get her stitches wet, so she fills the tub halfway and then swings her legs in, hunching over as best she can as she scrubs at her arms and legs as the safest options to get the clinic stink off.
When she’s as clean as she’s likely to get, she uses her toes to pull the plug so she won’t have to bend over and then rises, white-knuckling the counter as she does. The towel, when she presses her face to it, smells clean, fresh, in a way that tells her it’s been washed frequently, not left to get musty since the only person who would use this bathroom has been MIA and lurking in the garage for years.
She doesn’t know how she feels about it, the idea that Joel kept everything washed, everything clean and ready to go, even when he couldn’t have had any hope about her actually ever needing the option.
She decides figuring it out can wait.
*
She’s already downstairs when he returns with food, and even if he grumbles about her being stubborn and too independent, he leaves it there, and she doesn’t point out that he’s very much a pot calling a kettle black. Her hair is down, around her face, and every time she moves, she gets a whiff of clinic smell clinging to it, chemicals and rubbing alcohol and eau de despair or whatever the bottles of perfume and shit say. She hesitates on the favor she wants to ask for for a long moment, and then finally she decides on a policy of fuck it.
“Can you help me wash my hair out?” She asks as he’s collecting her plate.
He pauses, just for a second, and she worries that she’s found the breaking point, asking for something like that when she’s been a dick to him for so long, justified or not. Joel, though, just nods.
“Sure,” he says, like it’s just that easy.
When he walks away with a comment about grabbing some shampoo and a towel, she wonders if maybe it is, for him.
What a thought.
*
“Alright,” he says, voice low, when the dishes have been done and the sink cleaned out for purposes of Ellie-hair-de-clinic-ing. “You ready? 3. 2. 1-” With a little hop and the help from him, she makes it onto the counter, and they both stay still for a moment while she figures out if she’s fucked herself up in the process. After a moment, though, it’s clear that she’s fine if still a bit tender, and Joel helps her lay back, gently pushing a rolled-up towel under her neck. “Good?” He asks, and she nods, closing her eyes because that’s easier than looking at him up close. She could make a joke about that, probably. Break the tension.
Instead she remains quiet when she hears the water start running.
“Too hot?” He asks after running it over her hair and then pulling it away to let her decide.
“Mm-mm,” she says, shaking her head, eyes still closed.
He works in silence for a bit, and she lets him, sudsing up her hair and even rubbing at her scalp with his fingertips. She wonders if he did it like this when he washed her hair for her after Silver Lake. Those days are too fuzzy for her to know for sure. He seems good at it, she notes in a distant kind of way, and she wonders vaguely if he did this for Sarah.
“You could do this as a job,” she tells him when he starts rinsing the soap out. Even to her own ears, she sounds more than half-asleep.
“Oh yeah?” She asks, sounding amused. “Think I should open myself up a beauty shop?”
“Mmm,” she hums. “Call it Beauty and the Beast, like that movie they’re always showing.” She peeks her eyes open. “You can be the Beast part.”
“Little shit,” Joel grumbles, moving the spray enough to glance her cheek in punishment but not going further.
He ruins even that when he immediately uses the edge of the towel under her neck to dab the water off.
He squeezes her hair out for her and grabs a towel, scrunching it up and putting a hand right below her neck to help push her up. She reaches up with the hand not on her bad side, taking over holding the towel.
“Well, doesn’t look like you got fleas, at least,” he says, stepping back and leaning his hip against the counter.
She makes a face at him and hops off the counter to make a point about making fun of her, and she’s immediately humbled when he has to grab her when she sways, knees doing their best to buckle. She grips his arm hard, eyes closed, as she focuses on not passing out from the combo headrush-pain from the sudden movement, and when she’s sure she’s not about to take a header to the floor, she opens her eyes.
“Hey, Joel,” she says, biting back a smile.
“Yeah?” He asks, too worried about her passing out on him to catch her tone and thus taking her entirely too seriously.
“Did you know people get really fast when they pass out?”
“What?” He asks, frowning and pulling back to look at her better, like he’s missed her really fucking herself up.
“Yeah,” she says seriously, “they always get a head rush.”
It takes a second for him to get it, and then he groans, flicking the end of her towel over her face.
*
Joel doesn’t tuck her in–thank God, frankly–but he does knock on the door after she’s settled, right when she’s about to drop off. The sheets are clean like the towel was, indicative of him washing them even when there was no fucking way she would even be using them, and she doesn’t know how to process that, doesn’t know whether it’s hope or delusion or some combination of both.
Or if it was Joel’s own little way of making sure she’d always have somewhere nice to sleep if she wanted it, which might be even harder to work through.
“Come in,” she calls, having to push it through a yawn. She feels dragged down by more than the exhaustion of being wounded, back in this room, back in this bed. She hadn’t understood before why Joel had bothered finding a different bed to put in the garage when she moved back out there.
Now she wonders if it was just him making sure she’d still always have a way back into the house if she wanted it.
“Drug delivery,” he says dryly, holding out a bottle of something that looks truly foul along with a glass of juice and an empty shot glass.
“Your specialty,” she says with a grin, and he makes a face even as he measures out a dose of the painkiller into the shot glass, handing it to her and keeping hold of the juice. “Sláinte,” she toasts before she downs the shot glass, gagging immediately and reaching to trade it for the juice.
“Where’d you learn that?” Joel asks, handing it over.
“Jesse,” she says around another gag before she swishes her mouth with the juice and swallows. “His dad was Irish, apparently.”
“What’s it mean?” Joel asks, taking a seat on the edge of the bed.
“And how the fuck would I know?” She asks, draining the rest of the juice and handing the glass back to him. She could probably stretch to reach on her own, but if Joel’s already here…
He’s already wiped snot off her face within the last few days, after all. She’s not sure she’s got that much pride left to lose.
“Should probably go brush your teeth before you pass out,” he offers lightly, and while her knee jerk reaction is to tell him she’s a grown ass adult and can’t be told what to do, it is good advice.
“Goddamnit,” she says, when she remembers where her toothbrush is. “I left it-”
“Grabbed it before,” he interrupts. “Check inside the medicine cabinet.”
She blinks, and he doesn’t quite look at her.
“Wasn’t really looking to leave you out in the garage when you’re still limping around,” he says.
She considers picking an argument about the presumption of doing something like grabbing her toothbrush for her with the expectation that she’d be back in this room and needing it.
And then she accepts a hand out of bed to go brush her teeth without comment.
*
Being drugged makes hard questions significantly easier, Ellie’s learning. It’s the only reason she asks what she does when she’s on the verge of passing out but has a few last things she needs to ask first.
“You mad?” She asks, adjusting her head to be a little less comfortable so sleep won’t catch her before she’s ready. Joel’s been making himself busy around the room in what she could call out as a blatant attempt to make up excuses to not leave her alone, and she’d considered pointing it out. Instead, she’d just watched him in between blinks that started stretching just a bit too long.
“‘bout what?” He asks, adjusting one of the snowglobes in her collection so it sits more evenly between the others. They’re one of the things she left behind, that collection. Made up mainly of contributions from Joel after she was so delighted with the first one, they’d had too many memories to go with her into what she’d considered a fresh start. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed looking at them until they were all in front of her again.
“I’ve kind of been a dick to you,” she offers, the drugs meaning she doesn’t feel much about it at present.
He snorts, turning back and apparently judging it safe enough to approach and sit by her on her bed again.
“Been through worse than a teenager,” he says. His hand is beside hers on the bed, and without letting herself wonder why, she slips hers into it, squeezing slightly. He squeezes back. “‘Sides, ain’t ever had to collect you bare ass naked and drunk after some skinny dipping. Already easier than when Tommy was your age.”
She laughs, which turns into a yawn, which turns into quiet snickering, filing that away to use against Tommy later. After a moment, though, she goes a little more serious, another heavy thing wanting to escape through the haze of drugs.
“I think I’m still mad at you,” she says, even as she doesn’t let go of his hand. “I think I’m still gonna be mad for a while.”
“You got a right,” he offers.
“You didn’t know it wouldn’t work,” she feels the need to say.
“I knew it would kill you,” he says simply. “That was enough.”
What a short pair of sentences to be so heavy. Joel weighed the world against her, and it was still her. How selfish, to care about someone that much.
How tempting, to be cared about that much.
“If there’s a chance to make a cure in the future,” she tells him, “I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna try.”
Joel takes a breath, slow, in and out.
“I know,” he says. “You’re a good ki-woman. You’re a good woman.”
She smiles, tilting her face a little shyly, pleased but a little embarrassed at the correction. She is a woman, after all, a whole entire nineteen.
But how nice, too, to still be someone’s kid after so long of being no one’s.
“No straight to brain chopping, though,” she offers as her own version of a compromise.
She sees him flinch, just slightly, but he doesn’t mention it, just squeezes her hand.
“No straight to brain chopping,” he repeats, like they’re sealing a deal.
Smiling slightly, she summons enough coordination to lift their hands enough to shake on it. He smiles, a private kind of smile that she’s never seen anyone besides her get. When she decides they’ve shaken enough in agreement, she lets their hands drop down, not letting go.
“You should sing,” she says through a yawn, eyes begging to shut. “That should be bad enough to knock me out. Y’know. Like a self-preservation thing.”
“You’re such a little shit,” he says, but it’s warm, the same way he’s called her baby girl before.
She falls asleep to him singing her something about brown eyed girls, a tune she’s heard him hum before, his hand in hers, thumb stroking slowly over her skin. There’s more to cover, more to argue about, more to be mad about and fight about and maybe even give him the cold shoulder for a bit about.
But more to work through, too.
And she will, she decides, as she sighs one last time before she’s out. She’ll do it. She’ll work through it. They’ll work through it.
Together.