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Ellie hasn’t spoken since he found her.
She’s not crying anymore, even. She’s just quiet, staring off in the direction he points her in. When he walks, she walks, tucked under his arm half to keep her close and half to keep himself upright, but she hasn’t said a word.
By sheer fucking luck, they stumble across a group of cabins far enough away from the resort that he feels safe stopping.
Even if he didn’t, he’s not making it much further in the shape he’s in and he’s even more terrified of pushing Ellie too hard. He still doesn’t know how badly she’s hurt. She’s covered in blood but he can’t get her to tell him what hurts.
The first couple are out — collapsed roofs, broken windows — but he finds one that’s still shuttered and locked.
He presses Ellie into a corner of the porch, feeling almost like a deer leaving its young to go find food.
“Stay right here,” he tells her. When she stares at him, blank, he takes her knife out of the front pocket of her backpack and presses it into one of her limp hands, with some vague idea it might make her feel safe. “I’m just gonna clear the building. It’ll only take a minute. Ellie, do you hear me?”
She doesn’t make any indication she does, but he has no choice.
“I’ll be right back,” he promises.
The place is clear, thank God, and small enough a quick sweep doesn’t take long at all. It’s only a couple rooms, but the living room has a fireplace and, in what might be the closest thing to a miracle he believes exists, a stack of firewood next to it.
Ellie hasn’t budged outside. She doesn’t even seem to notice him reappearing, her knife slack at her side, until he’s in front of her.
“C’mon, let’s get you inside,” he says.
There’s an armchair next to the fire that he presses Ellie down onto. She drops onto it gracelessly, without looking.
“Okay,” he says. “Gonna make a fire, alright? We’ll get you all warmed up.”
Ellie says nothing, just hugs her backpack to her chest like a toy.
“Okay,” he repeats, and kneels in front of the fireplace.
His hands are shaking, from adrenaline, from the cold, from probably another fracture he’s ignoring, but he gets the fire going as fast as possible.
“I’ll be right back,” he tells Ellie, not expecting any sort of response.
Before he gets more than a step or two, though, she grabs his coat.
“What?” he asks, coming right back to her. “What’s wrong?”
She just stares at him. Her fingers are clenched so tight in his coat her knuckles are turning white under all the blood.
“You wanna help?” he offers. She’s a helpful kid by nature, and loves being involved. Maybe it’ll help her to be busy. Joel doesn’t fucking know. He holds out his hands and when she doesn’t respond, he gently slides them under her elbows and helps her to her feet. “You can leave your backpack here, baby. We’re gonna stay for a while.”
She lets him ease it away from her and lean it against the chair. He slips her knife from her fingers and tucks it into the pocket of his jacket, still around her shoulders.
She follows him into the kitchen, where he digs a couple pots out of a cupboard. They’re a bit dusty, but nothing too bad. A bit of scrubbing with snow and they’ll be just fine. He tries to hand her one and she just stares. After a moment’s debate, he lifts her hands and gently sets a small pot in them. She holds it, loose, like she’s barely aware of it.
Newborn babies grab things instinctively, Joel remembers reading in some parenting book a lifetime ago. Put a finger to their palm and they grab onto it.
They need water. He makes himself focus on that.
He blocked the front door with a china cabinet, but he unlocks the back door now. The yard is full of snow and he packs both pots with snow as tight as he can. It takes so much snow to make enough water to drink. Plus Ellie is covered in so much blood — she’ll want to get cleaned up, and that’ll take more.
She holds what he hands her and moves when he moves, but she takes no initiative. He has to pull the pot gently from her limp fingers to put it next to the fire to melt.
While it does, he goes through the cabin again more slowly, Ellie still against his side. There’s a tiny bathroom and obviously the water doesn’t work, but he finds a still-wrapped bar of soap under the sink and a stack of washcloths and towels that are only a little musty.
“Look at that,” he says, needing to fill the silence. He puts the soap in her hand to give her something to hold. “Might be old, but I bet it still smells a might bit better than the FEDRA shit.”
When he nudges her gently into moving, she trails after him into the small bedroom and stands silently as he rifles through the dresser. He manages to come up with some sweats that’ll be too big on her, but have enough of a drawstring they should stay up and a long-sleeved T-shirt. The closet yields a thick sweatshirt off the back of the top shelf.
“There we go,” he says. “Think those will work, hey?”
By the time he leads her back into the living room and coaxes her to sit in front of the fireplace, the small pot of snow has melted.
“Alright,” he says, sitting in front of her. “How about we get you cleaned up a bit?”
He can’t take another moment of looking at her covered in blood and not doing something about it. He’s afraid of how much of it is hers. He’s far too aware how much of it simply can’t be.
He offers her water to drink first, but she ignores it and he doesn’t want to push. He sets the cup off to the side and dips a washcloth into the melted snow. She doesn’t react to him washing her hands off or when he dries them with a towel.
Her hands are so small. Delicate, really, all bird bones and chapped knuckles.
“C’mere,” he says gently. He cups her face in one hand and carefully wipes the blood from it. Here, this begins to reveal the extant of her injuries. A lot of it is clearly splatter, but there’s thick, dark blood crusted under her nose and down her chin and the bruising says it’s hers. She winces when he touches her nose and he apologizes as he examines it. It doesn’t seem broken, but it’s swollen and the corners of her eyes are already turning purple.
Her forehead is scraped and bruised, and he tries to get her to follow his finger, but she’s non-responsive.
God, she’s probably concussed to hell and back.
“What else hurts, baby?” he asks, not expecting an answer at this point. It just seems right to talk, with all this quiet between them. Ellie’s not supposed to be this quiet.
She inhales sharply, the air shuddering out of her a couple times before she surprises him by grabbing his other hand. She drags it under her sweatshirt, pressing it against her side.
“Ribs?” he says. He presses, gently, and she makes a tiny, pained noise. “Sorry, I know. Hairline fractures, maybe.”
He doesn’t think any are fully broken, but it’s impossible to know for sure.
“You wanna put somethin’ — somethin’ dry on?” he asks, stumbling slightly over his words when he second-guesses asking if she wants a clean shirt. The light tan of her sweatshirt is covered in blood, but she doesn’t seem to have noticed it and he doesn’t want to upset her by pointing it out. “If you want, I can go into the other room—”
She grabs his shirt with both hands.
He’s gonna guess that’s a no.
“Okay. That’s alright.”
What the hell is he supposed to do here? Ellie’s an independent kid normally, and she’s fourteen. This is beyond anything he’s ever had to do for her.
When he touches her arm, she’s trembling.
And he gets over himself right fucking quick.
“I got you,” he murmurs. “Let’s get this off.”
He pulls the neck of her sweatshirt over a bit to make sure she’s wearing a bra, then slowly begins to work the hem up. It’s like undressing a toddler. She lifts her arms when he says to, but doesn’t participate otherwise.
Pulling the shirt over her head dislodges the elastic fully from her hair and it tumbles into her face. This seems to be the first thing that truly bothers her, and she shoves her hair back with clumsy hands.
She goes still, her fingers still touching her hair, and her breath turns fast and shallow.
“Hey, hey.” He catches her hands, pulling them away. “We’ll wash it. It’s okay. We’ll wash it.”
She won’t even let him help her into the clean shirt, pushing him away when he tries. He gives up and helps her off the floor again, guiding them into the kitchen.
“Hop up on the table,” he says, going to dig through the cupboard again. There’s twenty year old dirty dishes in the sink and he doesn’t care to deal with that, so he digs out a big mixing bowl from a cupboard and sets it on the floor by the table. When he turns back, Ellie is still standing next to the table. “C’mon, honey, sit up here. If you lie on the table, we can wash your hair out.”
It’s the best way he can think of. The bathroom doesn’t have a bathtub, just a shower, and he’s not sure she could lean over a sink enough for him to wash her hair out. He’s can’t leave her hair like that, especially not when it’s upsetting her so much, but he’s not going to let her get soaked even worse than she already is.
Table it is.
When he realizes her ribs might hurt too much to pull herself up, he pulls one of the chairs closer.
“Here, step up onto this first.” He puts his hands under her forearms to help keep her steady.
She sits on the edge of the table, but it takes her a few minutes before she lies down. She’s only in her bra from the waist up, his jacket slipping from her shoulders, and he gets his first good look at her torso.
God, she’s a walking fucking bruise. Her ribs are purple, and there’s a dark, almost black bruise on her stomach. Even her upper arms are covered in little round bruises, like… like fingerprints. Like someone held her down.
She curls up as much as she can on her back, bending her knees up, and that movement catches his eyes.
Her jeans are undone. The button’s gone and the zipper’s down.
Ellie catches him looking and reaches down, tugging at it with clumsy fingers. It doesn’t budge.
“Christ,” he exhales, feeling like it was punched out of him. He grabs his jacket and lays it over her like a blanket. She looks so fucking small under it.
Then he sits in one of the chairs. A little of the tension goes out of her when he’s not standing over her and he hates it.
“Ellie,” he says. He cups her face, gently encouraging her to look at him. He can’t say anything else. What the hell is he supposed to say here? Someone held her down. Someone ripped the button from her jeans and broke the zipper forcing it down. There’s bone and brain matter in her hair.
There’s an answer here and he doesn’t want to ask the question.
After a second, she shakes her head, squeezing her eyes shut as a tear slips down her cheek.
“It’s not your fault,” he says. “You didn’t do anything wrong and I’m not — I’m not mad or anything. Just if you’re hurt, I need you to tell me.”
He doesn’t know how, but if she needs medicine or something, he needs to make a plan. If that happened to her, he will not let it go further. He won’t make her live through that.
“Did someone hurt you?” he asks.
She shakes her head again, harder this time.
It’s not much of a relief. Someone tried. She’s not less traumatized because she stopped the bastard. But at least physically, there’s one thing she won’t have to deal with.
“Okay,” he says. He rubs his thumb gently over her damp cheek. “Let’s do your hair.”
She’s quiet while he washes her hair, but it’s not peaceful. Her breathing is too fast, too hard. He talks through it, trying to ground her. He doesn’t even know what he’s saying, or if he’s saying anything that isn’t nonsense, but it’s all he can do.
If he was alone, he wouldn’t give a shit about pouring water on the floor. But the water that runs off her hair is rusty red, and there’s… debris, and if she saw that on the floor, he thinks it would upset her. As soon as her hair’s clean, he wraps it in a towel and helps her sit up, then takes the bowl away and dumps it before she can get a good look.
When he comes back to her, she’s sitting on the table, hugging his jacket to her chest. There’s gooseflesh over her arms, and he rubs his hands up and down them for a moment.
“C’mon,” he says, helping her down. He wraps his jacket around her again and guides her back to the fire. She ignores the armchair and sinks to the floor in a boneless heap, making him wince slightly. He crouches down in front of her and holds out the sweatpants he found. “I’m gonna go into the bedroom for a minute. You wanna put these on while I do that?”
She looks at them, then at him. She takes the pants.
The sheets on the bed are covered in twenty years of dirt and dust, but when he strips them off and tosses them into a corner, the mattress is clean enough, and he finds a stack of linens in the closet that aren’t as stale as they could be. Thankfully, the mattress is light enough to slide off the frame without him doing more damage to his wound.
He shoves it over to the door, then stops at the entrance. “Comin’ back out,” he calls to Ellie.
Even so, he gives her a moment.
She’s still wrapped in his jacket, but her jeans are balled up across the room, like she threw them, and she’s in the sweatpants.
He drops the mattress in front of the fireplace, and grabs the shirt. “Want some help with this?”
She lets him dress her, still alarmingly pliable. When she’s dressed, he smooths his hands over her arms again, idly trying to warm her a little more.
She still hasn’t spoken a word, and he’s starting to worry it’s not just shock. He cups her face in his hands, gently turning her head. While he washed her hair, he got the last of the blood off her neck and he turns her towards the fire, checking for bruises. Nothing.
He’s struck by a sudden, horrible fear. She did talk, didn’t she? When he found her. She screamed and there were words in it. There were.
Or is he just telling himself there were words, his memories blurred into a haze of fear and Ellie Ellie Ellie.
He turns her to face him again. “Open your mouth,” he says, and it comes out too harsh, harsh enough it breaks through her haze and makes her give him a strange look. “I want to check your teeth,” he lies.
She’s still staring at him, but when he nudges at her jaw, she opens her mouth and he breathes a sigh of relief at the sight of her tongue, completely whole. He gives her teeth a precursory check just to not freak her out.
After a moment, though, she pushes his hand away.
“Alright,” he says. He pulls the towel from her hair and squeezes it for a moment, but her head clearly hurts and he stops as soon as he’s sure it won’t drip down her back. “You stay next to the fire. I’m just gonna go get more snow.”
When he comes back, Ellie’s pulling sheets over the mattress, tucking them into sharp military corners.
“You don’t have to do that,” he says, but she ignores him.
When she’s done, he spreads the quilt and blankets he found over them, then unlaces his boots and sets them next to the fireplace. She takes her cues from him, he knows, and he’s hoping a sign of him settling in will help her. Her boots are thrown in a clumsy pile, like she discarded them without thinking when she changed into the sweatpants. Joel picks them up and puts them next to his, tugging the laces untied and opening them to help them dry.
When he finishes, she’s still sitting on the floor where she stopped, not moving now that her self-assigned task is done.
He kneels down in front of her, reaching out to smooth her damp hair back from her face. “You should lie down. Think you’ve got a concussion there. Best thing you can do for it is rest.”
He’s gotten enough FEDRA beatdowns to practically wallpaper a room with the handouts they send you home with, the ones detailing the signs of a concussion and how to deal with them. He never thought he’d be grateful for that.
She stares at his shoulder, not moving.
“Can you sit over here?” he asks. “Think it’d be more comfortable.”
When she does, he catches sight of her feet. Her socks are damp and when he touches one foot, it’s cold. He left her a change of socks, but they’re still sitting on the floor next to her bag.
“Okay, kiddo. Let’s get those changed.”
He checks her feet for frostbite while he’s changing her socks. Her skin’s still cold to the touch and a little red, but there’s no sign of anything that can’t be fixed with warm, dry socks.
“C’mon,” he says. “You’d feel better if you laid down.”
Ellie grabs his sleeve and tugs.
Well, if it’s not speaking, at least it’s communication.
“Yeah, I can sit with you.” He moves over to the other side of the mattress, wanting her closer to the fire and wanting to be between her and the door. “I’m right here.”
After a second, she puts her hand on his shoulder and shoves.
He lets himself be pushed. “Bossy.”
When he’s lying down, though, she tucks herself close to his side, curling into herself as much as she can. He tugs the blankets up over her, bundling her up. He doesn’t like how cold she still is. He doesn’t like even more that he doesn’t know how long she’s been cold.
“There,” he says. He shifts onto his side, biting back a groan.
Lying down is definitely helping, but rolling over still feels like something he should not be doing. But he wants to get a better look at Ellie’s face, to try to get some kind of read on her.
“Hey,” he says, tracing a finger across her forehead. “Why don’t you close those eyes and try to rest a bit? We’re safe here.”
Ellie lifts herself onto her elbow for a moment. At the top of the mattress, where she can reach it no matter how she curls up, he put a mug of water and her knife. Her gun might still be in her backpack — he doesn’t like to go in her bag if he doesn’t have to — but he’s not entirely sure he’d be comfortable giving her one right now anyways. He’d be afraid she might accidentally hurt herself.
She grabs her knife and tucks it against her chest.
That’s fine, if that makes her feel safe. He’s got a gun on the other side of the mattress for the same reason.
“Okay,” he says. He pushes up on an elbow to match her posture, picking the mug up. “Here, how about you drink some of this? If you’re concussed, you gotta stay hydrated. Gotta have enough brain juice up there to keep your brain from knockin’ around more.”
Ellie gives him a look.
“That’s a scientific term right there,” he tells her.
She shakes her head, grimacing a little at the movement, but she takes the mug and takes a sip, then a few desperate gulps until he has to tip it back down. She makes a wordless, annoyed noise when he does.
“I know,” he says. “But you’ll get sick if you drink too fast. Small sips.”
She can bitch at him about it all she wants, and he’ll be grateful for it. It’s still not talking, and that’s terrifying in a kid who can normally talk his ear off, but at least she’s responsive. That’s better than that blank emptiness.
And she’s always had her moments of quiet. After Sam and Henry especially, it took days for her to tell him a pun or ask him a question, days of only speaking when necessary. Hell, even when she’s her normal self, he can tell she’s tired because she goes quiet.
This is different. More. Terrifying. But he’s not surprised, exactly.
As quickly as he allows, she drains the cup.
“You want more?”
She lays back down.
He gets up and pours more water from one of the pots into her mug anyways, leaving it where she can reach it. He puts more wood on the fire while he’s up. There’s plenty of it, and he saw more outside. The people who used to live here must have just gotten a delivery before the outbreak.
The one thing they won’t have to worry about, at least, is freezing.
Small mercies.
As soon as he’s back next to her, Ellie reaches out and fists a hand in his shirt.
“You eat anything recently?” he asks idly, not expecting an answer.
Ellie turns fucking green, and shakes her head so hard he gets concerned and catches the back of her head in his palm to stop her.
“Ellie?”
She curls into herself, like she’s trying to hide her face from him.
His stomach sinks. She knows what they were doing. He’d hoped, stupidly, she wouldn’t.
“Alright,” he says. “You didn’t do anything wrong, okay? Nothin’.”
He doesn’t know if her reaction means she ate something they gave her, if she’s just in denial. He hopes, desperately, it means she didn’t, for her sake. This is already too much for any kid to deal with.
He nudges her face up as gently as he can. “You look at me,” he says. “You did nothing wrong. Not a single goddamn thing.”
He can’t tell if she believes him, but he can keep saying it until she does.
The bruising on her face has gotten worse already. If she doesn’t wake up tomorrow with two black eyes, he’ll be shocked. There’s a dark one growing on her forehead, spreading towards her hairline, right above the scrape going through her eyebrow.
When he presses his thumb against it, even gently, she winces and inhales sharply.
“Sorry,” he murmurs. He’s being paranoid about a skull fracture, the way she’s bruised. Without thinking about it, he brushes a kiss against the scrape in apology, the same way he kissed probably hundreds of scraped knees.
When he pulls back, Ellie is looking at him very intently.
“Is that okay?” he asks.
She nods, once.
Good. The last thing he wants is to make her uncomfortable.
“Now you need to rest. Close your eyes,” he says. She stares at him, stubborn as ever. “C’mon, baby, eyes shut. Ain’t nothin’ to see, ain’t nothin’ to do.”
He’s not even sure why the words feel so familiar until he remembers saying them over thirty years ago. Sarah had gone through a big phase as a toddler where she’d been convinced if she slept, she was going to miss something fun and exciting.
He’d forgotten that, until this moment.
Ellie sighs, but she closes her eyes.
“Thank you,” he says.
The sun has set, somewhere between them finding the cabin and his last trip outside for snow. He’s not sure how late it is, but he knows he’s exhausted and he can almost feel how tired Ellie is. There’s so little he can do for her injuries besides getting her to rest.
He shifts onto his back again, trying to take a bit of pressure off his side. Ellie’s closer to the fire, with himself between her and the door, and he doesn’t want to sleep on his good ear, so he’s not exactly comfortable.
When he moves, Ellie shifts and he holds back a sigh. Rookie move, he thinks wryly, moving around before the baby’s asleep.
She pushes up on one arm, pulling at the quilt.
“What are you doin’?” he asks, tucking a bit of hair behind her ear.
It’s a pretty big quilt, so he folded it in half when he set it over her. She pulls at it now until it’s unfolded, then tugs the other side over him.
“Ellie, I’m fine,” he tries to protest, but she’s determined, not satisfied until he’s covered. The room’s warm enough that he was alright without it, but also that he’s not overly worried about her not getting warm without the double layer. She has another blanket under the quilt, some smaller fuzzy thing that he thought she might like, so she won’t get cold from the draft if he moves, either.
Ideally, he’d wrap her in every blanket in a ten mile radius, but if this makes her happy… he’ll share the quilt with her.
When that’s done, she nods to herself and presses in closer to him. Her movements are a little awkward, or maybe more just uncertain. There’s a moment’s pause, and then a glance at him like he’s going to stop her before she curls up against his side and puts her head on his shoulder.
She’s so stiff it’s like having a mannequin next to him.
“Here,” he says. “Lift up for a second.”
When she does, he lifts his arm from where she was sort of laying on it and tucks it around her back. He gives a little squeeze, careful not to hurt her ribs, then begins to rub little circles on her back.
Ellie melts. She’s positively boneless against him, actually relaxed for the first time.
Well, that’ll work.
Joel wakes up when Ellie pulls away. She sits on the side of the mattress, reaching for her boots.
“Just what do you think you’re doin’?” he asks.
She looks over her shoulder at him, then at the window, where pale light is leaking around the curtain, then at the door.
Still not talking, then. But it’s clear what she wants.
“No,” he says firmly. “We’re safe here. We’re stayin’ for a few days.”
A few days minimum, depending on how much food they can find. Ellie needs new winter gear before they’ll be able to do any real travelling. But how fast they get on the road isn’t even close to his main concern.
She glares at him, and starts tugging her boots on.
“You can keep doin’ that, but we ain’t leavin’,” he says. Apparently they’re awake, so he gets up and checks the fire, adding another log. “Gonna look in the kitchen real quick.”
There’s food. Joel leans both hands on the counter when he sees it, exhaling a low sigh of relief. It’s not a ton, but it’s enough for a few days, until he can look through the other houses around them or go hunting.
He grabs a can of peaches and a package of instant mashed potatoes. There’s some soups and pastas, but he’s not sure how much those will sit well with Ellie right now. She’s still moving like her head hurts, as stubborn as she is, and he’s worried about giving her anything too heavy.
As he’s setting those by the fireplace, a balled up pair of socks hits him in the forehead.
He stares at Ellie. “Seriously?”
Of course, he’s managed to find a kid who can have an argument with him without speaking.
“We’re stayin’ put,” he repeats. “We’re safe here for now, and I ain’t draggin’ you out into a storm when you’re beat to shit. It’s not happenin’, Ellie.”
Another pair of socks nails him in the chest.
“Will you knock it off? You’re gonna set your socks on fire.” He kneels down in front of her and catches her wrist in his hand before she can throw anything else at him. “Ellie, you’re concussed. If it gets worse, your brain could start bleeding. You could have a seizure. Your ribs are cracked. If we’re walkin’, and you slip and fall, one could puncture your lungs. And the way your belly’s all black and blue, if you’ve got bruising to your kidneys or liver and you end up with internal bleeding, there’s…”
He has to stop talking for a second, all too able to picture it.
“There wouldn’t be anything I could do to fix it,” he says, fighting to keep his voice steady. “Do you understand? I can’t…”
He can’t lose her.
Ellie looks at him for a long moment. Then she pulls her hand away, dropping another pair of socks on the floor next to her bag. She digs in her backpack for a moment, pulling out a small cloth bag. She opens it and takes out a syringe and a small vial, then reaches for the hem of his shirt and tugs it up.
“Ellie.”
She pulls his shirt up until she can see his wound. He hasn’t looked at it yet himself — it’s still pretty gruesome, but the skin around the stitches is less puffy and inflamed.
“You got medicine?” he says, but her face goes shuttered, so he doesn’t push anymore.
That explains a lot, though, like why, despite how much he feels like shit, he isn’t actually dead.
“This ain’t magic,” he says as gently as he remembers how. “It helps a lot, and you did so good gettin’ it, but it needs time and rest to work.”
And God how he hates using his own weakness to get her to rest, but nothing else seems to be working to get through her head.
He covers her hands with one of his. “Can you do that for me?”
After the longest moment of his life, Ellie nods. She nudges the syringe towards him.
“Alright. No, I can do it,” he says when she starts fumbling with his shirt.
He’s no expert on these things, but enough back alley medical care and piecing together what they could from what they smuggled has kept him alive for twenty years, so he knows his way around antibiotics, at least. He squints for a second at the tiny writing on the bottle before drawing up something close enough to the right dose.
He pauses to look at Ellie. “Now don’t you ever let me catch you sharin’ needles,” he tells her. “Really, you shouldn’t reuse needles at all, but especially you do not ever share a needle, understood?”
He gets a scrap of fabric and pours of bit alcohol onto it.
Then he raises his eyebrows at her. “You mind?”
Ellie gives him a blank look.
“Penicillin — antibiotics, they need to go in a big muscle,” he explains. “Hip, thigh, that kind of thing.”
Her eyes go wide in the second before she turns around. That raises some questions he tries not to think too much about.
She did her best. He’s alive. It’s fine.
Honestly he probably doesn’t want to know.
He gets himself injected and recaps the needle before fixing his clothes and telling Ellie she can turn around again.
“Do you wanna hold onto these?” he asks, slipping everything back into the bag.
She takes it and returns it to her backpack.
He reaches for her boots. “Let’s take these off.”
Ellie stops him.
“You don’t need them,” he says.
She looks at the back door, then across the cabin.
Ah.
“Let me help you up.”
When she’s standing, she presses a hand to her ribs, wincing, but she seems steady enough and there are some things a teenaged girl just doesn’t want an audience for. He gives her his jacket and as much privacy as he can.
She returns a few minutes later, and wanders over to the bedroom. He can hear her moving around in there, opening and closing drawers.
“Do you need somethin’?” he calls.
She comes back eventually with an armful of stuff. She holds up a thick sweatshirt for his approval, unzipped to show it has some kind of sherpa-style lining on the inside.
“Good find,” he tells her. It’s not as good as a real coat, but it’ll fit her better than his jacket and keep her warm enough if she needs to go outside until they find something better.
She sits on the mattress again and hands him a pillow and pillowcase. He’d thrown the pillows on the floor, too exhausted and too worried about her to bother with them, since they were covered in the same thick layer of dust as everything else. She’s stripped the old pillowcases off and found some clean ones, one of which she’s wrestling onto a pillow.
When that’s done, he sets it on the bed and reaches for her boots, giving her time to see him doing it before slipping them off and returning them to next to his.
“You gettin’ spoiled?” he asks. “Gonna be too good for a sleeping bag soon?”
She rolls her eyes.
He hands her a mug of water. “Would you be okay if I went and checked out the other houses?”
Ellie stills, then shakes her head just slightly.
“Yeah, I figured.” He gives her knee a squeeze. “What about some food?”
She goes pale.
“I know,” he says. “But I promise it’s safe. Ellie, I would never do that to you.”
He would do anything for her, anything to keep her safe. Those men he tortured yesterday, he won’t ever even think about them again. He would starve himself to the bone to make sure she had food in her belly. But he would never betray her that way.
“Can you try?” he asks.
After a moment, she gives the tiniest nod.
He decides on a pack of instant mashed potatoes. They might be a bit bland, but that might be easier for her right now. Plus because it’s only adding boiling water to the powder, he can mix up just a little bit, half a bowl, to start.
The living room in the cabin is so small that the mattress takes up most of the floor space, with just a couple feet of room between it and the fireplace. On the other side, the mattress butts up against the couch.
Ellie’s sitting against the couch when he turns back to her, her knees drawn up as much as she can with her ribs so sore.
He sits next to her with the bowl, stretching his legs out in front of him. “Here, baby.”
She takes it and stares at it.
The fire’s got the place pretty warm, but there’s still the occasional draft when the wind blows a particular way and Ellie runs a bit cold. She’s such a small thing. He pulls that fuzzy blanket free from under the quilt, tucking it around her shoulders.
She holds the bowl out to him.
“Kiddo, try to eat some of it.”
She huffs a frustrated breath. Clearly, he’s not doing something she wants him to do, but he’s lost until Ellie uses the spoon to scoop up some of the potatoes, then grabs his hand and puts the spoon in it.
Then gets it. He takes a bite and passes it over again.
She takes a slow breath, braces herself, and eats. She takes two bites before giving it back to him for him to take another. In that way, they work through the bowl, though Ellie’s eating is slow and unsteady. He makes another half-bowl serving and they do the same with that. She gives up before it’s completely finished, but it’s better than nothing.
He knows they ran out of food. The exact timeline of that is uncertain for him, but he suspects it’s been a while. He hasn’t been feeling it, still sort of vaguely nauseated from the infection and the drugs and everything else, but he was worried about how long it’d been since Ellie had eaten. She’s been fighting so hard — he’s terrified of the idea of her burning herself out and collapsing.
She’s got her head tilted back against the couch now, and she looks a little sick. But they got some calories in her, and that’s all he can ask for right now.
Better to take it slow, anyways.
“Still pretty early,” he says. The light’s still weak, though with the way the wind’s whipping, he suspects part of that might be more storm than time of day. “You could probably sleep a bit longer.”
She looks at the window for a long moment, then moves over on the mattress. Then she puts a hand on his shoulder and starts pushing.
“Alright, alright,” he says with a chuckle. He stretches out on the mattress, only slightly groaning. Ellie’s insistence on pillows certainly doesn’t hurt things here. Besides in Jackson, where he barely slept anyways, this is one of the nicer beds he’s slept on since leaving Boston.
She sits on the side of the mattress, her knees bent up as she stares into the fire.
Hesitating only a moment, he reaches over and begins tracing an idle pattern up and down the length of her spine. He’s not sure what’s going on in her head, but they can sit like this, if that’s what she needs.
After a while, she turns and presses in against his side, curling up with her head on his shoulder again. He’s arranging the blankets over her again when he realizes she’s trembling.
“What is it?” he asks, smoothing a careful hand over her head. There’s a big goose egg that’s risen up on her skull and she flinches when he accidentally touches it. “Sorry, kiddo. Your head hurt?”
She doesn’t respond, not even a nod. It’s not until he hears a little sniffle, barely audible, that he realizes she’s crying.
He lets her cry. Murmurs reassurances and rubs her shaking back, but she’s always so reluctant to cry in front of him. He’s only seen it a couple times, and she always roughly rubs the tears away as soon as she can, like she’s embarrassed to have been caught. Otherwise, the only time he knows she cries is late at night, when she thinks he’s already asleep.
It’s not his first time dealing with a kid who’s been through some shit. Sarah had never dealt with anything like this, thank Christ, but she’d dealt with some bullying at school one year, the absence of her mother in her life, a favourite teacher dying unexpectedly. It never made things better when she tried to bottle things up, is what he knows.
Breaks his damn heart, hearing his girl cry like that, but it’s what she needs.
Eventually, she cries herself out and passes out against his shoulder.
As gently as he can, he shifts so he can wipe her still-damp face with his sleeve. The bruising on her face has deepened, and her nose is swollen. He still doesn’t know exactly what happened to her, but he’s been able to make some guesses, and one of those is that it seems like she got hit hard in the face.
He strokes her hair back from her face, watching the smallest wrinkle between her brows smooth as he does.
He can’t understand it, how anyone would look at this kid and want to hurt her.
They spend a week and a half in the cabin. He thanks God for the storm that rages nearly the entire time they’re there, because otherwise he knows Ellie would be trying to get him to leave sooner. Neither of them is completely back in shape by the time he decides they can travel.
“Alright,” he says, tucking Ellie’s scarf a little closer around her neck. They found her a jacket that’s a little big, but with a few layers underneath, it works well enough. Still, he’s worried about her getting cold. “Now remember, we ain’t trying to do too much today. Just a few hours of walkin’. And if you need a break, you let me know.”
She won’t, he knows, but he has to say it.
They’ve already had a talk — well, he talked, and she made her displeasure clear — that they aren’t actively trying to get to Salt Lake while it’s this cold. He’ll point them in that direction, put the distance she desperately needs between them and that fucking hellhole of a town, but getting to Salt Lake isn’t his priority. The weather is too unpredictable.
Distance until she feels safe again. Then somewhere else where they can rest and heal and shelter until the weather is better for travelling. Ellie doesn’t like it, but she comes first for him, always.
“You got everythin’ you want?” he checks again.
Ellie nods.
“Alright. Let’s get goin’.”
In all the cabins they searched, they never found her a decent pair of gloves. The only pair he managed to find is one of those thin knit ones. They’ll keep her skin from being exposed to the cold air, but they don’t do much for warmth. He tried to give her his, but she argued with him. In the end, they compromised with each of them taking one glove.
As they walk away from the cabin, he feels Ellie’s small hand slip into his.
“Joel?”
He whips around to look at her so fast he almost breaks his own neck.
She bites her lip. “What do you get when you cross a vampire with a snowman?”
“Wh — what, baby?” he manages.
“Frostbite.”
“Jesus.” He tries not to let her see him grinning. “That’s terrible.”
“You laughed.”
He did.
It doesn’t last that long again, but she’s more prone to quiet after. He tries not to draw attention to it too much. Tries, a couple times, to mention if she’s quiet, but she just apologizes and that’s not what he wants. He talks instead, trying to remind her he’s there.
She’s so silent in the car after the hospital. Even her breathing is so quiet that he keeps checking the rear view mirror to make sure she’s still breathing. Once he even stops the car so he can reach back and put a hand on her side to feel her inhaling and exhaling.
When she groans herself awake, he lets out a sigh of relief.
He lies to her about the Fireflies, and she turns away, hiding her face. She’s quiet the rest of the drive, even when he pulls the car over so she can get dressed again. She doesn’t say anything until he mentions the hike back to Jackson, coaxing a little smile out of her, even.
But she stops him on the hill outside town.
“Swear to me everything you said about the Fireflies was true,” Ellie says.
“I swear,” he lies.
She looks at him for a long, long moment. “Okay,” she says.
She doesn’t speak for three days.
Tommy tries to get her to talk, and Joel tells him gently to quit it, to leave her alone. She can’t help it, when she gets like this. It’s not something she’s doing on purpose. She’s not being bratty or something.
Apparently the school in town still does summer breaks, which is something he has to explain to Ellie. FEDRA school was year-round, apparently. Much as it can be called school.
There’s only a few weeks left in the school year, so he suggests Ellie should go to adjust. With how hippy dippy they are about things around here, he doesn’t expect they’ll care much if she isn’t caught up academically, but socially it could be good for her, he thinks.
Ellie refuses. She won’t tell him details, but there’s something there that makes him stop pushing it immediately.
Some things about this version of their life feel like riding a bike. Making sure she’s fed, occasionally encouraging her to eat a vegetable, that’s easy. He was never the strictest about that anyways — Sarah was more likely to nag him about eating better than the other way around. Ellie leans closer to vegetarian than most people have the luxury of doing, anyways, and loses her appetite too easily, so he’s more worried about her getting enough to eat than eating the food pyramid.
Curfew? A breeze. Ellie won’t go further than his elbow the first week they’re in town and he’s the one gently nudging her to go when one of the other kids finally works up the courage to invite her to the movie. He says, casually, to try not to stay out too late after the movie and she’s home exactly thirty minutes after it ends. The next time she’s invited out, he says ten, figuring that’s reasonable for an almost-fifteen year old.
She’s in the door ten minutes early.
He gives up on the cursing at the dinner table — he doesn’t really give a shit about her swearing anyways, and he was really just on edge the first time they were here, too wrapped up in his own head comparing what he’d been doing for her with this town. But the first time she curses at dinner, she shoots him a suspicious look and he can’t bring himself to do it.
He’s spent too long with her silence. Swearing is at least talking.
So many things are easy with her.
Others, not so much.
It only takes one stupid, ill-thought remark that has her shrinking into herself before lashing out twice as fierce for him to realize she thinks he’s comparing her to other kids. He’s not — or if he is, it’s the same way he did with Sarah, where he’s absolutely certain his kid is better than every other kid.
He signs up for patrol and ends up agreeing to an overnight shift three times a week for a couple months, covering for someone who was injured right before they got there. He figures it’s fine. Since they’re only six hours long, he leaves right after Ellie goes to bed, usually, gets home in time to have breakfast with her, and catches a few hours of sleep until the afternoon. It’s a little rough, but he still gets to spend time with her and it’s only meant to be for a few months.
It takes three weeks for him to realize she’s not sleeping while he’s gone. And the only reason why is because his horse throws a shoe so he has to come back early, still in the middle of the night, and he finds her awake on the couch.
It makes sense immediately why she’s been looking so tired lately.
She almost shoots him when he walks through the door and he’s not sure which of them is more surprised. As soon as she recovers, she looks like she’s expecting him to yell at her.
Instead, he just tells her he’s going to take a shower. When he comes out, she’s sitting on his bed with her shoulders braced for a fight.
He doesn’t let it be one. He just pokes her forehead until she giggles and lets him nudge her back. When he stretches out with a groan, she curls up against his side.
She’s asleep no more than five minutes later.
The next day, he gets himself switched to a different patrol shift. Twice a week during the day instead. He’ll miss the time with her, but she can hang out with the other kids and that might be good for her. He’ll do more construction, more anything, but he’s prioritizing his kid.
Whether she lets him know he needs to or not.
She gives him suspicious looks when he tells her about the change, but he says he’s getting too old for overnight shifts and she pounces on the chance to tell him just how old he is, like he know she would.
He expects to have to fight about it, to defend his decision and his need to stay home with Ellie, but instead he’s thanked for how long he did the shift and the person he’s talking to makes a joke about his teenager causing trouble at home when he’s not there.
Like Ellie’s throwing wild parties instead of simply being unable to sleep.
Half the time he feels like he’s doing a terrible job. When she can’t eat and goes to bed without dinner, when he realizes she’s only showering every three days because she ended up convinced, somehow, that they’re supposed to be rationing water, when he snaps at her because she zoned out and missed meeting him for lunch and he panicked and thought something was wrong.
Then he checks on her and she’s sleeping soundly in her bed, and he hopes desperately that means he’s doing something right.
Ellie’s not eating today. She’s got food on her plate, but she’s just been moving it around on her plate for the entirety of breakfast.
She had nightmares last night. He’s amazed he even woke up, with his shitty hearing, but it must be some instinct, the same thing that had him awake at the slightest whimper from a baby decades ago. He thinks he must have heard the thud of her hitting the floor when she threw herself out of bed, but he’s not sure.
What he knows is he reached her door in time to hear her throwing up in her bathroom.
She didn’t sleep much after that, although he got her down for a couple hours.
“You feelin’ alright?” Tommy asks, and Joel curses his brother’s soft heart.
Ellie looks up. “Huh? Oh, yeah. I’m fine.”
“You want somethin’ else?” Tommy offers. “Maybe some toast? Or I know the kitchen staff wouldn’t mind makin’ you somethin’ lighter.”
“No, it’s okay,” Ellie says, her cheeks flushing pink. “The food’s good here.”
“It is,” Tommy agrees. “But to tell you the truth, it didn’t agree with me so good the first few weeks I was here.”
Joel gives him a look. Tommy’s never once in his life been a picky eater. Joel saw him eat a worm on a dare when he was twelve. He ate the sketchiest leftovers out of Joel’s fridge when he was young. He’s seen his brother seriously consider eating an old can of dog food, and they weren’t even that hungry.
“Why?” Ellie asks, so he stays quiet for now.
“Our food’s a bit more rich than I was used to,” Tommy says. “More butter, more fat. Honestly, even the vegetables. There’s this cabbage thing they make sometimes and the first time I ate it, I thought it would be the end of me.”
Ellie snorts. “Stupid way to die.”
Tommy gives her a mock wounded look. “I’m barin’ my soul to you here, darlin’. You could give me some sympathy.”
She rolls her eyes.
After a moment, Tommy reaches over and slides her plate away. “Why don’t we get rid of this, if you don’t want it?”
“But—” After the word, she goes quiet, frowning.
Joel nudges her. “What, kiddo?”
“This is what the meal is. And I took it,” she says, quiet and uncertain.
“It’s fine,” he says immediately.
“Ain’t no one cares about that,” Tommy agrees. “Everyone here can eat what they want. We just care about people gettin’ three squares a day.”
“It’s a waste,” she says.
Tommy shrugs, divvying the contents of her plate between his own and Joel’s. “Saves your old man a trip when he wants seconds. No problem here.”
Ellie stares after him while he crosses the dining hall, setting her plate in the return bin and grabbing a clean one.
Joel touches her hand, making her look at him. “It’s alright,” he says, though he’s not sure she’ll believe him.
The problem is, he doesn’t give a shit about most of Jackson’s rules, when it comes to her, and she knows it. There’s no rules around food she’s at any risk of breaking, but she has these ideas in her head that there are, the after effects of a life in a FEDRA school.
After a moment, though, Tommy comes back with a plate with just a couple slices of toast and some more fruit, the only thing Ellie actually did eat.
“Now if you’re really not feelin’ up to it, you don’t gotta eat it,” he says. He flashes her a grin. “I promise, the pigs wouldn’t mind your leftovers. And I don’t just mean Joel.”
Ellie hesitates a moment, then reaches for one of the jam jars on the table. She spreads a layer over one of the slices, thin.
Joel’s noticed she doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth. He let her eat a can of pie filling once, figuring what the fuck else were they going to do with it, and she barely got a third through before giving up. She loves fruit, though, especially berries.
“What does that mean?” Ellie asks, tearing off a bite of toast. “Three squares? I thought you didn’t have ration blocks here.”
Joel doesn’t look at Tommy, because if he does, he knows he’ll see the expression he’s trying not to make reflected back on his brother’s face. “It just means a good, solid meal, baby,” he manages. “Not literal squares.”
She makes a face. “Why? That’s stupid.”
“Not sure,” he admits. “Just an expression.”
Tommy clears his throat. “It’s an old sailing term,” he says, slightly hoarse. “The trays sailors ate their meals off were square.”
“Huh,” Ellie says while Joel is still processing this whole conversation. He ain’t used to his brother knowing things. “So… before, everyone did three whole meals a day? Like full, sit-down meals and everything? Like this?”
Joel reminds himself it takes several months to walk across the country and he has no ability to get his hands on a working car, so he cannot go back to Boston and murder as many FEDRA instructors as he can get his hands on.
“That different than what you’re used to?” he asks when he’s sure his voice won’t show what he’s feeling. “How’d your school do it?”
Ellie shoves more toast in her mouth. He ignores her talking with her mouth full. At least for now. “Breakfast and dinner, ration bar in the middle of the day. Red wrapper on even days, green wrapper on odd.”
He breathes slow to keep from reacting. “The green one’s disgusting.”
“Right?” Ellie says, excited. “I’d always try to save them and trade them to someone who didn’t like the red ones — which, just wrong — but we weren’t supposed to hide food in our rooms. But oh my God, the green ones were fucking vile.”
She gets going on a rant, and it distracts her enough that she eats both her pieces of toast and all her fruit.
After they finish breakfast, Tommy leaves to bring a container back to Maria. In the final weeks of pregnancy, she’s finally been convinced to sleep late once in a while and, he thinks, is perhaps a touch sick of his brother’s hovering, so he’s been eating meals with them the last couple days.
He’s got a construction job and Ellie decides to keep him company.
As they walk over to the site, she glances at him. “Really three times a day?”
It takes him a second to catch her meaning, since she’s gone through about five different subjects since then.
And then he isn’t sure what the right answer is. He won’t ever force her to eat, but is being asked to eat three times a day too much pressure?
On the road, they didn’t exactly eat three times a day. Sometimes there wasn’t enough food, sometimes there was nowhere safe to stop. Some days it was food when they woke up, and food when they camped at night. He tried to find things she could eat while they walked, but that wasn’t always possible.
He hates that she was already used to that, and he hates that he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to tell her now.
In the end, he just says what feels right.
“Three times a day,” he agrees. “More if you’re hungry.”
“Hm,” she says.
It’s a quiet day for her. He checks on her a few times, asks her questions, but she’s in her head, and it usually takes her a couple times of him saying her name for her to respond. Eventually, he leaves her alone. She’s in a corner of the room where he’s working, a notebook open on her lap and a pencil in her hand.
The only time he interrupts is when their lunch delivery is dropped off. They could go to the hall if they wanted, but it’s convenient, having food dropped off so they don’t have to walk all the way over there.
Someone must have caught wind that Ellie was spending the day with him and his crew, because there’s an extra sandwich in the basket for Ellie — cheese and jam, her bizarre favourite.
She hides it quick, but he catches the surprise on her face.
Two days later, when he’s putting away her laundry, he finds it hidden in her sock drawer, a single bite taken out of it.
After Silver Lake, she slept so close her nightmares woke him up. She woke up screaming twice, both times scaring the shit out of him, but every other night she had one, it was only thrashing as she woke, or her shoving away from him suddenly.
In this house, he can’t hear always her wake from a nightmare even with both their doors open. She won’t come to him, and he doesn’t understand it. On the road, after she came back to herself, she always accepted comfort from him.
Now, the only time she will is if he wakes up and doesn’t know why or if he checks on her and she’s awake. She lets him sit on her bed with her and stroke her back until she settles, but she won’t come across the hall to his room.
She doesn’t sleep well all summer and he can’t do anything about it.
Right before school starts, he says she has to go and for some reason he still doesn’t understand, it turns into a fucking fight. It’s a bad one, too, one that leaves them both pissed and stewing when they go to bed.
Two hours later, Ellie screams herself awake and he flies across the hall. He wasn’t sleeping at all, too wound up, and he’s stupid with it, getting too close before turning the light on so she knows it’s him.
Ellie clocks him across the jaw, hard enough that he loses his balance, falling on his goddamn ass.
Somewhere, if there’s an afterlife, Tess is laughing at him for getting his ass kicked by his ninety-pound fifteen-year-old.
“Oh, fuck,” Ellie says. “Oh, shit, I’m sorry.”
“You’re fine,” he says automatically. “Ain’t nothin’."
They get in each other’s way for a moment as Ellie tries to get a good look at his face and he tries to examine her hand.
“I’m sorry, I’m really sorry,” she says again, desperate.
All things considered, it was decent punch, so even as his jaw stings, he’s just glad to find her hand isn’t fractured.
“It’s okay,” he tells her, again and again, until she stops panicking.
When she does — finally — she flops down against her pillows, sweat still plastering her hair to her face. “Jesus,” she mutters. “You shouldn’t have gotten so close.”
“I know.” He does. But he doesn’t care, except that he scared her. “I was worried ‘bout you.”
“I’m fine,” she lies. “Go back to bed.”
“I’m alright.”
She huffs, annoyed suddenly, and rolls over so he can’t see her face anymore. “Fuck off, Joel. Go away.”
He touches her back, but she shrinks away and he stops.
“Rather not,” he says.
She sniffles, but doesn’t say anything. He sits on her floor until dawn, dozing off at some point between one blink and the other. When he wakes, his face smashed against the edge of her mattress, Ellie’s already gone.
His days get quieter, because Ellie gets quieter. There’s more days where she doesn’t talk, and now that she has a bedroom, more days where she doesn’t come out of her locked room at all. Sometimes he can convince her to open her door and take some food. Sometimes he leaves a tray outside her room and it’s left untouched until he has to clear it away.
When she does talk, it’s often sharper, angrier than she usually is. Especially with him. Tommy and Maria catch a few stray barbs, but the majority of them are directed at him.
He tries to stay patient, but he doesn’t understand it and it’s frustrating.
Not until an afternoon when they’re out in the new part of Jackson where they’re expanding the wall. It’s less explored out there, more stuff to look at.
Ellie frowns at an old store sign. “Did this store seriously just sell apples?”
He holds back a grin. “Yeah, you know. People would go to get speciality breeds and stuff. Apple pie, cider.”
She stares at him. “For real?”
“Nah. It sold electronics. But I had you goin’ for a moment, didn’t I?”
It’s not unusual for them to joke like that. She’s better at recognizing it now than the first couple times he teased her, more used to it. He might be better at doing it. And she’s certainly no stranger to fucking with him.
But for some reason, her face crumples in the split second before she forces her expression back to hardness. “Don’t fucking lie to me.”
He frowns, caught off guard by the sudden shift in her mood. “I’m just teasin’, Ellie.”
“You’re lying to me,” she spits. “You keep fucking lying to me.”
He stares at her. “Ellie—”
“I’m going home,” she says.
“You’re not walkin’ alone.”
Although it’s patrolled and there’s a decent amount of people around right now, this part of town isn’t technically inside the walls and he doesn’t want her out on her own.
She rolls her eyes and spots something over his shoulder. “I’ll get Tommy to walk me back. I don’t — I don’t want fucking want to be here.”
She’s gone before he can say anything else and he’s left standing in a ruined neighbourhood wondering what the fuck just happened.
The first time she gets in a fight at school, Joel figures it’s just her settling in. She’s not used to this kind of school, and she barely wanted to go at all. He wasn’t even the one who convinced her, in the end — he took the coward’s route and let Maria fight that battle for him.
The second time, he still doesn’t think much of it.
The third time, he starts to worry.
“Are you serious?” he asks the moment he sees her sitting outside the principal’s office. She’s got a split lip, but her knuckles are bloody and by this point, he’s less worried about her than whatever kid she beat. “Ellie, this is the third time in two months. What the hell were you thinkin’?”
She looks at him, surprised, but she doesn’t say anything.
“You better start talkin’,” he demands, and immediately knows it’s the wrong thing to say. They’ve never talked about these times when she goes quiet, but he knows she’s embarrassed by them. “No more excuses, kid. You need to start tellin’ me what the hell is going on. Enough bullshit.”
She scoffs.
He raises both eyebrows. “What?”
“Like you give a shit about being honest,” she says, practically spitting the last word.
He looks over his shoulder. There’s no one out in the hallway, but the other classes aren’t that far away. “You really wanna do this here?”
She slumps back, crossing her arms over her chest. “No.”
He still has to talk to her principal, leaving her in the hallway. It’s… not great. She’s suspended for two weeks, and it’s not exactly implied he’s doing an amazing job. It stings, the way it stung when Sarah’s teachers would ask about her mother’s absence, and he’s more than ready to go home when it’s done, even it means a fight with Ellie.
He steps out of the office and she’s already gone.
When he gets home, the house is quiet.
“Ellie?” he calls. He sits on the bench next to the door and unlaces his boots. “Kiddo, we need to talk.”
Nothing.
He walks into the kitchen. “Ellie?”
Still no response. It’s not unexpected that she might not be talking after today, but he’d expect to hear something from her. Stomping around upstairs, at least.
He makes his way slowly up the stairs. Her door’s ajar and he nudges it open as he says her name again.
Her room is empty, but there’s a piece of paper on her bed.
At Tommy’s, is all it says.
He sits on the foot of her bed. Her backpack is gone, the new one he got for her when they got here because he left hers in the hospital. Her closet door is standing open and a few of her drawers aren’t closed all the way, a pair of sweats half-hanging out of one.
Her backpack is gone.
He sees her around town. Of course he does — it’s a small town. But she avoids him. She’s never in the dining hall at the same time as him, and Tommy tries to write it off as her just wanting to eat with her friends, but Joel knows better.
Without her by his side, his days are so much quieter. He can’t even work himself to exhaustion the way he’d like. Jackson has rules about that type of shit, and even offering to pick up extra work only gets him a shift here and there in addition to his normal schedule. He puts more effort into the house, finally getting to the all the little projects he’s been putting off for the sake of living a life.
Ellie’s bedroom door remains firmly shut. He can’t stand the sight of it without her in it.
Besides, her room is the room he put the most effort into. Only days after they got here, he was ripping down the hideous pink wallpaper and helping her pick a new paint colour. There’s not a damn thing wrong with her room, besides that she ain’t in it.
Once, he even goes to the movie because the silence in the house is threatening to drive him crazy. It’s some stupid action movie, something he’d normally enjoy, and he’s shocked to see a familiar brown ponytail towards the front of the room.
He tries not to stare, and the next time he looks, she’s gone.
Today, he and Tommy are clearing out an old house. It’s busy work, something the kids could do, going through an empty house and clearing anything useful. Joel’s looking forward to the next day more, when they’re knocking down the rotting kitchen cabinets to replace with new ones.
“Thanksgiving next week,” Tommy says.
“Mm.”
“Gonna be a big meal in the hall and a dance after,” he says. “Everyone really goes all out.”
“Alright,” Joel says, barely paying attention.
“Lot of people who come here, it’s the first time they’ve had somethin’ to be thankful for in a long time.”
Joel throws down the book he’s holding. Ellie wouldn’t like it anyways. It’s some stupid teen romance novel and she has no patience for those. “What are you hintin’ at?”
“I want you to be there,” Tommy says. “For me.”
Tommy’s a fifty-one year old man. And yet, sometimes when Joel looks at him, he sees him as he remembers the most vividly from their childhood — five years old, the year their father left. Joel was eleven and with their mother suddenly working doubles every day to barely pay the bills, he was the one responsible for his brother. He was the one walking him to school and home again, the one who made sure he did his homework, the one who made sure he ate dinner and brushed his teeth.
“Fine,” he says. “I’m gonna go look around upstairs.”
There’s a child’s bedroom upstairs, and he’s in enough of a self-destructive mood to look through it. Probably a little boy’s room, judging by the decor. There’s some toys he makes a vague note to mention to Tommy, thinking they might be nice to put away for the baby in a couple years.
And on a shelf, next to a globe and a piggy bank, is a little snowglobe with a dinosaur in it.
A stupid thing, really.
He leaves the bedroom before he breaks something and takes on the much safer room across the hall.
When he gets home — late, but there’s no one to make it matter — he kicks his boots off and goes upstairs. Ellie’s door is shut, the way it’s been for weeks. When he opens it, the air inside is musty and he hates it.
He opens her window, changes her sheets for clean ones and leaves her bed made up tidy. There’s some dirty clothes on the floor that he picks up, bundling into the hamper with her sheets and putting the whole thing outside in the hallway to wash later. She normally hates him cleaning her room. Sarah did, too, so he wasn’t surprised by that. So beyond that, he only makes sure her dresser drawer and closet are closed and that there aren’t any old dishes in her room.
He leaves the window cracked and before he closes the door again, he sets the snowglobe in the center of her empty desk.
The morning of Thanksgiving, Joel seriously considers not going. But he spent twenty years disappointing his brother, and these months of not doing so have made the idea of it hurt more.
He puts on a nice shirt, combs his hair, and feels stupid about it.
To his shock, when he reaches the dining hall, Ellie is at the table next to Tommy. She’s glaring at Tommy, but when he sits down next to Maria, she doesn’t say a word to him.
"Joel,” Maria says and hands him the baby.
“Howdy,” he manages.
Ellie makes an annoyed sound and starts to stand, only for Tommy to dart a hand out and press it against the back of her neck.
“Nope,” he says flatly, not a trace of humour in his voice. It’s so unlike Tommy that Joel can’t help staring.
They aren’t at their usual table. He figured it was just because there’s more of a crowd than usual, extra tables packed in against the walls. But then he really notices how Maria is sat across from Ellie, Tommy next to her, both of them pinning her in against a wall in a way she probably hates. She’s small, but the spaces between the tables are tight and Tommy’s chair is nearly touching the person’s behind him.
Maria and Tommy both try and draw him into conversation, and he does his best, though he can’t stop staring at Ellie.
She’s too thin. The bags under her eyes are dark, and her lips are chapped like she’s been biting them. When she picks up her water glass, he can see she’s been picking her cuticles until they bled.
He misses her so much looking at her hurts and he still can’t stop.
She eats like she’s got something to prove, clearing her plate in record time even for her and then slapping Tommy’s arm.
“No,” he says without looking. “You’re stayin’ til the dance starts.”
Very deliberately, Tommy pulls Maria into a conversation about the new patrol schedule, fully ignoring Ellie.
Joel is not entirely not reminded of advice for dealing with toddlers having tantrums, and makes a note to find out how many parenting books Tommy has read recently and tease him about it.
Ellie’s staring at the table. Pouting, it wouldn’t be wrong to say.
He leans a little across the table and risks speaking to her. “Hey,” he says, and her eyes flash up. “You just not talkin’ to me, or not talkin’ at all?”
Her cheeks flush red, and she goes back to staring at the table.
At all, then. He leaves her alone after that. Even if she was talking, she wouldn’t be talking to him. It’s been a month since she’s even let herself be in the same room as him.
God, he misses her.
It’s not exactly a relaxed family holiday dinner. Ellie sulks her way through the rest of it, refusing to hold the baby even though Joel knows how much she loves her cousin. She won’t look at any of them, and as soon as dessert’s finished — which she doesn’t touch — and the music starts, she’s bolting from the room.
Tommy sighs and sits back, rubbing his hands over his eyes. “Goddamn, I was not made to be strict like this,” he complains. “Supposed to be the fun uncle here.”
Joel passes the baby back to Maria. The little one’s getting hungry himself and starting to fuss. She excuses herself saying the hall is too distracting, but he knows it’s a white lie to give him and Tommy a moment alone.
“Jesus, you picked a stubborn one,” Tommy groans. “How’d you manage to get another one exactly like you by accident?”
Fate.
That’s way too sappy to say, though, so he just takes a drink of his iced tea and wishes it was something stronger. “Sarah wasn’t that much like me.”
Tommy snorts. “Sure, yeah. That’s why she was already orderin’ me to eat my vegetables when she was two. Or why when I moved in with you after my tour, she came in every mornin’ to wake me up and make me come to breakfast. Or why when you busted your knee, she put princess bandaids all over it to make you better.”
“I know she was a good kid,” Joel says.
“She liked to take care of people. And she got it from you, dumbass,” his brother replies. He nods his head towards the door, even though Ellie’s long gone. “And that one got your stubbornness.”
“Sarah could be plenty stubborn,” Joel protests, but he knows Ellie’s a whole different creature in that department. Once, he would have wondered if it was a product of growing up in an apocalypse, in FEDRA school, but he knows her too well now. In any universe, Ellie would be Ellie.
Tommy just shakes his head.
He shouldn’t ask. He has to ask. “How long’s it been?”
Tommy clocks what he means. He sighs. “Three days this time. Usually it’s just a few hours, but this one’s been longer.”
“’Cause of this?” Joel asks.
Tommy shrugs. “I don’t think so. I told her ‘bout this last week. We already fought about it. I can’t figure out what set her off this time.”
Joel has an idea.
Three days ago, it snowed for the first time.
Three days ago, he woke in the middle of the night and saw the light on in Tommy’s guest room.
He watched it stay on all night.
As much as she’d like to blame him, it’s not actually his fault the day they get stuck working together. He’s got nothing to do with the work rotations the school sets up for the older kids, afternoons the two days a week they don’t have classes.
Ellie’s done one at the greenhouse, he knows, and she was about to start at the stables when she stopped talking to him.
He isn’t even aware she’s going to be there until he sees her. Half of him is panicking that something is wrong, truly wrong, like Tommy just had a heart attack or someone tried to hurt her for her to be here, until he sees the kid standing next to her, who has significantly more enthusiasm on his face than Ellie does.
He’s gotten used to it, having a couple kids around a few afternoons each week. He’s much better at not scaring the shit out of them these days.
It’s automatically assumed Ellie will be working with him. By now, it’s spread around town pretty well they aren’t talking much. Small towns are small towns, even now. Perhaps it’s even a bit of small town meddling, pushing them together, or maybe it’s just that everyone knows how much he worries.
She’s pissed about it.
After the basic lesson both kids get, he catches her arm and pulls her to the side, letting go of her when it looks like she’s about to start kicking.
“This wasn’t my idea,” he says, keeping his voice too low to carry. “I didn’t even know.”
If she’d told Tommy, he probably would have switched shifts with his brother, taken his patrol shifts for the three weeks she’ll be here, something. He wants to see her, wants to spend time with her, but not if she’s just gonna be miserable about it. It’s not worth it, when it’s so clearly not what she wants.
“Look,” he says. “I don’t much like this either. But I’m capable of being an adult here. Are you?”
It’s a low blow and he know it. She’s the kid here, only a few months into being fifteen.
But it’s also the only thing he thinks will work.
She won’t look at him, but she nods.
“Alright.” He rubs his hand over his jaw. “You ain’t gotta talk to me, but you gotta listen or I’m sendin’ you home for the day.”
Really, though, after all the time she’s spent following him around, she knows better than to do something stupid. She doesn’t talk — to anyone — but she listens, and she takes notes, more than the other kid who spends at least some time goofing around. Most of them do, and it’s usually not hard to guide them back into working. The kids pick the work rotations they want, so for the most part, they’re pretty good sports.
He doesn’t have the patience for it today, and leaves it to the others. It’s a good crew, and they’re used to it. With Ellie not talking, she ends up by his side, since he reads her the best. People have picked up sometimes she doesn’t talk. In another world, there might be rumours about it, unkind things, but with their world, she’s not even particularly unusual in this aspect. But it’s safer for her to work next to him. She doesn’t like it, but she understands.
And he can’t help enjoying it, even just a little.
Ellie’s smart, quick to pick things up, and he misses teaching her. He misses spending time with her.
He misses her.
As soon as the day is done, she’s gone, not even waiting to get his signature on her work paper.
The next work rotation afternoon, there’s a different kid in her place.
A pounding on his door wakes him up at dawn. He has a gun in his hand before he’s out of bed.
It’s Maria.
“What—”
“I need you to stay calm,” she says.
He grabs the door frame, immediately not calm.
“Ellie’s bleeding. We don’t know why. She locked herself in the bathroom and won’t open the door and Tommy’s afraid if we break the door down…” She doesn’t finish the thought.
She doesn’t need to. He’s already out the door.
He bursts through their back door out of habit. It’s already unlocked, lights on, and he spots the blood trail immediately. There’s a puddle by the sink, and then a trail leading up the stairs. He takes them two at a time and follows it down the hall to find Tommy sitting on the floor outside the bathroom.
His brother looks up at him with sheer, naked relief on his face. “Ellie,” he calls through the door. “Joel’s here. Can you unlock the door for him?”
He gives Tommy a look. She hasn’t wanted to be around him for months.
But it’s his girl behind that door so he gestures Tommy out of the way. When Tommy slides over, not even bothering to stand, he leans against the wall next to it.
“There’s a lot of blood out here,” he says, keeping his voice as calm as he can. “If I gotta break this door down, Maria’s gonna make me fix it. Really don’t wanna have to do that, kiddo.”
Maria, having just reached the hallway herself, raises her eyebrows at that. She’s holding his jacket and boots, and that’s the moment he realizes he ran across the street in bare feet and pajamas, snow and all.
Ellie hasn’t said anything. Hasn’t made a single noise to indicate she’s even conscious.
At the same time, he knows instinctively that if she’s still awake, this is too much for her.
“If you let me know you’re still hearin’ me, everyone else can leave,” he says to the door. “But we need to hear you first.”
After the longest minute of his life, he hears the sound of the lock disengaging.
He exhales, tilting his head against the door for a moment before turning back to Tommy and Maria. “I’ll call if…”
Tommy nods, picking himself up off the floor. “We’ll be downstairs.”
He waits only until they disappear from sight and not a second longer.
Then he knocks gently on the door. “Gonna come in now,” he warns.
Tommy’s upstairs bathroom is small, small enough a person sitting on the bathtub can reach the door without standing. That’s good because Ellie’s so pale he thinks if she tried she’d pass out.
There’s a bloody knife in the bathroom sink, bloody towels thrown on the floor. It looks like a fucking crime scene.
Ellie’s holding another towel to her arm, and it’s quickly soaking through.
“Okay,” he says, ignoring the rough catch in his throat, and opens the drawer under the vanity where Tommy and Maria keep their towels. There’s bloody smears on it he tries to ignore as he takes out another towel. Then he drops to one knee in front of Ellie. “What the hell happened?”
Her breath comes too fast, and before he makes her move her hand, he presses two fingers against her neck. She jolts but doesn’t pull away, and he frowns at how fast her heart is.
“Breathe slow for me,” he tries to tell her, though he isn’t sure how much is getting through to her. “Let me see now.”
He coaxes the towel away, getting a good look at the long, deep cut going right through her scar before he presses another to it.
She winces and he apologizes automatically.
“Did you do this?” he asks, a sick feeling rolling through his stomach. He can’t think of any other explanation.
She stares at him, wild-eyed.
And then he thinks of something, something so basic he doesn’t know why they didn’t think of it months ago. He leans out into the hallway, grabbing his jacket and dragging it closer. In the inner pocket, there’s a small notebook he uses to write down measurements, with a stub of a pencil jammed into the coil.
He flips it to a blank page and presses it into Ellie’s hand, taking over putting pressure on her arm as she takes them.
Her hands shake, and her writing is worse than usual, but after a minute, she turns the notebook towards him.
Scar, is all it says.
“Jesus,” he murmurs, pressing harder on the cut.
More scribbling. This time, the page says, I didn’t mean to.
“Okay,” he says. They don’t have time for this, for the panic and the guilt he can see on her face. They don’t have time for him to fucking spiral because this is what he’s been afraid of since Silver Lake, since that cabin where she didn’t speak for ten days, since long before the hospital where he destroyed her dreams.
Her breath hitches, almost a sob.
“It’s okay,” he says. It’s not, but she needs to hear it. “We’re gonna have to sew this up. I’m gonna go grab Tommy’s first aid kit. Just sit here and keep pressure on it. I’ll be back in just a minute.”
Before he can take his hands away, though, Ellie’s writing on his little notebook again.
I’m sorry.
“I know,” he says. He sets the notebook on the side of the tub and presses her hand into place again. “Pressure. I’ll be right back.”
He bolts down the stairs so fast he nearly eats shit and barely catches himself on the railing before pounding into the kitchen.
Tommy looks up from cleaning blood off the floor. “Is she—”
“No,” Joel says bluntly. “First aid kit? She needs stitches. She can’t go to the clinic.”
They both get it immediately. Maria picks a small red case off the counter. There’s a pile of supplies there, and if he had it in him to think of anything but Ellie, he’d be grateful.
“I could do them,” Tommy offers, rising to his feet.
He’s probably the better choice. He did some medic training in the army and of the two of them, Joel was always the one more likely to take risks, to get hurt. For years, Tommy was the one sewing him back up. Not always patiently, not always the gentlest, but Joel knows he would be for Ellie.
But he also saw her looking like a trapped animal and he knows that’s not happening.
“She won’t let you,” he says regretfully.
Frankly, he’d rather let Tommy do it. He’d rather hold his kid’s hand and tell her it was going to be okay and not have to be the one to hurt her.
But he knows that’s not what they’re looking at here.
Tommy nods.
Maria shoves the first aid kit into his hands. “There’s a suture kit in there. We’re here if you need anything.”
He’s on the stairs again when Tommy stops him. He almost snaps before he sees what Tommy’s holding.
“It’s the best we’ve got,” Tommy says apologetically as he passes over the bottle, a shotglass tipped over the lid. “I’m sorry.”
He claps his hand on his brother’s shoulder, and heads upstairs again.
Ellie hasn’t budged, but he thinks she might have gone even paler.
“Let’s see,” he says again, taking a knee in front of her. When he pulls the towel away, the bleeding has slowed to a sluggish crawl. “Good, it’s slowing down. This ain’t gonna be fun.”
She’s shaking like a fucking leaf in a tornado.
He pours a shot of Tommy’s moonshine, but her hand is trembling too hard to hold it steady when she takes it, so he has to keep his hand on hers.
“Good job,” he says after when she’s gagging from the aftertaste. Much as she pretends she’s so tough, moonshine’s not something she’s ever touched, thank God. The worst she does normally is steal sips from a beer from him or Tommy. Maybe a little more when she’s with her friends that she doesn’t tell him, but nothing like this. “One more.”
She shoots him a sharp look, but it’s the best he’s got to take the edge off.
After she’s shuddered her way through another shot, he opens the first aid kit and finds the other kind of alcohol.
“It’s gonna hurt,” he tells her honestly. “I’ll go as fast as I can.”
He presses her back against the wall — she’s wobbly already from blood loss and the alcohol isn’t helping — and goes to wash his hands. The water splashes over the knife in the sink and he tries not to look at it, tries not to look at the blood on his hands, on the floor, on — everywhere. It’s fucking everywhere.
“Nice, slow breaths for me,” he says, guiding her arm over the bathtub. “That’s your job right now. You hear me, Ellie?”
She manages a nod.
When he pours alcohol over the cut, she sobs and he hates himself more than he has in twenty years.
“I know, I know,” he says. When the cut is clean, he sets her arm across his thigh, and braces himself. He wants to tell her they’re almost done, that they’re past the worst of it. He can’t lie to her again. “You just keep breathin’, alright?”
She’s gone glassy eyed and he’s not sure she’s even hearing him anymore. He almost wishes she would pass out so she wouldn’t have to feel this.
The first time the needle passes through her skin, she whimpers, small and involuntary, and he apologizes with each stitch, each hurt.
He feels her move and goes to stop her, but her other arm is reaching around his neck, grabbing onto his shirt as she presses her face into his shoulder.
It’s awkward, with the angle, but he manages to turn his head enough to press a kiss against her head. “You’re gonna be okay, baby.”
She muffles herself in his shirt and he hates that she feels the need to do that.
“Almost done,” he tells her when it’s true. “Little bit more.”
Three more stitches and he knots off the thread, snips it, and prays he never has to hurt his kid like this again.
“Just gotta wrap it now,” he says.
He has to nudge her back to get the bandages and antibiotic cream, the half-tube precious these days. He uses it like it’s nothing.
The last thing she needs right now is an infection in a cut going through a bite they can’t explain.
He checks her pulse again, then makes sure she’s as stable as she can be leaning against the wall. “Can you sit here just for a minute? I need to run downstairs again.”
She manages a nod, her eyes shut.
“Good girl. I’ll be right back.”
The kitchen looks better, in that it’s not covered in Ellie’s blood. Tommy’s moved on to scrubbing the stove. Judging by how clean the cupboards already look, this isn’t the first thing his nervous energy has attacked.
Joel drops the knife in the sink. It clatters, loud in the near silent room.
“Jesus Christ,” Tommy bites out. “She — I thought maybe she snuck out and got hurt somewhere.”
He’s furious. He’s not angry at them. He knows that girl upstairs too damn well and he knows there’s nothing they could have done. He’s furious at her, but more, he’s furious about the whole goddamn situation.
“Y’all got any juice or anythin’?” he asks instead of replying.
Maria opens a cupboard and grabs a cup as Tommy gets a bottle from the fridge. They don’t make a lot of it here, with fruit still pretty precious, but the apple crop was generous this fall and the town made a few batches of apple juice. Ellie really likes it.
The fact that they keep some in the fridge, probably just for her, has the corners of his eyes burning.
They make each other clumsy in their rush to pour the juice, with Maria snatching the bottle out of Tommy’s hands and gently hip-checking him out of the way to do it herself.
“She’s stitched up,” he says as she hands him the cup. It’s plastic, with little dinosaurs all over it. It’s probably meant for children much younger than Ellie, but the baby’s too young for that kind of thing, and she gravitates towards plastic cups in general, and especially at home. “Just… blood loss. Your bathroom is a fuckin’ mess.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Tommy promises. His hands are shaking.
He’s the one, eventually, that washed Sarah’s blood off Joel. He couldn’t do it himself. Two days later, he was washing Joel’s own blood off him, too.
Joel nods and returns upstairs.
Ellie’s tilting dangerously against the wall, and he rushes to set her straight, keeping his arm around her shoulders.
“Can you drink this, honey?” he coaxes. “Gotta get some sugar in you.”
She’s clumsy, from moonshine or blood loss or both, he ain’t sure, but he helps her sip the juice a little at a time until it’s gone.
“Okay,” he says, setting the empty cup on the bathroom counter. “You’re gonna come stay with me the next couple days. No, I don’t care. You can be pissed about it tomorrow. You’ve lost avoidin’ me privileges, so either you stay with me or I’m stayin’ here and I don’t think Maria wants me as a roommate.”
He sends his sister-in-law a mental apology for throwing her under the bus again, for a second time tonight. They get along better these days, bonded over a common thread of worrying about Ellie, and he feels bad making her into the bad guy, but he’s desperate. He needs Ellie under the same roof tonight.
Ellie stops fussing. Probably because she’s not exactly sober.
Maybe one shot of moonshine would have been enough.
She’s not steady enough to walk, so when he’s sure her injured arm is tucked safe against her, he gets his boots on, wraps his jacket around her, and scoops her up. She’s looser, floppier than usual, and covered in blood, and for a moment his daughter is dying in his arms again.
“Baby,” he chokes, and nothing else, just holds her a little tighter.
He presses his face against her head and breathes in the smell of her shampoo. Rosemary and honey, and Ellie.
And blood.
She tucks her face against his shoulder, hiding it as he takes her downstairs.
“Get her home. I’ll check in tomorrow,” Tommy says, and leaves it at that.
Joel nods his thanks and does just that.
He owes them more than thanks, especially considering the state they left the bathroom in. He walks right upstairs in his boots and sets Ellie on the side of the tub in his own bathroom. She looks around, blinking in surprise.
“Can’t go to bed lookin’ like that,” he says gruffly and starts the horribly familiar process of cleaning the blood off her skin. Halfway through, he realizes he’s nearly as covered as she is, including when he takes his boots off and finds blood on the bottom of his bare feet.
Probably left bloody footprints tracked through Tommy and Maria’s house, he thinks, likes something out of a fucking horror movie, and silently promises to make it up to them.
“Gonna get you some clean clothes,” he says when he’s wiped as much blood off Ellie as he can. “Don’t move an inch.”
She gives one long, too fluid nod.
He goes into her bedroom and pulls a clean pair of sweatpants from her drawer, finds a big t-shirt in there. It’s one of his, one he swears he wore last week, and he doesn’t fully understand why it’s in her dresser, but it’ll work.
He gives himself exactly a minute to brace himself against her dresser and shake.
She’s awake still when he goes back to her, and looking at him with those big dark eyes, so serious, more focused than he expected.
“You with me?” he asks.
A nod.
He puts the stack of clothes on the bathtub next to her. “Can you change on your own?”
Instead, she lifts her arms up.
“Alright,” he says and grabs the hem of her sweatshirt. “Assumin’ you’re decent under this.”
She’s not exactly a little exhibitionist — most days, in fact, she wears at least two layers of shirts — but months of travel and living together mean he’s seen her in a sports bra enough times that it’s not even awkward anymore.
“You got these?” he asks, putting the sweatpants in her hands himself.
He wouldn’t push, but she’s still in jeans —and why was she still in jeans in the middle of the night? — and they’re nearly as bloody as her shirt was.
He stands on the other side of the door, back towards the wall, leaving it cracked an inch so he can hear her movements.
For a moment, he leans his head against the wall and closes his eyes. Jesus. Christ.
She bangs on the wall when she’s done, making him jump.
When he picks her up again, she’s a little less boneless against his chest, but not much. He holds her too tight, unable to help himself, until he can breathe enough to tuck her into his bed.
“Gonna lock up,” he says.
There’s more blood to clean up, first, little smears in his bathroom that he won’t be able to stop thinking about if he leaves them. More on the door from where he opened and closed it. He takes the towels he used to clean the walls and Ellie and her bloody clothes and throws them into a bucket next to the woodstove. He should wash them. He knows he won’t.
He checks every lock in the house and gets a cup of water for Ellie. Extra ice, the way she likes.
To his surprise, she’s still awake when he gets there.
Without thinking much about it, he settles onto the bed next to her. Not touching, because even with this, he’s not pushing it, but he’s not letting her out of his sight.
“You can sleep if you want,” he says. “Still early.”
Early morning by now, but early nonetheless. Besides they can’t have the conversation he needs to have with her until she’s ready to talk.
She hesitates a second, then reaches out and takes his hand, pulling to close to her. She presses their palms together for a moment, then pulls back enough to trace little designs on his palm. Soothing herself, he guesses. She’s always been a fiddler. Her clothes, his clothes, wrapping her hoodie strings around her fingers or playing with the buttons on his sleeves while they watch movies.
After a bit, it feels like a pattern, and with nothing else to do, his brain tries to pick it out. Squiggle, circle, the same thing twice, three short lines connecting in the middle. Squiggle, circle, that middle one repeated, three lines.
It hits him all at once.
Sorry, Ellie traces into his palm again, over and over.
He presses his hand over hers, squeezing it tight between his. “Go to sleep, baby.”
Her hand flutters between his. He’s loathe to take away a communication method when she’s not talking, but if she’s just going to apologize over and over, she’ll only work herself up.
“Sleep,” he repeats and holds her hand still until she does.
Ellie sleeps all day. He wakes her, once, at noon, to make her drink water and eat a slice of bread with butter and jam, and again at dinner to drink a mug of the bone broth he keeps in the freezer because she can usually be convinced to drink it on bad days, and another slice of bread. He already knows she’s not hungry, but she needs to eat, after losing all that blood. Each time, she stumbles to the bathroom on shaky legs and he tries not to hover, then falls asleep again as soon as she hits the bed.
She sleeps through the entire night, too, and he watches her sleep until the late hours of the night, when he dozes off without meaning too.
When he wakes, she’s sitting up against the headboard, staring down at him.
“I wasn’t trying to kill myself,” she says. Her voice cracks and he reaches for the water on the nightstand. She drains the cup and passes it back, then repeats, “I wasn’t.”
“What were you thinkin’?”
She hides her arm against her stomach. “I thought maybe I could make it look… different,” she says. “And it went — bad.”
What a fucking understatement.
He sits up with a groan, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. He’s still exhausted and she’s still too pale. “What the hell would make you do something like that?”
She stares at her lap. “I can’t — I can’t go swimming. Or wear short sleeves without wrapping something around it and then everyone asks what I did. The baby — last week, Benji grabbed my sleeve in the dining hall and jerked on it and I scared the shit out of him yanking my arm away.”
“That’s no good reason to—”
She groans, pulling her knees up to her chest and burying her face in them. “Joel, I wanna get naked with other people one day.”
He…
He does not have a response to that.
“Like not right now,” Ellie says to her knees and Jesus Christ he was not ready for this conversation. “But I don’t wanna be fucking celibate for the rest of my life. How am I supposed to explain to a girl why I can’t show her my arm but I can show her my—”
“Maybe enough detail,” he interrupts. He risks a glance at the clock on his nightstand and winces.
He expected some sort of… safe sex conversation, at some point. He’d had several with Sarah, the way the books all said to, from when she was little and it was just about boundaries around who was allowed to touch her to the horrifically embarrassing for both of them one after her first period. She wasn’t dating yet, but he had a feeling it would be starting soon.
Ellie’s… different. They’ve talked about this stuff exactly twice, if you could even call it that. Once with her beaten and bloody on a kitchen table, her jeans torn open. Once when he found a box in a medicine cabinet and gave it to her without saying anything. She read it, put it in her bag, and they never talked about it.
And the girls thing, which she’s never technically told him and he wonders if she realized she just did. He’s figured for a while, though, and whoever she likes, he wasn’t gonna let her go out there and not be careful. He knew that the talks were going to happen.
He did not expect it today or with this particular flavour of angst.
“It’s the rest of my life,” she says. “It didn’t even mean anything but the rest of my life I have to hide it or someone kills me and I just thought it could look different and it went too deep.”
“You scared the fucking shit out of me and Tommy and Maria,” he tells her, and he so rarely curses around her. Throws a you little shit or a smartass in her direction occasionally, but it’s automatic, the instinct to limit how much he cusses around her, even with the way she swears, and he never curses at her.
He means it today.
“I’m sorry,” Ellie says and he feels it in the palm of his hand. And then, “Are you?”
He sighs. “Not for savin’ you.”
She looks away.
“Ellie, I am sorry that I hurt you. But I ain’t ever gonna be sorry you’re alive.” He stands and grabs a change of clothes out of his dresser. “I’m gonna shower. If you aren’t here when I get back, I will track you down and throw you in the damn bank.”
Joel gives himself the luxury of a long shower. She’s quick. If she bolts, she’ll bolt if he rushes anyways. It’s not a big enough town for her to hide long and he’s so fucking angry at her that he would almost relish the chance to have the entire goddamn town searching for her. He’s never thought shame was a good way to parent, but maybe he’s wrong.
She’s still there when he comes out of the bathroom.
He rubs a towel over his hair. “Are you hungry?”
She won’t look at him. “I don’t really want to talk to you right now.”
“Fine. I’m going downstairs to make breakfast. I’ll bring you up something. You stay here.”
Her shoulders twitch. “Can I go to my room or did you already throw all my shit out?”
He leans against the door frame, frowning. “Kiddo, I ain’t touched any of your stuff. You can go to your room if you want, but the door stays open.”
That makes her look at him, eyes flashing angry. “What?” she demands. “That’s not fair!”
“I don’t care. And you don’t lock any bathroom doors, either.”
“What the fuck?”
He hates it almost as much as she does. He installed the lock on her bedroom himself, replacing the flimsy thumb turn lock with a solid deadbolt.
“Don’t make me take them off,” he says and goes downstairs.
She’s still in his room when he brings her food, and he doesn’t know what to think about that.
He keeps her with him for a full week. She speaks only the bare minimum, answering his questions when necessary and making it very clear she’s making a choice to not talk to him. School, he decides immediately, is out. She hates it at the best of times and as nice as the teaching staff is, he has no faith in their abilities to keep her there.
And maybe a little mean to ask them to try.
Instead, he signs her out of school for the week, takes himself off patrol, and she goes to work with him. She’s furious, stewing behind books that she barely reads, or scribbling angrily in a notebook in a corner of whatever site he’s on.
On the eighth day, he cuts the stitches out of her arm and she goes back to Tommy’s. He makes Tommy give him daily updates on it when he changes the bandage for her. They send her to school, and when she bails the first day before lunch, Maria goes to school with her the second, and spends the entire day sitting in her classroom. She stays in school the third day and the rest.
Joel’s more than a little impressed by that move.
When she’s not in school, she’s working with Tommy or Maria. Even after her arm heals, she’s not allowed to stay alone. Apocalypse grounding, Joel thinks.
Three weeks later, he’s working when a kid he vaguely recognizes bursts onto his site, calling his name.
Ellie’s in the clinic, he’s told, and he drops everything and runs.
Someone’s shouting when he busts through the door and he knows it’s her immediately, follows the sound into an exam room where four adults are struggling to hold her down.
She catches sight of him and her face crumples. “Joel.”
“Stop,” he says, and shoves someone away when they don’t do it fast enough.
“We need to—”
“Whatever you need to do can wait a minute,” he says. She’s not bleeding, he can’t see any immediate sign of injury. “It’ll be longer if you don’t let her calm down anyways.”
In the chaos of getting everyone the fuck out of his way, he doesn’t realize until he’s at her side that Ellie’s only wearing a tank top. Cold panic flashes through him and he reaches without thinking for her arm, to hide it before someone sees.
And then he sees it.
He freezes. “What did you do?”
“I made it better,” Ellie says, glassy eyed, wild. “Now it’s like it never happened.”
Then she leans over the side of the bed and pukes on the floor.
Joel lets them sedate her. It’s another betrayal, another thing to add to his list of sins, but half the skin on her fucking arm is melted off, and she’s shaking and burning when he touches her forehead, and she — and he — he can’t. He lets them sedate her and he takes the guilt when she looks so goddamned confused as she starts slipping under.
Tommy slams through the door as the staff is starting to work on her arm. “Joel — no.”
“She’s just sedated,” he says before Tommy goes too far into his own fear spiral. He’s already half there himself. He doesn’t need the what-ifs swirling in his head more than they already are.
“Christ,” Tommy says. He moves carefully around the doctor, coming to Ellie’s side next to him. “I don’t even — how — when did this even happen? She was just at school.”
“At least a day ago, I’d estimate,” the doctor says without looking up. “Maybe two. I don’t understand. Why didn’t she ask someone for help?”
He looks at Tommy and neither of them say anything.
More than once he’s heard Tommy say Ellie was just like him. Often fondly, sometimes in exasperation when she’s being exceptionally stubborn.
This time it feels like a curse.
He presses his face into her hair and breathes in the smell of her shampoo. Rosemary and honey, Ellie and burnt flesh.
He thinks he’s going to be sick.
Ellie comes to slowly, no small part in thanks to the pain medication they put her on. That kind of medication is precious here, hard to get. They’re more likely to use something herbal for small injuries. The fact that no one even hesitated to set an IV in her good arm…
“Why,” is the first thing she says, half a thought. She tries to lift her arm and he presses it down into the mattress before she can. “Why’m I… my head.”
“They had to sedate you to clean your arm,” he says. “It’s still wearin’ off. Lie still.”
She looks at him, surprised, then her arm, now wrapped in a thick layer of clean white gauze.
“No,” she says, frowning. “Don’t want you here.”
“Tough,” he says. “Go back to sleep if you don’t wanna see my face that bad.”
“No,” she repeats. Her other arm comes up and he spares a nervous look at the IV, but someone on the clinic staff had the good sense to tape the hell out of it. She rubs her palm clumsily over her eyes. “Not supposed to know. Just it was supposed to go away and then I’d be better.”
It’s slurry and uneven and breaks his goddamn heart.
“Baby, this isn’t better,” he says, unable to help himself. “What were you thinkin’?”
She sniffles. “That maybe if was gone, I could forget and I could stop hating you. Isn’t that what you want?”
“Not like this.” He cups his hand around the side of her face and turns it, the curve of her cheek so familiar in his palm. “Oh, baby girl, not like this.”
The conversation ends there because Ellie starts weeping, drugged and in pain. It’s not the way she usually cries, trying to hide it and swiping the tears away with rough little hands. Not the way she cried after Silver Lake, tears slipping silently down her face like she didn’t notice them. This is something different.
She cries, confused and in pain and lost.
“It’s okay,” he soothes. “Breathe. Close your eyes.”
He gets her back to sleep, but she wakes up upset each time and eventually the doctor suggests weaning her off the IV painkiller and trying a pill, something that might be a little easier on her.
That means, of course, that she wakes up in more pain, if a little more clear in her mind, and he’s the one who has to talk her into taking the pill, holding it to her mouth until she’s focused enough to take it and drink a little water.
“Good,” he says each time she gets the pill down. “Good job.”
“I’m really sorry,” she says each time she’s lucid enough to talk.
The pills are better, in most ways. He doesn’t love that she’s in slightly more pain, but she isn’t so emotional, so out of it. And a couple days of antibiotics clears up the slight signs of infection that had been creeping up her arm.
At least they don’t have to worry about sepsis, he lets himself think.
When she’s cleared to go home, he helps her into her boots.
“Are you gonna make me go home with you again?” she asks.
He finishes lacing her boot, and sits in the chair next to her bed. “Is it gonna do anything?”
She shrugs.
“You cannot keep hurtin’ yourself,” he says. “It’s not healthy, Ellie. We can’t let you do this. Maria says there’s a woman in town, used to be a therapist. You’re gonna go talk to her.”
“No,” she says immediately. “I’m not talking to some fucking shrink.”
He shakes his head. “This ain’t optional, kid.”
“You’re not in charge of me,” she says. She starts to push off the bed, but her arm stops her and she winces, hugging it carefully against her stomach. “You’re not my father. You made that very fucking clear. You don’t get to make me go to a shrink.”
He looks at her for a long moment. Her hair’s greasy and she’s too thin and she’s so pale. “Aren’t we past that?” he asks softly. “Is that still eatin’ you?”
“I know—”
“Apparently you don’t know anything,” he interrupts. “What the hell do you think we’re doin’ here? You think I just decided I wanted a fifteen-year-old roommate?”
She stares off to the side, a muscle in her jaw jumping as she clenches her teeth.
“You’re gonna talk to that woman,” he says. “I’m not askin’ and it ain’t even my decision. It’s the rules here. Your first appointment is tomorrow.”
“Fine,” she spits. “I’ll go and tell her all about my immunity. Sounds like a great idea.”
He sighs. “Go ahead. You burned off your evidence. Just gonna make you look crazier.”
“You’re being an asshole.”
Yeah, he is. His kid has hurt herself twice because he wasn’t around to stop her — or maybe because he wasn’t around to stop her from getting so hurt in the first place that she thinks this is the only option. Anyway you slice it, he’s failing her. Sue him.
“You’re goin’,” he says and gets up to grab the rest of her things. “I’ll walk you back to Tommy’s.”
He’s pissed, she’s fucking radiant with self-righteous anger that frankly she has no right to, as far as he’s concerned, and Tommy wisely bailed an hour ago to “make sure things are set up”, whatever the fuck that means.
So he’s expecting the rest of the time in this room to be silent as Ellie ignores him like she’s been doing for months.
“Joel?” she says, and he turns.
She looks small and scared.
“What, kiddo?” he says, gentleness coming out despite how angry he is.
“Can I go home with you?”
He nods. “Always.”
No matter how much she hates him, no matter how angry she is, it will always be her home. The first time he walked into that house, he knew it was hers. It was always hers.
When they get home, Ellie lingers in the kitchen, helping herself to a glass of water. She scratches absently at her head, making a face.
“Could probably find a trash bag to wrap that up if you wanna shower,” he offers.
She nods.
“Or… I could wash it for you,” he says, hesitating.
“Okay.”
When he comes back down with her hair stuff, she’s taking off the flannel shirt she’s been wearing since Maria brought her some clean clothes the other day, easing it over her bandaged arm to leave her just in a tank top. He’s still not used to it, but he’s distracted momentarily by the shirt.
Because that is definitely one of his shirts.
“I wore that last week,” he says. “You been sneakin’ in here just to steal my clothes, you little shit?”
Ellie tosses the shirt on the counter. “No.” Her shoulders curve slightly inwards. “I’ve also been moving your screwdrivers.”
“You — I knew it.”
Goddamn, he thought he was going crazy.
He helps her up onto the counter and tucks a rolled-up towel under her neck. “After this, you can get the rest of you cleaned up,” he says, turning the water on, but keeping it away from her until he’s sure it’s at a good temperature. “Maybe get some food in you before you take some more medicine.”
“Stop talking,” she says.
In any other situation, it’d be rude. It still is, a little. But even with her eyes squeezed shut, he can see a glimmer of dampness between her eyelashes and she’s trembling under his hands.
“You’re okay,” he says, and shuts up for a while.
Her hair is filthy. Not like after Silver Lake when he washed out blood and bone and brain matter, but days of not being washed, days of sweat and oil and tangles. He catches a whiff of something sour that makes him suspect she might have thrown up in her hair and not washed all of it out. It takes two long scrubs with the shampoo bar until her hair feels clean again.
He works conditioner through her hair, gently combing it with his fingers to work out some of the knots. While he’s giving it a moment to soak in, he bends down and presses a kiss against her forehead.
Ellie lets out a sob before covering her mouth with her hands.
“You’re okay,” he repeats, nothing more, and rinses her hair out.
He sits her at the table to detangle her hair, puts a muffin in her hands that she picks at while he does it. The muffin wasn’t in his kitchen this morning, and neither was the stack of medical supplies they probably aren’t supposed to have. At least Tommy was useful in his cowardice, Joel thinks with a bit of amusement.
Mostly in an attempt to get her to eat more by drawing this out as long as possible, he braids her hair into two French braids, tying each off with a hair tie.
Then he gets her a glass of milk and sits at the table with her until she finishes it.
“Go get cleaned up,” he says. “I’ll come up and check on you in a few. Bring you some meds.”
She nods.
When he goes upstairs after he stops hearing the water running, Ellie’s door is open. She’s sprawled across her bed, covers only half-heartedly kicked back.
“C’mere,” he says, and helps her sit up to take the pill. He sets the cup on her nightstand. “Holler if you need anything.”
He lets her rest, checking on her now and then. She’s in her room each time he does, only moving once to sit on her window seat. She’s reading sometimes, sometimes just staring out of the window. A few times he brings her food that she picks at, and when it gets late enough, he shoos her gently back to bed.
He changes her bandage there, trying not to react to the way the burn looks under it. It’s not great. The bite is gone, that’s for sure, but so is a lot of her skin. He still doesn’t understand why she didn’t tell them — no, more, he doesn’t understand how none of them notices.
When that’s done, he makes sure she has water on her nightstand and turns on the tape in her stereo. It’s some instrumental thing, soothing, and sometimes it helps her sleep when she can’t stop thinking.
“I’m sorry,” Ellie says as he’s leaving.
“Don’t,” he says. “You don’t just get to say sorry and keep doin’ the same thing.”
A tear slips down her cheek. “I wasn’t trying to hurt myself.”
“But you did.” He leans against her door frame. “I know you had reasons, but you hurt yourself and you hid it and you could have got real sick. We can’t just let that go, kid.”
The clinic gave him the painkillers she was prescribed, and he’s been keeping them in the lockbox in his room. There’s a reason for that. It’s the same reason he lied to her about the Fireflies. It’s the reason he told her about trying to shoot himself. For nearly a year now, she’s been teetering on the edge of something and he’s been desperately wrapping a rope around her waist to try to keep her from falling.
“Go on, go to sleep,” he tells her and turns to leave.
Her voice stops him. “I love you.”
It hits him like a fucking train. He turns with shaky knees to look at her, half-convinced he’s hallucinating.
She wipes at her face. “I love you and I’m so fucking mad at you. And I miss you so much. You took away everything that mattered about me and you’re my best friend and I don’t know how to do this without you, Joel. I thought if it was gone I could forget.”
He sighs and crosses to her, sitting on the side of her bed. She’s shaking when he pulls her in towards him, and he tucks her head under his chin, taking a long moment just to rock her back and forth.
“I love you, too,” he says before anything else. Before anything else, he needs her to hear that.
It isn’t something they’ve said before. Not in those words. It’s something he’s known for a long, long time, but he’s never known how to tell her. Even now, it comes out a little choked, more than a little rusty.
Maybe that’s one of the problems here. Maybe he’s spent too long not making sure this kid knows just how fucking loved she is.
“But it don’t work like that,” he says. “I wish it did, but it don’t, baby.”
“It’s not fair,” Ellie cries.
He presses a kiss against her head. “No. No, it ain’t.”
The next morning, Ellie comes down while he’s making breakfast and starts setting the table. Her hair’s mostly down, just the front part pulled back from her face, the rest wavy from the braids she slept in. Her hair against her neck bothers her, but she thinks it makes her look older when she wears it down, so she does this sometimes when she’s trying to make a good impression.
Secretly, he thinks it makes her look even younger, that it makes her face look even softer and rounder.
They eat breakfast, and he changes her bandage and gets her the lower dose of the painkiller she’s been prescribed for the daytime. She rolls her eyes when he watches her take it, but he also locked all the chemicals in the house under the kitchen sink last night while she was asleep, so he has no issues ignoring the attitude today.
He’s helping her into his spare jacket — her arm too sensitive for her own coat — when he realizes she hasn’t spoken a word this morning.
He looks at her for a minute and then decides that’s gonna be the therapist’s problem, not his.
Therapy is… interesting. The first day, she comes back and hands him a little piece of paper, ripped from one of the notebooks that he keeps in his coats.
She said it’s good you don’t try to make me talk when I can’t, it says.
He looks up and Ellie’s avoiding his eyes.
“Good,” he says. “Nice to know someone agrees I’m always right.”
She throws a pillow at him, but her shoulders relax.
The therapist gives her a journal. He brings her pens and pencils, and she takes to using different coloured ink for different things. He doesn’t read her journal, not ever, but she tells him about her system and sometimes he sees the colour of ink on the page. Red is bad things, blue is good things, black is for neutral.
There’s a lot of red ink.
For now, she has weekly sessions. They’re hard for her, he knows. A lot of the time, she comes home and naps for hours until he rouses her for dinner.
One day, she goes to therapy and immediately goes to Tommy’s house instead.
His stomach sinks and he drinks himself to sleep, something he hasn’t done in a long time.
“You look like shit,” Ellie says the day at dinner, the first meal he dragged himself out of the house for. She steals his dessert and comes home with him that night.
Her things migrate back to her bedroom, but she still spends a fair few nights in Tommy’s guest room. It’s days when she talks about him in therapy, he realizes eventually.
There’s a lot of those days.
She sneaks out of the walls, and steals a horse from a patrol group that will be hearing about that for fucking years, setting the others loose. Most go back to Jackson instinctually, but one gets itself lost, and the whole patrol group has to walk back to town. Joel assumes she’s at Tommy’s, Tommy assumes she’s at home, and in all the chaos, no one realizes she’s gone for almost twelve hours.
Joel tracks her, thanking God it isn’t snowing again so her tracks are still obvious, right up until he realizes he’s doubled back and is tracing his own tracks.
He stops his horse to regroup and to silently curse Tommy for teaching her how to mask her trail. He finds it eventually, but it slows him down, and distracts him enough that he doesn’t realize at first he’s following her back to Utah.
He finds her sitting on a bench across from Saint Mary’s, waiting for him. She has her battered green backpack sitting in her lap, her arms wrapped around it like it’s a stuffed toy.
He tries very hard not to think about what her finding it means. What she must have seen.
“Ellie,” he breathes, and nearly falls off his damn horse rushing to her. “What the hell were you thinkin’, running off like that?”
She looks up at him. “You swore.”
He stops.
Then he sits next to her on the bench until she’s ready to go home.
She goes to Tommy’s that night, and he honestly doesn’t expect to see her for a while.
The next morning, he gets out of bed and steps on her.
After a lot of cursing from the both of them, and him getting her an ice pack that’s more apology than strictly necessary, he sits on the floor next to her. Her old pun book is in her lap, and she’s running her thumb up and down the spine.
“Wanna see a picture of my mom?” she asks.
“I’d love to,” he says.
Sometimes therapy triggers quiet days. Sometimes it triggers silent days. He worries, but that’s his job.
Some nights, she crawls into bed with him. From nightmares, sometimes, but sometimes she can’t sleep and she just wants to talk. He’s grateful for both, so incredibly grateful that she’s reaching out to him again.
“Can I tell you about David?” she says first.
Then it’s, “I still miss Riley so much it makes my chest hurts.”
And, “Sometimes the basement smells exactly like the hole.”
Or, “When I look at Benji, I think about Sam and I get so scared.”
And once it’s, “I hate you a lot of the time, but a lot of the time I can’t, and I hate myself more for those times.”
He doesn’t talk much when she tells him these things. He listens, and he gives her space to talk.
She makes him sit in on a few sessions with her, and heavily suggests he should try some therapy for himself.
He tells her he’ll think about it.
They both know it’s probably not gonna happen.
But the sessions they do together help in some ways. They spend a couple talking about Ellie struggling to trust him, that she needs him to never lie to her again, that she’s struggling with being angry all the time and how desperately she doesn’t want to be.
And they spend a couple sessions talking about the cut, the burn. The showers that are so hot she comes out of them with her skin scalded red. The cuticle picking. The not eating. The fighting at school.
When Sarah was young, he used to watch the news, used to spend too much time reading the titles of brochures in her doctor’s office. He heard horror stories about girls cutting, but he didn’t realize it meant this stuff, too.
Self-harm, her therapist calls it, putting words to his worry.
He wakes one night and she’s not in her bed. When he touches it, the sheets are still warm, so he doesn’t panic right away.
Barely.
He finds her in the kitchen, sitting on the floor against the fridge.
“What are you doin’, baby?”
She opens her hand to show him an ice cube in her palm.
He lowers himself to the floor next to her, only groaning slightly. He’s too goddamn old for sitting on the floor, but he ain’t leaving her there alone. “What’s that about?”
“Sandra said I should try it instead of doing something… stupid,” Ellie says.
“Does it help?”
“I dunno. Kinda.”
He reaches up and rubs a thumb over her cheek. “Lemme know if you need another one.”
She nods, resting her head against his shoulder.
They sit in the dark kitchen together until the ice cube melts.
When spring finally breaks, warm and green and lush, he takes Ellie camping. He wants to take her on a trip for her birthday in July, but that’s still a way’s off.
She’s been doing really well in school. Her grades have always been good, because she’s so goddamn smart and more competitive than is probably good for her, but the rest of it has been going well. She’s only skipping a few days a month now, which is significantly better for her. On top of that, she’s finally started talking about why school is so hard, with him and with Sandra, and he’s proud of her for that.
He thinks she’s more than earned a little break.
Life in Jackson is good for her, he knows. Safety, security, enough food to have the spaces between her ribs filling out. She works hard. She’s tried a handful of work rotations, but she tends to either shadow him or Tommy. He doesn’t think she’ll stick with construction long term, but it doesn’t hurt if she knows how to do the basics.
Really, he knows her true love are the horses. She helps out at the stables even when she doesn’t have to, and the work has made her stronger. There’s muscle in her arms and shoulders that didn’t use to be there.
She’s making friends. Making a community. She’s a popular little thing, with their neighbours and her schoolmates and the people he works with. On patrol, he’s often slipped a comic or a novel that rightfully should probably go to the town library. The staff in the kitchen at the dining hall sneak him extra treats when he gets their weekly groceries, cookies and dried fruit and things she likes.
Jackson is good for her.
But goddamn if she doesn’t thrive in the woods.
They have the luxury of enough gear to make this easy, but they still keep it simple. It’s nicer that way, he thinks. The biggest luxury he allows them are sleeping pads that he throws at Ellie to blow up.
“Put all that hot air to good use,” he says, and ducks when she chucks a pinecone at his head.
They might do some hunting tomorrow, but today they set up close enough to the lake that they can fish. They hiked out, not bothering with horses, so it’s close enough to town that he’s more comfortable than he’d usually be.
It’s possible that a patrol route goes through not too far away and it’s possible that patrol route is the one he was scheduled on the day before they left and maybe there was a small detour through here, but he’s not talking.
Camping, turns out, is much more relaxing when you haven’t walked fifteen miles a day first.
Joel had sort of forgotten that.
Ellie’s not exactly a patient fishing partner, but she’s gotten better at it. Between the two of them, they catch enough for a good dinner.
“Mine are bigger,” she crows all the way back to the camp.
“And you’re so humble about it.”
She kicks the back of his ankles and he tries to trip her.
He teaches her how to clean the fish, with her leaning over his shoulder and digging her sharp little chin into it.
Ellie’s always liked making fires, so he lets her make theirs tonight, waiting for it to burn down to a good coal bed before setting their grill up. They roast the fish over it, along with some potatoes and some fiddlehead ferns he spotted on the way out, one of the few green things Ellie doesn’t view with deep suspicion.
He’s still not entirely sure why, but he thinks it has to do with the food they ate at her school in the QZ. She’s mentioned a few times she’s never had things like fresh peas, celery, or fucking lettuce. She thinks they ate spinach sometimes, but when he brought some baby spinach home once, she didn’t recognize it at all until it was cooked, and even then she said it didn’t taste exactly the same.
After dinner, Ellie pushes their sleeping pads together. It’s still warm, so both their sleeping bags are still open as they stretch out.
She nudges into his space, putting her head on his shoulder.
“Tell me your favourite stars,” he says.
She points out constellations for a long time, until her arm starts to droops as she gets sleepy. Then she rolls, letting her arm rest on his chest.
He turns it carefully, looking at the scar by the light of their dying fire. Considering what it looked like when she did it, it’s healing well. It ain’t pretty, but it ain’t lethal either. He still doesn’t like how she did it. It still scares him, the headspace she was in that she eventually told him about in a therapy session.
It scares him that his kid was hurting herself at all.
Ellie traces patterns onto his arm through his sleeve. Squiggle, circle, the double symbol, three lines.
“Stop it,” he says gently. He doesn’t need her to apologize. She was hurting. He understands that all too well. He doesn’t need her to be guilty about it. He just needs her to be safe. And he knows she’s trying.
She stops for a second, then starts again. This time, the patterns change. Two lines, circle, two lines, four lines. Three lines, circle, half-circle.
“Me, too,” he says. “Go to sleep.”
She hums a soft noise, already more asleep than not. Early, she stole his favourite sweater when she briefly got chilly, but she dropped it on her sleeping bag when she got too warm sitting near the fire. Now, he finds it and tugs it over her. Curled up as small as she is, it almost covers her like a blanket.
Eventually, he’ll have to maneuver her back into her sleeping bag. The nights still get cool. But for now, she’s alright.
They’re alright.