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Eating her pancakes that morning at the dining hall with Dina and Jesse, Ellie can’t help but feel like something about this day is off. She holds out hope that it’s because she woke up with her fan broken and the day started with her sweaty and disgruntled, but she’s not totally sold on that idea.
Dina and Jesse both attempt to loop her into their conversation, but they know by now when she gets like this there’s almost no getting her out of it. Only one person can do it successfully with any regularity, and she shoves thoughts of him out of her mind automatically.
Ellie’s scheduled to work in the stables all day today, which is her favorite job outside of patrolling. She gives up on eating more and makes her way to her favorite companions, the horses. Her first stop is Shimmer, of course, to give her pats and kisses, but then she gets to work. The day is hot but thankfully she’s in the shade a lot, and Ellie takes off her jacket so that she’s just in her tank top. She thanks her younger self for the chemical burn she put on her arm, no matter how much it hurt like a bitch in the moment, since it allows her to actually feel safe and stay cool during the Jackson summers.
Ellie can tell she’s missed lunch by the way her stomach is growling, but she doesn’t much feel like eating and she’s having fun with the horses, so she lets her hunger lie a little longer.
Suddenly, sharp yells break up the quiet of the early afternoon.
“Someone get Tommy! Get Maria!”
Ellie perks up, wondering why they’re being yelled for so frantically. Though Jackson is run by the Council, Maria and Tommy are the ones people often go to first when something goes wrong. There’s a wide variety of reasons that they could be being yelled for – god, once the two of them were forced to come running because a cat got stuck in a tree – but something about this time unsettles her.
She walks away from Shimmer, who whinnys when the rest of the carrots she’d been gobbling up end up back in Ellie’s pocket, but Ellie leaves with a pat and a distracted “be back soon.” Being in the stables with Shimmer is one of the only places she feels truly at peace. Her mind conjures thoughts of another place, but that house, that person, have been off the table for years – all of Ellie’s own volition.
Another round of shouting for Tommy and Maria occurs, and Ellie jogs over to the main street to check out what’s going on. At first, she can’t tell what all the ruckus is about, but then she sees.
There’s a flurry of activity at the clinic, and Ellie’s heart drops to her stomach. Someone got hurt, she thinks. But who, and why were people shouting for her de-facto Aunt and Uncle? They aren’t doctors, and usually only family get yelled for when someone is injured.
Oh god, Ellie thinks. No.
She starts jogging towards the clinic at the end of the road, picking up her pace even more when she sees Tommy shoot out from a side street and stride straight into the clinic.
Ellie passes a group she knows was out on patrol, and she hears them talking.
“We were surrounded,” she hears Jen say. “I can’t believe we made it out. Never would’ve even had the chance to without him. Joel–” and Ellies fears are confirmed. The ones she refused to even let surface in her mind. The ones she’s held onto since the broken end of a bat jutted out of Joel’s stomach years ago, and Ellie learned what it felt like to be on the edge of her world changing forever, in the worst way possible. Her mind whites out, and she doesn’t hear the end of Jen’s sentence, though she thinks it would've been useful information.
This isn’t happening, she thinks to herself frantically. Joel’s fine. It’s a different Joel. Even if she hasn’t heard of another one in her years in Jackson. Someone would have yelled for Ellie if her Joel was hurt, if he was wounded badly enough to require the level of panic in someone’s voice as they yelled for Tommy and Maria.
But why were Tommy and Maria yelled for in the first place? She’s sprinting down the street before her mind catches up to her body, and she bursts into the clinic.
She isn’t breathing properly, she thinks distantly. She’s trying, but she can’t. She saw Tommy come in here, and her eyes search for him frantically. He can confirm to her that it’s a different Joel that’s in here, not hers. She sees him, arguing with a nurse, and then she’s next to him.
Tommy turns when he senses her presence, face softening a bit. He still looks frightened out of his mind, the meaning of which Ellie refuses to accept. He’s just a worrier, she tells herself. He cares a lot about this town and everyone in it. She knows she’s deluding herself at this point, but she doesn’t want the spell she’s casting to break. Joel can’t be hurt. Can’t be injured enough to put that look of terror on his brother’s face.
“Ellie, where’d you come from?” Tommy asks, clearly trying to deflect.
She just stares at him, still trying to calm her breathing, and he sighs.
“Ellie… Joel got hurt on patrol. Badly. He got shot.”
And her world is collapsing in on itself. She feels Tommy attempt to guide her to one of the chairs lining the wall, but she pushes him off. No. No. No, no, no, no, no. She realizes she’s been muttering aloud, getting louder and louder every time.
This can’t be happening. Joel was supposed to be steadfast. Supposed to be around forever, no matter that they haven’t talked in almost two years. He’s supposed to stay and be there even when she couldn’t stand to be in the same room as him. He promised, she thinks pathetically. When he finally told her the truth, he still promised he’d be there for her if she ever needed him. I need you, she thinks to him, praying to a god she’s never believed in that he hears her and stays.
Distantly, she notices the waiting room is getting calmer. She’s suddenly next to Tommy again once she realizes she still doesn’t know what happened.
She grabs his arm and yanks him toward her, away from Maria – who got there Ellie doesn’t even know when.
“Tommy, what happened?” She all but begs.
And she listens as Tommy tells her what he’s learned. They were at a medical clinic scavenging – ironic, Ellie thinks, even if her heart breaks a little. They got surrounded by a large group of raiders who were there for the same reason as them, and much less willing to share or talk it out. Apparently, Joel saved both Matt, a patroller in his twenties, and Veronica, an eighteen year old out on her first run, from certain death – but not before taking out half the enemy practically on his own. He rushed the three raiders who had their guns trained on the two and took two of them down before getting shot in the chest by the third. The fight was wrapped up quickly after that, but the damage had already been done.
It’s a miracle they were even able to get him back alive, Tommy tells her, voice gruff in an attempt to stop the fear she knows he feels from spilling into his words.
Ever the protector, Joel Miller.
*
Ellie paces in the waiting room, unable to stop herself from thinking, from letting her mind run wild.
She sees Tommy and Maria sitting near the operation door, holding hands.
Why was Maria being yelled for? Tommy she understands, they’re brothers. But how could Maria and Joel have gotten close enough for her to be yelled for when Joel’s been injured? They didn’t like one another, didn’t trust each other, only tolerated the other for the people they loved. They barely spoke even when the five of them used to have family dinners, back before Ellie couldn’t stand living with the weight of Joel’s lie between them. Before their life blew up between them.
How has so much changed in the almost two years that Ellie’s refused to even look in Joel’s direction? How have Maria and Joel somehow repaired a relationship, and how has Ellie done so well in distancing herself from the only father figure she’s ever known that no one thought to tell her he might be dying?
No, she thinks to herself aggressively. He is not dying, he’s going to be just fine. He’s always just fine.
At some point, Maria tries to get her to eat something, but Ellie knows it would all just come right back up. She thinks about the time after Silver Lake, when she could barely keep anything down. About how gentle Joel was with her, how kind. Parental, the thought painful like the twist of a knife in her heart.
When she finally got the truth from Joel, she couldn’t comprehend it. How could the person she trusted so much, loved so much, betray her like this? It was her purpose in life, and he ripped it away from her. He said it was wrong of the Fireflies to not talk to her about it, to lie to her, and in some distant way she agrees, but she also knows she would’ve let them do anything to her for the cure. And he knew that too.
How can she forgive the man who lied to her for years, who let her build a home with him for the first time in her life? How was she supposed to move on from that? She couldn’t comprehend what Joel did for her, so she didn’t try.
She moved into the garage out back that Joel had been slowly converting into a private space for her, for whatever use she wanted. She wanted it as an apartment after their life together ended, so that’s what she used it for. And she didn’t speak to him again.
But now here she is, potentially about to lose him forever, and she can’t believe how goddamn stupid she was. She wants to go back and punch herself in the face, to tell herself to fight for the family she was lucky enough to get. Joel had given her everything, happiness and a home and a place to make friends, to build a life. But she couldn’t live with the guilt surrounding her, and so she laid her anger at his feet – and he let her.
She misses him, she finally allows herself to think. She’s missed him from the moment he told her everything, when she knew their relationship was changed forever. But if she truly believed their relationship was over, was altered permanently, why was she here, about to throw up, wanting to cry and scream herself hoarse because her parent was on the operating table with a bullet in his chest.
*
She hears a couple flurries of activity and loud beeping in the O.R. that almost make her pass out, but no one emerges, so she takes that as a good sign and runs with it.
Maria had shoved a water bottle in her hand at some point and told her to drink, or else, and with nothing else to do Ellie sips from it occasionally. Even that unsettles her stomach, so eventually she sets it down. Really, she wants to hurl it against the wall and run into the operating room to demand Joel gets the fuck up right now, but even in her current state of mind she knows that’s a bad idea.
Finally, finally, Freya, the town’s most senior doctor, emerges. She’s in her mid 60’s, making her the most experienced doctor from Before by a good margin. Ellie’s in the corner, at the end of a lap she’s made around the room, when Freya takes the mask off her face and pulls off her gloves. She turns to speak to Tommy and Maria, and Ellie’s heart just about shatters at yet another confirmation that she isn’t the one people turn to with information about Joel.
Tommy stands, and Freya delivers the verdict.
“We got the bullet out,” she says. “But he lost an incredible amount of blood, and even with your donation a bullet to the chest is not something easy to survive.” Ellie hadn’t even noticed him donating blood. “He’s stable, for now, but he is by no means out of the woods,” Freya looks at Tommy steadily. “If he makes it through the next couple of days, he should recover, but it’s going to be a long and difficult process.”
It feels like her strings have been cut, the way Ellie collapses to the floor. Suddenly Tommy is in front of her, reaching for her, and she reaches back. He wraps her in a hug, tears slipping down his face.
“He’s going to be okay. He’s going to be okay.” Tommy murmurs to her. Ellie is so relieved she can hardly think. Her mind pushes away the other things Freya said, like the fact that he’s not out of the woods, and revels in the fact that he’s alive .
Tommy knows just as well as she does that Joel is a fighter, and she can see in his eyes that he has no doubt Joel will be fine. She latches onto that belief because she can’t think any other way. Freya murmurs to them that they can go see Joel in the recovery room they’ve put him in, and Ellie scrambles out of Tommy’s arms and down the hall.
She opens the door gently, and tears well in her eyes when she sees Joel lying on the bed. He’s so still, and it’s so unlike him she can hardly stand it. He’s always moving, even when he’s sitting. He’s fiddling with something or shaking his leg, his anxiety making itself known. Now, he lies flat and unmoving, and somehow that is what sends her over the edge.
She throws herself into the chair next to the bed and starts sobbing. She can hardly breathe at the force of it all pouring out of her – the fear, the heartbreak, the anger that he would do this to her and that she wasted so much time being furious at him.
I won’t do that to us again, she thinks. She won’t waste whatever time they have together. She’ll work on her anger and he’ll be there to hold her whenever she needs it. Tommy trails in after her, and after a bit Maria and now-toddler Alex enter the room too. He calls for her, “Ewie!”, and Maria eases him into Ellie’s arms as she reaches for him.
Holding him has always soothed her, especially in times of distress. When everything that happened on the road would wash over her, and later when her complicated feelings about Joel would overwhelm her.
He still soothes her now, at Joel’s bedside.
*
Four days pass in the same way. Ellie refuses to leave Joel’s bedside except to use the bathroom, and people bring her food and water that she barely touches. Maria, Dina, Jesse, even Cat all come by at some point or another. Tommy is usually in the room with her, but they don’t speak. She has too much in her head to even attempt conversation, and sensing that, he gives up trying pretty quickly.
At about lunchtime on Joel’s fifth day in the clinic, Freya comes to tell them he should be waking up soon. They’d kept him in a medically-induced coma to help his body rest and begin recovering, but they were finally weaning him off it, and once he was awake he’d be cleared to continue resting at home. Tommy’s eyes light up, but Ellie doesn’t know what to feel.
She can’t stand the idea of leaving him, not when this event has put her life and behavior into rather harsh perspective, but she also can’t stand thinking of his reaction to her being there.
She’d been so mean to him for so long. Aggressive, rude, downright cruel for almost two years. How could she think he’d be happy to see her there? She wants to believe they can fix what’s been broken, but does she have the right to hope for that any more?
“Everything’s going to be okay,” Tommy says to her. She jumps, almost forgetting he was in the room with her.
“What do you mean?” She asks, though she thinks she knows where he’s going with this. Even when she stopped talking to Joel or allowing him in her life, she couldn’t cut Tommy, or Maria, or Alex out like that. She’d tried, initially, feeling like she didn’t have a right to them anymore, but they whipped that out of her real quick. She still has meals with them sometimes, goes on patrols with them, comes to them when she needs something. Still treats them like family, like they continue to do for her. So he probably knows at least some of what’s going on in her head.
“I’m not saying you need to forgive him or need to start talking to him again, but if this…” here he hesitates. “If this incident has changed something for you, I know Joel would be over the moon to be in any part of your life again.”
She gives him a halfhearted smile, but can’t bring herself to do more than that – let alone respond. She does consider what he says though. Maybe, she thinks, maybe she can rediscover the place Joel made for her in his heart, and the one she carved out for him too. She takes Joel’s hand, still limp, calloused and scraped from where he clearly threw a few punches in the fight, but so strong and warm. She misses his hands on her face, soothing her after a nightmare. She misses his gentle words. She misses him.
Okay, she thinks. She can do this. They can do this.
But when Joel finally starts to stir, Ellie loses any and all bravery she’d been working to gather.
And she flees.
*
On her hurried way out, practically blind in her panic to run from the pain and the distance between them that feels so insurmountable, she bumps into three people coming into the clinic. Penny, George, and C-something, she thinks. They all look concerned, and Penny speaks to her.
“Hey, you’re Ellie, right? I’ve seen you in the pictures at Joel’s house. Were you here visiting him? We tried to come by earlier to visit him but were told there were too many people in the room with him already.”
Why have these people been in Joel’s house enough to recognize her from pictures? Why do they look so concerned? Ellie can’t process the fact that Joel clearly has friends good enough to be so worried, good enough to recognize her from photos Joel clearly still has up in his home. How long has her and Joel’s estrangement gone that these people who evidently mean a lot to him she doesn’t even know? What has she done? It’s just the nail in the coffin, to realize that she knows nothing about Joel’s life anymore, has never met his friends or even knew he had them.
He knows her friends, though. Heard from Jesse that Joel gave him a talking-to on her first full patrol. Was told by Dina multiple times that he gave her cookies or some other treat to “share with her friends,” a barely-concealed gift to Ellie through Dina.
But she doesn’t know these three people standing in front of her, Joel’s friends.
She slips around them and sprints away, ignoring one of their shouts of “hey!” as she does so.
*
She makes it back to her little apartment just in time to throw up into the sink. It feels like the winter when she was fourteen, when her body was constantly trying to purge itself in a misguided attempt to cleanse itself. She wants to get the feeling of Joel so close to death out of her, but she knows this is yet another life experience that will be added to the fuel of her nightmares.
Ellie sits by her window, the one that can see Joel’s front porch and Tommy and Maria’s house across the street, and waits. Hours pass, but she just continues to sit there, hoping to see Tommy or Maria, or even better Joel. Finally, there he is, and her heart leaps.
He’s being pushed in a wheelchair by Tommy, with Maria and George on either side of him. She can tell he’s complaining about their fussing, and her eyes well with tears at the sight of him acting so normally, even when she knows he must be in so much pain.
They make their way inside, and Ellie forces herself to breathe deeply. Just keep breathing, she tries to tell herself, he’s going to be okay. And that mantra becomes all she thinks in the hours she lays in bed and weakly attempts to sleep.
*
All she wants is to glue herself to his side like she did after everything that happened that awful winter, but she can’t seem to get herself to take that one final step.
Instead, she pesters Tommy and Maria almost nonstop about Joel and his recovery. Is he eating, she asks, is he drinking enough water? Moving around okay? Taking the pain medication Freya prescribed him? Is he bored? When she gets an exasperated yes to her last question, she trades for some movies she thinks he’ll like.
The first time she sneaks into the house is when she knows Joel is on the front porch with Tommy. She can hear the low murmur of their southern drawls, always coming out stronger when they’re together, and the sound of it makes her want to curl up into Joel’s side. She slips into the living room and sets a stack of the four movies she gathered on the coffee table.
She hasn’t been in the house in so long, she realizes. She takes a moment to look around. Not much has changed. She notices a few new pieces of furniture, and a lot more whittled figurines. And the photos of her, of them, of their family. The ones his friends were referencing. She never took any when she moved out, too furious at him to even think of having such a physical reminder of him in her space, but now she can’t help but snag a framed photo of the two of them at a bonfire. It was taken in the first months of their permanent arrival in Jackson. They were somewhat settled by then, but still both had difficulty completely relaxing. That was the first night she thought they both accepted that this was their home, that they had this life, that it wasn’t a fluke.
She wants to look around more, but is scared of getting caught, so she slips back out with her new treasure. On her way out though, she notices a few dishes in the sink.
This is how she can help him, she thinks, how she can be there for him. So that night, she quietly makes her way back into the house. His bad hearing is to her advantage when she steps on a couple floorboards that weren’t squeaky when this was her home, and she shakes off the sadness that swells into her because of it.
She gets a test in patience trying to clean the few dishes left out and still staying quiet, but she succeeds. Then she wanders a bit more and tries to tidy whatever she finds. His injury has him lax, she thinks. When they lived together, he kept a tight and tidy ship. It makes her sad thinking about him being injured and doing everything on his own, and she resolves to keep coming over and doing what little she can to help him.
As the weeks go by and Joel becomes more active (she’s not stalking him, she's not, she’s just keeping an eye out. So what if that eye might be out all the time. So fucking what.), she also starts tracking his schedule. When he’s finally cleared to go back to work, though Tommy told her Joel’d been told very specifically to take it easy, she makes Tommy and Maria tell her his schedule before it’s out, so that she can decide whether or not she thinks he’s ready for it. She gets into more than a few arguments with them when she thinks he’s getting scheduled for too long of a job or too big of a project (his primary duties are construction and patrolling, and she’ll stab anyone who dares suggest he go out for patrol in the next twenty years).
One day, she’s just about to open the door to Tommy and Maria’s house for her weekly check-in (or interrogation as Tommy calls it) when she hears voices inside. She freezes, because the voice speaking is Joel’s deep timbre she misses so much.
“... fine, Tommy. I’m recovering even quicker than Freya said I would.”
Ellie presses her ear to the door before she has time to think about it. She soaks up his voice, lets it soothe some of the residual fear she still holds in her heart.
“You still need to take it easy, big brother. You were shot in the chest, if you don’t recall.”
“Yeah, yeah. Like I don’t feel it just breathing.”
Tommy makes a concerned sound, and she just knows Joel is waving his concern off.
They’re quiet for a moment, but Joel breaks the silence by tentatively asking, “...how’s Ellie?”
“Fine, overall. Like I told you, just about lost her goddamn mind when you came back from patrol on the brink of death. Still massively worried about you. Her fretting is over the top, even for me – and that’s saying something. She’s coming back to you, Joel.”
Joel sighs. “She doesn’t want anything to do with me, Tommy.”
“Joel, she comes over here every week demanding to know what jobs you’re being put on, and then argues about it no matter how easy or simple we try to make it. Hell, she’s probably gonna be over here soon for her cross-examination. She loves you, she’s worried about you, and more than all that she’s allowing herself to miss you. She’s finally moving past her anger. She just doesn’t know how to bridge the gap anymore.”
Joel seems to not have anything to say to that, and the two sit in silence. Ellie considers leaving, but just as she moves to walk off the porch, Joel speaks.
“By the way, can you stop sneaking into the house and doing shit for me? If you wanna hover, you can just do it in front of me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know, doing the dishes, dropping off movies, that stuff. I appreciate you being worried, but I can do everything myself. I did enjoy that last movie you brought though, Legally Blonde. It was great. That Elle Woods kicks ass.”
Even though Ellie’s sneakery is getting exposed right in front of her, she feels a burst of pride that he liked a movie she brought him.
“That wasn’t me, hermano.” He pauses. “It must’ve been–“
“Ellie.” They finish together.
“See?” Tommy says.
And she doesn’t think she’s imagining the hope in Joel’s voice when he says “Maybe.”
*
Ellie continues to go about her duties as time – the bastard – continues to carry on, and she continues to blow off Dina and Jesse when they come around trying to get her to hang out with them again. Dina says they understand, and she knows they’re doing their best to give her space, but she can tell they’re worried.
She used to spend all her time with them, when she was looking for ways to avoid thinking about Joel and his betrayal and her mess of feelings around the whole situation. Not that she didn’t enjoy being with them, but they’re funny and usually good at distracting her, which was a bonus.
Now, she spends her time worrying about Joel and trying to pull even more weight around town in the somewhat-misguided hope that it’ll keep Joel off his feet and resting longer. He does so much for everyone, fixing loose floorboards or stopping leaks or chopping wood. She’s even seen him taking care of some of the younger kids a few times when some emergency or another has come up. They climb all over him, and he’s so gentle and careful with them.
Like he used to be with her.
One day, Maria comes by and practically forces her to go to the dining hall with her. She’d been eating alone in her apartment, or just not eating, and it seems the leeway Maria was giving her is up.
Maria makes a few attempts to drag some conversation out of her, but besides a distracted “Yeah?” or “No way,” as she tells her about Alex’s latest escapades, it doesn’t work.
Finally, Ellie interrupts Maria’s story about Tommy and Alex ending up wrestling in a mud pile after Tommy tried to take Alex’s favorite toy – somewhat embellished, she can tell, for her sake – and asks Maria something that had been bugging her more and more in the weeks since Joel’s accident.
“Why did they yell for you when Joel got hurt?”
Maria stops talking and looks at her. “Well, we’re family.”
“But you don’t like each other,” Ellie says. She can tell it comes out somewhat aggressively, but she doesn’t care.
“We do like each other. We’re family, and more than that, we’re friends.”
Ellie looks at her, stunned. This is news to her. They were cordial, because they had to be, but she didn’t think they’d ever get anywhere close to friendly acquaintances, let alone actual friends, actual family.
“How?” Ellie can’t help but ask.
They come to a stop outside the dining hall.
“We…” Maria trails off. “...learned to understand one another,” she says finally.
With a significant look to Ellie, she can put together what they understood one another about. But Maria still decides to say it.
“Being a parent changes everything. You would do anything, become anyone, for your kid’s safety and happiness. I understood that for him, and he for me. We took different approaches when the world ended, and still have since, but nothing can heal you from the pain of the loss of a child. Some things will certainly give your life meaning once again, though.” Maria gives Ellie another look, and walks into the hall.
*
Yet another one of the new habits Ellie’s picked up is watching Joel’s lights to check on him and to guess at what he’s up to. She knows from Tommy that he’s healing well and moving around more and more, but she can’t seem to shake the bone-deep fear that reemerged those weeks ago.
She watches for his lights to turn off in the evening and on in the morning, part of his routine that is incredibly soothing to her, until one day when the pattern is disrupted.
When Ellie wakes up and gets out of bed to check that Joel’s living room light is on, she’s still half asleep. She imagines him sitting in the living room, reading a book and drinking his nasty coffee, and smiles a little to herself. Even though her room is cold this morning, checking the light has become the first thing she does when she wakes up, so she braves the cold of the room and makes her way to the window.
And no light is on.
Panic immediately bursts in Ellie’s chest, but she attempts to calm herself down by reminding herself that occasionally Joel will sleep in on a day off. But he’s scheduled to work on one of the old houses they’re refinishing, her mind whispers.
She paces her room, checking the window every lap, and tries to talk herself down. He’s fine, he’s fine, he’s motherfucking fine.
She should check on him, she thinks. But how can she just show up at his door like nothing, when she’s been ignoring him for the better part of two years, and still hasn’t spoken to him after he nearly died . She’s such a bitch. He must be so mad at her, so disappointed (which she knows feels worse, from back when she was his– well, his). She can’t face him, no matter that every day makes it harder to be apart. She’s wasted so much time, and she’s continuing to do so. But how can she even begin to bridge the Grand Canyon of a divide that she single-handedly carved out between them?
Maybe he went over to Tommy’s for coffee, she thinks in a burst of inspiration. She’s pulling on her sneakers in an instant, and practically running to Tommy and Maria’s front door.
She bangs on the door, a bit too loud for the time of day, she knows, but she can’t help it.
A disgruntled Tommy opens the door holding Alex, who shouts her name, and who has what looks like applesauce smeared all over his face. Ellie can’t help but snort, and Tommy rolls his eyes.
“Is Joel here?” she asks, refocusing. She tries to look into the house over Tommy’s shoulder, but her height restricts her.
“No?” Tommy says, confused. “Should he be?”
“His light isn’t on.” Ellie says, like that means something to anyone who isn’t a Joel schedule connoisseur.
“Okay?”
“Will you go check on him? Please.” She’s fidgeting, and she’d just really, really like to have the confirmation that he’s fine.
Tommy smiles softly at her, and passes Alex over into her arms. They talk about breakfast – “Daddy wanted my applesauce!” Alex declares, his little voice aggrieved. Ellie laughs as she watches Tommy walk over and enter Joel’s house.
“Is that why it’s all over your face? You couldn’t let him have any?”
“Yea!” He wriggles in agreement, and Ellie soaks up the feeling of her little cousin in her arms. He’s getting bigger by the day and growing more and more independent. She’ll soak up his smallness while she still can.
Tommy reemerges a couple of minutes later and walks back over to Ellie, who is rocking Alex back and forth nervously.
“He’s fine,” Tommy says. Ellie’s muscles practically turn to jello in her relief. “He just switched shifts with Violet. She wanted to get off early for her kid’s birthday. Was pissed off I woke him until I told him who was asking.” Tommy looks at her, and she flushes.
“You know, honey,” he starts, “you–”
“Thanks Tommy,” Ellie says, cutting him off. “Sorry ‘bout that.” She passes Alex back over, and then starts jogging off, embarrassment crawling over her now that she knows Joel is fine.
“Have a good day!” Tommy yells after her, and she waves behind her.
God, she’s stupid.
*
Ellie takes to trailing Joel, after that. Clearly just knowing his schedule isn’t enough, since even though she forces Tommy and Maria to give her final say, Joel himself can still make changes without telling her (not that he knows she feels she should know). She’s late to the stables multiple times because she had to make sure he got where he needed to go and then had to sprint to the other side of town for her job.
It’s been about four months since he was shot, and she’s following him from the dining hall. He’d eaten with what she’s learned in her trailing is his core group of friends – Penny, George, and Corey, whose name she found out when she heard Joel yell for them once – and is now making his way back home. He’s moving slower than normal, she notes. Is the wound bothering him? Maybe he just overdid it today at the site. They were building a deck, which sounds to her like a lot of work, so maybe he pushed himself too much. That would be in character.
He keeps slowing down, and now she’s getting concerned. They’re close to the house, but maybe he needs a rest before making it all the way home? She slows down too, and gets a little closer to see if she notices anything out of place.
Finally, he stops.
And she realizes what’s about to happen.
“Ellie.” He says.
Stupidly, her eyes fill with tears when she hears her name out of his mouth, said with his comforting Texan accent. She can feel his love in the word, and fuck how she misses him.
He doesn’t turn around, and she knows he’s giving her the chance to run like she’s done for months, for years. Even now, he won’t push her.
And that’s what makes her speak.
“Hi,” she says.
He startles, like he wasn’t expecting her to actually stick around. Her heart hurts a bit at the thought. Then, he turns, slowly.
“You’ve been taking care of me,” he states. He looks at her like he’s trying to read her mind, and like he’s drinking her in, standing in front of him.
She can tell she’s doing the same. It feels so good to see him, hale and whole, and be seen by him. The anger and betrayal she’d been nursing deep inside her fades even more.
“Yeah,” she says belatedly.
“Why?” A good question. There’s so many reasons she could give. Because he scared the shit out of her. Because she’s still kind of angry at him but she wants to be angry with him, not apart. Because losing him would mean losing a piece of herself that she doesn’t think she’d ever recover from, and in true boneheaded fashion, she only truly realized it when he almost left her behind for good. Because she loves him.
“Because…” What does she say? How does she explain everything she’s feeling, everything she’s felt? “...because you matter to me. Because you’ll always matter to me,” she settles on. It barely scrapes the surface of everything she feels about him. “Because I miss you. So much.”
His eyes are shining, and he takes an aborted step towards her.
She takes that for what it is, and pushes herself towards him, not away, for the first time in so long. His arms are open to her, like she should’ve known they’d always be, and she practically flings herself into them.
He holds her like she’s going to disappear, and she soaks up the warmth of him surrounding her. She’s missed how safe she feels in his arms, how protected. Missed his stupid jacket, the way it smells and feels around her. A few tears slip out, and she takes a shuddering breath.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers.
“No, baby girl. No. You did what you needed to do, what was best for you, and that’s what I’ll always want for you. What’s best.” The use of the endearment she loves so much, once again said to her by her person, warms the ice in her heart that froze the day she learned the truth.
She still feels guilty for how much hurt she’s put them both through, but she knows they need to move forward, not look back.
“I love you,” she says into his chest, still tucked in his arms. Maybe she should feel embarrassed, clinging to her parental-figure in the middle of the street, but she can’t bring herself to be anything other than content at last.
“I love you too, darlin’. More than you can even imagine.”
And when she asks, “Can I come home?” he says, “Always.”
*
Ellie moves back into their house. She’d missed living with him, hearing him putter around in the morning. Missed him standing in her doorway saying good night. Missed being able to check on him when nightmares of losing him in a million different ways startle her awake.
The room he’d made his workshop is switched with her garage apartment, and the garage becomes a space for them both to practice their craft. His woodworking tools next to her art supplies, just as it should be. He’d left her glow stars on the ceiling in her room, which makes her tear up when she sees them, and her stuff is easy enough to resettle.
She starts telling him about her life again, about her crush on Dina and how guilty she feels because Jesse is her best friend. And he tells her about his friends, about the parts of his life she’s missed. She helps him when his multitude of old wounds act up, and he holds her when occasional nightmares of David and Silver Lake, or of losing one of her countless loved ones, or some other horrible scenario her mind cooks up make her wake up screaming.
Her photos mix with his, and their lives slowly grow back together. They have dinners with Tommy and Maria and Alex, and movie nights with Jesse and Dina. Poker games with Joel’s friends. Hunting trips just the two of them.
They talk about Salt Lake City and the Fireflies. She talks about how hurt and betrayed she felt, still does sometimes. He tells her he doesn’t regret it and would do it again, but how sorry he is for hurting her. She starts to understand why he did what he did, how he wanted a normal, happy life for her.
They play guitar together again, sitting on the porch swing, one of them singing softly. She leans into his side, and his arm leaves the guitar and wraps around her.
And she feels peace.