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Year 2
She notices it slowly.
There wasn’t much reading on the road, after all. For him, at least. She would stay up with the flashlight reading her comic books before he’d scold her to not use up the batteries. But he would always either be busy getting stuff ready, or keeping watch, or catching the few hours of shut eye he would allow himself. So it wasn’t until Jackson that she even realized there could be a problem.
They’d spent a lot of nights doing their own thing in the living room— she with her drawing, him by the lamp whittling or sometimes reading or doing a crossword (”Gotta get better with my vocabulary and spellin’ to keep up with you in Boggle.”) She’d look over and he’d be squinting or look pained, but she figured it was because of the lack of light, or because that’s what it looked like when he was concentrating really hard (“Don’t hurt yourself too much trying to think, you look like you’re gonna break something”, she’d reply) .
When she turned 16, he took her to the science museum and they traded reading off the plaques by each of the exhibits, although he tripped over some of the words, or asked “What does that say?” She figured it’s because a lot of the words are in Latin, or just obnoxiously complicated in the way that only dinosaur names can be.
But when she comes home a few months later super excited by the school year’s first report card (that she definitely didn’t sneak a peek at even though it was in an envelope addressed to her “guardian”) and he squints at it really hard for a really long time rather than immediately congratulate her on it, the penny drops.
“Dude,” she says, disbelievingly, “are you blind?”
He looks up sharply at her and scoffs. “Blind? What are you on about?”
“Like, do you need glasses or something?”
He doesn’t say anything for a moment, and she marches up to the report card in his hands and points at the first line. “What does this say?”
He grunts. “Well now your hand’s in the way.”
She sighs, grabs the report card from him, and steps a few feet away. “How about now?”
His eyes relax, and after a second, he smiles. “Straight As? That’s amazing, kiddo.”
“Yeah, obviously,” she huffs. “But what the fuck, man? You’re just walking around handicapped like that?”
He rolls his (defective) eyes. “Quit bein’ a drama queen. Just have a hard time with it so close to my face is all. Pretty common for us old folk.”
She rolls her eyes right back. “If it’s pretty common, don’t you think there are, I dunno, glasses in town that would make it better? Doesn’t straining them make it worse, or something? Don’t give yourself headaches just cuz you’re a stubborn ass.”
Joel grabs the report card back. “Why don’tcha mind your own damn business and get your homework done to prove this wasn’t a fluke,” he says, turning around and forcefully sticking the document on the fridge like he always does with her drawings and well-graded assignments.
Fucking sap.
So when September 26th rolls around again, a day that they’ve tacitly decided will be passed without comment this year, she tosses him a small leather case that he just barely catches.
“The hell’s this?” he asks gruffly.
“Reading glasses.”
“Ellie—”
“It’s not a… it’s not a birthday gift. It’s a gift for me, really. I just can’t stand the sight of you trying to—” she dramatically mimes his squinting “while failing at the crossword anymore. Now you can’t blame your eyesight when you suck at it.”
He sighs, but pulls them out of the case. They’re purple, and they have a beaded string attached to each arm for hanging them around your neck. “Ellie, no way in hell.”
But she grins at him, and, despite the somberness of the day, she can tell he fights to hold his own grin back. She pats herself on the back for not commenting when she sees him wearing them to read the next night.
Still, she starts to notice other things. Like how there’s more gray in his beard, and how there are more wrinkles whenever he smiles (which luckily happens more now). How it always takes him a moment to stand as his knees figure out how to hold him up.
She thinks, not for the first time, of how precarious this all is. On the road, she could’ve lost him at any time, and almost did. Here, it might be safer, but even if he survived all that this world can throw at them (including Cordyceps, thanks to The Vaccine That Would Never Be), he still wouldn’t be around as long as she needed him to be (which is to say, always). She didn’t know what life expectancy in the apocalypse was nowadays, but she knew she didn’t see a lot of people with white hair around the neighborhood.
Her jokes about his age start to feel hollow in her throat and she starts to be more regular in initiating hugs, a behavior previously reserved for special occasions.
One day, as she hugs his side on a whim after seeing him try to stretch out his back, he hugs her back but peers down to look at her. “Ellie, honey, are you okay? Lately, you seem a little— not that I’m complaining, but—”
“Shut up and let me hug you, Joel. Haven’t you ever heard of touch starved orphans?”
He sighs exasperatedly but squeezes her more tightly.
Ellie starts to see it more in her cousin Jack, too. He’s one and half (“ 18 months,” as Maria would say. “How many months am I?” Ellie would retort) and growing more every day. It’s equally as exciting as it is scary, watching him age before her eyes.
So when Christmas comes around this year, she instantly thinks of a gift. A drawing of Joel holding up Jack and smiling, lines by his eyes all crinkled, shading to catch the slightly graying hair.
“Ellie,” Joel says, admiring it. “This is amazing.”
She smiles. “I just wanted to capture the moment before it’s gone.” She looks at the drawing. “They grow up so fast, don’t they?”
“Yeah,” he responds, watching her with her favorite Soft Joel smile. “They do.”
She exercises a lot of restraint later that night when she catches him examining the drawing close up, purple reading glasses perched low upon his nose, beaded string around his neck.
Year 3
Joel thought Ellie’s hardest years were behind him until the year she turned 17.
The first year in Jackson was an adjustment, the second a settling in. This third, though? A rebellion, apparently.
Ellie had started making friends as soon as she got to school, even getting close with kids in her grade named Dina and Jessie. They seemed like good kids, only ever seemed to want to play games or watch a movie rather than get into any serious trouble, a blessing at 15 and 16.
That is, until Ellie starts hanging out with Cat.
His girl has a thing for “bad girls”, he thinks, when he first meets Cat and sees how Ellie looks at her (she doesn’t admit it. He thinks she thinks she’s a good liar). She even started taking a little longer to get ready, dressing a little differently, chopping off her hair and wearing it down for the first time since he met her. But that thought was amusing only for a week or so. It flies out the door the first time she ever comes in after midnight. He’d never set a curfew before, sure, but he never had to. His kid was a homebody, and her friends would either come to Joel’s house or she would be home by 10PM of her own volition. (“From now on, if you go out you’re home by 11, or you don’t go out.” “Geez, man, it was one time, relax!”)
(It wasn’t and he doesn’t.)
After the second late night, she is grounded for the first time ever, and for a whole week. Breakfast the next morning is tense, and when she goes to stomp off after a heated exchange, he grabs her arm to stop her. She yelps.
Immediately, his irritation turns to concern. When she doesn’t explain herself, instead cradling her arm to her chest, he narrows his eyes and gently pries it away. He lifts up her sleeve until he sees—
“A tattoo ? Fucking hell, Ellie. You’re 16.”
She yanks her arm back. “Almost 17, dude. And besides, this arm has seen much worse.”
“Don’t remind me,” he grumbles, trying not to picture finding her in the garage, biting on a belt and burning her own flesh.
He pinches his nose, raises his voice. “Ellie—”
“What are you gonna do, ground me? Already outsmarted yourself there, buddy, so I guess we’re all set.”
“You will not speak to me that way, Ellie, not under my roof.”
“Your roof? We’re fucking commies, comrade. Besides, you won’t let me anywhere the fuck else, so that seems like a you problem.”
He clenches his hand into a fist, keeps himself from slamming it on the table lest he scare her. “That’s it. You’re grounded for the rest of the month.”
Her jaw drops. “My birthday is in, like, two weeks. Cat’s throwing me a party!”
“That seems like a you problem. You can celebrate it with your family and remember this the next time you think about actin’ out.”
She does the former, but instead of the latter, she sneaks out.
Joel learns this quite abruptly when he wakes up to a crash from downstairs at 3 in the morning. He runs down with his gun aimed for a sweep of the first floor when he points it at a dark figure and hears an “oh fuck” before it topples over.
He strains his eyes in the dark, before fumbling for the light. “ Ellie ? What the fuck is going on?”
She giggles, then clamps a hand over her mouth. “I knocked over the coat rack. Why the fuck do we need a coat rack anyway? It’s 100 degrees outside.”
“Are you drunk?”
“Guess you’re not so blind after all, buddy boy.” She breaks into giggles again, and he prays to a God he doesn’t believe in to give him strength as he puts away his gun.
“I’m going to bed,” he says, resolutely turning around.
“What, you’re gonna just leave me here?”
“I’m sure you can find your way back to your bedroom. You seemed to find your way out of it just fine.”
He breathes deeply through his nose as he marches up the stairs, determined to get a good night’s sleep so he can figure out what the hell to do with this kid when he wakes up.
That lasts about two hours before he’s once again wrenched from sleep by a bang. This time, he leaves his gun behind, and quickly realizes the noise was the bathroom door slamming shut, sounds of retching now audible behind it. He sighs and knocks on the door before poking his head around, seeing Ellie hunched over the toilet bowl, newly short hair falling out of her ponytail and into her face as she throws up.
He sighs again but moves to pull her hair back, slipping off the hair tie he keeps around his right wrist and gathering up the strands until they just fit into a ponytail at the crown of her head. He rubs her back, then notices a smell other than alcohol and vomit. “You smokin’ pot, too? Jesus, girl, what’s gotten into you?”
She hiccups a bit into the toilet bowl, then croaks out, voice echoing over the ceramic. “I’m seventeen.”
Joel clenches his jaw. “Exactly. You’re seventeen. Still a kid.”
She heaves herself off the toilet bowl, wiping at her mouth with one hand before wiping her eyes with the other. “Riley never got to turn seventeen.”
His breath catches in his throat, just like he’s sure hers does whenever he mentions Sarah. He recalls Ellie’s 15th birthday their first year in Jackson, how it came the day after Sarah’s and marked a year past what Sarah would ever get to see. How hard that was, but how relieved he was that Ellie had made it past that age and was still right there with him.
Ellie didn’t get that with Riley.
He’d learned more about her, too, over the years. He filled in the blanks between what he was given. He was pretty sure Riley was his kid’s first love.
He sighs again and resumes rubbing Ellie’s back, the will to chastise her evaporated.
Instead, he spends the next few hours caring for her as she continues to throw up until she passes out against the toilet bowl and he carries her back to his bed. He’s reminded of the only time Ellie got truly sick here, around a year ago. Her immune system must have toughened up on the road for it to take so long for her to fall ill, all things considered. But she came down with the flu sweeping through the schoolhouse in late spring, alternating between coughing and throwing up while sporting an ever increasing fever. She was a stoic patient at first, not asking for much or even complaining, as if doing so would have burdened him. But then, as the fever took her, she was as stubborn as she was physically capable of being, doing her damndest to fight like hell whenever he needed to touch her. He couldn’t help but be proud of her fortitude while simultaneously breaking apart at her need for it.
He watches her now, sleeping fitfully as he places a mug of coffee and a plate of toast on the bedside table. Her eyes flutter and she cracks one open to look at him.
“You brought that gross hot bean water in here to punish me because you hate me now, don’t you.”
He huffs a laugh, then grabs the mug and holds it out towards her. “I love you,” he says, holding her gaze as he does so, “and that is why I brought you coffee with enough sugar and milk in it to make it white.”
She doesn’t make a move to take it, so he nudges her with it. “C’mon. Trust me. The only way out is coffee and carbohydrates.”
She shuffles up to slump against the headboard and then grabs the drink and sniffs it dubiously before taking a sip. She groans, but takes another.
He turns around and takes the plate off the table before passing that to her as well. He settles next to her against the headboard as she slowly makes her way through her breakfast.
“Okay,” she says as she finishes. “Let’s get this over with.”
He looks at her for another moment. “This ain’t working for me, Ellie. Breaking curfew, getting a tattoo, sneaking out, getting wasted? We’re not doing this.” He swallows thickly. “I can’t wake up and not know where you are, baby. Worry if you’re okay. My heart can’t take it.”
She curls up into her side, her head falling lower to his shoulder. “I don’t…. I didn’t mean to be shitty. I’ve just never really had friends before. And now that things are— things feel good with having a- a family, I just wanna…” She nuzzles more into his arm. “You said I could be a kid. So I am. This is 17.”
He sighs, laying the palm of his hand on her head. “Being 17 don’t mean ‘defy Joel’. We’re a team, yeah? You and me against the world. Not you against me.”
She fiddles with the leftover crust on her plate. “Yeah. Okay.” She looks up at him, then back down. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. I know.” He pulls back his hand and crosses his arms. “Good thing you can beg for forgiveness while being grounded the rest of the summer.”
“What the fuck? Joel—”
“With parole in time for the Founder’s Day Festival for good behavior.”
She sighs, then nods. “Fine.” She throws the covers over her head. “That’s how long I’ll need to recover anyway.”
He smiles despite himself. This is 17, for better or for worse.
Year 4
During their fourth year in Jackson, Ellie turns 18 and Joel turns 60. They’re both significant ages, apparently. Eighteen was the age that someone is considered a “legal” adult Before, according to Joel. (She told him she’s been an adult since way younger than 18. Joel said “I know” and then made the Sad Joel Face.)
For Ellie, 18 comes with a lot of questions. People start asking her if she’s gonna get a place of her own yet, because apparently that’s what people tended to do at 18, Before, and Jackson tried to be a lot like Before. She hadn’t thought about it, really. In the QZ, she would have been out of the orphanage by now, either a FEDRA soldier or a runaway (or dead). But here, she’d gotten so accustomed to her home with Joel, her Sundays with her family, her routine. The creeping doubt that she’s supposed to want to reject all that now gives her a persistent tension by her temples.
For Joel, 60 comes with more gray hairs to (lovingly) poke fun at. But, much to her dismay, not everyone thinks it is a laughing matter.
“Joel’s really turning into a silver fox, huh?” Dina says one day after Ellie waves him goodbye as she joins her friends’ table for dinner. “Major DILF vibes.”
Ellie grimaces. “ What the fuck are you saying to me right now?” she asks as she steals a fry off Dina’s plate.
“DILF,” Jesse contributes. “From the Before times. Dad I’d Like To—”
Ellie throws a fry at him. “I dare you to finish that sentence.”
“I’m just saying,” Dina continues, a teasing glint in her eye, “he’s aging like a fine wine.”
“Have you ever even had wine? Shut the fuck up now, please.”
Dina shrugs and moves on, but Ellie spends the rest of the dinner stewing.
Not that this is the first time this has come up. She’d seen how people looked at him during their first few years in Jackson and, to be honest, it made her nauseous. She didn’t like thinking of Joel as a man, let alone having to compete with another person for his affection. Not that she didn’t want him to be happy, of course. But they had just found each other, just figured their shit out, just defined the space between them. There wasn’t space for anyone else.
But now that her “ick” blinders were off, she can’t help but notice the… effect Joel has on some of the town’s women. They’re practically throwing themselves at him on the regular.
It’s disgusting.
For his part, he seems as oblivious as ever, although he does seem to… flirt (blegh) with some in particular.
One lady, Melinda, was a newcomer with two adult kids. Ellie saw Melinda and Joel talking in the food line at the dining hall. Melinda had her hand on his arm and he had a smile that reached up to his eyes.
“Sparks flyin’, huh?”
Ellie whips around to see Tommy smirking at her. “I’ve been trying to set them up for a while, but Joel keeps brushing me off. Guess she took things into her own hands. I hope he won’t turn this one down, the ol’ fucker.”
“What do you mean?”
Tommy chuckles. “You know Joel. Only got room in his heart and head for you, with exceptions made for Jack and me and Maria. It’s a shame, though. He’s been battin’ ‘em off for years.”
She scowls at that, losing her appetite. “I’m not into green bean casserole, anyway. I think I’m gonna raid the pantry at home instead.”
She turns on her heel and heads out before he can say anything. Her footsteps match the pounding in her head.
Ellie knows that Joel is happy here, or however happy a Joel is capable of being. But she also knows that a lot of that has to do with her (it’s not conceited. He’s said it himself, the old softie). And here she was, growing up, moving on, potentially moving out. She might find the idea of Joel dating weird, but if the alternative is him being alone, that doesn’t seem fair either.
She finds herself on their porch swing, staring off into the distance, when Joel strolls up the front stairs.
“Hey kiddo,” he says, easing himself down next to her. “Tommy said you ran out of there before. Everything okay?”
She keeps pushing her feet on the floor, swinging them as she thinks of what to say. “You know you can date, right?” she eventually blurts.
The words seem to hit him like a bucket of cold water. “Excuse me?”
“Like, I hope you’re not trying to spare me, or something. I hear you’re quite the catch, even if I don’t understand it.”
He looks at her like she’s grown two heads then shakes his own. “Well I’m glad I have your permission. Not that I needed it. But I’m fine just as I am, thank you very much. Got everything I need right here,” he finishes, patting her on the knee.
Her tension headache notches up. She thinks of all he lost, what he gave up to give her this great life here. How much shit he’s taken from her these past four years. How she might still abandon him.
“I just mean…” she exhales, then starts playing with the loose thread on her sleeve. “I don’t ever want to get in the way of your life, is all.”
He doesn’t say anything, and when she finally braves a glance up at him, he’s staring at her hard.
“Ellie,” he says, “you are my life.”
The force of his love hits her, like it always does, right in the chest, warming her up from the inside out. He’s been doing this more, ever since that time in her bedroom when they talked through things after their falling out their first year here— using his words, stating things firmly so that she won’t ever doubt it.
She nods, because she knows, and she can’t say she doesn’t feel the same way. “Yeah,” she says eventually. “Yeah.” She bites her lip. “Maybe that’s not healthy though?”
He’s looking at her sideways, but she perseveres, looking anywhere but him. “Like, don’t get me wrong— never having had a… a Joel before, I never want to be without one, you know? And it feels good to know that you—that it’s the same for you. But I’m getting older. Hell, I’m 18, I’m an adult now, right?” She chuckles nervously. “I should probably think about moving out soon.”
He’s still silent, and after an insufferable minute, she looks up at him again. Sad Joel Face. Damnit.
“Is that something you’ve been thinking about?” he asks softly.
She shrugs. “I mean, people have been asking what my plans are. Jesse moved out on his own. It’s what people do.”
They keep swinging, both waiting for the other to make the next move.
“Baby…” Joel starts, then sighs, dragging his hand down his face. “I don’t ever want to get in the way of your life either. I just want you to be happy.” He catches her eye and smiles, but it’s still tinged with sadness. “And if that means you moving out, then… well then, okay. But I just wanna— you gotta know that there’s always a place for you here. Any move you make is because you wanna, not because you gotta, and definitely not because you think I want or need you to, okay? I’ll always want to be as close to you as you’ll let me be.”
There it is again, that warmth, and it reaches up to her temples and melts that nagging tension away.
“I don’t…” she swallows. “I’m not ready for that.” She nudges him. “I still haven’t had enough of this yet.”
He smiles genuinely at that, and nudges her back. “Well, thank fuck.”
She laughs and hastily wipes at the edge of her eye where a traitorous tear leaked out. “I meant what I said though, Joel. I know what I was like when we first got here, but things are different now. I used to be terrified of ending up alone. I’m not scared of that anymore. But I am scared about you being alone.”
“You don’t gotta—”
“I know, dude, okay? And I’m not going anywhere, even if I do end up moving out someday. I just want you to be open to more love in your life.” She pinches his side. “Besides, being loved by you is pretty awesome. I feel like a Joel hog.”
The edges of his eyes crinkle, and he wraps his arm around her, her head naturally falling against his shoulder.
“In that case,” he says, his voice ruffling the hair on her head, “Esther is really pretty…”
“Ew! You cannot date my riding instructor!”
Year 5
She does move out, about a year later. And even with a year to get used to the thought, Joel doesn’t.
She had started hanging out in the garage more often with her friends, but she still slept across the hall from him every night. But now, she was moving across town where a few of her friends decided to share a house together. He had never slept more than a room away from her in five years (except for the occasional sleepover and those two months after she found out the truth about Salt Lake City during their first year here, but that wasn’t exactly a banner time for their relationship). The thought of her being a 10 minute walk away instead of 10 seconds fills him with dread.
That evening after he helps her move into her new place, he only has to contemplate an empty household for two minutes before Tommy comes over with a bottle of moonshine to distract him. But that night, the silence is so deafening he can’t sleep.
On Ellie’s first full day in her new place, he stops by to see how she’s settled in. The second, he brings her a CD she forgot. The third, he makes an excuse to walk that way and gets to work on a loose plank he sees on their porch stairs before she steps out onto the porch and rolls her eyes at him (affectionately, he assumes).
He tries to cool the helicopter parent thing a bit after that, but some habits die hard, and he still habitually cracks open her bedroom door every morning as if to check in on her before waking her up. It’s only about a week in when he opens her bedroom door to once again check on her now-empty room, only to find her sleeping in it.
He blinks, scrubs his hand down his face, sure that he’s still groggy from sleep, but when he looks up again she’s still there. He moves forward to check— for his sanity, for her wellbeing, he’s not entirely sure— but the creak in the floorboards have her jolting up immediately, gasping for breath.
He hastens to the side of the bed, confident now that he didn’t imagine her, and sits down beside her. “Ellie, honey, what happened?”
She takes a moment to collect herself, and then looks pretty sheepish when she does so. “It’s stupid. Had a nightmare, couldn’t sleep, found my way here.”
His heart squeezes, both at the thought of her being in distress and the notion that she would instinctively come here to feel better. “That’s not stupid, baby. This will always be your home, you know that.” He reaches out to tuck some fallen strands of hair behind her ear. “Why didn’t you wake me?”
She shrugs, exhaling the tension in her shoulders. “I peeked in on you but you seemed pretty dead to the world, and I was already feeling better just… being here, honestly, so it didn’t make sense to wake you.” She scrunches her nose. “I could’ve been anyone, though, dude. You really must be fully deaf by now. You should start locking your door.”
He smirks. “Somehow I don’t think that will help in keeping the riffraff out,” he says, ruffling her hair as she bats him away. “But now that you’re here— you left something behind that could be helpful.”
She raises her eyebrows in question, and he gets up and goes over to her desk. He pulls open the drawer and hands her her walkie talkie.
“Oh shit,” she says, a small laugh. “I totally forgot about this, it’s been so long since we’ve used them.”
“Well, I still got mine,” he says. “And they still work, so next time you need anything, you call me, okay? Whether you need help, or if you wake up scared and just wanna talk, or even if you want me to come walk you back here. Shouldn’t be wanderin’ around these mean streets alone at night, not that I don’t want you to come here.”
She rolls her eyes at him but takes the walkie from him. “Okay. But just for emergencies.”
Her definition of “emergencies” is pretty broad.
At first, the pipe under her bathroom sink is leaking, so she asks him to come over and fix it. Then, there’s a mouse, the only type of critter that gives her the “heeby jeebies” and is therefore a threat he must eliminate for her. Next, it’s because she decides she needs to rearrange the furniture in her room immediately and none of her roommates are home.
He doesn’t complain. In fact, he delights in feeling needed.
She’s never really acted embarrassed of him, or at least not in a long time, but she does try to play it cool when her friends are around, so unless she chooses to sit with him at the canteen or seek him out at work he normally avoids bothering her out in public. When he sees her at the Founder’s Day Dance, they exchange a few words but then she waves goodbye and goes to stand by the bar on her own.
He takes it in stride, instead keeping an eye on Jack, already 4 years old, running around with his friends while Joel sits with Tommy and some guys he knows from construction work. That is, until Tommy nudges him and points in the direction of the dance floor, smiling.
Joel turns to see Ellie on the dance floor kissing Dina.
He allows himself a second to appreciate the moment and smiles as he turns back around. He’s pretty sure his kid’s had a crush on Dina since they first met, so the fact that those feelings might be reciprocated fills him with pride and happiness for Ellie.
That is, until he hears some asshole yelling at her.
Joel’s a little too deaf to make out what’s being said, but he immediately gets up and starts walking over to investigate when he hears it and sees the man, Seth-something, looking aggressively at Dina and Ellie as they walk away. So he is there to hear it loud and clear when Seth says “Just what this town needs, another loud-mouthed dyke.”
Joel’s seen red before, but he hadn’t seen quite this shade of it in a while. In seconds he finds himself in Seth’s face, taking him by the collar and dragging him until he slams him against the wall, arm to his throat. “What the fuck did you just say?”
“Joel!” He hears Ellie yell from behind him. He loosens his arm a bit from Seth’s windpipe, and then in the next second, Maria is stepping in between them. When the deep red starts fading from Joe’s vision, he sees Ellie, her expression unreadable.
He’s reminded of the first night he met her, after he beat down that guard who wanted to kill her, her eyes alight in a way that made him convinced that they understood each other implicitly, were the same in many ways.
This look doesn’t look like that.
“Ellie—“
“C’mon,” she says to Dina, to him. “This isn’t fun anymore. Let’s all just go home.”
He ignores the ache in his chest when they all step outside and they, wordlessly, walk in the opposite direction of him.
She shows up on his porch an hour later, though, looking pensive.
“Hey,” she says, voice failing at casual.
“Hey.”
She nods to the guitar that he is idly strumming in his lap. “Whatcha playing?”
He hums. “Was listening to some Fleetwood Mac, earlier. Landslide.”
“Never heard it. What’s it about?”
He looks at her, feeling exposed, and shrugs. He clears his throat. “What brings ya all the way across town at this time of night?”
She huffs and rolls her eyes. “You make it sound like I’m on the other side of the world.”
He has the good sense to not respond to that, waiting her out instead.
“I wanted to talk to you about… before.”
He puts the guitar down and meets her by the porch railing, where she’s leaning and not looking directly at him. He tries to look her over, to gauge how he’s doing with what she’s so lovingly referred to as his “Ellie-Radar,” but it seems to be failing him now.
He looks out into the distance with her and clears his throat. “You and Dina okay?”
She nods. “Yeah. Seth is a dick, but it’s whatever.”
He scoffs at that, and she raises her head to look directly at him.
“Look, I appreciate you defending me, Joel. But… you know I can handle stuff like that on my own, right?”
He absorbs that, leaning back a bit. “You shouldn’t have to,” he says, lingering anger coloring his words. “And— what do you mean, does this happen a lot?”
She sighs. “I mean in general. I can handle myself.”
Despite the five years extra, he looks at her and still sees the tiny, sassy, 14-year-old girl he grew to love as a part of him. He looks at her now, trying to take her in as she is today. “I know. Still, I’m never gonna not want to protect you, to be there for you, Ellie.”
“And I’m never gonna stop wanting you to,” she says, gently bumping into his shoulder. “But… I want to make sure I never get to needing you to. I used to have to take care of myself, and that became a big part of me, that I’m independent. And it’s been… nice, having someone else care enough that I don’t have to only rely on myself so much. But it’s nice to remember that I can, sometimes.” She tucks herself a little closer into his side, and he automatically raises his arm to place around her shoulders. “And I think we’re both a little too used to you taking care of everything for me. So I’m only gonna call on you when it’s really important from now on. Okay?”
He rests his chin on her head, breathing her in. “Okay. But when it is, don’t hesitate.”
She nuzzles a bit into his neck. “Okay.”
They stand there, comfortably silent for a few minutes, listening to the sound of a Jackson evening.
“So,” he starts, squeezing her shoulders, “you and Dina, huh? How long has this been going on?”
She huffs a laugh and ducks out of his embrace. “Pass.”
“Be careful there, kiddo, she’s your roommate, could get a little messy.”
She puts her hands over her ears playfully and starts walking backwards away from him towards the stairs. “Speaking of my room, it’s late and I’m done talking now, so I’m gonna go to it.”
He moves to follow her down the porch stairs, but stops himself. “You’ll be okay to get home, then?”
“What, in the mean streets America’s most dangerous city? I think I’ll manage.” She pauses at the bottom of the stairs and grins up at him. “But I’ll radio you when I get there.”
“Okay.”
She does radio him when she gets home. It’s enough to settle him into a deep sleep.
Year 6
The year Ellie stops being a teenager, she takes stock for the first time of how much has changed.
She used to do that a lot when comparing her life in the QZ and then their life on the road to what they had now in Jackson. But in the five years they’ve been here, things have become nearly unrecognizable from where they started.
Those first few months she’d spent mostly in bed or at home with Joel. Now, she lives on the other side of town with her friends where she shares a room with her girlfriend, she spends most of her time patrolling or with the horses or teaching art classes at the school. Joel, on the other hand, lives across town and does his contractor shit and is often put on different patrol routes and has started to go to bed a lot earlier than he used to (the last two times she tried to have a movie night at 8, he was conked out by 8:15, not that he’d ever admit it. Fucking weirdo.). They’ve kept family Sundays sacred, but between her schedule and Joel’s, it occurs to her one Sunday that she somehow hadn’t seen him in a full week.
Which is why she decides to pop in on him when she finds herself with a free morning.
“Joel?” she hollers when she enters the house. It’s 8am, so she’s surprised when she doesn’t immediately see him downstairs, and there’s no sign of a Joel Morning that she had become so accustomed to over the years (the smell of coffee, something cooking for breakfast since he wakes up hungry but avoids going to the canteen in the morning because it takes him a few hours to even get to Joel-levels of sociable). She strains to hear any movement upstairs in case he’s getting ready, but she doesn’t, and the hairs on the back of her head stick up.
“Joel?” She yells once more, now at the base of the stairs.
“Ellie?” she hears in response, muffled but strained, and she races up the stairs two at a time to find him, senses now on high alert.
She bursts into his room in such a rush that she nearly stumbles over him where he’s lying face up on the floor.
“Holy shit, Joel,” her breath quickens as her mind starts to run rampant with scenarios. Stroke? Heart attack? Did he get stabbed?
Stop the bleeding, hold pressure, I can’t do this without you—
She’s hovering over him now, brain so fuzzy that it takes a moment for her to register Joel’s voice.
“—breathe, kiddo, I’m alright, just take a breath.”
Her vision clears a bit from where it momentarily went blurry and she tries to register his condition. He looks… okay, but then—
“What the fuck is going on, man? Why are you on the floor?”
He sighs and grunts. “Don’t laugh.”
Laughing is the furthest thing from her mind at the moment, so she just stares at him expectantly.
He shifts, grunts. “I got up in the middle of the night to get some water, and I tripped, and when I fell I think I threw out my back, so now I’m kinda… stuck.”
She takes that in for a beat, and then, predictably, bursts into laughter.
“Nice,” he says, rolling his eyes. “Get it outta your system.”
She tries to quiet it down, but the laughter at this point is the definition of hysterical, having already run the gamut of human emotions in the preceding minute and nearly having a PTSD flashback in the process.
“I’m sorry,” she says, taking in a deep breath between guffaws, “I’m sorry. I’m just— that’s a relief, dude.”
“Great, can you help an old man out now, kid? I’m already humiliated enough.”
And maybe she really is maturing, because that sobers her up. “Shit happens, man. Don’t sweat it. C’mon, let’s get you off the floor.”
It takes a few minutes to carefully maneuver him up and onto the bed (“Damn, you’re heavier than I remember, old man. Jackson’s been treating you too good” “I think I preferred being stuck on the floor”) and once she gets him settled she goes about making them breakfast and gathering supplies to help his back. Thirty minutes later, they’re both eating breakfast in his bed, him propped up on some pillows against the headboard and her opposite him at the foot of it.
“Thanks for your help, kiddo,” he says after a few minutes. “You don’t have to babysit me all day.”
She shrugs. “I don’t have anything better to do. That’s why I came over in the first place.”
“I’m flattered, as always, that I’m your last choice for avoiding boredom.”
She huffs out a laugh and watches him as he finishes his coffee. “Hey, Joel?”
“Hm?”
“How long were you down there for?”
He looks down into his mug, as if avoiding her eyes. He shrugs. “I dunno, not that long.”
“You said you woke up in the middle of the night. So you were down there for hours.”
He shrugs again. “Would’ve been able to get myself up eventually. Or Tommy would’ve checked in at some point, nosy bastard.”
She puts down her half-eaten toast, appetite lost. “Why didn’t you radio me?”
“Couldn’t reach it.”
“Would you have, though? If you had it on you?”
He sighs, looks up at her, all Soft Joel Face. “It’s not that big a deal, Ellie. People tweak their backs all the time. And, besides, it’s not your job to worry about me.”
Her body reacts to that immediately, heart rate quickening and face reddening. “That’s such fucking bullshit, Joel. Somebody’s gotta be worrying about you. And it’s so fucking rude of you to think that I don’t or shouldn’t. I thought we were past that.”
He shifts on the bed, as if trying to move to reach out to her, but he winces at the attempt. “Baby—“
“No , Joel. I’m gonna worry about you and you’re gonna worry about me, and that’s the deal. What if I hadn’t come by this morning? What if something worse had happened and it had been hours before anybody knew?”
She feels herself getting worked up, in a way that feels foreign and yet all too familiar. She’s brought back to the present by the press of Joel’s foot against her thigh, and when she looks up he’s watching her worriedly and breathing in and out deeply, in the way he used to so she would remember to do the same. She does so, but feels the tears prick her eyes against her will.
“Ellie,” Joel says softly. “Can you— can you come over here?”
He looks all kinds of distraught at her distress, and she feels 14 again, like in the days after Silver Lake or when they first got to Jackson, feeling lost and like Joel was the only thing in the world that might help her feel found.
She crawls over ungracefully until she’s sitting next to him against the headboard. He tries to lift his arm around her but gives out a pained grunt, so instead she leans her head against his shoulder and gently places a hand on his chest, like she did on the floor of that basement in Colorado, the only way she could feel remotely, relatively calm.
“I’m sorry I scared you,” he says quietly, chest rumbling under her ear.
“It’s not just that,” she says, sniffling. “I came by because I realized on Sunday that I hadn’t seen you in a week. I didn’t even notice it when it was happening.”
He rubs his head a bit against hers. “That’s okay, babygirl. You’re just living your life. That’s the point of all of this, remember?”
“Yeah, but…” she pushes herself up to get a better look at him. “What if it keeps happening like that? Like, what if it keeps getting longer and longer without seeing each other? The only times we’ve been apart since we met were… bad. I don’t want that. I don’t wanna wake up one day and you’re just…” she trails off, not daring to finish her thought. “We take care of each other, right? I’ve been pretty shitty on my side of things, and I don’t wanna be anymore.”
He sighs, wincing slightly in pain as he reaches up and strokes her hair, just like he always does when she’s upset. “You ain’t done nothin’ wrong, sweetheart. But if you’re worried about all that, why don’t we make a plan to see each other more regularly, yeah? A time that’s just for us.”
She smiles despite herself, thinking of all the nights they used to spend together, content with each other’s company. “Yeah, that sounds good.” She hangs her head. “But also, can we, like… make sure that we hear from each other every day? Like if we don’t see each other, just use the walkie to check in, make sure we’re good?”
It’s silent for a moment, and when she looks up, his Soft Joel Face is back on full display. “Yeah, baby. I’d love that.”
“And maybe you should start keeping the walkie on you at all times. I can even find another beaded chain to hang it around your neck, it’ll be cute.”
“Don’t push your luck, kid.”
They settle into comfortable silence after that, and Ellie starts to pick at the rest of her discarded breakfast.
“Uh, Ellie?”
“Yeah?”
“I really gotta pee.”
She chuckles, but she gets up to help him. Because they take care of each other.
Year 7
Jackson has a flag system. White means Jackson residents. Yellow means strangers. Red means that someone on patrol got hurt.
Joel made a habit of hovering by Jackson’s gates at the end of Ellie’s patrol shifts, which is why when he sees a red flag he immediately has a sinking feeling in his gut.
That feeling is validated all too soon when he sees Ellie, slumped over in front of someone else on a horse, covered in blood.
He runs over but they’re already putting her onto a stretcher by the time he gets there. “What the hell happened?” he shouts, and a fellow patroller (Doug? Darren? He’s slowly starting to forget everyone’s names) comes over to him, hands up in a placating gesture.
“She’s been shot. We got back as fast as we could.”
Joel is already pushing past him to run after the stretcher making its way over to the clinic. “Get Tommy Miller!” he shouts behind him, singularly focused on one goal.
Despite his hollering, they don’t let him follow Ellie into the room when they get there. “You have to let them do their work,” one of the clinic attendants says, and he finds himself on a waiting room chair with his head between his knees, struggling to breathe.
“Joel?”
He jolts up, hoping it’s somebody coming with news, but it’s Tommy, Dina in tow.
Dina. He’d totally forgotten to have someone fetch her too, even though she’s been his daughter’s girlfriend for two years. He feels, as ever, grateful to Tommy for keeping a straight head.
“What the hell happened?” Tommy asks, breathless, Dina shaking beside him.
Joel gets up and paces. “I don’t know. Nobody will tell me a goddamned thing. All I know is she was shot.”
He senses Dina sink into one of the waiting room chairs and has the thought that he should go to her, comfort her, that that’s what Ellie would want. But he can’t be much of a comfort to her when he himself feels like he was shot.
We’re not sick!
He squeezes his eyes shut at the memory and feels Tommy’s hand grip his shoulder. Joel turns to look at him, and they share a look of understanding.
This won’t be like last time. It can’t be. He wouldn’t survive it, this time.
Finally, after what feels like an eternity but is likely only another few minutes, one of the medics comes out of the room. The three of them snap to attention immediately.
The medic removes her mask, blood smattered across her smock that Joel tries not to dwell on.
“She’s stable,” she says, blissfully getting straight to the point. “The gunshot went through and through her left abdomen, and luckily it seems to have missed anything important, but she’s lost a lot of blood. She’s unconscious now, but if she wakes up and the wound remains uninfected, she should be okay. But in the meantime, we have to keep the room as sterile as possible— there’s been some sort of bacteria around, we’ve had a lot of infections recently that we’re trying to stymie. Only one visitor at a time, and clean hands and a mask.”
Joel automatically steps forward, but he feels Dina also move forward beside him, and he forces himself to stop, turning to her.
“Dina, you go ahead. She’ll wanna see you when she wakes up.”
Dina shakes her head, but then looks behind him towards Ellie’s room, face desperate. “Are— are you sure?”
He nods, not trusting himself to say anything, and breathes out slowly as he watches her scrub in to enter the room.
“She’s stable,” Tommy repeats from behind him, as if to reassure both himself and Joel. “She’ll be okay. Are you?”
Joel huffs and walks back over to the chairs, slowly lowering himself back down into one. “Don’t ask stupid questions, Tommy.”
“Joel—”
“I just need a minute, okay?”
He focuses on his breathing, the edges around his vision having gone blurry and a faint ringing buzzing in his good ear. He sees Tommy nod in his peripheral vision. “Then I’m gonna go get someone to send a message to update Maria— she needed to find someone to stay with Jack before she headed over. I’ll bring you some water while I’m at it, okay?”
Joel grunts. He doesn’t mean to be an ass, especially because he knows that Tommy must be feeling some kind of way as well, but he is barely keeping it together himself.
This won’t be like last time.
Tommy’s back a few minutes later (he thinks. Time feels like a relative concept at the moment) with water as he promised, and some time later Maria comes in too, sitting on the other side of Joel and placing a warm hand on his shoulder, but otherwise keeping silent vigil. He’s not sure how much time passes until Dina comes out, pulling down her mask, wearing a watery smile.
“She just woke up,” she says, smiling. “I’m gonna go get the medic, but, she’s asking for you,” she finishes, turning to speak directly to Joel.
His heart leaps and he once again steps forward, but then stops himself. “Dina, I don’t—”
“Mr. Miller, she’s asking for you ,” she repeats. “Go.”
So he does.
Once he sterilizes, he enters the room and pauses for a beat, taking it in.
She’s still so small , lying there on the bed, covered up with wires. He hears the machines beeping steadily next to her, and he is immediately transported back to that operating room in Salt Lake, needing to reassure himself that he made it in time to save her.
“Joel?” he hears her ask quietly, and he’s back in the present and at her side in two strides.
“Yeah, baby, it’s me. I’m here.” He settles into the chair that Dina left by her bed. “You’re alright, babygirl.”
He reaches out and pets her hair, and she turns towards his hand, fluttering her eyes open. “I got shot,” she says plainly.
“I heard.”
“That was a dumb thing to do.”
“Can’t say I’m a fan.”
“You should see the other guy.”
“If I do, I’d just kill him.”
“Too late.”
He breathes out a chuckle, and she joins him, but then winces in pain. His brows immediately furrow in concern. “What hurts, baby?”
She swallows effortfully. “Everything, dude. I just got shot, you know.”
He rolls his eyes affectionately. “Don’t remind me.”
He grabs her some water and helps her sip on it, but then hangs back as the medics come in and check her over. He practices his breathing as they do so, trying to get into a place where he can take care of her, rather than needing to be taken care of himself. He gets to as good a place as is possible for him given the circumstances, just as the medics confirm that things look good so far and once again clear out of the room.
He settles back beside her and resumes stroking her hair, a tried and tested comfort technique that they’ve perfected over the years.
“What happened, Ellie?” he whispers, not wanting to know but also needing to at the same time.
She squeezes her eyes shut. “It was an ambush. Some guy—” she breaks off, starting to tremble. “He got the jump on me. He was pinning me down.”
She doesn’t need to say more than that for him to know what’s in her head, because it’s in his too. His body goes cold, and his free hand reaches for hers, gripping it tightly.
“I was able to get away and reach for my gun, shot him in the head, but— guess he got to me first,” she says, peering down at her bandaged up stomach.
He takes it in now, too, and thinks back to a bleeding bullet wound in a dark field, his hand trying to stem the ceaseless flow of blood. He involuntarily leans forward and kisses her hair. “You’re okay, babygirl,” he says into the strands, as he breathes in her scent. “You’re okay.”
She starts to shake harder, sobs wrenching free, and he holds her as close as he dares, his own tears seeping into her hair as he continues to murmur sweet nothings, none of which are good enough but all that he has to offer.
Eventually her sobs slow down, and he slowly pulls away to peer down at her. “Everyone’s waiting outside, worried sick about you too. Want me to bring back Dina?”
She sniffles, and says “Can we wait a bit longer?”
He tries to quell the twitch in his lip, but she catches it, tone teasing. “Don’t be so cocky, old man. It’s just that… you’ve been there for all of it, ya know? I just… it’s more than just the bullet wound, right now, and I don’t have the energy to explain myself.”
“I’ll stay as long as you want,” he responds, settling back in to hold her. “Always. But… when you do have the energy, it might be worth explaining to Dina, yeah? She loves you. And it ain’t easy to have someone you love get hurt like this. She’ll want to be there for you.”
Ellie sniffles again and closes her eyes. “I will.”
Her breath starts to even out as he resumes stroking her hair, and he thinks she’s fallen asleep until she mumbles “Can you sing that song I like?”
Cryptic, but he knows exactly the one she’s referring to. So he does.
“I’ve got to admit it’s getting better, it’s getting better all the time…”
Year 8
She notices it a lot faster this time around.
The first sign was pretty obvious. Joel was supposed to come over for dinner, and after approximately 23 minutes of patiently waiting (or impatiently, Dina would say) and an unanswered walkie-call, she tries not to run all the way over to his house to check up on him, convinced that she would once again find him in a bad way. But when she arrives out of breath and barges into the house, he is in the living room, eating a sandwich and watching TV.
“Ellie? What’s up, everything okay?”
She runs into the room and frantically searches him up and down. “You’re okay?”
He puts down his plate. “Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?”
“Why didn’t you answer your walkie?”
“Didn’t hear it, I must’ve left it upstairs.”
Her anxiety quickly morphs into rage, and she walks over and punches him in the shoulder.
“Hey, what the hell, kid?”
“I should be asking you the same question!” she retorts. “If nothing’s wrong with you then what the hell are you doing standing me up?”
He looks genuinely perplexed. “What are you talking about?”
She raises her eyebrows and stares at him expectantly. “Dinner, dumbass.”
His confusion melts into shock and then shame. “Shit. I totally forgot. I’m sorry baby.”
She finds that hard to believe, as they had discussed it more than once, but as she watches him shuffle around to walk back to her house with her for dinner, her disbelief turns to a funny feeling in her gut.
He… forgot.
Joel was always so on top of shit, this seemed particularly odd. Often, the only thing he forgets is his glasses (even when they’re hanging around his neck), but she always thought that was a “convenient” forgetting, because he was embarrassed to wear them (especially because of what they looked like, surely, and yet he never tried to get a different pair).
The funny feeling sharpens into something more knowing the next time she pops in for a visit, only to smell smoke.
“Joel?” she shouts out, before following the scent to the kitchen, where two pieces of toast are completely burnt on the stove that is on, no Joel in sight.
She runs to turn it off and is looking for something to discard the smoldering pieces of toast with when Joel comes walking leisurely down the stairs.
“Ellie?”
“Joel, what the fuck?”
He seems to notice what happened and runs down the rest of the steps to join her in the kitchen. She leans back and accidentally touches the too hot pan and yanks her hand away when it burns, and she feels Joel spring into action beside her and pull her over to the sink to run it under cold water. After a beat, she looks over at him, but sees him concentrating really hard on her hand.
She furrows her brow. “Joel?”
He sighs. “I thought I’d warm up some bread and make you a sandwich for when you came over today but then I must’ve… gotten distracted. Sorry. Burn doesn’t look too bad, how’s it feel?”
She pulls her arm back from the sink and watches him as he studiously avoids her gaze. “I’m fine.”
But she’s not sure if Joel is.
She asks Tommy about it on her way home, to see if he’s noticed anything weird with Joel forgetting stuff, but he doesn't seem too concerned. (“ A bit, sure, like he’ll forget an important tool at home or something when he’s working, but that’s pretty normal as you get older.”) But Joel always told Ellie to listen to her gut, so the next time she sees him, she squares her shoulders and brings it up.
“Joel,” she says, after helping him finish painting the table he’s been fixing. He grunts in acknowledgement as he puts his tools away, and she takes that as her go ahead. “I’ve noticed you starting to forget stuff lately, and it’s freaking me out.”
He pauses with his back to her, but he seems tense. He turns his head to the side to address her. “No need to freak out, Ellie. I’m fine. Just getting older is all.”
“Okay but…” she sidles up next to him, leaning against the counter as finishes closing up his toolkit. “What if it’s not, though? Can you go to the clinic to get checked out, just in case?”
He sighs and then turns towards her. “Ellie, I’m fine. Besides, even if I wasn’t, which I am ,” he says as he places a hand on her shoulder that started to creep up in anxiety, “they don’t exactly have the things we used to to determine that kinda thing, let alone much to help.”
“But can you at least try?” she asks again. “For me?”
In the past he may have argued more, but the years have seemed to soften him, or at least just want to make sure he doesn’t add to her distress. “Okay, babygirl. I’ll go.”
He’s right, though. They do what they can to check on any cognitive issues, but he leaves the visit with a clear bill of health, or at least a “we can’t see anything wrong with you so not much we can do but hope you’re not developing dementia or something.”
Still, she can’t get it out of her mind. Every clumsy moment, every forgotten name of a town member he interacts with enough to know, or lost piece of memory when he’s telling a story, adds to the feeling of dread in her stomach.
She’s been visiting consistently, every Wednesday night since that incident two years ago when he hurt his back. Sundays were still family days, but Wednesdays were Joel and Ellie nights, a way to ensure she got her fix of just him at least once a week.
They would typically pass the time playing guitar or cards on the porch (Porch Time, she calls it), but more and more she finds herself asking about his life Before. After his initial ban on talking about personal histories when they first met, they had stuck to mostly generic history. Over the course of the past few years, he would sometimes tell stories about Sarah or other bits and pieces of his past would come out, but there were still 56 years of life she didn’t know much about.
She thought she was being subtle, when she would start asking more and more about his personal life every Wednesday, but Tommy had always joked she was as “subtle as an Ellie-phant.”
“Ellie,” Joel says about three weeks in after she asks several follow-up questions about the time he was in the school musical in 5th grade while they’re playing Go Fish, “where’s all this sudden interest in my past coming from?”
She shrugs, going for unbothered. “It’s just weird to me that after all the time we’ve spent together, there’s so much we still don’t know about our past lives. Plus, you’re pretty boring, so diving into your memories is as good a way to pass the time as any.”
He watches her for a moment, face contemplative. “Is this about you thinking I’m losin’ my marbles?”
She looks back at her cards. “I literally have no idea what the fuck that means.”
His hand covers the cards and pushes them down until they’re looking each other in the face, Serious Joel Face on full display. “Are you asking me about my memories because you’re worried I’m gonna lose ‘em?”
She looks off to the side to compose herself before looking back. “Yeah, I guess I am. But, also, because… I’m worried I’m gonna lose them.” She bites her lip and puts the cards down on the porch swing in between where they both sit on either end. “It’s like… we’ve built a life here, and every time we make a new memory of it, there’s a piece of it here to remind us, ya know? But we don’t have that from Before. And I don’t have it from before you, even. So, like… I’m worried that my chance to know anything about that is slipping away.”
Sad Joel Face awaits her when she meets his eyes again, and he sighs, placing his palm on the top of her head. “Baby, I’m just getting older, and that means that I’ll keep forgetting things here and there. But if it’s important to you, I’ll tell you anything about me you wanna know, okay? There’s just one thing I ask in return.”
She nods at him to continue.
“For every memory you get from me, I want one from you. Because you’re right. There’s too many years that I don’t know enough about from your life. And I want to know them. Deal?”
She agrees, and it all sort of evolves from there. They start using their Wednesdays to trade stories, and Ellie starts to sketch them, at first idly but eventually with purpose. So they start to write them down too, everything kept in a large red leather notebook that they now add to, religiously, every week. Not all their stories make it in— some, like some of Ellie’s less savory recountings of her time in FEDRA school, end instead with Joel tugging her to his side and planting a kiss in her hair— but they do make it to each other.
Year 9
She’s barely 23 when she tells him she and Dina are gonna get married.
They’d had another scare, a flu that swept through town and nearly sent Dina to death’s door, and on top of Ellie getting shot only a year or so earlier, it really solidified things for them. ( “I don’t wanna take any of this for granted,” Ellie had said when she’d told him. “I don’t want to waste any more time, ya know?”)
Weddings are a bit like everything else in Jackson: more informal and practical than they used to be, but rooted in tradition. They have a council instead of a courthouse, and people can basically just declare themselves married or adopted or whatever as long as all parties seem to be on board, but residents still tend to practice a traditional American wedding ceremony: meet at the end of the aisle, exchange vows and rings. Joel had offered to host the whole thing in his backyard and had set to work putting together a chuppah to honor Dina’s Jewish heritage, while Maria was in charge of the food and reception. Jack was called upon to be ring bearer, with Jesse and Dina’s sister Talia standing up there with them.
Dina and Ellie had asked Joel to walk them on either arm down the aisle, and it took everything in him to stop himself from crying at just the request, or else he’d never stop.
Everything came together easily enough, and Ellie even came to Joel’s to stay over the night before ( “It’s bad luck to see the bride before the wedding!” Dina had said. “Don’t you think we’ve had enough bad luck to last a lifetime?”).
It was almost surreal for Joel, waking up with his daughter in the room across from his, making them both breakfast, trying not to smile at her typical morning grumpiness.
How could his baby be getting married when she’s still just a kid?
The morning flies by after that, and before he knows it he’s with Ellie in her old room, helping her with the bowtie she’s decided to wear with her suit for the occasion. They’ve fallen into their comfortable silence, the sounds of her old “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” CD playing softly in the background from the stereo she left behind.
“Hey, listen,” she says after a few moments, watching his fingers work on the tie. “You know that part where they have you say ‘I take you,’ and then say the person’s full name?”
“Uh, yeah?” he replies absently as he straightens out the bowtie, now tied to perfection.
“I, uh— Dina is planning to call me Ellie Williams Miller. And if we do that, we were thinking she would go by Dina Adler Miller, from now on.” She looks up at him. “Is that, uh, cool?”
He keeps her eye for a moment, time suspended, and then drops his hands from her finished bowtie and bursts into tears.
“Oh fuck, Joel. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—“
“No, babygirl, there’s nothing to be sorry for,” he says, a smile cracking through the tears. “I’m just… feeling some big feelings right now, but they’re all good.” He pats her cheek then rests his hands on her shoulders. “I love that you’re both Millers. Makes me feel… well, I’m so happy for you, baby, but there’s a part of a father that can’t help but feel sad when their little girl goes off and starts a family of her own. But I guess it’s really more of our family growing, huh?” He takes one of his hands and swipes roughly at his wet face. “Just what the world needs, more Millers.”
She smiles a watery smile of her own. “Yeah. Our family just includes Dina now. And I’m glad that you love her too.” She busies herself removing some lint from Joel’s own suit jacket. “Just— you can’t love her as much as you do Sarah and I, okay? It would make me insanely jealous.”
He laughs, always pleasantly surprised at how casual mentions of Sarah now warm his heart rather than stop it. “I do love Dina, but nobody can ever take the place of you or Sarah.” He places his hand on his chest. “You each got your own heart right there next to mine, remember?”
A wistful look passes over her, and he can tell that she is thinking back on their conversation in this very room nearly 8 years ago now. “Yeah, I remember.”
He nods at her, and she nods back, but they both just look at each other with dopey smiles, as if trying to preserve this moment forever.
“C’mon then, soon-to-be Mrs . Ellie Williams Miller. Can’t be late to your own wedding, or Dina will kill you. Happy wife, happy life.”
“Ugh, please don’t call me Mrs., that’s not gonna be a thing. Besides, what do you know about having a happy wife?”
“Nothin’, that’s why you gotta learn from your old man’s mistakes.”
“Is that why you make so many of them?”
He shoves her playfully out the door in front of him, but doesn’t respond. He has made a lot of mistakes, but he must have done one thing right to still have Ellie here beside him.
Year 10
It feels kind of fitting, in a way, that his heart would be what failed him. Like it was tired from overuse. Ellie’s never seen anybody love as hard as Joel Miller does.
She finds out after a knock at the door, which already sets her on edge because most of the people that come visit her and Dina have the kind of relationship with them in which they just let themselves in. Her edge turns to dread as soon as she sees Tommy with his own version of Sad Face on, hat in his hand.
Ellie’s stomach sinks, immediately knowing this is about Joel. “Where is he?”
Tommy sighs. “He’s okay, Ellie, but he’s at the clinic. He had a- a heart attack.”
She’s already sprinting out the door by the end of his sentence.
Joel’s mortality has been a ticking time bomb in the back of her head ever since Colorado. They made it out of that by the skin of their teeth, and ever since then she’s been waiting for their luck to run out. He’d had that bad accident their first year here, and has remained remarkably unscathed since then, so she thought maybe they’d been in the clear. That she could just get used to the idea of him getting older.
But getting older has its own risks, doesn’t it?
He’s sleeping when she arrives, but it doesn’t stop her from crawling right into bed with him, finding her hand right over his heart like it was all those years ago and where it ends up any time she’s scared of losing him.
She’s not sure how much time passes with her in that bed waiting for him to wake up. She vaguely recalls Tommy and Maria being there, and Dina coming by to check on her, and the medical team coming in and out of the room. She was in a foggy haze but must have fallen asleep, because she wakes up to him stroking her hair, and she can almost pretend that he’s comforting her after a bad dream.
“Shh,” he coos, “it’s okay, babygirl. I’m gonna be just fine.”
She slowly raises her head to face his, and immediately tears up when she does so. “Joel, your heart literally tried to kill you.”
He chuckles softly. “Yeah. But it didn’t. You’re stuck with me, kid.”
That brings up all sorts of feelings and memories for her that she doesn’t know what to do with, so she just buries her head back into his neck and lets herself get lulled back to sleep, as if she’s the one whose heart just broke.
They send him home the next day with instructions that Ellie writes down on a small notepad, because she WILL be taking care of him thank you very much. In the past he would have fought her, but he knows better than that by now, and just sighs as she goes into Caregiver Ellie mode.
Caregiver Ellie has honed her skills over the years, and with the help of Tommy, Maria, and Dina, she’s got a good routine down to take care of him. For Joel’s part, he resignedly lets her fuss over him, and only barely complains or protests about it, which she takes as a win.
On the sixth day, though, he says “You don’t have to be here 24/7, Ellie. I’ll never be able to repay you for taking care of me, but Dina must be missing you at home. At this point I’ll be fine without round the clock supervision, I promise you.”
She pauses where she was putting away his freshly laundered clothes into his drawer. “She won’t have to miss me for much longer, Joel,” she says, trying to formulate the words she hadn’t yet prepared for this conversation. “She’s actually started getting our stuff together to move over here.”
She waits a beat, trying to interpret his silence, before turning around to face him. He looks stunned.
“Ellie, what the hell are you sayin’ right now?”
She takes a deep breath and then walks over to sit on the side of his bed. “I’m saying that we’re gonna move in, Joel. We can take the garage if you’ve gotten used to having your own space, but this is happening. Think of it as how you can repay me.”
His face is going through all different kinds of contortions, and she can already hear all of his conflicting thoughts playing out in her own head. She just waits him out, exercising a patience she’s never known before.
“Baby, you know I’m gonna be fine, right? I don’t need you changing your whole life for me.”
She resists the urge to shake him, and instead takes a page out of his Jackson playbook, staring at him hard and declaring herself firmly. “Joel, this is more for me than it is for you.”
She lets that sink in for a few moments, then starts playing with the comforter. “I used to be scared of ending up alone. And then it was of you being alone. But now I’m just scared of… time. Of never having enough of it. Because even if we get to spend all of it together, one day time will take you away. And it’s not fair, because we already got robbed of nearly fourteen years together, ya know? So I just want to spend as much time with you as we have left. And it better be a hell of a lot of time, okay?”
When she looks him over again, she can practically see how overwhelmed he’s feeling by his Joel-thoughts and emotions. She crawls up so that she’s laying down beside him, and he slips his hand into hers wordlessly. She squeezes it in response.
They both stare up at the ceiling, lost in thought, before she breaks the silence again.
“Do you ever think about what would’ve happened if we met sooner?”
He doesn’t respond right away, but she feels him grip her hand more firmly. “All the time.” He turns his head to look at her, eyes glistening. “I wish I could’ve been around to take care of you, to protect you.”
“Me too,” she replies softly. She wishes he had been there to give her the love and safety she’s known since meeting him, but she also wishes more than anything to have been there to take care of him in the two decades during which he was struggling after Sarah’s death. “And then I think about… I think about what would’ve happened if I had never met you. Like maybe you didn’t run into Marlene when you did, or maybe you did but didn’t agree to take me, or left me when you found out I was infected.”
He turns away from her, looking back to the ceiling. “I try never to think about that,” he says carefully. “But one thing I know for sure is that I wouldn’t be here without you. In every sense of the phrase.”
And that’s a thought she can’t contemplate. Which is the whole point, really, isn’t it?
She turns onto her side to face him, head propped up on her hand. “I’m not doing this cause I feel like I have to, Joel. I want to.” She swallows thickly. “You once said you wanted to be as close to me as I’d let you be. And I’m telling you, I want to be as close as you’ll let me, too. So will you? Let me?”
He’s still staring at the ceiling, but she can see the tears gently rolling down his face. She pokes him. “Besides, if you refuse, considering how much you love me, I’ll assume that you just don’t like Dina, and then we’d have a fucking problem.”
He chuckles, and finally looks at her. “Dina is definitely not the problem. The problem is that I only JUST got things tidy in the years since you moved out, that’s how much shit you leave in your wake wherever you go.”
She snorts, but her stomach, which she hadn’t even realized had been in knots since the start of this conversation, starts to relax.
“Well you’re in luck,” she says with faux enthusiasm, “I think picking up after me can count as the ‘gentle but consistent exercise’ that the clinic recommended.”
“Yeah, lucky me.”
And he smiles as if he does feel lucky, and she joins him because she does too.
It’s bittersweet for them to see each other get older, when what they never had was time. But growing older is a privilege not granted to many anymore. She’ll hold onto it until their luck runs out.