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1.
It's a warm enough night that he keeps the windows open. On really bad days they stay closed and latched when he and Ellie go to bed. He still locks the door every night even though Tommy and Maria don't lock theirs. Ellie sleeps with her switchblade under her pillow. They have a go-bag in the hall closet.
You can't escape the world once you've seen it. When Ellie laughs or tells him about her favorite horse after an afternoon at the stables, he wonders if he could be wrong, but after twenty years and change he's got bitter faith in his instincts. Mostly, he tells himself that it could be worse. It has been worse. He will fight till the last breath in his miserable old man body to make sure it does not get worse.
Tonight is not a good night for either of them but nowhere near a bad one. The early summer breeze is fresh and warm in the dark of the living room. They've been in Jackson for a few months already and only every few nights does he close his eyes and feel the dead weight of Ellie in his arms as he runs through the hospital, the red lights flashing and the alarm blaring. When he's really unlucky, he finds her too late, her blood dripping off of the table onto the floor.
He puts that away. Thinks instead: Her birthday is soon.
Joel recrosses his legs where they're stretched out in front of him, socked feet resting on the coffee table. Not the first time he's set a bad example, but he figures feet on the table is better than choking a man with his bare hands in the grand scheme of parenting. He had given up on sleeping by the time Ellie padded down the stairs to find him sitting in the dark, her hands shaking and eyes too haunted for his liking. What a fuckin' pair they make.
The kid in question blows a raspberry and he turns to his right to look at her. She almost always sits on that side, covering his weakness, filling in his gaps. Does she realize she does it? Knowing her, she drilled it into herself on the road and now it's a habit. He hopes that soon she feels like they're safe enough that she can sit anywhere. As it is, she's slumped in the dark, hair pooled around her head where it rests on his bicep. She's doing that thing he doesn't like where she pick at the skin around her nails and does not look any closer to sleep than when sat next to him almost an hour ago.
The cassette radio that came with the house sits on the table, its glow the only light in the room. He wants to find a guitar but he's not on the patrol roster yet. He keeps telling Tommy that they're not ready for that and his brother keeps patting him on the shoulder and saying, No problemo with a tone that screams bullshit in the way only little brothers can. It he were a bit braver and a bit less weary he might come clean and say he doesn't like leaving Ellie alone, doesn't like when she's out of his sights for too long. He's gonna have to get over it sooner or later, especially if he wants to start chipping away at the codependency they've wrapped themselves in after thousands of miles and an ocean of blood at their backs.
He's only spent a day and a half without her in the last year and it was maybe one of the worst days of their collective lives.
As it is, they're sitting on the couch, legs almost pressed together, listening to fucking Enya because they both can't stop having nightmares. It's an early 90s tape that also came with the house that's worked to get them to sleep a few times before. The same CD worked on a different girl in a different house in a different life over two decades ago.
Sometimes parenting is just recycling.
"How're we doin'?"
"I don't get it, Joel," she says. "She's not even saying real words but it's so fucking soothing." So, better. But better ain't sleeping.
"I know." He gently tugs on the ends of her hair and she makes a soft noise that makes his mouth twitch. His arm is starting to get tingly under her head. "Doesn't seem to be workin,' though."
She sighs and turns to look at him, her cheek smushing against his skin. They're not exactly huddled together -- the worse the night, the closer she sits. He smooths her brow with his thumb because he knows she'll let him. He's a selfish bastard. "I think it's a lost cause."
She sounds a little mad at herself and that won't do. These days they both usually manage at least four hours, which beats three days on the road of no sleep because he was terrified someone would sneak up on them at night, or a week of her waking up screaming every hour in the dead of winter. Four walls and a roof and a lock on the door really work wonders. But he'd like her to get proper rest to go with proper meals and socialization and all the rest of the regular bullshit he can give her now to try to erase everything that came before.
"Wanna try something else?" He bends his arm up over her and she scoots closer, pushing up the sleeve of his sleep shirt as she goes. He drags a knuckle down her cheek and her eyelids flutter. She had pretty bad hay fever their first few weeks here and he would stroke her nose to distract her from her itching eyes. Sometimes he thinks she wants him to do it again, just because, but neither of them know how to ask for things like that.
She sighs again, then looks away from him. A 14-year-old shouldn't sigh so much.
"You, uh," she starts, sounding shy. It makes her seem so, so young. He wishes, not for the first time, that he knew her when she was 13, 10, 7. That he could have held her before the world had a chance to be cruel. "You found a game. Back in Salt Lake City, right?"
A chasm opens between them at the mention of it. Joel doesn't know how long he's got before this smart girl finally has enough of his bullshit about it.
But parenting also makes you fast on your feet. So he jumps over it. "I did," he tells her.
"Do you still have it?" She sits up and turns to face him, crossing her legs on the couch in a way he hasn't been able to do comfortably for years. She scoots close enough that her knees brush his thigh.
"When have I ever thrown away something useful?" He stands and groans as his knees crack. It's to make her laugh but truth is he's real tired of getting old. The board game is on the shelves across the room and he turns on the floor lamp on his way back. Ellie winces.
"C'mon, I don't know! Maybe your old man brain makes mistakes sometimes." She snorts her I'm-about-to-make-fun-of-you snort. "You tried to throw me away, once, after all."
Joel sits back down heavily. Christ, this girl. Making a joke about a day he made her cry. "Yeah, well," he says. "You got me there." Ellie looks at him with a small smile, one that's full of forgiveness he doesn't and will never deserve, and flicks his knee.
"Alright, tell me how the fuck you play this. You said I was gonna beat you, right?"
He realizes now, too late, that he never opened the box. There could very well be nothing inside it, or pieces missing, or something else entirely. But when he pulls the lid off it looks just fine. Ellie leans in so she can see, almost bonking her head with his. He pulls out the instructions and scoots the box to her across the couch cushion.
The print is way too fuckin' small and the readers he traded a belt for last week are upstairs. There's no way he's getting off this couch and leaving her down here, so he squints.
"Dude, just give me those." Joel looks up and see Ellie smirking, hand outstretched and making a grabby motion. "How can you hit a guy like, 30 yards away with your revolver but you can't read?"
"Old man magic."
He listens for her laugh but she's already reading. "Okay, so you put all the letters in that thing and then shake it up -- dibs on that -- and then we have 3 minutes to...make words?" She keeps talking about diagonals and parts of speech and Joel lets her ramble without listening. There's no way he's going to win, anyway. Is it really a good idea to get her brain going when she's supposed to be falling asleep? Maybe not, but he knows that she'll start to get tired once she feels safe. Or, at least, safer. So if this is what it takes, he'll play all fuckin' night.
They learn quickly that while she knows infinitely more words than he does, she's a shitty speller.
"How the fuck do you spell coif?" she mutters. He's pretty sure she's mispronouncing it but he has no idea how to correct her.
"Girl, I ain't never heard that word before in my fucking life. Do you think I know how to spell it?" He doesn't mean to sound so fond but apparently he can't help it. Ellie looks up at him and grins before going back to scribbling out words in her neat handwriting.
He stops trying before the timer finishes. "Joel, I think you really need to read more." She takes the list of words he wrote down and peers at them with raised brows. "Not bad, but...I'm not even going to tell you how much I won by, because it's embarrassing."
"Told you, smartass."
She chews on her lip. He knows what's coming long before it does. Ellie's tells are as easy to spot as...as anything. He knows them well by now. All the time he's spent looking at her like she was going to disappear has been useful. "Did you play this with Sarah?" The kicker is that it doesn't even hurt like it used to but he knows Ellie worries. She's a kind kid and she doesn't want to cause him pain. Not like this, anyway.
"Sometimes," he tells her, looking out the window to the quiet safety of their street. She starts to set up another round. "She was smart, like you, and real good at it, but she didn't like it much. She preferred Monopoly. You know that one?" Ellie hums. "She'd count her paper money like the richest girl on Earth. Plowed her way through the properties, cut deals that were not allowed. She was damn clever and ruthless with it."
As always, he's hit with the wave of regret: that he didn't spend more nights with her playing that damn board game, that he couldn't give her more people to play it with. But it fades and he looks back at Ellie. She's staring at him. "Just like you," he adds, and her nostrils flare and she rolls her eyes.
"Thanks," she says. For the story, he knows she means. For another thread between us.
He does not want Ellie to thank him for anything. She can have whatever she wants. His entire life is hers for the taking.
"We gotta do another round to prove it wasn't a fluke," he says instead. She flips him off.
Ellie yawns halfway through the fifth round. Bingo. "Fuck, Joel," she says, stretching her arms above her head. "We should find Monopoly or something so you at least stand a chance."
"There's no hope for me against that big head of yours." He gingerly starts to pack up the game but she doesn't stop him, instead flopping back onto the cushions and yawning again.
"I do not have a big head. Asshole," she mutters. No one has ever made asshole sound so fond. He puts the game back on the shelf and stands over her. Her eyes are closed and wouldn't it be something if he could just hit pause? Stop the stars and the sun and the ground under his feet so that his brave, funny, shit-speller girl could get some rest, could feel safe for just a little longer?
Like so many things, he can't give her that.
In a different life, he'd scoop her up and carry her back to her bedroom. Honestly, she'd probably let him. But all he's got is this one, so he prods her cheek with his pointer finger. "Do you wanna sleep down here, kiddo, or go back to bed?"
She groans. "Bed, I guess." He tugs her up and she sticks to his side all the way upstairs. "Night," she mumbles, squeezing him once around the middle before disappearing into her room and shutting the door with a soft click.
"Night, Ellie," he says to the hallway. He leaves his own door open a few inches, just in case.
2.
Joel is about to get on his horse when it happens. It's colder than he thought it would be and he's worrying about his damn fingers freezing off on patrol when someone shouts from the other side.
"Don't open the gate!"
Commotion on top of the wall. "Holy shit, is that Oliver?"
Joel looks up, shades his eyes from the early fall sun still high in the sky, and sees the walkway crew looking at each other. He knows that name. It's the kid who snuck out a few weeks ago and didn't come back. He's seen the parents around town looking that awful mix of haunted and hopeful that makes his stomach turn. The day he went missing, Ellie had promised him, out of the blue, that she'd at least tell him where she was going if she snuck outside the walls.
"I was coming back but I got bit on the ridge," the kid yells. An unnatural kind of silence descends on everyone near the wall. The practical, twenty-years-of-this-shit part of Joel's brain does the math -- the ridge isn't far from here, so he's probably got a few hours yet. It's rare to have infected that close, though. This kid is just extra stupid or has shit luck. Maybe both. "I just wanted to ask if I could see my folks, before I..."
"Someone go get 'em!" Joel tries to remember Oliver's face. They've never patrolled as a pair but in a group maybe once or twice. He's young, but older than Ellie by at least a decade. Still a kid, in his eyes. The other part of his brain, the one that's still got cobwebs and scars, tells him to brace himself for what's to come.
A scream like nails on a chalkboard. It's a scream that reminds him of a field in Texas, of hot blood on his hands, of the cold kiss of the barrel of his pistol against his temple.
It becomes unbearable, then, the urge to see Ellie, to make sure she's alive and safe. His ears ring with it, his chest tight and for a second he worries he's going to have a panic attack right here. He looks around, starts to make his way back to the stables as Oliver's parents, shaking and crying, slip through the gate behind him.
The thing about parenthood he's never gotten used to is being afraid all the time.
He gets about three steps before he hears her. "Joel!" she calls. He saw her minutes ago when she handed him his horse, but for a moment it feels like finding her in the snow all over again. He must look haunted because she steps close, one hand on his elbow. He realizes he's reaching for her. "What's happening? Are you okay? I heard that someone got bit --"
There is a single gunshot and then wailing from the other side of the wall. Ellie wraps her arm around his back and tucks herself into his right side. He puts his own around her shoulders. "Fuck," she says, softly, but he hears it. His heart is still racing, pounding in his ears, but the fear fades. She's fine. She's right here.
He wonders what they said to each other out there. How do you say goodbye to your kid? Is it worse to have to say it or to look away at the wrong moment and lose the chance? What do you do when you wake up and she's already gone, ripped from you because you couldn't hold on tight enough?
The gate opens again and some people run out with a tarp. Joel sees Ellie tug on her sweatshirt sleeve. No, he thinks. I ain't letting that happen to you. Any bullet meant for her will have to go through him first. The parents of the poor kid come back, both shaking, their loud grief turned to silent shock. Joel knows that look.
The body that was once a living, breathing boy is carried in and Joel can't help it. He tugs Ellie closer, lets go of his horse's reigns to properly hug her. She goes willingly, pressing her face into his jacket and squeezing him a little. He closes his eyes and feels her lungs inflate, puts his face in her hair for just a few breaths.
Another kid died, another casualty of this fucked up world they live in, but it wasn't his kid. Not today, not ever again. Never.
"Are you okay?"
He pulls away a little and looks down. Ellie is staring at him. "What?"
"Joel." He nods. What else can he do? He realizes, belatedly, that she probably blames herself in that fucked-up way of hers. Taking responsibility for the sins of the world because he told her there was nothing she could have done. "Are youokay?" he asks.
She wrinkles her nose at him. "Fuckin' fantastic."
And then, because life is life and he can't seem to stop fucking leaving her, he has to let her go so he can go on patrol.
"I'll see you at home, okay?" she tells him. He tugs on her ponytail before she can dodge it.
"Okay, kiddo."
Sarah scared him most when she climbed shit way higher than he'd liked. Otherwise, she was an easy kid. Never had a habit of chewing things she shouldn't, called him when she got to friend's houses, wore her helmet when she biked. The world drove him out of his mind, though. Having a daughter as sweet as her, that looked like her, and knowing she was out there walking around without him most of the day? It was exhausting. She could get kidnapped, hit by a car, sick, lost, hurt, you name it.
With Ellie, it's the other way around.
After fighting infected and raiders and hunters and mowing down threat after threat as best as he could to keep her safe, it's easy to forget that there's one thing that could kill her that he can't do a damn thing about: the bite on her arm. Someone sees it and she's bleeding out on the ground, no questions asked.
He has no fucking clue how to fix it.
Two days later, he wakes in the middle of the night with a gasp and for a second he feels like he's in a frigid basement on a bloody mattress hundreds of miles away. The same tendrils of panic weave through his gut, a sixth sense he never really got used to once his heart up and walked out of his body in the form of a tiny, screaming baby. No matter that the same heart died in a ditch and came hurtling back towards him twenty years later, knife in hand.
Something ain't right.
But Jackson is safe -- Joel knows it, he tells Ellie so as often as he can without spooking her and he means it each time. He wouldn't keep them here if it wasn't. But, same song and dance no matter what. He sweeps the house.
The door is cracked open, but Ellie's room is empty.
She's free to come and go as she pleases, she knows that, but she's developed a habit of telling him when she's planning to sneak out with her newfound friends. Maybe she forgot? That wouldn't be a bad thing. For her to be so excited to get up to whatever shit teenagers do these days that it slipped her mind to tell him.
But that doesn't feel right. "Ellie?" Joel calls into her room before he pushes the door all the way open, just in case. "God damn." Then he sees it through her window -- the garage lights are on.
Joel intends for it to be a place for her and her alone whenever she wants it, but it's not exactly ready for her to be hanging out at 2 in the morning yet. He's finished the wiring and the water but it's got no furniture and it's bound to be cold, since they are supposed to put more insulation in soon.
He's willing to risk her anger to soothe his shot-to-hell nerves. Winter will be here soon and with it the memory of trudging through the snow, not knowing where she was. The fear that knocked aside any pain when he found her backpack in that fucking awful place --
He shoves on his boots and strides across the yard. The most likely outcome here is she's doing something she doesn't want him to know about and she'll be pissed at him, but he can handle that. Sarah was great at the silent treatment, nose stuck in the air primly as she ignored him for days on end. Ellie is less likely to stay silent and more likely to say some mean shit and call him an asshole.
He only hesitates for a heartbeat before rapping his knuckles on the door. "Ellie?" he says. "You in there?" Nothing. Maybe she's listening to her walkman, got her headphones turned up too loud. He knocks again. And then he opens the door.
"Kiddo, you here?"
Then he hears it. Whimpering. From the bathroom. "Fuck. Joel? Don't -- don't come in!"
A million things flash through his mind at once. She's sick, she's hurt, she's hurting herself --
He goes to the bathroom. Ellie is on her knees in front of the tub, right arm outstretched. A bottle of...bleach?... is on the floor next to her. One look at her forearm tells him it's now an empty bottle.
"What the hell is going on here?" Her skin is red and angry, blistered already even though she must have just done it. He feels more than a little sick, frozen in the doorway when she turns to look at him. Her face is wet with tears.
"I--it hurts," she whimpers, and damn if that doesn't just kill him.
He gets on his knees next to her and turns on the bathtub and tries to remember what little he knows about chemical burns. "I'll bet it does," he says, too gruff. Ellie notices.
"Don't be mad," she says, but a hiccup sob cuts the last word short. He doesn't reply, just gently grabs her wrist and leads her arm to the tap. He can feel her pulse under his fingers, quick and scared. He's not mad. He's furious. He's scared out of his mind. He has no idea what the fuck he's doing. But one thing at a time.
He tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear and hopes she can't see how his hands are shaking. "Gotta rinse it, okay? It's gonna hurt, but keep it there. I'm gonna go get some bandages."
She hisses when the water hits the burn but does as he says. "Joel, I--"
"Ellie." He stands, runs a hand down his face and wills her to just fucking listen to him. "Rinse it. I'll be back." She looks up at him with those cow eyes of hers and something in him cracks wide open. He leans down and cups her cheek, swiping his thumb under her eye. "You're okay," he says, as much to himself as to her. "It's gonna be okay."
After, he sits by her bed until the sun bathes her bedroom in golden light, watching the rise and fall of her chest and wondering what the fuck he's going to do with her.
"Okay," she says when she wakes to him playing sentinel at her bedside. "You can yell at me now."
"I'm not gonna yell at you." She's doing that thing where she looks like she's bracing for a hit. He hates it. "Lie back down." She stays sitting up. "Look," he says. "I'm on the roster for today. Should leave in a few minutes. Short patrol, just a few hours. But Ellie, I need you to tell me if I should be worried about leaving you alone."
She looks confused. "You leave me alone all the time." It shouldn't hurt, she doesn't mean it to, but it does, a little.
"I know," he says. "But..." Fuck, he doesn't even know how to say it. "Are you gonna hurt yourself again? You can tell me, I won't be mad. I just gotta know, kiddo." Her eyes go wide and her cheeks darken.
"Oh, fuck. No, no, Joel, that's not what -- I didn't mean for you to think -- no, I don't want to --" He sighs. This girl. Embarrassed, of all things.
"Alright." He stands. "Maria is gonna come check on you in an hour, and I'll be back soon." She shrinks into herself a little and fuck, what is he doing? "C'mere," he says, already reaching for her. She flies into him, pressing her head into his chest.
"I promise I'm not gonna," she mumbles. "I'll explain it all when you're back."
"How's it feel this morning?" She shrugs. Ellie-speak for it fucking hurts. On the road, she complained about small things constantly. The heat, rocks in her shoes, holes in her jeans. But never injuries, never anything that might make her seem weak. It's startling how alike they are. Was she always going to be like this, or did she pivot and start to become like him? "Go back to bed, kiddo." He gives her a squeeze and tucks her back in.
Joel does not want to go on patrol. Should call in sick, should tell them he's got a family emergency, anything. But he needs Ellie to know that he believes her, that he trusts her. If she had told him she was a danger to herself he'd have...well, he doesn't know what he'd do. But he'd figure it out. Thing is, he's pretty sure he knows what she was doing. Kid gets bit, comes home, gets shot. He didn't handle it that well and she read him like a fucking book, as usual. So she takes it upon herself to make sure her own bite mark isn't going to be a problem anymore. By fucking burning it off.
Joel can handle teaching her to swim, comforting her after she screams herself awake, getting her used to eating meat again. He can handle broken hair ties and bad cramps and boredom. This, though, he doesn't know how to handle.
And then finds a god damned guitar on patrol and it feels like God is laughing at him.
It's probably not recommended to bring your slightly feral 14-year-old sort-of daughter a guitar after she burns off a chunk of her arm. But he's not about to leave it out here. A quick strum proves the strings are good, though it's out of tune. He'll play for her after she explains, he decides. He'll give it to her and he'll teach her and everything will be fine.
Ellie is waiting for him on the couch when he gets back. She eyes the guitar but doesn't say anything as he leans it against the wall. Boggle rests on the table in front of her.
"Wanna play?" She fidgets with the edge of her bandage and won't look at him. "I'll let you win if it'll stop you from being mad."
He sighs. He forgot how much sighing you do as a parent. "I said I wasn't mad --"
"No you didn't, and even if you did you'd be lying. I know when you're mad, Joel."
"Oh, you do, do you?"
"Your jaw twitches like you're grinding your teeth and you get that crease between your huge, bushy old man eyebrows."
"Hm." He sits on the other side of the couch. I lie to you all the time, babygirl, he wants to say. Because that's how it works, sometimes. Because I'm still not good at this. I never got this far. "So, you gonna explain?" he says. Ellie pulls her legs up and wraps her arms around them, the bandaged one on top.
"You don't have to worry about me," she says.
"I worry."
She ignores him. "I was thinking about the whole thing with Oliver and I couldn't stop imagining someone seeing my arm and shooting first, asking questions later, and I just didn't want that to be possible. I don't want you to have to worry about it and I don't want to accidentally show someone, or something. So, now it's not a problem." She looks at him, eyes big and almost pleading. "It was smart, right? Now we don't have to worry about it ever again." She sounds like she did back when she shot someone for him, begging him to tell her she did a good job.
"I'm not going to tell you it was a good idea, Ellie," he says. She deflates a little. "We would have figured something out."
"I did figure something out--"
"Something that does not mean mutilating yourself in the middle of the night." She sniffs. Joel beckons her over with one hand and she scoots closer, closer enough that he can put a hand on her face, make sure she's looking at him. "Kiddo, listen. You and me? We are a team. We figure shit out together. You just have to talk to me. I ain't mad at you. I'm just...upset that you're hurt, okay?"
She sniffs again. "I'm sorry for scaring you." Ellie doesn't apologize often. He takes it for what it is: a peace offering.
"Just...walk me through your stupid ideas next time, okay?" She laughs a little and shoves him. Her eyes finally land on the guitar and stay there.
"So...is that just for show, or are you going to play for me?"
He grabs it and settles it across his lap. "Thought you wanted to play Boggle."
"Joel, you brought home a fucking guitar and you expect me to want to play Boggle, instead?" He shrugs. "You have to sing for me."
"Don't know if you deserve it," he says, strumming a few chords.
"C'mon, man!" He knows by now that he can't deny her anything.
He has to tell her the truth.
3.
This is how he loses her.
Joel never wanted to make Ellie cry again but here they are. He tells her how it happened: he woke up, Marlene told him the cure meant her life, he killed them all. He watches her realize what he's saying, realize that it wasn't her fault, realize that she never had a choice because other people made it for her. Grief, sadness, anger, rage. But not guilt. Not anymore.
He could tell her how he begged, how he was on his knees trying to explain how there would be no world without her in it, how it was never a question as to what he'd do to save her.
But he doesn't, because she doesn't need any of that. What she needs is the truth: he is why there is no cure.
This is how he loses her and maybe he deserves it. God knows she deserves better than what she's got so far, than this fucked up world and all the times he's failed her in it.
She tells him she can't look at him. He can't stop looking at her because it might be the last time she lets him.
She presses a hand to her chest like she's unraveling from the inside, fends off his reach with a sharp tongue. She screams at him until they turn to sobs. He lets her be cruel, lets her curse him and swat at him and all the rest because this is the least he can do. Maybe this way she will stop blaming herself and start living. If she stays mad at him maybe she won't have room to be mad at herself any longer. Maybe she'll finally realize that she is worth the world, that she deserves everything.
But damn if the look on her face when he tells her she was supposed to die doesn't break his heart. She would have said yes, he knows that. He knew it when he carried her out of that hospital and he knows it now as she screams at him in their kitchen. And that's the worst part, because he doesn't give a damn. He'd do it again. Every time.
He goes for a walk to give her some room and comes back to a silent house and a note on the kitchen counter in her neat script.
Moved into the garage permanently.
Joel flips it over. He runs his finger over the letters just once before leaving it where he found it and looking out the window at the garage. It was always going to come to this, right? Someday, sooner or later, Ellie would be without him again. She's done it before, she can do it again.
He considers breaking every dish in the kitchen. He considers smashing all of the windows, flipping over the furniture, torching the walls. Ruining this house that's now just a shell for him and his sins. But what's the point? This anger he feels towards himself is nothing new. He's been angry every day for decades for failing, for being too slow on the uptake, too god damned stupid to get it right. He's fucking furious at Marlene and the Fireflies and every fucking person who made Ellie feel like she should be dead, that in order for her life to mean something it had to end. He's fed up with this broken and fungus-covered world that makes it so hard to catch his breath, that keeps giving him nightmare fuel and cuts and bruises and good things only to take them away. He wants every sorry motherfucker who has ever hurt him and everyone he loves to pay.
More than anything he just wants to hug her.
Joel realizes his eyes are wet. He blinks once, twice, and puts his head in his hands.
"Okay," he says to his empty house. "Okay."
In a lot of ways, this is the best case scenario. This is what he tells himself every morning after. She's alive, she's safe, she's got everything she needs. She has friends by now and she can go to Tommy and Maria for an emergency. She can blame him and not herself. She can heal. He's lucky she didn't take off entirely, that she let him know where she was going. He can just glance outside at night and see the lights and try to let that be enough.
But he'll be here just in case.
"You told her?" Tommy asks him, later.
"I did." His brother claps him on the shoulder.
"She moved into the...garage?"
Joel nods. "Been meaning to talk to you about that," he says. "I don't think it's insulated enough, so I'm gonna need to get her out of it before winter settles. Just for a day, and I'll finish up." It's been keeping him up at night, the thought of her being cold. It'll be her first winter in Jackson and he has no idea how it's going to affect her.
"Yeah, man, sure," Tommy says. "Do you want to talk--"
"Thanks, brother."
He turns the dining room into a workshop. It takes the better part of a month, but he makes himself a guitar. One time, when he threw out her lucky soccer cleats, Sarah didn't speak to him for two weeks. They'd sit in silence on the way to and from school. She cooked but would eat dinner in her room. He sat on the top step just to hear her voice as she talked to her friends on the phone in her room. When she finally said good morning he almost cried.
Ellie avoids him entirely, but when he's poking around the bookshelves for something about woodworking, he realizes that Boggle is missing.
"How 'bout that," he mutters.
And then:
He's playing his guitar on the porch, getting a feel for it. It's dark out and he can see his own breath.
"It's a little cold for that, don't you think?" He looks up and sees Ellie at the top of the stairs. For a second, he wonders if he's dreaming. Or maybe he's finally cracked and he's seeing things. But he shakes it off quick.
"You okay in there?" He juts his chin over his shoulder. She blinks.
"What?"
"That garage," he says. He leans the guitar on the railing. Maybe if he keeps talking she'll stand there for a little longer. "I didn't get to finish insulating it before you moved in, and it's getting colder. I'm sure Tommy and Maria would let you stay over for a night while I finish it--"
"Could you just...shut the fuck up for a second?" Ellie chews on her lip.
"Okay." Then he sees what she's holding.
Boggle.
She takes a deep breath, sets her shoulders, and looks him dead in the eyes. "Do you want to play?" she asks.
He's pretty sure he knows Ellie better than anyone else on this miserable planet, but she has a way of reminding him that he sure as shit still doesn't understand teenagers. But he knows a miracle when he sees one. Funny how all the miracles he's seen in the last little while have her face.
Joel swallows. "Yeah," he croaks. "I do."
4.
It gets easier. They hash it out and Ellie stays living in the garage but he gets her back, which is more than he ever hoped for. They both survive their first winter in Jackson, then their second, and life goes on.
Having a teenager is fucking stressful. She gets a tattoo and a girlfriend -- consulting him about the first beforehand, and the second after he stumbles upon the two of them behind the tannery in town -- and she laughs a lot. She teases him about his grey hair and his old man knees and she forgives him. Another miracle.
Boggle is...something they do. It's a bridge for them to meet on since they're both fucking hopeless when it comes to talking about their feelings. He brings it out when she gets overwhelmed at school, when something sets her off and sends her back to one of her worst days. When a kid makes fun of her for hoarding cans of beans, when she and the girlfriend break up. She brings it out after they fight, or when she finds him on the couch in the middle of the night. He thinks they both know what they're really saying but never seem to find the words for I'm here. You're safe. We're okay.
Sometimes they watch movies instead. Sometimes he sings for her. Sometimes Ellie wraps her arms around him and squeezes and he presses his lips to her hair. They're trying.
And then he falls off a roof. His dipshit patrol partner gets them trapped up there when he opens a bedroom full of runners, forcing Joel to break a window and cut his hands and face to shit when they shove themselves through it. He isn't fucking 37 anymore so he loses his balance after stabbing one in the neck and goes down hard, rolling down the slope, clipping the gutter, and landing on his side. More than one thing cracks.
Dipshit can at least take out the rest and check to be sure he's not dead and help him on his horse when he proves to be alive and kickin'.
His shoulder is fucked for sure, his arm hanging limp in the socket. He blinks away blood and manages to pick glass out of one palm. His partner, wisely, says nothing beyond asking him if he can make it back to Jackson.
Ellie is going to be so pissed. He's managed minor scrapes and bruises for two years, and since she started going on group patrols last year she's only had a sprained ankle. They're lucky, but luck runs out. He'd laugh if it didn't hurt so bad.
Maybe she won't be waiting for him. She doesn't, usually, but he's been gone overnight and he know she likes to lay eyes on him when he gets back from longer routes. He hopes she's busy with her friends or at the stables and maybe he can just sneak to the clinic and get cleaned up before she sees him.
Once they get back, the gates open slowly, so slowly, and his entire body throbs and --
As soon as he trots inside the wall she's there."Joel!" Aw, fuck. This girl has a sixth sense. She runs up to his horse and for a second she looks 14 again. He expects her to tell him to fucking walk.
"I'm fine," he says automatically.
"Your fucking face is bleeding! And...your hands! What the fuck!"
"He fell off a roof," his patrol partner says. Traitor. Dipshit traitor.
"Why the hell were you on a roof?" Joel ignores that.
"I'm fine, Ellie." He really sells it when he almost collapses as he gets off his horse. She's there immediately, handing the animal off to someone else and looking ready to punch him for daring to get hurt.
"Are you like, I got impaled on rebar fine, or I tripped and I'm embarrassed fine?"
"Somewhere in-between." His arm still hangs limp at his side, which is pretty damn inconvenient. "I think my shoulder popped out. Can you --"
"No," Ellie says. "You are not putting it back right now. Are you shitting me, Joel?"
She tugs his good arm around her shoulders and forces him to the clinic. He is diagnosed with two cracked ribs and a dislocated shoulder along with the cuts on his face and hands.
The doctor seems inclined to leave them alone, bringing Ellie some alcohol and bandages after she resets his shoulder.
"Fuck," he hisses when it pops back in.
"He tried to reset it at the gate but I stopped him," Ellie says. She sounds smug, the little shit.
The doctor looks unimpressed. "Well, good thing you listened to your daughter, Joel. You can really mess things up that way, you know?" Ellie coughs. Maybe two years and a thousand miles ago he'd correct her, but he's tired and he's been trying to tell the truth since then.
"Yeah, yeah," is all he says.
Doc leaves them be and Ellie shoves her way between his knees to clean his face, then his hands. "See?" she says. "Everyone thinks you should listen to me more." This close he can see how tense she is. He can't tell if it's from what the doctor said or everything else. The fear isn't totally gone from her eyes and she's putting in a valiant effort to keep her hands from shaking. But she's still Ellie, so he knows where's she's steering him because he knows her.
"I'm not building you a dart board to practice your knife throwing." She's being gentle, but he ups the drama and winces when she puts a butterfly bandage on his forehead. It works -- she rolls her eyes.
"It's a good idea and you know it." She moves to his hands, picking glass out of the one he couldn't move before and cleaning them both. "Don't think you need stitches," she says softly. "You gonna tell me how this happened?"
He sighs. She cut her hair recently, started wearing it in a sort of half-up half-down style. The moments when he remembers that she's growing up are random and manage to knock him on his ass. He could have missed it. "Got cornered by infected. Went through a window to the roof. Turns out you're just as trapped on a roof as you are in a house. Lost my balance after killing a runner and fell."
"Well that was fucking stupid, Joel." She wraps his palms in gauze and gently secures them.
"Yeah, no shit, Ellie." He sighs. He's too fucking old for this. And then he hears her sniff. Growing up, but still a kid in so many ways. "Kiddo," he tries, softer, reaching up one bandaged hand to her face, tucking the short strands behind her ear. "You okay?"
"I'm not the one who got fucked up on patrol." He strokes her cheek with his thumb and she scrunches her nose up and looks away. "It's been a while since you've been hurt this bad."
"Hey, look at me, please?" She does. "I'm sorry, babygirl." For getting hurt, for leaving you, for making you wonder if I'll come back. For the world and all of its bullshit and how we never seem to catch a damn break.
"You're okay," she says. It sounds like she's trying to convince herself.
He nods. "I'm okay. And I'm always coming back to you even if God Himself gets in my way." He leans in and presses a kiss to her brow. Her inhale is shaky, her exhale even shakier, but then she pulls away.
Ellie wipes her nose with the heel of her hand. "Yeah, well, you better, dude. Who else am I going to play Boggle with?"
5.
Fall comes and with it Ellie's clearance to go on paired patrols. She requests him more often than not, which makes him feel a little like a helicopter parent and also makes him miss being on the road. He doesn't miss not being able to feed her, staying up all night to keep watch, or getting rained on all the fucking time, but he does miss spending time with her like this. Like they're a unit. Communicating silently behind a burned-out car, watching each other's backs, clearing a house in less than a minute.
So, because he's a selfish bastard and he loves watching his kid shoot shit with scary accuracy, he never turns down a patrol with her. They're the best team in all of Jackson and fuck if that's not something he's proud of.
On a longer, two-day trip, they clear a grocery store of clickers and a bloater. It's a tough fight -- they'll both be bruising tomorrow and he burned his hand a little lighting a molotov, but they did it.
"That was fucking awesome," Ellie says, blood splatter on her face, her shark-like grin so wide it makes him smile, too.
He holds his hand up for a high five. They both probably smell like burning flesh. "Good work, kiddo." She smacks his palm with a whoop. Trusting her to look after herself is a little easier on his weary heart when he can keep an eye on her.
They make it to the lookout on the top floor of the firehouse without having to kill anything else as the sun starts to set. It's a nicely stocked one with a couch and a table and some kitchen supplies.
"I'll clean the guns if you cook," he says.
"Roger dodger." She hands over her pistol and rifle before rifling through his pack for food. "Oh, fuck yeah, Joel!" She holds up the cans of Chef Boyardee he packed with plans to utilize the lookout camp stove.
She's been upgrading her guns, he realizes as he cleans them. Pretty well, too. Always been a fast learner. He should tell her he's proud of her more often. "I think you're gonna eat the world out of this shit," he says instead.
"And I'll enjoy every god damn bite."
After they eat, she starts digging through her pack as he cleans up. It would be nice if they could bring their guitars on patrol, play a little before bed. She's been writing songs of her own and he's trying and failing to not be to eager to hear them.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck," Ellie mutters with increasing intensity. "Shit. Oh come on, really?"
"You forget your hairbands, or something?" She pulls out a mess of plastic and dice with a scowl. It's their Boggle set. He hadn't realized she brought it with her -- it must have gotten smashed when the bloater threw her. "Aw, damn."
"Fuck! I'm sorry, Joel." She looks so genuinely crestfallen that he considers trying to fix the game with his bare hands just to make her smile.
"It's just a game. Don't worry about it."
She shrugs. "Yeah, but..." Ellie suddenly finds her fingernails fascinating. "It's the one you picked up for me in Salt Lake City. The one we've been playing since then."
"That's right," he says, slowly. "It is." It's a little weird to talk around it, even now, but the fact that this game he grabbed to make her smile means so much to her makes his heart crack in two. God, how he loves her.
"I guess that's that." She sinks into the couch next to him and he slings an arm around her shoulders.
"We'll just have to find another game for you to beat me at. Even if you are a shitty speller."
Ellie smacks his stomach. "Won't be that hard, old man." She sighs. "What do we do now?"
Joel knows she means right now. But also tomorrow, and the day after that and the day after that. The game might be broken but she's still here and so is he. They're still here together, which is more than he ever hoped for. And he's going to fight every god damned day to keep that the case.
"Wanna check out the roof? Teach me some shit about stars?"
"Oh, fuck yeah I do." She hops to her feet and holds out a hand to pull him up. He lets her, groaning as his knees crack like they always do. Instead of letting him go, Ellie pulls him to her and hugs him. She presses her ear to his chest and he wills his heart to beat extra loudly for her. He presses his face to her hair and inhales.
"You smell like shit," he mutters. I love you , he thinks.
Ellie laughs, bright and young and unburdened, and pulls away but snags his wrist and tugs him towards the roof access door. "Fuck you," she says. It sounds like I love you, too.