Work Text:
In his many years of taking on jobs for too-little pay, there’s one assignment he’s never worked. The other workers call it the “preschool brigade,” the FEDRA-school kids sent out into the field for what they call “work experience” to get them used to the real world. Really, it’s a behavioral tool, he knows, an example of “better act right or you’ll end up like these poor fuckers when you’re grown.”
He's deliberately never worked on one, uninterested in being put in charge of a kid doing a dangerous job they shouldn’t be. The kids that get sent on the preschool brigade are the ones FEDRA doesn’t necessarily care about getting back, after all, and there are things even adults shouldn’t be doing, not as untrained as most of them are.
(He’d been on a job one day shoring up a section of the wall when someone else’s assigned FEDRA kid had gotten trapped underneath rubble when a support beam was knocked loose. In his dreams, he still hears the girl’s terrified cries, the way she screamed for help until the rocks shifted further to squeeze the air out of her, so that she died with her mouth open in a silent scream, no matter how fast he and two others he just knows were parents before by their grim-faced determination tried to dig her out.)
And then comes the day one of the FEDRA guards assigned to his work detail that leads over a sullen-looking girl, who kicks rocks the entire way.
“I don’t take on kids,” he says flatly when they stop in front of him, resolutely not looking at the girl. There’s extra compensation in exchange for taking them on, he knows, but it’s not worth the hit to his conscience to be stuck with a kid tagging along after him if they get hurt, and this girl looks so small he already knows she’s going to be on wiring duty, crawling through dark pipes alone while she’s guided through.
“Well no one else wants her,” the guard says flatly, and he sees the girl flinch, just the slightest bit, finally drawing him to look at her. She meets his eyes directly, with a confidence that’s slightly impressive from someone as small as her, but there’s a wariness there, too, like she’s sizing him up as a threat.
She’s also clearly taken a hell of a beating recently, so the reaction isn’t that surprising.
“FEDRA’s beating kids now?” He asks the guard, aiming for casual and almost making it. It’s not a surprise, not really, but the bruising on the girl’s face and what he can see of her arms seems pretty fucking excessive.
“This one’s impossible,” the guard says, rolling his eyes. “She’s a liar by nature and violent as hell. Impossible to discipline, too. Solitary, electrostaff, ration withholding. You name it, we tried it. None of it works.”
For her part, the girl is staring silently into the distance now, every inch of her clearly screaming defiance.
But not violence, he notes, even when she’s being shit talked right in front of her.
For all of her clear anger, hitting doesn’t seem to be her go-to.
“Well then I certainly don’t want her,” he says, and he sees the girl’s jaw clench as she tries very hard to keep her face perfectly neutral.
“Well,” the guard says, crossing his arms across his chest. “It’s working with you, or she goes back in solitary with no rations today. She doesn’t work, she doesn’t eat.”
The girl looks to him, then, just from the corner of her eye, and despite his best effort to ignore it, he sees the little plea there.
She might be a delinquent, but she’s also a hungry kid.
“Fine,” he says, cursing his own foolishness even while he does so, and the guard scribbles a note on his clipboard. “But I’d better see those extra ration vouchers at the end of this.”
*
“I outrank you,” the girl says the moment the guard is away. “You’re a civilian. I’m a FEDRA recruit. I’m basically your supervisor”
Something about the immediate defensiveness of the statement tells him this isn’t just a kid trying to one-up. This is a kid trying to remind him that there are potentially consequences for hurting her.
He raises an eyebrow.
“Ma’am, yes ma’am,” he says with a mocking salute, but it makes her lose a bit of her ready to run tension.
*
“So, how’d you become the Don Corlione of FEDRA school?” He asks when they’ve been directed to the line of piping they’re responsible for, and she peeks her head around a turn in the tunnels to give him a look. These are pretty wide, and she’s a little thing, so she could walk around in a crouch if she felt like it, but for now she’s on her hands and knees.
“I have no fucking clue what you’re talking about,” she says, as she catches the roll of wire he sends her way, keeping hold of one end so it unrolls.
“Must have pulled some stunt to get handed off to this shit,” he says, catching a pair of wirecutters when she tosses it to him and sending a pair of pliers back to her.
She mumbles too low for him to hear, as she groans, trying to pull a bracket open to thread the wire through, and he debates a moment before he prompts her to repeat it.
“I said,” she says, louder, looking to him briefly to confirm he can hear her “That a kid named Carlos has a big fucking mouth and doesn’t know when to stop talking.”
“And I’m sure he’d say the same about you,” he says dryly, and she glares at him.
“Yeah, well, a big mouth goes over better when daddy’s a high up FEDRA agent,” she says, throwing a rock out of her way with more force than she needs to use, strictly speaking. “His word versus mine, and a kid’s word doesn’t mean shit when she doesn’t have parents to back her up.”
There’s bitterness in her voice that makes her sound older than she is, and he doesn’t have a response for the statement.
“I’m Ellie,” she calls after a while, when they’ve gone through one spool of wire and are working on the second. He’s securing the ends in place while she finishes up getting them through the pipes, and they had fallen into silence except for when he gives her an instruction or sends her a different tool.
“Didn’t ask,” he calls back.
All that echoes back to him after that is grumbling.
Even without the actual words, though, he knows the cadence of a teenager talking shit when he hears it.
*
On the next assignment, he sees Ellie coming before he sees the guard, she’s beelining to him so fast. He raises his eyebrows, but he doesn’t say anything when she reaches him, and her shoulders drop the slightest bit of tension when she’s at his side.
“You’ve got her again,” the guard says, a woman this time who seems more bored than anything else as she scribbles away on a clipboard. “You’re the first worker she’s been assigned to who hasn’t had complaints.”
It’s on the tip of his tongue to fuck with her by saying that he does, but the careful way Ellie is watching him keeps him quiet. It must be a relief to spend a day next to someone who doesn’t backhand her just because she has a smart mouth. She’s a good enough worker, and it was faster, having a second pair of hands, and the assignment they’re on today is more wire-laying, nothing excessively dangerous. He can handle some babysitting.
“Fine,” he says, and then he lightly tosses a bag of parts to Ellie, who staggers a bit under the weight but keeps hold. “C’mon, kid.”
She almost trips over herself with how fast she follows.
*
The tunnels she has to move through are smaller this time, enough that she has to wriggle in on her belly, and he sees her pause for just the briefest moment as she lays down at the opening, hesitant. Her pausing doesn’t fill him with confidence, especially when the pipes are small enough that he won’t be able to get to her after she’s in.
“Hang on a second,” he says, as he goes to get some rope from a pile of supplies. He ties it around her waist and then gives it a tug, Ellie scowling at him when he does it hard enough to make her stagger a bit.
“Dick,” she says, tugging the rope in return, and he gives the lead one more teasing yank just to mess with her.
“You need to get out, you holler,” he tells her, and for all that she’s displeased at being on a leash, she doesn’t pause as long at the opening before she’s in. These tunnels are small enough that almost no sunlight gets in, so she has a flashlight clipped to the collar of her shirt as she wriggles, and he kneels, watching the slow movement of light.
“Okay,” she calls back, and then he sends the ball of wire down to her, misjudging the distance enough that it hits her in the face when it reaches her. “You’re such an asshole,” she yells back to him, and he sits back, unconcerned with the accusation.
“Faster you get to work, the faster you don’t have to deal with me anymore,” he calls back, and that seems to refocus her enough to get her back to the task at hand.
It goes faster today, now that she’s started to get the hang of things, and it’s almost satisfying, being a part of a team instead of struggling through how to do this alone.
And then her flashlight goes out.
His first warning is an increasingly panicked “shit shit shit” and what sounds damnably like a cheap government-issued flashlight being hit against a concrete wall. When he kneels by the opening, it’s pitch black inside, and he can’t even see a hint of her, she’s so far in.
“Ellie?” He calls, the first time he’s used her name. “You okay?”
The only response is labored breathing and the sound of plastic cracking when her hitting her flashlight against the wall gets too hard in her panic.
“Hey, Ellie,” he says, with more force this time. “Talk to me. Can you get back out?” He already has the rope in hand, but he doesn’t know exactly where she is, and he’d rather not end up concussing her by dragging her right into a concrete wall.
No response.
“Shit,” he hisses, as he starts reeling her in, slowly at first, and then faster when he doesn’t encounter resistance. In the matter of a few moments, she’s sliding through the opening, and she reaches for him the moment she’s out, like she’s afraid of getting pushed back in as she scrabbles up to her knees, white-faced and sweaty, streaked with dirt.
"Sorry," she says, voice more than a little shaky, as she clings to one of his hands, not seeming to realize she's doing it as she squeezes her eyes shut, shaking her head. He can feel her trembling. "Just-just reminded me of The Hole."
And God, isn't that a sentence to hear come out of a kid's mouth.
“You’re alright,” he says, reaching out before he thinks about it to push a piece of hair back behind her ear from where it’s sticking to her cheek from sweat. “Just breathe.”
She does, and after a couple of minutes, she’s managed to gather herself once more. She gives him a sardonic look after she inspects her flashlight, a cheap dollar store sort of thing, now cracked open from hitting concrete.
“Well shit,” she says.
Well shit, indeed. Most people bring their own supplies to jobs, and he doesn’t imagine the FEDRA guard is going to be happy to hear that she needs a second of their shitty flashlights. Might tell her to figure it out in the dark as a lesson on taking care of supplies.
“Here,” he hears himself say, as he holds out his flashlight. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s solid and has never gone out on him. “Use mine.”
She looks to him then, pausing like she’s trying to work out where the trick is, before she takes it so quickly it’s almost a snatch. When it’s in her hand, she looks at him like she’s expecting him to hit her for actually taking it.
Instead, he jerks his chin back to the tunnel.
“You ready for round 2?”
After a moment, she nods.
*
She’s edgier this time around, not surprising after being trapped in a too-small concrete cylinder in pitch black darkness, and it makes her babble, a bit.
“Did you know dinosaurs might have had feathers?” She asks as her opening question, and he snorts, just a bit, at the lack of any sort of segway.
“That so?” He says, playing along. If telling him about paleontology helps her keep her head, then fine. He can hear about some dinosaur facts.
“Yep,” she says, and then grunts. The sound of movement says she’s making a tight turn, and he feels a moment of nervousness on her behalf until she speaks again. “That would be cool as shit, huh? Feathered dinosaurs?”
“Dunno,” he says. “Don’t think a t-rex would look so scary with a bunch of feathers.”
“You ever seen a rooster, man?” She calls back in rebuttal. “I’ve seen pictures. Those things look like they’re scary as shit when they’re mad, all puffed out with those knife things on their feet. Imagine one of those, but the size of a fucking building.”
“They know what color they might have been?” He says as he wraps a wire around a grounding stud.
“And how the fuck would they know that?” She asks, and he does smile then, just a little, at the way he just knows from the tone that that question was asked with an eyeroll.
*
By the time they’re done, he knows more about dinosaurs than he ever cared to learn, but Ellie emerges from the tunnel under her own power, smiling. She’s absolutely filthy, covered in sweat and dirt, and it’s an urge he hasn’t felt in twenty years that makes him want to use the edge of his shirt to wipe her face off.
He clenches his hands against his thighs.
“Good job,” he tells her, and for all that he’s been told more than once that she’s a stone-faced killer of a juvenile delinquent, the smile she gives him in response makes her look like she’s glowing.
“Thanks,” she says, punching his shoulder with about as much force as a fly bouncing off of him. “You were adequate, I guess.”
He laughs at that, the first time he’s done so since he can’t remember.
“Well maybe if you were a better supervisor, I might have something to live up to,” he tells her, leading her back to the FEDRA guards slowly. They’ve finished early, and he’s a little hesitant to give her back, knowing already that she’s likely to have at least a couple more bruises by the end of the day because the guard who replaced the woman from earlier is someone he’s seen shoving kids around more than once.
He drags his feet, and she doesn’t call him on it, matching his pace.
“I can only do so much with the workers I’m given,” she says with a shrug, but he can hear her struggling to keep a straight face. He hip checks her enough to make her stumble, and she catches herself, laughing, and tries to shove him in return with limited success.
They keep trying to trip each other all the way back to the central point, and he takes some relief in the fact that there’s already three other kids waiting. He doesn’t get the feeling that she’s popular with the other kids, either, but hopefully being one of four will let her keep a lower profile.
(Looking at the way she’s already eyeing the guard, though, he won’t hold his breath).
“Oh, shit,” she says, “almost forgot. Your flashlight.” She starts to unhook it from her belt loop, but he stops her, waving a hand as she tries to give it back.
“Keep it,” he says. It’ll be annoying, finding another one, but he has a better chance at it than a kid locked up in FEDRA school when she isn’t at a construction site.
(It’s bothered him since she said it, the reference to what she calls The Hole. If they’re as militant as she says, they probably search her before they put her in, but he lets himself foolishly toy with the idea of her having the flashlight anyway, a little something to make it easier).
She hesitates, then, holding it against her chest, but finally with a little shake of her head, she holds it back out to him.
“Nah,” she says, but he sees the covetous regret in her eyes as she hands it over. “Someone would just steal it from me.”
The resignation in her voice makes him a little angry on her behalf, this kid who can’t even keep a goddamn flashlight of her own, but she’s not his to be mad for.
“Besides,” she says, perking up just a bit. “I’ll need to borrow it next time we work together.”
There’s a question there, and after a moment, he shrugs.
“We’ll see.”
The lack of commitment doesn’t seem to matter, to judge from the way it makes her smile.
*
The next time he works with Ellie, he’s late. He’s cursing under his breath–a too-late smuggling run having made him sleep in because he accidentally turned off the alarm–and hoping they’ll still have a spot when he gets there.
As it turns out, no one has noticed.
And that’s because Ellie’s too busy facing off against a guard that dwarfs her, drawing all eyes her way from nosy people who’d rather watch a spectacle than do backbreaking labor for little to no reward.
As he watches, the guard zaps a taser baton in her direction, making her flinch, even though she stands her ground, posture defiant.
He’s across the distance and at her side in a moment.
“Problem here?” He asks, forcing his voice to remain casual. His instinct is to put an arm around her shoulders, a subtle hint she isn’t standing completely alone, but they haven’t touched beyond what’s strictly required for one thing, and for another, he knows enough not to let the guard think there’s a connection there.
Besides, he’s not looking to lose out on a job from a fight he didn’t even start.
“I don’t see where that’s your concern,” the guard says dismissively, and he forces himself to remain calm.
“She usually goes with me,” he says, like it doesn’t matter to him either way.
“Well,” the guard says, clearly already bored with this conversation, “today she’s going with him.”
He looks to the worker standing by, a greasy-looking man he doesn’t like the look of, especially with the way he’s looking at Ellie. He meets the man’s eyes and alarm bells go off in his head at what he sees there.
Knowing already he’s in for something he didn’t sign up for, he knows immediately that he’s not letting Ellie go off alone with him.
“She doesn’t listen to anyone else,” he says.
“Well she’ll learn to listen to me today,” the man puts in, and both he and Ellie send him a look. “If she knows what’s good for her.”
“Fat fucking chance,” Ellie puts in, helping not at fucking all.
“Enough,” he says to her, and she sets her jaw but goes quiet. Good, she can pick up on hints for this little act of theirs at least.
“The roster’s already signed off on,” the guard says, and it’s clear he’s frustrated with this, ready to be done with his part of the work and be free to fuck around with his buddies for a few hours. “She’s going with him,” he says, with a jerk of his head to the man who steps forward to claim her.
And that’s when Ellie steps very calmly up to the man she’s supposed to go with, smiles at him in a way Joel immediately knows is a trap, and then kicks the man in the balls so hard his eyes roll into the back of his head as he goes down with a guttural noise between a grunt and a whine.
Before he can process absolutely any of that, the guard is moving, jabbing Ellie with the taser baton and sending her to her knees with a scream. He’s in motion at once, moving to her, and he drops to one knee beside her when the guard finally lets go, leaving her panting. His urge is to grab the baton from the man and beat him senseless with it, but he’s not stupid, even if he’s more angry than he can remember being in a long time.
“Fine. You take her,” the guard orders. “We get her back how we get her back.”
There’s a threat in the man’s voice directed at Ellie, and he clamps a hand around her jaw when he sees her starting to open it to shoot her mouth off again. She’s trembling still, a bit, from the electricity, and he doesn’t think she’s really thinking through the consequences beyond the satisfaction of being a smartass in the moment. There’s no mistaking from the guard’s words and tone that he’s meant to bring her back beaten black and blue to teach her some respect, and if she doesn’t shut up, she’s going to be handed off to someone who will.
“Got it,” he says, and then he pulls her up, tugging her along in his wake while she stumbles, not fully recovered.
“You were late,” she accuses when they’re halfway to their assigned spot, and it makes him stumble for a moment, sending him back to the last time a teenage girl was annoyed with him for being late when he wasn’t supposed to be.
“I was busy,” he manages to say back, trying to get himself under control.
From the corner of his eye, he sees her open her mouth, but a look back to the guard languidly waving his baton around apparently lets her sense overrule her sass for once.
“Don’t do it again,” she orders him, jogging a bit to be right at his side.
He grunts, not promising one way or another.
After she steps on the back of his foot to pull his boot partially off, she seems to consider them even.
*
His reputation as an Ellie whisperer means she’s assigned to him exclusively after that, and he’s given extra ration tickets because she’s classified as a “hazard” because of her reputation, so it all works just fine for him. She’s quick, and while mouthy, obedient, and even though he won’t ever, ever tell her, she’s funny, adding a little variety to the monotony of government work.
“You can’t just hit people they try to assign you to,” he still tells her as he lowers her down into a hole for copper stripping after she’d almost done just that when she didn’t see him immediately. He hasn’t been late since the time she was tasered for assaulting someone else, but she’s so short she doesn’t always see him in crowds. “Not a good way to get off of work assignment finally.”
"But if I were off work assignment, you’d miss me. We're work buddies," she coos, grinning. "Best friends, pals, bosom bud-"
He lets just a little extra slack into the line, enough to bounce her slightly.
"Oh fuck you," she spits up at him, clinging to the rope.
He grins.
*
She always comes to work assignment some degree of bruised, and with time he’s learned to swallow back his own rage about it. There’s nothing he can do other than offer her a few hours of no one hitting her, so he does what he can and tries not to catalog every new bruise he sees on her the next time they work together.
(He fails, but he tells himself that it’s the thought that counts).
Then she comes to him limping and with one eye almost swollen shut, her wrist purple-black and almost twice its normal size (a bad sprain, he confirms for himself, after she says it was just a guess because she wasn’t allowed to go to the infirmary). He tilts her face to get a look at the damage, and practically damages the enamel on his molars with how hard his jaw clenches when he sees distinct handprint-shaped bruises on her throat.
“Fuckers ganged up on me,” is her only explanation, and he leaves it at that.
It’s also on this assignment that they’re assigned work that involves going through old flooded chambers, with water that’s up to his chest and will be over her head.
He learns quickly that this is a problem.
“I can’t swim,” she says, staring at it, as wide-eyed as she can get with only one available, and he feels angry when he realizes that was likely the point of this assignment. Here kid, try to stand up for yourself against a whole group of little shits jumping you and spend a day afraid you’re going to drown at any minute.
“Just hold onto me,” he says. “I won’t let you get hurt.”
She’s hesitant at first, but they have no choice, as the guard watching them proves, and she gets over it quickly once her feet can’t touch the ground, when she clings to his shoulder so hard he thinks he might have bruises in the shape of little fingers by the time the day is over. He doesn’t say anything, though, just keeping one arm around her as he tugs them through the water to the side of the chamber they’re meant to be stripping down of parts to be reused. He realizes too late what it’ll feel similar to, and by the time it’s dawned on him, he can’t just ditch her to sink.
Tugging her around behind him reminds him of pulling Sarah around in a pool, back when she still wore water wings and needed him to tow her around to pick up any speed. Ellie clings to him in a way Sarah didn’t, though, and she’s certainly not laughing with delight. He can tell she’s fucking terrified, not even trying to make a smart comment or a joke, and he’s angry, that her fear is being used to punish her when none of the fuckers even bothered to teach her how to swim in the first place.
“You ever heard of a waterpark?” He asks, after him tripping over something in the water makes him stagger enough that she sinks in to her neck, making her cry out sharply and cling to him tighter.
It takes her a moment to even process that she’s been spoken to.
“What?”
“Used to be a big thing,” he tells her, readjusting her to hold her a bit more securely. “Slides and pools and stuff, all with water. Even had a wave pool.”
“What’s a wave pool?”
They pass the rest of the shift that way, covering water topics from parks to slip’n’slides, and towards the end of the day, she slips back into the water immediately between platforms, trusting him to catch her.
“So you had a kid?” She asks, on what must be the ninth time he’s pulled her close to get to the next old utility box they need to take apart.
He freezes, not for long, but long enough for her to notice.
“Joel?” She asks, trying to tilt her head to look at his face.
He shifts her back just a little more to prevent her.
“Sorry,” she says, and her voice sounds genuine. “It’s just that the way you talk-”
“Pass,” he says shortly, all but tossing her up out of the water for the next one and stepping back, needing a little distance. He sees an abortive little gesture as she half-steps toward him, clearly afraid she’s about to get left, and that makes him tuck away his own pain and return to the edge of the old bar she’s standing on. “I’m not leaving,” he tells her, reaching out to squeeze her ankle.
“You looked like it,” she says doubtfully, as she looks between where she’s standing and the distant light indicating the exit.
There’s a whole lot of water between the two points, and he knows she’s suddenly uncomfortably aware that he could leave her here to die if he felt like it.
He knows she almost certainly knows more than a few adults who would.
“I don’t-” He starts, and then stops himself. “We keep our pasts to ourselves.”
She studies him for a long moment, but finally she extends her hand and they shake on it.
“So,” she says, taking the screwdriver he hands her and going back to taking the old phone box on the wall apart. “Tell me more about this Super Soaker thing.”
*
By the end of the day, she’s comfortable enough being towed along that she lets her legs trail behind her, and feeling apologetic for making her fear being left earlier, he even stops to spin her, making her laugh.
When he gives her back over to the guards, both of them squelching, he gives her back smiling.
*
He’s felt from the start that she’s too skinny, and he doesn’t miss that she almost never has food with her. He’d thought maybe FEDRA just feeds them before or after.
And then she collapses on him one day.
“Shit,” he says, dropping an armful of metal poles to try and catch her, managing only to get his hand under her head in time to save her from a concussion. She’s totally limp when he pulls her to rest with her head on one of his legs, and he presses a hand to her forehead. She’s cool, if anything, and he taps her cheek lightly.
“Ellie?” He calls softly. “Ellie, wake up. Open your eyes for me, kiddo.”
It takes a few minutes before she comes around, blinking drowsily. When he helps her sit up, she sways a bit, and he tugs her over to rest against a wall.
“We gotta-we gotta work-” She says, trying to sit up, but she’s too dizzy to get far.
“It’ll keep,” he says. They’ll be in trouble if they don’t get to work soon, he knows, but he can hardly drag around a kid who’s going to faint on him. “Talk to me. What’s wrong?”
Now there’s the faintest hint of color to her face, a blush rising to her cheeks.
“Haven’t…” She mumbles, and he has to get her to repeat it, tapping her chin gently to get her to look up at him. “Haven’t eaten in a couple days,” she says.
“What? Why?” He demands. He’s had a daughter, he knows about the dangers of eating disorders, and he’s almost afraid to hear her answer because there’s absolutely fucking nothing he can do about it.
“People keep stealing my food.”
He blinks.
“What?”
“A couple of the boys in my group are on half-rations, which doesn’t mean shit if you can steal from someone else.”
“Did you tell someone?” He asks, and she gives him a look as she raises her hands to indicate that she’s a 14 year old in a construction site. Enough said.
He digs out his bundle of food from his pocket and hands it over.
“Here,” he says, pushing it at her when she just stares at him. She takes it when he physically presses it into her hand, but she holds it like he’s handed her a bundle of bugs. “Eat it,” he insists, shoving her hand. “Quickly. We have work to do.” And they do, but mostly he wants food to get into this kid as fast as possible. Haven’t eaten in a couple of days. Jesus Christ.
“This is yours,” she says, like he’s missed that.
“Now it’s yours,” he says, as he hauls her to her feet, keeping an arm around her shoulders because she’s still wobbly. “Now eat it before someone else takes it from you.”
She elbows him, but she obeys, eating so quickly he’s half-afraid she’s going to choke.
When it’s gone, he regrets he doesn’t have more to give her.
*
“Thought we don’t feed strays,” Tess says teasingly when she catches him packing extra food before his next job assignment. She wraps her arms around him from behind and squeezes, moving with him around the kitchen.
“We don’t,” he says, trying not to sound defensive and falling short. “But if she dies on the job because she hasn’t eaten in two days, it’s gonna make me look like shit.” He doesn’t think about what it means that he doesn’t have to clarify which “she” he means.
“Sure,” Tess says, letting him go and moving to flop down on the couch. “Whatever you say.”
He doesn’t dignify her with a response.
*
The next time she turns up with a black eye, his patience snaps, and he decides it’s about time she learned how to throw a good punch. She’s a natural little hellcat, he can tell, and she’s feisty enough to still be alive, but fury doesn’t always beat sheer size, and she’s never going to have the advantage there.
Instruction takes place in little snatches of time, here and there, stolen when they aren’t being watched and won’t be called on wasting time. She beams during this practice because she’s a bloodthirsty little goblin child, but he doesn’t miss how she never tries to take a cheap shot at him.
“Hope you don’t hold back like this in an actual fight,” he tells her when he deliberately leaves open a stomach punch she doesn’t take. “Might be why you’re getting your ass kicked so badly.”
That flares her temper, as he’d known it would, and he takes a hit to the jaw when she fakes him out. He staggers back a half-step, but he’s grinning as he rubs what’s going to be a bruise later.
“Atta girl,” he tells her, and when they step back together, he can tell it isn’t just the delight of a fight she’s grinning about.
*
Three work shifts later, she shows up with a proud grin that lets him know at once that she’s done something he’s either going to be proud of or pissed about.
When they’re at their jobsite, she holds out a paper-wrapped candy bar, one of the ones he’s seen FEDRA agents eating now and then.
“Brian tried to take my breakfast,” she says, clearly smug. He recognizes Brian’s name as one of her worst bullies. “Took his shit instead. He got this for winning the rope climb at last week’s phys check.”
He should probably reprimand her for turning things around to that degree, but he knows better than most how many times she’s been knocked down. He won’t begrudge her a little turnaround when she’s finally managed to kick someone else down for once, especially someone who’s made a fucking sport of picking on her. He tugs on her ponytail in a gesture of approval for a job well done in standing up for herself, and she shoves the candy bar at him insistently.
“Here,” she says, physically picking up his hand to put it in his palm. “You taught me how to fight, I got a candy bar, now it’s yours.”
He laughs, just a bit, at becoming the inadvertent boss of a one-girl candy bar mafia shaking down other kids for the goods.
“Nah,” he says, tossing it back to her. “You won it, fair and square.”
“But-” She cuts herself off, frowning. “Whattya want, then?”
“For?” He humors her, looping a thing of wire over her head to rest on one shoulder like a sash before he puts on the bigger bundle the same way and leads her to their jobsite.
“For teaching me,” she says, like he’s missing something obvious. “You gotta want something in return.”
It makes him sad, a bit, that she thinks someone looking out for her has to be transactional, and it makes him soft enough that he puts an arm around her shoulders, shaking her lightly.
“This one’s on me,” he says. “Ask me again when you’ve shaken down a kid for some coffee beans.”
*
For all of that, though, she still isn’t satisfied until they split the candy bar at the end of their workday. She tries to give him the bigger half, and he splits it in half again and hands her part back. She takes it as suspiciously as she takes everything, looking for a trick, but she’s quicker now to accept it when he just holds it out steadily.
She also grins now and leans enough that their shoulders touch, just slightly, as they share the spoils of child on child violence.
*
He and Tess usually keep to strict schedules with their smuggling, almost always carrying out jobs in a single night. On this trip, though, a rat means they’re stuck outside of the city for almost a week waiting on the shipment they’re supposed to sneak back in.
He spends almost the entire time worrying about Ellie.
He feels absurdly guilty at the idea of her waiting by the guards, grin slowly fading when he doesn’t step up to claim her. He hasn’t mentioned his smuggling to her because he’s not stupid, but he thinks she can probably put enough together to make guesses based on the food he passes on. He hopes, desperately, that she’s guessed he just got held up on a job.
I didn’t ditch you, he thinks in her direction in an appalling display of sentimentality. I’ll be back, promise. I’ll bring you something good to make up for this.
His other worry is who’s going to take over supervising her shifts without him there.
She’s working along the wall this week, and he can’t shake the thought of her under a pile of rubble, buried even more quickly than the girl crushed to death in front of him because she’s smaller. She’s gotten handy with tools and knowing what to do, but she’s still a kid, and he wonders who’s going to keep her from playing with an unattended jackhammer if he isn’t there to do it.
It’s also not just powertools he has to worry about, though he’s trying very hard not to go there in his head. The jobstie is huge and not always in sight of a supervisor or earshot of other workers, even if they would answer a little girl screaming for help. He’s painfully aware that not every man there is going to have even neutral intentions around a small girl, especially when they don’t know she can hold her own.
Even with their lessons, though, she’s a little thing, and he’d rather she not have to try her skills against a grown man without him there to tap in.
When they finally get back, he barely sleeps that night, anticipating seeing her the next morning and handing over the comic book he traded for as an apology for going missing on her.
*
Ellie isn’t at the jobsite the next morning.
He can feel his stomach swirling the same way it did the time he lost Sarah at a playground, that same “No, this isn’t happening” anxiety as he looks and looks and doesn’t see her. Slowly, the kids are sent off with the adults until it’s just the guards left, already moving to play cards on the sidelines.
And still, no little hellion in a ponytail.
“Hey,” he calls to one of the guards, the least actively hostile one he can see, which isn’t saying much. “You’re missing a kid. Ellie Williams.”
The woman rolls her eyes, but she checks her clipboard, tracing a finger down columns.
She finally got off work assignment, he thinks, he wills. She’s been doing better in her classes. She just got the highest score on her history test, he knows from her telling him, proud of her achievement. She’s finally proven she doesn’t deserve to be stuck out here. He’ll miss her, he realizes, but better that she stay relatively safe in her school than set loose among-
“Runaway,” the woman says, letting the papers flutter shut again.
“What,” he says flatly.
*
He works all day with unease stirring in his stomach, painfully aware of no little pest at his side, needling him with questions or telling him terrible puns.
“An ingrate to the generosity of FEDRA,” is the line they fed him when he wouldn’t stop asking, like a kid should be grateful to be sent into a construction zone and then raised to die for the cause if needed.
He doesn’t buy it.
Ellie’s a little hellraiser for anyone who isn’t him, mainly because she doesn’t have another goddamn choice if she’s going to make it out alive, but she’s not stupid. Even with bullies, her school feeds her regularly, and now that she’s made a few decisive victories with his strategizing assistance on who to target, she almost never gets hers stolen, even though he still supplements it. She wouldn’t run away to sleep on the streets where she doesn’t know where her next meal is coming from. She wouldn’t trade relative safety for an uncertain future. She’s not that kind of kid.
And then he sees one of the other kids with her pun book.
He knows it’s hers because she’s scrawled her name in marker on the back, and it’s all he can do not to snatch it out of the girl’s hands where she’s slouching against a wall, paging through. The girl’s work adult is boldly napping under a ledge and doesn’t even notice him approach.
“Hey,” he calls, and the girl looks at him, giving him the same up and down Ellie did on the first day, sizing him up for what threat he could pose. From the way she tenses, ready to run, he’s been judged as high risk. “Where’d you get that book?” He asks, forcing his voice even so he won’t spook her.
“Found it,” she says, and her defiant tone is nothing compared to Ellie’s.
“It’s not yours,” he says, nodding to indicate the name on the back. She glances to it and shrugs.
“She left all of her stuff,” she says dismissively. “Didn’t take any of it. We gave her a day to come back. It’s fair game after that.”
“She didn’t tell anyone where she was going?” He asks sharply. Ellie isn’t a social butterfly by any means, but a kid planning to run away would probably tell someone, to brag if nothing else.
(Would have told him, if he hadn’t been caught up on that fucking job).
The kid shrugs.
“One night she was at mess, then she was gone in the morning. They probably killed her or something because she makes so much trouble.”
And God, isn’t that a statement on the state of the world, a kid throwing that out with as much care as someone might remark on the weather.
He tries to ask the girl for more details, but she really doesn’t have anything else to offer. She wasn’t close with Ellie–he wonders if she had any kids she was close to other than the friend Riley she’s mentioned–and he finally gives up, trading her some food for the pun book. He’ll need to give it back to Ellie, he thinks. He knows how much she loves it by how carefully she takes care of it when she brings it to the jobsite.
She’ll want it back.
He refuses to consider a possibility in which he won’t get to give it to her.
*
He tries, subtly, to ask the other kids for information, and he doesn’t even have time to think about how this is the most he’s spoken to anyone under 20 in decades.
He’s too busy trying to find his kid.
A couple of them mention that they saw Riley that night, and one even says they think they saw Ellie sneaking out with her. None of this has gone to the FEDRA guards, of course, because the kids know not to snitch, but apparently they’ve heard enough about him from Ellie that they cough it up.
It’s when someone mentions the Fireflies that he gets a new element to worry about. He knows they’ve been recruiting pretty heavily recently, especially among teenagers, and he knows they’re good at it based on how many young faces he’s seen turning corners after tagging walls with yellow fireflies.
He’s seen how Ellie turns to attention like a sunflower. He can picture, all too easily, an adult telling her she’s special, slowly convincing her to be cannon fodder for their cause.
She’s tough and she’s smart and she’s a smartass, but she’s also a kid who’s never had a grownup give a fuck about her before.
( Until you, whispers a voice in his head. You give a fuck about her. )
(And whether it’s true or not, he still wasn’t there when she needed him, wasn’t able to keep her safe by his side.)
(And God, isn’t that the story of his fucking life.)
*
Talking to the kids leads him to the next part of his hunt, and he barely has to convince Tess at all to help. He does a few things he’ll never tell Ellie about as part of his search, but it’s worth it, it will all be worth it, when she’s finally in front of him again, and he can hand over the pun book that’s been sitting on his bedside table the way a Bible would on someone else’s.
But as the days slip past, there’s still no Ellie.
“Joel-” Tess starts tentatively after yet another dead end leads them to a teenager named Ellen, not Ellie, but he shakes his head, cutting her off.
He’s not stupid. He knows what this sort of silence means.
He just can’t accept it, not yet.
*
He gets the break when he’s beating the shit out of a Firefly he heard mention “girl” and “smart mouth” in the same sentence at a bar.
As leads go, it’s not the best, but it’s stronger than most of what he’s had before.
“What girl?” He demands, as the man reels from the latest punch. He flicks out of his knife, and the man’s remaining good eye goes wide. “What’s her name?”
“She’s-she’s-” The man stutters, and he sinks the knife deep into the meat of his side and twists. “Her-I don’t know-her name. That’s above my head, man,” he pleads.
“Describe her,” he demands, shoving the knife just a bit deeper.
“Sh-short, skinny, brown hair in a ponytail. Never shuts the fuck up.”
The rest of it is innocuous enough, but the annoyance is the latter half says it’s her.
“Where?” He demands.
And when the man tries to resist, he shows him exactly how poor a decision that is.
*
He’s hesitant to drag Tess into his own shit, but she gives him one look that has him in line and leading her along.
It’s laughably easy to get into the building, and he only has to knock out a couple of guards. He would kill them, but they’re only a little older than Ellie, and he knocks their heads against a wall hard enough that they’ll be out for a while and useless for a while beyond that.
Then it’s a straight shot to a room where he can hear a girl’s voice scream-singing “87 motherfuckers I hate on the wall, 87 fuckers I’d shoot, take one down, shoot to the ground, 86-”. He leaves Tess to keep watch in the hall and shoves the door open, clearing the room with a quick look and finding it empty.
Except for the 14 year old sprawled out on the floor on her back, kicking her feet against the wall in time with her song.
“Great, here we go again,” she says, stopping her singing and rolling to her stomach. “1, 2, 3- Joel?”
She’s scrambling up to her feet immediately and bolting to him, and he feels rage building deep in his chest when she gets yanked back by the fucking chain on her wrist.
“What the fuck did you get into?” He asks, hugging her with one arm as he passes on his way to look at the chain attached to the radiator. It’s solid steel. Whoever chained her up certainly wasn’t looking to risk letting her get free.
“This one was not my fault,” she says, offended. “At all. Those crazy fuckers just took me from-wait. How the fuck are you here?”
“Went looking for you when I didn’t have anyone talking my ear off at work,” he says, grunting when he gives the chain a tug. Nothing.
“You came looking for me?” There’s a fragile sort of hope in her expression, balanced by her clear doubt. From the angle of her head, he can tell she’s getting ready to toss her hair like she doesn’t give a fuck if he dismisses her, if he tries to play it off like this is all just part of a larger goal.
But he thinks of a small face looking up at him out of a hole, terrified but trusting him even when she has no reason to, and he can’t lie to her.
“Of course I did,” he says, reaching up to rest a hand on her head. “We’re job buddies.”
A flicker of a smile.
“Supervisor and underling,” she corrects, and he snorts.
“Life lesson: shit talk after you’re not chained to a wall anymore, supervisor.”
*
“Joel,” Tess hisses, and then she’s through the door.
“Who the fuck a-” Ellie starts, but he claps a hand over her mouth, ignoring when she licks his palm to try and get him to let go.
“We need to leave,” Tess tells him, already moving to the door.
He didn’t move at all to follow, but Ellie still reaches out, fisting a hand in his shirt. When he looks to her, her eyes are wide, begging not to be left.
Like that’s a fucking option for him at this point.
Another look to Tess, and the message has been sent.
Run if you want, he tells her. I can’t leave her here.
Tess rolls her eyes, but she returns to his side, drawing her gun.
A few Fireflies come in, guns drawn, and he moves automatically in front of Ellie, but he notes quickly that as soon as he does, the guns point down.
Interesting.
“Step away from the girl,” says a woman who-
“Marlene?” He asks, incredulous.
“Joel,” she acknowledges, gun still pointed down. “Step away from the girl.”
Ellie’s hand clenches harder in the fabric of his shirt at his back, like he’s actually going to listen. He wants to reach back, wants to still her hand with his own, but he needs both hands free if they’re going to get out of whatever the fuck this is about. At his side, Tess reads the same pattern he has and steps closer. Sure enough, as soon as she’s in range of any shots at her being a threat to Ellie, the guns drop, pointing away.
Useful, but confusing.
“You trafficking kids now?” He asks Marlene. “Things that bad?”
“We’re not trafficking her-”
“I definitely feel trafficked!” Ellie puts in from behind his back, and he kicks her ankle lightly as a signal that now is not the time for her input. It’s an indication that she’s aware of the danger they’re in that she doesn’t kick back.
“As I’ve already told her,” Marlene says, trying to peer at Ellie as she says it. He shifts so he’s blocking her better, and Marlene gives him an unimpressed look. “She has an important job to do.”
He snorts.
“She’s 14,” he says. “How fucking important could it be? Muling pipe bombs?”
“Saving the goddamn world,” Marlene says flatly.
Well, that has his attention.
*
It’s a relief when they can finally leave, Ellie tucked between him and Tess. Tess hasn’t met her before, has no connection to her at all beyond what he’s told her, but he appreciates at once how Tess still immediately keeps her safe between them. He gives her a look over Ellie’s head and knows she understands.
Thanks given, he shifts his attention to Ellie.
“You alright?” He asks quietly once they’re out on the street. She looked alright, all things considered, but he can see that her wrist has been rubbed raw no matter the material wrapped under the cuff, and he knows exactly how much she can push through.
“Better now,” she says, with a little smile despite the way she immediately glances away nervously.
“Good,” he says, squeezing the back of her neck lightly before they fall into single file.
Marlene was vague with the details but clear in her instructions, and it makes him uneasy, how much hope is resting on Ellie without him knowing exactly why.
She’s a good kid, but “saving the world” is a tall ask of anyone.
*
Thankfully, he only has to wait until they’re at their apartment and it’s just him and Ellie. She plops down on the couch with such proprietary relief that he almost smiles. She tips her head back and breathes, and he lets her recover.
“You hungry?” He asks, dragging a chair over, but she just shakes her head. “Alright, so spill: how the fuck did you fool them into thinking you’re the savior of the human race?”
“Same way I fooled you into feeding me?” She asks lightly.
“Not a time for joking,” he tells her, and she responds to his tone, sitting up straight.
“Gun down,” she tells him, voice serious now. He raises his eyebrows. “I mean it. You want me to tell you, gun down on the table over there, and then you sit back down.”
He obeys.
“It happened the first night after you ditched me,” she says, “which we will be talking about, you fucking dick.” She narrows her eyes at him.
“Job ran long,” he says, remembering something. “Hang on.”
He gets up and grabs her pun book from his room, tossing it to her. It takes her a second to realize what she’s been handed, and then she wraps her arms around it, hugging it to her chest. She tilts her head forward, and he can see from the way her hand moves that she’s wiping away a tear or two, but he doesn’t remark on it, waiting until she gets herself back under control.
“What?” She asks when she’s calmed down, and when she raises her head, her expression is nothing but playful. “You breaking into dorms now?”
“Kid on a jobsite had it. I got it back.”
“You beat ‘em up?” She asks with interest.
He just gives her a look.
“Yeah, yeah, fine man of principles who still smuggles and beats people up when he needs to. You’re practically a saint.”
“The point, Ellie,” he says, leaning back and crossing his arms across his chest. “Arrive at it.”
“No going for that gun until you listen to me,” she says seriously. “Swear it.”
“I don’t-”
“Swear it,” she says, and there’s the same sort of fear in her face as the day he pulled her around in the water.
“On my life,” he promises.
“Okay,” she says, reaching for her sleeve. “That night, my friend Riley came back, and we went to a mall.”
His immediate instinct is to tell her how stupid that is, how dangerous, but she’s 14 and it’s already done. He can have that conversation later. He nods to prompt her to go on.
“There was an infected there.”
He tenses.
“It bit her,” she says, voice breaking a little, and he closes his eyes, sighing. Poor kid, watching her friend bitten and then getting fucking kidnapped of all fucking th- “And then it bit me.”
His eyes fly open, and he’s halfway out of his seat on impulse when Ellie’s in front of him, hands grabbing onto his wrists.
“You swore you’d listen!” She says, frantic. She pulls at him, trying to tug him further from his gun. “Joel, you swore you’d listen!”
Twenty years of survival are telling him to go for his gun.
But fourteen years of fatherhood keep him in front of the terrified kid.
“Show me,” he says, sitting back down so she won’t look so close to hyperventilating. “Now.”
She pulls her sleeve up and extends her arm to him, and he takes it, noting distantly that she’s thinner than she was before.
But the way it’s far too easy to wrap his hand around her arm is lost beneath the bite mark near her elbow, tracing whorls of infection along her pale skin.
A bite mark and infection that’s clearly old.
“Fucking ow,” she complains, and he realizes he’s holding onto her too hard.
“Sorry,” he responds automatically, squinting at the bitemark, trying to find the trick. For bites this old, she would have turned days ago, would have already been a shrieking, mindless beast. She jumps when he reaches to take her face between his hands, looking into her eyes intently, searching for the animalistic gleam of an infected.
But no, it’s just Ellie, looking at him like he’s lost his damn mind, but still herself, completely in control.
“What do they want with you?” He asks, still holding onto her, sure he’s going to watch her change any second, turn mindless and ready to bite.
But she just brings her hands up to cover his, squeezing lightly.
“They’re gonna make a cure,” she tells him, sounding disbelieving even as she says it. “Joel, I’m gonna save the fucking world.”
*
By the time Tess comes back, he’s still not totally convinced, no matter Ellie’s confidence. He’s heard promises of the cure from the very start, has long given up believing in it. If it were up to him, they’d stay here. Ellie’s already missing from FEDRA school. She’ll be presumed dead soon, and then she can be just one more nameless kid. If they need papers, he can get them. He thinks Tess still has a contact with a forger. It would be a simple thing. Ellie Williams into Ellie Miller. He could keep her here, could keep her safe, could tell the Fireflies to fuck off if they try to come looking.
But Ellie’s already decided she’s doing this, one way or another.
And in the face of that, what other choice does he have?