Chapter Text

The cold hadn't found Ellie's room yet, not the way it had the hallway, not the way it had the kitchen where Joel was probably down there already, swearing at the woodstove. She woke up sweating a little under two blankets she didn't need, and lay there listening to the house.

Outside, Jackson was still mostly dark, the mountains behind it holding onto the last of the night the way they always did, a deep blue-black ridge against a sky just starting to pale at the edges. Frost had crept up the inside corner of her window overnight, a thin white lace of it spreading from the sill, and somewhere down the street a rooster that belonged to nobody in particular was making its opinion of the morning known, loud and unbothered by the cold. The town itself sat quiet under it all, rooftops dusted white, smoke starting to rise here and there from chimneys as other households woke into their own mornings.

Pipes ticking. Boots on the porch. Joel's, probably, since Tommy never showed this early. A horse somewhere down the road. She'd gotten good at sorting which sounds belonged to the house and which didn't.

She didn't get up right away. Just lay there, eyes open, not thinking about the day, not running through the patrol board in her head. Just the blankets, the mattress, nothing in this room trying to kill her.

Not yet, anyway.

Eventually the light through the curtain went from grey to slightly less grey, and she got up. Her comics were still stacked by the window, six issues gone soft at the corners, because six issues was all there was and Jackson wasn't exactly flooded with new stock. She flipped the top one open to a page she'd basically memorized and closed it again without really reading it.

The journal lived under the mattress. She pulled it out, sat cross-legged on the bed in her socks, flipped past a horse she'd tried to draw three times and never gotten the legs right on, past a sketch of Dina laughing that she liked even though the proportions were all wrong. Further back there were pages she didn't linger on tonight. A drawing of a museum room she couldn't remember the actual name of, just the shape of it. A page from right after the hospital that was mostly crossed-out lines, sentences started and abandoned, because back then some nights she hadn't had the first idea what she was trying to say, only that the pen needed to keep moving.

She flipped past those the way you'd walk by a door you knew better than to open before bed, landed on today's blank page instead, and added a couple lines. Who she'd been on patrol with. A joke of Dina's that was already less funny than it had been the first time. Nothing that mattered, except it kind of did, the way all of it added up to did if you let it sit long enough.

"You keeping a diary in there?" Joel had asked her once, catching her mid-page, and she'd told him to mind his own business, and he'd put his hands up and backed out of the room like she'd pulled a knife on him. Neither of them ever brought it up again. He didn't ask what was in it. She figured he didn't need to. Some things you just let a person keep.

She shoved the journal back under the mattress before she could start reading old entries and lose twenty minutes to it, which was a thing that happened more than she wanted to admit.

Downstairs, the smell of not-quite-coffee hit her on the stairs, and it was such a stupid, ordinary, good thing to smell first thing that she was smiling before she noticed she was doing it.

Joel was at the table, a mug in front of him, his rifle broken down in three pieces on a rag, cleaning it with more patience than he had for basically anything else in his life. He didn't look up when she came in. That was its own kind of hello, at this point.

"There's more if you want it," he said, nodding at the pot.

"Tastes like dirt."

"Tastes like chicory. You say that every morning."

"Because it tastes like dirt every morning, Joel! Every single morning it tastes like a hole in the fucking ground, and every single morning you tell me it's chicory like that's supposed to fix anything." She poured herself a cup anyway. Dropped into the chair across from him, boots up on the seat next to her, which she knew he hated.

"Feet."

"They're not on the table."

"They're on my furniture."

"Barely your furniture. Tommy built half of it."

"Tommy built the chair. I own the chair. Feet."

She left them there another second on principle, then dropped them with a thump louder than it needed to be. Neither of them was actually fighting. It was just the shape a fight would take, worn smooth from being run a hundred times, all the teeth filed off it years ago.

He went back to the rifle. She watched his hands work for a second, the scarred one and the other one, moving in a rhythm old enough it didn't need his eyes anymore. A couple years back she'd have had something sharp to say about that. She didn't have it in her this morning.

"You're on with Dina today," Joel said. "North loop."

"I know. I read the board."

"Just telling you."

"You tell me the same three things every morning like I've got amnesia."

"One of these mornings you'll surprise me and not know 'em."

"One of these mornings you'll surprise me and make coffee that isn't dirt."

Something crossed his face, not quite a smile, gone before it fully landed, but she caught it. She always caught it. And something in her chest did its own quiet thing back, the kind of feeling she'd stopped trying to name a while ago because naming it never made it any clearer, just smaller.

She finished the coffee, grabbed her jacket off the hook, the one with the wolf patch Dina had sewn on crooked on purpose, because Dina thought "too perfect" was a character flaw. Checked her knife. Checked it again, because checking twice cost nothing.

She had an hour before the stables, so she spent it at the fence line behind the old feed store, where a stretch of the perimeter had come loose in the last storm. Whitney was already out there working a post into the frozen ground when Ellie showed up, and the two of them fell into it without much talking, the way you did with a job you'd done together plenty of times before.

"You're early," Whitney said, not looking up.

"Couldn't sleep past it. Wire or post?"

"Wire. Your hands are steadier than mine these days."

They worked. Ellie's fingers went stiff in the cold despite the gloves. Whitney hummed something tuneless under her breath. It wasn't glamorous work, but Ellie liked it anyway, the satisfaction of a thing that held once you'd fixed it.

"How's Joel," Whitney said, not really a question, the way half of Jackson had started asking it lately, folded into other sentences like they weren't asking anything at all.

"He's Joel. Cleans a rifle every morning whether it's dirty or not."

Whitney laughed, a dry, creaking sound. "Man's earned the right to need somethin' to do with his hands. Tell him I said he oughta come by for cards sometime. He keeps saying he will."

"I'll tell him. He won't come."

"I know he won't. Tell him anyway." She twisted the wire tight, glanced over. "How you two even eatin', out there? I know for a fact neither of you can cook worth a damn."

"I can cook. I make things that are technically edible."

"That's a low bar to be proud of."

"It's the bar we've got."

"You could come by Sunday, I'm putting a stew together. Be nice to feed somebody who doesn't already know how to make it."

"I'll think about it."

"You won't."

"Probably not."

Whitney snorted and shook her head, going back to the post like Ellie's answer hadn't surprised her one bit. "You gonna raise that boy right, or is he just gonna keep livin' on patrol rations and whatever you two throw together for dinner?"

"There's no boy, Whitney. It's just me."

"I know that. I'm being funny."

"You're not funny."

"I'm exactly as funny as Joel is, and you both think you're hilarious, so I'd watch how hard you laugh at that."

Ellie laughed anyway, the sound cutting white in the cold air, and Whitney looked pleased with herself, like she'd finally landed the joke she'd been building to. They finished the wire without much more talking, and Ellie helped gather the tools before jogging off toward the stables.

"Ellie."

She stopped, hand on the gate.

"Watch yourself out there."

"Always do."

"You don't, actually. That's kind of the problem."

She flipped him off without turning around, and heard the almost-laugh behind her before the door shut, and went out into the cold with her breath fogging and the whole ordinary machine of Jackson grinding into its ordinary morning. If you'd stopped her right there and asked what love was supposed to feel like, the big movie version of it, she wouldn't have had an answer. It didn't feel big. It felt like a man telling her to watch herself, and her not having to ask why he bothered saying it.

Dina was waiting at the stables with two horses already saddled, which meant she'd gotten there early on purpose, which meant she had something to say and couldn't wait to say it.

"You look like hell," Dina said.

"Thanks. You look like you've been sitting on something all morning."

"I have no idea what you're talking about." Dina swung up onto her horse, easy, a motion Ellie still hadn't quite gotten down no matter how many times she faked it. "You hear about the flour thing with Seth?"

"There's a flour thing with Seth now?"

"There is a whole flour thing with Seth."

Ellie got up on her own horse with slightly less grace, and Dina launched into it as they rode out toward the gate, some tangled story about a bakery delivery and Seth accusing half the settlement of theft before somebody found the missing sacks sitting in his own cellar. It wasn't even that funny in the retelling. Dina just told stories like this, all arched eyebrows and dead pauses in exactly the wrong places, and Ellie was laughing before the punchline even landed.

Jesse waved them through the gate with two fingers, lazy, and they rode out into a morning that had finally decided to commit to being daylight, pale and thin over the fields north of town. The land out here rolled away from Jackson in long, uneven waves, dead grass bent flat under old snow, fence posts leaning at odd angles where nobody had gotten around to straightening them, the treeline standing dark and close along the ridge to the east like something patient, waiting to see if anyone would come closer. It was beautiful, in the specific ruined way most things were beautiful now, and Ellie had stopped finding that particular contradiction strange a long time ago. They fell into the sweep pattern without discussing it, checking sightlines, watching the treeline the way you watched a treeline in a world with things in it that wanted to eat you.

"You ever think about how weird it is?" Dina said, a while later, once the silence had gone long enough to feel safe to fill with something real. "Like... you and Joel. How you even ended up here. With him."

"Not really weird. Just how it happened."

"I mean it in a good way! I just mean, most people don't end up with a whole dad out of nowhere at your age. That's all."

Ellie kept her eyes on the trees. "He's not... I don't know. He's not 'out of nowhere.' It took a long time to get here."

"How long?"

"Long enough that I don't really wanna get into the whole thing on patrol."

"Fair." Dina let it go, easy, no push behind it. "Was it bad? At the start?"

"Kind of. I didn't trust anybody for a while, and he wasn't exactly easy to trust either, in the beginning. We both had our reasons." She thought about it, watching her breath fog. "Took a long time before it stopped feeling like something that could just... end. Like he'd wake up one day and decide I wasn't worth the trouble."

"And now?"

"Now I don't really think about it like that anymore." No hedging on that part. Never really had been, not for a long while now. "He's my family. That's just it. That's the whole thing."

"That's kind of a lot to say on a Tuesday!"

"You asked."

"I did ask." Dina bumped her horse a little closer, knocked their shoulders together lightly, the closest either of them came to saying anything soft out loud. "For what it's worth? I think you two are stupidly good together. Considering everything."

"Don't make it weird."

"I'm not making it weird, I'm being nice!"

"You're always weird when you're being nice. It's your whole thing."

Dina didn't have a comeback for that one, just grinned and let it sit, and the quiet came back around them, comfortable, the kind that only worked when neither of you needed to fill it.

The culvert sat near a stretch of overgrown field, and something about the tall grass gone gold at the tips always made Ellie think of the giraffes, even now, even this far out from the actual place, which was nothing like this and miles and miles away. She didn't talk about the giraffes much. Wasn't a secret, everybody who'd made that trip already knew, she just didn't have a way to say it that didn't come out smaller than it had actually felt, standing in that overgrown stadium with those huge, stupid, impossible animals grazing like the end of the world had forgotten to invite them.

She remembered the quiet most of all. Not silence, exactly, there'd been wind and the animals moving through the grass and some bird she couldn't name going off overhead, but a quiet underneath it, the kind that shows up when something's too big to talk over. She'd looked over at Joel without meaning to and found him already looking back at her, both of them wearing the same dumb, stunned expression. Neither of them said a word about it for a long time afterward. Didn't need to.

"You're doing the face," Dina said, not even looking over.

"I'm not doing a face."

"You're doing a whole face. Where'd you go?"

"Nowhere. Giraffes."

Dina, who'd heard that story exactly once, a while back, by a fire, didn't push. Just nodded like giraffes was a completely normal thing to say in the middle of a patrol and let the quiet stretch again.

"Shit, there," Dina muttered, already reaching for her bow.

The runner was alone, easy, barely worth counting after everything else Ellie had seen. Dina took point, Ellie circled to cut the retreat, and it was over in under a minute, the two of them working the same coordination they'd built over months of doing exactly this. Ellie's hands unclenched slow on the ride back, the adrenaline draining out the way it always did.

They stopped at the north lookout, a squat platform on stilts, where Robert was leaning on the rail with a thermos, looking bored out of his mind.

"Anything?" Dina called up.

"One runner, hour back. Didn't come close enough to waste a shot on." He squinted down. "You hear about the flour thing with Seth?"

"Is there a single person in this town who hasn't heard about the flour thing with Seth?" Ellie said.

"Give the man a break, he's had a bad week."

"I'm not giving him anything. I don't even know the guy."

"You don't gotta know him to be nice about it."

"I'm plenty nice about it. I just also think it's funny."

"Those aren't mutually exclusive," Dina said. "That's basically my whole personality."

Robert laughed and leaned back against the rail. "You two want coffee? I got a thermos up here nobody's touched."

"We're good, we're headed back in," Dina said. "You want us to send somebody up to relieve you?"

"Nah, I'm good another hour. Tell Maria I said the pie better still be around by the time I get off."

"No promises," Ellie called back, and Robert waved them on, and they finished the loop easy, Dina complaining about her greenhouse rotation and a supervisor who wouldn't stop humming, Ellie half listening, half watching the treeline out of a habit so old it wasn't really vigilance anymore, just how her brain worked now.

Dina peeled off toward home with a wave, and Ellie cut through the market on her way back, because she owed Joel a couple of guitar strings and the trader by the old feed store usually had something. Jesse was already there giving the guy hell about fishing line prices.

"You're getting robbed," Ellie said.

"I'm negotiating."

"You're losing, dumbass. There's a difference."

"How was the loop?"

"One runner. Dina got most of it."

"Exciting's overrated," Jesse said, finally forking over ammo for the fishing line and looking personally wounded about it. "You hear about the flour thing?"

"Everyone's heard about the flour thing."

"Did Dina do the voice?"

"She did the voice."

"God, I love it when she does the voice." Jesse shook his head, tucking the fishing line away. "You two doing the thing tonight at Tommy's?"

"Apparently. Maria already cornered me about it once today, she'll probably do it again before six."

"She corners everybody. It's how she runs the place." He squinted at her. "You bringing the guitar?"

"Why would I bring the guitar to a dinner?"

"Because last time you brought the guitar to a dinner and it was actually pretty good, and now everyone's gonna ask."

"Not tonight."

"Your loss. I was gonna request something."

"You were gonna request something so you could make fun of it."

"Little bit, yeah."

Ellie got her strings, overpaying because she didn't have Jesse's patience for haggling and didn't much care, and was still counting ration cards when Maria came striding past with a clipboard under one arm.

"Ellie, good, saves me a trip." She didn't slow down much. "You and Joel still on for tonight?"

"That's what he tells me."

"Tell him not to bring that awful wine again. Tommy's still recovering."

"No promises. He likes that wine."

"Nobody likes that wine." Maria was already moving. "Six o'clock. Don't be late."

She vanished into the crowd, and Jesse shook his head watching her go. "She runs this whole town, you know that? Tommy thinks he does."

"Everyone knows that, Jesse."

"I'm just saying it out loud."

They split off, Jesse toward the barracks, Ellie toward home, strings in her pocket, and the light had gone that flat gold-grey it got before evening properly took over. She liked this walk. Liked having somewhere specific to walk toward, a specific window she knew would be lit, because Joel didn't come home to a dark house and never let her, either. She'd asked him once why he always lit the lamp even when he wasn't sure when he'd be back, and he'd given her some line about not wanting to fumble for matches in the dark, and she'd let it go, because she already knew the real answer. Neither of them wanted to come home to a house that looked the way an empty one looked. She got it. She had her own version of the same superstition, small and stupid and hers, the way she always checked the latch on the front door twice even though she'd checked it the first time, the way she couldn't fall asleep without knowing exactly where her boots were in the dark.

Somewhere behind her a dog barked, and somewhere further off somebody was hammering something, the ordinary noise of a town that was still standing, still full of people fixing fences and arguing about wine and complaining about flour, and she let herself walk slow through all of it instead of hurrying the way she used to, back when slow felt like a risk she couldn't afford.

The window was lit when she came around the corner, smoke going up thin from the chimney, and for one second she let the thought run all the way through instead of cutting it off halfway, the way she usually did.

She loved him more than she'd ever loved anybody. She was never going to say it that plainly out loud. Some things were better left as a joke about a clock, or feet on the furniture, or a light left burning in a window.

She pushed the door open. Venison hit her before the warmth did.

"You're late," Joel said, not turning from the stove.

"Patrol ran long. There was a runner. Stopped at the market too." She dropped the strings on the table. "Got these. Guy tried to charge me double, said the salvage was hard to come by."

"It's fishing line with a fancy name. Same guy tried to sell me a busted transistor radio last month."

"You buy it?"

"...No comment."

"You bought it."

"Works fine. Mostly."

"Mostly."

"Watch it."

He huffed something close to a laugh, and for a second the kitchen had that low warm quality it got at this hour, and then he wiped his hands on the rag hanging off the stove. "We're due at Tommy's in an hour. Maria's doing one of her big dinners."

"Do I have to go?"

"You don't have to do anything. But there's pie."

"...What kind."

"Kind you like. Maria traded somebody out of a whole crate of dried apples and she's been looking for an excuse."

Ellie considered that with the weight it deserved. "Fine. But if Seth brings up the flour thing I'm leaving."

"Nobody's bringing up the flour thing at dinner."

"Somebody always brings up the flour thing."

Tommy and Maria's house always smelled like woodsmoke and whatever Maria had going in the oven, warm and a little chaotic, lamplight spilling gold across a table crowded with mismatched chairs, some of them clearly borrowed from neighbors for the occasion. A fire cracked in the hearth behind Tommy's chair, throwing shifting light across the room, and the windows had gone fully dark outside, condensation fogging the glass from all the bodies and all the cooking. It was loud in the particular way a full house was loud, plates clattering, somebody's kid shrieking with laughter somewhere near the stairs, and Ellie found a seat between Dina and an empty chair that Joel dropped into a minute later, smelling like cold air and woodsmoke himself.

Somebody did, about four minutes into dinner, but Dina was kicking her under the table every time Seth opened his mouth, so it landed more funny than annoying, the whole meal sprawling loud across a table built for fewer people than were crammed around it. Tommy held court at one end with a story about a horse that had apparently developed a personal vendetta against him, gesturing so hard with his fork that Maria had to duck twice.

"He bit me. Unprovoked. I was just standin' there," Tommy said.

"You were standing there eating an apple in front of him and not sharing it," Maria said. "That's provoked."

"That's not how horses work."

"That's exactly how horses work, Tommy."

"He's lying anyway," Dina said. "Ellie, tell him he's lying."

"No opinion."

"You have every opinion, you were there when he missed that runner from twenty feet."

"I was aiming for the other one," Jesse said, with the wounded dignity of a man who'd used that line before.

"There was no other one, Jesse."

"There could've been."

"There was not another one anywhere near you, I watched the whole thing."

The table cracked up, Tommy loudest of all, and Ellie caught Joel watching the whole thing with a look she didn't have a clean word for, something settled, something he almost never let anyone catch him wearing. When he noticed her noticing, he didn't look away fast the way he used to. Just held it a second, then went back to his food.

Tommy brought up the wine somewhere in the middle, holding the bottle to the light like he was checking for defects. "This the same stuff from last time?"

"Better this time," Joel said, entirely unconvincingly.

"It is not better. Maria, tell him."

"Already told him." Maria didn't look up from cutting the pie. "He doesn't listen to me either."

"I listen plenty."

"You listen when it's convenient."

"That's just being efficient."

"That's just being a man, is what that is," Maria said, and the whole table laughed again, Joel included, holding his hands up like he was surrendering to a verdict he couldn't argue with.

Maria brought the pie out near the end, exactly the kind Ellie liked, and there was a brief undignified scramble for the good pieces that Ellie won through pure elbow work, apologizing to one of Tommy's ranch hands afterward in a way that wasn't really an apology at all, and Tommy declared, not for the first time, that Jackson's survival was single-handedly Maria's doing, and Maria's dry comeback got an actual laugh out of Joel, the real kind, loud enough that a couple heads turned.

Ellie watched him laugh across the table, pie forgotten on her fork, and thought that she'd trade almost anything to keep hearing that as often as she could get away with. She didn't dig into the thought any further than that. Some things you just let sit warm in your chest and left alone.

They walked home well past dark, breath fogging, neither of them in any hurry to get indoors.

"Good night," Joel said. Not a question.

"Maria's pie should honestly be a currency."

"Don't let Tommy hear that, he'll try to start trading in it."

Back at the house, Joel got the fire going again while Ellie hung her jacket up. Before the guitar, there was always the knives, not a rule either of them had ever said out loud, just something that happened most nights, Joel getting the whetstone down and Ellie pulling her blade without being asked, the two of them working across the table in a quiet that didn't need filling.

"You're getting better at this too," he said, not looking up.

"Guess I've had a good teacher for this too."

"Apparently."

"Not gonna deny it?"

"Too tired to deny anything. Maria's cooking put me half to sleep already."

She tested the edge against her thumb, satisfied when it caught skin without her having to press. He checked her work anyway, ran his own thumb along it, nodded once, handed it back without a word. That nod sat in her chest the same way everything else about tonight had.

"You good?" he asked, out of nowhere, in the low voice he used when he actually wanted an answer.

"I'm good."

"You've been quiet tonight."

"I'm always quiet."

"You're quiet different than you're usually quiet." He set the whetstone down. "Somethin' happen out there today?"

"No! Nothing happened. It was a good day, Joel. I had a good day... I just don't really have the words for it right now."

He studied her a second longer than she liked, the way he did when he wasn't fully buying an answer but had decided not to push it, and went back to his own blade. "Alright."

"I mean it. It was good."

"I heard you."

She almost said something else, the real thing, the giraffes and the fence line and Whitney's stew invitation, all of it stacking up into something she didn't have a word for. She didn't. Some nights the words weren't worth the reach.

Afterward she got the guitar down and settled by the stove, working through the same clumsy chord progression she'd been fighting for a week, hitting the same wrong string in the same wrong place.

"You're still hitting that wrong," Joel said, sitting close enough to correct her fingers without either of them making it a thing.

"Stylistic choice."

"Sure it is."

"You don't believe me."

"Not even a little."

He guided her hand into the right shape, and this time the progression came out clean.

"You're getting good," he said. Plain. Five words, no dressing on them. She looked down at the guitar so he wouldn't catch whatever her face was doing about it.

"Had a good teacher."

"Had a stubborn teacher. Different thing."

"Same thing, with you."

He didn't answer that, just reached over and adjusted her hand again, an excuse to keep his hands busy a second longer.

"Play it again," he said. "Whole way through this time."

"It's gonna sound bad."

"I don't care. Play it."

She played it. It didn't sound bad. It didn't sound great either, a little rough at the edges, but Joel sat through the whole thing without correcting her once, and when she finished he didn't say anything, just gave her that same almost-nothing look he'd given her across the dinner table. Better than a compliment. A compliment you could argue with. That look you couldn't.

She thought about her mother sometimes, a woman she had no memory of, just a name and a handful of secondhand facts. She used to wonder if she was missing out on something, some kind of love she'd never get because the world took her mother before she was old enough to know her.

She didn't wonder that anymore. Whatever that kind of love was supposed to feel like, she already had it. Had it in bad coffee every morning. Had it in a rifle cleaned for no reason except his hands needed something to do while he waited for her to get up. Had it in a joke about a clock, told the same way every night. In five plain words about a guitar. In a light left burning whether he knew when she'd be back or not.

She loved him so much it scared her sometimes. She never said any of that out loud. Wasn't going to start tonight.

She almost fell asleep on the floor by the guitar, but stayed up a while longer anyway, listening to the house settle, the fire ticking down, a board creaking under Joel's weight as he did his last check of the doors, a habit he'd never explained and never needed to.

Later, halfway up the stairs, eyes already half shut, he said her name, the exact way he always said it, and she stopped on the third step and turned around already grinning before he'd gotten the words out.

"What's the downside to eating a clock?"

"I don't know, Joel, what's the downside to eating a clock."

"It's time consuming."

She groaned, long and theatrical, exactly like every other night, and he huffed his almost-laugh from the chair by the dying fire, and she went up the rest of the stairs still grinning where he couldn't see it.

She fell asleep in a warm room, twenty minutes' walk from a man who told her to watch herself every morning and meant it more than he ever said out loud, and outside the window, past the walls, past the gate, past everything Jackson had built to keep the world out, the night went on being exactly as dark and exactly as far away as it had been for months.

That was about to change.

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