Chapter Text
Ellie has a recurring nightmare.
Granted, she actually has several. In one of them, Riley peels off her rubber Halloween mask and fungus is already growing double time out of her eyes. In many of them, David grabs her from behind and throws her bodily onto some flat surface, and she finds out all the horrible ways he can hurt her. The one that always leaves her shaken for at least a week has her trapped underwater. In it, she can’t find the surface because the bodies of everyone whose death is her fault float, bloated, to the top, and she can’t push through them to breathe.
For the most part, she’s able to distinguish what’s real and what’s false immediately as she wakes up. Most times, she can recognize she’s dreaming as it’s happening.
But there’s one dream she hates more than any of the others. The thing that makes this one dream all the worse is that for some reason, she always reads it as real.
In it, the world is blue-black with shadow. She’s laying on her stomach, paralyzed, or maybe pinned down. Her cheek rests on the floor where she’s turned her head to look at Joel. Joel is also on the floor, large, strong body twisted and limp in a way it shouldn’t be. His eyes, his ancient, infinitely protective eyes rove quickly over her face and he mutters something she can’t quite hear. Her breath comes in quick, reedy pants. Her heart seizes in her chest and she calls out his name all the ways she knows how.
And then a figure swings down with something blunt and she has to watch, choking on screams, as the light in Joel’s eyes dies violently in front of her. The whole time, she’s pleading with him to get up, to open his eyes, to stay with her. He never does, and Ellie wakes up begging.
-
The world is gray and blue black with shadow. And, and,
And Ellie wakes up howling, sobbing, begging. She doesn’t make it two steps out of her bed before she’s heaving up all that she ate during the day on her bedroom floor.
Somehow, that helps. The mess of it, colored by the warm light, bleeding into her floors from the bathroom light on down the hall, grounds her. And the scent is so sharp and bright and so unlike that of blood that the phantom sensation of floorboards against her cheeks lessens.
Behind her eyes, though, is still Joel’s wretched, broken face. She shakes her head to try and clear it and she sits down at the edge of her bed, rubbing her temples like she could physically erase the picture, but anywhere she looks that’s not the rectangle of bathroom-hall light is black, and Joel’s face jumps out at her. His dead eyes, hair matted with his blood.
Her chest starts to seize up again, so she inhales, sharp, through her nose and wrinkles it. She needs a task. Luckily for her, she’s made herself a mess to clean right on up. Still, it’s an effort to nudge her door open more and slip out of it, to jump between floorboards like she’s dancing to not let the floor squeak. Joel, she notices when she peeks in his room, is sleeping on his good side, which means even if she makes the floorboards creak, he probably won’t really hear it anyway.
Even so, sometimes it feels like the floor gets creakier every damn night.
Immediately at the supply closet, she’s confronted with a problem. Technically, she’s never actually cleaned up vomit by herself before. Frankly, the two times she’s thrown up in the past year were both outside and behind bushes so she’d just left it there.
She considers asking Joel for help, even looks behind her at his door. He always leaves it open a crack. But she shakes her head again to clear it of the thought because he would ask questions, and this is something she has to deal with by herself. She’s independent and practically already an adult, at nearly fifteen, and besides, every adult has nightmares. And every adult knows how to clean up vomit. So let’s fucking do this.
Ellie decides she needs rubber gloves and a bucket and every cleaning chemical she can find. The process of getting it all back she thinks goes stealthily enough, and when she makes it back to her room, she shuts the door and sighs in relief. The puddle of vomit on the floor looks a lot smaller than it did before, but she’s hit with the sense that the task is so much harder than it seemed before she got the chemicals.
She frowns and wills herself not to cry, because she’s not stupid and she’s not weak and it’s just a little fucking cleaning. Still, she grimaces the entire way through, and when she realizes that her method of trying to shove the mess into a bucket with her rubber-wrapped hands is both extremely messy and extremely inefficient, she begins to really cry, frustrated.
The rest of the task is completed like it’s a temper tantrum. She nearly throws the bucket into the toilet to dump out the mess and hits the plunger so hard she briefly fears she’ll break it. She shoots with the nozzles of the chemicals like they’re guns and, when she’s wiped up the worst of it, she sprays them again for the satisfaction of shooting something and lets the fizzy liquids stay on the floor. She brushes her teeth and stomps into bed like she’s angry with it.
Unfortunately for Ellie fucking Williams, her anger is a forceful thing but it acquiesces easily, when she’s by herself, to a bone deep grief.
Staring at the wall, Ellie sees nothing but the hit of the blunt thing — some sort of club, or bat, or something — again, and again, and again, until tears leak from her eyes faster than she can wipe them away.
Rocking herself, like she used to do in school, doesn’t help all that much either, because back then, the worst thing she could be, lonely, she already really was. You can’t lose a parent you never knew, and beyond that, she spent years of her life, before knowing Riley, completely friendless. But now she’s got something to fucking lose, and rocking herself, holding herself by the arms, curled in fetal position— even going so far as to clutch her blankets up to her chin— doesn’t help. It only makes her feel worse, smaller, more alone.
Rationally, she knows going to Joel would help. There’s something invincible about him that’s grounding, and the few times he’s held her are the times she’s actually, really been able to let her guard down.
And any idiot would know that seeing continual proof of him safe and breathing evenly would stop the goddamn nightmare imagery on loop in her brain.
She decides to give it a minute. She’ll squeeze her eyes shut tight and hum to herself until she can hopefully lull herself into a sleep, and she’ll picture herself on a boat, in space, rocking, rocking, rocking…
She forces the images behind her eyes to shift and morph into galaxies, stars exploding white and green and golden and red, red like the blood on the club, red like the blood on the side of Joel’s face, red like, red like…
She forces her brain back on track.
Stars. That aren’t red.
And infinite calmness of space, which, she imagines, she can see from the moon, from the sheep ranch on the moon, where, inside, she’ll find Joel, beaten, bloody, and she’ll scream for him to get up and he won’t, and—
Okay. Nothing that reminds her of Joel. Even as she arranges her pillows so they curl around her and she can mash her face into the one she holds.
Back in space, the infinite calmness of space, where stars shine like diamonds, except all of the sudden the blackness of space morphs into Joel’s dead face with his dead, dead eyes, and she sits up gasping.
That doesn’t help much either because the black shadows in her room turn into Joel’s dead face, too, and they seem like they’re getting closer, dozens of broken Joel bodies that aren’t supposed to break, he’s not supposed to break, and she can’t she can’t she can’t.
She ends up standing in front of Joel’s slightly open door, breathing heavily. Joel’s in there, okay, she notes with relief. He’s snoring loudly the way he only does when he’s actually sleeping deeply. He’s okay.
She wants to go and stand at the foot of the bed until he wakes up. But she’s not a kid anymore. She’s not a kid anymore. She’s not a kid anymore.
And, besides, she’s mad at him, the adult part of her reminds her. He lied to her. And he robbed her life of its purpose. She shouldn’t be standing at the foot of his bed at all, nor even his doorway.
But, she rebuts herself, she can’t fucking go back into that black room again.
She watches him sleep for a little bit, and then her legs get tired so she sits down in the doorway. When she moves, the floor creaks slightly, and Joel’s head lifts slightly from his pillow and he, with his deep-ass sleep voice, croaks out an “Ellie?” but she doesn’t answer. Her head rests against the doorframe. She lets herself doze off.
Next thing she’s aware of, Joel is gathering her in his arms, her head lolling onto his shoulder, and she feels him press a kiss to the crown of her head. “You awake?” He asks softly, and Ellie just makes a sleep-thick noise.
He tries to carry her to her room; she can feel the way the world spins and his weight changes as he tries to nudge open her door, so she grabs a fistful of Joel’s collar and shakes her head and says “No,” enough times that he stops.
“You okay, baby girl?”
“Not there—I don’t want” She’s trying to stay asleep when she talks. “It’s too dark, and the club, and your face too many, it…”
“Okay,” He grunts, and she’s carried to his room and deposited on his bed. She snuggles in until the covers envelop her and he scoots in beside her, and damn the rational, childish part of her, but him breathing evenly and deeply beside her soothes her panic, and she falls completely back asleep again.
She wakes up feeling stupid and weak. She doesn’t even try to practice her WWE skills on Joel when he’s still sleeping. Abruptly, she curses herself so completely for being so vulnerable to any affection that here she is, excusing his fucked up lies just because she’s scared. What kind of fucking integrity is that?
She crawls out of his bed and it hurts her in her chest so much she nearly doubles over with it. The sky is still a pale, early morning purple and the light, when she sees it creep slowly over her bedroom floor, is cold. The sad pile of chemicals on her floor has shrunk, but has, Ellie notes with a vague sort of detached horror, left a splotch of discoloration on the wood.
Instead of doing anything else about it, Ellie drops a few rags onto the mess and folds herself to fit into the little enclave by the window. Her head rests against the glass and she drags a slow, slow finger over the Savage Starlight comic she had left there.
—
Ellie has actually never been accused of excessive sociability. Joel fits in great with the rest of Jackson once he gets over the whole communism thing, which is great especially because Ellie doesn’t know what communism means, but Ellie…
On good days, where Ellie can tuck Joel’s lie into some four dimensional space in her memory where it exists but not where she can see or sense it, Ellie sticks mostly by Joel throughout the day. He is well liked and very capable, so he always has some sort of a job to do. When the people find out he used to be a contractor, they start giving him work at least four times a week, (but never more than five,) which Joel grumbles about but she can tell he loves. Also, he gets to start on patrols when he can be trusted to not freak out when Ellie’s not in eyesight.
On bad days, Ellie mostly just stays home and locks the door to her room so she doesn’t have to see Joel but she doesn’t have to see anyone else, either. He doesn’t like leaving her alone in the house, those days, which she’s only grateful for when her weakness wins out and she has to find him to calm her about David or the fireflies (which, she reminds herself viciously, was his fucking fault to begin with ,) or Kansas City or the world that’s blue-black with shadow.
Ellie probably would’ve spent the rest of her life either locked up alone or trailing Joel like a shadow had it not been for a girl Cat who’s dad needed Joel to fix something. She asks Ellie to join her and her friends when they ‘take over’ the dining hall that evening, and Ellie’s never been invited to do something like that before, so she says yes before she can think about it, and Cat tells her to bring pillows and ‘good snacks’ if she has any and to be there at around the time the street lamps turn on.
When they get back to the house, Ellie’s frowning and looking at her backpack like it can tell her what ‘good snacks’ even are.
“Everything okay, kiddo?” Joel asks, when she hasn’t moved for a few minutes. He’s cautious with her like this, sometimes.
“What the fuck is the difference between a good snack and a bad snack?”
“I’d guess whether or not you like it,” Joel says. “Why?”
“I have plans tonight.” Ellie says, and the words feel like a different language in her mouth. She can’t quite get the sounds right.
“Plans?”
“Cat invited me to go to the dining hall with her and her friends.”
“Oh.” Joel says, and when she looks at him he’s got that faraway look in his eyes which means he’s seeing her but he’s also seeing Sarah, which she never likes. “Is it a sleepover?” he asks.
“What’s a sleepover?”
“Like… like when a group of kids all take over the living room of someone’s house an’... and they all do stupid shit like play spin the bottle or wreck the kitchen trying to make brownies. Sarah had a few.”
Ellie has a lot of questions like what’s spin the bottle and do brownies count as good snacks , but she doesn’t ask them and instead says “I don’t know.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Joel says. “We’ll pack pillows and a blanket for you,” yes , Ellie thinks, Cat wanted me to bring pillows , “and at around midnight I’ll come find you and ask if you want to sleep at home. I’ll bring your toothbrush and pajamas for you in case you don’t.”
Ellie thinks about it. Since coming to Jackson, she’s never tried to sleep anywhere that wasn’t the house they have, now, and even her own bedroom feels too far away sometimes. She suddenly has the horrible image—the world blue black with shadow, and Joel’s head is bloody, bloody, bloody— flash before her eyes and she shakes her head. That is an image she resolutely does not want to see anywhere else but someplace she can easily reach Joel.
“That sound good?” Joel emphasizes again.
“Okay.” says Ellie. “Do we have good snacks?”
Joel packs her bag with her and Ellie tries to whip out a Livingston classic to get him to stop fucking thinking about Sarah but it doesn’t work until he says, “Now, the last time I did this I got yelled at for picking out uncool pajamas, so if you have a preference, say somethin’ now—” and then he catches the look on Ellie’s face and he goes over to sit next to her and help as she’s shoving down a pillow to get more room. From then, he’s completely present.
“Now, I ain’t got the skill to make cookies if that’s what you want to bring, but I think we might have some jerky—”
“Joel, I’m not bringing fucking jerky—”
“Alright, alright, I’m just sayin,”
Joel ends up bringing Ellie over to Tommy and Maria’s because Maria recently made banana bread that Joel encourages Ellie to wheedle out of her with a promise to let her show Ellie how to make it that Sunday.
Ellie feels slightly overprepared by the time Joel hovers near her as she’s lacing up her shoes to walk to the dining hall. She begs Joel not to walk her there but he doesn’t listen. At least he stops out of sight of the building and she gets to walk in alone. She looks back at him right before she turns the corner and he’s just standing there, watching her, and he raises one hand in a wave when she stops. She shakes her head and keeps on walking.
She enters the dining hall like she plans to clear it, edging around the door and checking shadowy corners with her shoulders slightly hunched, hand resting ready on her pocket in case she needs to grab her knife. Then she notices a group of about a half dozen kids in a space they cleared out in the middle, and some girl waves at Ellie at Cat turns around and welcomes her heartily.
The banana bread goes over really well, which pleases Ellie.
“This tastes literally exactly like the one Ms. Maria makes—” says some kid with freckles.
“It is, isn’t it?” asks another kid with high cheekbones and pitch dark hair. “She’s your aunt, right?”
Ellie just nods and smiles once at the kid—Jesse, she learns—before leaning back and listening.
As it turns out, the hangout isn’t a sleepover, but kids apparently have blankets and pillows stashed in a box somewhere. Some other girl arrives a little bit later than Ellie and makes a whole, hilarious production out of the story of how one of their schoolteachers got shat on twice by a bird in the span of one hour— “I’m not joking, he’s like, touching it, trying to figure out what it is, and then he looks up which was really stupid considering the whole lesson was about pattern recognition in birds or something, and, get this—the bird shits on his glasses. ” Ellie doesn’t even know this teacher but she’s wheezing at the image of it, and immediately decides she likes this group, with the funny girl with shiny dark hair and eyes.
They put on a movie and don’t pay attention to it, and instead trade stories about the people they know. Ellie is immensely grateful to Jesse, who sits next to her and explains some of the context Ellie doesn’t know. It’s fun and easy in a way Ellie’s never experienced, and she’s constantly checking herself to make sure she’s laughing right, speaking enough but not too much for a newcomer, clipping back the parts of herself that jolt at loud noises and tend towards antagonism.
Still, they all disperse before it’s even an hour until midnight, and Jesse and Dina—the pretty, funny girl with the story about bird shit—live close enough to Ellie to walk the first part of the way home together.
“We’ll be in there at the same time tomorrow, you should definitely come,” says Dina.
“Yeah! I think someone’s older brother or something found a horror movie out on patrol so we’re gonna watch it,” Jesse says, then, “I think it’s one of those one’s about aliens.”
“Okay!” Ellie says, trying so very hard to be casual about it. “I think I’m free.”
Ellie makes the last leg of the walk home alone. About half of the houses she walks past still have lights on, but the night is quiet and peaceful and Ellie pokes at the weird, excited, hopeful thing in her chest.
The light in her living room is on, and the front door swings loosely open. Joel sits on the porch, face half lit from the light outside, and he’s leaned up against the railing with his guitar on his lap. She can see he’s concentrating on it, lost in thought, even if he’s playing softly enough she barely hears it from up the street. She ducks into a shadow and watches.
“ I don’t know about anyone, but me
If it takes all night, that’ll be all right
‘F I can get you to smile before I leave… ”
He strums his guitar softly for a few seconds. He’s playing slowly and gently, and his voice is gravelly and syrupy and has a sort of country twang it always gets when the guitar is in his lap. Ellie swallows and wills her face not to crumple completely. The song isn’t for her, she knows. He doesn’t even know she’s watching him. Except that he had found that song out on patrol and had given it to Ellie, and she had played it through her walkman practically on loop for a week. And when he offered to teach her guitar, he held up the cassette and said, “Even this song.”
Ellie steps forward onto the street and goes slowly to their house.
“Looking out at the road,
Rushing under my wheels.
I don’t know how to tell you all, just how crazy this life… Hey, kiddo. Everything okay?”
He looks like a painting, Ellie thinks. The light is blue and orange and it looks like some Americana country bullshit they used to make before the end of the world. It’s the shit Riley would put up on her walls when she could find prints of it. Riley always liked the sense of open space they communicated. Ellie always thought they looked really, really fucking lonely. Ellie’s heart hurts.
“Ellie?” Joel puts down the guitar and moves to stand up, but Ellie climbs the stairs to the porch and shakes her head.
“Everything’s fine, it just wasn’t a sleepover.”
“Oh. You had fun?”
Ellie looks at Joel and feels so guilty for leaving him that evening it nearly drowns her. “Yeah.” she says.
“They like the banana bread?”
“Yeah.” Ellie says, nearly chokes on it, then runs to her room, slams the door, and hugs a pillow to her chest as tears fall hot and fast down her face.
She’s detached from them, a little bit, part of her feeling them from the third person, like, why are these tears falling? I’m not even crying. I’m not even a kid anymore. But then her face crumples and her chest caves in and her eyes squeeze shut like they’re trying to wring out every last tear they can from her and she can’t stop it, and all she can do is grit her teeth and hear the rushing in her ears and rock herself through silent sobs.
She loves him so fucking much, him and his stupid guitar and his stupid contracting work and the way he complains about it and the way he’s the guy everyone always goes to when they need something done. She loves how invincible he is and how dryly funny he is and she loves that he’s helping her make friends even if he’s kind of embarrassing her more than he’s helping. She loves the way he squints when the sun is too bright and the way he finds things he thinks she’ll like and he’s always right. She’s everything she wanted but never had in a parent growing up and she hates herself so, so, unspeakably much for being angry with him.
She goes to bed and only says goodnight to him once he nudges her door open and says “I’m going to bed now, kiddo.” He looks like he wants to move closer, but Ellie doesn’t get up off the bed.
-
That night, the world is blue black with shadow, and—
And Ellie wakes up gasping.
Embarrassingly, Joel is immediately in her room, holding open his arms if she needs him.
“I’m okay, I’m okay,” She chokes out, even as she crawls into the space he makes for her. He hums lowly to soothe her. It works. “You don’t have to stay.” She tries again, but he just says “Nonsense,” and stays with her until she’s asleep again.
She dreams about wandering through a mall that’s also the house Joel scared the two old people in, and then she turns a corner in the dream, and the world is blue black with shadow again and she’s laying on her stomach, and Joel is dead, dead, dead, and—
She wakes up and her throat is raw and her face is wet with tears. She frowns and looks for Joel but he isn’t there—she checks the clock — it’s not even half past five in the morning. Wyoming isn’t very far north, so even in the summer the sun isn’t up until around six.
But Joel’s a contractor and he probably just left the house.
Even the shadows in the corners of her room threaten to morph into Joel’s bloody face, so Ellie sits up and grabs a book about a detective and doesn’t go back to sleep.
She’s a little drowsy during the day, but she’s nowhere near as catatonic as she was last month with the early spring snow, so she figures she’s fine.
The movie the next day is good, from the parts of it she paid attention to. Embarrassingly, Dina has to call Ellie’s name more than once to get her attention at a point, but she’s invited back again, so she counts it as a win.
That night, it doesn’t take an hour after she’s asleep to wake up with her heart pounding, the crack of the club echoing in her ears, pleads dying in her throat as she orients herself. Her room feels claustrophobic and stifling, and she has the horrible, horrible image of Joel dead, head beaten in, in his bed across the hallway.
Ellie rubs her eyes, frustrated, then goes up to check and makes sure he’s alive. His chest rises and falls normally. She lets out a breath.
Though some tiny part of her wants to, she also can’t crawl under the covers of Joel’s. She’s not a baby. But she can’t crawl back under the covers of her own bed either. She stares at them, already sleep rumpled, but she can’t bring herself to see Joel die again. She sits in her enclave instead, and stares out the window and the mountains beyond Jackson. There are points where her eyelids get heavy, but the terror of the nightmare prevents her from falling asleep.
By the time dawn breaks over the mountains, Ellie’s eyes hurt with the strain of keeping them open, and she lets herself rest her eyes, head against the cold glass, as long as the sunlight is rosy and pink on her face.
That day, she learns how to play Cops and Robbers with Cat’s group, and she glows with pride when, after a few rounds have been played and new teams are called, she’s one of the first to be picked.
Even so, it worries her, slightly, that when it’s her turn as a robber, she doesn’t really check her periphery, and when she’s a cop, she has a hard time keeping an ear out for robbers aside from those she actively tracks. And when it’s time for a break, she very nearly dozes off in the grass, in the sun.
When the group walks back to the dining hall, Ellie plods behind with her head down and her feet moving on autopilot until Jesse falls back next to her and she makes a point of seeming animated.
She gets home in the late afternoon, and the click of the front door closing only makes Joel raise his head slightly from where he’s laying down on the couch. “Hey, kid,” He says warmly. Ellie raises a hand in greeting. “You have fun today?”
“Yeah,” Ellie says, moving closer. “We played Cops and Robbers. I’m pretty fuckin’ good.”
Joel grins—easy, for her—and settles further into the couch. “I bet you are.”
Ellie chuckles, and Joel stops adjusting and his eyes drift shut. There’s a silence. It feels like Joel is far away, even though he’s right there, and Ellie knows it’s her own fault. The same guilt, for leaving him alone to hang out with other people, rears its ugly head. Some vulnerable part of her wants it to be just them on the road again. She wants him close again.
“What, is your bedtime four p-m, now, old man?” She tries.
“Oh, gimme a break, I ain’t sleeping, I’m only resting my eyes.”
“Sure,” Ellie says, and she goes to pour herself a glass of water, but when she gets back, Joel is fully asleep on the couch, all warm and relaxed. She wants—
Honestly, what she wants to do is put down her glass of water and then climb up in the space he makes for her between the couch’s back and his side. She’s so damn tired, and she misses him so much, even though he’s right there, that makes her just want to take a nap with his arms around her, so she doesn’t have to worry about dark shapes with long, thin clubs. He’s trying so hard, she knows, and that’s the worst part. He’s trying so hard to give her her space, to make it easy for her. And the way he loves her is so quiet but so present, and Ellie’s heart hurts.
-
Ellie really has no choice but to break down and sleep that night—by the time she’s sitting at the dining hall table with Tommy, Maria, and Joel, she’s in danger of falling asleep right on her plate. Even so, in anticipation of it, she hangs around Joel in the evening, absorbing the fact that he’s there, present and healthy. If he notices, he doesn’t say anything, only gently ruffles her hair as he passes by her, the way he used to when they were on the road, before he told her the truth. It hurts and she wants more just as much as she wants to tell him never to do that again.
When she’s put it off long enough, she stares at her mattress like she can intimidate it against presenting her with nightmares.
The first battle, she loses. She can’t make it onto the mattress without staring directly into a dark corner and imagining, vividly, the picture of Joel’s beaten head emerging from it.
Joel is still downstairs, so she sneaks into his bedroom to rifle through his closet and pilfer a flannel. Even being in his space is comforting; it smells like him, it’s filled with his things, she feels very securely under his wing as she roots through his clothes.
However, she’s not a kid, so she doesn’t stay there, she grabs a green flannel and inhales the scent of it to make sure it doesn’t smell too much like the new Jackson soap and not enough like Joel (it’s old enough that it’s okay,) and she heads back to her room, but not before stopping at his nightstand.
There’s a picture of him and Sarah there, she notices. It brings up something ugly and vindictive in her, and she hates herself immediately for it. The girl looks sweet, with beautiful hair and large doe eyes, but Ellie thinks fuck you, perfect girl with her perfect fucking life and perfect fucking dad who’s actually yours , and runs out of the room with her eyebrows drawn.
The flannel helps. She wears it over her sleep shirt and goes so far as to button up a few buttons to feel really enveloped in it. It’s too long and fits her like a dress, but that’s not a problem when she’s laying horizontally.
For the first part of the night, it really works. She falls asleep quickly and stays dreamless, until she wakes up disoriented needing to relieve herself. She tries to keep her eyes closed and her mind in sleep-mode as she goes about her business, but unthinkingly, she takes off the flannel after washing her hands—water got on the sleeves, and besides that, it’s goddamn hot , and she leaves it on her floor and crawls back on her bed.
In her dreams, she knows she lost something that keeps her safe. The dream starts in a snowy wood, and she’s moving slowly and confusedly. She knows she’s forgetting something, that she left something crucial behind. The snow and air is thick, and it takes her a lot of effort to breathe, and she reaches for the rifle on her back but she drops it…
When she bends to pick it up, she’s in a world that’s blue black with shadow. Dark figures move about the room, and she’s knocked to her stomach and she fights, but she’s kicked several times. Her throat closes with the imminent horror—she knows what’s about to happen, dreamed it a thousand times before—and she’s face-to-face with Joel, whose eyes meet hers, and he’s scared, already bloody, but Joel is never scared, and then the swing of a club…
She’s screaming, throat already hoarse: “Joel, get up, fucking, get up, Joel, please, please stop, please— Joel, please get up—”
And the figure swings again and there’s a sickening crunch and she screams—
“Ellie! Ellie, wake up, baby, you’re safe.”
She’s confused, and she’s still screaming. The room she’s in is dark and dawn light through her curtains throws the figure in her room into backlight. She doesn’t know where she is, but there’s no longer anyone kicking her, so she curls up in on herself and clamps her hands over her ears.
“Ellie!” It sounds like Joel, but he’s dead, she just saw him die… “Ellie, baby, it’s okay. It’s just me, you’re okay.”
“Please, please,” She says, and hunches further inward as her whole body shakes with sobs.
“Ellie, baby,” Joel’s voice is soothing and it’s made all the worse by the fact that she’s not entirely sure it’s real. “Ellie,” he says again, and then there’s a dip on the other side of her mattress and a gentle hand on her back, petting her. And it’s so real, present the way even the kicks in her dream weren't, that she uncurls a little bit.
“Joel—” her voice is hoarse.
“Ellie, it’s okay. It’s just a nightmare.” Ellie manages to turn around, and Joel is whole and present and alive in front of her. And Ellie is so weak so she crawls towards him and lets herself cry like a child as Joel holds her.
“You were—they had a club—” She tries to say, but she doesn’t think it comes out as much more than incoherent mumbling.
“It’s okay. It’s just a nightmare.” Joel says, and he passes a hand up and down her back and she times her breathing to it.
Dawn light creeps in slowly and Ellie dozes off on Joel’s shoulder. She knows he has some sort of construction job that day, but he lets her sleep on him until late morning, and when she wakes up, he’s flipping absentmindedly, with the hand that’s not still passing up and down her back, through one of the space books she has on her nightstand, and he’s holding it like an old man, peering at it from, like, a foot away.
She loves him so much.
She rubs at her eyes and squints at the light, and Joel turns to look at her, face open and slightly bemused. She loves him.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.” She feels sort of stupid. “Don’t you have work today?”
“I’ll tell them I had something come up. They fucked up the blueprints anyway, so they could use a few more hours to get their shit straight.”
“Idiots.” Ellie says, grinning. Joel reaches up to ruffle her hair.
“That’s right.”
-
Because Ellie is Ellie and a good morning can’t mean a good day, a patrol comes back one man short that day.
“Clicker got’em.” The lead says darkly, and a shadow passes over Joel’s face and Ellie feels immediately guilty for having fallen asleep on him that morning.
It’s Joel’s fault. She reminds herself viciously. If he had let me die—
And that thought wells up something deeply sad and deeply terrified in her. She’s angry again.
“You ready to go?” Joel asks her when he’s finished picking up rope, or nails, or whatever he needed from the city center.
“Fuck off, Joel.” Ellie says, and storms off in front of him. She turns a corner and gets a glimpse of him a few yards behind her, looking sort of cracked open and confused. Hurt wells up in her chest.
-
Ellie starts spending more time with her friends and less time at home. She becomes a god at Cops and Robbers, and often wants to enter the house and tell Joel everything about how well she did. She catches it on the tip of her tongue more than once, stories of valiant escapes and rescues and tackles. She gets a nosebleed, once, in the middle of a game, as Jesse trips her during her daring escape from ‘jail,’ (which is actually just a section of dirt in an otherwise grassy field,) and she comes home with dirt and blood smeared across her face.
Joel stands up immediately when he sees it, and begins asking if she got in a fight, if she’s alright, if she needs help, and Ellie wants to grin at him and tell him the whole story, but her anger resurfaces and she brushes him off.
She spends most evenings out of the house. It makes her nightmares worse, but.
“Hey, kiddo,” Joel says one afternoon when she’s lacing up her shoes. He’s gentle and careful with her, present but not pushing it. He’s trying to give her space and she’s stuck between wanting absolutely nothing to do with him and begging him to let her crawl into his personal space and make it her own. Let him love her.
“What?” She says, and cringes at how rude it sounds.
He dithers with a few long uhhs and false starts. Part of Ellie wants to snap at him to get on with it, but she immediately feels guilty for the thought. She sits back and lets him find it.
Finally, “You’ve been coming home late, recently.”
“Yeah.”
“I was just thinkin’, you know, so I know you’re okay, if we could agree on a time that you’re home by.”
Ellie frowns. Most of her friends have curfews. Honestly, she likes the routine of it. She likes imagining that her life is totally normal and she’s like any other teenager, whining that she has to get home at a certain time. But Joel’s not her dad, she’s under no delusions.
“Okay.”
“What do you say, near eight-thirty, nine p.m.?”
“Okay.” Her head is down.
“Now, listen to me, I’m open to negotiation—” look at how careful he’s being , she thinks. She almost wants him to set a hard limit. “An’ if you know you’ll be out later, I’m okay with it, as long as you tell me first.” She almost wants to throw the fact that she’s not his real daughter back in his face. She doesn’t get a picture with him on his dresser.
“Okay.”
-
Cops and Robbers often merges into dining hall takeovers, and those don’t typically end until ten or eleven.
The first time since the curfew conversation that she knows that’s happening, a group of her friends break off—(“I need to go tell my mom, I’ll meet you there!”)--and she almost joins them to tell Joel, but.
He’s not her father.
“Do you need to tell your dad?” Someone asks her. Despite the truth, she doesn’t correct him.
“No, it’ll be fine.” Still, she’s nervous.
When she makes it home, she enters the house gingerly, making as little noise as she can. Joel is still up, she notices with chagrin, and as soon as she’s within eyeshot, he lets out a breath and passes a hand over his face.
He looks so tired. Still, when she’s going to bed, he hovers by her doorway and says “Goodnight, kiddo.”
She feels small and young and her voice comes out thin when she answers, “Goodnight.”
He keeps the door open just a crack when he goes into his room, and he leaves the hallway light on. She turns to face it so she can’t see the shadows in her room.
Still, when she falls asleep, the world is blue black with shadow, and, and, and,
She wakes up gasping.
-
She comes home at sporadic times. Sometimes, she makes curfew, and Joel smiles at her from his spot in the living room or kitchen. Most of the time, she doesn’t. It makes her feel older than fourteen, which she embraces. Adults, she thinks, are big and capable enough to handle anything, and they don’t have to be home at specific times.
Still, Joel is always within eyesight of the door when it’s evening. She hurts at the thought that he spends those evenings in the house, just waiting for her to come home.
One night, it’s one of her friend’s mom’s birthdays, so they don’t go to the dining hall after Manhunt—Cops and Robbers got boring after a few weeks, but Manhunt is new and exciting—and Ellie has nothing better to do than make it home around seven.
She’s getting to the front door via the back of the house, but it means she walks under a living room window which is cracked open.
“I mean, she’s at that age, I don’t know what to tell you.”
It’s Tommy’s voice. Ellie stops.
“I don’t know…” It’s Joel. “You know what I did in that hospital.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. I was tryin’ to do right by her. I was tryin’ to do right by her tellin’ her after, but. It’s like sometimes she’s able to put it behind her, sometimes she looks at me like she hates me for it.”
“Joel…”
“Funny thing is, I don’t really blame her for it. Dunno if I wouldn’t hate myself if I were her.”
“Man, you saved your kid.”
“I saved my kid.” Joel’s voice breaks, and Tommy’s voice goes low and she can’t hear him reply. Then Joel says, “I don’t know what to do. She ain’t listenin’ to me when I tell her to be home, and she’s waking up screamin’ every night from nightmares she won’t even tell me about, she brushes me off most times when I try and help, and Tommy, I don’t even know half the time ‘cause I’m too fuckin’ deaf…”
“You’re doing the right thing.” Tommy’s voice is stronger. “She needs you to be there for her. Now, you know as well as I do handlin’ teenagers is like herdin’ cats. You yelled at my drunk ass enough times to know it’s true.”
“Yeah, but…”
“Listen, man. Her bein’ angry at you is good. It means she don’t think you’ll leave her.”
“I don’t know…”
“Joel…”
Ellie runs off and climbs a tree. She doesn’t get back in the house until the streetlights turn on, and even then, she doesn’t meet Joel’s eyes.
Even then, he’s at her doorway when she’s tucked into bed, and he says “Goodnight, kiddo,” softly, and her voice is still small when she replies “Goodnight.”
And she chokes back a scream as she wakes up from a world that’s blue black with shadow.
-
Joel starts going on patrol rotations—and long, multi-hour ones—regularly, and Ellie fucking hates it. When he’s away, she spends half her attention worrying after him, and her performance in Manhunt slips, so her friends ask her if everything’s okay, why she’s so spacy. She hates herself for feeling so weak about it. When he leaves early in the morning, she wakes up and lays awake in bed until she hears the front door shut. Every time, he spends a few moments before leaving standing in her doorway, and she’s frozen with the want to get up and hug him before he goes.
Sometimes, if she’s had a nightmare and he’s leaving early, he presses a kiss to her temple before he leaves her room. She pretends to be asleep but stays so perfectly still, measuring her breaths so precisely, that she can catalog and imprint the feeling of the kiss onto some permanent part of her brain and run through the memory of how it feels.
When he leaves early, she gets up from her room and climbs into his bed and finishes off her morning that way. She never has nightmares like that.
She develops a habit of conveniently being by the gates when his patrol is supposed to return to make sure he gets back okay. It means her and some of her friends get complaints about ‘hanging around the damn store without any reason to,’ but Joel always walks by their little group and starts ruffling her hair again, and it settles something in her.
“The way you kids hang around, some of these shop owners might propose anti-loitering laws again.” Tommy teases her as he passes by her little group.
“What’s loitering?”
“Hangin’ around for no good reason.”
(Loitering, it turns out, is very fun and interesting, especially when it means she doesn’t have to wait to find out that Joel's safe.)
Even on the days he goes out on patrol, Ellie breaks curfew. She really doesn’t know why she keeps doing it. Part of her wants him to yell at her about it, part of her is satisfied with the way he looks hurt when she comes home too late. Most of her hurts with him, and when the bags under his eyes grow dark and he looks routinely broken open at night, she hates herself intensely for twisting the knife. She starts avoiding eye contact completely in the evenings, only speaking to him to say good night. Her nightmare becomes nearly nightly.
She makes no attempt at sneaking in; she has courtesy enough to afford Joel the peace of mind that she’s at least made it into the house.
“Ellie…” Joel says one night, leaning up against the counter. She can’t tell if he’s angry or sad or disappointed or all three.
“Yeah?” It’s the most they’ve spoken at night in days.
“Can you please…” He stops and runs a hand down his face. Abruptly, Ellie is afraid he’ll ask her to move out of the house. Instead turns toward the refrigerator and takes out something that he immediately puts on the stove to heat up.”I didn’t know if you’d skipped dinner. I brought something back for you.”
The plate he makes for her is full of her favorites. She swallows and frowns. He sets a fork beside the plate and hovers around the counter until Ellie fully turns her face away from him so he can’t see the emotion she’s got cracked open on her face. He raises his hand slightly, like he’s going to try to ruffle her hair again or something, but when Ellie doesn’t move, he lets it drop onto the counter.
“I’ll uh. I’m gonna start headin’ to bed, kiddo.”
“Okay.” she manages.
As she starts with her favorites, she’s able to choke down the emotion rising in her throat, but when she goes to ignore the brussels sprouts that are in the corner, her eyes flick to the staircase as if she can conjure Joel up to tell her to finish them. When he doesn’t, she looks at the lonely vegetables on the vast white plate and puts her head in her hands and rides out her misery.
She ends up throwing away the brussels sprouts and washing the plate by hand.
-
One night, she gets back late, but she’s feeling kind of on top of the world because they were playing spin the bottle—she found out what that was recently, and it kind of freaks her out except in a good way, especially because, well—they were playing spin the bottle, and Dina was spinning and the bottle landed between her and Jesse, and Dina had crawled across the circle and chosen to kiss Ellie on the cheek instead of Jesse, and Ellie’s whole face had turned red and she had to fight to tamp down the smile on her face the whole rest of the night.
She beelines for a shower as soon as she’s back, and as she’s washing her hair she plays through it again in her head, again and again. She’s still softly smiling when she gets out of the shower, and as she bundles up in her robe, she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror and she’s surprised by how happy and normal she looks.
Her bed, as she left it that afternoon, was unmade—all the better to crawl right back into. But she enters her bedroom, her covers are tucked tight around the mattress, and in the middle of her bed is something wrapped.
She frowns.
The thing looks wrapped in brown paper. She’s never really gotten a present like this before, and besides, it’s not even her birthday, so she’s confused. Obviously, it’s from Joel—who else—but still, she checks, and there’s a card written in Joel’s hand.
It reads
Hey, kiddo. Found this on patrol today, thought you might like it.
-Joel
She unwraps the present. It’s a thin, paperback book with a black cover. A space shuttle looks like it’s flying right off the page, and the title, written in a thick, serif font, says, To Space & Back , and under it, Sally Ride with Susan Okie .
Ellie runs her hand along the front of it, then uses her thumb to flip through the pages. Her attention gets caught on a few full-page pictures of space.
She’s seen this book before. She used to read it and then hide it in the library of FEDRA school, until one day some punk ass kid saw her with it and tore off the cover so the book would have to be removed from circulation. It broke her heart when it happened, and Riley had spent, like, three weeks trying to get her to forget it.
She’s biting the inside of her lip, she realizes, as she thumbs through the pages again. She wants to go and find Joel to hug him and squeeze the book between them.
Once more, she curses herself for always coming home late. He doesn’t fucking deserve that. He deserves his real daughter, nice, kind Sarah with her perfect doe eyes and her painted nails, and, Ellie realizes, her chest constricting painfully, she is a piss poor substitute, rude and ungrateful.
Honestly, she thinks, she doesn’t even deserve to go to Joel to thank him. If she got what she deserved, she would be dead on the operating table or sleeping outside in some garden shed somewhere. Joel is too fucking nice for exactly how difficult Ellie is.
The thought makes tears well up in her eyes. She runs her thumb through the pages again and hugs the book close to her chest, and she moves to stand outside Joel’s room, but he’s puttering around downstairs and the thought of going down there makes her remember that she’s a coward. She doesn’t know what she would even say, if thanking him would make her want to apologize for being so awful, if she even could look him in the eyes for how mean she’s been.
In the end, she retreats to her room and reads through the first half of the book before going to sleep. Joel appears, as he always does, at her doorway. He stands there like he’s afraid to go in all the way, like he’s afraid she’ll tell him to fuck off again, and holy fuck, exactly how awful a person can she be?
“Goodnight, kiddo.” He says, like always.
She turns to face him. She has the book clutched fast to her chest.
“Goodnight. Thank you.” Her voice breaks.
“Always.” He says. He hesitates, which he doesn’t typically do. “Hey, do you want…”
“Hmm?”
“Do you want me to…” He adjusts his lean on the doorframe and then finally settles. “You know what, never mind. Sleep tight.”
She holds the book tighter and fights off a wave of sadness that makes it hard to breathe. When she falls asleep, she doesn’t look forward to it as much as she resigns herself to the inevitable nightmare; it’s familiar misery and fear where her conscious life is a tangled mess of anger and sadness. She adjusts the covers around her and loses consciousness.
The world is blue black with shadow, and…
-
It becomes a semi-regular thing, the gifts he leaves her from patrol. And every night, he leaves her dinner. Some other parents—well, no, Joel isn’t her parent. Some other adults might hold back the presents and the dinner until the kid learns to obey curfew, but Joel just gives it all to her.
The patrol gifts are always perfect and thoughtful and each time she finds one she feels worse for being unable to forgive him. He loves her so much, and hates that she won’t let him.
By the time he’s been on patrol for about a month, she has the Sally Ride book, a horror book about a high school girl with a very religious mom—it brings up a lot of questions about the world before the outbreak—and a new cassette for her Walkman. She almost feels guilty reading the books and listening to the music, but would feel worse if she ignored it.
She thinks about it on walks home, why she’s being so mean to him. She doesn’t know, she’s so unspeakably angry. She knows she’s sorry. She loves him so much. It hurts her too.
“Hey.” Joel catches her as she’s on her way out the door one afternoon. She doesn’t want to stop for him; she’s too tired to cry today.
“Hey, Ellie, are you going to be home for dinner? Tommy an’ Maria don’t have anythin’ to do this evening so they’re gonna be over for about an hour before. I’d really like it if you were there.”
Ellie already has one foot out the door. Refusing to turn around, unable to search for his face, she frowns and draws her hurt around her like a cloak. She lets the door swing behind her. She has to bite her lip and choke as she leaves without answering.