Chapter Text
“983,” the guard calls, clanging a baton on the bars of the cell. He doesn’t bother to look up, very busy tracing out the state of Texas in the lines on the wall. He’s found four of them so far. He’s trying for a fifth. “New buddy.”
He does exhale through his nose at that, slightly amused to find out what new victim they’re offering him this time. He doesn’t have a great reputation with his “buddies,” the fuckers attached by handcuff to their cellmates to make it harder to escape, a standard practice in FEDRA prison. He’s gone through four now, each and every one of them trying to pull a power play by picking a fight.
It hadn’t gone well for any one of them.
“Try not to kill this one too quickly,” the guard says, and there’s a certain amount of anticipatory glee in the man’s voice that sets off a quiet alarm in his head. They’re vicious bastards, the COs, but they’ve never sounded this fucking happy about the potential of him killing a new person they’ve handed over.
He lifts his head, needing to see what makes this new inmate so special.
And looks right at a kid who can’t be older than 14, absolutely swamped by a prison outfit meant for someone about three sizes larger.
A girl, in the middle of a men’s prison.
*
He just stares at the girl for a long time when the guard has left her behind.
She stares at him in response, nervous but very clearly trying to hide it.
“Fuck with me, and I’ll kill you,” she says, with all of the ferocity of a hissing kitten.
She must see his extreme doubt, because she puffs up more, even as she hugs her spare uniform and blanket like a stuffed animal in front of her.
“I mean it,” she says. “I’ve killed somebody before and-”
“Leave me alone, and I’ll leave you alone,” he tells her flatly.
“You can’t trick me,” she says, but her shoulders go the slightest bit looser at his offer. “You try some shit and-”
“You’ll chomp my ankles to death, yeah, I get it.” He lays back, not bothering to watch her. “I’m on the bottom bunk. You take top.”
She doesn’t move, and he rolls his eyes, lifting his head enough to look at her.
“What?”
“You…” She pulls herself up as high as what he estimates 5’1” can get her. “You don’t fuck with me, and I won’t fuck with you. That’s the deal?”
“That’s the deal,” he repeats dryly.
She nods, once, decisively.
Agreement made, she starts working out how to get to the top bunk. She tosses up her uniform and the blanket and then circles the foot of the bed. There are no ladder rungs for her to use, he knows, and he’s a little interested as to how the fuck she’s actually going to manage to get up. He certainly won’t be switching with her.
He’s more than a little interested despite himself about how the fuck a teenaged girl got stuck in a place like this. He can tell already she’s a bit of a troublemaker, but he doesn’t imagine this arrangement is supposed to go well for her.
She must have caused quite some trouble.
He doesn’t bother getting to know people, not really.
But despite himself, he is curious.
“How’d you end up here?” He asks when she’s decided her best course of action is just jumping for it and pulling herself back up.
“Summer camp was full,” she snarks before groaning as she finally manages to get herself up.
“So you’re a smart ass,” he observes. “That part of it? Run your mouth at the wrong person?”
She pokes her head over the side of the bed to look at him. He decides immediately that it’s obnoxious.
“Keep your head on your bunk,” he tells her.
“I’m top bunk, asshole. Everything around the top bunk is mine, too. I’ll put my head wherever I goddamn please up here.”
Well, she’s got guts if she has nothing else.
Including sense.
“You run your mouth like that around here, you’re gonna get hurt,” he tells her.
“That a threat?” She asks, bristling.
“It’s a warning,” he tells her flatly. “I’d suggest you listen to it.”
*
They sit in tense silence after that until it’s rec time, when cellmates get handcuffed together for the duration of their time outside of their cells.
And then their cell is anything but silent.
“I’m right handed,” the girl says, keeping it by her side as she extends her left.
“So am I,” he says flatly, already impatient with this fight.
“Okay, well, I don’t know how to be in handcuffs yet,” she says, offering her left wrist insistently. “You do. So I should get to have my right hand free.”
“No,” he says flatly, grabbing for her right arm. She skips backwards, scowling.
“Why?” She demands. “What, too old to learn new tricks?” She says, displaying a bit of the attitude that he imagines was a contributing factor with her somehow becoming his problem.
“Too old to put up with your bullshit,” he tells her. “Now knock it off and c’mere. We don’t get long out of the cells, and we don’t get out at all until these are on.”
“Then we’ll stay in the cell,” she says, lifting her chin defiantly. “I don’t give a fuck.”
“Well I do,” he says, losing his grip a bit on his irritation. Jesus, how the fuck has this happened to him?
He’d prefer not to manhandle her if he doesn’t have to, but when it comes down to it, he gets the handcuffs on her right wrist and his left with only a few bruises as the price of wrangling a wildcat. She attempts a silent protest of standing still and refusing to walk.
Unfortunately for her, she’s also barely 90 pounds and prison shoes have shit traction, so she ends up towed in his wake for the entire two hours they have out of their cells.
When they return when time’s up, she flings herself up onto the top bunk and sulks.
For his part, he enjoys the silence.
*
If nothing else, he has to grudgingly respect the kid’s determination to her protest. He gets a workout in dragging her along in his wake, and he thinks of the one time his aunt Georgia tried to leash train her cat.
Turns out Mr. Fluff had a great deal in common with a pissy teenager. Go figure.
“You’re really gonna do this every single day?” He asks her as he clicks the cuff into place on his own wrist. She no longer makes him wrestle her into her half of the handcuffs and instead does it herself, but she still pitches a silent protest about giving up her dominant hand by being silent and resentful.
With how much she talks in the cell, it’s honestly a nice break.
“Keep it up if you want,” he says, when he hears her cuff click into place and starts his now-daily routine of dragging her across their cell to the door. He looks over his shoulder when she stumbles, raising an eyebrow. “It just-”
He stops when he actually sees her arm, pulled taut with him dragging her.
The handcuff barely gets small enough to keep her hand from slipping out, and it means he gets a clear view of the mess of her wrist.
And it is, most definitely, a mess.
“Shit,” he says without thinking, stopping at once and giving her slack so the metal won’t rub. “Jesus, kid, why the fuck didn’t you say something?”
He doesn’t think when he reaches out, not until he touches her hand and she flinches back at once, limited in how far she can get by the chain between them. He doesn’t try to touch again, but he tilts his head to try and get a better look at the damage. With how he tries to look at her as little as possible and how she now puts her cuff on herself, he hadn’t actually seen what days of being dragged around in slightly too large handcuffs had done to her, and he feels a wave of guilt that he desperately doesn’t want to feel now that he has.
Her slender wrist is chafed to the point of having raw spots, red and angry, barely visible against the bruising she’s caused in trying to resist and being dragged anyway. It looks wildly painful, and he marvels, slightly, that she’s borne it in complete silence when she’s so mouthy about everything else that crosses her mind.
“What?” She snaps, clearly uncomfortable with the attention. “I told you you were hurting me.”
She had, yeah.
And he’d chalked it up to an ongoing hissy fit.
He absolutely hates the fact that he feels about two inches tall while looking at how he’s hurt a child without even meaning to.
Even a child who’s a pain in the ass.
“Why the fuck would you let me keep dragging you?” He demands. Irritation with her is easier than guilt. “You could have really hurt yourself doing this.”
She gives him a disbelieving look.
“I didn’t do this,” she says, slowly, like he’s stupid. “You did this because you wouldn’t fucking listen to me.”
“You not saying shit when you’re getting dragged around for being a pain is your call,” he corrects her.
“And what?” She says, scoffing. “I go ‘Joel, you’re hurting my wrist because you won’t let me have my right hand free’ and you’d stop? I said you were hurting me. You didn’t fucking care.”
I didn’t know you were serious, he thinks but doesn’t say. I would never have hurt you if you’d fucking said something, you little pest.
“I need my right hand free,” he tells her, with less of a snap than he’s said the line with before. “If it comes down to a fight, who do you think has a better chance of keeping us both alive?”
Her mouth, open for a smart ass retort, shuts, her lips pressing together tightly. So wound up in trying to get her way, she clearly hasn’t actually thought about why he’s so insistent on the way they’re chained together, and he hasn’t dealt with a teenager in so long that he hadn’t actually thought to explain it. He’d written it off as her being stubborn just to be stubborn and hurt her as a result, and now he has to feel guilty about it when he’d rather return to simple annoyance.
“You’re a girl in a men’s prison,” he says. “That’s a dangerous thing to be. I’m not being a dick to you for no reason.” Not entirely, at least. “I’m just trying to keep us both alive. Think you can help me out by cooperating?”
She’s quiet for a brief, resentful moment before she sighs.
“Fine,” she says, rolling her eyes.
When they leave the cell that day, she falls into step beside him.
*
Predictably, the already-sparse medical ward has nothing they want to spare for the sake of her wrist. When the doctor riding high on his own power steps away, though, a nurse darts out of a side room with a little bottle of antiseptic and some bandages, stuffing it into his hands.
“You didn’t get this from me,” she says in a low hiss before she scurries away again.
They don’t stick around to get caught.
He stuffs the goods into his pockets when they leave so no one gets any ideas about stealing it, and they go about their usual routine until it’s time to return to their cell. He can’t risk tending her in the open where guards and other inmates might see and either have shit to say or a desire to steal the supplies for themselves. The time out is significantly more pleasant when he isn’t playing tugboat for a pouting teenager, and not needing to account for traction for the sake of pulling the kid behind him means they can actually go into the yard. He leads them to the corner of the enclosed space to a section of patchy grass shaded by the building at this time of day. He doesn’t have much to fear from the sun, but the paleness of the kid’s skin tells him she likely wouldn’t fare as well, and he’d rather not have her sunburned.
(If only to avoid hearing whining about it, obviously.)
“So is this always what prison was like?” She asks after they’ve sat down on the grass, and he’s glared off a pair of shifty-looking men who had contemplated wandering closer.
“No clue,” he says, tracking an inmate four cells down from them as he makes a slow and seemingly-random wandering path towards them, his cellmate following meekly. He’s seen the man looking in on their cell when they pass, eyes on the kid, and he’d rather not spoil a nice day by painting the grass with blood. Better to make sure he doesn't get close enough to push him into it. “Never been in prison before.”
Tommy would likely laugh if he knew he was in one now. A near-constant weapon in trying to get his little brother to behave while growing up was the assertion that he’d end up in prison one day for doing something stupid if he didn’t straighten up.
He doesn’t really appreciate the irony of those threats now.
*
“I can do it,” she insists when they’re back in the cell after rec time is over. Her wrist doesn’t look better, but not being dragged means it at least doesn’t look worse, so he’ll take what he can get.
Right now he wishes he could get her not being a pain in the ass.
“You’ve got one hand free,” he says, holding the antiseptic out of reach. “You spill it, and we’re fucked.”
She tries to glare him down, but finally she huffs out a breath and rolls her eyes while she extends her wrist like a little princess bestowing a favor. He resolutely doesn’t comment on the attitude.
“Gonna sting,” he warns her before he actually touches with the cloth. To her credit, she barely flinches. With a forearm across her thigh as he works, he feels the twitch of her muscles in response to the pain, but she doesn’t complain. He works gently but diligently, knowing as he examines them that it’s a miracle none of the abrasions got infected. Some of them are bad enough that there’s scabs on them, and he feels a deeply unwanted renewed surge of guilt. “You should have told me,” he says, as he turns her arm over to get at her inner wrist.
She shrugs.
“You don’t like me,” she says without any tone that indicates she cares about this one way or another. “I told you you were hurting me, and you kept doing it. I figured you didn’t wanna hear it.”
“I didn’t know I was actually hurting you,” he says, grabbing the bandages and starting to wrap her wrist. He’s careful to be gentle for the sake of the bruises, but he makes it firm enough that it won’t slip. “You’re mouthy. I thought the complaining was just more lip service.”
“It wasn’t,” she says, a little testily. He doesn’t match the tone. After how bad her wrist has gotten, he can allow her a little attitude.
“Next time,” he says, tucking in the end of the bandage. “Speak up when you’re actually getting hurt, alright?”
“And what? You’ll suddenly care?” She asks.
“No,” he says at once. He doesn’t care about her, and he certainly won’t in the future. “But I won’t actively continue hurting you.” He can promise that much at least. She’s annoying, but she doesn’t deserve to get hurt over it. “New cell rule: bodily harm is not a ‘keep it to ourselves’ kind of thing, deal?”
She studies him for a moment, looking down to her wrist just briefly, still held loosely in his hand. An expression he can’t read crosses her face, and then she looks back up to him, nodding once.
“Deal.”
*
“Does this mean you’re gonna start calling me by my name now?” She asks later when she’s on her bunk and he’s on his. “I feel like you gotta. You wrap my wrist up, you gotta stop calling me ‘Hey you’ and ‘pest.’”
“Pest suits you.”
He slides over to lay against the wall as the comment gets him a flat prison-issued pillow flailed wildly as a weapon, his only saving grace being that her arm is too short to actually reach him.
“I’m serious,” she says when she’s given up on clobbering him with a huff, returning her pillow to her bed. “You wrap my wrist up, you gotta start using my name. You can’t act like you just don’t give a fuck anymore. I know better. You give at least a little fuck.”
“Whatever you say, Ellen.”
“God, you’re such a dick.”
*
He takes care of her wrist the next morning as well and wraps an extra layer of bandaging around for cushioning. They’ll need to be careful with how much they use because they’ll need to wash and reuse it again, but it still looks tender enough that he imagines a little padding would be beneficial.
Naturally, her walking around with her wrist wrapped gets them commentary because he can never get one day of peace.
“Well,” says a man with greasy hair and shifty eyes, getting far too close on their way to the yard, “what’s this now? Your buddy gotten a little too ro-”
The man’s fingertips have scarcely touched Ellie before he has her tugged to his other side and his free hand around the man’s throat. The buddy, attached, squeaks slightly in fear but makes no move to help when he pins the first man to the wall, squeezing hard. Not surprising. He’s seen enough of their kind to understand the dynamic. An underling never steps forward when the boss is in trouble. They always wait to see which way the wind’s gonna blow in the fight.
“You ever try to touch her again,” he says, low and almost conversational, as he squeezes tighter until the man’s skin is white around his fingers, “and I’ll kill you. You hear me?”
The man wheezes and nods frantically with as much room as he has. After a final squeeze, he steps back and flings the man away by his throat, taking down him and his buddy both.
“C’mon Ellie,” he says without looking to her.
With a final look to the man on the ground, she follows.
*
An additional complication he hadn’t seen coming in being attached to a scrawny pain in the ass: the novelty makes him popular gossip.
Fan-fucking-tastic.
The creeps he’d predicted, slimy monsters corrupted by nothing to do with fungus and everything to do with evil that’s always existed, men sidling up to him eyeing Ellie like she’s something to devour, flexing hungry hands like they’re anticipating touching. The kid acts tough, but he can see she’s unnerved, especially when they try to offer him things in exchange. He catches the nervous looks she gives him in the first couple weeks when the men ask what he wants for a few minutes with his new “buddy.”
He wants to be left the fuck alone, and a few broken bones and one skull smashed into almost a pulp makes that clear, and they finally stop fucking asking. He catches the rumor from a guard who repeats it, almost savoring it, that it’s because he’s possessive of his new “toy,” and it’s a struggle to keep his face blank and uninterested. It’s disgusting, but if it gets the other prisoners to stop treating him like a goddamn pimp, then he’ll let it spread.
That rumor, though, means he still deals with more interaction than he wanted before, just as annoying if less vile: prisoners who aren’t actively pieces of shit. The kid isn’t a mascot and no one has that much kindness to spare, not in a fucking fascist prison, but even in a shitty world, not everyone is fucking evil.
Even if talking to them is still fucking annoying after having made it clear that he wasn’t interested in interacting at all.
Ellie’s wary the first time someone approaches them in the mess hall, pressing ever so slightly tighter to his side. He looks over very briefly, just to weigh up a potential threat. It’s an old man, older than him, dark skin creased, curly hair going silver. He shuffles, slightly, more than he walks, in the way of a man who’s done harder work than he should all the way up to an advanced age. His chained buddy behind him isn’t much better off, a Hispanic man shorter than him and older as well. They’re not a physical threat; taking them on, even together, would be almost laughably easy. He also, Joel notes with some suspicion, isn’t looking at Ellie like a prize or an object. He’s just looking at her like a kid, as is his buddy behind him.
“Hello,” the man says, a trace of accent in his voice that sounds German or something similar. One of the unlucky fuckers stuck abroad when the world ended, probably. His buddy says nothing.
“Hey,” Ellie says, clearly suspicious.
He doesn’t bother responding.
“My name is Johan. I mean no disrespect to a young lady,” a faint smile at this, “but you are swimming in those clothes. If you wish, I can make them fit you a bit better. I was a tailor Before, and I do uniform alterations now for the guards. I can work on yours between shifts.”
Ellie looks to him from the corner of her eye, clearly looking for an opinion on this, and he pretends he feels nothing about a kid looking to him for an answer on how to deal with a stranger.
“How much?” He asks, resigning himself to getting involved for the sake of not getting dragged along into a trap later. It’s not a bad idea, her getting clothes that actually fit her, but he’s also not a goddamn idiot. Someone coming up out of nowhere just to do a good deed? Not fucking likely.
“No charge,” the man says with a nod of his head. “I will keep the scraps and use them for myself. We can call ourselves–what is that phrase? Fair and square?”
He narrows his eyes.
“Risking a beating doing alterations and using your free time? And you ain’t gonna charge for that?” He doesn’t buy it. He’s seen the ugliness of this new world too thoroughly.
Hell, he’s been the ugliness of this new world too thoroughly.
The man, though, just gives him a small, sad sort of smile.
“I came here on a business trip, doing alterations for a Wall Street executive,” he says. “Twenty years ago. I left my wife and daughter behind. I had thought it would be too much fuss, organizing for two more people.” He presses a hand to his chest. “The last thing I ever said to them was goodbye.”
It’s a sob story he’s heard the rough shape of before, and his doubt must show on his face.
“I should hope that someone would extend the same kindness to them if they had a chance,” the man says. “Perhaps, in my way, I am sending out a debt into the universe it must pay. I can believe that someone will look after my girl if I look after someone else’s.”
His first instinct is to insist that the kid isn’t his girl. His girl is buried in a grave in the middle of a random field. This kid is an annoyance he’s been chained to. Unfortunately, reports of her being his have bought him too much relative peace to discard the idea now. He turns to her.
“Do it if you want to,” he says. “But don’t come crying to me if he takes your shit and never gives it back.”
The briefest flash of distaste crosses the man’s face, but it’s gone soon enough.
“My cell is five down from yours on the left,” he tells Ellie. “Drop off your spare uniform or do not,” this with a small smile again. “I will not be offended either way.”
His piece said, he shuffles off, his buddy still silent behind him.
*
“Do you think he meant it?” Ellie asks him later in their cell.
He shrugs but doesn’t respond, even though she can’t see him from the top bunk where she’s laying. He’s forgotten where his third Texas is and is far too busy trying to find it again to play this game with her. She can do what she wants, after all. He doesn’t fucking care.
“He doesn’t seem like he would steal it,” she says contemplatively. “What would he want with a third uniform?”
“Less frequent laundry?” He suggests. He doesn’t want to play this thought game with her, but irritating as it is, he wouldn’t feel quite right if he let her get fleeced with absolutely no warning. She’s young, after all, and a FEDRA orphan. It’s not like she’s actually been part of the real world.
He’s still deeply annoyed by his own weakness.
“I’m gonna give it to him,” she decides. “We can trust him.”
“There’s no fucking we here,” he says at once. “We’re stuck in a prison cell and get handcuffed together. That’s not a we. That’s a me and an annoying teenager I was assigned.”
“Aw, but Joel,” she coos, “we’re buddies, best friends, lifelong companions, bosom bud-”
She squeals when he sits up and lifts her mattress enough to threaten to tip her over onto the floor.
That refocuses her quite nicely.
*
Johan, surprisingly, doesn’t steal Ellie’s shit, and he does quick work. Her clothes are back with her by the next day, and when she has them on, he finds Johan definitely wasn’t lying about being a good tailor. They’re loose enough to hide any shape Ellie might have–something he appreciates, even if he’ll die before he ever brings it up with the man, still suspicious of his motivations–but the clothes are no longer so huge that they’ll swim on her.
“So do I look super cool now?” She asks, spinning to give him a full look he did not ask for or want.
“You look like a little kid playing some fucked up dress-up.”
She frowns, tilting her head in a habit he knows by now she does when she asks a question.
“What the fuck is dress-up?” She asks, sounding out the last two words like they’re foreign.
“Y’know, playing pretend and shit.”
A blank look.
“Putting on clothes and costumes and-” He stops, noticing her face do something interesting at the word costumes. “What, not a Halloween fan?” He smirks. “Would have thought you’d love that shit. Don’t all weird kids lo-”
“Shut the fuck up, Joel,” she nearly growls, launching herself up to the top bunk.
She doesn’t talk to him for the rest of the night, and he hates that he feels like a dick when he hasn’t even fucking done anything.
Life was so much simpler when his only worry with his cellmate was if they’d kill him in his sleep or not.
*
Ellie forgives him by the next morning for whatever grave sin he committed without even knowing he was doing it, and he goes with her to Johan’s cell to drop off her other uniform to be tailored, too. The man smiles when he sees them, and he tries hard to set aside his lingering mistrust. He still doesn’t think it’s possible for him to be giving without receiving anything beyond some scraps of government-issued cloth, but if it gets Ellie clothes she won’t be swimming in, he’ll be suspicious in silence.
Before they leave, Johan waves Ellie closer.
“You will pardon us for a moment, won’t you, Joel?” Johan asks, his manners completely incongruent with being in a government prison.
“I’m attached to her,” he says flatly. “I can only pardon you so far.”
Ellie snorts, as does Johan’s cellmate, though he looks away when Joel looks to him in mild surprise. He knows by now that Miguel is nonverbal and only speaks with ASL, which is complicated when he’s out of the cell and attached to Johan, but it’s still the first time the man’s ever actually interacted with him, even this much.
From the way he’s very determinedly not looking at him now, it might end up being the only time.
“Now, I do not mean to embarrass you,” Johan says in a low voice, handing Ellie a bundle of cloth. “But I was married for 22 years and had a daughter. I know there is a, ahem, monthly concern that I imagine this establishment has not considered.”
“O-oh,” Ellie says, taking what he sees now are cloth pads. “Shit, thanks, you didn’t, y’know, have to do this. These were supposed to be your payment.”
Johan gives her an easy smile and a wave of his hand like he’s dismissing the idea.
“Once I was done, the pieces were too small to be useful. I am sure they will serve you much better than me.”
“Still,” Ellie says, looking a little overwhelmed. “Thanks, man, um, Johan.”
“You are very welcome, Ellie,” Johan says with a smile.
Joel narrows his eyes just slightly. It’s something he’d considered by now as well, the fact that there’s no way in hell this prison has planned anything for when Ellie gets her period. She’s young enough that he knows it might still not be regular, and he’d been counting on that to buy them a little time. He’s figured by now that trying to humiliate her by letting her bleed through her uniform was likely part of whatever kind of punishment she’s in here for, but he hadn’t yet come up with any ideas beyond possibly stealing washcloths when it becomes a problem to fix.
He doesn’t know how to feel about Johan both also anticipating the problem and coming up with a solution.
Especially one he’s still pretending he doesn’t want anything in exchange for.
He makes his arm slack enough for Ellie to practice the bits of ASL she’d picked up with Miguel at lunch as he studies Johan. When he sees him looking, Johan returns the look placidly.
“Mighty kind of you,” he says neutrally.
“As I said before,” Johan says, spreading his hands and smiling slightly when Ellie laughs at something Miguel signed. “I would want someone to do it for my daughter. Wouldn’t you?”
“And what makes you th-”
“It is a gift, Joel,” Johan says, shrugging. “Take it and say thank you. Not everyone is out to get you.”
“He can’t help it,” Ellie cuts in. “I think his mind is getting all fucked up with age. Some cogs loose in the ole-” He catches her hand before she can tap his head, giving her a look that says behave.
Her returning grin says she understands and is choosing to continue to be irritating anyway.
“Aw, don’t get mad, grandpa,” she says. “If you ask nicely, Johan might even be able to make you some diapers for-”
He hauls her over his shoulder and carries her away before she gets a chance to finish that sentence.
*
The guards seem almost disappointed with time that he hasn’t brutalized the kid he now knows he was given to kill. He still doesn’t know what the fuck she did to make herself such a target, but whatever it was, it gets them sour looks when faces peek into their cell and find her perfectly well. Especially when they find her laughing.
And for a girl tossed into a men’s prison to be beaten to death or worse, she’s surprisingly perky.
With time, she gets more comfortable in the relative protection of being attached to him. After a certain point, it’s all he can do to keep her from mouthing off like a chihuahua barking at pitbulls from someone’s purse. It gets him some elbows in return when he clamps a hand over her mouth, but he generally keeps her from sassing off.
Unfortunately, there seems to be very little he can do about her sassing him.
There also seems to be very little to be done about the goddamn puns.
“-a prisoner climbing out of a window?”
Foolishly, he hopes silence will make her stop.
“A con-descension,” she says, poking her head over the bunk and beaming. “Eh? Eh? Pretty good, huh? I came up with that one.”
“2/10.”
“Oh, c’mon,” she says, throwing her arm to the side in exasperation. “A con-descension? That was good! It’s at least a 7, and you know it.”
“1/10 and dropping with each defense.”
She rolls her eyes before she lights up.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you! I came up with one for you.”
“Lucky me,” he says dryly.
“Why do contractors always have the best parties?”
Despite himself, she has his attention. He’d only just told her in the past couple days about being a contractor Before, largely because if he’s talking, it means she isn’t chattering away. She’d been an attentive audience.
Naturally, she was planning to use it against him all along.
“Cause they know how to raise the roof.”
Subtly as possible, he bites the inside of his cheek. He will not find it funny. He will not.
She grins, tilting a little farther over the bed.
“You’re smiling!” She crows, pointing at him triumphantly.
“No I’m not,” he says at once, doing his best to stay neutral. “That was awful.”
“You’re smiling, motherfucker!” She says, beaming. “Oh man, okay, you’re really gonna like the other ones I’ve worked on. What do you call a carpenter with-”
She spends the rest of the evening telling him every single contractor-related pun she came up with, clearly proud of her work.
(He’ll never tell her, not even under pain of death, but he supposes there are worse ways to pass the time.)
*
The primary reason FEDRA even bothers with prisoners is to use them for hard labor. They have a steady supply of workers from day jobs, but there are some tasks they prefer to use prisoners for, either for ease or to do it more cheaply. It’s hard work, but sadistic though they are, the guards don’t generally want bodies to deal with when they could have workers instead. With this in mind, work shifts rotate with one week on and two weeks off. It still leaves workers dead, but not as many as they might have otherwise.
Still, it’s hard work for a grown man, let alone a tiny 14 year old.
Through sheer dumb luck with a Firefly bombing of a jobsite, his group’s shift got skipped, so it’s not until about six weeks in that it comes time for him and Ellie to get to work. Ellie sticks close to his side for the assignment, clearing a field of debris for a new building. It was a building destroyed by bombs during the outbreak, and there are some chunks that will need machinery to move.
Doesn’t stop them from trying to just use humans, though.
With Ellie’s clothes now taken in by Johan to fit her better, she doesn’t end up tripping over her clothes. If she had tried in the baggy uniform she’d had before, there’s no way she’d even stand a chance. Still, it’s hard work even for him, and he’s had a lifetime of manual labor to build up his strength.
For Ellie, by the end of the first day, she lays down on the ground by the time they’re finished, muscles quivering with overexertion. She doesn’t even get up when it’s time to be re-handcuffed to be returned to the prison. She’s not the only worker to collapse, but the guards already don’t like her, and he sees a guard immediately notice her down.
“Hey!” The man says, an electrostaff in hand as he starts walking over with speed. “Inmate! Off the ground!”
Ellie’s too exhausted to even register she’s being spoken to.
“Hey!” The guard says, seeming almost gleeful as he gives his staff what seems to be an anticipatory zap. “Off the ground or-”
“C’mon, kid,” he says, low, reaching out and grabbing her by the upper arm, hauling her upright. After a day of work, it’s about all he can manage, too, but there’s no way in hell he’s standing by and watching her get tased because she’s a kid pushed into doing a grown man’s labor. Even if he doesn’t like her, that’s too fucking far. “She’s up,” he tells the guard, and he says a silent prayer as he lets go of Ellie’s arm. Please, God, who probably doesn’t even fucking exist, let her stay on her feet right now. Just until the guard is gone.
Blessing of blessings, she does.
The guard looks like he’s swallowed a lemon at the prospect of his chance at tasing her taken away.
“I’ve got my eye on you,” he says sourly. “I catch you lazing around again, it’ll be thirty lashes with a whip, you hear me?”
Even exhausted, he can see Ellie about to mouth off, and he steps between them at once.
“Got it,” he says, standing between them and staring the guard down. The man, for all of his own self-importance, is shorter than him by a head, and though younger, clearly less muscled. He has the soft hands of a paper pusher.
Joel’s hands haven’t been soft since he was a child, and from the uneasy way the guard shuffles back, he’s not ready to find out how that might translate to their odds in a fight.
“Thanks,” Ellie says quietly as they shuffle back to their cell, her limping slightly from where she banged her ankle on a bit of metal when a prisoner had tripped her. (He’d kicked the man into a pit and left him with a broken arm after that, but still, the damage had already been done.)
“Don’t mention it,” he says, reaching over to grab her arm with his free hand to offer her a little more support. “C’mon, kiddo. Almost there and you can get some rest.”
It’s about all he’s got to offer her.
*
Ellie doesn’t complain on their work assignments. She’s a tough kid and not a whiner.
But she’s gong to end up killing herself trying to keep up with the work.
Or being killed, he thinks uneasily, as he watches the guards watch her, looking for any excuse to get physical. The hawk-like attention also means there’s very little he can take off her plate, and the best he can offer her is keeping a lookout for a few brief moments now and then for her to sit down and boosting her up to her bed at night when she’s too exhausted to climb. She can’t keep doing this, he knows. She just can’t.
He gets an opportunity to do something about it during their second work rotation on the day the warden comes by to check their work when they’re on the last section of the clean-up. They’re on a brief water break, so he settles Ellie in some shade with a full cup and tells her to stay. Tired as she is, he doesn’t even know if the instruction is necessary.
“I’ll be right back,” he says, just loud enough for the people nearby to hear. Johan and Miguel aren’t on this assignment today or he’d try leaving them on watch, but he won’t be out of sight or earshot, so he has to hope the threat of that will be enough.
She doesn’t even look up as he walks away.
“Sir,” he says, resisting the urge to pull a face as he says it. The word is sour in his mouth, but he has higher concerns than the distaste of playing at respecting the head of a pyramid of sadist fuckers.
The warden looks mildly surprised at his approach, but he holds out a hand to stop his underlings from stopping him.
“983 if I’m not mistaken,” the warden says conversationally. “Joel Miller, I believe?”
“Yes,” he says, hiding his surprise. Apparently his reputation is even wider than he’d thought it was. After a moment of consideration, he adds another “sir.”
“And what can I do for you today?” The warden says with the magnanimity of a man who has not one goddamn thought of actually doing anything for anyone.
He hesitates, for just a moment, reconsidering. Ellie’s already got a target on her back. He doesn’t want to make it worse by pointing her out.
But he also doesn’t want her to join the pile of corpses that gets gathered together as a final task of each day.
“My assigned partner, 657,” it feels wrong, referring to her by her number, but he figures it can only help their chances if they think he doesn’t think of her as anything but that, “is too young for this work. In a few years, sure,” and fuck, isn’t the idea of Ellie still being in here in a few years horrible, “but for now all you’ll be doing is wasting a worker.”
“And you’re an expert on human resource distribution?” The warden asks, amused in a way that rankles at him. He forces himself to remain calm.
“No,” he says evenly, “but it’s not a hard leap to make. A child doing a man’s job only ends one way.” A gamble, reminding him that she’s a child, but the warden’s family lives on the compound, and he’s seen that he has at least two kids of his own, a boy a few years younger than Ellie and a little girl still learning to walk, always dressed up in frilly pink dresses and bows.
“Hm,” the warden says, considering. “I suppose there could be a place found on the resource sorting crew-”
He very carefully doesn’t betray any trace of the suspicious hope he can feel flicker to life.
“-but that would be a rather large favor,” he says, with a slyness he should have expected.
A man who would approve a girl being put in a men’s prison doesn't care about a random child.
“It could be managed, though, I suppose. Provided you and I could come up with a deal to make it worth my while.”
He clenches his jaw for a moment. He already hates where this is going. A quick glance to Ellie, though, refocuses him on his goal. She’s going to end up dead if she doesn’t get off of these work assignments. He doesn’t care about her and still wishes she’d been given to someone else, but annoying or not, she’s his problem for now. If she dies, it won’t be because he didn’t try to prevent it.
“And what sort of deal might that be?”
*
The deal the warden gives him is a hit on two guards. He isn’t given a reason why they need to die. He doesn’t bother to ask.
Ellie almost doesn’t make it to the end of work that day, and a guard tases her when she doesn’t get up fast enough because he was too far away to haul her up. Her scream, even weakened by exhaustion, rings in his ears for the rest of the day, and when they get back to their room, he tells her to take his bunk for the night.
“Don’t get used to it,” he tells her. “One night only deal.”
She’s so tired she doesn’t even respond, just falls asleep exactly how she drops.
The guards he’s meant to kill come to their cell that night after final check and lights out. He’s still fully dressed and in his boots from his place on the top bunk, expecting them.
“983,” one of the guards says, clanging a staff across the bars. “Up and at ‘em. Warden wants to talk to you.”
He hops down and presses Ellie back down when she starts to rise, wincing with every centimeter she moves because her body’s been through hell. It’s a miracle she can still move at all.
“Stay awake until I’m back,” he says, low enough for only her to hear. “Someone tries to pull something, you scream until every last person in this prison is awake, and you go for their eyes and then their balls, alright? You remember what I told you?”
It takes her a moment, exhausted as she is, but finally she nods.
“Hook around, grab, and yank hard as I can.” A simplification of what he told her for both options of disarming an opponent she doesn’t have a single advantage against, but it covers enough to let him know she remembers.
“Good, I’ll be back.”
Despite how tired she is, she follows him to the cell door, though she stays well back when it’s opened, smart enough not to get in hitting range when the guards might have an excuse. Still, the moment he’s through, she’s pressed against the bars, watching him go with big, worried eyes.
It’s like a worse version of when he used to leave Sarah at home with her grandmother and go to work, when she would press herself to the storm door and cry for him not to go.
Still, now just as then, he’s got a job to do.
*
It’s an almost comically easy kill, the knife just where the warden told him it would be and the guards cocky enough on their own importance to not see it coming.
Under a minute, and it’s over.
He stacks their bodies in a closet as per his instructions, stops by the warden’s office to drop off proof of the kill in the form of their ears in the top drawer of his desk, and then he takes the keys and returns to his cell, finding Ellie awake and alert, sitting on the bottom bunk. When she sees him approach, she’s on her feet at once, but she staggers and almost falls when her enthusiasm exceeds her body’s overtaxed abilities.
"What happened?" She asks when he's through the door, eyes wide at the blood on him.
“Had a talk,” he says shortly. He contemplates slipping the key to their cell off the ring and seeing if he can get away with it, but he’s already flirting with a hanging offense if this was all a trick. A key won’t save him. He reaches through the bars and then slides the ring of keys out of reach of any of the cells.
“Are you-” Ellie starts, reaching out. He grabs her hand in his, not un-gently but firmly, and lowers it. No reason for them to both be bloody.
“I’m fine,” he says calmly. “Gonna clean up a little in the sink. Go back to sleep, alright? Everything’s fine, I promise.”
“But you-”
“Do you trust me?” He asks, forcing himself not to snap. It’s not her fault. She was left alone in a place full of people who want to kill her or worse, and he came back covered in blood. It would be more concerning if she wasn’t a little anxious about what’s going on.
She’s quiet for a moment, considering, but finally, she nods, almost reticently.
“Yeah,” she says. “I trust you.”
“Then go to bed. Anyone asks, you were asleep all night and you don’t know jackshit about anything, got it?”
She lays down and fakes a snore in response.
*
"Miller, Williams," he tugs Ellie to a stop at the sound of their names the next morning, on alert at once with the rare departure from their numbers. She already looks exhausted, so it’s not like she resists. He doubts she’s fully aware of what’s going on to start with. The guard looks like he’s swallowed something vile as he approaches. “Re-assignment from the warden,” he all but growls. “You two are on sorting crew now. Back inside.” He’s very clearly pissed about the fact that he’s losing out on a chance to try and beat Ellie for not keeping up.
For his own part, it’s an effort not to grin with success as he leads a bewildered Ellie back inside.
“How the fuck did you do this?” She hisses as she hands over a box full of saline bottles. Sorting tasks are partner work, one sorting through things on the table and the other stacking boxes and retrieving unsorted bags. Partners usually switch off, but he tells Ellie from the start that he’ll do the carrying. She’s earned a day of sitting down.
“Held my mouth right,” he says with a small smile that widens when she gives him a look.
“I don’t know what the fuck that means!” She whispers after him.
He pretends he doesn’t hear, barely restraining a smile when a guard turns his way to watch him.
*
“So how’d you end up here anyway?” She asks him on a day so unseasonably hot for fall that he’s already dreading going back inside. The group in the yard is languid but pissy in the heat, and their usual spot required punching an upstart who wanted to edge in on it, so he’s not exactly in the mood for a Q&A session.
Unfortunately, Ellie’s nosiness is apparently heat-proof.
“Pass,” he says, eyes still closed. His head is tipped back against the wall, and he’s trying to focus on soaking in the coolness of the stone through his shirt.
“Is it that embarrassing?” She asks, sounding gleeful at the idea. “Does it have something to do with that scar on your head?”
“No.”
“Was it stealing?”
“No.”
“Were you a Firefly?”
“Fuck no. And being a Firefly is a hanging offense anyway.”
“Were you-”
He shuts his eyes tighter and tries desperately to tune her out.
He doesn’t succeed.
*
Back in their cell, she’s droopier in the increased heat, which is both a blessing and annoying. She sighs to herself occasionally, noisy even when she’s supposed to be napping. For his own part, he’s trying very hard to just sleep through the heat instead of giving into dramatics. Tess used to tease him for hating the heat while being from an infamously hot state, but he’s always maintained that heat without access to A/C is a whole different beast than a Texas summer Before.
Especially when Ellie decides she’s not too hot to keep chattering again.
“-like a bank robbery or something? I think those sound cool. There aren’t banks, though, so I don’t know what-”
“I beat the shit out of someone,” he says at last, desperate for a few minutes of suffering in the heat in silence.
He groans when a shadow tells him even with his eyes shut that her head is over the edge of the bed. Sure enough, he opens to see her face upside down.
“That’s all?” She asks dubiously. “I got the shit beat out of me plenty, and no one ever went to prison for it.”
He very resolutely doesn’t feel anything about that at all, the idea of her, feisty but tiny, getting her ass kicked in an unfair fight.
“FEDRA guard caught me doing it. I got arrested for disrupting the peace. The guy had a cousin in some branch of something. That’s how I ended up here.”
“Why’d you beat him up?” She asks.
“Because I felt like it,” he says, closing his eyes.
She’s quiet for a moment, and he almost lets himself hope she’ll just take a goddamn nap like a normal person.
“I don’t think so.”
So much for that hope. He slits one eye open to look at her, finding her watching him intently.
“You don’t fight people just cause you feel like it,” she says, narrowing her eyes a little in concentration. “You had a reason.”
It’s a perceptive response.
He wishes she hadn’t been observant enough about him to make it.
“I had a bad day and felt like beating the shit out of someone. Now shut up before I feel like beating you.”
The way she snorts says she’s not even remotely entertaining that as a possibility.
“Did he say something to you? Do you have a girlfriend? Did he hit on your girlfriend?”
He lifts a foot to kick her bed once, to bounce her, but that just makes her laugh. Who knew he would miss his roommate who snored loud enough to shake the bed.
“C’mon,” she wheedles. “You gotta tell me, or I’ll just-”
“He was beating his kid.”
Ellie, at once, goes silent.
“He was a piece of shit. Used to hear him beating his wife,” something that had made him grind his teeth, but it hadn’t been his business. “One day, saw him wailing on his kid in the stairwell.” Also not his business.
And yet.
“She’s only 4 or 5, still a little thing. Don’t even know what he was so fucking mad about. Not that abusive pieces of shit like that need a reason. He had her on the ground and was going at her with a belt. I stopped him. I got caught. Now I’m stuck with a teenager who never shuts up. The end.”
He’d done more than just stop him, technically speaking. He’d broken the man’s jaw along with a few other bones and drawn blood with the belt he’d gone after his daughter with, had let him know how it felt to be smaller and vulnerable against someone willing and able to hurt him for once. The whole time, the girl had sat there, watching him with wide eyes, one slightly swollen.
He’s thought of those big, dark eyes since.
He wonders if his interference did anything to help her at all, or if he just set her up for more pain in the future.
That’s what he’s learned by now: trying to make things better almost always makes them worse.
And yet that day, he hadn’t thought about it, hadn’t done the smart thing.
And now he’s here, and that little girl and her abuser are still out in the world.
That’s how trying to be a hero always ends up.
“You did the right thing,” Ellie says softly, and he opens his eyes, giving her a disbelieving look.
“I’m stuck here with you,” he says flatly. “And that fucker is still out there. What about any of that is the right thing?”
Ellie looks older in the moment, wise in a way she has no fucking business being when she’s the same kid who was laughing too hard about her own pun about grass to actually say it this morning.
“No one ever stood up for me when I was little,” she says, and there’s no self-pity in her voice. She’s not looking for sympathy. She’s just stating a fact.
Somehow it makes it hurt worse.
“After I turned 12 I met a friend who did, but before that? No. If they had, if one person had gone ‘stop it’ when I needed them to...that would have been important to me.”
“I’m sure it’ll be real important to that little girl the next time daddy goes after her with a belt and no one’s there to stop him,” he says, determined not to fall for any rah rah heroism bullshit.
“But she’ll know there was once someone who tried,” she says. “No matter what. There was once someone who cared enough to try and help her. She’ll remember that. I would have.”
With that, her head moves out of sight, and he hears her settle down again.
Her breathing, which he knows better than he ever wished to by this point, tells him she’s not asleep.
But still, she doesn’t speak.
“Hey,” he calls up after a while, second-guessing himself even as he says it.
After a moment, her face peeks back over the edge of the bed, just her eyes showing this time.
“I would have…” He stops, feeling stupid. But still. He’s already started. Might as well just rip the bandaid off so they can move past it. “I would have tried. For you. I would have…y’know.” He shrugs.
She blinks, and then her eyes go softer in a way that he knows means she’s smiling.
She doesn’t speak, but somehow, that look is enough of an answer.