Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Ellie wakes up and immediately knows it’s going to be a bad day. A fuzzy day, Joel had taken to calling them, a day where out of the corner of her eye she swears she sees Sam, where the snow piled up outside reminds her too much of she and Joel starving in the Colorado wilderness, where she dreams of Tess blowing herself up, where she is never quite present in any of the conversations happening around her, where she has to tuck herself into Joel’s side like his heaving mass will save her, not just from bullets or Infected, but also from prying eyes.

She’s sixteen years old, and she still hides behind Joel when the going is too tough.

It's Tommy, in the end, who reminds her what day it is.

“You alright, kid?” He asks, and it’s the first thing that’s pierced her hazy mind since Joel asked the same when he gently knocked on her door to wake her from her nightmare.

Joel’s so good at that, she thinks absently. Knowing when to wake me up with a kiss to the forehead and when to let me hear him from across the room. She wonders how he knows.

“Kid?” Tommy repeats, and Joel would’ve scolded him for prying already if he weren’t in line to get their lunch.

Ellie blinks. “Yeah, Uncle Tommy, I’m fine. Why?”

“It’s alright if you’re not,” he says softly, and she rolls her eyes.

“But I am,” she says, exasperatedly, but by the look in his eye, she hasn’t quite managed ‘bratty teenager’ and probably fell somewhere more along the lines of ‘child throwing a tantrum’.

“I’m just saying, Ellie Bean, I know how hard today is for you, and it’s alright. We all have bad days.”

Ellie Bean makes her roll her eyes for real this time, but she aborts the action halfway.

I know how hard today is for you, he’d said, and suddenly she remembers.

Two years ago, to the day, Joel had found her in the ash of a burning building in bumfuck nowhere, and they’d started their journey to Salt Lake City.

She hadn’t even noticed the leaves turning brown and falling off, the thick Wyoming snow coming down harder, the Christmas decorations going up, the fires in the dining hall burning brighter and more often.

She doesn’t know how her body seemed to remember even when she didn’t.

She blinks again, and Tommy winces. “Ah, shit, kid, I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s alright,” she says, and it's only after the words come out of her mouth that she realizes how clipped and angry they sound. “Seriously, Tommy, the day was fucked anyway.”

It doesn’t seem to make him feel any better.

It had been two years. Two years to the day of EllieandJoel, JoelandEllie. She likes to think of them like that, as one inseparable thing. It makes her heart feel like its going to explode, but in a good way. It's the only good thing to come out of the whole journey. They're a team, a unit. JoelandEllie. She likes how it makes Joel smile, too, when people in Jackson call them that, all rushed into one word. EllieandJoel are coming to fix the roof today. JoelandEllie are on patrol right now, but they’ll be back later. Some time last year, Benjamin had been so overexcited in his babbling, that when she and Joel had entered Tommy and Maria’s kitchen for family dinner night, instead of screaming tio! or prima! or Uncle Joel! or anything else that may have referred to them, he yelled ‘Jellie!’ with all the joy a two year old could muster. Tommy hadn’t let them live it down, and neither she nor Joel had fessed up to how much they loved it.

Thankfully, it had stuck.

Joel finally returns with their food, venison stew for Joel, and chicken for her, made special by Becca in the kitchen. They had finally succeeded in growing oranges in the greenhouse this year, and she’d made Ellie some kind of Asian-style chicken using the preserves. It was sweet, a little tangy, and overall delicious.

Ellie manages to steel her face. She’s with Joel (JoelandEllie), and Becca from the kitchen loves her and knows red meat is still iffy if Ellie isn’t on shift in the kitchen helping to prepare the food herself, and Tommy knows and cares what days might be fuzzy days, and Benji and Maria are babbling at her from across the table, and distantly, she remembers Dina and Jesse waving hello at her this morning, and it’s a good day, except for the fact that it isn’t. She is going to enjoy it if it kills her, damnit.

She still doesn’t really have the energy or presence to be, well, present, but she desperately wants to be, so instead of even attempting to engage with the conversation, she makes grabby hands across the table, and Maria picks Benji up from his high chair to pass him to Ellie. Ellie spends the rest of her lunch time letting her cousin play with her fingers and squishing him in between her and Joel to make him giggle. Babies are easy because they don’t require conversation, even if Benji is speaking now, and getting close to saying real whole sentences. She puts him back in her lap and he pokes suspiciously at her chicken, but when he sticks his little chubby baby fingers in his mouth, he recognizes the orange jelly he loves so much, and Ellie marks the rest of her lunch as being lost to the whims of a toddler. She wasn’t all that hungry anyway, and she’d gotten a lot of it down before Benji had gotten to it.

The warm presence at her side leaves suddenly, and she looks up to Joel smiling down softly at her. “I’m going to the wall, you coming or what?”

She hadn’t remembered him having a shift today, but she sure as hell isn’t staying here without him, so she nods and hands the baby back over to Tommy.

“You’re a goddamn cheater, you know that right? Taking your kid so you only have to do lookout half the time is cheating. Blatant daylight robbery, if you ask me.”

Joel goes to open his mouth to say something, but Ellie beats him to the punch. “Aww, but no one asked you!” She said, keeping a smile on her face that might’ve read as genuine if Tommy didn’t know her so well.

“Har har, Ellie, very funny.”

“Don’t worry little brother,” Joel said, clapping Tommy on the back with more force than was strictly necessary. “Fourteen more years, and you may get the same privilege.” Joel grins, and Ellie can really see it sometimes, how some of the townspeople think she’s really his daughter. They smile the same way, especially when they’re being mean. Tommy sputters, and Joel offers Ellie his arm as he walks away laughing.

Dina calls her lame, for hanging out with Joel so much, especially when he’s stuck working and she’s supposed to have free time, but it’s Ellie’s favorite thing when it happens, especially when he’s on the wall.

They get to have something productive to do, but they also have the ease of having someone to do it with, and they mostly spend it in silence, sitting and watching the horizon for danger or quietly telling each other about what's happened since the last time they saw each other. Maria once told her this Before saying about burdens being lessened when they’re shared, and joys being greater when they’re shared. That’s what wall time with Joel felt like. A shared joy and a halved burden.

Joel does the same when he’s free and she’s working, but he does it differently. If she is in the stables, he’s fixing the fence that the horses knocked down a while ago. If she’s patrolling, he’s on the wall. If she is in the dining hall, he’s in the hunting group to bring her meat to prep. Around, but not stifling. Away, but not far.

-=+=-

“There’s a group comin’ to Jackson today,” he says softly, breaking their comfortable silence up on the watchtower.

The sun is almost all the way down, turning most of the sky into a dusty purple color, except right on the horizon, where it still burns fire red.

“Mmm?” Ellie hums softly, not looking up from the copy of War of the Worlds that Joel found for her at a library last time he went on a real patrol. It was really interesting, what people from Before thought the end of the world was going to be like.

“You know Ms. Keller? From the school?”

Ellie rolls her eyes good-naturedly. “You mean a woman I’ve seen just about every day for the last two years of my life, old man? Who I have to listen to drone on about American History as if the government from Before still exists and matters? Of course I know Ms. Keller.”

He glares at her, but it softens when she looks away from her book and smiles at him.

“She apparently left a note for her sister, telling her to meet her here. Long time ago now, maybe five years?”

“And?”

“And her sister just now found it. Joined the frequency and asked to bring a small party with her to Jackson. They apparently lived in a place like Jackson, a peaceful place. In Nebraska or something.”

Ellie appreciates the briefing. Usually, getting details out of Joel is like pulling teeth. He never remembers the juicy bits of any gossip (she goes to Tommy for that), he never tells her about what's happening in the council meetings she’s still not allowed to attend, and he is the most boring storyteller in the history of the entire universe. Somehow it’s different when it's something like this– something the details of may matter, if things ever went south. He’s good with the details, up here on the watchtower.

“It’s why we’re up here when I was supposed to be able to take the day to do nothin’ with you.”

Ellie hummed. Made sense why she didn’t remember Joel being scheduled for a wall shift. Her heart squeezes in her chest when she thinks about Joel purposefully asking for today off in case she wasn’t okay.

“Their town got raided a couple months ago, I guess she finally found her sister’s letter, and is now bringing some survivors with her towards Jackson. She’s a teacher, too. Science, I think. They’re supposed to arrive today,”

“Is that why– we’re here?” Ellie says, stifling a yawn, despite it not even being totally dark outside. Fuzzy days take a lot out of her. “We the welcome wagon?”

Joel smiles out of the corner of his mouth like he always does when he's about to be a shit.

“You really think they’d send us to be the welcome wagon? The two most antisocial fucks out there?”

Ellie grins and scoots closer so she can rest her head on his shoulder. “Technically they only sent you.”

“Nah,” he says, turning to drop a kiss on her hair. “Graham said specifically ‘you take that girl with you to play backup in case they’re not so frrrriendly’” He exaggerates the last word, the way that Graham does, the way that Ellie thinks makes him sound like a pirate. She laughs.

“Oh I see, so we’re the snipers.”

He shrugs, making a sort of what-can-you-do face.

“Cheerful.” Ellie snorts, turning back to her book, but keeping snuggled up close to Joel.

It's late by the time they see flashlights and hear voices, and Ellie has read the same page of War of the Worlds probably twenty times and comprehended nothing.

Joel picks up his gun, but doesn’t make any move to do anything with it, so she doesn’t bother picking her head up off his shoulder.

The lights get brighter, the voices get louder, and before Ellie knows it, the travelling party is reading their names to the guards on duty so they can make sure everyone is accounted for and there aren’t any unexpected tagalongs. Joel counted seven, which was what they were expecting, mostly women, one man.

“Last name?” The guard asks, and Ellie can’t see her, but she’s pretty sure it’s Anna, their neighbor in the house next to Tommy and Maria.

“Keller,” A woman says, and her voice is kind of croaky. She must be even older than Ms. Keller. I wonder how she’s survived this long, Ellie thinks a little morbidly.

“First name?”

“Sonia.”

“Alright, head up to the checkpoint, we’ll call your sister down to come get you.”

There’s a sob, and Ellie is reminded of all the bullshit that came with her cross-country expedition. She remembers the relief upon getting back to Jackson, and if she had been a little weaker mentally or stronger physically, she may have cried, too.

“Last name?”

“Jones.”

“First name?”

“Alexander. Alex.”

“Go ahead to the checkpoint.”

They kept filtering in, and Ellie could hear the checkpoint guard faintly. None of them appeared to be armed, with the exception of a bow on one of them and a knife on another, but no guns or anything else. Ellie wondered how they survived this long without weapons.

“Last name?”

“Miller.”

Joel flinches. Ellie knit her eyebrows together. It wasn’t like Miller was an uncommon name or anything, but—

“You related to the Millers? Tommy and Maria and Joel and them?” Anna asks. She says ‘and them’ for a reason, Ellie knows, not wanting to release any information to strangers about the kids, but it still makes her bristle a little. They’re JoelandEllie, BenjiandTommy. They’re more than ‘and them.’

“What did you just say?” The woman asks, something like panic creeping into her voice.

“The Millers? T–”

“Did you say Joel and Tommy Miller? Ohmygod,” she breathes out all in one word, and Joel is suddenly standing up with the worst look on his face, the one he had carried all the way from Colorado until they’d hit Salt Lake, and—

“Ohmygodohmygod, that’s my family! My name is Sarah, please go get them, ohmygod please let me see them. My name is Sarah.”

And Joel is scrambling down the watchtower.

And Ellie’s heart stops.

Chapter Text

It’s only years of training that stops Ellie from tumbling down with him. Her heart rate is picking up, and she can hear it pounding in her ears, but she’s cared about Joel for too many years to not have his six when he’s vulnerable. Joel left his gun, stupid, and so Ellie picks it up and sights the scope on the ground towards the woman, just in case.

She has super curly brown hair, just the same texture and styled the same way as in the picture on the mantle. If this is a trick, it’s a damn good one. Ellie tries to do mental math. Sarah was twelve on Outbreak Day. It’s been— fuck, she can’t do math right now— and her scope is set on Joel instead of being set on the woman, and he’s frozen on the last step of the watchtower, and he isn’t saying anything, isn’t out calling to the woman, does that mean it’s not her? It’s been almost twenty-three years since Outbreak Day, so that would make Sarah thirty-five? Ellie looks through the scope again and tries to determine if the woman down there looks thirty-five, but she isn’t quite facing the right direction for Ellie to see her face super clearly.

“Oh, sweetie,” Anna says, and Ellie’s breath stops again. “I’ll radio for Tommy and Joel, just a minute.”

Maybe-Sarah has her hands over her nose and mouth, like she’s trying to stop herself from breathing, but Ellie still can’t see her face, and Anna is grabbing her radio, and—

“Mija?” someone croaks softly, and it takes Ellie several seconds of stagnant silence to process that it came from Joel. Joel who never sounded that weak, Joel whose voice was strong and never wavered.

The woman whips around, and yeah, she looks like she could be in her mid thirties, but Ellie is so confused because Joel never would have left her if there was even a chance Sarah were alive, he wouldn’t have abandoned her, and Ellie swings the scope back to Joel to see if she can read his face, but he’s facing the wrong way, and he’s hunched over like he’s physically in pain and—

“Daddy?” She starts to move, slowly, towards Joel, taking halting steps like she thinks he’ll disappear. He doesn’t move at all. She’s pretty, Ellie notices. She’s got real delicate features, like she could be in movies, if it were still Before. High cheekbones, soft, pretty eyes. Sarah in the picture had those things too, but Ellie’s never seen someone young and seen them grow up before, Ellie’s never known anyone that lived that long, never seen baby pictures of any of the adults in her life, so she has no idea if the woman in front of her is what grown-up-Sarah is supposed to look like. Distantly, Ellie hears Anna radioing for Tommy.

“Daddy?” she asks again, and Ellie registers her southern drawl, even more pronounced than Joel and Tommy’s. She sounds like Scarlett O’Hara. Tommy made her watch Gone with the Wind last month, after Ellie had missed it on movie night. Joel and Tommy had gotten real offended when Maria had said they sounded like the characters in the movie, said those people were more trans-atlantic than they were southern, and for all Ellie leaned into Maria’s teasing to watch them flounder, she didn’t really hear it. But Sarah sounded like Scarlett O’Hara, voice light and airy and melodic-sounding.

Joel still hasn’t moved. Sarah doesn’t step any closer to him.

They just stand there, in a stalemate.

Joel is breaking down.

He’s having a fuzzy moment.

He hasn’t gotten them regularly since a few months after they got back from Salt Lake. There are still things that make him go still, but they’re fewer and far between. Men getting too close to Ellie make him this way, once she's out of danger. Little kids not watching where they’re going and bumping into his bad side. Anyone looking too closely at his broken watch.

But Joel is fuzzy now, and he’s empty in his brain and his daughter is right in front of him and—

“Sarah? Sarah!” Someone calls, and Ellie moves the scope of her rifle to the gate, which is opening slowly. Before it even opens all the way, Tommy squeezes through it, like it’s life or death, like he needs to be on the other side instantaneously. He’s breathing heavy. He must’ve sprinted here.

Sarah looks like she doesn’t want to look away from Joel, but she pries her eyes away long enough to register Tommy bolting towards her.

“Uncle Tommy,” she breathes, and then Tommy crashes into her, nearly knocking her to the ground. He grips her face in his palms like she’s gonna disappear beneath them, and he’s crying, a steady leak that Ellie can hear more than she can actually see.

“Oh my god, Sarah,” he repeats, over and over like a mantra, moving her face around like he’s checking for injuries. He’s memorizing her face, Ellie realizes with a start. In case it’s not real. “How—” he grips her more solidly by the shoulders, and Ellie sees that she’s crying too. “How are you here, bug?”

The nickname sets her off with sobbing little hiccups, and Tommy suddenly straightens. “Oh, god, where’s Joel? Anna, where’s my brother?” Sarah’s eyes dart behind Tommy, and the man spins.

Joel is still standing there, unseeing, on the last step of the watchtower. Tommy lets out a huff of air that Ellie can see even from up in the tower.

“Breathe, big brother,” Tommy says softly, approaching Joel with his hands up like Joel’s a spooked horse or something. Joel is shaking his head softly, like he’s trying to rouse himself from a dream or something. “Joel, look at me. Are you alright? Where’s Ellie?”

Her name snaps him out of it, just a little, and he turns back to the watchtower to look at her. She sets the rifle down for real this time, and moves to run down. She spots Maria and Benji out of the corner of her eye as she climbs down the ladder to the platform where the stairs start. Maria is staring in open shock, slack jawed and blinking. Ellie moves up behind Joel and slots herself into his side. She looks up at him, and he’s breathing hard, heavy like it’s taking him a lot of effort to do so.

“You okay?” she asks at a whisper. Joel goes back to shaking his head lightly.

“Joel,” Tommy says lowly, moving closer towards them and leaving Sarah several paces back. “I think there’s someone you need to introduce Ellie to.”

He’s doing it on purpose, saying her name. He once called Joel a sleeper agent, and said his activation code was “Ellie”. He’s using her to snap him out of it, and while she usually feels a lot of pride in that, it puts an uneasy feeling in her stomach.

“Ellie’s never met her before. I think she needs an introduction.” He stares at Joel like he’s not sure it’s gonna work, looking scared like Joel may just be stuck like this forever.

Joel blinks. “Ellie, this is my daughter Sarah,” he says, catatonic. Tommy leads them carefully back towards Sarah, who is still just standing there. “Sarah, this is—” He chokes, and then his eyes seem to clear of their haze for the first time since he scrambled down the tower. “Oh my god,” he whispers, and then he’s pulling Sarah into a deep hug, dragging Ellie along for the ride. Eventually, his arms go slack around her so that he can pull Sarah closer, and Ellie wiggles out of their hug to go stand by Tommy.

Ellie grabs his hand, and he squeezes it, turning from the scene to look at her. His eyes are glassy with tears, and he looks faraway, like he’s seeing something other than what’s right in front of him. There’s snot in his mustache, and his hair is all fucked up.

“You know, Ellie girl, when you and Joel showed up here, I thought life had gotten as good as it could get. Then Benji was born and I thought life couldn’t get any better, and now—” She squeezes his hand back instead of answering, and they both turn back towards Joel and Sarah. They’ve lowered themselves to the ground, tangled in each other inextricably.

JoelandSarah, Ellie thinks, a bit nonsensically.

SarahandJoel.

-=+=-

They’ve long since missed dinner at the dining hall, so she, Maria, and Tommy guide JoelandSarah back home. They reach the front door, which Ellie opens, and she’s suddenly struck with more self-consciousness than she’s ever felt in her whole life.

Three of her four total pairs of shoes are scattered haphazardly on the kitchen floor, and her math textbook and notes are overrunning the whole coffee table like mycelium. Her jacket is thrown haphazardly over the bannister on the stairs, and her hunting rifle is in pieces on the kitchen table where she had only gotten halfway through cleaning it before they had gone to lunch that afternoon.

Joel’s daughter is back, and Ellie has made a supreme mess of the house. She looks sideways at herself in the hallway mirror, and she’s turned bright red.

Maria reads her mind, nodding at her wordlessly and going to pick up Ellie’s homework white Ellie moves to quickly piece back together her gun. Joel and Sarah slip into the kitchen table.

She’s in my seat, Ellie thinks bitterly. I sit on Joel’s right, because that’s his weak shoulder, that’s the ear he can’t hear out of. She shakes her head to clear her mind. Obviously she’s in that seat. Her seat is the one closest to Joel. Obviously after not seeing him in 23 years she wants to sit next to her fucking dad, Ellie. Get it together.

Homework gathered, Maria goes to open their fridge, kicking Ellie’s shoes into some semblance of a pile on her way over. She pulls out a tupperware of leftovers always stocked in their fridge for days when the dining hall is too much for Ellie and Joel, and Ellie’s heart pounds annoyingly at that, too, before she convinces her brain to knock it off.

Tommy sits on Sarah’s other side, monopolizing her right hand and tracing patterns on her palm and up and down her fingers, like he can’t quite believe she’s real, like he’s studying a historical artifact that could shatter if he held it too tight.

Ellie has never felt so out of place in her whole life, and she hasn’t ever really felt ‘in-place’ in the first place. Maybe that’s why this feels worse. She has a home now, for the first time, and she’s currently staring at it from the outside like a nosey neighbor.

Maria has finished microwaving two plates, and she places one in front of Joel and the other in front of Sarah. She takes the last seat at the kitchen table, and that’s that then.

Ellie can’t even sit at her own table. Maria hasn’t made Ellie a plate even though she’s eaten even less today than Joel has. No one else mentions it.

Ellie feels her heart clenching, as stupid as she knows it is.

She’s always known, after all.

Joel would do anything to get Sarah back.

She was the replacement, and always would be.

Clearly Tommy and Maria agree. Tommy hasn’t so much as looked at her since they entered the gate, and Maria just cleaned up Ellie’s fuckups and then took the last seat. Ellie doesn’t even know where the baby went, so it’s not like she can distract herself with him.

She breathes shakily, feeling the fog start to cloud her mind again. It had dispersed at the threat of Joel being in trouble, but it was back again.

It’s fine.

A part of her brain tells her that she’s overreacting, that the adults in the room are just overwhelmed at the return of the prodigal daughter. The fog in her mind can’t quite let her believe it.

It’s fine.

She takes a breath, steadier this time.

She has to get out of here.

She takes an even deeper breath, and leans over to whisper to Maria something about going over to Dina’s house. Maria smiles absently at her, clenching her hand in acknowledgement. No one else seems to notice her leaving.

She grabs her rifle, and leaves, but doesn’t go to Dina’s, even though she kind of wants to. Instead, she walks back to the wall, and no one has taken up Joel’s post yet. She doubts anyone will, since there's another tower just a ways away, and Ellie knows Mike is on shift. She climbs the tower again, heaving up the infinitely long ladder even though she isn’t really breathing well enough to be doing this yet. Her only intention is really to go get Joel’s rifle from where she left it up there, but once she arrives at the top, she finds that she doesn’t have the energy to come back down.

She wakes there the next morning, a little after dawn, screaming from memories of fire and a man weighing heavy on her, and a cleaver and a skull that looked like ground beef.

Joel isn’t there to kiss her forehead, and no one has noticed she never came home.

The fog creeps in a little more.

Chapter Text

Ellie walks to the house in a near-catatonic state, hoping that none of their neighbors or anyone else from town has tried to tell her good morning or hello, because she didn’t process them if they did. Joel’s work boots aren’t sitting next to the door when Ellie inches through it, meaning he’s probably already on a job. She’s pretty sure he was supposed to help Ms. Linden with her herb garden shed today, and Ms. Linden wakes up at 4:30 and thinks the day should start at 5, so it makes sense that he’s gone early. What makes less sense is him not dropping into her bedroom to wake her up before he leaves.

Or maybe he did, a piece of her mind croaks at her. Maybe he saw you weren’t there and just didn’t care.

Ellie blinks.

She takes the stairs two at a time. She may be having the weirdest 24 hours of her life, and may be feeling a little bit floaty and fuzzy, but she was still so excited she thought she could vibrate out her her own skin. Today the herd was going to graze way out past the walls, since the winter wasn’t doing the Jackson grass any favors, and they were starting to get some bare patches in the pasture that they couldn’t really afford.

She was going to be gone all day, and was hoping to see Joel before she went, but oh, well. He probably saw she was gone and assumed she was already at the stables getting ready for her journey out. They grazed the cattle far out past the walls twice a month, and she was usually up and working way earlier on days they moved the herd. Wasn’t even 7:30 yet, if Ellie had to guess, and she was already late.

She had most of what she needed in her backpack, her guns and rope and packed food, so she was already pretty well prepared even considering her little watchtower-nap, but she didn’t have her boots or hat, so, even though she didn’t really want to, her trip home was necessary.

Someone had found a fancy, mostly untouched ranching supply store, and while most of the useful spoils went to the community, things like cowboy boots weren’t necessarily a communist-able good. Joel had bartered a small fortune for them to get them for Ellie’s birthday this summer. They were supple leather, fit her perfectly, and Joel had said they were made of ostrich leather, which blew her mind. He had paid the blacksmith to make her a pair of spurs, too, after promising that spurs didn’t hurt the horses when they were used right. Tommy had gotten her a Stetson hat, in a show of coordination she hadn’t been previously aware the Miller brothers possessed, but still warmed her chest to think about. Maria had made fun of her, for being too influenced by hillbilly Miller boys, but Tommy promised he’d teach her to ride like a ‘real vaquero’, so Ellie took the ribbing like a champ.

Tommy had been teaching her to throw ropes to wrangle cattle pretty much every weekend since then. She knew how to do all the important knots he showed her, from the lariat knots that made up the lasso, to simple slip knots that she could undo in a hurry. She could rope the tree stump well enough, even roping it while she rode by on Shimmer, but she hadn’t quite managed it on a real cow yet. It was alright, though. She and Shimmer were good enough at herding even without being able to lasso the misbehaving ones. And anyway, Joel said the only people who really knew how to throw ropes anymore were bad herders and rodeo clowns, which made Tommy sputter with annoyance since apparently he had been in some ranching club in school, and won a bunch of rodeo awards or something. Ellie didn’t really get it, much like she didn’t get a lot of stuff from Before, but it was still funny.

She’s still thinking about practicing her lariat knots when she comes bodily to a halt in her doorway. Because where her room is supposed to be empty, instead Sarah is sleeping on her bed.

It makes sense, theoretically. Ellie hadn’t come home last night. Joel and Ellie don’t have a spare room in the house. Ellie just thought Sarah would’ve slept on the couch. Or at Tommy and Maria’s, who do still have a spare room, even if that room has a crib in it.

She tries to shake off her annoyance by telling herself that at least Sarah wasn’t actually in her bed. She wasn’t using her pillow or buried in her sheets, in fact she was kinda curled up fetally at the bottom of Ellie’s bed. Ellie frowned. Weird. Whatever.

Her rolling closet doors are squeaky, but she has to open them to get to her boots, so waking up Sarah may be a necessary evil. She moves them as quickly as she can, and they make a pretty bad noise, but Sarah doesn’t even twitch. Ellie makes a face. She’s survived 23 years in the end of the world, and somehow she’s not a light sleeper?

She huffs. Whatever. She finds her hat from its hook on the back of her door and goes to leave, when grumbling from behind her turns her around.

“Ellie?” The woman in her bed asks sleepily.

“Yeah?”

Sarah’s really slow to wake, which confuses Ellie. This woman was supposed to have died at twelve. How did she make it all the way here with the barest of survival skills? Deep sleep in an unusual place is not something that is ever in the cards for Ellie, or anyone else she knows.

“Sorry, I was—” she cuts herself off with a yawn, and Ellie decides she doesn’t care about whatever Sarah is going to say next.

“Whatever, man. Just don’t touch my stuff.” Ellie puts her hat on and disappears from the doorway. She doesn’t think about how shitty she sounded until she’s almost at the stables, at which point she ignores it, too late to do anything about it.

-=+=-

Danny Green already has his horse, Pascal, tacked and ready to go by the time she reaches the stables at 8, and he has Joule, his shaggy English Sheepdog, ready with him.

“Hi, Joule!” Ellie says happily, and the big mop of a boy jumps all over her until she kneels to properly pet him. Joule is the perfect balance of a well-trained working dog while also being a big lazy sweetheart. Ellie loves him. She’s enlisted Tommy’s help in several different harebrained schemes to steal him from Danny. Thus far, none of them have worked, despite Danny being probably a hundred years old and mostly deaf.

“What am I, chopped liver?” Danny asks, which is an old ass Before phrase. He’s twirling the ends of his (frankly glorious) mustache up in a way that Joel once said makes him look like an outlaw in an old western movie. Ellie didn’t know what that meant, so Tommy made Joel promise that he’d show Ellie Tombstone and ask her which character she thought Danny looked most like if they ever found a copy. Joel rolled his eyes, but didn’t disagree. She really hopes they find one, eventually. Every time Joel and Tommy happen to have the misfortune of meeting at the stables at the same time as Danny, they look giggly like little boys caught passing notes in class. Ellie wants to be in on the joke badly.

“Hi, Danny,” Ellie says finally, shaking out of her stupor. “And Joule greeted me first and with more fuckin’ enthusiasm than you ever do, so I figured it was only right to return the favor.” Joule wiggles so that her pets get him right behind his ears, so she scratches behind him like he clearly wants. Danny looks like he wants to call her on her dirty mouth, but he catches himself, knowing he’d be a fuckin’ hypocrite if he did.

“C’mon, kid, tack up, I wanna be back here in time for supper.” He doesn’t ask about last night, even though Ellie is sure all of Jackson knows by now. Ellie’s grateful for it. Joel Miller’s daughter, miraculously alive. She nods and heads to Shimmer’s stall, getting her saddled and ready as quickly as she can while still doing it correctly.

Danny opens the gate to the pasture as she pulls herself into Shimmer’s saddle, and they pad out to the cows. Danny works on opening the other gate, towards the pasture with the sheep in it, and Joule is biting at the fence to be let in to play with the sheep.

Veronica and Fabian are already on the other side of the gate, ready to help herd the animals to the nearest good grazing patch, a couple hours southeast, and Summer has her gun ready as their protection. Summer is this burly ex-Navy woman who could probably use Ellie’s bicep as a toothpick. Ellie’s a little bit in love with her. They’re all armed, of course, but it’s their job to defend the herd, and Summer’s job to defend them.

Ellie had been real confused, the first time they let her outside of the wall with the herd, a few months ago. She had imagined that if anything went south, she was supposed to bail and go find the herd later once the danger had passed. But Danny was real serious about her not ever, ever abandoning the herd, though, not even if things went wrong. She wasn’t supposed to leave the herd unless the herd was dead, not even if Infected or raiders got he and Summer and Veronica and Fabian. Not to go warn the patrolmen, not to save herself, not for anything. The herd fed Jackson. If they lost the herd, her people would starve. That’s why they take Summer with them. The herd protects the town, they protect the herd, Summer protects them.

The thought of being responsible for the wellbeing of all of Jackson had freaked Ellie out at first, but it also gave her a real purpose for the first time since she’d woken up in the backseat, leaving Salt Lake City. This is how she takes care of people. Even though her immunity ended up being useless, even though they gave up on the cure and she couldn't save the whole world, she could save Jackson. She takes care of their food, is entrusted with maybe the most important job in the commune, other than patrolling, and they sometimes even let her tag along for that, too.

Ellie takes a full breath for the first time in almost 24 hours as they open the main gates. She loves her job.

-=+=-

The day is mostly uneventful, just many hours of slowly but surely moving animals. Danny and Joule take the sheep today, and she, Veronica, and Fabian are saddled with the cows. They spend most of their time seeing how long they can keep the herd moving in the shape of a dick. She laughs the whole way there.

Summer had laughed at them, too, from her place at the back of the pack, and said next time she’d bring her disposable camera to see if she could capture the phallic cows.

They saw no raiders, and only saw one small horde of Infected, Clickers down in the valley they were gonna be grazing the cattle on. She, Fabian, and Summer take turns sniping them from their horses from afar, seeing how accurate their shots could be while they were on horseback. None of the Infected even get close to them or to the herd.

They lollygag for a while, even after the herd has grazed on fresh grass and drank cold snowmelt. To Danny’s dismay, they don’t make it back by dinner. Ellie would usually feel bad about that, but her stomach had churned at the thought of going to the dining hall and seeing Sarah in her spot there, too.

She resolves to make it up to Danny some other time.

She and Veronica are still laughing about their stupid phallic herd when Joel materializes out of thin air in Shimmer’s stall.

“Jesus fucking Christ, asshole, don’t do that!” She says when she turns around and sees him, Sarah at his side.

“Where the fuck were you, Ellie?” he asks sternly, his lips pressed into the thin line it’s always in when Joel is equal parts worried and angry. She quirks her eyebrow and looks up at Veronica for help, but the woman is purposefully avoiding eye contact with them, hurriedly making her way out of the stable.

“Joel, the fuck are you talking about, it’s herd grazing day.” Ellie huffs, sitting on the bench outside Shimmer’s stall and pulling her boots off to change back into her sneakers.

“What, and you just thought you’d join them without being scheduled to, without telling anyone where you were going? You just fucking disappeared, Ellie.”

Ellie’s face screws up angrily. “Fuck you, old man, I’ve been scheduled to do this for weeks!”

“Ellie,” he warns angrily. “What happened to telling me before you leave the house?”

She tamps down the part of her that wants to say she technically never came back until he had already left, and was thus exempt from re-telling.

“Says you,” she spits instead. “It’s not like you woke me up when you left today, even though that’s part of our deal,” she says spitefully, knowing damn well he couldn’t have woken her up even if he had remembered. His face goes guiltily blank at that, seeming to remember not going into Ellie’s room. Ellie almost feels bad for it. Almost.

“I’m sorry I didn’t go to your room to wake you up, Ellie, but at least you knew where I was going to be today. I didn’t.”

“Well she wasn’t in her room when you left anyway,” Sarah pipes up, and Ellie wishes she had laser vision so she could smite her standing. Snitch. Ellie hadn’t met a grown adult who was such a snitch since those fuckin FEDRA sellouts.

“What?!” Joel roars, whirling on her.

“It’s not my fault she was—” she starts to defend, but Danny clears his throat from the corner.

“Joel. Ellie has been scheduled on this shift for ages. We all know you had a big night last night, but you are supposed to know where your kid is, and you forgettin’ ain’t her fault. If you were that worried, you could’ve checked the fuckin’ shift logs.”

Joel’s eyes go murderous.

“Yeah, asshole, it’s not my fault you’re going senile,” Ellie says, leading his ire away from Danny and making up her mind about Joel and Sarah and the whole damn thing. “I’m going to Dina’s,” she says finally, once his bullet-eyes are trained on her, but before he's had time to say his piece. She stomps out with her Stetson still on her head and Shimmer only half-untacked. Danny would finish it for her, she knew. She really was going to have to get him a nice birthday present or something.

“Ellie Williams!” Joel yells at her back, and Ellie tries her best to hide the breath she involuntarily sucks in.

Joel hadn’t called her that in over a year. He didn’t usually need to use her full name anyway, but when he did, it was always “Ellie Miller!” and had been for a long time.

They’d had a whole conversation about it, about Ellie having no attachment whatsoever to Williams. About “Williams, E.” being called every time she got in trouble at FEDRA school. Williams belonged to a father she never knew. Her parents never married, so it wasn’t even her mom’s name. Miller belonged to a family she chose.

She signed Ellie Miller on all her school work. She got a science award at school last month, and the little foil plaque she got for her trouble shined ‘Ellie Miller’ back at her. Even Maria and Tommy called her Ellie Miller, when the situation arose.

Legally, she might still be Ellie Williams, but it’s not like anyone was looking at FEDRA records to check. She loves being Ellie Miller. It makes her feel the same gooey way as JoelandEllie, EllieandJoel.

But of course, the real Miller daughter was back now.

Why was she stupid enough to think she would get to keep Ellie Miller now?

Her back was still to Joel, and now she was going to keep it that way. He was not going to see her cry over this. Not if he was going to throw her away so easily.

The tears fall, but Joel Miller never sees them. All he sees as she runs away is her retreating back and the middle finger she flips behind her.

Chapter Text

Sarah’s been sleeping in her bed for a week when Joel finally puts his foot down and makes Ellie come home. He doesn’t mention the name thing, and Ellie isn’t even sure he noticed, which fucking sucks, because Ellie hasn’t been able to stop thinking about it.

“Ellie, you can’t be living at Dina’s house, it ain’t right, and I haven’t gotten the chance to talk to you. It’s time for you to spend a night at home, kiddo,” he says to her, after she’s snuck into the house through the back door after school. She was sure she hadn’t stepped on any of the creaky stair steps, so he must’ve been really listening for her.

“Spend the night where, asshole? In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t exactly have a bedroom right now,” she snarks back, entering said bedroom to grab her sketchbook so she and Dina and Jesse could go hang out at the pond. Someone had found ice skates, and Dina and Jesse really wanted to try them. Ellie didn’t really love the idea of knife shoes, so she was going to sit this one out, but she still wanted to be there.

“Ellie,” he stresses and Ellie doesn’t understand his fuckin’ problem.

“What, Joel? I’ve come home like three times to her sleeping in my bed, which is fine,” Ellie spits, even though it’s not really fine, and she’s trying her hardest to be civil even though she really doesn’t want to be, “But I’m not fuckin’ sleeping on the couch, man, you know it doesn’t sit right with me.” It doesn’t, and he knows it. Sleeping on the couch is for being stuck in the winter, waiting for Joel to heal up on the only mattress. It’s falling asleep eavesdropping on Tommy and Joel arguing on the porch, it’s waiting on Joel to get out of surgery once they made it to Jackson and he got real medical assistance. Sleeping on the couch is not for sleeping, it’s for waiting. It’s for anxiety and unease and fear.

That being said, Ellie doesn’t really like staying at Dina’s either. She likes Dina, obviously, and she and Jesse never make her feel like a third wheel, but Dina gets this look in her eye when Ellie startles awake that she doesn’t like, even if it is just her wanting to make sure she’s okay. Plus, staying at Dina’s means no back rubs or forehead kisses from Joel when she’s having a shit night.

“Ellie, Sarah fell asleep on your bed the first night because she was waiting up to try and talk to you— which, by the way, we’re not done talking about your little disappearing act to god-knows-where, because I know damn well you didn’t go to Dina’s—” he cuts himself off with a huff to calm himself down. Joel does that a lot, works himself up until he’s almost yelling, but then he forces himself to breathe and cool off before he does. Sometimes he does it several times in a conversation if they’re really arguing about something. Ellie usually thinks it's kinda sweet, that he doesn’t wanna yell at her, but it really just makes her more mad on the off chance that she’s trying to pick a fight. He builds and builds and builds and right when Ellie thinks she’s gonna get the satisfaction of watching him blow a gasket so she can scream, too, he backs off.

“You told me you weren’t comin’ home the next night, anyway, so I told her to stay in your bed. I figured you’d just come crawl in mine if you did come back, and found her there.”

“That’s fuckin’ presumptuous of you,” she murmured under her breath.

“Yeah, presumptuous? You hardly need a fuckin’ bedroom at all, Ellie, you sleep in my bed almost every night, anyway, how could that be fuckin’ presumptuous?”

“Yeah but it’s still my room, and you just fuckin’ gave it away!”

Her room is perfect. It’s so perfect she almost can’t stand it some days. They’d gotten rid of the godawful pink— of everything that belonged to the girl who’d lived here Before. Joel had handmade her all new furniture, and taken out all the old frilly stuff, except for the bookshelf, which Ellie liked. They’d painted the whole room green, a soft, mossy shade that Ellie called ‘decaying town green’ when she saw it because it looked like the color of the ivy that always seemed to grow in the cracks of every house, town, and city that was abandoned for too long. Joel called her gross and morbid for it, but he painted it for her anyway.

There was a comic book store all the way out in Cody that Joel found last time they patrolled out there, and Joel had pretty much brought her the whole store back. Her bookshelf is now filled with every Savage Starlight comic ever made, except the fifth one, which is sort of random, but Ellie’s holding out hope they’ll find it one day. Riley’s firefly pendant is framed in something called a shadowbox on her bookshelf, and her weapons sit in a row, unloaded and out of reach of Benji should he ever come up to her room. She has Savage Starlight posters, and big topographical maps from several of the state and national parks that had once surrounded Jackson Before.

Maria found three big movie posters that were stashed inside the old Cinemark that the town didn’t use anymore because the whole roof had collapsed at some point. They had gotten a working projector and lots of reels of film for movie night out of it, though, so the place wasn’t a total waste.

The Fellowship beams down at her bed from her Two Towers poster, and so do the crew of the Black Pearl from Pirates of the Caribbean, and so do Anakin and Padme from Attack of the Clones. Her colored pencils, and the watercolors that Ms. Garcia, two streets over handmade from pressed flowers, and the thick parchment that Tommy always tried to save for her, all sit neatly on her desk, the only part of her room that is ever any semblance of organized.

Her bedspread is red plaid and made of flannel, but it had been Joel’s before, technically too small to fit on the king-sized bed in his room, so she’d stolen it when they’d found him a new one. It’s kind of ugly, but it’s warm and perfect and makes her think of Joel and she isn’t ever getting rid of it.

Her room is perfect. It’s sacred. And Joel hadn’t even asked her to let Sarah use it.

He doesn’t respond to her, but Ellie can practically hear the gears turning in his head as he decides what to lecture her about next.

“Whatever, Joel. I’m going to the pond with Dina and Jesse.” She pushes past him in the doorway, and he lets her. She gets halfway down the stairs before his mouth finally catches up with his brain.

“Absolutely not, Ellie, it’s Friday.”

She halts her stomping. Friday is family dinner night. She loves family dinner night. It’s Tommy and Maria make the sides while Joel teaches her how to work the grill night. It’s Maria never being able to convince Benji that he doesn’t have to bring all his toys across the street night. It’s Ellie and Benji watch The Little Mermaid night. Ellie would rather be anywhere but here tonight.

“I already promised, they’re going to be at the pond waiting for me,” she sasses, continuing down the steps. On the last step, she turns to the kitchen, only to find Sarah with her ear pressed against the wall, eavesdropping from below.

She doesn’t even have time to process how mad that shit makes her before Joel is booming down: “Then you can use the landline to call Robin and tell her you forgot it was family dinner night, Ellie, because if you take a step out that door, you’re grounded ‘til you turn forty.”

And Ellie sees red. She keeps darting her eyes from where she knows Joel is still standing in her doorway upstairs, to Sarah, eyes wide and face still pressed against the wall, back to Joel, then back to Sarah, caught red-handed and not even trying to defend herself or lie her way out of it.

“Ugh!” she screams, flopping back onto the couch, because Joel really is serious about family dinner night, and she knows he’ll enlist Maria’s help in enforcing his twenty-four year grounding. “Fucking fine,” she continues, and she knows she sounds like a brat teenager, but she feels like a brat teenager.

Sarah’s staring at her from the wall.

“What are you looking at,” Ellie hisses, and she revels in Sarah’s ensuing discomfort. She finally removes herself from the wall, averting her eyes from Ellie, but instead of fucking off outside or back upstairs like Ellie wanted her to, she instead comes to sit down in the recliner five feet away from Ellie on the couch.

Ellie’s life fucking sucks.

Sarah makes an aborted little move to say something to her, but Ellie doesn’t want to fucking hear it.

“Save it,” Ellie says, and goes to lay down on her back, shoving her Stetson off her head and laying it on her face so she doesn’t have to look at the living room around her.

-=+=-

After all that fucking work she put into not sleeping on the couch, she still wakes up to the smell of something on the stove and country music in the kitchen.

And she hates the feeling she wakes with for the same reason she always hates sleeping on the couch. She had fallen asleep on the couch because she had been waiting, and angry, and anxious. That was all couch sleeping was for, and she had fucking fallen asleep anyway.

“Couch not so bad after all?” Joel teases at her, walking from the kitchen to the back door, holding a lighter he’d clearly forgotten.

“Fuck you, man,” she replies. Joel raises his eyebrow like he wants to make a comment about her attitude, but he drops it, walking outside and leaving the back door open. It’s fucking freezing, this deep into winter, and she wishes he’d close it, but he always leaves it open when he’s grilling so he can hear what’s happening inside in case anything bad happens.

Instead, she walks into the kitchen, hoping to flee the chill of the open door. Maria has Benjamin strapped to her back as she slowly stirs creamed corn, and Tommy is multitasking.

He’s trying to trim the ends off of green beans, but mostly, he’s just twirling Sarah around with his free hand.

“Well I didn’t mean, to cause a big scene!” he sings into his chopping knife in a way that makes Maria look like she wants to commit murder. He drops the knife back onto the cutting board and grabs Sarah in a way that makes her giggle. “Just give me an hour, and then.” Tommy dips her, making her long hair drag on the tile.

“I’ll be as high as that ivory tower that you’re living innnnnnnn!” He hauls Sarah back up and shuffles her up close to Maria at the stove, then he takes the spoon out of his wife’s hand and presses it into his niece’s. He grabs Maria around the waist, and she’s frowning, but Ellie can see the smile in her eyes trying to edge out onto her face.

Tommy has a nice voice, and he continues to sing to the dumb country song as he spins around the room, this time with his wife and baby in his arms. Benji doesn’t stop giggling the whole time. At some point, he tries to dip Maria just as dramatically as he did Sarah, but it doesn’t work as well with Benji strapped to her, so she huffs good naturedly at his antics, pats his chest, and goes back to the stove, relieving Sarah of stirring duty.

With his brief deficit of a dancing partner, his eyes zero in on Ellie.

“No.” Ellie says sternly, but he’s already stalking across the room to her. “Uncle Tommy, I can’t dance,” she protests, but he’s getting closer to her, and he’s blocking the closest exit. “And I hate country music, and– and you’re a hillbilly, and—”

“Yeah, I’m not big on social graces,” he croons, his voice swooping low as he reaches her. “Think I’ll slip on down to the oasis, oh I’ve got friends,” his eyes ask her whether or not he’s allowed to touch her even if his mouth doesn’t, and she huffs in defeat as he wraps one arm around her waist and uses his other to drag her so her feet are perched on top of his.

Her face reddens. He thinks she’s so bad at dancing that she can’t even move her own feet.

Tommy drags her around the room anyway, smiling and singing purposefully obnoxiously until the song ends, and by then, she’s almost so embarrassed for him that she’s forgotten her own embarrassment and is grinning right along with him.

Sarah has finished trimming the green beans by the time Ellie looks up, and she’s smiling knowingly at her, the way a lot of the adults in Jackson do, in this fake-happy, condescending way. Ellie frowns.

It’s weird, that Sarah is twice her age. In Ellie’s brain, she’s still twelve. She can’t even imagine how Tommy and Joel feel, twenty three years lost to them, their girl an adult. And like, Ellie’s pretty much an adult, kids are considered adults in Jackson at seventeen because of the necessity of having workers and Ellie’s almost there, but Sarah is a real adult. And they had to grieve, and ache, and miss her for almost twice as long as they ever had her.

And she thinks Sarah is condescending, and an eavesdropper, and a snitch, and she’s still so angry. But she can’t be. She can’t deny Tommy dancing in the kitchen, Benji a cool cousin, Maria a new niece. She certainly can’t deny Joel his daughter.

But she’s so– Ellie doesn’t even have words for it. She’s still being included, but she’s been pushed away. It’s not that anyone is ditching her, they’ve just forgotten about her a little. And Ellie is trying really hard to be okay with that, but Sarah is taking up all the space in the house that Ellie had painstakingly carved out for herself, not on purpose, not because she’s mean, but just by being here. It makes acid pool at the back of her mouth, and she feels like she’s going to be sick.

Ellie feels fuzzy, but for the first time in a long time, it's not in sadness or fear or emptiness, but in anger. She’s so angry she can’t even do anything about it, can’t move, can’t speak, can’t yell or scream or run away back to Dina’s. She just stands there, as Tommy goes back to Sarah to take her chopped beans to the stove where Maria is boiling a pot of water for them. She stands there, catatonic, and blinks as her vision goes blurry.

Joel chooses that moment to bust in holding a plate full of steak. “All right, it’s hot, how we doin’?”

“Maíz y habichuela, cabrón, ¿qué fue?” And it's weird enough that Ellie blinks away her fog. Sarah has her mouth wide open in disbelief, and she swats faux-angrily at Tommy with the towel they keep hanging off the stove, but Joel and Tommy are laughing. Deep belly laughs that make them sound like the old men they really are.

Ellie doesn’t really know what they’re saying. She knows one of those words is a curse word that Joel always tells her not to repeat, but everything else is a mystery. She knows, on some level, that Joel and Tommy speak Spanish, obviously. But they never really do, beyond Tommy ribbing ‘tío Joel’ or Joel muttering curses at Tommy when he’s being a bastard.

But Tommy’s dumb jest clearly made them really happy. And they’re laughing, and even though Maria and Benji are just as lost as she is, Sarah is smiling knowingly at them both.

And Ellie’s blood boils.

-=+=-

“So what do you do around here, Ellie?” Sarah asks once they’re all sitting around the table in uncomfortable silence, and Ellie is still hoping she spontaneously develops laser eyes so she can burn Sarah into ash.

“Nothing. Jackson’s boring as shit.”

Maria laughs, but Tommy and Joel both hiss “Ellie!” simultaneously, so Ellie just looks down at her plate. She’s eaten all her corn (Maria’s creamed corn is fucking delicious, and when Ellie had told her so the first time she’d eaten it, Maria laughed and told her that was why she should always have a black person in her life, which Ellie didn’t get until Joel explained “soul food” to her) but the green beans, though good, are making her mad.

And on top of that, the steak is looking at her funny.

Joel always makes sure to grill hers an extra long time, so that there’s no blood or anything. He always grumbles about wasting good cuts of meat by cooking the steak until it chars, says no self respecting Texan would ever eat meat this well done, but then, Joel eats his barely cooked at all, gross, and Ellie isn’t Texan anyway. She knows he’s just joking, that it’s just his way of making light of something that makes them both uncomfortable.

Today, though, he hadn’t grilled it for quite long enough, and the pink center was making her want to vomit. Maybe he forgot. She pokes at it, feeling sufficiently scolded by the Miller brothers for being short with Sarah.

At least she got her spot back, since she sat down at the table first, dragging Joel along with her, once he set the food down. A chair that matched the rest of their kitchen chairs had appeared from somewhere, which meant either there was already one in the storage shed or Joel had made a whole new one, which honestly wouldn’t surprise her that much, with how much he liked to build things.

“Ellie doesn’t work full time, since she’s still in school, but she takes most of her shifts at the stables, working with the horses and wrangling the sheep and cow herds. She’s getting very good at it.” Maria answers for her. “And speaking of, come find me tomorrow so we can get you on some rotations. Just a few at first, we want you to ease into it, but I can let you know who has availability and needs help and you can take your pick. Most people rotate jobs, especially if they don’t have a working niche. You may be out helping Joel frame houses, or in the kitchens doing dishes, or weeding the greenhouse. If you’re a fighter, you may even go out on patrol eventually.” Sarah nods dutifully, looking happy to be helpful. Joel had said, that night on the watchtower, that the group Sarah had come from had been in a different commune before Jackson. She was probably looking forward to getting back to the normalcy of being a communist. She wants to say that, mostly to make Tommy grumble, but she has a feeling that teasing Sarah will just get her scolded again.

Ellie takes in a deep breath and releases it, hoping that when she looks at her plate again, it will look more like the beef that she knows it is and less like what she knows it isn’t. She looks back down, and still can’t tell the difference, so she pokes at it again.

“You don’t like steak, Ellie?” Sarah tries again, and laughs. “You can’t be a Miller and not like steak, c’mon.” She says it lightly, like it’s a joke, but it doesn’t feel like a fucking joke. It feels like Sarah outright admitting that Ellie doesn’t fit in here, with Sarah’s perfect little family.

And at this point, Ellie has been mad for so long that she doesn’t even say anything. She doesn’t threaten Sarah with her steak knife, doesn’t yell or make a scene or anything. She just stares back down at what may-or-may-not be steak and pokes it again.

“Junebug, leave it,” Tommy says, much softer than he had five minutes before, when he was scolding Ellie. She does, thankfully.

Sarah doesn’t seem mean spirited, but she doesn’t know anything about Ellie, and so she’s being mean anyway. Accidentally mean. Hopefully accidentally mean.

“Ellie, baby, do you want me to go throw it back on the grill? I’m sure the coals are still hot.” Joel leans into her and turns from the table, so he’s saying it just to her, like the rest of the room doesn’t exist. She shakes her head. He’s lying, anyway. This far into winter, the coals likely barely lasted long enough to cook all their steaks to begin with, which is probably why hers is a little pink in the first place. She suddenly feels bad for assuming he had just forgotten she didn’t eat it pink. If she had said yes, Joel would’ve gone back out there and used a whole new thing of charcoal and lighter fluid, which she doesn’t want. They only got so much.

“Baby girl, you watched Tom dress this one. We picked the cut out ourselves, baby, it’s just steak,” he says a little desperately. Ellie nods at him, because she knows that, she does, but just because her eyes saw it, saw Tom methodically quartering the cow, doesn’t mean that her brain or her stomach are with the program.

She exhales heavily through her nose and picks up her knife to cut up a small bite. Before she loses her nerve, she shoves it into her mouth and chews. Joel is rubbing tiny circles into her back, trying to be encouraging. She swallows it.

She thinks she’s in the clear, so she looks back up at the Millers. Benji is babbling at her with his little baby face, and Tommy and Maria are making sympathetic, encouraging faces. She looks back at Sarah, who’s got her head tilted in wonder like a fucking dog, and the sight of her staring like Ellie is some sort of artifact in a museum has Ellie scrambling out of her seat to sprint upstairs to the bathroom, hearing forks clattering against plates and chairs scraping as she does.

Chapter Text

She pukes for a long time. Way longer than her body needed to to get the offending piece of maybe-steak out of her system. Longer than should be possible, given how little she’d eaten in the past 48 hours. It’s miserable, and it’s even more miserable because she knows she’s overreacting.

It was a piece of meat from a cow she raised and fed, slaughtered by Danny Green, cut up by Tom while she watched, and cooked by Joel. It left her sight a grand total of once, and even then it was being handled by Joel. There isn’t a safer piece of meat on the planet. She knows that. She knows it.

But still, there’s this little voice in the back of her head that tells her it isn’t.

It sounds like him.

It’s just venison, he had told her, and she’d fucking believed him. And she’d eaten it. And to this day she still didn’t fucking know if it was true.

Ellie hears thick combat boots approach the bathroom door, and she knows it’s Maria before she’s even knocked or said anything.

“Please, go away,” she says, as Maria goes to knock.

“I heated you up some broth, Ellie, and I know eating is the last thing you wanna do right now, but—”

“Ughhhhhhhhhh,” Ellie groans, flopping her head back into the toilet bowl. “Go. Away.”

“Ellie.” She says sternly, and it feels like that’s the only way anybody has said her name in the last week.

“Where’s Joel?”

“He’s– He’s explaining the situation to Sarah.”

“Great, so now the interloper gets my whole life story?”

“Where did you even hear that to repeat it, Ellie, wha–” she cuts herself off by heaving a sigh. “Sarah is not an interloper, Ellie, she’s family. Joel’s just trying to make sure she’s more sensitive, next time.”

“She’s a stranger.”

“She is not a stranger, don’t be—”

“I don’t know anything about her. I’m pretty sure that’s like, the fuckin' definition.”

“Ellie she didn’t know.”

“Maria, that’s my fuckin’ point.”

Maria sighs heavily, and Ellie thinks that might be all she knows how to do anymore. She expects to get scolded some more, but Maria just sighs again, and then dishes clatter from outside the door.

“I’ll send Joel up when he’s done. You’ll feel better if you sip on some of the broth before then.” She goes back downstairs without saying anything else.

Maria’s right; the broth will make her feel better. Even if she does throw it back up, puking up bone broth sucks less than puking up bile and stomach acid. But knowing doesn’t change the fact that her arms and legs feel like they’re made of cast iron, heavy and unyielding. She lays there with her cheek rested on the toilet seat, even though she knows how gross it is.

-=+=-

An unknown amount of time later, she finally gathers the strength to crawl to the door for her broth.

The bowl full of broth is there when she opens the door, but so is Sarah, sitting with her back to the wall in front of the bathroom and knees pulled up to her chest.

“Holy shit!” Ellie screams, scrambling backwards before her brain catches up and realizes she’s not in danger. Her breath is heaving, which is embarrassing, but not as embarrassing as the way Sarah winces like Ellie is the one who scared her. Ellie didn’t even hear her come up the fucking stairs, she moved like a damn ghost.

Maybe she is a ghost, her sick-addled brain supplies unhelpfully.

“Hey,” Sarah says softly, sounding like she’s trying to approach a rabid animal. And Ellie is angry again, even though she doesn’t have the energy to be, even though Sarah didn’t really do anything.

“What, Joel tell you about how cannibals fed me human meat and then tried to chop me up into little pieces and eat me, too, and you wanted to take a closer look at the freak show?”

“What?” Sarah asks incredulously, and her brown eyes go huge. Ellie scoffs.

“Oh, please, Maria told me he was telling you all about it, there’s no reason to fuckin’ lie to me.”

Sarah blinks, caught off guard and clearly still processing information. “All dad told me was that you have trouble with red meat sometimes, he didn’t tell me… that,” she finishes lamely, and Ellie feels like a fucking idiot. “It makes sense, though,” she continues, her voice still soft and sweet and lilting in a way that makes Ellie’s eye twitch. She nods quickly, and her curly hair bounces with it. Ellie can’t tell which one of them she’s trying to reassure with the motion. “Makes a lot of sense.”

Ellie scowls. “Yeah, no shit. Why are you here? Where’s Joel?”

“He went out. Uncle Tommy said he was going to go get you protein that’s not meat.”

“He fucking left?” Ellie cries, and she feels pathetic with the way the news makes her whole body ache for him, especially in front of Sarah. Sarah winces. Ellie doesn’t wanna look at her stupid face with her stupid dumb pitying looks, so she drops her head between her knees the way Joel always makes her when she’s having a panic attack.

“I–” Sarah starts, but snaps her mouth shut. “Nevermind.”

“Oh, so now you’re keeping secrets?” Ellie says to the floor, not bothering to look up at Sarah.

“I’m sorry.”

Ellie blanches. That’s not what she was expecting at all. What the fuck did Sarah have to be sorry for? She looks up at Sarah, and her eyes are sort of glassy and puffy, almost like she’s about to cry, but not quite. It doesn’t make sense, what, she’s about to cry out of pity for Ellie? Fucking ridiculous. “For what? You didn’t do shit,” Ellie says, spitting into the toilet and flushing all the nasty shit down it.

“Mostly because I was the one who asked him to make steak tonight. I didn’t– I didn’t know you had a thing, otherwise obviously I wouldn’t have asked for it, but I–”

Ellie cuts her off with a hand up. “It’s alright, it’s not like you knew.”

“But I still feel bad, I mean, seriously, dad should’ve just told me no, like–”

Ellie wants to be affronted that she’s trying to pin it on Joel, but she gets what Sarah’s trying to get at, and despite how irrationally angry she’s been at the woman in the past week, she’s not actually trying to be a bitch. “No, it’s– I really love Joel’s steak, too. It’s just that–” she cuts herself off, because she doesn’t really have the words to explain this well at all, but she tries anyway. “Some days are better than others. On a good day, I’ll eat 12 ounces of meat in five seconds flat, especially when it’s something Joel made. Today just… wasn’t a good day.”

Sarah smiles sedately at her, but for the first time all week, it doesn’t come off as pitying or condescending, more just… commiserating.

“It’s just that—” Ellie continues, surprising herself with her honesty, “it’s just that the day you showed up here was like, the anniversary of when it happened, so this whole week has fucking sucked. It’s been two years since…” Ellie trails off, not knowing where to go from there.

Sarah goes pale. “Oh my god, Ellie, I’m so sorry.”

She shrugs. “It’s fine. I mean it’s not fine, it’s really not, but like, it’s whatever. It happened, and now I’m here and have to deal with it.” Sarah tilts her head up to the ceiling, looking upwards in the way that lots of adults do when they need a breather, a break from the conversation. She kinda looks like Tommy, when he’s trying not to cry. “But I mean, it’s not entirely bad. I like to think of it as the anniversary of me getting Joel, too, even though I’d known him for a while at that point.”

“What do you mean?”

“What, he didn’t tell you the story?”

“About you?”

“About everything.”

Sarah makes a flat face, trying to keep it neutral. “No, we haven’t talked much about anything important. We’re just, like, reveling in it, I guess. And he’s never been a super great communicator anyway. He definitely didn’t tell me anything about you. Said you were real private, and that I should ask you stuff myself, to get to know you. That’s why I’ve been in your room so much, but I’m sorry about that, too. Dad told me you slept in his room anyway, and that you wouldn’t mind, but I should’ve asked you first, anyway.”

“Yeah, you should’ve,” Ellie says, instead of accepting the apology for what it is.

“And back at the stables, I wasn’t trying to make him mad because you weren’t home. I wasn’t trying to snitch on you, I promise. I was trying to apologize to you, for taking your bed, and hopefully explain to dad why you left without saying anything, because that was totally my fault. I just picked, like, the absolute worst time to open my big mouth.”

Ellie doesn’t say anything to that, determined to be the petty one in this argument. Sarah doesn’t fuck off though, even though Ellie wants her to even more than she did earlier. She’s so annoyingly peppy and persistent, and it’s starting to drive Ellie crazy.

“Sorry,” Ellie says, once the silence has stretched uncomfortably for several minutes. “It’s fine, anyway, I’ll just go stay at Tommy’s.”

“No, seriously. I’ll go to Tommy’s. It’s not right for me to be kicking you out of your room, and I need to catch up with my uncle anyway.”

“But don’t you wanna stay with your dad?”

“Well, yeah, but he’s your dad, too, and Tommy’s just across the str—”

“He’s not, though,” Ellie huffs. “And even if he was, you’ve been like, presumed dead for two decades, which I think takes priority.”

“Wait, what?” Sarah’s breath hitches funny.

“Presumed dead? You really think you wouldn’t have been here with us all this time if—”

“No, the other thing. Dad’s not your dad?”

Ellie stops short. “Huh?”

“I mean, you live with him. You call Tommy your uncle, and Benji calls you ‘prima’. I just assumed…”

And it makes her breath hitch a little, that even Sarah thought Joel was her dad, as much as the thought confused her. “What kind of kid calls her dad by his first name?” Ellie says instead of letting the heat of the compliment (because that is what it was) rise to her cheeks.

Sarah stops short at that, knitting her eyebrows together. She doesn’t seem to have noticed that, which can’t be true. “I don’t know,” the woman says finally, and they’ve been sitting across from each other on the floor long enough that Sarah has to untangle her arms from around her knees to stretch her legs out in the hallway. “One who didn’t always know he was her dad?”

“We look nothing alike.”

Sarah shrugged. “Neither do we. People Before used to ask me if I was being kidnapped a lot. Because being a mixed race kid with a single dad was somehow less likely than whatever they thought was happening.”

Ellie laughed despite herself. “People asked me the same thing when we came to Jackson.”

“See!” Sarah yells, pointing victoriously at Ellie, “it wasn’t that weird of me to assume!”

They lull into silence, this time a less-uncomfortable one than before.

“And you do look like him.” Sarah tacks on.

Ellie blows a raspberry. “I can’t even tell you how not possible that is—”

“You do! I swear! You glare the same way.”

“Gee, thanks.”

Sarah laughs. “No, it’s sweet! And you curse too much, like him.” She smiles, and settles back into the wall. “And it makes sense. Tommy told me you’re sixteen, that puts six years in between Outbreak Day and you being born. That’s six years to start over, which seems like a lot, but reasonable.”

“Six? Try twenty, and even then he was still an angsty mess.”

“What?”

“Joel? He didn’t get over you dying in six years. I met him twenty years after Outbreak Day, and he bit my head off for even daring to ask about his watch. I don’t think he ever got over you dying. Or, not dying, I guess, but—”

Sarah’s eyes have gone misty again, and in between thinking of how much of a crybaby this lady is, she also thinks for sure that she’s fucked it for good this time. Joel’s gonna come upstairs, see her crying, and Ellie’s gonna be done for. But Sarah just shakes her head to snap herself out of her sadness, and instead switches gears with a pretty blatant change in subject.

“You really only met three years ago?” She asks softly, and Ellie nods slowly, ignoring the shitty segue. Her questions felt like a trap. She has no idea how she’s supposed to answer them. “Really? You guys are so in sync, three years doesn’t seem long enough.”

“I guess that’s what happens when you spend a whole year trying to save each other from Infected and raiders and not dying from stab wounds and cannibals. You learn to figure each other out, else, you’re dead.”

Sarah gapes, and goes to say something else when—

“Girls, you good up there?” Joel calls, and she can hear his thick hiking boot settle on the first step, the way it always does when he wants to call up to her but is too lazy or tired to actually climb the steps. Ellie can practically see him standing there, one hand on the balustrade, the other on his hip.

“Yeah, we’re good!” Sarah calls back, but the stair doesn’t creak with the sound of his boot leaving the step. Ellie’s heart clenches at the fact that he’s still there, waiting for her answer, too. She thinks about how warm it makes her feel for long enough that he asks again.

“Ellie? You alive?”

“I’m good,” she breathes, but she knows he’s heard her. Sometimes she swears he can hear it when she breathes funny from halfway across the house, because as soon as her breath hitches, he’s in the doorway of whatever room she’s in.

“Come back down here, then, I’ve got bean soup for ya, it’s gonna get cold.”

He must’ve gone to Becca’s. She was always the one who made the bean soup, and even though it’s kind of a weird texture, and made from canned beans instead of any fresh Jackson produce, it’s Ellie’s favorite on fuzzy days. Her heart stutters at that, too, both at the fact that Joel had bothered to go all the way across town to get some for her and that Becca, who was by all means mostly a stranger, had some saved up for her.

Sarah rises by sliding her back up the wall, stretching once she’s reached her full height. She’s really tall, Ellie notices, almost as tall as Joel.

She looks back down at Ellie. “So whaddya say, are we good?”

Ellie scowls, but it's not exactly an out-of-line question for Sarah to ask. She seems kind of oblivious about some things, but clearly she’s noticed Ellie’s frostiness towards her.

For Joel, Ellie thinks, even though Sarah’s still giving her that lame pitying look that every adult she’s ever met except Joel gives her. For Joel, because he may have a heart attack if I keep being mean to his kid, even if she is a grown woman.

Sarah reaches out her hand, and Ellie takes it.

“Yeah, we’re good.”

Chapter Text

Ellie’s good will towards Sarah lasts approximately five minutes.

She takes Sarah’s offered hand to haul herself up from the bathroom floor, and Ellie grabs her broth to bring it back downstairs, and they both coo at the baby as soon as they reach the bottom step, because someone has propped Benji up on the couch with one of his little interactive baby books and his face looks particularly chubby with the glow from the setting sun lighting him up from one side and the far away kitchen lights lighting him up from the other. The night really does seem like it’s taking a turn for the better.

And then Sarah suggests that they watch Beauty and the Beast instead of The Little Mermaid.

Which, like, should really not be upsetting Ellie as much as it is. Benji picks The Little Mermaid every family dinner night. The VHS tape is starting to wear down from how much they watch it, so much so that Tommy keeps not-so-subtly bringing up the idea of trading for a DVD player to Joel, because Tommy and Maria have the movie on DVD, but no one in Jackson has yet to find another VHS copy.

But it’s their routine. Benji and Ellie always watch The Little Mermaid while they play, and Tommy never ever fails to point at King Triton and tell Joel that that’s him, because of how overprotective King Triton is, and then Maria points out that she thinks Joel should grow a beard like Triton, and—

It’s just what they do. Even if they don’t actually watch it, even if it’s playing in the living room while they’re still in the kitchen, even if they decide to play cards and not pay any attention to it at all, it’s always playing on Friday nights in the house. Enough so that it’s actually kind of started to annoy Ellie, when Benji ultimately babbles “Duh Liddle Mermaid!” excitedly, like it’s something novel.

But Sarah’s looking through their ever-growing stack of tapes, and her eyes light up when she sees Beauty and the Beast. She turns excitedly to Benji and wiggles the case in front of him.

“Look, Benjamin! It’s Belle!”

And Benji babbles excitedly, because he’s a baby, and everything that gets wiggled in his face excites him, although he does put up a token, “But Ari-uhlllll”

“But Belllllle” Sarah rebuts, and that seems to satisfy him. He nods his approval, and Ellie whips her head around when the adults in the kitchen breathe an audible sigh of relief.

“Thank God,” Tommy says, scraping his chair against the floor as he goes to move towards the living room. “I thought he would never grow out his Ariel phase, she was getting to be a bit much.” Tommy kisses the top of Ellie’s head as he passes her on the stairs, and then Sarah’s when he crosses her next to their stack of movies. He flops so hard onto one end of the couch that Benji, on the other end, bounces too, and it makes him laugh in a way that sounds like bells.

Ellie’s got this truly ancient copy of Peter Pan that she found at some point on the road with Joel, and the author said something about babies’ laughter being so bright and innocent that it created the first fairies. Ellie didn’t get it then, because she didn’t know many babies, let alone ones who were happy enough to laugh, but she understood the second she met Benji. His laugh could spark a million fairies, could power a house for a day with how bright it was. Ellie had never been a baby person, but she is a Benji person.

Which is maybe why the Ariel thing bothers her so much. She is supposed to be Benji’s favorite. He went with Sarah’s suggestion with only the barest of protests, the little traitor.

And like, Ellie knows she’s being ridiculous, but it hurts on a kind of deeper level, too. Because of course all of the Millers are choosing Belle over Ariel. Why would anyone choose the misbehaving, troublemaking redhead who’s too curious for her own good, over the beautiful brunette who’s so perfect even the asshole of the movie is in love with her. And Tommy thinks that Ariel is “a bit much” and Ellie doesn’t think she’s exactly like Ariel, anyway, because she wouldn’t give up shit for a man, but she totally would sell her soul sometimes for a chance to explore outside of Jackson, and really, they had more similarities than differences, and—

And the back of her brain is calling her a moron, because of course it isn’t that deep. Obviously the adults have just gotten tired of watching the same thing over and over again, just like Ellie has, and there’s no deeper subtext or anything.

But it feels like there is.

Ellie manages to hold her composure until they reach the part of the opening song where all the townspeople are singing about how beautiful and perfect Belle is. Once they hit the part where Belle starts singing about how much she loves books, it’s over for Ellie, because fucking— of course Sarah can sing.

Why the fuck wouldn’t she able to do something that makes her more perfect. She makes Benji laugh when she grabs one of the VHS cases and opens it to pretend she’s reading a book, gesturing to it as she sings about her favorite part. And Ellie looks back to Joel, who is looking at Sarah like she hung the fucking moon.

And something in Ellie fucking snaps. It might be giving her real, actual whiplash, the way her emotions can’t seem to figure out what they’re doing. Sarah’s nice, Sarah’s mean. Joel loves Ellie, Joel couldn’t care less what happens to her. She fits in with this fucking family, she doesn’t. It’s fucking exhausting, and all Ellie wants to do is sleep until the whole thing goes away.

Sarah will still be there, singing like a fucking Disney princess when she wakes up, though.

-=+=-

Ellie hastily retreats back upstairs with her bean soup, and Joel must really think she looks pathetic; he’s got a rule about food upstairs, but he lets her go without any fuss, without even saying anything about her missing the end of family dinner night.

And her room looks just the same as it did before Sarah arrived. Nothing looks moved or messed with, so Sarah must’ve heeded Ellie’s warning about touching her stuff.

Ellie flops down onto her bed and instantly recoils.

Because her bed smells like fucking roses. Of course Sarah smells like fucking roses. What’s next, does she fart butterflies or some shit?

And she wants to scream into her pillow, really she does, but that would be a problem for two reasons. First, that she’d have to keep smelling Sarah in her fucking bed, and second, it would immediately lead to Joel sprinting upstairs to find out what was wrong with her.

So instead, Ellie stands back up and strips everything off of her bed, shoving everything into a pile on the floor in the corner of her room like it’s hazardous waste. She lays back down on her case-less pillows and grabs a spare blanket from the closet. It’s threadbare and moth bitten, something left in the house from Before, but at least it’s hers. At least it smells like her.

And for some reason, she thinks about Salt Lake City. She thinks about the weeks after they got back, about screaming matches and tears and long walks in opposite directions to calm down.

She thinks about Joel, and the promise he made her. She thinks the promise just about killed him to make.

“You have to promise me we’ll try again,” Ellie had screamed through tears at him on their front porch one of those first nights. She had been making a massive scene in the hopes that the public embarrassment might make Joel yell back at her. Scolding her, he did often, but yelling at her was something he did rarely.

He had shaken his head resolutely, like there wasn’t any changing his mind, and it had set Ellie off on another tirade of screams. She remembered seeing Tommy and Maria on their porch. Several of their other neighbors had been, too, at the time. Ellie hadn’t cared.

“Then I’m leaving, and you can’t stop me,” she’d spat at him, thumping closed fists on his chest like it would get him to change his mind. “Someone has to have hope. Even if the Fireflies gave up, someone out there has to still be trying, FEDRA or something—” and that had really been the wrong thing to say, given that Joel would let Ellie go back to a QZ over his dead body, and it had led to a screaming match that had lasted so long that Tommy had approached the porch and made them take it inside so they didn’t keep disturbing the neighbors. Ellie had finally gotten the satisfaction of Joel yelling back at her, but it hadn’t felt as nice as she’d hoped it would.

The night had ended when Ellie had cried so hard and for so long that she couldn’t even breathe let alone keep yelling, and Joel had just sat there with his face in his palm as she hyperventilated, and once she could finally breathe again, he agreed that he would talk to Maria about keeping an ear out for people still looking for a cure. Then he had told her that they would go looking, when she was older, if they got even a peep of the Fireflies starting back up their cure-searching. “Not FEDRA,” he’d made her promise back. “We’ll go try again, but I’m not letting you back within a hundred miles of FEDRA ever again.”

And she knows agreeing to it at all made Joel really sad, probably because of all the pain they went through the first time, just for it to be for nothing. He didn’t wanna go find a doctor looking for the cure again, just for Ellie to be disappointed again when they couldn’t do anything.

But well, Ellie is older now.

Just a few months, and she’ll be seventeen. Jackson city council says you’re an adult at seventeen. And adults got to make their own decisions about whether or not they left the commune. Joel probably wouldn’t agree, he always says that you can’t be an adult if you can’t have a drink, which apparently was only for 21 and up Before. But she can drink now. She and Cat had gotten so drunk they’d passed out in the hayloft just a few weeks ago. And Jackson said you’re an adult at seventeen, even if the people from Before didn’t agree.

Ellie makes up her mind then and there.

She can’t wait six months for July, for her birthday, and she definitely can’t wait five years for Joel’s idea of being an adult. She needs to get out now. She’s sure the council will understand, once she brings back a vaccine to give to the people of Jackson. She might be seventeen by the time she gets back, anyway. Maybe it’ll take months for her to find people working on a cure, or months to run tests and synthesize a vaccine.

But she can’t stay in this stupid fucking house. With stupid fucking Sarah, with the Millers wrapped around her pinky finger, shoving Ellie out of the home she fought so hard for.

She can’t take Sarah from Joel, she knows that. She wouldn’t try to even if she wanted to, which she doesn’t. But she can’t stand being here with her.

So if she can’t make Sarah leave, that means Ellie has to go.

She’ll go to Salt Lake, and she’ll bring back the vaccine. So that Joel can have Sarah without fear of having her taken from him again. So Benji can grow up in a kinder world where there aren’t any monsters out to get him. So Maria and Tommy don’t have to send their kid out to patrol, to die by the hands of raiders or Infected in the name of preserving their peace.

So that maybe she’ll find somewhere where she can just be. Just be Ellie. Not a replacement for Sarah, not humanity’s savior, just Ellie.

She’d thought she’d found that already. She thought Joel was her place to just be. But she was wrong. Joel has just as many fucked up expectations of her as everyone else in the fucking world, even if he has different motivations for it.

Maybe she’ll pull a Bill and go cordon off an abandoned town. Steal a few Jackson sheep to start her off and be a rancher till the day she dies. She doesn’t think she’ll bring a Frank, though. It would hurt too much. But then, Bill didn’t think he’d ever get a Frank either.

The thought of the sheep makes her stomach ache. It was Joel who wanted to be a sheep rancher. She tries to tell herself that she wants to be a sheep rancher because she’s good at it. Because she likes it, regardless of Joel and his stupid dreams for After.

She can’t quite convince herself it’s true by the time she falls back into her bed, racked with sobs. Joel doesn’t come up to check up on her, even though she knows he can almost always hear her in the house.

Beauty and the Beast is still playing downstairs.

She lays in her stripped-bare bed, looking blankly at her offensive bedsheets on the floor. Then her decaying town green wall. Then she looks at her desk full of her art supplies, then her bookshelf with her comics on it. She just keeps darting back and forth to all the stuff in her room in a cycle, as if reminding herself that it’s her room will make this horrible pit in her stomach, this nasty acid behind her teeth, go away.

Sheets. Green wall, art, comics.

Roses. Decay, pencils, Benji’s toys.

Sheets. Moss, watercolors, pendant.

Roses.

Green wall.

Art supplies.

Gun.

Ellie’s hunting rifle is calling out to her.

You’ve survived alone before, it says. You killed a hundred Infected swarming you in the middle of winter in a burned out husk of a building with nothing but a cannibal who couldn’t shoot for shit to help you fight them off.

She looks at her knife in her palm in front of her. She hadn’t even noticed she’d brought it out, flipping it around to calm herself down. You killed someone who wanted to hurt you with nothing but a kitchen knife, her knife says. Stripped of everything you owned and hunted from every direction, you survived anyway.

The revolver she stole from Joel the week they got back from Salt Lake stares at her. You even saved Joel, it says to her. You shot a human being through the fucking brains because an ally was in trouble. He would have drowned in that puddle. You didn’t even get a real thank you, it hisses. But you did it anyway because you are strong.

Her bow is stashed in her closet, but there’s an arrow on the very top of her bookshelf, one she made herself. You hunted and fed yourself and Joel in the middle of winter for three weeks, it whispers at her. You killed enough food to survive and to barter for medicine.

You killed your best friend,” the 9mm hisses, staring at her like it wants to pick a fight. You did it because you can do the things that need to be done, even if they hurt.

And it does hurt, Ellie thinks. The idea of leaving Jackson hurts more than anything else she’s ever done in her whole life. More than getting bit, getting shot, getting assaulted, killing Riley. She aches to leave Jackson, to leave the only family she’s ever known in her whole life.

But Ellie can do the things that need to be done.

Even if they’re hard.

Even if they hurt.

Chapter Text

Ellie’s final straw comes in the form of Joel going on patrol, a week and a day after Ellie had made the decision to leave Jackson.

Correction: JoelandSarah are going on patrol.

Luckily for Ellie, it’s also her chance. Sarah’s staying in the nursery at Tommy’s, which was what Ellie wanted, but her plan had backfired pretty spectacularly since now it meant Joel is up and gone across the street every time he had any sort of free time. Which, like, defeats the entire point of sleeping at home.

“Hey baby girl,” Joel says, rubbing a circle into her back as he passes her in the kitchen to get coffee. He puts it in his thermos mug so he can take it over to Tommy’s, and Ellie scowls.

“Hey,” she says meekly, not bothering to pick her head out of her arms from where it's laid on the breakfast table.

Joel calls her baby all the time. It had kinda confused Ellie at first, because while she understood nicknames on a surface level, ‘baby’ was the same number of syllables as ‘Ellie.’ It took her longer than she would like to admit to truly understand that ‘baby’ is just Joel’s way of showing he cares without making a big deal out of it. Like ‘Ellie Bean’ for Tommy.

But ‘Baby Girl’ is different. ‘Baby Girl’ is reserved for I just pulled you away from meat cleaving someone’s skull into ground beef. ‘Baby Girl’ is for I thought you were going to die and for I hate it when you’re hurting. Joel only pulls out the full ‘Baby Girl’ for two reasons.

First, when Ellie’s sad or hurt.

And second, when he’s about to say something he knows she won’t like.

And Ellie isn’t feeling particularly sad or hurt right now.

He scoots his chair out and sits down next to her, his thermos so close to Ellie’s face that she can smell the burnt-toast-smelling bullshit he loves so much. He reaches out and sets his hand on her arm, and Ellie resists the urge to shrug it off.

“Hey, I’m gonna be gone tomorrow,” he says softly, and Ellie resists the urge to roll her eyes from behind her arms. He’s never at the house. “gone tomorrow” implies he hasn’t been gone this whole time.

“I’m going out on patrol, gonna show Sarah the ropes a little bit. We should be back before dinner.”

“I go out on patrol with you on your short Saturday ones. That was our deal,” she mumbles, and she’s pushing her luck, because Joel is big on manners for important conversations, on making eye contact and listening.

He sighs. “I know, baby, but someone needs to show her how to do it.”

“Then I’m coming with you.”

Joel hisses like he’s in pain. “I really don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Make Tommy take her, then. Then I can come,” she sasses, and Joel’s lack of response finally makes her lift her head to meet his eye.

“I’m not doing that, Ellie,” he says solidly, making eye contact and raising one of his eyebrows.

“Why not?”

“Because I’m her dad, and I’m not lettin’ her outta here for the first time without being able to see her.”

Ellie heaves a really dramatic sigh and thunks her head back down onto the breakfast table. It’s there, staring at her thumbs where the crack between her arms lets a little morning sunlight through, that she realizes that Joel out of the walls is a good thing.

Joel being outside of Jackson makes it way easier to leave without being caught.

“Fine,” she huffs, pushing her chair back fast enough that it makes a horrible screeching sound. The more of a fit she throws, the more likely he is to let her go, but it's a fine line she walks. “Fucking whatever, Joel.”

“Ellie,” he sighs, all stressed out. “Don’t just walk away from me.”

“What, so you just get to break our rules, all of our deals, but when I do it's a problem? You get to leave without saying goodbye, get to ditch me on patrols, get to give away my bedroom, and that’s fucking fine, but I don’t tell you goodbye because you were already fucking gone and there was someone in my fucking bed to go out on a scheduled shift and its a problem? Like it’s my fault you didn’t remember my work schedule? That’s such horse shit!”

“Ellie!”

“I’ve been trying to ignore it, Joel, because I get that this has been like, the best two weeks of your life, or whatever, but you don’t get to be a fucking hypocrite, man.”

“I’m sorry about your bedroom, Ellie, that wasn’t right.”

Ellie flinches back and knits her eyebrows together. That wasn’t what she was expecting.

“But—” and Ellie groans, because of course theres a fucking ‘but’, “Ellie, it wasn’t because I don’t respect your privacy or your space, it was because I knew you were gonna be spendin’ most of the week in my bed curled up eatin’ soup anyway!” His voice starts to raise, and his accent always comes out a little more when he’s stressed like this, but he stops himself with a breath. “Or, I thought I knew. I miscalculated, Ellie, I was wrong. But it wasn’t some dig on purpose at you.”

“Fine,” she snaps. “Apology heard. Can I go now?”

Joel sighs again, put out, but he’s never been the kind of person to demand forgiveness. He’s not gonna make her accept the apology, and he’s not gonna make her offer up one of her own. “Yeah, alright. Remember it’s family dinner night. And I’ll do better at wakin’ you up before I leave, I promise.”

Ellie wants to pull her hair out, but if she complains about family dinner night right now, they’re both gonna be miserable. So she just nods, hoping that she can feign sleep when the time comes and hide in her room, hoping Joel will have mercy and won’t wake her up.

-=+=-

She can smell food wafting up from the kitchen, and she really thinks she’s in the clear of being forced to come downstairs, but right when she thinks it's safe to get up and start packing her bag, there’s a soft knock at the door.

She resists the urge to groan. Maybe he’ll open the door, see her, and back away. Nevermind the fact that she’s such a light sleeper, she would’ve woken at the knock, anyway.

“C’mon Ellie,” he says from the doorway, and Ellie knows better than to try and lie to his face, “dinnertime.”

She gets herself vertical as Joel tiptoes into the room, nearly closing her door behind him. He offers her his arm, and she takes it.

You’re leaving him tomorrow, her boots whisper at her from where they’re set beside her door.

He’s leaving you, her hat chimes in from its hook.

She ignores them both, and accepts Joel’s help up out of her bed. He smiles at her softly. “Rice tonight,” he breathes quietly, even though there’s no reason to whisper. “Grilled chicken. Alexa pulled up her spinach yesterday, so it’s fresh.”

Ellie hums.

“Hey,” he says softly, and she looks up at where he towers over her. “I love you.”

Ellie startles. It’s not the first time he’s said it to her, obviously, and Ellie knows he loves her, but it’s not something Ellie would say happens often. He said it when he was discharged from the hospital after they got back to Jackson. He said it when she tried to stab a classmate who implied he was a predator. He said it when she jumped off the barn roof and broke her foot. He always said it any time she was hurt or sick, and he said it back any time she said it first.

“You’re not like, dying, right?” Ellie asks cautiously, pulling away from his side that she’d burrowed into so she can look at his face. He laughs softly.

“Nah, can’t get rid of me that easy,” he says, smiling his crooked half-smile down at her. He only does it when he’s really calm, and too lazy to put on a fake front and smile wide. Smiling for real isn’t in his nature, but this is, this little soft half smile is just for her. “I just thought you needed to hear it. I know this has been a….” He stumbles for the right word, but squeezes her tighter against his frame. “Just a change. I know you don’t like change much.”

And Ellie thinks of the list she’s been making in her head. All her weapons, as much food as she can convince Becca from the kitchens she needs to restock their leftover-reserves. Her sleeping bag. Her boots, her hat. A lot of rope, which always came in handy, especially after Maria had taught her how to belay herself on a girls trip to the foot of the mountain last summer. Riley’s pendant from where it sits all perfect in the shadow box. She’ll have to break it, she thinks, but it’s better than leaving without it. Shimmer. All of Shimmer’s tack. Sugar cubes. At least one book. As much ammo as she can realistically steal from the shed. All her arrows, plus the pile of flint tips on her closet floor so she can make more.

She looks back down, ashamed. And Joel is still looking down at her, she can feel it, and they’re still just standing there, frozen, in her bedroom, the light from the hallway spilling in like molten gold. And she can’t look at him.

If she looks at him, she’ll give up.

She’ll stay here in this house until the end of time, always second best. Always the replacement.

She wants to make a joke she might’ve made on the road, to get rid of the heavy air in the room. She wants to say “are you sure old man? Because you look like you’re right on Death’s door. One more gray hair, and I think he might just have to take you on principle.” She wants him to say something back like “alright, you little shit” and ruffle her hair into her head.

But she knows what Joel’s face looks like right now, even though she’s not looking at it. She can see it crumpled with indecision, whether to ask her what’s wrong or whether to let it lie. She knows he’s worried about her, and she knows he’d throw a fit if he even got the smallest inkling about what she was doing. And her resolve will crumble if she looks up. She’s strong, but she’s not that strong.

And because she’s not strong, she’s weak, she’s so weak, she buries her face in his chest and gives him a real hug. She can’t look him in the eyes before she goes, before she sneaks out of the back gate they send the animals through after he’s left through the front, none the wiser. But she can do this. His arms come up to cradle the back of her head, one supporting her head by holding it to him, and the other running his fingers through her hair.

“I love you,” she says back, into his chest instead of to his face, because she’s a coward.

They walk down the stairs all tangled up together, Joel practically carrying her down the steps for all she’s not holding her own weight. Her side is almost melted against his, and she thinks back to everyone in Jackson, who never used to say one of their names without the other. As Joel tromps down the stairs holding both of them up, she feels like she did before Sarah got here. Like she and Joel are something inseparable. Like there’s something in their souls that are intertwined, that no one could remove them from one another with all the force in the world.

They feel inextricable.

Maria taught her that word last year. It’s a nice word. It feels silly in her mouth when she says it. In-ex-trick-uh-ble. It was apparently a word Maria had used a lot in the law Before, and she still uses it in phrases in council sessions like “the spirit of the law is inextricable with the letter of it” when someone tries to twist Jackson’s laws into something they’re not. But Ellie likes it in a more personal way. She liked the idea of two things being so inseparable, so attached, that they had to make another word for it. That inseparable wasn’t good enough

And Joel is still cradling her, one arm under her armpit and wrapped around her back, the other still cradling her head, and they feel inextricable. And Ellie thinks she’s losing her will to leave.

But as they get lower, the atmosphere downstairs greets them. And it stops being EllieandJoel. The way it had been for years. The way she wants it to be. Instead it becomes EllieandJoelandMariaandTommyandBenjiandSarah. And Ellie wants to be mad at herself. She loves her family. She wants them around. She wishes she wanted EllieandJoelandMariaandTommyandBenjiandSarah. But she doesn’t. Not as much.

They’re listening to country music downstairs again. Sarah and Maria are laughing, and Tommy is singing the guitar riff obnoxiously, and Ellie can practically see his dumb air guitar as he does it.

EllieandJoel reach the last step right as the song ends.

As soon as they’re fully bathed in the light of the living room, the next song starts, and Ellie and Joel step into the commotion.

“Oh my god, daddy, it’s my song!” Sarah squeals, and Joel is smiling that same half smile that’s usually only reserved for Ellie. He deposits Ellie softly on the couch next to Benji, and gives her a kiss on the forehead, and moves towards Sarah. Sarah sticks her arms out, and Ellie thinks Joel is about to sweep her into a hug— one that was more natural and enthusiastic and less awkward than the one she and Joel had shared two minutes ago— but what really happens is actually worse.

Joel sticks his arms out, catching one of Sarah’s and sliding the other around her waist, and they start dancing. It’s a quick song, and they’re both stumbling with it, out of practice, but it’s clearly something they’ve done before. Something they might’ve been really good at, once upon a time. Ellie looks at Benji, who’s looking at them in wonder, and Ellie gets closer than she’s gotten in a while to crying in public.

Her resolve strengthens again. She’s going back to Salt Lake, so Joel can dance with Sarah until the end of his days.

She picks up Benji, who’s delighted to be paid attention to. She bounces him on her lap to the beat of the song, and she’s not paying attention to the words at all until she hears Sarah scream with laughter, “that Earl had to die!” and she turns to find Tommy reluctantly singing backup vocals into their big wooden spoon, while Joel leads Sarah around the kitchen in a quick dance.

The song is really horrible. It’s peppy and fun to listen to, and she had been content at the beat until she had started listening to the words. But the words— they’re about murdering her husband. Her abusive husband. And her friend helps. And it’s so explicit, it’s not even a metaphor or anything, and Ellie can feel the fog coming up her head, and it’s such a happy song, and—

-=+=-

Ellie doesn’t really know how she got on the porch. She has an idea, sort of. She imagines her feet carried her here. But she can’t remember passing Joel and Sarah in the kitchen, can’t remember opening their front door that sticks when it’s cold. She should remember, because the front door isn’t exactly easy to open when it sticks, and she shouldn’t have been able to drift aimlessly to the porch without remembering fighting with the door jamb. But it was like she just appeared out here. One minute, Ellie’s inside listening to that horrible song, and the next she’s on the front porch swing.

She blinks again and suddenly Tommy is sitting next to her, and she didn’t hear him open the door either. She didn’t hear the front porch swing creak when he got in it, nor did she feel him settle in next to her. He just sort of materializes beside her.

“You all right out here, Ellie Bean?” He asks, and he smells like the cilantro he always puts in the rice when they have some to spare, and Ellie feels bad that he’s stopped making dinner and singing just to come sit out here in silence with her, when she wasn’t even really here. She nods.

Tommy doesn’t pry anymore, not the way Joel does sometimes. He tried to, at the beginning, but learned pretty quickly that Ellie only really accepted being talked down on by Joel. He nursed a dislocated shoulder for a few weeks to prove it. So he just sits there while she stares, unblinkingly, at the stars.

They’ve been there for minutes or hours when Ellie finally finds the words. “Did people really do that? Before?”

Tommy shifts beside her, and Ellie thinks he’s probably turned to look at her. “Do what, honey?”

“Kill people,” Ellie says plainly, with no energy to mince her words. “Write songs about killin’ people. Like it was easy. Like it didn’t matter.”

Tommy sucks in a breath sharply, exhaling slowly like he’s buying time because he doesn’t know what to say next. “Yeah, Ellie. It’s not a new thing. People have killed other people for all of time. Since Cain and Abel, if you ask my momma. War happens. People kill in self defense, like in the song. It’s all—”

“I know about war, Tommy. And self defense. But it’s just—” she breathes sharply, the cold winter air biting at her throat uncomfortably. “The song is so… peppy. Like it was a good thing. Like they enjoyed it. Were people really like that? Before? Back when they didn’t have to be?”

Tommy takes a second, and Ellie likes how he’s not afraid of the silence that settles while he really thinks about his answer. Sometimes Joel just talks because he can’t stand the silence. You wouldn’t think it, for all Joel seems to thrive in long sullen silences. And he does; he loves quiet mornings, and calm, wordless walks, and communicating with just his eyes. But silence when there’s supposed to be words makes Joel antsy. The things he says in that space between sentences when he doesn’t like the quiet have led to some of their biggest arguments. Tommy just revels in the silence, which would honestly probably drive Ellie crazy, too, if she had to deal with it all the time, but it’s nice right now.

“There have always been evil people, Ellie.” Tommy decides on finally. “I think there always will be. But no. People didn’t typically enjoy killing other people.”

Ellie blinks and goes to respond, but Tommy’s not done. “But you get one thing clear, girl. What the women did in that song was not a bad thing. The man in that song deserved to die. He hurt someone he was supposed to protect— his family. The music only makes light of him dyin’ because they know what he did was unforgivable. Because there isn’t a good person on this earth who would’ve faulted those two ladies for getting rid of an evil person.”

She knows he’s looking at her now, knows it in a visceral way, even though she still can’t face him, even though he’s still just out of sight from where she’s staring at the moon, which is just a tiny tiny wisp in the sky, mostly black.

She knows when it finally clicks for him, what she’s getting at, even though she hadn’t actually told him, hadn’t even really said anything at all.

“Ellie Miller.”

A sob rips its way out of Ellie’s body before she can help it. Something about Tommy saying her name like that makes it slip out before she’s even thought about it, her nervous system giving her no choice in the matter.

“Ellie Miller, you look at me. Look at me,” he says, gently prying her head towards him, settling his two warm hands on her freezing cheeks. He looks her deep in the eyes, like he’s staring directly into her brain, like if he looks deep enough, he could see all the way to her soul. His eyes are wet, and there’s snot in his mustache. “Earl deserved to die. David deserved to die.” Ellie flinches away from his hold at his name, but Tommy holds her steady. He’s not caging her in, but he’s keeping everything else out. Ms. Keller told her once that people used to stick themselves in cages so they could go dive with sharks. That’s what this feels like, Tommy’s calloused hands framing the side of her face, unable to move but feeling all the safer for it. She thinks that it would scare her if anyone else did this to her, maybe even Joel, for how solid and huge he is. “I’m so sorry, honey, that you had to do it. You never should’ve had to. It shouldn’t have been you. Joel should’ve gotten there sooner, or that buck you shot shoulda led you the other way, or better yet, any one of the people in that town who knew what he was doing should’ve stepped up and stabbed him in the back before you ever even got the chance to meet him in those woods. But him bein’ gone is a good thing. It’s better for everyone, and he deserved it. Evil people have always deserved it, Before and now.”

She’s crying again, but Tommy doesn’t let her use her tears as an excuse to avert her eyes the way Joel does. Instead, he holds her there by her cheeks, as she spits up snot and salt, and she’s so uncomfortable, but he’s still staring into her eyes like he’s going to find the secret to life in them. She stares right back at him, at his slicked back hair with one little piece falling into his face. At his warm eyes, at the place where his hands disappear from her field of vision to latch onto her face. “Those girls didn’t actually feel good about killing him in that song, Ellie, they were celebratin’ because there was one less evil person in the world. One less person who hurt other people on purpose, who enjoyed hurtin’ people.”

“And that’s— okay?” She asks, hiccuping with a sob.

“That’s more than okay, honey. If you wanted to shout from the rooftops, let the whole world hear that you shanked that sumbitch, me and Joel would be right there with you, thanking God he was dead, telling the world how proud we were that our Ellie made the world a little bit better of a place.”

Ellie heaves a sob so hard that she kinda can’t breathe, and he finally, finally lets her go, only so she can dive at his chest so hard, she sends the swing rocking perpendicular to the direction it’s supposed to go. She and Tommy are knocked off balance, for a second, but then he lowers one of his legs to the ground to steady it, and starts rocking it back and forth, soothing her sobs while she gets snot all over his University of Texas hoodie. Slowly, but surely, she can feel her soul sink back into her bones, from where it felt like it had been floating away, trying to seep out of her skin and head to the moon without her.

She thinks about Joel, and his hatred of the University of Texas, then at Tommy calling Joel a traitor to Austin for supporting Texas A&M, then back to Joel saying he’d die before he wore that ‘ugly ass busted-up orange.’ They both cared a lot, especially for people who never went to college in the first place. Maria told her that’s just what southerners were like, especially when it came to football. She deliriously thinks about how happy Joel will be for just a second when she and Tommy walk back inside, and Tommy has to take off his snot-covered hoodie to throw it in the wash. He’ll probably threaten to pour bleach into the spin cycle. He might actually pour bleach into the spin cycle.

Apparently crazy Mr. Richt, who lives in the house behind Maria and Tommy, is from Georgia, originally. Maria once warned Ellie not to ever get him started about how Georgia won the last of something Maria called the SEC Championship. Apparently people from Georgia had been even crazier than people from Texas about football. Ellie didn’t really get it, even after Joel’s attempts to get her to understand it. A bunch of guys hit each other around to make a ball go to a place. That was like every other game ever, except people shaped like Ellie were designed to be bad at it.

Soccer was better, from what Ellie could tell. Same idea, but soccer favored small, quick people. People like her. People like Sam, like those kids who lived in the sewers in Kansas City. She thinks about their soccer goal painted on the sewer wall all the time, especially when she’s in class and she sees the real one behind the Jackson Hole High School out of the window of her math class. She thinks about the kids from Before, getting the privilege to use a real soccer goal, and not even knowing it. Worrying about boyfriends and girlfriends, and clothes, and Prom, and college admissions, and never seeing how lucky they were to have a real soccer goal that they could use whenever they wanted. Those sewer kids in Kansas City might’ve killed for a real goal, or a real field. Or the real school, or for the sunlight, or the snow, or even fresh air.

At some point, she realizes that she’s been sitting there thinking about football, and soccer, and Before, for so long, that she hadn’t even realized that the fog clouding her vision had gone. Tommy is still just sitting there letting her stuff her face into his hoodie, and she finds that she’s okay again.

“You think dinner’s ready?” She asks, kind of fearing the answer of how long she’s been out here.

“Probably. Let’s go look.”

She starts to peel himself from his side, and he grabs her on the shoulders. “And Ellie,” he says, looking into her eyes again. “For what it’s worth, Joel and Sarah don’t like that song because of any of that.” Ellie nods. It feels irrelevant, now that Ellie feels better, but she gets the sense that he needed to say it. “Sarah’s momma hated country music. Especially the Dixie Chicks. Thought they were whiny. So when she left…” He sighs. “Let’s just say there was always somethin’ from them playing in the house after that.”

“I don’t even know her name,” Ellie realizes suddenly, blinking. This lady was the most important person in Joel’s life at one point, and Ellie doesn’t even know her name.

Tommy shakes his head sadly as he gets up, offering her his hand. “You don’t need to. She abandoned this family. Her name ain’t worth repeating.” She takes it, and he hauls her gracelessly off the front porch swing. “It ain’t worth anything, Ellie. I just wanted you to know.”

She smiles at him, but it feels wrong, it feels insufficient, to what he’d just told her, what he’d just done for her. He makes a face at her and squeezes her hand, then leads her back inside.

Chapter Text

Ellie knows Joel so well.

As soon as Tommy walks inside, he pulls off the hoodie, asking Joel if he has anything else to throw in the wash.

And Joel immediately starts egging him on. “Nah, don’t worry about it, Tommy. I’m not letting any of my clothes touch that ugly ass sweater in case it infects the rest of my shit. In fact, don’t even bother with the laundry. Throw that shit back outside so I can burn it.”

“Har har, traitor. Laundry.”

“You’d think it was appropriate. Burnt orange.” he continues, setting plates onto the table. “You know where it is. Don’t forget detergent. It’s the big bottle up top labeled B-L-E-A-C-H.” Ellie snorts, because Joel’s funny, but also because she really does know him so well.

“Shut the fuck up,” Tommy calls as he walks towards the basement, Maria calling a “Language!” at his back. Maria didn’t need to know that Ellie had accidentally taught Benji to say fuck months ago.

Tommy’s usually so careful around Benji. Now at least, Ellie’s got plausible deniability, as long as Benji doesn’t snitch.

Joel mutters something about Tommy’s scheming, and follows him into the basement, leaving Sarah and Maria in the kitchen chuckling at the Miller brothers.

Dinner is uneventful. Chicken is easier than steak, and they’d had a double freeze this year, so Alexa’s spinach is sweet, not bitter. The Millers talk over Ellie’s head, and she’s pretty sure the only reason no one calls her on her lack of participation is because she’s been so off recently. She’s pretty sure Joel and Tommy were gossiping about her in the basement, but since she hadn’t followed them, there wasn’t exactly a way to prove it. She eats silently, and before she knows it, the food is all gone, off her plate. It’s the first time Ellie has finished all her food at a meal in a while. Maria nudges her and offers her more, but Ellie doesn’t wanna jinx it. She’ll take her win and quit while she’s ahead.

It isn’t until they’re all piled in the living room watching Star Wars, Benji asleep in Joel’s room, that Ellie notices the multicolored lights on the back porch.

“When did those go up?” She asks Joel from where she’s leaning against him. She nods at the lights, and he moves his ear closer to her mouth so they can talk quietly with his bad hearing, jostling Sarah’s legs on his lap.

“While you were napping,” Joel whispers, so quietly it was almost a breath. “We’re a little late this year, but it’ll have to do.”

“It’s Christmas?” Ellie breathes back, and Joel looks at her with a more-than-concerned look in his eye. His face looks harsh, lit up by nothing but the fluorescent light from the TV, and even though she knows it comes from a place of love, it still makes her shrink back with its intensity.

“Yeah, baby,” he says, and weasels his arm out from under her. “Christmas Eve is in a few days. You didn’t see the tree go up in town?” He uses the arm he’d taken from behind her back to gently move her head from side to side, like he could find something wrong with her in the action. Then he rests the back of his hand against her forehead like she’s sick. She’s not sick. Or at least, not in any way Joel would be able to discern with his Ellie-sensing-magic.

“I guess I did,” Ellie says quietly. The Christmas tree goes up real early in Jackson, around mid-November. Ellie had the pleasure of finding out this year that Tommy takes this as a personal offense, Christmas encroaching on Thanksgiving territory. She’d seen the tree go up, but it had been long enough now that it had sort of faded into the background. She had kinda forgotten she was supposed to associate it with Christmas at all. “I just forgot.”

“We’re gonna watch a Christmas movie in town tomorrow, remember? Robin and Jesse invited us.”

“It’s a Wonderful Life,” Ellie says suddenly, and she does remember, sort of.

She doesn’t really recall any point of being so fuzzy she would forget plans, but she did vaguely remember Robin cornering Ellie and Joel in the dining hall to force them to socialize. She wondered if there were any other plans with Jesse and Dina, or with Cat, or anyone else, that she forgot about.

He hums. “It’s Tommy’s favorite Christmas movie. I think you’ll really like it. It’s really old. Black and white.”

“I’m also supposed to go do Hanukkah stuff with Dina at some point.”

“Yeah, Hanukkah ends tomorrow. She told me y’all had plans.”

He’s saying more whispered into her temple, Ellie thinks, but she’s already drifting off into his side, muffling his words against his own torso.

Ellie dreams about Christmas with Joel. There are big evergreen trees outside the walls in Jackson, and last year Joel had cut one down and put it in their living room, which was apparently a Before tradition that Ellie didn’t understand. At least the tree in town made sense. They planted it into the ground, at least, but Joel just dragged the dead tree inside, nailed to two pieces of plywood to keep it upright and slightly wobbly. They didn’t have a lot of decorations last year, but Joel cut out a star out of a piece of plastic and rigged a little lightbulb inside it. It went on top of the tree, and their presents to each other all rested underneath it. It was calm. And it was nice, getting the chance to have something pointless. If they could afford to do something as dumb as hauling a dead tree in the house for no reason, it meant they were safe. And Ellie feels safe. Even though the winter made her uneasy, even though the snow reminds her of dangerdangerdanger, she feels safe.

She stares at their Christmas tree in her dreams long enough that it eventually stops being a Christmas tree at all, and suddenly it’s just a regular evergreen tree still in the forest, surrounded by millions of others just like it. She’s on top of Shimmer, and she knows in her heart that she’s leaving Jackson. She dreams of herding moon sheep all the way to Salt Lake City, of forcing the Fireflies to start over on the vaccine, of being useful.

-=+=-

Ellie wakes up in her bed.

Joel has clearly moved her during the night, and it speaks volumes as to how much her body implicitly trusts him that him jostling her up to her bedroom didn’t wake her up.

It’s early— so early that it might still be classified as “late” rather than “early”. Ellie isn’t sure what woke her up, maybe her body just knew she had to get ready to leave.

Ellie slowly gets vertical, slow enough that not even Joel would be able to hear her getting out of bed, and tiptoes to the wall where the floorboards don’t creak. Her door is already open, thankfully, so she doesn’t have to go through the painstaking process of opening it without it making noise, and she slowly walks towards the stairs. Joel’s bedroom door is open like it always is, but Benji isn’t sleeping in his bed anymore; Maria has taken the baby home.

The floorboard outside of Joel’s bedroom creaks, and Ellie bolts back to bed. The floorboards keep creaking, and even though she hasn’t seen him, doesn’t know which of his hundred flannel shirts he chose to wear today, doesn’t know if he’s wearing his double-layered windbreaker or his fleece-lined leather jacket, she can still see him when he reaches her doorway. She thinks she’ll always be able to picture him perfectly even when her eyes are closed.

He’s leaning against the doorway, one hand on his hip, and he’s staring at her. She knows he is. He normally does this on his own fuzzy days, and Ellie has woken up many times to see him in the doorway, or sitting on her floor with his back against her closet doors, ot kneeling at the foot of her bed, staring at her, like if he doesn’t, she’ll fade away. She pretends to sleep when it happens, and he pretends like he doesn’t know she’s seen him. But this isn’t that, Ellie doesn’t think.

He used to be able to tell when Ellie was faking sleep. When she broke her arm falling off a roof last year on a contracting job they were working together, and she’d landed herself in the clinic, Joel had several sternly-worded conversations with Maria and Tommy regarding Ellie’s fitness for work while Ellie was meant to be sleeping away the pain of having her shoulder reset. They had all spoken in these hushed voices like they didn’t want Ellie to hear or know, but as soon as Maria and Tommy left, Joel had turned to her and asked her what she felt about working. It was like he could hear her neurons firing in her brain or hear her heart beating.

She’s gotten better at feigning sleep, though, now that she knows what real sleep is supposed to feel like. She didn’t know before that her breathing was supposed to even, that her body would occasionally fidget until it was comfortable without her actively choosing to. She was never safe enough to sleep deep enough to do so until she came to Jackson, nor did she know anyone else who could.

But now she does. She knows what Joel looks like, feels like, sounds like when he’s really asleep. She knows he sometimes doesn’t wake up at all when she crawls into his bed, that his arms wrapping around her are completely involuntary, that he doesn’t control the sloppy kiss he smacks on her forehead. She knows how to mimic it, now that she knows what it is, so she doesn’t think he can tell she’s awake, not from all the way over there at least.

But he’s still just staring at her, unmoving. He stares at her for so long that she begins to actually fall back asleep, from her eyes being closed for so long, and from the sense of calm that comes from the fact that Joel is watching over her. She can feel herself listing back to sleep when the floorboard creaks again, and Sarah joins Joel.

“Hey,” she says softly, so softly Ellie probably wouldn’t have heard it if she was actually asleep, light sleeping be damned. She whispers it, breathes it, like Ellie is worth taking the care to not wake up.

“Hey,” Joel breathes back. “Time to go?”

Sarah doesn’t say anything, so Ellie assumes she’s just nodded.

“Alright. I’m gonna say goodbye, then I’ll come downstairs.”

The floorboards creak again with Sarah’s departure, and then the ones in her room protest under Joel’s weight. His big hand envelops her back, and he moves it in soft circles around her back until she starts to stir.

“You don’t have to wake up for real, baby, I just wanted to say goodbye.” Ellie hums at him, the same sleepy way he hums at her when she asks him too many questions before he’s had his coffee. She opens her eyes, and he smiles down at her, and Ellie is reminded why she didn’t want to look at him before she left. His eyes are so soft, and that’s for her, all for her, that look is hers, no matter how much it feels like it hasn’t been in the last two weeks. She suddenly feels bone-tired with the self-admission.

“Go kill a Clicker for me,” she mumbles, and she’s asleep before she even hears him laugh.

-=+=-

Becca doesn’t even question Ellie stockpiling food at breakfast. Ellie tells her that they’re out of stock of the hardtack that Joel hoards because he never feels like going all the way to the dining hall or the storage depot before he leaves for a long patrol. Becca gives her more than a month’s worth of the stuff, as well as their rations of canned goods for the month. Ellie almost feels bad for stealing some of their food, especially now that there’s another mouth to feed in their house, but she’s not gonna take all of it, and Joel has a good enough relationship with their neighbors that they’ll help him if he runs out. Becca also gives her four big tupperwares full of frozen bean soup and other stuff Ellie likes eating on the days when she can’t bring herself to go to the dining hall. She’ll leave that for Joel, since she’s taking so many of their nonperishables. Ellie brings her the wooden chair and little carved deer she commissioned from Joel in return.

No one around town even looks at her funny, hauling all her guns on her back around town. They probably assume she’s up in the patrol rotation. They wave at her, a couple of them ask her for favors, or to remind Joel of something or another. They’ll forgive him when he doesn’t show, hopefully. Dina will forgive her when she misses Hanukkah celebrations. Hopefully.

No one questions her at all, with her pack, and all her guns, and three duffel bags full of stuff she’s going to load on Shimmer, until she reaches the stables.

“Absolutely not,” Danny Green says without looking up from the cigarette he’s lighting.

“Fuck you, man,” Ellie says, making her way towards Shimmer’s stall and starting to tack her up.

“I’m not gonna be the one responsible when Joel comes up here swearing up a storm because someone let you come after him. Turn around.”

“Like any of you could stop me,” Ellie scoffs, tightening the straps around Shimmer’s stomach. “And I’m not going after him, anyway.”

“Bullshit,” Danny laughs incredulously.

“I’m not. I’m just leaving. I’ll be back by the end of spring.”

“What the shit?” Danny asks, suddenly stunned into caring enough to actually look properly at Ellie. “The fuck do you think you’re going that’ll have you gone til spring?”

Ellie considers lying, but Danny would see right through her, and that would be a problem. A Jackson tracking squad with sniffer dogs would be on her tail before Ellie could even say ‘Salt Lake City,’ let alone actually get there.

“Can you keep a secret?”

Danny huffs in agreement and annoyance, and a small part of Ellie's brain thinks it’s funny that she’s learned to decode his old man grunts.

“Danny, you know how Joel and I came here in winter, and then we left and came back?”

Danny raises an eyebrow. “Yeah, kid, I know that. E’rrybody knows that.”

“I’m immune.”

His eyebrow raises so high Ellie thinks it’s gonna disappear into his hairline. “You wanna pick a topic, kid? I’m not following. None of that seems related.”

“The only reason Joel and I came to Jackson in the first place was because Joel took on a contract to smuggle me out of Boston and to get me to Fireflies out west, but we didn’t know where we were going. We knew Tommy was a Firefly before, and that he might know where we were going. Joel was supposed to take me to the Fireflies so they could make a cure with my blood or something. So that’s what he did, he took me to Colorado, then Salt Lake City. But they couldn’t make the cure. They gave up. So we came back here.”

Danny blinks. Ellie stares at him pointedly, but he makes no move to acknowledge what she said. She huffs at his stoicism and rolls up her sleeve. “Why do you think I did something as stupid as getting a tattoo from my ex-girlfriend without telling Joel? I had to hide the bite scar.”

Danny still doesn’t say anything, but he shifts uncomfortably.

“Actually, it was to hide the chemical burn that I gave myself to hide the bite scar. But, whatever, same thing.”

Danny still doesn’t say anything. He just sits there with his eyes trained on her, eyebrow hiked so far up it starts to blend with his hair. Ellie dosn’t know what to think. A blank look can mean anything, in Ellie’s experience. Anything from you’ve gotta be shitting me, to I’m trying to figure out how to most effectively kill you, to I’m happy but surprised so I’m gonna go catatonic about it.

“Please don’t shoot me. That would be really fuckin’ lame.” Ellie says, when she’s spent a second trying to decipher Danny’s blank look and still can’t figure it out.

“I’m not gonna shoot ya, kid. But that doesn’t explain where you’re going.”

“I’m gonna go back to Salt Lake and make them try again. They have to start over. There has to be a way to do it.”

“And you’re just gonna run away? Just gonna leave without tellin’ your daddy where you’re going?”

“He’s not my—” Ellie starts, but she doesn’t have time to argue about it. She keeps loading her stuff onto Shimmer. “He’d just stop me. I can’t let him do that. I have to try, Danny. You can tell him once I’ve gotten a head start. He won’t be able to catch me until we’re too far to turn back.”

“Ellie—”

“And it’s not running away.”

Danny pulls a face.

“It’s not! Running away is trying to escape your own problems. I’m trying to solve my problem. I’m immune. I can help make a cure, I’m going to go try. Joel’s gone, which makes it the perfect time for me to go without getting into a fight about it.”

Danny just blinks again, and honest to god, Ellie doesn’t think she’s ever heard him this quiet.

“Danny, please, you have to help me out. I can’t sit here and do nothing anymore. I can’t sit here with my family knowing they could die from an Infected tomorrow and I could have done something about it. I have to try again.”

Danny makes a pained face, and though it’s not really what Ellie was going for, it’s better than the blank nothingness he’d been giving her before..

“I can do it, Danny, I can. I know the road is dangerous, but I’m good. I’m a great shot, almost as good as Joel, better than Graham. I know how to survive, I did it on my own for a long time. I have to. I have to. I have to protect Jackson. I could make life so much better. No more putting down our neighbors because they got bit. Please, Danny.”

For the first time since she met him, Ellie sees Danny look afraid. Really afraid, and conflicted to boot. Danny understands her more than anyone else in Jackson except Joel. He gets what it feels like to leave Jackson with the herd, to be free like a horse, like a cow, with no responsibilities except living. He also knows what it’s like to be responsible for other people’s safety. He knows he won’t stop her, but his old man heart that couldn’t save his granddaughter isn’t letting him believe it.

“Please, Danny. Please. Pleasepleaseplease–”

Danny opens his mouth to decide her verdict, but he never gets the chance.

The radio on his workshop desk in the corner blares to life.

“Mayday, Jackson!” It croaks, and Ellie’s heart drops into her shoes, because it’s Sarah.

“This is Copper Mine, Copper Mine is overrun, I repeat, Copper Mine is overrun with Infected, more than I can count. We’re holed up in the operator’s room, and the door seems like it’ll hold, but Joel is down! We need help!” The radio crackles back into silence, and whoever was working the radio tower must have been on break, because no one responds immediately. Not fast enough. It takes Amy almost a full minute to wheel back into the radio control room if she’s downstairs for something. Ellie knows this firsthand.

Danny blinks at the radio. Then at Ellie. Ellie holds her breath.

He goes to reach a hand out to her, like that will stop what happens next. The world stops. Ellie exhales.

She sprints at him, snatching the radio, and while Danny probably could’ve held her down in his prime, he’s too old now to do anything more than grasp weakly at her while she yanks herself and the radio out of his grip.

Shimmer is tacked. Her stuff is packed. She’s the only one in Jackson prepared to offer immediate aid. Even if Tommy runs at a dead sprint from the other side of town from the council building, it’ll take him at least 15 minutes to get here and another 10 to get his horse tacked to ride out. Longer, if he has to wait for a squad. Ellie is half an hour ahead of the next person who can offer aid.

“Copper Mine, this is Ellie Miller. I’m on my way.”

Chapter Text

Thankfully, the wall is close to the stables.

Thankfully, the people of Jackson generally trust her judgement unless Joel or Tommy or Maria’s opinions override hers.

Thankfully, Ellie makes it through the East Gate before Joel gets his hands on the radio.

“Jackson Wall, do not let my girl through without a squad, do not—”

“She’s already out, Joel,” Tommy’s voice crackles through the radio as Ellie pushes Shimmer faster. “And as much as I hate it, if you need immediate aid, she’s as good as you’re gonna get unless you wanna wait another half-hour.”

“Ellie, turn around,” Joel’s voice filters through, and Ellie can hear the pain he’s in. “Ellie, the door is strong, we can wait another half an hour. Baby do not come here with no backup, there’s too many of them. Turn around!”

The buttons on the radio are too small to press with her gloves on, so she takes them off as she presses Shimmer even faster. One of them flies out of her grip as she tries to get a hold of the radio, but Ellie’s moving too fast to do much more than reach half heartedly as it flies away. Her hands will be near frozen by the time she makes it to the mine, but that’s okay. She’d need to take her gloves off to shoot anyway. “Shut up, old man. I’m on my way. 10 minutes—“ She cuts herself as Shimmer barely misses tripping over a tree trunk half-hidden in the snow. “I’ll be careful.”

He, along with everyone else listening in on the radio in Jackson, must know better than to argue with Ellie when it comes to Joel’s wellbeing, because the radio is silent after that.

The mine has a watchtower which has a side that faces the operating room. If Ellie can just get there, she can climb it and pick them off from afar. She has enough ammo packed to get her through a hundred hordes of infected. She can manage one.

She got away from a town full of cannibals who wanted her dead.

She got out of a FEDRA-controlled QZ as an infected person.

She killed someone who was going to kill Joel.

And she’d killed about a hundred Infected in a place more rotted and abandoned, with worse cover than the mine.

This is going to be a piece of cake.

-=+=-

She ties Shimmer to the fence of the mine, feeling lucky that they haven’t encountered any Infected yet. Ellie hopes, a little morbidly, that they’re all too focused on Joel and Sarah in the fortified control room to notice Ellie climbing the rickety old tower, but it’s not the easiest thing to convince herself of. She’s climbing the tower because it has the best vantage point to clear them out, but it has the best vantage point because it’s close, which means that, even if they are focused on Joel and Sarah, there’s a good chance at least a few of them will hear her climbing and seek her out.

She’ll have to deal with that when she gets to it.

She knows without looking that the two main entrances that they usually enter and leave through on patrol are no good. They’re wide open, with no cover and nothing good to use as a distraction. If Ellie wants any chance of making it to the tower, she has to steer clear of them.

There’s only one other way into Copper Mine, one that the adults don’t know about. Through the weed room.

It’s not the big one that Eugene actually farms out of (which he keeps secret so no one raids it, but personally, Ellie thinks he’s hiding it somewhere else along this patrol route) just a little storage closet on the second floor of the old mine administration building. As much of a cranky old bitch as Eugene is, he’s always been one for a little teenage rebellion. He figured if kids were old enough to go on patrols with ‘big fuckass guns,’ then they were also old enough to smoke a little pot. That’s why he stashed the mini weed room in the depths of the easiest patrol route. It’s just one tiny little basement closet, but someone brought beanbags and bongs and blankets to it once upon a time, so it was pretty nice.

Ellie didn’t like smoking; it made her hazey in a way that was too similar to her fuzzy days. Dina told her where the room is anyways, just in case Ellie ever changed her mind. The adults paired with kids on their first patrol were never in charge of clearing buildings— that was always the first test for the trainee, clearing the admin building by themselves— which meant that only trainees would ever be in the position to find the room.

But more important to Ellie than the pot stashed in it is the secret door. The weed room has a hidden door that leads out to a ladder to the ground floor and a busted up back fence that is insultingly easy to scale, just in case any of the adults ever catch on and someone needs to make a quick escape. Which means that it’s also perfect for Ellie’s sneaky entrance into the mine. Infected can climb ladders, but they usually don’t unless there’s a reason to. That means that even when the mine isn’t clear, the weed room, on the second floor, is. But the rest of the building is not. So the problem is, it means Ellie has to clear out the building before she can make her way to the tower to help Joel and Sarah.

Or she can take the risk, run through the building, and hope there’s no stragglers.

And like.

It’s not really a choice, is it? Spend half an hour clearing this building or get to Joel quicker. Not something she really has to think about.

Ellie takes the stairs to the first floor two at a time, something Joel always tells her not to do so she doesn’t bust up her face.

She’s too focused now to let that happen, but she does think it would be horribly ironic if it did, Ellie injuring herself in her quest to save Joel.

Not clearing the building is the right choice, right up until it’s not. There’s nothing, not even a mouse, in the entire administration building until the second she sights the front door, running as fast as she can.

Then a stalker sprints out at her and they collide in a butting of heads three feet from the door. By some miracle, the impact didn’t knock her out, but it certainly did more damage to her than it did to the stalker.

It recovers quickly. Ellie does not, the impact having left her sprawled on the ground.

“Fucking, ugh,” she spits from her place on the ground, swabbing around her mouth with her tongue to make sure she didn’t knock out a tooth. She tastes iron, so something happened, but thankfully her teeth seem to be intact. She’ll ponder the blood later.

The stalker is staring at her, unmoving, tilting its head like an animal. The fungus growing out of its eyes points straight upwards, and Ellie has the most ridiculous thought— that with its curious tilted stare and its antler-like fungus, it almost looks like a deer. A deer that got hit on the highway, where Ellie plays the part of the semi truck that smashed the fuck into it.

It’s not attacking her, though, which is strange even for a stalker. They’ll hide, but they know when they’ve been found, and they know when it’s time to attack. But this one just sits there staring at her, and Ellie jolts when she realizes that it can still see, but just barely.

She swallows thickly and shuffles backwards, and she’s suddenly reminded of the position she’s in.

She grabs her pistol from the ankle holster, holding her breath so the stalker doesn’t suddenly remember she’s there. Her shot hits its target, the bullet passing right above the bridge of where its nose would’ve been.

It’s not that Ellie didn’t think when she shot the damn thing. She did, but clearly not enough. The logic behind shooting it was that since there were no more infected in the building, there would be no harm in the sound of the gunshot. The rest of the fuckers were too focused on Sarah and Joel, making too much noise to hear her.

She was wrong. Faulty logic.

As Ellie pushes open the door, fifty feet from the base of the tower, she hears the screeches that signify more infected coming her way.

She doesn’t even look.

She just runs.

They scream at her as she sprints clumsily through the fresh snow, feet sinking in, and she has half a mind to radio Sarah and ask her to cause a distraction, but she’d never get the radio out in time to stop her sudden doom.

The rungs on the ladder are slick and freezing on her bare hands, but she’s never been more thankful for them when she reaches them and wrenches herself upwards, towards the first platform. The infected can climb, but not as fast as Ellie can.

But her superior climbing skills only get her so far when they’re right on her heels. One catches her, grabbing her ankle and wrenching it downwards when she’s nearly to the first platform. Pain shoots down her side, her leg nearly ripped out of its socket, and her whole left leg goes numb. Ellie hooks her arm around the rung and fires two shots into the runner’s face. As its body falls, it brings down two other infected that have almost reached Ellie with it, and she’s free to haul herself onto the first platform while infected trip over each other trying to get up the ladder.

Ellie has a second to breathe, to think about how much white-hot pain her leg is in, but only a second.

She inhales deeply once, then grabs her shotgun, which had been slung over one shoulder, her rifle on the other.

She aims down the rungs of the ladder, where there are about a dozen infected still fighting (and failing) to climb after her. Ellie’s sawed-off finishes them off with three shots straight down the barrel of the ladder.

Finally, Ellie has the chance to look towards the entrance to the mine, towards the solid steel door which Joel and Sarah hide behind. The door’s holding, but Ellie can’t imagine it will hold for much longer. It’s denting under the weight of at least a hundred infected that are pushing inwards on it.

‘We can wait thirty more minutes’ my ass, old man, she thinks angrily at Joel, hoping he can somehow hear her thoughts from inside the blast doors.

The idea of climbing up the rest of the ladder with her hip hurting the way it does is so painful that Ellie’s eyes start to water just with the idea of it. But it’s safer for both her and Joel if she doesn’t start shooting til she’s at the top, so Ellie sucks it up. Thirteen fuckers down, a hundred more to go.

She paws her radio out of her pocket when she reaches the top, panting and wincing at the way she kind of can’t feel her left leg. “Alright, fuckers, these shots are about to get a lot closer to home, are you ready?” she says into the radio, putting as much bravado into her voice as she can, hoping that it’s enough to mask the amount of pain that she’s in to Joel.

“Yeah— we’re rea—, -–by.” Joel’s voice crackles through, and it’s only then, with the radio fucking up, that Ellie notices that the snow had started picking up again. If Joel was only a few hundred feet away, and he was breaking up this bad, Ellie imagines both of them are totally incomprehensible to Jackson Tower.

“Good, because the storm’s picking up. I don’t know that backup’s coming any time soon.”

Joel says something to that, probably telling Ellie that she shouldn’t be outside in the middle of the storm, but she can’t make out any words.

“I can’t hear you. Hold your hats.”

She lies prone and lines up her shot at the horde. There’s so many of them near the door that Ellie almost doesn’t have to use a scope or anything, even as the snow starts to whip around her vision. The horde is so big, she’d probably hit a bunch of them just by firing aimlessly into the crowd. She wishes she had an automatic, but those were banned in Jackson, except for the ones on the wall. They only had four of them, and they were mounted to each gate, in case they needed to stop a wall breach.

Ellie aims for the one in front, a clicker which is throwing itself against the door with no regard to the fact that it's hurting itself— breaking little pieces of fungus off of its head and arms— as it hurdles itself towards Joel and Sarah. If she aims well, she can probably take a couple of others down with it.

She breathes in deeply, and squeezes the trigger firmly and decisively as she exhales. Every time she shoots a long shot like this, she can’t help but think of Joel trying to get his targets pregnant with his weirdly sensual shooting technique. Oddly enough, the thought, which might have distracted someone else, always makes Ellie shoot better. Which, in hindsight, was probably Joel’s whole point, but that doesn’t mean that he didn’t still sound really stupid while he made it.

Three infected go down— the clicker, which Ellie got through the chest and probably isn’t actually dead yet— and two runners which Ellie got in the head before her rifle round made it to the clicker. The rest of the infected screech, but make no other move to find out what downed their friends, too focused on the target in front of them.

Out of the corner of Ellie’s eye, she sees a few stalkers get smart and head towards the window. The window is sturdy— two inches of shock proof glass meant to withstand an explosion if the flammable dust in the mine were ever to catch fire and a wire caging meant to stop the glass from completely shattering if it ever did break— still, it’s been 25 years minimum since the last time it was inspected, and infected have scary super-strength, so Ellie doesn’t want to let them get any closer to the window than they already are.

Three shots later, four stalkers are down.

She swings back to the main entrance and keeps picking off infected, lining up her shots to get more than one as often as possible.

After a few minutes, she’s thinned out the crowd enough that they’re no longer doing any damage to the door, and they’re making no progress on getting closer to Sarah and Joel.

A few more after that, she’s down to a few stragglers, mostly stalkers that have buried themselves in the snow and behind abandoned cars and pallets to evade Ellie’s shots. She hates the fuckin’ smart ones.

“Alright, there are a few more, but I gotta get closer,” Ellie says into the walkie as she prepares herself to get down the ladder with her fucked up leg, hopefully without braining herself on the way down. “I’ll let you know when it’s clear.” She puts the walkie down, then adds— “It’s not clear yet.” just in case the radio cut out and they only caught the last part.

“Got it,” comes Sarah’s reply, scratchy and whiny through the shitty connection. Ellie doesn’t hear her say anything else, but the line keeps coming through with static, so she really hopes Sarah’s not saying anything else that Ellie can’t hear.

Her hands are fucking freezing, so instead of trying to grip the rungs, she loops her elbows around them. It makes for way slower getting down, but also way less of a chance of accidentally letting go.

Part of Ellie thinks she might die climbing this ladder. Her fucked up leg is gonna slip out from underneath her, or she’s gonna fall off, or she might just freeze to death her blood crystallizing and muscles freezing up, her body stuck up here until the snow thaws.

But she makes it down, slowly but surely, with the knowledge that there are stalkers waiting for her when she lands.

She misses the last rung.

The rough landing jars her leg in a way that she thinks is probably really bad, but through the adrenaline and numbing cold, she can’t actually feel her leg to know how bad she’s fucked it up. It hurts, throbbing with pain, but can’t bring herself to look at it. No matter what she were to see if she looked down, she still has to drag herself towards the mine anyway. Joel came for her in the snow when he was half dead, and actively bleeding out. She can come for him with her dislocated hip joint or whatever the fuck that infected did to her leg.

One of the stalkers is hiding behind a car, but since it can’t see, it can’t actually tell that it’s hiding behind a window. “97,” Ellie whispers as she lines up the shot. Ellie’s (Joel’s) revolver takes it out nicely, a neat hole in the glass and a dead stalker. The shot makes three others shriek, but they don’t rush her. It makes Ellie antsy. She hates the hiders.

She ducks under an old cargo truck, a big one with an open top that was probably used to haul copper from the mine to the train, once upon a time. Infected don’t usually look down, so Ellie’s banking on the idea that the stalkers will have expected her to go around the truck.

While she’s lying there prone, she sees two more stalkers waiting to ambush her from opposite sides of the truck. She is so fucking good at this apocalypse shit.

They’re far enough apart that they can’t hear each other, especially with the wind whipping as hard as it is, so Ellie gets up and limps to one of them, stabbing it in its jugular with her knife. She spins, using its body for cover, as she shoots the other, which has finally decided to rush her. “99. Pretty close,” she says to herself as she finally straightens out. “100 would have been cooler.”

Her hip hurts something awful, and Ellie thinks her finger might be frozen on the trigger, but she’s done it. Joel and Sarah are safe.

She hobbles through the door, and knocks three times. One short rap, then two heavy knocks— morse code for ‘EM.’ It was her “all safe” call sign among Millers.

“Open it up Sarah, it’s all right. It’s just Ellie,” She hears faintly from the other side, and the infected must have gotten way closer to getting to Joel and Sarah than Ellie thought, because Ellie shouldn’t have been able to hear Joel’s voice through the thick metal door.

Ellie hears the screech of the latch being undone, and then the door swings inwards about a quarter of the way. It’s too fucked up and dented to open any further.

“God, my fucking fingers are gonna fall off,” Ellie mumbles as she tumbles past Sarah and through the door, immediately noticing the fire Joel and Sarah scrounged up, venting through the emergency hood. “Coldcoldcoldcoldcold.”

“Ellie,” Joel mumbles from where he’s propped up on the ground, looking stern and unappreciative of Ellie’s sacrifice of almost freezing into an Ellie-sicle for him.

“Can’t talk. Freezing to death,” Ellie responds, hobbling towards the fire, completely ignoring Sarah and Joel.

“Ellie.”

“What, Joel, give me a minute!”

She finally whips towards him, and he’s got the eyebrow of doom raised at her for her backtalk. She makes a guilty face as she meets his eyes, but rather than scolding her for ignoring him and being flippant about his concern, his expression softens.

“Y’alright, baby?” he asks gently, his accent slipping out through his stress.

“Leg hurts,” Ellie replies, holding her hands out to the fire. “Cold as fuck. Otherwise, I’m okay.”

His face hardens back into a scowl as soon as she confirms that she’s okay.

“Alright, then, you wanna talk about what possessed you to ride out here all by yourself? With no backup, a walkie that only half worked, and no gloves?”

“I had gloves,” Ellie says petulantly. “I just lost one of them. And I can’t shoot right with gloves on. And I was the only person who could help.”

“That does not mean you ride out alone, Ellie, you could have gotten yourself killed!”

“And if I hadn’t ridden out alone, you and Sarah would be dead. I could hear your voices from the outside— the door wasn’t going to hold for much longer. That means those fuckers would’ve had the door open before anyone else could have reached you—“

“Sarah and I would’ve been fine, Ellie, you shouldn’t have—“

“Am I having a fucking stroke? Am I fourteen again? Are we back in Pittsburg and you’re scolding me for shooting a guy who was gonna drown you in four inches of water? There was no getting out of this one, Joel, and last time I checked, you were perfectly aware that I could handle myself! In fact, last time you were in trouble like that, you apologized for underestimating me and handed me a rifle to watch your back—“

“Ellie, me trusting you to watch my back when there’s no other choice and no way around it does not mean I want or need you to put yourself in unnecessary harm to do it now—“

“I don’t fucking care!” Ellie screams. “You’re not allowed to fucking leave me, so I came to help you because that’s what we do for each other. There’s no changing it now. It’s done, I saved your fucking life again, you’re ungrateful as per fucking usual, and— woah, what the fuck?”

Ellie tears her eyes away from Joel, whose stupid grownup I-know-better face is really pissing her off. As her eyes leave Joel’s, they drift towards Sarah.

Sarah, who is pointing a gun right at the space between Ellie’s eyes.

Chapter Text

“Sarah baby, put the fucking gun down.” Joel’s voice is deadly quiet, and Ellie doesn’t think he’s talked to Sarah with anything near that level of seriousness since she came back.

Ellie deliriously thinks that there’s nothing he could do even if he wanted to. He’s laid up on the ground with a splint around his leg, and fuck, Ellie hadn’t even gotten the chance to ask how he’d gotten it, yet. She had no idea what happened, why he was lying there in the ground, up on his elbow with his arm braced against the ground like he could get up if he wanted to, even though the amount of blood staining the tourniquet around his leg says otherwise.

If Sarah decides to kill Ellie right now, Joel couldn’t do a damn thing. He couldn’t get to her in time even if he wanted to.

God, what if he didn’t want to?

Sarah is shaking her head minutely, looking like she’s had to force herself into the action. Ellie thinks it’s funny, actually, that Sarah seems to be the one who’s frightened even though Ellie’s the one with the gun pointed at her head.

“No,” Sarah mumbles, almost to herself. “No, no no no.”

Joel tries to stand up, but with his leg splinted straight, he can’t get his knee under him to actually get any leverage to stand. He hobbles into a strange kneeling position, one leg tucked under himself and the other uselessly sprawled to his side. “Sarah, put the gun down. What are you doing?”

Sarah keeps shaking her head, to herself, like she didn’t hear a word Joel said. “No, you shouldn’t have to— not again. Not again. So I’ll do it.”

“Sarah, what the fuck are you talking about?” Joel hisses sharply, and all of Ellie’s fears about him letting Sarah shoot her disappear, because he’s shuffling on the ground towards Ellie, trying to put himself between her and Sarah, trying to shield her even though he can’t even stand. “Sarah, put the gun down. Talk to me, baby.”

Sarah’s shaking so hard that Ellie bets she could draw and fire her pistol before Sarah shoots her, but where would that leave them? Both of them dead? Joel following them soon after? Ellie may be young, but she isn’t naive enough to believe he wouldn’t kill himself if he lost both of them on the same day.

“You shouldn’t have to kill her. I wouldn’t make you do that. So I have to. I have to, I won’t make you do it.”

“Sarah, I would never do that, what are you talking about, sweetheart?” Joel sounds a bit frantic now, like he’s finally realized that there’s no way he’s getting to Ellie in time if Sarah is serious about pulling the trigger. “No one’s shooting Ellie, Sarah, put the fuckin’ gun down.” He’s trying to keep his voice soft for Sarah’s sake, but he’s having a hard time of it. Anger and desperation in equal parts seep out of his voice like air from a leaky balloon. His face goes hard, and Ellie can tell how desperately he is trying to keep the Joel Ellie met in Boston at bay. Boston, smuggler, ruthless, hardass Joel had no place in Jackson. No place here, with Sarah and Ellie. But he’s close to unleashing it on Sarah— Ellie can practically taste how close he is.

Sarah comes to herself, just for a second, still shaking like she’s about to vibrate out of her own body. She gestures at Ellie with her gun. “Daddy, she—” Sarah swallows hard, and points at Ellie’s leg with her gun.

For the first time, Ellie looks down at her own leg. She hadn’t wanted to look at it— she hadn’t had the time, and she didn’t want to see something ugly and painful that would slow her down.

There’s a bite on her ankle. It’s torn the bottom of her jeans and ripped into her flesh. Suddenly Sarah’s standoff makes a lot more sense.

The infected that fucked up her leg didn’t just grab her leg and pull, it bit her and pulled, latching on with teeth and jarring Ellie’s leg downwards. It was a good thing Ellie’s leg is so numb, because the thing ripped out a chunk of skin big enough that when Ellie had time to think, it was definitely going to hurt bad.

Without meaning to, entirely inappropriate for the situation, and uncaring of the gun pointed at her head, Ellie swears. “That motherfucker! Now I can’t wear shorts, either? Fuck! Motherfucking asshole, I didn't even notice. Fucking motherfucker I’m gonna— Now I have to—” Some tiny part of Ellie deep in the back of her mind, sounding suspiciously like Joel, scolds her for caring more about the fact that she can’t wear shorts than she cared about the imminent threat to her life. Ellie tells it to shut up.

“Sarah, put the gun down. Nothing’s happening to Ellie,” Joel interrupts her bitching about the inevitable scar, and Ellie cuts herself off abruptly as she is reminded of the situation she’s in. “Ellie, a little more care when there’s someone pointing a gun at you, please.”

“Wait, you didn’t fucking tell her?” Ellie whips towards Joel incredulously.

Joel flinches. “It was your business, Ellie, I wanted you to be able to tell her yourself.”

“Well look how that turned out, Joel, what the fuck.”

Sarah still has the gun pointed at Ellie, but she’s also still shaking like a leaf. Ellie could probably walk right up and press the barrel of Sarah’s gun to her head and Sarah wouldn’t do anything about it. Joel would probably have a conniption, though.

“Sarah, Ellie is immune,” Joel says softly, putting his hands up placatingly, soothing Sarah like he would a horse. “Baby, nothing’s gonna happen to her. You don’t need to shoot her. No one needs to shoot anyone. Just put the gun down.”

Sarah’s eyes, which had been glazed over with fear and unshed tears, finally clear up as she comes back to herself. “What?”

“Ellie can’t get infected. Nothin’s gonna happen to her. Put the gun down.”

“That’s– That’s not possible,” Sarah stuttered, and Ellie sees something in her straighten, and she levels the barrel back at Ellie. “I won’t make you do it, you shouldn’t have to— not after—” Sarah’s hiccupping her words, but her aim is steadier than it was before. “Not another kid. You shouldn’t have to bury another kid. I’m not gonna—”

There’s a noise behind Sarah, and Ellie doesn’t think, she just points her 9 mm and shoots, uncaring of the way it must look to Joel and Sarah, who can’t see the—

Sarah looks so out of place with the revolver in her hand that it doesn’t even register in Ellie’s fight-mode brain that she’s even a threat until Sarah’s gun goes off a fraction of a second after her own.

It’s only a miracle, and the fact that Sarah’s clearly never shot a gun in her life, that has Sarah’s bullet missing Ellie’s skull, going over her head by several inches as Ellie throws herself to the ground so hard she ends up practically tackling Joel, jostling both of their fucked up legs. They both groan in pain, as Sarah whimpers at the sight of the smoking gun. Sarah’s eyes look wild, but (at the very least) she looks more than relieved that her bullet missed.

“What the fuck,” Ellie moans emphatically from the ground, “was that for?”

“Ellie,” Joel growls from the floor. “What the fuck is wrong with you?!”

“What the fuck is wrong with me? She shot at me!”

“After you shot at her first, Ellie, what—”

Ellie makes a noise of protest, gesturing wildly to the spot behind Sarah, maybe five feet behind her and a foot to her left, where a stalker lies twitching on the ground with a chunk of its head blown off. Ellie hadn’t quite made her mark, a little preoccupied with not getting shot herself. The stalker is still screeching, tinny and gurgling, the sounds malformed on the basis of half of its jaw being missing.

Sarah whips around to see the thing, and Ellie cocks her gun again, to the protest of Joel and Sarah, and shoots it once more, a headshot this time, and it stops moving at all.

“Motherfucker, did you think I was going to shoot Sarah after I just spent like an hour saving your asses? Do you really—”

Sarah and Joel make twin offended noises, and both start talking at the same time, cutting Ellie off and both scolding her so hard and fast she can’t really make out what they’re saying.

Holy shit, she thinks instead of listening to their lectures.

Joel thought she was going to shoot his fucking kid.

He really thought that little of her.

It was one thing for Sarah to think it. Sarah didn’t know her, had no reason to trust her, and had a real reason to believe that Ellie had just been infected. She had backed Ellie into a corner, and people do dangerous things when they’re cornered. Sarah had every right to be wary.

But Joel thought she was going to shoot his kid. In cold blood.

“Shut up,” Ellie says, quietly, but loud enough that it makes Joel and Sarah stop their lectures mid sentence in shock. “I don’t fucking care. I’m leaving.”

Joel snorts in the way he always does when he’s gearing up to yell at Ellie. Maria always says he sounds like a bull getting ready to charge when he does that. Right now, he’s angry and spitting and ready to gore something, and Ellie is waving a red cape with no rodeo clowns in sight. Ellie doesn’t care. She’ll be the fucking matador. She’ll rile him up until he’s seething with it.

“Save it, Joel, I don’t want to hear it. I’m not going to sit here and be lectured after I just saved both of your fucking lives. I didn’t put up with it when I was fourteen and I’m sure as hell not doing it now.”

Ellie holsters her gun on her thigh, pushing past Sarah back to the half-open door, kicking the stalker out of her way. “That was an even one hundred, by the way,” she says childishly, because there’s a part of her that wants him to know how well she’s done, even though she’s furious. Maybe it’s Ellie that’s the bull, because she’s so mad at the fact that she wants his pride even now that she’s seeing red.

“We’ll talk about this when we get home, Ellie.” Joel says finally, lowly, angry in a way that she hasn’t seen him in a while, not since— not since the last time she told him she was leaving.

“Yeah, good luck with that,” she mutters as she continues to cross the room away from him.

“What did you just say?” He asks incredulously, and Ellie should really just let it go, she should just leave and let him figure it out on his own, but she’s so fucking angry, so so angry and she wants to rub it in his stupid smug, pretentious face, his face that could have died today and didn’t even seem to care, or even recognize that Ellie was the only thing that stopped it from happening. Instead, he was laying there on the ground, saying what did you just say to me, like he was some bigwig FEDRA officer who was about to bitchslap her for backtalking to him.

“I said good luck with that, Joel, because I’m not fucking going home. Talk to the wall.”

“And, where, exactly, do you think you’re going?” He asks, and she whips back around to face him, so angry she thinks steam might be coming out of her ears like it does in newspaper comic strips. He’s sitting there with a self-righteous smirk painted on his face, and if he weren’t injured, she thinks his arms would be crossed over his chess and he’d be tapping his foot impatiently.

“Salt Lake City,” she says plainly.

His sanctimonious face drops quicker than Ellie can say ‘Ha!.’ He sits there for long enough that Sarah, who had been silent since she tried to fuckin murder Ellie, speaks up.

“What’s in Salt Lake City?”

“Sarah, not now, bug—”

“Fireflies are in Salt Lake City.” Ellie interrupts, looking at Sarah pointedly. “They failed in making a cure last time, but they won’t again. I’m gonna go find them.”

“No you’re not, Ellie, you’re not goin’ anywhere right now in that snowst—”

“Like hell I’m not,” Ellie spits, making eye contact with Joel, who looks so powerless sitting there on the ground. He wants to get up, she can feel it. He wants to stomp over to her and grab her by the arm and haul her back to Jackson. But he can’t. He’s stuck there on the ground, fucked up leg tied to a rotting board. He can’t stop her going back to Salt Lake any more than she could stop him from driving away from it. “You can’t stop me.”

“Ellie, like it or not, I’m your guardian, and I get to decide what’s best for you. You aren’t going fucking anywhere, and especially not right now. We can talk about this when we get back to Jackson. In private,” he emphasizes, eyes darting quickly towards Sarah, and Ellie scoffs.

“What, are you afraid I’ll embarrass you in front of Sarah? Afraid I’ll show her what a fuckup I really am? Don’t want her to know how dysfunctional Ellie is?”

“Ellie Miller, don’t you go puttin’ words in my mouth, that is not what I meant.”

Ellie laughs sardonically. “So now it’s Ellie Miller? I get to be Ellie Miller when it works in your favor, but you take it away when it suits you? Fuck you, Joel.”

Joel makes an incredulous face. “When did I say that? Ellie, stop—”

Ellie’s jaw drops open. How dare he?

“Only in front of Danny Green and Sarah and the rest of Jackson that were within earshot of the stables that day, only everyone who fucking matters—”

“I did not—”

“Yeah you did,” Sarah says quietly, but it's unexpected enough that it stops Joel dead in his tracks. “You called her Ellie Williams. I didn’t know her whole name before.”

Joel deflates immediately, anger rolling away from him in waves, eyes darting between Sarah and Ellie dejectedly. Ellie swallows, feeling like there’s nails stuck in her throat.

“Ellie, I didn’t mean— Baby, I didn’t do that on purpose, please believe me. I didn’t—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Ellie spits, even though it does.

“I don’t care,” she says, even though she does. “But it’s not something you get to change your mind on. You picked. I’m going to Salt Lake City, and just see what happens if you try to stop me.”

Joel doesn’t raise his voice again. He doesn’t dare, not after both Sarah and Ellie made him feel like the massive ass he was acting. “You can’t,” he says softly, voice hoarse. Ellie moves to say something, but he cuts her off with his hand. “You can’t, Ellie, because there’s nothing there to see.”

Ellie’s heart drops into her shoes.

“What do you– mean,” she asks, voice cracking. “Joel, what does that mean?”

He shakes his head sullenly. “I’m sorry, Ellie.”

“Joel, what the fuck are you talking about?”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Joel!” Ellie’s shaking her head now, too, and she can feel Sarah’s eyes darting between the two of them, confused. She wants to go to him, wants to shake him until he tells her it's just a joke, that he’s pulling her leg with one of his stupid dad jokes that Ellie never ever finds funny, or one of those life lessons he always teaches her at her expense. But he won’t. She knows in her bones that he’s not joking.

“Ellie, there's nothing to see in Salt Lake. There’s no one there.”

“How do you know that? They were fine a couple of years ago, you told me they were fine!” Ellie can feel herself starting to hyperventilate.

Maria was right. It’s the people who love who betray us. She was right about Joel all along. Marlene was right about Joel all along. He was a smuggler. He was a bad person. He was evil, he was a liar.

He lied to her. He lied to her he lied to her he lied he lied he lied he lied.

“Ellie— I didn’t want you to have to shoulder the burden alone, baby girl, I was going to tell you—”

“What. Did you do.” Ellie spits, staring at him, tears gone. “What the fuck did you do?”

She’s halfway across the room from him, but she can still see the way his eyes shine with tears that won’t fall. He shakes his head mournfully. He swallows hard, like he’s preparing mentally for whatever he’s gonna say next. “Gettin’ a cure was going to kill you, Ellie.”

A sob rips its way through her body, but she doesn’t look away from him. He looks at her like he almost can’t stand to do so— so she takes a lesson from Tommy and makes him sit there, staring at her, and she hopes he’s uncomfortable. She hopes he’s itching with her stare, she hopes it’s killing him.

“So I stopped them.”

He doesn’t try to say anything else, even though they sit there in silence for so long, he should be able to come up with something, anything in his own defense. Anything. Anything at all that would justify what he’s done. But he doesn’t. He just sits there, lips pursed, like he’s gearing up to say something that’ll never come.

“How dare you,” she whispers, and it’s not even a question. “How fucking dare you.”

“I’d do it again, Ellie. I’d do it every time. Over and over again, as long as it meant you got to live.”

“What did you do?” she asks again.

He swallows hard. He looks up at Sarah, and Ellie gets it now, why he wanted to have this conversation without Sarah in the room. God forbid he let his perfect fucking daughter know that he was fucking evil.

“I killed ‘em. I killed every single person who was gonna get in the way of me gettin’ you out of that hospital.”

Ellie’s lip trembles. Marlene never would have let her leave. The soldiers listened to her and only her. The doctors, nurses, they were all Fireflies. Everyone listened to her. Which meant he killed them all. Drove her back to Jackson, a hospital full of corpses in his wake.

And he lied to her about it. He smiled and told her there were others like her. That the cure failed because they gave up.

And the worst part was that Ellie fucking knew it. She knew it the whole fucking time.

Part of her had known all along. That first day in Jackson, hiking from the spot the truck broke down. She fucking knew it. She knew he was lying to her even back then, she just hadn’t wanted to admit it to herself. It was why she made him promise.

She made him promise. And he’d fucking lied to her.

Ellie sees red. She is the bullfighter. She is the bull. It doesn’t matter. Either way she’s gonna fucking kill him.

“I hate you,” she whispers to no one instead of acting on her murderous urge. She turns back to the door, getting ready to return to the snowstorm outside.

Joel says something to her turned back, but she can’t hear it. He sounds frantic, and she can hear him shuffling around on the ground. Ellie doesn’t care. He can hobble after her on his broken leg. He can hobble all the way to Jackson, for all Ellie cares. She hopes they have to fucking amputate it. She hopes it hurts, hopes it—

Joel and Sarah are distant memories by the time she reaches Shimmer. She’s not really in control of her body. She can’t feel her fucked up leg as she hauls herself into the saddle. She can’t feel her tears as they freeze running down her cheeks. She can’t feel Shimmer breathing heavy beneath her as she spurs her faster and faster, wanting to get as far south as fast as possible.

The snow piles into her mind, making her brain fuzzy, but this is worse than her worst fuzzy days, this is something different entirely. Usually, her brain fills with cotton on bad days. The cotton makes her fuzzy, but at least it’s warm. At least cotton means she’s safe enough to go catatonic, trusting her family to steer her safely around Jackson. Cotton means she’s home safe as time passes without her knowledge. This is different. Her mind is filled with snow, like an avalanche fell on top of her and knocked the wind out of her. And the snow is worse than the cotton. It’s just as white, just as all-consuming, just as hard to see through, but it’s cold, and numb, and empty.

Ellie is cold, and numb, and empty.

Her body hurdles towards Salt Lake City, but Ellie isn’t sure her mind follows.

Her mind is stuck in a burning mess hall in an old ski lodge in Colorado, surrounded by cannibals and hovering over a corpse that doesn’t even look human anymore.

Her mind is stuck in a froyo shop in an abandoned mall, and the basement of a kitschy house in a boring suburb, as Joel bleeds out next to her.

It’s on an operating table in a Firefly camp where it was supposed to be all along.

It’s left behind in a mine ten minutes outside of Jackson.

It’s somewhere, anywhere else, but it certainly isn’t here with the rest of her, numb with anger, on its way to Salt Lake City.

Chapter Text

It’s mid October, twenty two years after the apocalypse, when raiders finally find Doniphan.

Doniphan, Nebraska, Sarah was told, didn’t have anything in it even before the outbreak. Its claim to fame had been an old Fort Kearny historical marker— not even the actual fort. It was entirely abandoned, didn’t even have a McDonalds, barely had a church. There was nothing east of Doniphan until you hit Lincoln, an hour and a half away by car. South was nothing, north was the river, and west was a state park filled with more nothing.

Sonia had told her once that she thought it was where the apocalypse would start, because the end of the world could go unnoticed. It would have time to fester and bubble over with the rest of the world none the wiser.

She was wrong, of course. It took the better part of a week for the apocalypse to reach Doniphan, since nothing ever came in or out. Which is what made it the perfect haven after Outbreak Day.

Sarah arrived in Doniphan in late spring, months after she was ripped away from her dad in September of 2003. It was so long ago, now, and Sarah had been so sick— she didn’t remember much, except that it was a far cry from Austin. Nothing at all like the city she grew up in— pestering her dad to take her on his jobs in the city, hipsters and the public library and fast food and traffic jams and concerts and weed and the university. She remembers thinking that her preschool back in Austin had been bigger than Doniphan’s sad excuse for a high school.

The day raiders finally found their backwater piece of nothing they called safety, Sarah had been in that same high school she arrived at on that first day, which housed Doniphan’s makeshift hospital in those first months, and had continued to do so ever since. Twenty-odd years later, Sarah was no longer the patient, but the closest thing they had in Doniphan to a doctor.

Or, really, she was now, ever since Dr. Ramirez died.

She had been working on a list for the scouts— a medicine list: must haves, good to haves, can live without if the backpack is full. Most importantly, they needed antibiotics. Desperately.

But right as she was getting up to deliver the list to Sam— a soldier fresh out of basic on Outbreak Day, now Doniphan’s best and only scout— the man himself came bursting through the doors of the hospital with his father, Alex, draped heavily over his shoulder.

“Sammy, what—” Sarah had startled, but he didn’t even seem to register her presence, he just shoved a chair into the handles of the double doors and started pushing a desk up against them.

“Dad, go to Sarah, now.” Sam continued, unholstering his gun and pointing it at the door.

Alex limped to Sarah’s side, where she knelt to his leg to find the problem. The wound on his leg was long, and bleeding steadily, but didn’t seem very deep. Sarah sat him in her chair as she went to get gauze and a bandage.

“Sammy, what’s happening?”

“Raiders,” Sam says breathlessly, keeping his pistol leveled at the door.

Sarah stops breathing. “Sammy, Sonia’s out there with the animals, so is everyone else, why did you—”

“Sarah,” Sam looks at her pleadingly, and Sarah stops asking questions.

-=+=-

Sarah doesn’t remember much of the rest of that day, only that it ended with twelve dead raiders, half the town burned to ash, and only one dead. Sammy took a bullet in the back leading the raiders away, and he still clung to life long enough to take them down with him.

His dad raged. His mom didn’t react at all.

Sarah cried.

The remaining twenty-four Doniphanians headed for Kearney— the only lead they had on somewhere that might be safe.

-=+=-

Sarah had thought she knew everything there was to know about Sonia Keller. She had pin-straight gray hair, so long that the bottom of it was still the mousy brown color it had been before time had turned it gray. She hadn’t had any idea how to take care of Sarah’s hair the first year of taking care of her, but she had been open-minded and eager to learn as Sarah taught her. She was quicker on the uptake than Sarah’s dad had been, after her mom left. By the time Sarah was fifteen, Sonia could do more intricate braids than Sarah got back in Austin, in those months when her dad had the extra cash to take her to the better braiding shops.

Sonia wore overalls more days than she didn’t. She loved sewing patches onto things— even things that didn’t need mending. She hated coffee, and took her tea with no cream and one sugar. Her husband’s name was Dr. Miguel Ramirez. She had a degree in Biology from Georgia Tech, and a Master’s degree from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln in Molecular Biology. Sonia and Miguel had never had kids after their first baby had been born without one of his lungs and died an hour after being born. She had a heart of gold and a passion for teaching. She didn’t blame Sarah for killing her husband. She had been a teacher at Doniphan High even though she could have taught anywhere. She needed glasses but had refused to get them until it was too late.

One thing Sarah did not know about Sonia Keller was that she had a sister. She didn’t know that they had had a massive falling out over Sonia marrying Miguel. Miguel had been Catholic. The Kellers had not. Sonia’s sister had cut off Sonia at the behest of their mother, twenty years before the end of the world.

Mary Keller, Sonia’s estranged sister, had left a letter for Sonia at their childhood home in Kearney. They’d stopped there to see if there were any supplies in her father’s basement. Mary spoke of a town in Wyoming that was unaffected by the apocalypse. She spoke of forgiveness, of getting to know Miguel after all of these years, not knowing it was far too late. She wrote down a radio frequency, and with it, she gave the twenty-four remaining townsfolk of Doniphan hope.

-=+=-

The road is hard. They have no fighters. Sarah is a good doctor, but not good enough to fight starvation. Not good enough to piece together a person shot in the head with a hunting rifle.

By the time they reach Jackson, Wyoming, twenty-four has become seven.

-=+=-

It’s dark outside, but they don’t stop to camp. Jackson is just ahead. There are floodlights, and even from miles away, she can hear the hum of electricity, the hum of life within the massive walls. If only Doniphan had had walls. Maybe her friends, her family, would be safe. Maybe Miguel would still be alive. Or Sammy. Or Sammy’s mom, Julia. Or the Frevels. Or the Johnsons. Or the Chens. Or any of the others.

But Doniphan didn’t have walls. So now there were seven.

Sarah and Sonia made two.

Alex made three, though with the loss of Sammy, at the beginning of their travels, and Julia, just days ago, Sarah wasn’t sure how much he counted. He was a husk of a man. He hadn’t seen beyond his own feet in days.

Eva and Rosie, and their son Max, made six.

Lauren made seven.

Sarah breathed deeply through her nose. They were so close. Jackson was up ahead. They had electricity, which Sarah hadn’t even had the luxury of even thinking about since about a month into her trip away from Austin. They probably had running water, indoor plumbing.

They had to be within a couple of miles. They could make it tonight. They didn’t need to camp, even if Sonia looked a little out of breath and worse for wear. They could make it.

Sonia looked tired, physically and mentally. All this, and Sonia’s prize at the end of the road was the sister that abandoned her, so long ago.

Sarah was sure her own feet would give out before they reached the wall. But they didn’t.

Sonia and Alex were the oldest, so they sent them up first, just in case.

Eva and Rosie sent Sarah ahead, even though they needed it more. They had a kid, they needed to be in front. But they wouldn’t hear it. They sent Sarah in front so she could get inside to Sonia quicker.

And then—

And then the guardswoman, who was jotting down their information as she let them into the town, said words that Sarah had never hoped to hear again in her whole life.

“You related to the Millers? Tommy and Maria and Joel and them?”

-=+=-

“Oh sweetie,” the guard says as Sarah hyperventilates. “I’ll radio for Tommy and Joel, just a minute.”

Sarah wraps her arms around herself, and her eyes dart towards the gate, where Sonia is waiting for her. Her eyes are wet, and she’s giving Sarah an encouraging look, but Sarah doesn’t feel very encouraged. She’s staring at the gate.

What if they don’t recognize her? What if she doesn’t recognize them?

What if it’s not real? Tommy is a common enough name. Joel, too. What if she’s lost her mind, and she’s really imagining this, pinned under the floodlights as the rest of her party walks around her, leaving her in the snow?

She stares at the gate, willing her dad through it.

What happens instead is someone tumbles down the rungs of the watchtower. And she can’t see them, with the floodlights in her face, but they look frantic. Something must be wrong. Maybe they got bad news. Maybe there’s a pack of clickers right behind her and Sarah is about to go down. She wouldn’t fight it. Not if this is a trick.

“Mija?” the shadow asks, and it’s been so long, so so long, and his voice is raspier, like he hasn’t used it in an age, but it’s unmistakably her dad. Sarah’s hands fly to her face on instinct, and her own gloved hands covering her mouth is not helping her breathing problem, but she can’t help it.

She whips towards him, but she still can’t see him.

She can’t see him, so he isn’t real. This is a hallucination. A vivid one, but nothing more. The shadow on the other side of the lights can’t be her dad. He died that day. He must have. He wouldn’t have left her behind. If he was real, she would be able to make out the lines of his face. She would see his eyes, his smile, his hair. But she can’t, so it’s not real.

“Daddy?” She asks anyway, in a moment of weakness. But it’s not possible. The figure, hunched over and clutching the railing of the stair, can’t be her dad. Her dad is never in pain. Her dad wouldn’t still be there, just out of her reach. If the shadow were her dad, he’d be here with her already. He wouldn’t be frozen, like Sarah feels. Joel Miller is stronger than anything. He’s a statue of protection, he's not—

“Daddy?” she asks again, because something is wrong.

Her feet had been moving towards him automatically, but she stops herself. Just in case.

She wants to talk again, wants to ask the shadow to step into the light, wants to scream or cry or do anything but stand here at the looming gate to Jackson, Wyoming, but she can’t.

“Sarah? Sarah!” A voice calls, snapping her out of her reverie, and it’s been a while but there’s not a chance in the world she doesn’t recognize her Uncle Tommy.

“Uncle Tommy!” she breathes as he barrels into her, sweeping her off her feet and taking her breath away, stealing the minimal oxygen she already had. She doesn’t care. He’s prying her head away from his shoulder and moving her face around, trying to see all the differences in her face. She does the same. He’s got a mustache. There are little flicks of gray in it. It suits him. There are tears freezing on his cheeks in the winter chill.

He’s talking to her. Sarah can see his lips moving, can see his eyes looking at her like he’s prompting her to respond, but Sarah’s gone mute. Because if Tommy is real, here, in front of her, calling her bug and holding her face in his hands, then that must mean he’s real too, standing in the shadows, refusing to come to her.

Tommy seems to realize this at the same time Sarah does, shouting over her shoulder— “Oh, god, where’s Joel? Anna, where’s my brother?”

And Tommy doesn’t know, can’t see him, over his shoulder, until he does, and he freezes at the sight of the shadow. It must be her dad, if the way Tommy’s face falls has anything to say about it.

“Breathe, big brother,” Tommy says, inching towards the shadow like it’s a spooked horse, dragging Sarah with him. “Joel, look at me. Are you alright? Where’s Ellie?”

Sarah has half a mind to ask who Ellie is, but it doesn’t seem like the time. Her question is answered a blink later when a second shadow scrambles down the watchtower, practically tackling her dad into the light. She— because it’s a girl, a tween, or maybe a little older— slots herself into his side, and drags them both into the light.

His hair is lighter, peppered with gray in a way it never was when Sarah dreamed of him. And she did dream of him, all the time. His eyes are the same, a few more crows feet, but the same ‘shit brown, Sarah, ain’t nothin’ special about ‘em’. They’re sad, downturned and shiny, but at the same time they’re completely unseeing, cloudy in a way she’s never seen before. He looks like a ghost, staring into the middle distance somewhere past Sarah’s head, and Sarah comes to the conclusion that he’s struggling as much as she is to convince himself that she’s real.

The girl at his side has auburn hair, once tied into a ponytail, but messy with sleep and frizzy in a halo around her head. Her eyes are striking and clear, and she looks at Sarah with distrust. She doesn’t look like Sarah’s dad, not really, but they’re making twin expressions of trepidation. She clings to Joel’s side like he’ll disappear if she doesn’t.

“You okay?” The girl asks her dad, and Sarah thinks that’s a dumbass question. None of this is even close to okay. Her dad is so close but so fucking far away. He shakes his head softly at her.

“Joel,” Tommy says hesitantly, finally dropping Sarah’s shoulder, where he’d been holding her still like she’d float away. He walks away from Sarah, which makes bile rise in her throat in a way she can’t explain. “I think there’s someone you need to introduce Ellie to.” Sarah’s dad’s eyes finally clear up, and he looks aware of where he is. He blinks, but he’s still not quite right.

“Ellie’s never met her before,” Tommy continues, and Sarah notices her dad clutching desperately to the girl– Ellie. He looks like he’s going to keel right over and die, gonna have a heart attack right when Sarah got him back. “I think she needs an introduction.” Tommy is looking at her dad pleadingly, a little desperately, like whatever tactic he’s trying to pull on her dad isn’t gonna work.

Right when Sarah thinks Tommy is going to try again, Joel blinks. Then again. “Ellie, this is my daughter Sarah,” he says nervously, looking back at Ellie to gauge her opinion. The girl smiles softly, encouragingly. “Sarah, this is—” He makes a horrible choking noise, which rips Sarah’s heart in half, but finally his eyes clear up. He sees Sarah, really sees her, for the first time. “Oh my god,” he whispers, and then he’s dragging Sarah into one of his wonderfully suffocating bear hugs, dragging Ellie into the center of it, and Sarah’s always been a hugger, so she just accepts it, because strange, stiff teenager or not, she’s being hugged by her dad again.

He smells the same. Sarah is aware that’s probably an absolutely demented thing to notice, seeing her dad for the first time in twenty years, but it’s true. He smells like drywall dust and sweat, and old worn leather. He wasn’t a smoker, but Tommy was, and Tommy had lived with them for so long that cigarette smoke always seemed to cling to Joel anyway, uncaring of his hatred for the stuff. He still smells like smoke, but not like cigarette smoke anymore. More like campfire smoke, like Fourth of July grills and barbecues at the community pool in the dead of the Texas heat when they couldn’t afford to run the AC high enough to cool the house down.

His jacket isn’t the same one he wore when he still knew Sarah, which was once her abuelo’s— but it’s similar. It fits him the same way, sung on his wrists but loose on his broad shoulders, and Sarah buries her snot-covered face into it anyway. Some peripheral sense of Sarah’s notices that Ellie is no longer in their embrace, but she’s so lost in all that is her dad that she hadn’t realized when.

At some point, they sink down into the snow, but Sarah can’t feel its biting chill. She’s warm, so warm, wrapped up in her dad’s arms.

-=+=-

Ellie doesn’t come home after dinner, which Maria– Uncle Tommy’s new wife who is as kind as she is stern– said to expect.

Sarah’s dad still hasn’t even mentioned Ellie, let alone explained her presence to Sarah, too caught up in Sarah’s return to really think about the world around him. But Sarah understands anyway. She’s clearly his kid. Sarah just wants to know how it happened, wants the story of her little sister.

She always wanted a little sister, when she was a kid. Twelve year old Sarah had been absolutely sure of three things in her life:
First, that Demi Parker, the lead singer of Halican Drops, was going to be her best friend one day.
Second, that she was going to be a soccer player on the US Women’s National Team.
Third, that Joel needed another baby, and she needed a little sibling.

When the world ended, Sarah realized pretty quickly that none of those things were going to happen.

Now, she’s got a little hope for at least one of them.

Sarah never actually meets Ellie that night, which makes her feel a really strange mix of disappointed and guiltily relieved, and she’s so exhausted the next morning that she’s half convinced the Ellie she thinks she sees upon waking up was actually a hallucination. By the time she actually gets the chance to talk to Ellie alone, one on one, it’s far too late to not be uncomfortable, and Sarah feels the guilt about it like a black hole gnawing at her stomach as they sit there on the floor of her dad’s hallway, talking about cannibals.

-=+=-

On the day of her eagerly-awaited-yet-completely-dreaded first patrol out of Jackson, Sarah wakes up on her dad’s couch at four in the morning, if the clock on the wall is to be believed. She’s been in Jackson for long enough now that her body has just gotten used to being able to sleep in, but she’s so nervousanxiousexcited to patrol with her dad that her body wakes her up anyway. She figures she would have had to be up in thirty minutes anyway, so that they can leave for patrol right at dawn. Daylight is precious in the dead of winter— especially in a place surrounded by mountains.

“I just,” Joel sighs from the kitchen, and Sarah flinches, completely unaware that anyone else was awake.

“I can’t do anything right, Tommy. Everything I do makes her upset. I forgot about her grazing patrol, and I blamed it on her. I made steak for family dinner night. I can’t take her with me on patrol with Sarah because I know being around Sarah makes her uncomfortable, but I can’t— I can’t not be there when Sarah leaves either, Tommy, I just can’t do it. The thought of either of them going out there without me is just—“ he cuts himself off. “I don’t know how to help her. It’s like she and I are riding on totally different wavelengths.” Sarah almost turns tail and books it upstairs, regardless of the fact that Ellie is asleep up there. She’s not meant to hear this. She doesn’t want to hear this.

“She’s a special kid, Joel. She’s gotta deal with things that most adults in Jackson only have nightmares about. It’s not your fault, just like it’s not hers.”

“I feel like you’re better at getting to her than I am.”

“That’s because I have the benefit of not being her dad. I get to be fun Uncle Tommy, and I don’t have to punish her when she messes up, or make her do things she doesn’t wanna do, or take her to the clinic, or any bullshit like that. And most importantly, I’m not someone she feels like she has to impress.”

“She doesn’t have to impress me, Tommy, she impresses me just by being alive. Just by surviving, just by living to see another day. She impresses me by still wanting to help people even though no one in this world has shown her anything but hatred and neglect.”

Sarah feels wetness on her face, even though she didn’t even notice that she had the urge to cry. She still doesn’t know a lot about Ellie, seeing how elusive the girl is, but she knows enough. She and Joel met in Boston. Their journey to Jackson brought horrors that Sarah can only imagine. All of that on a young girl must have really messed her up. No kid should ever have to worry about fucking cannibals.

“I know that, Joel. I think everyone in Jackson knows that. Everyone ‘cept her.”

Joel groans, and there’s a thunk that Sarah thinks might be his head hitting the kitchen table.

“But that’s not your fault, either. Ellie has had everyone’s expectations of what she was supposed to be her whole life. That’s not something that goes away with just a couple years of love on her side. Her momma, that Firefly friend of hers, Marlene, those doctors, even Tess— don’t look at me like that, Joel, you told me Tess was the one who made you take Ellie out west in the first place— point is, everyone had expectations on what Ellie was meant to do. She was supposed to go give up her whole childhood to save the world. She knows that. She feels it, deeply. And besides, every girl wants to impress her dad. That’s unavoidable.” Sarah doesn’t know what the fuck that last part means, about saving the world, but she isn’t given much time to dwell on it before her dad is talking again.

“I’m not her dad,” Joel says, and it takes everything in Sarah not to make a noise of surprise. “Sometimes I think I might be,” Joel continues, and some weight is lifted off of Sarah’s chest at the fact that she hasn’t completely misread this whole situation. “I think we’re there, I think she trusts me. Then she just, she just pulls away. Like I’m not. So I don’t know. I wouldn’t want her to make her feel like I’m replacing her real dad—“

“Joel—“

“Tommy, just— just drop it.”

They lapse into silence, and Sarah’s heart is lurching towards him, trying to will her body to go to him, to tell him that of course he’s her dad. Sarah has barely seen them at all, but she knows it’s true.

All in all, she’s only known this version of Joel for a few weeks. Ellie for even shorter, considering she’s maybe only seen her on four or five separate days. And still– even Sarah, a stranger for all intents and purposes, can tell that her dad is more to that kid than just a reluctant caretaker.

“No.”

“Excuse me?”

“No, damnit, I won’t drop it. God, you and Ellie, you two might be the densest fuckin’ people on the planet, you know that? You and Ellie need to have a real fuckin’ conversation, Joel, I mean it. That girl looks at you like you hung the fuckin’ moon and the stars and the whole fuckin’ galaxy around it. Like you’re gonna take her to space if she asks, like with you there she could be a regular Sally Fuckin’ Ride. And you have the audacity to sit there and tell me you’re not her dad? Bullshit, Joel. Bullshit. How many daughters do you have?”

“What?”

“How many? When a newcomer comes to Jackson, and they’re asking about your life, making small talk, what do you say when they ask you about your kids? How many daughters do you have?!”

“Tommy—“

“Answer the fuckin’ question, Joel!” Tommy hisses, quiet but stinging.

“Two! I tell them I’ve got two.”

“So you’ve got two daughters, but you’re not Ellie’s dad? How the fuck does that work?”

Joel sighs heavily, and Sarah really needs to go upstairs now. She wills her body to move, to stop listening in to this conversation that really isn’t any of her business. She tries to get her feet up under her. She fails.

“She’s never said anything—“

“Oh, good Lord, Joel that’s because you and your kid have the communicative skills of that fuckin’ sign language gorilla. But you’re the adult, Joel, you’re the one who needs to tell her what you really think about her. She’ll follow, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I can’t. Not now, Tommy.”

“Why the fuck not?” Tommy hisses softly, suddenly seeming to recognize how much their voices have been raising.

“I’ve gotta wait til the spring.” Joel says quietly, dropping his voice, too. “She’s gonna spiral if anything changes right now, Tommy. She’s really struggling. She needs consistency. I’ll drop that truth bomb later.”

Tommy sucks in a breath. “You’re an idiot if you think she isn’t already spiraling, Joel. She didn’t even notice the damn Christmas lights going up. She is walking through this life like a damn ghost, and she needs you to step the fuck up and be her fuckin’ dad. I know you’re trying to make up for lost time with Sarah, but Sarah’s an adult. I know it hurts, but you’ve lost the chance to be able to raise her.”

“Tommy—“

“Your other kid needs you more right now, Joel, and it feels like you can’t even see it.”

There’s a moment of silence, and Sarah feels like she’s about to witness an honest-to-god murder. Instead, there’s a heavy sigh.

“Of course I see it, Tommy. That’s the worst part. I see it, I go to her, and she runs away. I apologize, she stomps off. I tell her I love her, and her eyes glaze over like she’s on the moon, a million miles away. I just don’t know how to help her. I don’t know how to be what she needs, without spooking her. Every time I get close she pulls back.”

“She needs you to talk to her. She needs to hear out loud what you think of her, what she is to you. She knows you love her, Joel, but that doesn’t mean much to a kid like Ellie if you won’t actually fuckin say it.”

“I say it plenty,” Joel says, but it sounds weak even to Sarah’s ears. They lapse into silence, and Sarah can practically see the dead-eyed glare Tommy is probably leveling at her dad right now.

“You say it a lot more when she’s not there,” Tommy says eventually, practically a whisper that Sarah has to strain to hear. She swings her feet softly off the couch, and pads towards the kitchen, thankful that she’s wearing socks, and that the floorboards don’t creak. “My kid perfected her lasso yesterday, Danny. Ellie’s picking the guitar up so fast, Maria. Hey, Seth, do you know that my girl is the one who foraged those wild grapes for your latest batch of wine? JJ, do you know your cousin is the coolest? Hey Robin, did you hear that Ellie beat Jesse in a quickdraw contest with those paintballs we found in Cody? Isn’t she the greatest? The sun just shines out of her ass, didn’t you know that? She’s—”

“I get the picture, Tommy,” Joel says softly.

“You’re turning into our fuckin—”

A chair scrapes loudly against the kitchen tile. “Don’t finish that sentence,” Joel says dangerously, and Sarah can see the face he’s making in her mind. That look was scary before the outbreak. When Sarah was about eight, he’d made this scary looking biker dude apologize for breaking Sarah’s toy with that look. She’s finding it hard to picture exactly how it might look now, but she can only imagine 25 years in hell hasn’t exactly made it a nicer face.

“What, the sentence that you need to hear?”

“Tommy, I’m warning you—”

“You’re turning into dad. I’m fucking saying it, because you need to hear it, Joel. How much more normal would you have turned out if he’d just told you he was proud of you every once in a while?”

Sarah gasps softly. “That’s enough,” she says firmly, finally poking her face into the kitchen, because she’s a grown woman, and she can backtalk her uncle now without him being able to say shit about it. She can defend her dad when he’s unwilling to defend himself. Joel is standing up, his chair pushed pack, finger pointed at Tommy accusingly, sneer on his face, halfway through forming a retort. Tommy is leaned back, acting nonchalant, but Sarah can see the tension in the line of his arm as it grips the table that betrays his calm exterior.

“Sarah,” Joel breathes, finger falling to his side.

“Hey daddy,” she says softly, glaring at her uncle icily as she picks the seat between the two of them to sit down in. She picks her knees up and tucks them under her chin, and the action is comforting, especially when it makes Joel and Tommy smile softly at her, but it makes her feel like a kid again.

“How much of that did you hear?” Joel asks tensely.

“Enough,” she says, reaching out to grab Tommy’s mug of coffee. Sarah doesn’t hate coffee, but she doesn’t love it either. Tommy at least takes his with sugar when there’s some to spare, so his mug is generally safer to steal sips out of than Joel’s. Plus, he deserves it. Getting his coffee stolen is the tax he has to pay for being an asshole.

Tommy frowns softly, but makes a motion to Sarah like he wants her to keep his mug. He stands up, his chair scratching back much quieter than Joel’s had, a minute previous. “I’ve gotta get home to the baby,” he says softly, and it’s a shitty excuse if Sarah’s ever heard one, but she needs to talk to her dad alone, so she doesn’t call him on it. “Maria’ll be leaving to the greenhouse soon.” He ducks a kiss onto Sarah’s forehead as he leaves, and he shuffles back to his house across the street, closing the front door gently as he retreats.

“Tommy was out of line,” Sarah starts when she’s sure her uncle is out of earshot. Joel hums at her noncommitally. Sarah purses her lips back at him awkwardly. “Didn’t seem wrong, though.”

“Sarah, please–”

She shrugs her shoulders, raising her hands placatingly. “I’m just saying. He’s right. I’m thirty five years old, dad. I can go out on patrol with someone else. You should stay here with her. Have some father-daughter time.” Joel makes a wounded noise, but still doesn’t say anything.

“You should stay here with her,” she repeats lamely, feeling awkward that she’s had to walk her dad through every step of her train of thought.

“No.” He says firmly. “No, not this time. This time you’re going with me, then after…” He trails off awkwardly. “Give your old man some grace. If I let you outta here without me, I cannot be held responsible for burning down Jackson until you get back.”

Sarah snorts. She remembers the first time he’d let her go to a sleepover with a bunch of girls on her soccer team, and a girl named Macy stuck gum in her hair when Sarah had been the one to fall asleep first. He had been awake at 2 in the morning when she’d called him to pick her up and he’d gotten to Macy’s house in 10 minutes flat even though they lived in East Austin and Macy’s house was almost all the way to Round Rock. She’s pretty sure he had been camping at a 24 hour McDonald's nearby or something, and she can definitely picture the chaos he created while he waited on her. She can only imagine the havoc he’d make in Jackson now.

“I think Tommy’s right, though,” she says after she snaps out of the memory. “It seems you’ve really gotta talk to her. I don’t wanna get in the way. Of that.” God, Sarah, can you not get through one conversation with your dad without it being the most awkward thing ever spoken aloud?

“You’re not in the way, baby. And I will talk to her. Me and Ellie will sit down and have a nice chat as soon as I get back. I promise. It’s just…” he sighs, taking a sip of his coffee. “It’s so complicated, Sarah.”

“I can’t pretend I know why. You and Ellie have been so… tight-lipped about it. I don’t know the story yet, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear it.”

Her dad smiles bashfully at her, and Sarah smiles back, hopefully encouragingly. It’s maybe the most genuine interaction she’s had with her dad since the hug at the gate.

“Well, baby, the patrol route is about two hours. Two hours won’t scratch the surface, but it’s a start. I can’t tell you everything. A lot of it is a little sensitive, and you’ll have to get the rest of it from Ellie.” Sarah nods. That seems more than fair. “But I can tell you the story.”

“And I wanna hear more about Sonia Keller,” he continues, staring at Sarah with his eyes slightly widened, and pointing at her chest, so she knows that he’s really serious. “So I know just what exactly I need to be thanking her for, for taking care of my girl for so long.”

“I could talk about Sonia for days, daddy,” Sarah says, and Joel’s eyes soften. “She’s the best. She really is. You’ll love her.”

“I’m sure I will, baby.” Joel clears his throat, setting his coffee down on the kitchen table. “I’m gonna go get ready and say bye to Ellie. Then I’m all yours.”

He pads softly up the stairs, skipping a step so it won’t squeak. Despite his conversation with Tommy, Sarah thinks that little action— skipping over the squeaky step so she doesn’t startle awake, even though he’s about to wake her up anyway— says more about his success as a father than Tommy really gave him credit for.

In the end, Sarah ends up talking about Sonia for the whole ride to the mine. Her big mouth and willingness to talk about the woman who became her caretaker means that Joel never explains the deal with Ellie until it’s too late, Sarah’s pistol aimed at the bridge of the girl’s nose.

-=+=-

“Ellie!” Joel yells as the girl stalks out of the room.

Sarah is frozen. Immune? She’s immune?

“Ellie, come back here right now,” he pleads, but Sarah’s mind is still lagging thirty seconds behind. Her dad killed people to stop the cure from being completed.

She shakes that thought out of her head almost as soon as she’s thought it. He killed people to protect his kid, she thinks next, which feels better in her mind, more accurate and nicer.

He’s trying to get his feet underneath him, but Sarah’s haphazard splint to hold together his leg that was run through with razor-sharp sheet metal is holding exactly the way it’s supposed to, not allowing him to bend his leg, so he can’t get the leverage to lift himself off the ground.

More pressing than his leg, though, is the panic attack he’s halfway through. Sarah had been too emotional herself to see the signs, that night at Jackson Wall, but she can see it now. He’s breathing too fast, whipping his head around to see like he’s got tunnel vision, scrambling against his better judgement to get up and walk on a leg that had been minutes from bleeding out before Sarah’s battlefield triage.

“Daddy, lay back down,” she barks firmly, and Sammy always used to comment on how quickly Sarah could go from casual-Sarah to doctor-Sarah. “Stay there.”

“She can’t leave, mija, she can’t. Not by herself, not by herself, not by her–”

“Dad, calm down. Where’s the walkie?”

His eyes widen, and he scrambles for it, but his hands are shaking too badly to push the buttons down. Sarah pries it out of his hands. “Uncle Tommy, can you hear me?”

A few seconds later, someone grunts out an affirmative.

“Ellie cleared out the infected, I need you to come get dad ASAP.”

Joel makes a noise of protest, lunging for the walkie, but Sarah just stands up, out of his reach, and his lurch for the walkie turns into a weak grasp at her leg as he falls against her. “Now! I mean right now. I mean if you’re not here in ten minutes, dad’s gonna bleed to death.”

It’s not true. Not in the slightest.

Sarah’s been a trained medic for nearly two decades now. The tourniquet she applied and the makeshift splint means her dad likely could last several days like this, maybe even long enough for his wound to heal on its own.

But if Sarah’s about to do what she thinks she’s about to do, she would rather Tommy get here sooner rather than later.

“We were already on our way, Sarah, I’m five– maybe seven minutes out. We’ll be there in time, don’t worry, bug.” There’s panic laced in his throat, and Sarah flinches at how strongly she made him worry.

“Sarah, what are you doing, baby?” Her dad mumbles, eyelids squeezed closed in pain, the adrenaline of everything finally wearing off.

Sarah blinks at him, at his horrible worried expression, his eyebrows knit together and his frown deeper than she’s ever seen it before. She activates the walkie again. “Tommy, under no circumstances are you to follow me, no matter what dad says. You take him back to town, no matter what he tells you.”

“–rah? –at’s –oing on?” The walkie spits back at her.

“Tommy, you have to come to the control room to help dad! I have to go follow Ellie, while the tracks are still fresh. They’ll be covered in snow by the time you get here, you have to get to dad. I love you.” Sarah signs off with, just in case this is a massive mistake and she never gets to say it again. Sarah has no idea what lies between here and Salt Lake City. If it’s anything like what’s between Doniphan and Jackson, she thinks she and Ellie’s chances of survival are extremely slim.

But the look on her dad’s face, the devastation in his eyes when Ellie stomped out of the control center, means that Sarah has to try.

She’s just gotten her family back.

She can’t lose it now, not again.

She can’t let her new little sister go all by herself. Not. Not that that's what Ellie is. That would be awfully presumptuous of her to say, even in the comfort of her own mind. Except that like, she kind of is. Half sister, at worst. They don't know each other, but they share custody of a dad. Whatever the word for that is.

“I love you dad,” she says as she hikes her backpack up on her shoulders. He’s crying, full blown, which Sarah has never seen in her life. She’s seen him shed a single manly tear, she’s seen him so sad that the sadness turns to fury, but she’s never seen him like this. She honestly didn’t think he could cry like this. “I’ll bring her back. Promise.”

Chapter Text

Ellie is most of the way to Alpine when she realizes she’s being followed. It’s been almost a full day since she left Joel in the mine. She’s not exactly making good progress, but she’s been going slow to try and help with the voice screaming danger! in the back of her head.

Which, not to pat herself on the back or anything, it’s pretty fucking badass that she noticed anything at all, considering that it’s dusk, she’s in the shadow of the Black and Bradley mountains, its negative fuckall degrees outside, it’s snowing so hard that Ellie can’t see five feet in front of her, and she’s leading Shimmer down a mountain trail so steep and narrow that it would’ve been impossible to traverse on foot in the middle of summer in broad daylight, let alone now.

At first it’s just an inkling, a prickling on the back of her neck like someone’s watching her, but it gets stronger by the second. A branch snaps, and Ellie whips behind her. She doesn’t see anything, so she tries to convince herself that it’s just an animal. She thinks she hears a distant cough, but the wind endlessly buffeting around her ears convinces her she’s hearing things.

But Ellie hasn’t made it this far by ignoring her instincts.

If it were Tommy, or, god forbid in his state, Joel following her, they would have called out to her. Anyone in Jackson would’ve. The person stalking her can’t be anyone from Jackson.

The person following her silently could be anyone, and Ellie has to take a few forced breaths to remind herself that she’s too far west to run into anyone from Silver Lake. It’s probably some sort of bandit scout. Ellie can handle one raider, maybe more, as long as it’s not a whole caravan.

So at her first opportunity, when the trail levels out and widens a bit as it approaches Snake River, she sets a trap. She walks Shimmer on the edge of the trail she’s on, out of the deepest part of the snow and near the tree line, so Shimmer’s tracks will stay longer without being covered– the perfect way to lure someone right where she wants them. She leads Shimmer off the trail and doubles back, tying her to a tree just outside her line of sight. Then, she sets a tripwire trap, low enough that it can’t be seen through the snow on the trail, and then sets up her ambush several feet in front of it.

Then she waits.

It takes half an hour– her pursuer had been farther behind Ellie than she had thought, meaning they were either really bad at tracking people or really good at it. Soon enough, Ellie begins to hear the snuffles and hoofbeats of a lone traveler on horseback. One is doable, she thinks. She can handle one person.

The person is bundled up, so Ellie can’t really make out any defining features. They’re tall, on a huge horse, and don’t have many supplies. That’s all Ellie can see as they pass her.

When their horse is about ten feet away from Ellie’s trap, she steps out onto the trail behind them.

“Put your hands up and turn around slowly,” Ellie says, dropping her voice and raising her shotgun, going for dangerous, but probably landing more on panicked, given how loud she has to yell over the wind and snow.

The figure freezes, but makes no move to turn around. Their gloves grip the reins tightly, like they’re considering fleeing.

“Reins down, hands up. You better listen to me if you wanna make it out of this alive, asshole. Why are you following me?”

They’re trembling hard enough that Ellie can see it even through the wind and snow. They sit frozen for a minute, twitching with indecision, until finally, they make a decision and drop the reins.

“Turn around.” Ellie orders, bringing her shotgun to her shoulder so she’s ready if the rider tries anything stupid.

The rider turns awkwardly in their saddle, and Ellie lets out a breath so forcefully she physically staggers with it.

“Holy shit, Sarah, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

Sarah, who Ellie can now see is riding Toothpick, branded with the Jackson seal on his back leg, makes an offended sound. “What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with you? Why are you fucking holding me up like an outlaw in an old western?”

Ellie scoffs. “We live in weird times, man!” She huffs defensively. “In my experience, when people follow me for long period of time through the woods, it’s fuckin’ raiders or hunters or cannibals! Why the fuck didn’t you like, call my name or something? I thought you were trying to kill me!”

Sarah winces at the reminder of the cannibal thing, which Ellie would probably think was hilarious if she weren’t still high on the adrenaline of preparing for a fight.

“I don’t know!” She cries defensively. “I kinda got the impression you wouldn’t answer me if I did. If you wanted to outrun me on horseback, you’d win by a long shot. I thought my best chance at you not running away and stranding me in the forest was not letting you notice I was there.” She shrugs, and grabs Toothpick’s reins again. She’s kinda right, so Ellie doesn’t really have a good comeback for it.

Eventually, she huffs out a “you still scared the shit out of me,” and lowers her gun, which she maybe should have done earlier. Sarah goes silent at that.

Wait. If Sarah’s here, then—

“You left Joel?” Ellie screeches, nearly startling Sarah off her horse. “He was injured and you just left him there?!”

“Woah, Uncle Tommy was like five minutes away, dad’s fine–”

“You don’t fucking know that! What if he bled out, what if Tommy got sidetracked, you fucking–”

“Ellie!” Sarah interrupts exasperatedly, but she’s smiling, which infuriates Ellie to no end. “Dad’s fine. I kept the walkie on until it went out of range. Tommy found him when I was, like, ten minutes out. They had almost made it back to Jackson by the time I made it out of range.”

“That’s ten minutes you left him to bleed out, Sarah, what the fuck?”

“He wasn’t bleeding out.” Sarah assays calmly, not rising to the bait that is Ellie’s ire. “I applied a tourniquet, I splinted his leg, his wound was already clotting up by the time you got to the control room, let alone by the time you left.”

“What if it came loose? What if the splint fell off? What if more infected came, what if–”

“Ellie!” Sarah interrupts again, which makes Ellie want to strangle her a little bit, but honestly, she probably needs it, because her thoughts are spiraling. She has to turn around. Joel could be dead or dying back in Jackson. He could have bled out. They could have been ambushed before they made it. He could be gone and Ellie was here riding away from him instead of towards him— “I promise he’s fine.” Sarah says placatingly, turning Toothpick around to approach Ellie. “The wound isn’t anywhere worrying. It didn’t nick his femoral artery or his saphenous, and it wasn’t deep. The only issue was the blood loss, and I stopped it. The only reason it bled so bad was because it was right near his knee. And he still had control over his shooting arm. And if anything would have come for him, he’d have killed it. Nothing happened.”

Sarah’s words stop Ellie’s spiraling in her tracks. “You’re like, a doctor?” She asks warily. Sarah had used some fancy words, ones that Ellie didn’t know. Words like Bailey used at the clinic.

Sarah smiles shyly. “Yeah, I guess. I’m a damn good medic, at the very least. Can’t really be a doctor anymore.”

Ellie sniffed hard, nose cold and runny, her eyes leaking without her permission. “And like, you’re sure?”

“I’m positive. All dad needs is stitches and time. Nothing’s gonna happen to him or his leg.”

“Why are you here?” Ellie asks sharply, changing topics, because Sarah may seem perfect and sweet and innocent, but Ellie still can’t quite get a hold on her, on what she’s supposed to do and say with Sarah around. Sarah doesn’t know her. Why the fuck would Sarah follow her to the middle of fucking nowhere? She looks up at Sarah on the horse. She somehow looks regal sitting up on Toothpick, posture perfect. She didn’t think anybody could look normal on Toothpick. He’s so big, he makes his riders look wimpy. But not Sarah. Sarah rides Toothpick like she was meant to. A big horse for a big ego.

Ellie’s sure she looks terrible right now, not that she’s ever really cared what she looked like. (Not that she’s ever been able to afford to care, more like). She can feel her nose dripping like a faucet, she hasn’t taken the chance to redo her ponytail, her cheeks must be flushed beyond measure. But Sarah still looks like something out of a movie, out here on Toothpick in the freezing cold.

“I wasn’t gonna let you do it alone,” Sarah replies, something lacing through her voice like the words were obvious.

“I can handle it alone.” Ellie says firmly, frowning.

“I’m sure you can. But you still shouldn’t have to.”

The shitty part about Ellie’s hesitation around Sarah is that Sarah really hasn’t done anything to deserve it. Ellie knows that, logically, but she still can’t get her nervous system under control whenever Sarah is around. Perfect people always have something wrong with them, in Ellie’s experience. The more rough-and-tumble people look up front, the less bullshit they tend to hide behind Ellie’s back. It had been Ellie’s favorite thing about Joel, right when she was still figuring him out. All of Joel’s flaws were right on display with his virtues, from the minute Ellie met him. He was gruff. Easily annoyed, easily provoked into violence. Fiercely protective, unwaveringly loyal. Shitty taste in music. Even shittier sense of humor.

But Sarah’s so nice. So pretty, so perfect. She talks a lot but never says what she means. She dances around the point and around Ellie’s kitchen. She asks Ellie questions she doesn’t know the answer to, just like Marlene used to. Everything Sarah says and does throws Ellie for a loop, because there’s no way someone so nice and naive would’ve fuckin’ survived this long. And it’s not like Ellie thinks she’s evil or anything. She doesn’t think anything Joel helped make could ever be evil, but twenty-two years can do a lot to a person. It’s all so maddening Ellie might actually start ripping her own hair out about it.

“Where’s Shimmer?” Sarah asks after an awkward amount of time has passed without Ellie saying anything in response to her previous comment. “C’mon, we should find somewhere to hole up,” She continues, turning Toothpick back around and continuing forwards down the path.

Ellie’s eyes go wide, and her heart stops for a second when she realizes what’s about to happen. Tripmine. Hidden in the snow. Ellie blowing up Joel’s daughter.

“Wait!” Ellie cries, sticking her hand out like that will stop Sarah moving forward. Sarah freezes, thank god, and Ellie runs to her side. “Don’t take another step. Back Toothpick up.”

“What?”

“Back the horse up. I planted a mine when I thought I was being followed. Just– stay back, let me disarm it.”

“What?”

“A mine. A bomb, whatever. Just stand back so I can undo it–”

“You’re telling me I almost blew myself up and didn’t even notice???”

Ellie winces sympathetically. “Uh. Yeah? But in your defense, I’m pretty good at this whole end-of-the-world bullshit. Also, you wouldn’t have blown yourself up. Technically I would have blown you up–”

“That is so not funny, Ellie,” Sarah says, but hey, it made Ellie laugh.

Ellie reaches down and grabs her makeshift bomb, carefully detaching the string so she doesn’t accidentally pull the pin. She can feel Sarah’s gaze on her back, eyeing her warily as she returns the mine to her backpack.

“You’re just putting that back in your backpack?” She asks incredulously.

Ellie raises an eyebrow. “I promise that accidentally setting off my own bomb in my bag is the least of my worries. It’s safe to handle as long as it’s not rigged.”

Sarah doesn’t look convinced, but Ellie can’t really think of anything else to say to help her feel better about it, so she just shrugs and steps off the path, trudging through the snow to go get Shimmer. Sarah doesn’t follow her through the trees, but she does angle herself so she can watch Ellie’s back as she leaves. It conflicts Ellie. On one hand, Sarah could be watching her to make sure she isn’t doing anything bad. On the other, she could be watching her back.

Ellie files it away under the increasingly-growing section of her brain dedicated to figuring Sarah out.

-=+=-

“Hey, don’t hate me,” Sarah says, about an hour later as they walk the deserted streets of Alpine. “But we’ve gotta go find the watchtower.”

Ellie quirks an eyebrow and turns back to stare at Sarah. “I’m not an idiot, dude. I’m not gonna set myself up for an ambush.”

Sarah makes an offended noise. “You think I’m gonna give you up? To like…” Sarah trails off, staring hard at Ellie. “Like criminals or something?”

Ellie huffs. “Not unless you count your uncle as a criminal. I’m not stupid, I’m not gonna go to the patrol tower just to have Tommy or Maria drag me back to Jackson.”

Sarah huffs back, annoyed, like her plan’s been foiled. “It’s nothing like that. And besides, we’re like an hour ahead of anyone else at least. I’m not setting you up. I just… I promised dad I’d radio from Alpine.”

Ellie wishes she was at a table, or directly in front of a wall, or something else solid enough that she could bang her head against it. “Well, why the fuck did you do that?”

“I don’t know,” Sarah pouts defensively, and Ellie can’t tell if the rosiness in her cheeks is from the cold or from embarrassment. “Because he asked me to. Because he sounded about thirty seconds from following us, and my dad may be a superhero, but he’s also fifty-four years old and recently injured. I figured anything I could say to make him stay in Jackson was probably worth it.”

It’s true, so Ellie doesn’t protest again. What the fuck was she going to say to Joel on the radio? What did she have to say to the man who doomed the whole world? Who took away the only good thing Ellie might have ever done in her whole life? Who threw away all the suffering Ellie took to get to Salt Lake City without even fucking asking her?

She didn’t have anything to say to him. Not a fucking word.

But Sarah was right. He’d be right behind them if she hadn’t convinced him otherwise, convinced him that she was a good enough babysitter for Ellie. So, watchtower it is. And if she got even the barest hint that Tommy or Joel were coming her way, she’d fucking book it and leave Sarah behind to go back to Jackson empty handed with them.

-=+=-

They make it to the resort town of Alpine, Wyoming at about 8 PM, if Ellie had to guess, hours after the sun has set. On horseback, the trip from Jackson should have taken half a day. Instead, they arrive most of the way through the second day of their journey, which does not bode well for the rest of their trip.

The trip passes in total silence that thinly walks the line of comfortable and awkward, and they only encounter one infected in the square street block that Ellie clears for their base of operations.

They hole up in the only house Ellie finds with an intact roof. Twenty-five years of harsh winter without being snow shoveled or maintained means most of the houses on the block are completely unenterable let alone livable, roofs caved in and houses flooded, moldy from snowmelt. Thankfully, people who lived in Wyoming Before tended to be hunters, so Ellie finds a decent amount of ammo for Sarah while she scouts around their home base. One shed has a whole box of 9mm ammo, fifty rounds, completely unopened. Ellie doesn’t think she’s ever seen a full box of ammo in her life, not even when she was in FEDRA military training. She puts aside most of it for Sarah, who had exactly 9 shots worth of ammunition, having only expected to go on a one-day patrol.

Ellie had been prepared to make this journey. Sarah had not.

-=+=-

The “watchtower” in Alpine sits at the highest point of the valley: the lodge at the top of the ski lift. It’s not actually a tower at all, unlike most of the other lookouts on patrol routes. After Ellie has found their home base, tied up and fed the horses, and sulked about whether or not they really needed to call Joel for half an hour, she grudgingly leads Sarah on a trek through town to the lodge.

The “downtown” of Alpine (if it can even be called that, just the Boston QZ alone let alone the city as a whole was probably ten times bigger) is clear, as it should be, given that they send patrols out this far every couple of months. When they reach the lodge, after climbing the million steps it takes to reach the top of it, Ellie notes this down in the logbook, writing a simple “Clear - The Millers.”

She’s already halfway through the motion of putting the logbook away when she realizes what she’s written, freezing like a deer in headlights, like that Stalker had done after Ellie had barreled into it at the mine. She fucking hates that it’s his name she goes to write when she’s done something good. With a quick glance to Sarah, who’s staring out of the window overlooking the slopes on the other side of the room and hasn’t even noticed Ellie’s little slip, she snatches the logbook back up and scratches out “The Millers,” instead writing “Ellie and Sarah.” Then, she goes back and keeps scribbling over what she had written before until it’s completely gone, ink staining the side of her hand and pressing so hard she creates a depression in the paper.

She hates that she can’t really tell if the pit of agony forming at the bottom of her stomach was from scratching it out or from writing it in the first place.

“So how does this work?”

Ellie raises an eyebrow at her. “Seriously? You just promised Joel you were gonna radio him and you don’t even know how the radio works? What were you gonna do if you hadn’t found me?”

“If I hadn’t found you, I would be back in Jackson and it wouldn’t matter. That’s what dad said.”

Ellie snorts. “It’s a Ham radio. Jackson has four frequency bands that they operate under, one lower frequency that operates at a range of about 10 miles to run the walkies, two high frequency bands that can relay pretty much all around the world from Jackson tower when it’s clear and the moon’s out, and one secret one that I’m not supposed to know about that they use to communicate with other groups of people, mostly FEDRA to coordinate trade drop-offs. We’re gonna operate on 24.98 MHz, which is the frequency Jackson uses at nighttime. It can travel really far, because they bounce the radio waves off the fuckin moon.”

Sarah steels her face into being perfectly neutral and pleasant. “I’m just gonna smile and nod and pretend I know what any of that meant.”

“It’s not that hard. Most of these hardcore radios in the downtown areas of cities are already set up to do this crap, so most of the time the only thing you have to know is the frequency band. No one in Jackson tower transmits on the high frequency radio unless they’re contacted first, but there’s always someone receiving. Amy is the head of radio operations in Jackson and she works the night shift, and Mike and Alexa take turns on the day shift. In order to radio to Jackson and have someone answer, you have to have a callsign and a code.”

“Dad told me my callsign was Demi Parker.”

“Right. Before Outbreak Day, people used to have cool callsigns, numbers and cool nicknames or whatever. But now, we want it to sound boring and unimportant, so we pick normal, boring names so that if anyone happens to be listening in, they won’t think twice about it.”

“What about the code?”

Ellie looks up at Sarah’s curious stare, affronted. “They let you go out on patrol without knowing our safe codes?”

Sarah blinks owlishly. “Uh… yeah?”

Ellie swears. “That’s no fucking fair, dude. I had to memorize the morse code pips, the phonetic alphabet, and all of Jackson’s codes before Joel even let me do a wall shift let alone a real patrol. This is bullshit.” Sarah makes a sympathetic face, wincing at the injustice of it all. “The codes in Jackson for trouble are about food. You’ll start your conversation with your callsign and start talking like normal. Small talk. At some point, the Jackson receiver will ask you when the last time you’ve eaten was. If you’re completely safe, and more importantly alone, the last time you ate was breakfast. If you’re in immediate danger, need backup ASAP, the last time you ate was dinner. And if you’re either not alone or in a position that could become dangerous, the last time you ate was lunch. The only time a Jackson receiver will disclose any sensitive information is if you’re safe and alone. Otherwise they’ll make shit up until you can drop the line. There are more codes so that you can still talk even if you aren’t alone, but that gets a little more complicated.”

Sarah nods, which Ellie takes as her cue to move to the radio. When she turns it on, the frequency is still set to 24.98 megahertz, which means whoever patrolled here last was too lazy to scramble it before they left. Ellie flicks the switch on the mic, annoyed.

“Jackson Tower, come in. This is Will Livingston.” There’s silence for a few seconds, but that’s normal. Amy always leaves the radio on, but she’s not always at her desk. Sometimes it takes a minute for her to respond. “Jackson Tower, this is Will Livingston. Can you hear me?” Ellie’s going to be really embarrassed if she explained how easy all of this was to Sarah just to have it not work. “Jackson To–”

“We hear you loud and clear, Will. How’s the weather in the mountains?” Ellie smiles. Tommy must’ve warned Amy to expect a transmission.

“You know, it’s not too bad, Jackson, I can’t complain. The snow is beautiful.”

“Have you eaten?”

Ellie grins, looking backwards at Sarah like see? I told you. “You know, it’s been a while. Last time I ate was breakfast, with Demi Parker. Eggs, sunny side up.” Ellie doesn’t really know what that means, sunny side up, but it was something people said in old movies a lot.

“Well I hope you get a good meal in you soon. What can I do for you, Miss Livingston?”

“Well Jackson, I was hoping you could gather the Earps for me. I’ve got a message for them.”

“All of ‘em? Wyatt and Virgil and Allie and Nellie Jane?”

“Just Wyatt will do, Jackson, but if the others are around, they can come, too.”

“Alright, Will, stand by.”

She turns back to Sarah, switching the radio mic off. Sarah’s grinning like a maniac.

“Wyatt Earp? My dad made his callsign the Tombstone character?”

“Actually it was Tommy’s idea. He called himself Virgil way back when he came to Jackson. Maria told me once that her wedding present to him was changing her callsign to Allie Earp.”

“I’m sure that just tickled him,” Sarah giggles, and Ellie is struck again with how much of a hillbilly she sounds, just like the rest of the Millers. I’m sure that just tickled him. I’m Sarah Miller and I talk like I walked right off the set of one of those old dumb westerns.

“Joel thought it was funny, but Tommy told me that he bitched about being Wyatt because Wyatt was the younger brother. When Benji was born, it was Danny Green’s idea to make his callsign Nellie Jane. I don’t think Nellie Jane is actually in the movie, though— That’s the real-life Virgil Earp’s daughter’s name.”

“And you? Is Will Livingston another Tombstone character? I don’t remember the name, but it's been about twenty-five years since I’ve seen the movie.”

Ellie flinches. She’d never really thought about it before, but in hindsight, of course her name didn’t fucking match. Of course her callsign wasn’t a member of the Earp family, because Ellie wasn’t a real member of the Miller family. She wasn’t an Earp, and the Millers hated Ariel, and Joel forgot her patrol, and Sarah slept in her bed, and it all just clicked into place.

“Uh, no,” Ellie states dumbly once she manages to swallow the battery-acid anger crawling up her throat. “No, I actually haven’t ever seen the movie, we don’t have a copy. My callsign is about— there’s this joke book I really like. Written by a guy named Will Livingston. So that’s what Joel picked out for me.”

“Oh.” Sarah says dumbly. “Well, mine is the name of the lead singer of my favorite band, so I get it.”

She doesn’t fucking get it. Sarah was born into the Miller family. If she stands out it’s quirky, it’s Sarah forging her own path. Ellie only has a different sign because she clearly wasn’t actually in the family.

Sarah gets that horrible look of pity she’s worn on and off ever since coming to Jackson, but Ellie is spared hearing her attempts at making Ellie feel better by the radio sputtering back to life.

“Alright, Will and Demi, I’m passing you over to Wyatt. Virgil and Allie are in a council hearing. Have a good chat, girls.”

The static of the mic being shuffled around Amy’s desk spikes, and Sarah winces as she comes to lean over the table with Ellie.

“We can talk now?” Sarah asks, finger over the mute toggle.

“Someone could always be listening. Don’t say any specific details of where exactly Jackson is or where exactly we’re going just in case. Anything else is pretty much fair game.”

She passes the mic over to Sarah, watching as the woman fidgets with the mute toggle before finally switching it over. “Hi, daddy,” she says softly, and Ellie hears Joel’s breath hitch on the other end of the line.

“Hey, Junebug,” he replies softly. “You made it.”

“I made it,” Sarah echoes lamely. “I found Ellie. We’re here, we’re safe.”

Joel hitches a breath at the mention of her name. It’s stupid, that she notices it. It’s stupid that she cares. But she does. A little hiccup, like he was expecting that Sarah wouldn’t find her. Like he was preparing himself for what would have happened if she didn’t.

Sarah and Joel lapse into silence, and it takes longer than it should’ve for Ellie to notice they’re waiting for her to say something. She crosses her arms and steels her face. She doesn’t have anything to say to him, she’s decided at this moment. Sarah raises an eyebrow at her, and Ellie is struck with how much she looks like Joel like that, even though she kind of doesn’t. But that’s the same stupid eyebrow she sees anytime she does something dumb, so it looks the same.

Under the weight of Sarah’s stare, Ellie clears her throat. “Hi,” she says curtly. Joel sighs again, like part of him didn’t believe that she was actually there, that Sarah had actually found her.

“Hey,” he says, softening his voice like he’s talking to a spooked animal. Ellie huffs.

“I’m gonna give y’all some space,” Ellie says, keeping her voice as level as she can manage it, even though the sound of Joel’s voice is reminding her exactly why she left. Fuck him, for sounding so soft and treating her so delicately after being the reason Ellie couldn’t save the world. Fuck him, for making her care about him, when he couldn’t even give her the dignity of choice. Fuck him.

“Ellie, I wanted to talk to you–” Joel sputters, like Ellie didn’t fucking know that. Obviously he wanted to talk to her. He wanted to defend himself, convince Ellie that killing a whole hospital full of people was somehow good, or right, or necessary. Obviously he wanted to convince her to come back, to convince her that they could go on being one big happy family. She isn’t a fucking idiot.

“Well I don’t wanna talk to you, so you can shove it.” She switches the mute toggle, even though Joel is still making vaguely choking noises at her disrespect, and turns to Sarah. “Can you get back on your own?”

“Ellie—”

“Sarah. I know you probably mean well, but you really don’t understand what this is about, and I really don’t wanna hear it. Can you get back to the house on your own or not?”

Sarah frowns. Ellie can see her thinking over her options in her head, which are of course, none. Because Sarah isn’t as strong as she is, can’t shoot a gun, and has no other way to keep Ellie in this stupid fucking ski lodge by force. Ellie tunes out Joel asking for them over the radio, and she has already halfway-turned on her heel by the time Sarah nods slowly.

The door bangs behind her, which she flinches at. She stomps all the way down the hill that the lodge sits on. Once she reaches the bottom, once she’s sure that she’s out of earshot and Sarah won’t come running, she screams.

She screams herself hoarse. Her voice is raw and aching. She doesn’t care. She screams some more. She sinks to her knees in the snow, trying desperately to ignore all of the stupid fucking feelings she has about Sarah, about Salt Lake, about Joel, and she screams some more.

This isn’t what was supposed to happen. It’s only been, like three weeks. Three weeks since Sarah came and ruined everything. But that’s not right. It’s been three weeks since Ellie had realized everything had gone to shit. But it had been two years since Joel ruined everything when he took her out of that fucking hospital. Two years since the world wasn’t cured, and Ellie didn’t even fucking know it.

Ellie kneels in the snow, soaking through her clothes and shivering. It gives her a horrible sense of deja vu, except back then she wasn’t cold. She was warm. Fire burning around her, hot blood spattered across her face, heart racing, sweating from fire and adrenaline in equal parts. She wasn’t cold, then, not really. She was burning up a fever. But she’s cold now. And Joel isn’t here to wrap her up and lead her through the white.

A little belatedly, she realizes. It’s probably after midnight by now. It’s Christmas.

The Millers celebrated Christmas the way most Mexican people do, supposedly. They opened presents on Christmas Eve instead of Christmas Day. There were presents for her underneath their dinky tree back home. She has presents for everyone else, too. She painted Maria and Tommy and Benji, all perfect and realistic, on a real canvas and everything. She got Benji new toys that she found on patrol, one of which lit up with the real working batteries she’d found the next day. She found a dreidel for Dina, a hat for Jesse, and a sketchbook for Cat. She got Joel coffee. A lot of coffee, which she had somehow managed to keep hidden under her loose floorboard. Like six bags of it, all of which were grown in Texas. Ellie had been kind of worried– she didn’t think Texas was known for coffee. But she was hoping it would be similar to whatever kind of coffee Joel drank Before. She was half surprised he hadn’t sniffed it out like a bloodhound.

But now she wasn’t going to be able to give her gifts, and she wasn’t sure if she wanted Joel to have his anyway. But even though she wasn’t sure she wanted to be there, she was certain she didn’t want to be here, soaked to her bones, sinking in the snow like it would swallow her whole.