Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Tess practically kicks the door open, a gun in one hand and the back of Ellie’s hoodie as she practically shoves her into the capitol building, immediately scanning for threats. Once they’re in, Tess is striding fast across the floor, letting go of Ellie as Joel pushes the door open after them.

Upon going into the main area, Ellie freezes up, and apparently, so does Tess going by how she looks around, almost in shock.

There are dead bodies everywhere. Blood. The supplies are unmanned, every single person on the floor.

“Holy shit,” Ellie gasps despite herself.

“Jesus.” Joel mutters as he sees from behind Ellie. She can’t help but stare at how they’re sprawled, how their wounds are distributed, how-

Tess’s breathing turns shaky, and Joel grabs Ellie’s arm, pulling her closer to him as Tess looks around almost-frantically, putting her gun away.

“Okay. I mean, there’s- there’s gotta be a fuckin’ radio or something, right?” Tess says, practically running for the supplies and immediately starting to rifle through the boxes.

“Who killed them? FEDRA?” Ellie asks, heart pounding.

“No.” Joel says, pointing to one body with a pool of blood beneath his head. He kicks it over, and the guy’s brains squelch out in a pool of crimson. “One of them got bit, the healthy ones fought the sick one, everyone lost. Tess! What’re you doin’?”

Tess is frantic now, digging through with shaking hands before whipping towards Ellie and moving towards her. “Where did Marlene say she was taking you? Ellie!”

Ellie’s brain shorts out for a minute. “Uh, I- I don’t know. Just west.”

“Just west. Fuck. Okay. Well, I mean, one of them’s gotta have a map on him, right? Joel! Can you help me?”

Tess is digging through the pockets, and Joel doesn’t move. “No! Tess! It’s over! We are going home!”

“THAT’S NOT MY FUCKING HOME!” Tess all but screams, whipping around on Joel with her teeth bared.

She looks like an Infected in that moment, ready to strike.

…she is an Infected.

Joel straightens, expression going slack, and Tess huffs and stares at the wall over the body she’s searching for a minute before straightening and turning back to look.

“I’m staying.” she says. “I mean, our luck had to run out sooner or later.”

Oh, shit. Ellie’s right.

“Fuck.” Ellie breathes, drawing both grown-up’s eyes to her. “She’s infected.”

Joel’s face changes to pure shock as he slowly turns back around to Tess. 

Tess smiles bitterly and huffs. “Smart kid.”

“Show me.” Joel practically orders, not taking his eyes off her.

Tess steps towards him with a ‘Joel,’ only for him to step backwards.

She freezes, breath shuddering, before she reaches up and yanks her jacket and shirt to the side, showing a bi-

Wait.

Joel stares at her, and Ellie assumes it’s the same confusion she’s feeling.

She’s seen Infected before. She’s seen how they look, she’s seen the diagrams of how the tendrils spread - hell, watched the bite on Riley’s hand spread - and if Tess got bit in the museum several hours ago-

It definitely doesn’t look how it should.

The skin is angry and red instead of black and weeping, and there are tendrils around it, but they’re mostly inside the bite instead of spreading outward. The teeth marks aren’t widening like Riley’s did, instead looking like normal teeth marks.

“Oops, right?” Tess says, not looking at it. “My luck’s out here, Joel. So you take her to Bill and Frank’s, they’ll handle it from here-”

“Tessa.” Joel interrupts. “It don’t look right.”

Thank God he noticed it too.

“Joel, I was fucking bit. I’m going to turn. It happens to everyone sooner or later.”

“Tessa, it don’t look-”

“I never ask you for anything. Not to feel the way I felt-”

“Tessa-”

“Shut the fuck up because I don’t have time!” she snaps. “This is your chance. You get her there. You keep her alive. And you set everything right. All the shit we did… please say yes, Joel.”

One of the bodies starts moving, starts snarling, and without so much as flinching, Joel pulls his gun and shoots it, but that’s when he freezes, staring at it.

“More comin’.” he says. “It’s got-”

He runs to the door, opening it fast, looking out before running back.

“How many?” Tess asks, voice shaking.

“All of ‘em. We got maybe a minute.”

Tess grabs a gun off the floor and uses it to knock over a barrel of gasoline.

“What are you doing?” Ellie asks, hating how young she sounds.

“Making sure they can’t follow you.” Tess snaps. She knocks over a thing of grenades into the gas.

Ellie can’t breathe.

“Tessa, you ain’t sick.” Joel snarls. “We need to go now before they catch up.”

“I’m gonna turn. Least I can do is keep you alive.” Tess says, coming back to stand in front of Joel. She gives a small smile, tears in her eyes. 

It’s silent for a second, just heavy breathing and screeching in the background and them practically having a conversation telepathically.

“Save who you can save.” Tess finally whispers.

Ellie looks over at Joel, waiting nervously for his reaction - he’s not really gonna leave her here, is he, her bite looks like Ellie’s, she’s not gonna turn, he can’t-

Joel grabs Ellie’s hand, and the world stops.

He really is gonna make them leave her.

But then he all but lunges at Tess, grabbing around her thighs and hauling her up onto his shoulder like a bag of flour even though she starts shouting and kicking, and he starts to fucking run.

-

Joel doesn’t stop until they’re in the woods, the Infected abandoned far behind them and his chest heaving like he’s dying, Ellie’s feet starting to ache and Tess finally done fighting to be put down.

When he stops, he barely lets Ellie go and sets Tess down on her feet before falling back against a tree, hunched over and gasping for breath. Ellie can’t blame him - she’s out of air herself, and she wasn’t carrying a big-ass backpack and a grown woman on her shoulder.

Tess sits down too, but her reaction is different.

She stares at Ellie like she’s an alien, hands folded in front of her mouth as she looks over them at her.

“Tess.” Joel pants. “Tessa, let me see it again.”

Tess takes a minute to react, continuing to stare at Ellie, before she finally unfolds her hands and moves one over to her shoulder, barely pushing her shirt to the side to show the bite again.

The bite looks different than half an hour ago. The angry red swelling is starting to calm down, and while the deep puncture marks where teeth broke skin are still there, they’re smaller now, the edges already starting to knit back together. The tendrils of infection have come to a standstill.

Ellie rolls up her sleeve and shows them the bite again. The teeth marks look like what Tess’s are healing into, and the tendrils under her skin look the same.

She looks at Ellie’s arm, then down at her own shoulder, then Tess returns to staring at her.

“Tess.” Joel says, and she doesn’t react.

“Tess.” Nothing.

“Tess.”

And just like that, she’s up like a shot, striding over to Ellie so fast that she jumps when Tess grabs her face, cheeks squished between her hands. Ellie almost expects her to dig her nails in, but she doesn’t, grip strong yet not intentionally harmful.

Tess crouches slightly to look at her, eyes darting all over her face like she’s trying to memorize it before settling on looking at Ellie’s eyes.

It freaks her out after a minute, and she tries to move backwards, but Tess doesn’t budge.

“Tess?” Joel repeats.

She finally releases her face, straightening up with an absolutely shattered expression on her own features before stumbling back over to where she was sitting, practically falling back onto the ground.

“What’s wrong?” Ellie asks, voice cracking a little bit. “I- I don’t know what’s happening.”

“Tess?” Joel says.

She looks up at him, hands pressed over her mouth, and Ellie sees tears in her eyes.

“I had cancer.” Tess says, and between her quiet, shaking voice and her hands muffling it, Ellie has to strain to hear. “Before the outbreak. Thyroid, stage two. Before they cut it out and I went into remission, they gave me microdoses of fungus to shrink the tumor. I had just finished the treatment when the outbreak happened. The fungus was supposed to continue living in my thyroid and in my blood permanently, even once the tumor was gone, but it was harmless.”

She stares into nothingness for a minute, a tear or two slipping out of her eyes.

“They gave me Cordyceps. The plain one, the- the kind insects have. It must have-”

Tess presses her hand to her eyes. “It must have made me immune to the new kind.”

Ellie stares at her in shifting shades of horror and confusion, and a glance to Joel shows a similar ‘what the fuck’ vibe.

“So then I- I’m immune too?” Tess waves her hand in Ellie’s general direction. “Fuck. Fuck.”

And that’s when it clicks.

Two immune people?

Tess’s first name starts with a T.

Ellie’s hand flies to her pocket, immediately rooting around for her knife. “What’s your name? Your full name?”

Tess doesn’t say anything, dead still.

“Theresa Anna Servopolous.” Joel says instead, voice low and quiet. “Why?”

Ellie pulls out the knife that Marlene said was her mom’s.

‘TAS’ is on the handle.

“Was this yours?” Ellie chokes out, holding it out. “Marlene said it was from my mom.”

Joel looks at it, and his eyes widen as he looks over at Tess. His voice is low and dangerous when he speaks. “Tess.”

Tess’s shoulders start shaking ever-so-slightly.

“I’m your fucking kid?” Ellie asks, voice warbling and reaching a higher pitch than she means it to.

Joel stares at Tess like she’s grown a second head. “Tessa?”

“I thought you were dead, Ellie.” Tess chokes out. “I fucking thought you were gone. Fuck!”

“I need you to explain right now.” Joel says, voice dangerously quiet and level. “Right now.”

“I- I was pregnant.” Tess chokes out. “Fourteen years ago.”

Joel takes a step back, breathing shallow. Ellie’s brain is still loading. “She mine?”

Tess nods into her hands, and he stops breathing entirely, just staring at her, jaw clenched.

And then chaos erupts.

When Ellie was little, she imagined meeting her parents. Imagined they were lovely people who’d been looking nonstop since losing her and who loved her more than anything, that she was greeted with hugs and tears and whispers of how loved she was before going home with them, where she was safe and there was food and she wasn’t alone.

She did not imagine two fifty-year-old smugglers shouting fuck at each other.

“The doctor fuckin’ told me she was stillborn, Joel, the fuck did you-”

“I didn’t know you were pregnant, Tess!”

“What, were you expecting me to sit down and tell you-”

“Yes! You should’ve fuckin’ told me! That ain’t one of those things that you get an expectation of privacy! You an’ me were gonna have a kid! You didn’t think-”

“Shut the fuck up!” Ellie shouts, yanking on a handful of her hair with the hand not holding the knife. “You’re my fucking mom and dad?!”

“I thought you didn’t make it past being born and Joel didn’t know, kid! This isn’t fucking on us!” Tess snaps.

Joel looks like someone just told him they shot his dog, Ellie wants to have a panic attack, Tess looks like she’s actively having one, and all they need now to complete the picture is something to catch on fire.

When Ellie looks back at Joel - her fucking dad - he’s looking at her like she’s an alien.

“Ellie,” he says, and he sounds shattered, “I didn’t know.”

Tess’s hands are over her face. “They told me you were dead. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t know.”

“So you’re only just now realizing you have an alive kid?” Ellie asks, and she hates that her voice cracks.

Tess doesn’t move. “Yeah.”

Joel presses his knuckles against his forehead. “Fuck.”

Ellie doesn’t know what the fuck to do.

“I wouldn’t have left you if I knew.” Tess mumbles. “I was thirty-three, the world had ended, I hadn’t taken any of the supplements and shit, I went into labor at eight months, I was really fucking stressed, so I didn’t question you’d died-”

“And you never told me you were pregnant?!” Joel snaps.

“Like I said, I was stressed!”

“So you were just gon’ come home with a baby an’ be like ‘hey, we have a kid’-”

“Yes!”

“Tessa!”

Ellie wants to cry. She settles for shoving her - Tess’s? - knife in her pocket and smacking her hands against her head as hard as she can to rattle her brain enough to make it stop.

They keep shouting. Ellie resorts to punching like she used to when she was little. It sounds like gunshots in her skull and makes her ears ring.

“Hey!”

Hands are on her wrists, yanking her hands away from her head. “No!”

Joel’s hands are big, swallowing her wrists as he wrestles them away from her. Her hands don’t look like his, finer and less sturdy. She realizes her hands look like Tess’s. She tries to yank her hands away to hit herself again. He won’t let him.

“Hey! Look at me!” Joel snaps, crouching slightly.

When she obeys and looks up at him, he looks pissed, but also like she’s about to shatter.

“We don’t hit ourselves. Understand?” Joel says firmly. “You can be pissed, but it ain’t okay to hit yourself.”

And what the actual fuck is happening? Did Joel - Mr. Smartass-Fuck-You-No-Gun-I-Want-To-Shoot-You - just fucking-?

“Fuck you, asshole!” Ellie shouts, wrenching her hands away from him after much effort before wildly swinging her fists in his general direction. “You- don’t- tell- me- what- to- do- when- you- fucking- abandoned- me!”

“Ellie- hey! Hey! Calm down!” Joel says, catching her hands again, but he doesn’t snap like he has constantly since they met, angry but steady. “Listen to me, girl, I wouldn’t’a let ‘em take you if I had any idea you existed, y’hear me? I ain’t your enemy. Take a deep breath.”

Ellie refuses, continuing to try to hit him, even as hot, angry, useless tears that she hates well in her eyes. “You fucking left me!”

“Ellie, listen to me- listen to me.” Joel drops her hands and grabs the sides of her face, holding her still even as she starts to cry. He ignores her fists colliding with his chest even though it must hurt even a little. “Ellie, if I’d known I had a little girl, I would’ve searched til the end of the goddamn earth, y’hear me? I didn’t know you existed. I didn’t know.”

Ellie shakes her head, gnawing on the inside of her cheek so she doesn’t sob. “You’re lying.”

“I ain’t, I swear.” Joel says, thumbs rubbing her cheekbones. “I ain’t. I didn’t know.”

And he has to be lying, because she gave up, she understands that she’s not loved now, she’s not six anymore-

“Ellie, if I’d known I woulda burned down the world to get to you, alright?” Joel says, rubbing her cheeks again and catching some of the tears, and Ellie forces herself to stay angry.

“Oh, yeah? You would’ve just- somehow stopped smuggling and read me fucking bedtime stories and shit?” Ellie forces out, but it sounds wobbly and teary instead of angry.

Joel doesn’t fucking flinch, doesn’t even pause. “Yeah. I woulda taken care of you. Woulda figured somethin’ out. I wouldn’t have left you.”

Ellie stares at him, chest heaving, throat so thick she might be having an allergic reaction.

“Cariña, no te habría dejado por nada del mundo. Por favor, tienes que creerme.” Joel whispers, and she sees the tears in his eyes.

Ellie doesn’t understand what he said, but-

Joel didn’t know Tess was pregnant.

He couldn’t have abandoned her.

He might not have left her.

Ellie focuses her eyes back on Joel. He looks exhausted, brown eyes wide and soft and sad, and he has old-man wrinkles and graying hair and he looks like her. He has brown eyes and brown hair that looks like hers. His skin is a little bit darker than a tan, and Ellie’s skin is a tiny bit lighter, but looking-

Joel looks like her.

She fucking looks like him.

The anger drains out of Ellie - anger towards Joel, at least.

He’s her dad. He didn’t leave her.

He might not hate her.

“Do you hate me?” she asks, voice too young and cracking, and his face crumples.

“No, no, of course I don’t hate you.”

Ellie’s lungs stop working, and then her body decides to be shitty, because she starts crying harder and her knees give out. Joel catches her. He hugs her.

He has warm hugs.

Chapter Text

It’s interesting, really, how much things change, even just that afternoon.

Tess walks behind silently rather than in front talking with Ellie, which is strange, but even stranger is Joel - he stays right at her side, gun constantly at the ready, looking around like a guard dog on high alert even as he’s so close to Ellie that his arm occasionally bumps hers.

Ellie’s mad. She thinks she has a right to be - she grew up in an orphanage alone and unwanted and unloved because Tess didn’t think to look for her or tell Joel that she was even pregnant - but more than anything, she’s just confused.

Lost.

She feels lost.

The woods around them are quiet, the smooth silence only marred by the sounds of birds and leaves crunching underfoot. It’s peaceful in a way Boston never was. Ellie’s never been outside before - it feels bigger, more dangerous, even though she also feels safer, because here, she’s not afraid of getting thrown into the Hole or struck with a gun or backhanded or starved for misbehaving.

She’s also more afraid, because she’s with her mother and father - who she doesn’t even know that well - in a wilderness she’s never been in with a bunch of Infected and bad people in it.

“So, uh…” Ellie starts, kicking a rock. “Where are we going?”

Joel glances over for a millisecond before returning his sights to the woods around them. “Bill an’ Frank’s. Friends of me an’ Tess.”

“Cool.” Ellie says, kicking another rock. Her feet are starting to hurt inside her Converse. It randomly hits her that she’s wearing the same clothes that she was wearing when Riley-

“So, uh-” Joel says, clearing his throat. “You got any questions?”

Ellie kicks another rock hard enough that her toes give a sharp spike of pain. “Nope.”

Joel takes a deep breath. “You sure?”

She does have questions. But that anger is still ebbing and flowing inside her brain, and it ebbs again into ‘it wasn’t Joel’s fault.’

“What did you say earlier?” Ellie asks. “In Spanish?”

Joel’s eyes dart back to her, almost surprised, before returning to scanning the world around them. His shoulders relax just slightly. “Said I wouldn’t’a left you for anythin’ in the world an’ asked you to believe me.”

“Oh.” Ellie says, some emotion she can’t name twisting around her stomach. “So you speak Spanish?”

“Yeah. First language.” Joel says. His fingers flex on his gun.

“Were you not from the United States?” Ellie asks before realizing that’s probably racist. “Or- shit. Uh- that came out wrong.”

“I was born in San Antonio. My parents were from Cuba.” Joel says instead of pointing it out. “My mother was an immigrant, my father was second-generation American, but he wasn’t ‘round a lot an’ my mother didn’t speak great English, so I grew up speakin’ mostly Spanish.”

“Huh.” Ellie tries to think. “Are, um, are you Hispanic, then?”

“Yeah.” Joel says, shifting his backpack. “Guess you are, too.”

He looks at her, the first time longer than a second since they started walking, eyes scanning her face.

“Yeah.” he repeats. “You look half-an’-half. Got the brown eyes an’ hair, slightly more melanin than all the white folks, but you still look like-”

He cuts off mid-sentence, but Ellie can fill it in. ‘You still look like Tess.’

They’re quiet again for a minute, continuing to walk. Ellie’s feet hurt more and more.

“You, uh, you got any friends?” Joel asks.

Ellie wasn’t expecting that, and she blinks in surprise. “Huh?”

“You’re smart.” Joel says, squinting at the distance. “Funny. Kid your age, you gotta have friends.”

She doesn’t have the words to say ‘I had one person who didn’t hate me my whole life and she died.’

“I don’t.” Ellie dismisses instead. “Never have. I’m not the kind of person people like.”

Joel slows slightly, and when she glances at him, he has some twisted expression that she can’t decode. “Why the hell not?”

He sounds almost defensive, and Ellie wants to laugh. “Well, there are a lot of reasons. One, I’m loud and annoying. Two, when I was little, I accidentally got someone thrown into the Hole and then got labeled as a rat and everyone hated me and thought I was gonna get them in trouble for the next ten years. Three, I bite.”

Joel blinks. “What’s the Hole?”

“Nothin’.” Ellie dismisses, defensiveness immediately twisting in her stomach. “Solitary confinement. No big deal.”

His jaw clenches, but he doesn’t push it. “...alright. We’ll come back to that. You bite people?”

Ellie looks up at him, and she still feels uneasy, unsettled, but she grins in a way she knows bares her teeth. “Gotta keep ‘em sharp.”

He scoffs, shaking his head. “You’re somethin’.”

“Of course I am. I’m in existence.” Ellie retorts before perking up. “Oh! Did you know I lost an electron the other day?”

Joel looks down at her quizzically.

She grins, this time genuinely. “I’m positive.”

He stops dead in his tracks. Stares at her with this expression of ‘what the actual hell.’ He looks so bewildered that she can’t help but start giggling.

“Atoms don’t need therapy. Know why?” Ellie asks, trying to swallow it.

Joel shakes his head, expression not changing. “No.”

She knows he’s saying no to the pun, not answering ‘no,’ but she starts giggling again. “They have great bonding skills.”

Joel pinches the bridge of his nose and keeps walking. “Dios mio.”

“What did the mermaid wear to her math class?” Ellie grins.

“Feel free to hang behind an’ torture Tess.” Joel sighs.

“An algae-bra!” she cackles.

He rolls his eyes, and he looks so dad-like in that moment that the laugh dies in her throat.

That’s her dad. Like, they share DNA. 

“So, uh, you never answered my question.” Ellie says, kicking another rock. “About you and Tess.”

Joel exhales through his nose. “Business partners.”

“‘Business partners.’ Right. Is that why you had a kid together?” Ellie says.

He doesn’t say anything that time, just continuing to walk.

“Cool. Okay. Business partners who also fuck.”

“Ellie!” Joel hisses, head snapping around to look at her. “Language!”

“Oh, c’mon! It’s obviously true, and it’s not like the world’s gonna end if I say ‘fuck.’” Ellie says, almost waving her hands around in exasperation. “Was I a one-night stand, or was it a friends-with-benefits, or-”

“That ain’t your concern.”

“Well, if you’re my mom and dad, it kind of is my concern.” Ellie retorts. “Just say it, dude, Jesus.”

Joel huffs, his movements becoming more jerky and erratic as he looks around and his boots crunching more, like he’s trying to stomp the conversation into the ground.

“It’s complicated.” he says after a long time.

Ellie rolls her eyes. “That’s not an answer.”

He rolls his eyes right back, and Ellie’s amusement fades mildly at the idea that she might get that from him.

Despite the show, Joel doesn’t actually tell her. After a second, she clears her throat.

He sighs. “Me an’ Tess, we… care a whole lot ‘bout each other. But our lives don’t leave much room for normal shit like gettin’ married, an’ this world don’t leave much room for normal shit like goin’ on a date. So… we ain’t married. We ain’t nothin’ official or labeled. We just get each other like nobody else does an’ work together, both personal an’ smugglin’.”

Ellie blinks, trying to think through it. “So… coworkers with benefits.”

Joel looks like the weight of the world is on his shoulders as he rolls his eyes again, but he doesn’t argue.

“So, uh… did you… clearly, you weren’t planning on having me, but, like…”

“We woulda raised you, if that’s what you’re askin’.” Joel says firmly, cutting off her awkward attempt. “Figured it out.”

“Would you have- like, you would have taken me from the orphanage?” Ellie stumbles out.

Joel scoffs, and she immediately shrinks, but he says, “One, you never woulda gone to the damn orphanage, an’ two, if we’d found you later, ‘course we woulda taken you out. If you ain’t an orphan, you ain’t gon’ be in an orphanage. At least not on my watch.”

“Oh,” Ellie says, and because she loves to torture herself, she asks, “What would I have grown up like? Like, what would you have done?”

Joel’s pace slows slightly, and he looks at Ellie for more than another glancing moment. He actually looks, some soft expression that Ellie hasn’t seen before on his face for a millisecond before it shutters off again.

“Well,” he starts, flexing his hand on his gun, “I reckon you woulda had a real bed, for one. Proper meals. Tess can’t cook worth a damn, but I ain’t too bad. Used to be too busy to cook before the outbreak, but when I did have time, it was good…”

He trails off for a second, then seems to catch himself. “Woulda taught you how to survive, that’s for damn sure. How to shoot, how to stay quiet, how to spot trouble comin’. Not just for Infected, but for bad people too. Lotta bad folks out there. But only when you were a little older an’ were gon’ start goin’ out on your own - little kid don’t need to be handlin’ a gun.”

Ellie wants to retort ‘is that why you won’t give me one,’ but she doesn’t want him to stop talking even though it hollows something in her - what kind of cruel fucking joke is it that she has parents who are alive and would have loved her and taken care of her but got separated from them - so she doesn’t say anything, just nodding along.

“Woulda taught you how to read people, how to talk your way outta situations. I- actually, no, we wouldn’t have. We ain’t great at that. Both Tess an’ I tend to be a lil’ hotheaded. Prefer to shoot ourselves outta situations.” A small smile passes over his face for a fleeting second. “But we’d’ve kept you safe. Probably not been smugglin’ as much, probably woulda tried to be a storage house instead’a gettin’ things in an’ outta the QZ, but we woulda kept doin’ it ‘cause the ration cards are better an’ it woulda been easier to keep food on the table. Either way, we woulda started playin’ things a whole lot safer, stayed at home more. Probably woulda figured out a new apartment setup, too - only one room an’ one bed ain’t great with a little kid. Woulda found somethin’ better. Maybe rigged somethin’ up in one of the abandoned apartments nearby. Built you a proper room.”

Ellie’s stomach is twisting into agonizing knots, longing and self-pity and anger - not at Joel, but at whoever the hell took her away from the life Joel’s describing - bubbling up so much that she’s choking.

“We might not’ve been able to give you too much after the outbreak, but you woulda had things that were yours. Books, toys, clothes - we woulda given you everythin’ we could’ve. You woulda grown up safe an’ loved, if nothin’ else.”

Ellie’s tearing up now, and she’s not gonna fucking cry, so instead she clears her throat and kicks another rock. “Cool. Sounds nice or whatever. Different from what I got, that’s for sure.”

“What’d you get?” Joel asks, and when she looks at him, something pained is on his face.

Ellie shrugs. “Military school. Orphanage. FEDRA standard for random abandoned kids.”

He tenses and relaxes in the span of a second before ‘mm-hmm’-ing.

“They weren’t big on the ‘safe and loved’ thing. More on the ‘shut the fuck up and follow orders or we’ll beat the shit out of you.’”

Joel tenses again. “They lay a hand on you?”

There’s something dangerous in his voice. 

“Standard stuff,” Ellie says, trying to keep him from losing it. He sounds like he’s about to.

He takes several deep breaths, hands flexing on his gun. Ellie tries to stay calm.

“Well,” he says, taking another deep breath, “that ain’t ever happenin’ again. Even if we go back to a QZ, you ain’t gon’ anywhere near FEDRA or their bullshit.”

‘We.’ Ellie’s throat wants to lump up again. He’s talking like it’s just a fact that they’re sticking together, like it’s just a given that he’s not going to leave her side.

She swallows it.

“You really meant it?” Ellie says, hazarding another look up at him. “That you would’ve burned down the world to get to me?”

Joel is quiet for a second, continuing to look forward, before he simply says, “If one of my girls asked me to burn down the world for ‘em, I would just ask where the gasoline is. An’ now ‘my girls’ includes you.”

Chapter Text

The rest of the day is spent walking in something relatively close to silence, Ellie trying to process quietly and asking only one or two more questions, Joel saying instructions, and that’s pretty much it. Tess doesn’t make a sound, just quietly walking behind Ellie, who’s walking behind Joel (she fell behind when one of her blisters popped and made pain spike up her heel constantly - she refuses to mention it and get them to stop liking her again.)

Ellie doesn’t hear Tess’s voice until late that night, when they’re curled up under threadbare blankets under the trees. She took first watch with a nod towards Joel, so he laid down next to Ellie on the frosted ground and - Ellie thought - went to sleep around the same time that she dozed off, but she wakes up when the moon is high in the sky and the stars shining (like someone poked holes in a can and shined a flashlight down the top, it’s so cool) and voices quietly meeting in the dark.

“-shouldn’t have kept it from you.” Tess is saying, so quiet that Ellie has to strain to hear it. “I know that. I just- it didn’t really seem to matter. I knew you could handle a kid, and the only reason to say anything while I was pregnant was so you’d be prepared, so I figured I’d just say when I started showing, but that never really happened, I never really started to look pregnant outside of a few extra pounds-”

“That’s bull. We woulda found vitamins, woulda made sure you were eatin’ right, woulda gone somewhere safer, all that shit.” Joel says. His voice is raspy, but whether from emotion or exhaustion, Ellie can’t tell. “I woulda wanted to know, Tessa.”

“I know.” Tess says. “I fucked up.”

“Yeah, you did.” Joel sighs.

Ellie fights to keep her breathing steady, to make it seem like she’s still asleep. The air is cold, and it bites her nose like a rat, and she wonders if it would be worth interrupting to cover her face with the blanket.

“I didn’t know.” Tess says, and now her voice sounds watery. It honestly scares Ellie - she’s never heard Tess cry outside of her eyes getting watery when she thought she was about to die. “After they told me… I just couldn’t. They handed me some papers to sign, said she was gone, and I just… did. I didn’t even ask to see the body.”

Joel says something in Spanish that Ellie doesn’t understand, but his voice is rough and pained.

“I should’ve checked. I should’ve made sure. But I was bleeding and exhausted, and they said she’d been too small, and that she was five pounds and strangled by the cord anyway, and-” Tess’s voice cuts off with a low, agonized noise. “Why didn’t I check?”

There’s sniffling and fabric rustling and Tess muttering something under her breath, and when Ellie cracks her eyes, it’s a second of her eyes adjusting to the dark before she registers that Joel is holding Tess, his arms wrapped tightly around her as she cries into his shoulder.

Ellie immediately squeezes her eyes shut again, guilt filling her for intruding, but then remembering that this is very much so about her and opening them to watch.

Joel puts his chin on top of Tess’s head and rocks slightly, and she clings to him and just cries for a long time before she finally stops sobbing and goes quiet.

Ellie sees her turning her head to look at her, and she quickly squeezes her eyes shut again.

“Look at her.” Tess whispers, feet crunching on the ground closer and closer to Ellie. She crouches near her, and Ellie has to remember to breathe. “She’s got your eyes.”

Joel huffs a small laugh. “She’s got your everythin’ else. Nose, chin, face-”

“She’s got your stubbornness too.” Tess says.

“Liar. That’s all you, darlin’.”

Ellie almost jumps at the sound of ‘darlin’’ directed from Joel towards Tess, but Tess just chuckles low in her throat before going quiet again.

“I don’t want her to hate me.” Tess whispers. “I know why, I understand, but… Jesus fuckin’ Christ, I feel like I’m gonna break when she looks at me like I’m nobody.”

“She’ll come ‘round.” Joel says gently.

“I know, but- every time I look at her, I keep seeing this baby that I never held, and she’s- she’s not dead, Joel. She grew up. Look at her. She’s beautiful, she’s perfect, but- she’s got scars and bruises and she won’t meet my eyes, and it’s like losing her all over again, just in reverse this time.”

A muffled sob comes from Tess, and she sits down on the ground near Ellie. She can’t breathe.

Tess’s hand runs along Ellie’s cheek, her touch gentler than any of her other ones, before warm skin presses against Ellie’s forehead. She realizes when she feels warm breath brushing her hairline that Tess is kissing her forehead.

Ellie’s never had her forehead kissed.

“I’m so sorry.” Tess whispers against Ellie’s skin. “I’m so sorry, honey. I didn’t mean to leave you. I never would have if I’d known.”

Ellie chooses not to breathe after that, because there’s such a big lump in her throat that she knows that if she breathes any deeper than tiny little inhales she’ll start sobbing, and that wouldn’t be good.

For a second, though, she considers letting them know she’s awake as Tess gently combs a little bit of hair that escaped from her ponytail back away from her face with ever-so-gentle fingers before sniffling and walking away, boots crunching.

These are her parents.

That’s her dad, the man who swears he’d have looked after her and has been gruff and a little grumpy but also nice, also walking exactly at her side to make sure she’s safe. That’s her mom, the woman who was funny and nice to her before they knew and who kept her alive. 

They both are acting like they would have wanted her, like they would have loved her. Maybe they would have. Maybe they do. Maybe, if Ellie just keeps talking to them and existing in their space with them knowing she’s their kid, they’ll love her even if they lost her. Besides, it’s not either of their faults, is it? Joel never knew Tess was pregnant and never knew that she even existed, and thus couldn’t have looked for her. Tess thought she was dead. They told her that her baby was dead, and she was grieving so she signed.

But then Ellie imagines a world where she got the life Joel said she would have. Where she grew up with a mom and dad who loved her, with toys and books and her own bed and room, in a world where she learned not just how to survive and fight, but how to live, how to do her hair and how to speak Spanish and how to exist as something other than a burden.

Maybe she would’ve been happier.

Maybe she wouldn’t have met Riley.

Ellie hates herself for this, but she wishes she hadn’t. Sure, she never would’ve had her best friend, but she wouldn’t have spent three days alone in a Halloween store with nothing but Riley’s dead, rotting body in a pool of dried blood that Ellie had been forced to shoot and a bunch of masks and her own horror as she waited and waited and waited to turn. She wouldn’t have nightmares of Riley’s snarls as she ran at her, of her scream as Ellie fired through her skull, of the iron in her mouth as she just sat criss-cross-legged on the floor looking at her body for hours and hours and hours until she can’t remember what Riley was supposed to look like. She wouldn’t have the good memories, but she wouldn’t have the pain.

When Ellie cracks her eyes again, Tess is pressed against Joel’s side again, and he’s asking about the bite and peeling her shirt down to look at it and tape gauze over it, and she deems it safe to roll over onto her other side and cry silently, a skill learned from years of living in an orphanage where she apparently wasn’t supposed to be.

It’s not fair of her to be mad at Tess. It wasn’t really her fault. It was whoever lied and stole Ellie.

But it’s not fair that Ellie’s suffered, either.

Chapter Text

The next morning, Ellie is miserable.

Her feet hurt - when she goes off to pee, she takes off her socks and puts her feet in the small stream to try to freeze out some of the pain that's making her limp, and the freezing-cold water does make them numb, but it also makes blood turn orangey-pink as it dilutes and flows away - and she still has a cry headache and pressure behind her eyes that says ‘hey, we’re your tears, we’re ready to go the second you think too hard about literally anything,’ and she doesn’t even know when they’ll finally stop walking.

Still, she stuffs her swollen feet back into her bloody socks and canvas sneakers, rinses her hands in the stream, and then goes back, trying her damn hardest not to limp.

When she goes back to camp, Joel is packing up what little they unpacked last night, and Tess is staring at her own hands palm-up like she’s never seen them before. Her shoulder is visibly bandaged, and Ellie wonders what the bite bark looks like now. Her own new scar tissue itches under her sleeve.

“You ready to go, Ellie?” Joel asks, and Ellie nods, because what else does she say? ‘No’? Is that even an option?

She grabs her backpack and the jacket that was over her last night and puts them both on, though she freezes when she realizes why the sleeves are way too long.

It’s Joel’s jacket.

He put it over her last night.

Ellie shrugs the jacket off quickly, holding it out to him like it burns (it doesn’t - it just makes something in her chest puff up so that she feels too full even though she hasn’t eaten.) “Uh, here.”

Joel glances at it, then at her, then looks back at his pack. “Keep it. Gettin’ colder today.”

“No, it’s yours, I’m sorry-”

“Ellie.” he says, fixing his eyes on her, his voice firm but not unkind. “It’s fine. Keep it on.”

She hesitates, then puts it on. He’s enough bigger than her that she feels like a little kid playing dress-up, but it’s warm in a way that her hoodie isn’t, and it smells like leather and gunpowder and something vaguely comforting.

“Thanks.” she mumbles, not meeting his eyes.

Joel nods and continues packing, but his lips quirk up like he’s pleased as he turns away.

The start of the walk is silent, just like yesterday. Joel leads, Ellie follows, and Tess trails behind. Ellie tries not to wince, but every time she steps, pain shoots up her legs, and eventually, she’s limping despite her best efforts.

“You’re limpin’. You alright?” Joel says suddenly.

“I’m fine.” Ellie dismisses, trying to stand up straighter.

“You ain’t fine if you’re limpin’.” he says, dropping his bag and signaling something to Tess with his hand as he crouches to rummage through his backpack. “Sit down.”

Ellie steps over to a fallen log and obliges with a huff, wanting to argue but in too much pain. Joel comes over to her with a small bag, crouching in front of her and reaching for her foot, and she instinctively flinches back. He freezes.

“Just wanna look at ‘em, mija. Please.” he says gently.

The ‘please’ catches her off-guard, and she reluctantly extends her leg, letting him take hold of her foot and take off her shoe.

He winces when he sees her sock, even more bloody and crusty than this morning. “Jesus Christ, kiddo, why didn’t you say somethin’?”

“It’s not that bad.” Ellie says, even though she winces as he peels the sock off and does the same to the other foot.

“Lord, girl, you gotta let us know if somethin’s wrong.” Joel sighs as he pulls out a small thing of alcohol. “Gon’ hurt like a bitch, alright?”

Ellie just hisses through her teeth as he pours a little onto each of the open blisters before he starts wrapping her feet in gauze.

“In the future,” he says as he ties it off on her left foot, “you gotta tell me if somethin’s wrong, alright? I know you ain’t happy with me, but it’s easier to handle things before they get bad. Easier to take care of a blister with a bandaid than cut off an infected foot.”

“‘Kay.” Ellie says, but then she feels the way his jacket fits over her hands and says, “I’m okay with you. I’m just figuring it out.”

His eyes soften as he ties the gauze around her other foot, then goes into his backpack and pulls out a pair of socks. “These are thicker. Might cushion your feet more. As cool as a pair of Chucks are, they ain’t for walkin’ miles in the woods - we’ll find you new shoes when we get to Bill an’ Frank’s. Hikin’ boots.”

“Will they even have any?” Ellie asks, a little relieved that he’s dropping what she said.

“Yeah. They got a boutique fixed up. Him an’ his partner, Frank, they got a whole town to live in. They got a boutique there. Half of me an’ Tess’s wardrobes are from it.” Joel says, putting the socks on her. He packs his backpack back up as she puts on and ties her shoes. As soon as she’s done, he gets to his feet, looking back down at her. “C’mon. Just a couple more miles. If you need me to, I can give you a piggyback.” Joel says, offering his hand.

Ellie takes it, but she says, “I don’t need a piggyback, I’m fourteen fucking years old” as she gets to her feet with a wince.

“Thirteen.” Tess pipes up, speaking for the first time that morning.

Both Joel and Ellie look over at her, one with a scowl of ‘I’m still not sure how I feel about you,’ the other with a ‘what are you talkin’ about’ look (guess who’s who.)

“You were born on April 19. It’s still January. You’re thirteen.” Tess says, not looking at either of them.

Ellie blinks, staring at her, anger forgotten. “You know my birthday?”

“I was there.” Tess says, her voice monotone but her jaw clenched. “I know when my own damn kid’s birthday is.”

Something in Ellie burns. April 19. FEDRA had said she didn’t have a birthday. She’s thirteen. She was born on April 19.

“C’mon. We gotta get moving.” Tess says, passing both of them without looking and starting to walk ahead.

Ellie follows, Joel right next to her like he’s ready to catch her if she falls, but Ellie already feels like she’s falling - just not physically.

Chapter Text

It’s a few hours after Ellie learns her birthday that her feet start killing her again.

She grits her teeth and bears it, though, remembering FEDRA.

When Ellie was about eight, she did the same thing as all the other kids and walked The Miles - it was an endurance and fear test that all the kids went through to determine if they were ‘suitable’ in fourth grade. You would end up walking the wall in full military gear in squads of twelve kids, and the FEDRA guards would grab you and hold you completely over the edge to scare you - the nicer ones for a few seconds by your underarms, the meaner ones by the back of your shirt or by your ankle - and fire blanks over your heads to keep you moving. You would walk six hours, twelve loops, or twenty miles - whichever came first. If you cried or stopped moving, you went in the Hole or had your rations taken away for a day. They said it wasn’t mean, just educational to make them not be afraid as a FEDRA officer and able to walk long enough to be useful.

When she was around eight, she was the only one who didn’t cry or stop moving - every time she was held out and put back down, every time a shot made her ears ring, she gritted her jaw and kept walking.

Ellie’s had worse. She’s survived. She can do this.

Eventually, though, she stumbles, and Joel keeps her up by grabbing the strap of her backpack.

“Easy.” he says, almost gently. “You need to stop? Or a ride?”

“A ride?” Ellie scoffs, looking up at him. “Do you have a car in your pocket?”

“No, but I can give a damn good piggyback.” Joel says.

“Fuck off. I’m fine.” Ellie says before she can think. She immediately cringes internally, waiting for him to tell her off, but his lips just quirk up and he nods, propping her back up, and when she starts walking again, he stays much closer.

It’s quiet for a minute, Ellie telling herself left-foot-right-foot-don’t-fuck-it-up, and then Joel says, “How ‘bout a game? Make the time go quicker.”

Ellie glances back at him. “What kind of game?”

“Simple. We’re secret agents, an’ we gotta find intel.” Joel says, shrugging slightly.

Ellie, despite herself, is intrigued. “Oh yeah?”

“Mm-hmm. We’re workin’ for a spy agency - real top secret shit. We’ve been assigned to check these here woods for anythin’ strange.”

“Why?” Ellie asks, stupid excitement bubbling in her gut. It’s a stupid little-kid game - why is she excited?

“Well, an evil government planted some codes out here to lead to… a nuclear reactor. That… has missiles plus the nuclear power.” Joel says, and Ellie doesn’t know either of those things, but she remembers nuclear fission from Savage Starlight and knows it’s powerful.

“Mm. What codes am I looking for?” Ellie asks.

“Anythin’ that seems real strange, you come bring it on over to me. See, I’m a senior agent, an’ you’re new to fieldwork, so I know all the stuff.” Joel proclaims. “But before we do any work, we gotta establish some rules.”

Ellie deflates a bit. “What are they?”

“Well, ‘cause you’re new to fieldwork, you gotta stay in the line of sight of me an’ our handler back there.” Joel says, nodding back to Tess. “Otherwise, you stray too far, the enemy spies might get ya, an’ then what would I do? I’m too hardened by the world to have your view of evidence.”

Ellie almost giggles. “You’d fail.”

“Exactly! So you gotta stay close so the spies don’t get you. Second, when you find evidence, you gotta run like this-” Joel does this weird shuffle that actually does make her giggle “-so the motion detectors don’t get ya. Third, you gotta leave any dangerous clues - don’t drag over a rabid boar.”

“Well, that makes sense.” Ellie smiles.

“Fourth, you gotta tell me when you’re hurtin’ and what you’re thinkin’. We’re partners - if we ain’t communicatin’, the enemies win, ‘specially if you’re hurt an’ I don’t know. Sound good?”

“Sounds good.” Ellie says, immediately looking around.

“One more thing.” Joel says seriously, and when she looks back at him, his lips are twitching again. “We gotta have codenames.”

“You’re Agent Texas. Obviously.” Ellie says, thinking of what Tess was calling Joel when they were first together as a trio.

“Well, if you’re namin’ me…” Joel says, tapping his chin with a finger in fake contemplation. “I reckon Agent Cactus suits you just fine. Small an’ prickly, but tough as all get out. Strong as hell.”

Ellie shouldn’t feel as fuzzy and happy as she does, so she masks it with a scoff. “That’s stupid.”

“Could always be Agent Starburst, ‘cause you like those Savage Starlight comics an’ you’re sweet an’ colorful.” Joel says.

Ellie’s face scrunches. “Cactus.”

“Roger that.” Joel says, saluting her. “Mission starts in three… two… one…”

The second he counts down, Ellie’s scanning, trying to find anything neat.

They fall into a rhythm. Every few minutes, Ellie calls something out - a weirdly shaped tree knot, running off and coming back with a rock shaped like a dinosaur (prompting a discussion of her favorite dinosaur, which was funny because Joel didn’t know what a pachyrhinosaurus or psittacosaurus are) - and Joel evaluates it with a serious face that makes Ellie laugh before pronouncing that she has a good eye and pretending to use a gun magazine as a tech-detector. Tess doesn’t say anything, but Ellie sees her smile when Joel does what Ellie’s decided to call the Joel Shuffle into a bush, claiming he needs cover, before returning with a pinecone he swears is bugged. Joel calls it a ‘Spycone’ and swears he can use it to triangulate enemy movements. Ellie tells him to prove it, and he tells her he needs a protractor, three hours, a whiteboard, and six other pinecones to finish the report - and she nearly falls over laughing when she actually pulls out a protractor and hands it to him and he gives her the most dumbfounded ‘why the fuck do you have this’ look.

“You don’t got a gun but you got a goddamn protractor?” he asks disbelievingly, and Ellie full-on cackles as she tucks it back into her backpack.

“I like weird shit! And it has sharp edges, it could totally be a weapon.”

“Hmm. What other weird shit you got?” Joel asks.

Ellie grins, looking around until she finds a rock formation, which she quickly walks over to, plopping down and opening the front pocket. Joel signals to Tess before following and sitting next to her.

She pulls out a metal button with the letter ‘K’ on it, a green marble, a plastic dinosaur missing an arm, a flamingo keychain, a book about dinosaurs, three pennies, a single scissor blade, a picture of a dog and a little girl, neither of whom she knows, and a full compass set.

Joel just stares for a second before he starts to laugh, first little huffs through his nose, then full body-shaking laughter that makes him cover his eyes and shake his head and smile with his teeth. “You’re a weird lil’ thing, you know that?”

“Hey!” Ellie protests. She considers packing it back up when she sees Tess drift closer, clearly trying to subtly look at Ellie’s treasure pile, but she doesn’t, instead casually holding pieces out in her hands like she’s stretching to get them closer to Tess to look at. (It’s not letting her in. Just not excluding her and showing off Ellie’s cool shit.)

“Ain’t a bad thing, kiddo. Just think it’s funny.” Joel says, reaching over and ruffling her hair despite a yelped protest as Tess takes another step closer, pretending to keep watch but her eyes flicking down to the items and her eyes crinkling like she’s trying not to smile.

Ellie feels warm and happy, and she realizes that it’s the middle of the evening but she hasn’t thought about her feet once since the game started.

Chapter Text

That night, Ellie has a nightmare.

They aren’t new. She’s been having them forever, though they shifted from an Infected getting her or a Firefly shooting her when she was little to being locked in the Hole, or the aching hunger in her stomach eating her alive, or the isolation of solitary confinement, or the feeling of falling when held off the wall, or the memories of screams when a van transport got blown up when she got older.

But lately, when Ellie has a deep sleep, she dreams about Riley.

She does that night.

Ellie’s smashing everything in the Halloween store and screaming as blood drips down her arm from a bite that doesn’t belong there.

This can’t be happening. This shouldn’t be happening. She’s twelve, Riley’s fourteen, this can’t be happening, this can’t be happening, this can’t be happening, they can’t be sick-

“There’s more stuff over there you can break.” Riley says monotonously, staring straight ahead from where she’s sitting on the floor.

Ellie walks over, dropping the crowbar and falling next to her, matching her position as she rubs a hand over her face, starting to cry.

“What are we going to do?” she whispers.

“The way I see it, we got two options.” Riley says quietly. “One, we take the easy way out. It’s quick, painless… no. No, I don’t like Option One. Option two… we just keep going.”

Ellie blinks away her tears. “What are you talking about, Riley? It’s over.”

“It will be. But not yet. It ends for everyone this way sooner or later, right? Some of us just get there faster than others. But we don’t quit.”

Riley offers her hand, and Ellie copies her, and they entwine their hands.

“Whether it’s two minutes or two days, we don’t give that up. I don’t want to give that up. We can just be all poetic and shit and lose our minds together.”

“What’s option three?” Ellie asks, voice shaking as her tears get worse.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Riley cries.

Ellie falls into her shoulder, and they sob together, Riley cradling the back of her head and Ellie holding her arm.

Ellie moans in her sleep, rolling over under the stack of coats (one her size and two too big) as her eyes flit behind their lids. She’s drifting between awareness that she’s dreaming and the horror of the memory.

Ellie falls asleep after a few hours.

She and Riley had been wandering around the mall, trying to have fun but ending up freezing, smiles dying or becoming hollow, and starting to cry again.

Riley's started getting twitchy. Ellie hasn’t, but she’s angry, wanting to scream every time they go back to the Halloween store and ending up ripping apart several pieces of paper and smashing up several more pieces of glass. Aggression is a symptom. So is twitching and shaking.

Riley says they only have a few more hours. Ellie believes her.

Neither of them have slept, so they have the agreement that they’re going to just go to sleep and wake up infected because they’re both exhausted. Ellie falls asleep on the floor a few feet from where Riley is curled up.

She wakes up when there’s growling and snarling, eyes snapping open.

Ellie sits up fast, quickly grabbing Riley around the neck to keep her snapping jaws away from Ellie’s face, short bursts of screaming forcing their way out of her throat as fingernails claw at her shoulders.

It’s instinct to go for the gun in Riley’s waistband. It’s instinct to fire through Riley’s temple. She doesn’t even think beyond the animalistic adrenaline flooding her.

Her best friends makes a strangled choke as she falls to the side, twitching where she lays as the blood spreads and spreads and spreads. It smells stronger than Ellie would think, smelling painfully of iron and filling the entire room with this metallic odor.

Ellie doesn’t scream. A few tears fall, but she doesn’t feel much other than cold. She’s freezing, every inch of her ice and every part of her shaking so much that it makes her muscles hurt.

She soothes herself by telling herself that she’s next as she manages to get to the corner, staring at Riley’s body. It takes everybody sooner or later. She’s next. She has to be next.

Ellie sits in that room, stock-still except to get up and pee in the old abandoned bathroom, staring at her friend’s dead body long enough that Riley’s body starts to bloat and foam escapes from her nose and mouth and she smells.

By the time Marlene finds her and takes her away, Ellie’s bite mark has scabbed over, and Riley has been dead for four days.

Ellie’s dreams start to replay again and again as she shifts in the waking world, making a soft noise.

-

Tess’s head snaps over to look at where the other two members of their little party are sleeping from where she’s keeping watch (having taken over from Joel (currently asleep about two feet from their daughter) about an hour ago) at the sound of a small, frightened noise.

It takes another small cry and another shift underneath the jacket pile (both Joel and Tess’s coats having been silently donated to keep the little girl warm) for Tess to realize that Ellie’s having a nightmare.

She stays still for another minute, just watching, unsure of whether or not to handle it because Ellie hates her, until Ellie makes a louder noise and she finally gets up, pressing her hands against the tree trunk to get to her feet. It makes her shoulder twinge, the bite healing strangely and pulling, but she ignores it, creeping over to Ellie’s small, curled-up form.

“Hey,” she whispers, going to shake her and wake her up, but she pauses. She saw the tear tracks on Ellie’s cheeks yesterday morning after getting up, and she saw the dark circles under the kid’s eyes before that - Ellie doesn’t sleep much, let alone well.

She used to do this with her son. She knows how to calm a kid down while still keeping them asleep.

Tess is sure as hell out of practice, though.

After a bit of hesitation, she reaches out, gently resting her hand on the side of Ellie’s head. Her hair is softer than Tess would assume, not quite silky because it’s tangled but something close where it’s falling out of her ponytail in large pieces around her face, mouse-brown and curling now that it’s not in the tight elastic.

Her hair has waves. Tess’s guess is that her daughter’s hair is matching her dad’s.

Her daughter. The words still feel foreign, impossible - agonizing.

This is the little girl she could’ve gotten to raise if she’d just asked to hold her baby’s body.

It makes a lump appear in her throat before she swallows it, gently stroking Ellie’s hair back out of her face and tucking it behind her ear. “Shh, baby, you’re okay. You’re safe.”

The word ‘baby’ slips out without her permission, and she almost flinches - she’s only ever called Charlie that, and even then, very rarely - but she ignores it. This is her baby, after all. Her daughter. Hers.

“You’re okay,” Tess repeats, gently repeating the process of brushing her hair behind her ear, though this time, she hesitates and moves her hand to Ellie’s cheek. The little girl is thin - far too thin, all bones and wire beneath her hoodie - but still has round cheeks, covered in constellations of freckles.

Tess is going to make sure she eats. She’ll shove four meals a day down her throat if she has to. Ellie still has round cheeks, but they should still be more padded with baby fat - the kid is still thirteen, still practically prepubescent, still a kid.

She takes a deep breath.

Tess knows so much about this little girl but not enough. She knows more about Ellie than Ellie does - that she’s actually thirteen and what her birthday is, that Ellie’s name is ‘Estella Inez Miller-Servopolous’ because Joel had been drunk once and mumbled that ‘Estella’ was a beautiful name, that it meant light or star, and Inez because it was his mother’s name, and Miller-Servopolous for obvious reasons.

Tess wasn’t close with her family. Her parents were perfectionists, constantly trying to make her perfect while giving her no resources to do so. She was expected to get straight hundreds or she’d be screamed at even if she got a ninety-three on her early-college trig class final, expected to go to an Ivy without any college fund or scholarships, expected to take care of her own food and medicine and clothes and charged rent at sixteen and ending up working at some shitty pharmacy, expected to do everything right and being hated when she inevitably failed. Once she was kicked out at eighteen, she stopped talking to them. Her family as an adult - a husband and son, one of whom she killed and the other who got locked in a basement when she couldn’t bring herself to kill him even though he was infected - was better, but she and her husband had problems even before his death. Joel was minorly better - he and Tommy were close until they split up about fifteen years ago, he had adored his mother before she died, he’d loved his daughter dearly - but she’d traced scars on his back and stomach and arms and asked, and he’d admitted in the light of the lamp in their apartment that his dad tried his best but his best sometimes ended with Joel having to stand watch outside Tommy’s room to keep him safe or intentionally pissing him off to get himself beaten before his mother got home and she’d take the hits instead.

So yes, she’d named their daughter after Joel’s mother, and she’d liked ‘Estella’ too.

But the thing is, while she knows Ellie’s name and background and age better than even the little girl herself, she doesn’t know enough. She didn’t know about her kid’s strange little goblin hoard (she thinks Ellie would have liked the rocks for sale at an outrageous price at museum gift shops), or how her nose scrunches whenever she’s thinking, or even what she’s having the nightmare about.

“You’re okay, sweetheart.” Tess says quietly, leaning forward and pressing her lips to Ellie’s temple. 

The nightmare seems to ease under her touch, Ellie’s face relaxing and the small whimpers fading slightly. Tess keeps her touch light and gentle, tracing over freckles and cheekbones and little escaped curls that she’s memorizing.

Her baby. She still looks so young, so soft. She is young and soft. Even if she’s been abused by FEDRA and acts tough, she’s still a little girl who’s armed with shitty puns and carries a bag of random shit like a protractor (a goddamn protractor, really?) and is barely five-foot and ninety pounds and gets excited over a silly game.

Joel did good with that.

He’s a good dad. Tess knew it from stories from Tommy used to tell, from when Joel would get drunk and tell her about Sarah, even able to tell from his rage and grief over her and from the scar on his forehead. He was a good dad. Now she’s getting to experience it firsthand, and it makes her both warm and empty.

Because she wants Ellie to love her.

It’s selfish, but she does. She wants Ellie to at least look at her, at least talk to her, even if Tess is never going to be ‘Mom’ or told ‘I love you.’ She just wants her daughter to not hate her.

Because she was wanted. God, she was so wanted. When she was pregnant and she knew that she must be giving birth soon, even if she looked like she’d just gained a tiny bit of weight because she was carrying really small, she thought about her and talked to her and loved her before she was even born. And the after... well, Tess cried for months after in the shower, shut down every year for a week in April, froze every time she heard a baby cry up until they left the QZ.

Tess forces herself to take a deep breath, and after a quick look around, she lays down next to Ellie, keeping one hand on her daughter’s cheek and curling her other arm around her own waist. The gun is still on her thigh, another one on her hip, and she worries about falling asleep for a minute, but looking at her little girl, far too grown-up - Tess should’ve gotten to see first steps and hear first words and kiss scraped knees, not come in when her daughter is almost fourteen - she knows she won’t go to sleep.

She doesn’t, just staring at Ellie’s face until Joel rises after about an hour, puts his backup flannel over Tess, and kisses her temple before standing guard instead.

-

When Ellie wakes up, she feels warm and safe and comfortable, but then she freezes.

She’s in someone’s arms.

She’s immediately trying to place what happened - who the hell she’s with - but when she opens her eyes, she just sees Tess.

Her eyes are closed, the bruises on her eye and cheekbone almost healed, and she’s breathing deep, her arm over Ellie’s waist and her knee almost pressed against Ellie’s.

She doesn’t know what to do.

She’s mad at Tess. She abandoned her, let Ellie go to FEDRA and literally go to hell as a baby. (Even though Ellie knows it’s not her fault, she doesn’t know who took her away, and she wants - needs - to blame someone.)

But she closes her eyes and pretends to still be asleep, letting herself turn into the touch, because if she’s ‘asleep,’ nobody can comment on it, right?

She just lays there, enjoying Tess’s hand occasionally rubbing her back before going lax again, like it’s just built into her mother’s sleep brain that she should definitely pat and gently rub Ellie even in deep sleep.

Ellie stays that way for a while until she hears the crackle of fire and the crunch of boots - after Tess stirs and yanks her hand back like she’s burned, Ellie pretends to yawn and stretch, sitting up and realizing that she’s got all of their jackets on her.

“You don’t need to keep giving me your jackets. I’m fine.” Ellie says, getting to her feet for a wince before handing both their jackets back and pulling her red hoodie back on.

Neither of them answer, Joel just silently handing Ellie a lovely road breakfast of a whole granola bar and some beef jerky.

Ellie almost protests when she realizes that Joel and Tess are splitting what’s equivalent to what she has by herself, but when she opens her mouth, Joel gives her a shut-up look, so she obeys and quietly eats before they all stand and start moving, still without a word.

As they start to walk again, Tess’s arms wrapped around her waist, it takes a minute, but eventually, Ellie finds the words.

“Hey, I think we need to bring in our handler on today’s mission.” Ellie tells Joel, having practiced it, like, eight times in her head. “Can you call her? You have the, uh… radio.”

Joel looks crazy surprised, but after a minute, his face gets all soft, and he turns back and nods at Tess. Ellie braces herself as her shoesteps get closer.

“What’s going on?” Tess asks quietly once she’s standing only a little bit behind them, maybe five feet.

“There’s intel and spies in the woods. Agent Texas and I have been hunting intel down without  down, and we need, uh… our handler, Agent… Shadow to help because today’s an important mission.”

Tess stares at her like she’s crazy for a minute before straightening up, some kind of proud-determined expression crossing her face. “Agent Shadow, at your service.”

Chapter Text

Tess, weirdly, is the absolute best at the game.

She clearly tries to stay cool about it, but her eyes are gleaming and she smiles frequently as she creeps through the woods, leaning slightly forward with her knees bent as she looks around.

“Agent Shadow reporting suspicious movement northwest,” she whispers into her cupped hand like it’s a radio attached to a vest instead of just air and a button-up shirt, and Ellie has to fight not to laugh because she’s taking it so seriously. “Possible enemy surveillance activity detected. Agent Cactus - two o’clock, fifty feet out.”

Ellie’s distracted by Tess - she’s moving like she actually knows what she’s doing, not the Joel Shuffle - and she gets a bit disoriented and accidentally starts walking to the left.

“Other two o’clock. Other way. No- other way.” Tess says, repeating herself when Ellie keeps going the wrong way unthinkingly. Unfortunately, Ellie does not course-correct, too busy giggling at the absurdity of the game as well as Tess’s repetition.

“Agent Shadow, Agent Cactus seems to be having some directional and coordinational challenges. You might want to keep your fellow agent from fallin’ into a tree, ‘cause with all that gigglin’, that’s where it sounds like it’s goin’.” Joel calls back. It just makes Ellie start laughing harder and start stumbling.

“Roger!” Tess laughs - actually laughs, possibly for the first time since Ellie’s met her - as she jogs over to grab Ellie’s shoulders and steer her in the right direction. “Come on, other way-”

Tess keeps laughing, and Ellie keeps giggling as she walks like she’s seen stray puppies walk, feet floppy.

“Jesus, kid, you’re gonna fall flat on your face- left foot, right foot- there you go!” Tess half-laughs, half-cheers, and Ellie feels fuzzy a little bit and leans into the hands on her shoulders a bit more than she’d like to admit. “Alright! Now you just keep doing that.”

“I know how to walk!” Ellie protests through her own laughter.

“Coulda fooled me there.” Joel calls back, and that makes her laugh so hard that there are tears in her eyes.

Ellie doesn’t know what it is that’s got her giddy. Maybe it’s that she’s having fun with Joel and Tess. Maybe it’s that she has really fresh air and is in nature for the first time in her life. Maybe it’s that she’s safe and isn’t afraid for the first time in forever.

She doesn’t really care what it is that’s making her feel lighter than she has since Riley as she follows Tess to loop around back to the tree she was talking about.

Ellie was half-expecting just a weird knot on the trunk or something, but no, there’s actually a piece of metal embedded in the bark, deep enough that it’s barely a glint before Ellie manages to work it out of the trunk, revealing - wow - a triangle-shaped piece of shrapnel.

“How the fuck did you see this?” Ellie asks, looking up at Tess.

She smiles, and once again, even though Ellie doesn’t like her (she doesn’t like her- shut up, brain), it makes something ease in Ellie’s chest that Tess is happy. “I have good observational skills. Lots of practice.”

For a minute, Ellie goes to dismiss it as living post-outbreak, but then she remembers Tess’s lingo as they were playing the game on the path.

“Were you in the military?” Ellie asks, still holding the metal. It’s surprisingly warm, the wood of the tree keeping the chill of the autumn air off.

“Smart kid.” Tess says, turning back to the path. “For a couple years, yeah.”

Ellie’s brain breaks a little bit while it picks up at the same time. Logically, she knows that the Outbreak was only twenty years ago, but it’s still weird that her parents had actual lives and careers before the apocalypse. “Wait, really?”

“Yeah. I spent six years in the national guard and three in the Air Force.”

Ellie stops in her tracks, staring at Tess. “The Air Force? Like, planes?”

“Yeah.” Tess says.

“You got to go up in the sky?!”

Ellie can’t imagine it. Even in a plane, just being off the ground-

“Sometimes, yeah. I flew planes and helicopters, but I mostly did that during the National Guard, weirdly enough. In the Air Force, I was mostly intel. I did reconnaissance, analyzed information, tried to track down terrorists. I was stationed in Afghanistan. Major Servopolous - was going to be Lieutenant-Colonel if the Outbreak had happened a bit later. Hell, everyone in my squad was convinced I was gonna wind up in the CIA or the FBI or something.”

Ellie stares at her. “You flew helicopters in Afghanistan in a war?”

Tess shrugs as they get back onto the path, clearly trying to be modest, but her smile is a bit too proud to make it work. “UH-60s, mostly. A few smaller planes. Black Hawks. Spent a lot of time in the sand, though. Mostly intel, like I said, but I was part of the national guard, too. 

“Holy shit. You’re a real-life badass.” Ellie breathes.

“Still is. She’s the most badass woman I ever met.” Joel says. Ellie jumps a little - she was so consumed by the idea of her mother getting to go up in the sky to realize they had wound up walking close to him.

Tess snorts. “He says as if he’s not a badass too.”

“Were you in the Air Force too?” Ellie asks.

Joel chuckles under his breath, shaking his head. “No. I ain’t the type to be military - that’s your uncle Tommy. Me, I ran a construction company back in Texas. Built houses, buildin’s, all that kinda thing.”

“After being a death-defying firefighter for almost as long as I was in the military.” Tess grins at his back. Ellie feels like she’s in on the joke, even though everything is overwhelming and too much information.

Ellie can practically feel him roll his eyes. “Not death-defyin’, just a normal firefighter.”

“You were a firefighter? Like, you dragged people out of burning buildings like in books?” Ellie asks.

He chuckles again. “Yeah, even though it was more a situation of goin’ in an’ savin’ people from car accidents an’ medical emergencies. Eight years. Stopped when I turned twenty-six - fell through a couple stories in a bad accident, broke both my legs an’ some vertebrae, wasn’t allowed back ‘cause of disability, so I just healed up an’ then started doin’ construction full-time. Before, I was only doin’ a bit of construction, doin’ repairs for my neighbors an’ that kinda thing, but after I wasn’t able to be a firefighter, I just did it full-time since I already knew how to do it.”

Ellie’s quiet for a minute, processing. Her parents were heroes - actual heroes who fought in wars and saved people from burning buildings and built things that helped communities. It’s so different from the FEDRA officers, who mostly just hurt people and hoarded resources.

“So you both had these amazing jobs helping people - you were, like, real-life superheroes - and then the world ended and you, what, became smugglers?” Ellie says slowly.

There’s a beat of silence, and she immediately regrets asking. She didn’t mean for it to sound judgmental - she’s honestly just curious - but based on their reactions, it came out wrong.

“I- shit, I didn’t mean it to sound weird. I just mean- you knew how to build and fix things, and you were a pilot and a spy and- hell, you were already military. Why didn’t you end up being FEDRA?”

Nobody says anything, Tess just looking ahead with a ticking jaw and Joel’s broad shoulders are suddenly more tense, and Ellie takes the hint and shuts up.

Chapter Text

It’s pretty quiet as Ellie reflects and they walk through the woods.

It’s hard to hate her parents when she’s learned a bit about them. She doesn’t even know that much - if they had families before each other and her, if they had friends, about their parents and siblings, about their hobbies, about what their daily lives were like, even about what they did in their careers - but she knows a little bit more about them. She’s been spending time with them.

Ellie has come to the conclusion that she’s not mad at them.

Tess is kind, even if she’s tough. Smart as hell, funny, gentle - she laid down with Ellie this morning, she steered her onto the path, she was in the military and got to be in the sky, and she acts like she cares about Ellie, and she’s starting to believe it. Joel’s gruff but he also acts like he cares about her, and he made the game, and both of them are trying to be parents at her, and Ellie’s confused as hell, sure, but the more she’s around them, the more she kinda just wants to give in and ask for a hug or at least goof off and try to talk to them more.

She’s still mad, though.

Not at them.

Joel didn’t know she existed because Tess didn’t tell him, and Ellie’s still not exactly pleased about that, but more than anything, Tess thought she was dead.

Someone took Ellie away, told her mother she was dead, and then put Ellie into an orphanage to be hated and isolated and starved and hurt to make her a good soldier.

They took away the life that Joel was telling her about, where she would have been loved and had two parents and her own room and everything she needed, to give her her current life, where she’d only ever had one stuffed animal her entire life because they said she was too old, where she’d gotten scurvy once because they only fed them the Loaf (where it was half flour-slash-sawdust and half ground-up food) twice a day, where she was beaten and put in solitary confinement and she only ever had one person who loved her.

Someone did that. They did that on purpose. Someone told Tess that Ellie was dead, literally covered it up, and left her mom to grieve her secretly-alive baby while she was shipped off to become a good soldier, a good sacrifice to be tossed onto the fire.

It makes Ellie so, so very angry.

It makes her chest feel too tight and the rest of her too hot, vision blurring with tears.

Ellie doesn’t usually cry when she’s sad. She’s good at swallowing it until she’s alone and safely stowed away.

But when she’s angry, or frustrated, or overwhelmed?

The tears come, and the thing is, when she breaks and cries, it’s not elegant like the protagonists of the novels that Ellie reads sometimes. She doesn’t weep while roaming the halls of the castle in a white nightgown. She shouts and tears and snot stream down her face as she screams up a storm.

Luckily, Ellie manages to swallow the waves, focusing on the pain in her feet. She counts to ten like she learned to in the Hole or in classes when it felt like the walls were closing in. The anger still doesn’t go away, just burning in her chest like a coal, but she manages to keep walking and not cry.

“You alright, Agent Cactus? Break time?” Joel calls back over his shoulder to her, and Ellie realizes that she’s accidentally fallen behind again.

“Yeah. I’m just… thinking.” Ellie says, jogging a few painful steps to catch up. It’s not entirely a lie. “I don’t need a break.”

“Alright. Let us know.” Joel says.

He doesn’t push her.

Ellie’s not sure whether she’s glad or annoyed at that.

They walk in silence for a while, the game temporarily forgotten as they walk along thinning woods.

Ellie finds herself watching her parents - really watching them.

Tess is stable, walking straight, glancing back to make sure Ellie’s keeping up as well as looking around, constantly maintaining surveillance. Ellie wonders if that’s military training or just her. Joel, meanwhile, keeps drifting between her and Ellie, falling the few feet behind Tess to Ellie long enough to ask if she needs a break or water or any food, and when Ellie says no, he walks ahead again, going to Tess’s side. He always starts a few feet away, but eventually, he drifts closer until their arms are brushing.

She watches for evidence of the past they told her about. She watches to see if Joel walks weird from breaking his legs and back, watches to see if Tess does anything that makes it obvious that she was in the military for almost as long as Ellie’s been alive, and she comes to a few conclusions, and they’re all about Joel.

One: he does walk weird, but not in a super noticeable way, not unless you’re looking for it like Ellie is. He has a bit of a limp the longer they walk and the more tired he must get, like when they’re walking uphill, like one of his legs is stiff or sore, and every once in a while, he stops and his back clearly seizes up when they’re walking on uneven ground. He compensates so well that it’s almost invisible, but it’s there.

Two: he has a deep scar on his right temple, and he clearly can’t hear out of that ear, speaking louder when his right side is to Tess and turning his head to look at her as he listens when they talk. He does the same thing when he falls back to check on Ellie.

Three: he always keeps himself between Ellie and wherever danger might be.

If the smashed-up-road trail gets wider, less overgrown, he goes to the side where the woods are thicker. When they’re walking along a part where the road is a bit higher than the grass below, he’s nearest to the drop-off. If there’s any sound - snapping branches, a weird bird noise - his hand goes to his gun first, and he falls to Ellie’s side. When a rabbit hops out across the road from the woods, Joel pulls his gun and puts his arm out in front of her.

Tess notices too, clearly, because sometimes, when he’s checking on her too many times, she rolls her eyes and tugs him forward, exasperated but fond, like this is a repeated problem.

Ellie files it all away in the growing, confusing mess of feelings in her chest.

She feels cared for.

It adds to her anger.

Who the hell took this from her?

Chapter Text

Ellie doesn’t mean to throw everybody off.

Sure, she has to sit down a lot, both because she’s not used to walking so much and because her blisters are murder (and because both Joel and Tess keep making her sit down and take a break to drink water or eat something or check for more blisters), but this time, there’s not even a good reason to stop, really.

It’s just that they’re crossing a bridge and it’s pretty.

Ellie can’t help but get distracted.

The entire time that she’s been alive, she’s been in a gray city. Everything’s always been grays and browns, ugly shades and sad people and even the sky looking gray and gloomy more often than not.

This is not gray.

The sun is hitting the water, bluer than she’s ever seen, and it’s making it shine. The trees are all along the bank, swaying gently, and Ellie can see the shape of fish down in the water, grasses lining the shore.

“What are you lookin’ at, kiddo?” Joel asks, starting to wander back over.

“The… look at the view.” Ellie says, leaning on the metal bridge railing to look down. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Well, we can take a break, enjoy the view.” Joel says, and he hesitates before gently patting her shoulder as he leans on the railing next to her. Tess wanders over as well, leaning on the railing on Ellie’s other side.

It’s quiet for a minute.

“Do you know who Monet is?” Tess asks, sitting down on the bridge edge and sticking her legs through the metal, dangling her feet. Ellie quickly follows suit, and Joel hesitates before doing the same with a groan and a crackle of his knees.

“Isn’t he, uh… the… the paintings guy?” Ellie asks. “In FEDRA, art class wasn’t really a thing. I just remember one time I looked him up in a dictionary.”

Tess huffs a small laugh. “Yeah, the paintings guy. He was an impressionist - that means that he basically tried to paint quick snapshots of whatever moment he thought was beautiful. He was known for water lilies. He lived by a pond, and every day, he’d go out and paint the lilies. A lot of his landscapes looked a lot like this. Actually, it looks almost the exact same as his painting ‘Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies.’ It was one of my favorites by him.”

“That’s cool.” Ellie says, blinking a little in surprise. “You… like art?”

Tess scoffs. “Oh, yeah. I like art so much that I got a degree in it.”

“I thought you were in the military?”

“I was. I joined because they used to have this program, called ROTC. Basically, you signed up, and they paid for your college if you promised you’d serve in the military. I signed up as soon as I turned 18 because I needed the money, and then… well, I did pretty well. I got a Bachelor’s degree in history with minors in fine arts and art history when I turned nineteen, and I was going to just go serve in the military full-time instead of the National Guard like I was and figure out what to do, but then I got into Columbia - that used to, uh, be a really good, famous college - and I got a PhD in Art History and Archaeology when I turned 24. I’d just finished my dissertation - my final project - by the time the outbreak hit. Funnily enough, it was on human kindness and how it perseveres. I wrote about all the people with broken legs or disabilities who couldn’t walk and how people took care of them. Even kids with the most severe disabilities lived for quite a while because everyone around them protected them. People tamed dogs by playing with wolves and scratching their backs where they couldn’t reach, people took care of the elderly, people buried their dead - I wrote a hundred-page essay on how humanity is kindness.”

She looks over at Tess with a slightly-open mouth, trying to picture it. Not the woman who shot a Clicker in the face, but someone who used to sit in a quiet room somewhere with books and canvases and a cup of water writing about kindness. About people helping each other.

“You’re, like, a real academic. Like in my books. And you flew helicopters too?” Ellie manages.

“Yeah. I guess I was.” Tess says, and she smiles, and it makes her look less tired. “I actually still have some of my papers. I kept writing them after the Outbreak. Helped me… just remember who I am.”

“That’s awesome. Can I read them sometimes?” Ellie asks.

“Yeah. Of course you can. Whenever you want.” Tess says, blinking rapidly for a second as she looks back out over the water. “You’ll have to tell me what you think.”

“Okay.”

It’s quiet again for a minute until Ellie asks, “Did you go to school too, Joel?”

When she looks over at him, he scoffs and shakes his head. “Nah. Wasn’t my place. See, I, uh… I dropped outta high school. Just got my GED - the, uh, the high school twin degree, ‘cept it’s a test instead of years of school. I had to take care of my family.”

“You did?” Ellie asks.

“Yeah. My dad, he left when I was turnin’ sixteen, an’ that was when my brother was twelve an’ my mama was gettin’ real sick from cancer, so I dropped out to work an’ keep the family alive.” Joel shrugs slightly. “Worked sixty hours a week in a grocery store until I was nineteen, then… some other things came up. My mama died, so it was me an’ my brother an’... well, uh, I had to be home a lot, an’ I needed money, so I just signed up to be a firefighter so I could work a 48-hour shift on the weekend an’ be home the rest of the time. But I wasn’t really a school kid, even before my mama got sick.”

“You’re named after her.” Tess says abruptly.

It goes very quiet very fast again.

“I am?” Ellie asks in a very small voice, followed by a gruff, “What?” from Joel.

“Her name was Inez. That’s your middle name.” Tess says, looking out over the water.

Ellie’s throat lumps up, and Joel does a deep inhale.

“What’s my full name?” Ellie manages to choke out. “I- they said I was just ‘Ellie.’”

“Estella Inez Miller-Servopolous.” Tess says softly, still looking over the water. A few strands of hair blow across her face and chest. “‘Estella’ means light or star. It’s probably where they got Ellie from. Inez was your grandmother’s name. Then Joel’s last name is Miller, and my last name is Servopolous, so you get both.”

Ellie isn’t sure what to do. She’s always just been Ellie, both her name and a simple identifier for FEDRA, and she’d been told that was it. No last name, no middle name, no long first name, just ‘Ellie.’ Nothing else.

But that’s not true. Her name is ‘Estella Inez Miller-Servopolous,’ and she’s named after her grandmother and the stars. She was born on April 19 thirteen-and-a-half years ago, not just some random time fourteen years ago. She has a mom and a dad and an uncle, and she had grandparents, and her mom used to fly helicopters and love art and humanity so much she became a doctor, and her dad loved his family so much that he quit school and worked super hard as a firefighter to save people and take care of them. She’s half-Hispanic and half-Greek and her family would have loved her if she hadn’t been stolen.

She fights to swallow the lump, but she can’t control how her lower lip is trembling - and when she looks over at Joel, it looks like she’s not the only one.

He’s breathing shallowly, eyes squeezed shut and hands clasped white between his knees and his head bowed, and when Ellie quietly says, “Joel?” he takes a quiet breath. 

“‘S a good name.” Joel finally croaks, all gruff. “Real good name.”

“Did you- did you pick it when they said I was… stillborn? Dead?” Ellie manages towards Tess.

“Uh… no.” Tess says, still looking out at the water. “I figured out I was pregnant when I was about halfway through, and… I got pretty excited, even if I was terrified and I didn’t know what we were gonna do. Had it picked out about a month in advance. Don’t ask me how, but I was so sure you were gonna be a girl that I wasn’t even thinking about boys’ names. So… I knew you were going to be Estella Inez for a bit before, and when you were born and they said you were gone, I just… you kept the name anyway. Wasn’t going to have another kid with you gone, and I thought you deserved to go with a name, so I let it be. Told them to bury or cremate you or whatever with the name.”

Joel lets out another stunted exhale, and after a second, he reaches out and gently rests his palm on the back of her neck, thumb rubbing a circle on her skin. Ellie relaxes involuntarily.

“We’re real glad you’re here, kiddo.” he says, voice rough. “Wish it had been sooner, but we’re real glad you’re here.”

Ellie looks back out over the water that apparently looks like her mother’s favorite Monet painting, and when a few tears fall, neither says a word. They don’t move until the sun starts to go down.

Chapter Text

Early the next day, Joel and Tess stop walking, and Ellie - Estella - does as well, assuming they’re stopping to rest and eat, but they don’t start trying to make a fire or food like normal.

After a minute of sitting on a log and waiting for them to do something and getting nothing as they quietly look at a piece of paper - a map? - Ellie asks, “What’s up?”

“We’re almost to Bill and Frank’s house.” Tess says, glancing up from the map before looking back down at it. “The only problem is that there’s a lot of traps on the way in. I think I know where all of them are, but I want to make sure that there aren’t any on the way we’re going into the town.” Tess says, looking over it even closer.

“You stay real close to us, you got it?” Joel says, looking up at her. “Bill’s hella paranoid, an’ he’s an alright guy, but he’s got a whole lotta traps that can an’ will kill you. Tess an’ me, we’re used to ‘em, unthinkingly walk around ‘em, but you don’t got that kinda sixth sense for ‘em, so we gotta be real careful to make sure you don’t get hurt, chiquita.”

“Okay.” Ellie says instead of asking ‘what does ‘chiquita’ mean’ like she wants to.

“So the plan is to go around through the woods, because we walked a long way by accident because your d- Joel can’t read a map-”

“I can read a map. We just went the long way after the capitol threw off the route-”

“-anyway, we have to walk through the woods to get on the main path and get through the gate. Joel and I know the code, so we’ll go straight to their house, and- well, Bill might try to handcuff you, but Frank’ll tell him off and offer you soup. They’re just that kind of people.”

“Okay.” Ellie says, trying to reconcile ‘deadly traps’ and ‘handcuffs and soup.’ “Wait. They… live together?”

“Yeah.” Tess says as she folds up the piece of paper and stows it in her pocket. “Have for… what, fifteen years?”

“Bit longer, I think, but I couldn’t tell you.” Joel shrugs as he hefts his own backpack and starts walking. “Pocket.”

Ellie blinks. “What?”

And bam, Joel stops dead in his tracks, completely frozen, not even breathing.

“I-” he starts before he stops again, dead quiet with his back to her.

It’s completely silent, both Tess and Ellie waiting for Joel to say something while he stands away from them, only breathing occasionally.

“I’m sorry.” he says after a long moment. “When… my daughter was little, I… would always say ‘pocket,’ an’ she would hook her fingers into my belt loop or pocket so I wouldn’t lose track of her when I was carryin’ groceries to the car.”

Ellie’s world falls out from under her yet again.

“You two couldn’t be more different kids.” Joel says, voice getting rougher, more choked. “But, uh… somethin’ in my brain is just… some wire is crossing over. Tryin’ to make me do the same things I’d do with her with you. I’m sorry, Ellie. Real sorry. Jus’ an’ ol’ fool bein’ a dumbass.”

He starts to walk away, and Ellie stays behind, stuck to the ground as she tries to process.

Joel had a daughter.

Her father had a daughter other than her. Before.

Tess’s hand comes to rest between her shoulder blades as she quietly creeps up behind Ellie. “Don’t bring her up, okay? Let him.”

“I have a sister?” Ellie chokes out.

“Yeah.” Tess says, nudging her forward slightly. Ellie’s too shocked to do anything but obey. “Her name was Sarah. She died on Outbreak Day - your dad’s thirty-third birthday. She was fourteen when she was killed.”

“Was… she infected?” Ellie asks.

“No. She wasn’t.” Tess says. “A soldier shot her to death even though she wasn’t sick. Joel… your dad never recovered, really. It’s still a deep hurt for him. Don’t… bring her up.”

“...but I had a sister.” Ellie manages to pretty much repeat.

“Yes.” Tess agrees. “And you had a brother. Charlie. My son. He died early on Outbreak Day. His dad got bitten on his way home from the military base where he worked, and when he turned, he bit my son. It was…”

Tess exhales. “Both your dad and I have lost a lot of people. But if you want to know about our families, come to me, alright? I’m… numb to it, mostly, after all this time. But Joel, he… losing his daughter, it affected him in a different way.”

“What do you mean?” Ellie asks.

Tess sighs as they keep walking, lifting the hand not on Ellie’s back to pull her hair back behind her ears. “Back when we had brain doctors and everything, we used to call it PTSD. Post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s… how do I explain it…”

She navigates around a fallen log, Ellie along with her. “Sometimes, when people experience something that’s really bad, where they’re… powerless, where they’re completely helpless to stop the horrible thing that’s happening, their brain stops functioning right. Their brain gets stuck reliving that bad moment over and over and over. They dream about it, have these moments where something sets off the memory and they relive it while they’re awake, think about it all the time - their brain just gets trapped in that moment. They’re constantly scared and angry, trying to avoid things that set off the episodes and have these constant… spiraling thoughts. They’re constantly tense and feeling like they’re in danger, can’t sleep or focus, get easily startled, blame themselves for the bad thing that happened…”

“Why didn’t you get it?” Ellie asks, trying to ignore how so many of those things align with how she’s felt since Riley. “You experienced something really bad with your husband and son and the Outbreak and everything. Why does he have it and you don’t?”

Tess exhales. “There are these things that psychologists used to call risk factors. Where if there are other aspects to that event or your life, it makes you more likely to get sick with something. Your dad had a lot of risk factors for PTSD. He had a lot of traumatic experiences before Sarah. He already had a mental illness - he, uh, he had these things called ‘generalized anxiety disorder’ and ‘panic disorder’ before. He got hurt when Sarah died, and he tried but couldn’t save her. She bled out in his arms. But me, I shot my husband and locked my son in a closet so I didn’t have to kill him. It happened so fast for both of them that I can hardly remember, and I was trained for it. In the military, they teach you to respond fast, how to… distance yourself from what you do. And between that and the fact that I knew there was no way that I could have saved them, that I did what I had to and I had no other choice, the nightmares and panic attacks and everything aren’t like Joel’s. They’re still there, sometimes, but they’re muted. Like background noise. I know what happened, and it hurts a lot, but it didn’t take over my life like it took over his.”

Ellie blinks away tears. “Is that part of why you didn’t tell him? About me?”

Tess goes quiet again for a long time, carefully navigating her around a tripwire, both hands on her shoulders. “...Partially.”

Ellie waits.

“You should ask about the scar on his head.” Tess says quietly. “At some point. Not now. But… yeah. The thing about pregnancies is that… in the first few months, things can go wrong really easily. They’re called ‘miscarriages,’ and a lot of people have them in the first few months, especially when they’re a bit older, like I was. I was thirty-three when I had you. But, uh… I didn’t want your dad to know. If I miscarried. Because… if I told him that we were going to have a baby, I knew that he would immediately fall in love with you before you were even born. And I knew that if something went wrong and I miscarried, he… wouldn’t recover, I think. I told myself that when you got big enough that I looked pregnant, it would be far enough in that I could tell him because the odds of something going wrong would go way down and it would be safe for him to know. But… I don’t know why, but I never truly looked pregnant. Not enough that Joel ever knew. And I never told him after because… what would that do? To say ‘we had a daughter but she died’? It would… it would cut him really deep. So yes, I didn’t tell him in part because of the PTSD.”

Ellie goes quiet for a second, trying to think, and she feels bad, but then she turns to Tess and says, “Could I walk with him for a minute? I’ll come back, I swear.”

Tess nods, but she doesn’t let Ellie go, just picking up her pace and hurrying them to keep up with Joel, carefully avoiding stepping on any plates or tripwires. After a minute, with Tess’s help, they get caught up.

Joel glances back slightly, but he doesn’t fully react until Ellie hesitantly reaches out and hooks her fingers through one of his side belt loops.

Tess’s hands come down from Ellie’s shoulders, and after a moment of her hesitation, Tess’s hand slips into Ellie’s.

Ellie squeezes Tess’s larger, more weathered hand in her own as she pretends not to notice how Joel’s breathing has gone ragged or how he reaches out and gently pats her bicep before he hefts his backpack once more and keeps walking.

Chapter Text

It’s almost two hours of just walking through the woods, both Joel and Tess carefully steering her away from traps.

For the most part, it’s just them using her arms or shoulders to pull her away or hold her so that she keeps moving in the correct direction and way, but at the moment, Ellie’s not quite sure what to do as Joel does the weirdest fucking move she’s ever seen.

He’s holding her out by under her arms, his own arms straight out, as he dangles her above the ground, her feet coming down to his knees because he’s probably nine, ten inches taller than her and her head is now level with his because of how he’s just holding her out like she’s seen people do with particularly annoying puppies and kittens. She was just fucking walking right in front of him and then he reached out, grabbed her, and lifted her up like she was a sack of potatoes.

“What are you doing?” Ellie asks. She doesn’t quite know why she’s not moving, but she’s not, still and half-limp as he carries her, Joel staring at the ground as she looks over her shoulder to watch him.

“Whola lotta pressure plates an’ landmines. You ain’t losin’ a leg.” Joel says, and when she cranes her neck and looks down, she sees it: there’s a ton of small hills that Joel is slowly, precisely walking around, Tess stepping exactly where he does. “You need to eat more. You ain’t hard enough to lift for thirteen.”

“This dude is seriously paranoid.” Ellie says, trying to count the landmines they’re walking around. There have to be easily a couple dozen.

“That’s Bill for ya.” Joel shrugs, continuing to just hold her dangling as he navigates.

“...how long are you gonna hold me like this for?”

“Long as I want to, considerin’ you’re a skinny thing.” Joel jokes (Ellie thinks?) as he focuses back on the ground. “This is comfortable.”

“Good for you. Not for me.” Ellie says, being careful not to shift. “Gonna pull my fuckin’ shoulders out.”

Joel stops in his steps, Tess stopping behind him, and after a minute, he practically fucking throws her, lifting her fast and letting go for a millisecond before grabbing her and pulling her against his chest, arms around her waist instead so that she’s still far from touching the ground, but it’s more comfortable now, the weight off her arms.

“Better?” he asks gruffly, huffing slightly but not breathing too heavily.

“...yeah, actually,” Ellie says, but she’s less surprised at that than she is at the fact that she feels safe.  

She’s being carried by somebody else - something that Ellie, who normally has complicated feelings about touch, would normally fight against - over a field of active land mines and booby traps, and she doesn’t feel threatened or frightened. She feels completely calm, completely secure, like something in her brain is just broadcasting the message of ‘yeah, no, he’s not going to drop us, he’s good to touch us, we’re good.’

It’s a little bit weird, but she doesn’t mind, just leaning her head back against his shoulder and looking up at the trees, enjoying the feeling of someone carrying her and breathing against her back.

“Seriously, girl, you need to eat more.” Joel mumbles from behind her, stepping around another lump under the grass. “Puede levantarte como un saco de patatas. Gon’ feed you five times a day, swear to God.”

“I’m not that skinny, and you don’t have to fucking fixate on it.” Ellie says, but she’s distracted by a drilling sound up in the trees. “What is that noise?”

“It’s a woodpecker. Uses its beak to drill through wood to get to bugs inside. And yes, he has to fixate on your weight, because he’s Joel, and Joel shows that he cares about you by obsessing and getting anxious about everything and not stopping.”

“That ain’t what I do,” Joel says, but his arms tighten around her anyway as he makes the next cautious long step, like he’s protecting her against a stumble that hasn’t even happened yet. Ellie can’t help but relax further, melting a little bit more than she’d like to admit as she lets her head rest fully against his shoulder, looking up at the sky.

“Are dinosaurs and birds related?” Ellie asks, watching a bird fly overhead - a crow, maybe? She doesn’t know, she’s a bird enthusiast, not an actual bird-watcher. “Or are dinosaurs closer to reptiles?”

“Birds and raptors are close.” Tess says as Joel ‘hmm’s. “I bet your favorite character in Jurassic Park is - will be - Alan Grant.”

“Who’s Alan Grant?” Ellie asks, grunting as Joel hefts her again.

“Movie scientist. We like him - he’s a good one.” Joel says, squeezing her. Ellie wonders if he’s trying to keep her from falling or if he just wants to hug her. “We’ll find a copy of the DVD, make ya watch it. It’s a good movie. If you like dinosaurs, you’ll like it.”

“I do like dinosaurs.” Ellie immediately says. “And birds. I like animals a lot, generally.”

“Hmm.” Tess says, doing a couple strange hops over a few mines. “Such as?”

“I found a bunch of frog eggs in the water fountain one time. I hatched them in a jar. I got, like, three frogs out of the deal. And then I used to shoot at the rats with a BB gun sometimes, but then I realized they were kinda cute and took a few. And there was this one dog that I would sneak out to feed.”

Joel steps around another mine. “What happened to him?”

Ellie shrugs. “Dunno. I ended up in the hospital for a few weeks, and when I got out, he wasn’t showing up anymore.”

“Why were you in the hospital?” Joel asks, Tess starting to ask the same question but Joel beating her to the punch.

“I… uh…” Ellie stammers before she resolves to just deal with their anger and tell the truth. “I had scurvy.”

“I’m sorry, what?!” That time, they’re in unison, and Ellie flinches slightly.

“ I was seven, and believe it or not, it took them a whole, like, month to figure it out. Because my gums were bleeding and I had a ton of bruises and stuff, but other kids sucked and I got into fights a lot, so they didn't know until I got put in the Hole and I slept for, like, two days straight because I was so tired.” Ellie rambles nervously. “They said I was the only kid in the whole QZ to ever have gotten it, and they made me eat food other than the Loaf-”

“What’s the Loaf and what’s the Hole?” Tess asks, talking over Joel.

Ellie shrinks as Joel’s arms get tighter. “In FEDRA, everyone got a slice of the loaf - that was when they took all the meat and bread and vegetables and shit and ground it up and made it into a giant loaf. And you got two slices a day, and you got a third if you were underweight. But it wasn’t really food, you know? Like, it would be half food and half flour. And so then you'd get sick because you were eating only a little bit of food, and when you got your bones breaking because they were too weak or you got a disease from not having enough vitamins and stuff, they'd put you on the same food as the officers to make sure you didn't die. I usually got lemons and oranges and milk because of the scurvy and because I had bone density issues. And the Hole was… just our name for solitary confinement. It wasn’t that bad.”

(It was. You weren’t allowed light or a bed or anything - it was just a completely dark 6x6 room with a bucket in it and food once a day if you didn’t piss any of the guards off too bad. When Ellie got put in there for the first time when she was five, she wouldn’t stop screaming until they knocked her out by hitting her head on the floor.)

“Jesus Christ,” Joel mutters.

“It wasn’t that bad.” Ellie repeats, but her voice wavers, and Tess looks shattered as she turns towards the ground and doesn’t look at her, and Joel hooks his chin over her shoulder and squeezes her tighter as they keep walking.

“...seriously, when are you putting me down?” Ellie asks, trying to swallow the lump in her throat.

“When you’re safe.” Joel says. “So once we’re at the gate, kiddo. Just hang on.”

Ellie does.

Chapter Text

Ellie ends up falling asleep on Joel’s shoulder as he carries her, practically snoring as her legs dangle limply and her head lolls back against his neck, and after a minute, he pauses to shift her up into a bridal carry, leaning slightly so that her head is still carefully pressed against his shoulder. Their daughter immediately snuggles closer in her sleep, curling up tighter and pressing her face into his collarbone with a sleepy mumble.

Tess can’t help but watch them, especially after they’re free from the absolutely fucking insane minefield that Bill put in place. (Seriously - what if there was a wild animal or something? There were so many mines that it would blow the whole place to hell if a goddamn squirrel stepped wrong.)

“You know, you could wake her up and have her walk,” Tess says, even though she knows Joel won’t. (She wouldn’t either, if she was the one carrying her.)

“Nah. She’s tired an’ she’s got blisters. Ain’t makin’ her walk. Besides, she’s so light that it ain’t hard.” Joel says simply before scowling. “Seriously, she’s too light. Can’t be more than eighty pounds.”

“She’s short, Joel. Four-eleven, maybe.”

“C’mere an’ try to lift her.” Joel says.

Tess raises an eyebrow at him. “You want me to bench-press our daughter like we’re at the fucking gym?”

“Nah. I just mean that she’s too light.” Joel says, frowning hard enough that lines deepen on his face. “She’s too small.”

“I know. You were picking on her earlier about it.”

“Wasn’t pickin’ on her.” Joel mutters. “I just think it ain’t right that a lil’ girl’s this damn skinny. I mean, look at her lil’ face. She looks too hollow. And- fuckin’ scurvy? Jesus, they fuckin’ starved her.”

Tess exhales slowly, watching how his jaw tightens. “Texas, calm down. We’ve got her now.”

“We do.” Joel says. “An’ the second we can, she’s eatin’ everythin’ I can get my hands on, swear to God.”

“I’ll help hold her down while you shove food down her throat.” Tess tries to joke, but it falls flat when she looks at Ellie.

Her face really is hollow. Her cheeks are soft, but that’s just because she’s still got baby fat that’s hard to lose even if you’re hungry - and when Tess looks at the back of her neck, bony with her vertebrae sticking out, it’s so obvious that she really was starved.

“We’re not giving her to the Fireflies, right?” Tess asks quietly, not taking her eyes off Ellie as they start to walk up the real path up to the gate. It’s mostly clear of traps, just a few tripwires they automatically avoid - Bill and Frank keep it clear for them. “I just… want to make sure that we’re on the same page.”

Joel moves his hand to cradle the side of her head, a few curls - worse since Ellie took a dip in the river to clean off this morning before they started to move again, not brushed out and now forming wild loose curls now that it’s not been brushed out - escaping both her ponytail and his fingers. His jaw clenches, and Tess almost tells him that nobody’s going to snatch her away from him right now, but then she remembers the drunken nights when he sobbed over not being able to save Sarah and stays quiet.

“Nobody’s takin’ her.” Joel says, his voice both velvety-soft and cold and hard as steel. “Not the Fireflies, not fuckin’ Marlene, not anyone. Nobody will ever take her away from us. Ever. She’s ours, and we ain’t ever lettin’ her go again.”

“No, we aren’t.” Tess agrees. “Hell, might just stay at Bill and Frank’s. Live in a different house, but live where it’s safe. Keep her safe.”

“Hell, ain’t a bad idea.” Joel agrees.

It’s quiet for a moment as they keep walking up the path.

“She’s… real good at the thing kids do.” Joel says after a bit. “Where they’re all talk and act all tough an’ swaggerin’, but then they fall asleep or get quiet, an’ bam, they’re just babies.”

“Yeah.” Tess says, thinking of Charlie. “It’s like there’s this switch that they don’t even know they’re flipping. One moment, they’re an absolute gremlin, the next second, they look like little angels.”

Joel smiles slightly. “Think she really might be a lil’ angel. Carryin’ around goddamn protractors an’ lovin’ fuckin’ dinosaurs an’ puns, feedin’ fuckin’ stray dogs an’ hatchin’ goddamn tadpoles an’ lookin’ after fuckin’ rats.”

“Yeah. She’s a good one.” Tess says, and when she looks back at the little girl with her face tucked into the hollow of Joel’s collarbone and her hand fisted in his shirt and her ponytail completely falling out, her chest aches. “Don’t know how FEDRA made her like this. Bunch of fuckin’ brutes, but they didn’t break her somehow.”

“She’s perfect. Ain’t just good.” Joel says, and he might be biased, and he almost jokes about it, but then he gently smooths her hair, and she’s overcome with so much affection for both of them that Tess has to look away. “Lord, her hair’s curly. Musta put in a whole lotta effort in FEDRA to keep it straight-ish. We gotta find somethin’ to keep it from gettin’ matted.”

“Her hair’s beautiful.” Tess says.

“Yeah.” Joel says simply before he keeps talking. “Sarah, she had… all these curls. I took lessons at a goddamn hair place to figure out how to manage it. Used to put ‘em up into these knots they showed me how to do. ‘Course, Sarah’s hair was from her mama, an’ apparently Ellie’s hair is from me… different textures an’ curls an’ everythin’, but still. Maybe I can remember a lil’. Try to keep her hair from becomin’ a rat’s nest.”

Tess gets a lump in her throat, hearing him talk about Sarah - she normally does, it’s so fucking obvious how much he loved his daughter, and it’s even worse now that they have Ellie - but before she can think of a single thing to say in response to that, they’re at the gate.

Tess silently punches in the code, and when the gate unlocks, she pries it open for Joel so he doesn’t have to put Ellie down.

Chapter Text

They walk the hundred steps over to Bill and Frank’s house in quiet, Joel’s hand still cradling Ellie’s head as they head straight for Bill and Frank’s house. However, unlike normal, Joel stops at the bottom of the porch.

“You knock.” he tells Tess with a small nod. “Don’t wanna wake her.”

Tess nods back, heading up the steps, but when she knocks, there’s no answer.

She knocks again. No answer.

After a moment, she tries the door. It opens.

And that’s when she knows that something is very wrong.

“Hello?” Tess calls as she steps into the foyer. 

Nothing.

Nothing’s broken. Hell, everything looks perfect - boots by the door, paint drying in its palette next to the easel, all the lights off. But something feels wrong.

Tess tries to take a deep breath as she starts walking through the rooms, hearing Joel walk up the steps as she begins to search.

Nothing in the living room. Nothing in the kitchen. Nothing in the study or the sunroom or-

“Tess.” Joel calls quietly from the dining room.

Her heart’s pounding as she goes in, and when Joel points with his chin at the piece of paper on the table, Tess’s hands shake when she picks it up and opens it.

‘If you find this, please do not come into the bedroom. We left a window open so that the house wouldn’t smell, but it will probably be a sight.’

Tess’ knees go weak, tears automatically welling in her eyes.

“Tessa?” Joel asks, but she can’t speak as she keeps reading.

‘I’m guessing you found this, Joel, because anyone else would have been electrocuted or blown up by one of my traps heheheheheh. Take anything you need. The bunker code is the same as the gate code but in reverse, do not make a mistake or you will get blown to shit. I’m not joking. Don’t fuck that up heheheheheh.

Anyway, I never liked you, but still, it’s like we’re friends. Almost. And I respect you. So I’m gonna tell you something because you’re probably the only person who will understand. I used to hate the world, and I was happy when everyone died.

But I was wrong. There was one person worth saving. And that’s what I did. I saved him and then I protected him. That’s why men like you and me are here. We have a job to do, and god help any motherfuckers who stand in our way. I leave you all of my weapons and equipment. Use them to keep Tess safe until such time as you and she decide you’ve had enough. At that point, I recommend pairing 40 Vicodins with a nice Brunello.

-Bill’

Tess can’t breathe. She can’t move, she can’t think, she can’t do a fucking thing. When she turns over the page to Frank’s handwriting, she audibly chokes. Joel leaves the room, walking fast to the living room, fast enough that Ellie’s shoes bounce with the movement. She somehow doesn’t stir.

‘Tess -

Don’t be mad at me. I probably had a few more months left in me, but it was hard. I was tired, and I wanted to have one good day before I went, so I married Bill, I had a good dinner, and we’re dying in each other’s arms. I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye, but that’s what I’m doing now, I suppose.

Speaking of marriage, that’s what I want my last message to be to you.

I know that it’s been hard for you. After you lost Her (not saying who because I don’t know if you’ve told him yet), you weren’t the same, and when you add that on to losing everyone else - well, between all that you two lost, it’s no wonder that you never officially got together or tied the knot or anything. But I also watched you both be shut down and lonely and isolated.

You don’t deserve that. You’re a good person, and I want you to have whatever the hell passes for a happily-ever-after in an apocalyptic hellscape. So my last wish for you is that you find peace. I hope that you and Joel get the chance to figure out what’s going on between you and settle down. I hope you get a chance to put that art degree to use and steal a couple paintings out of abandoned museums to put on the walls of wherever you end up. I hope that you and Joel both figure out how to breathe without remembering that you loved kids who aren’t anymore. (Speaking of which, if I see either Sarah or Charlie in wherever-we-end-up, I’ll say hi for you and let them know that you still love them.)

I hope you get a dog or something to take care of - you and I both know Joel’s the kind of guy who just wants to take care of living beings, even if he accidentally killed that tomato plant you traded your old boots for. I hope you find a home that feels like yours. I hope that, if there’s still a world worth anything out there, you’re in it and you’re making it better.

I’ll miss you. I hope you’re safe. I hope you finally get peace.

-Frank’

Her vision just goes white and her ears start ringing as she tries to take a deep breath.

They’re gone.

They can’t be gone. They- they can’t be. 

In this- in this whole fucked-up world, they were some of the only people she had left. She lost her biological family because she cut them off at eighteen, and then she lost her husband and son and friends, and then she lost every single friend she made after the Outbreak except for them. She lost Estella - or so she thought - and the only people she’s had since have been Joel, Bill, and Frank.

They can’t be dead.

God, she can’t take losing one more person. God, no-

Her hands press into her mouth as she tries to physically hold back the sob that forces its way out, but when her knees give out and she starts to fall, Joel catches her.

Distantly, it occurs in the back of her mind that Joel must have laid Ellie down on the couch in the living room, but in this moment, in this headspace, it’s all she can do to bury her face in his shoulder and sob.

“They gone?” Joel asks, voice rough.

Tess manages to nod, her whole system too busy with just pure grief to manage to speak.

“Oh, honey.” Joel says, hugging her tight in that way that makes it feel like the world isn’t completely falling apart. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

Tess just sobs.

She’s so tired of losing people. God, she’s so tired.

But somehow, it’s so on-brand for her that just when she finds out her daughter is alive, when she has a chance at something close to happiness, the universe comes in and reminds her that nothing and nobody she loves is ever safe.

Chapter Text

When Ellie wakes up, she yawns and stretches, becoming acutely aware that she’s on a much more comfortable surface than the ground or her barely-a-mattress in FEDRA school.

She makes a sleepy ‘brr’ noise involuntarily as she runs her hand over the softness underneath her, finding it to be a very comfortable couch. Underneath her head is this weirdly square pillow, and over her is this quilt like this one girl, Tamara, had when she first showed up when she was six.

Ellie stretches, looking around for her Joel and her Tess, but the room is empty for a long, distressing moment until Joel comes in, setting down a bowl of… something. Bread pieces?

Wait. It’s cereal. She’s read about this. Ellie’s an idiot.

Anyway, he sets it on the table in front of the couch, and when she looks up at him, he smiles slightly, but it looks tired. “Hey, kiddo. Figured you might want somethin’ to eat.”

“Where are we?” Ellie yawns, rolling onto her back where she was asleep facing the back of the couch.

“Bill an’ Frank’s.” Joel says.

Ellie sits up fast. “Oh. Uh- I didn’t- I didn’t mean to be… rude or any shit. Showing up to someone’s house asleep.”

Wait. She fell asleep. Joel carried her the whole rest of the way here.

Joel smiles again, this time smaller. “It’s kinda the heritage of kids. They fall asleep on the way to places. Hell, it was a whole stereotype that kids fell asleep in cars. Ain’t rude. ‘S fine.”

Ellie doesn’t ask what she wants to - did Sarah fall asleep in cars, what was my sister like, would she have liked me - instead just looking around. “Where’s Tess? And… Bill and Frank?”

Joel gets down on one knee in front of the couch with a groan, looking up into her eyes. “Ellie, mija, I need you to be real quiet ‘bout Bill an’ Frank. ‘Specially ‘round Tess.”

“...why?”

His eyes get distant for a moment before he focuses back on her. “Frank was real sick. Somethin’ called MS. Basically, he got these wounds on his brain, an’ they were gon’ get worse ‘til they killed him. Him an’ Bill killed themselves together instead of waitin’ for the end an’ for Frank to leave Bill alone. An’ it’s real sad, but right now, it’s wreckin’ your mama, an’ I need you to be real gentle with her, alright? She’s holdin’ on by a thread.”

Ellie doesn’t say anything for a minute. There’s too much to unpack there - that the people they were gonna bring her to and have her meet are dead and they chose to die together, that Joel called Tess ‘her mama,’ that Joel himself has this hollow look in his eyes, the same grief Ellie felt with Riley where it’s something horribly missing instead of overflowing like everyone always says grief is.

“Where is she?” Ellie asks.

“She’s upstairs. In one of the bedrooms. She’s calmin’ down.” Joel says, and then as if he can tell her thoughts, he says, “Eat your cereal before you go to talk to her, an’ when you do, be real sweet, alright?”

Ellie nods. “Okay.”

-

When she finally goes upstairs, the stairs creak, and everything’s dusty, like nobody’s been up here in a while. It’s quiet, though, and it’s only on the third opened door that Ellie finds Tess.

She’s sitting on the bed, perfectly made yet (once again) dusty, staring out the window, hunched forwards. When Ellie opens the door wider and it creaks open (seriously, was nothing oiled), she quickly leans further forwards, wiping her eyes with her palms. “What’s up?”

“I… just…” Ellie stumbles, slowly stepping into the room and wandering to her mother’s side. “I thought you could use the company.”

Tess looks over at Ellie, still standing awkwardly and nervously fidgeting with her fingers before Ellie manages to get her voice working again. “I… we don’t have to talk. Like, I’ll shut up. I just…”

Ellie forces herself to exhale. “I- I wasn’t alone in the mall. I lied. My- my best friend Riley and I snuck in together. And we were having fun, the mall was empty, but then the- the Infected came out of nowhere. And it got both of us. And we were waiting to turn together, and we were just gonna wait it out, but then she turned, and when she ran at me, I shot her with her gun. And then I thought I was going to turn too, so I waited in the room with her dead body just looking at her for two days. Until she started to rot. And it’s not the same, I know it’s not, but- I would have given anything not to be alone.”

Tess just looks at her for a second, eyes wide and watery, before she lifts up her arm and shifts her other hand to her lap. “C’mere.”

Ellie freezes. She’s not usually a fan of physical contact - Riley was really the only one allowed, because everyone else just used any opening to touch her to try to hurt her - but so far, she’s let Joel hug her and pick her up and shit, and she hasn’t pushed back when Tess has tried to touch her either-

“C’mere. It’s okay, I swear.” Tess says, looking up at her while keeping her chin tilted down.

After a minute, she takes a few small steps over and sits down next to Tess.

Tess is immediately all over her, one arm around Ellie’s shoulders and the other hand cupping Ellie’s cheek with thin fingers, pressing the side of Ellie’s head into her neck as she presses her own face into Ellie’s crown.

Ellie goes stiff for a second, just automatic ‘I don’t know what I’m doing’ from her dumb body, before she melts, wrapping her arms around Tess’s waist and hiding in the crook of her neck while Tess presses a kiss to her hair.

“I’m so sorry, honey.” Tess whispers, cupping the back of her head. “I’m so sorry that happened to you.”

Ellie hasn’t told anyone, and her eyes start to prick with tears as she manages to choke out, “I still see her. Behind my eyes. I can’t remember what she looked like not dead.”

“Oh, baby.” Tess murmurs, hugging her tighter. “Oh, I’m so sorry…”

And the grief comes crashing down like the dam in one of the propaganda videos they used to show at school to show why maintenance workers are important, and Ellie just shatters, starting to cry.

Both of them do. Tess cries for Bill and Frank and maybe the other people she’s lost like her son, and Ellie cries for Riley and lost time and the siblings and friends and family she never got to meet or didn’t get enough time with, and they grieve for different things and different people, but they do it together, and somehow, it feels so much less heavy to not grieve alone.

Chapter Text

Ellie finds that both of her parents are, in fact, excellent huggers - in very different ways, but still really good. 

Joel’s hugs are heavy and solid, tight enough that you can’t move and he could probably lift you without adjusting his grip, still and there and solid like he’s a big oak tree like Ellie used to pretend she was laying under when she felt alone and just laid on the floor. He doesn’t move much, but his hugs are all steady and sure and strong, like he’s holding onto her so the world can’t rip her away out of his arms. Even though he’s only hugged her once or twice so far, it’s been making Ellie feel small when Joel hugs her, like she doesn’t have to be a badass and tough for a second because Joel’s enough for both of them.

Tess’s hugs are different. She moves. Her hands rub circles on Ellie’s back, her fingers rake through Ellie’s hair, her lips and chin and cheek keep pressing against the top of Ellie’s head over and over. She doesn’t hug tight like Joel, but she holds Ellie like she’s something fragile and breakable, and it still feels warm and safe.

There are similarities, to be fair. They both make noises as they hug - humming, sighing, rumbling in their chests. Both of them smell like safety - does that make sense? - even though they both smell like sweat and gun oil and the sharpness of the soap from the apartment that Tess carries in the bottom of her bag. They don’t smell like FEDRA people, scrubbed and bleached until everything is so clean that it stings your nose and your skin - they smell alive and lived-in. And both of them hug like they mean it - none of the half-hugs and grabs that Ellie and Riley had that were Ellie’s only source of affection for years, just both-arms, chin-on-her-head kind of secure hug. Best of all is that they hug and they don’t let go until Ellie does. Joel, when he hugged her, only let go when she’d stopped crying and was breathing better, and Tess only lets go of Ellie when Ellie starts to pull away by herself.

The con of their hugs? Ellie thinks that they’ve broken her brain a little, because when she pulls away from Tess and scrubs at her face - she notices that Tess’s hand raised like she was going to wipe Ellie’s face for her before she unthinkingly did it herself, and she kicks herself a little bit for not letting her, even if she’d look like a baby - she feels dizzy. Like- she feels legitimately dizzy from how much she wants to be hugged more, how badly she just wants to be touched and feel their skin, feels just- icky from how badly she craves falling back into someone’s arms and staying there. 

Still, she doesn’t want to seem too weak, so after just a moment of silence of Tess and Ellie sitting together, Ellie gets to her feet and goes downstairs.

Unfortunately, though, when she goes downstairs and sees Joel - who’s apparently taken a shower, as his hair is all damp and flat and he’s wearing new clothes - cooking something, the untouched bowl of cereal in the sink (he didn’t lecture her on wasting food?), the craving gets even stronger, and Ellie wanders (read: beelines as casually as she can) over to where he’s standing at the stove and just kinda… stands there. In a way that’s definitely not creepy at all.

“Dinner’ll be ready in a minute, kiddo.” Joel says simply, stirring something that smells good.

Ellie just kinda keeps hovering, wandering slightly to feel less awkward but never orbiting more than a few feet away.

“You alright?” he asks after a minute of her being a fucking specter and just standing there.

Ellie chooses not to say anything, not sure her voice can do that right now because her whole body is mildly fucked up from pure longing, instead just ducking close and hooking her arms tight around his middle from the side-slash-back, hiding her face where the boniness of shoulder-meeting-blade is mildly more meaty and comfortable.

Joel startles slightly, almost dropping the spoon, clearly not expecting her that close, but after a second, he relaxes, shoulders coming down again before he moves one arm to wrap around her shoulders when her hands automatically fist in his shirt and tug slightly. “Hey there.”

Ellie doesn’t respond, just snuggling a little bit closer. He’s warm, and this spot isn’t the most comfortable but it’s close, and she just wants to be close. She doesn’t need to be comfortable - she just needs to be near.

“You’re too skinny.” Joel says for the God-knows-how-many-ith-time. “Good thing dinner’s in a minute.”

Ellie remembers what Tess and Joel and Riley said. ‘Yes, he has to fixate on your weight, because he’s Joel, and Joel shows that he cares about you by obsessing and getting anxious about everything and not stopping.’ ‘Seriously, girl, you need to eat more. Gon’ feed you five times a day, swear to God.’ ‘My mom used to make me eat as much as she could because it was how she showed that she loved you.’ She just tries to get closer.

“Got any more of those jokes, baby girl?” Joel asks, rubbing one hand up-and-down her back.

Ellie tries to think of one, but her brain is empty, so she just shakes her head. “My brain’s off. Sorry.”

Joel huffs, smoothing his hand over her back again and again. “‘S okay. Don’t gotta be funny all the time.”

Ellie doesn’t know what to say to that, so she just keeps hiding.

“We’re gon’ leave in a few days.” Joel says quietly, resuming the stirring. “Not yet, but soon. We gotta go find your Uncle Tommy - he’s gon’ be fuckin’ ecstatic to meet you - so we can’t stay. Might come back, dependin’ what we find an’ where it’s safe, but we might not, so we gotta tie up some loose ends. Pack up a buncha food an’ supplies… bury Bill an’ Frank… uh, Frank kept lotsa random trinkets. I’ll bet you can find some other things you like that you can add to your collection.”

He huffs a half-laugh. “Actually, Bill had a whole collection of backpacks an’ bags. Might get you a second bag so you can carry some real supplies along with your protractor. The survival bag an’ the Ellie’s Thingamabobs bag.”

Ellie snorts even though her throat is suddenly very, very tight. “That’s a stupid name.”

“Well, you gotta come up with a better one, then.” Joel says, giving her a half-squeeze. “But you need a second bag, ‘cause I got no doubt we’re gon’ find lotsa lil’ treasures for you the whole way, an’ you also need to have some kinda food an’ water an’ clothes an’ shit.”

“‘Treasures?’”

“Or junk, accordin’ to who you ask, but if you’re carryin’ ‘em around on purpose an’ you’d be upset if you lose ‘em, that makes ‘em treasures in my book.” Joel says. He starts to move, and Ellie panics somewhere low in her gut that it’s going to be him trying to get out of her grip and her hands tighten in his shirt, but he just turns so he can get bowls down from a cabinet, which he sets on the counter before turning so that they’re back to their starting point. Ellie’s throat gets so tight that it’s hard to breathe as he does the same thing to get silverware out, hand shifting to her shoulder to keep her with him as he does so before plating the food - some kind of rice with what looks like meat and corn and beans - into the bowls.

“I assume that you two are going to separate for dinner?” Tess asks, apparently having come downstairs as she comes up behind them, resting one hand on Ellie’s back as she presses a kiss to the back of Joel’s head. “Or is someone going to remain a barnacle forever?”

“I can stop,” Ellie forces out at the same time that Joel says “Barnacle forever.”

Ellie has to squeeze her eyes shut so she doesn’t cry as Joel puts spoons in the bowls. “Alright- kiddo, this one’s yours, you gotta carry it.”

She reluctantly semi-unburies herself and unclenches her hand to take it, and Joel uses his stirring hand to carry his own over to the table. He kicks two of the chairs together, and once she’s sat down, he sits close again, and Ellie could fucking sob when Tess does the same move so that it’s an Ellie sandwich.

She does get distracted, though, when she takes the first bite of the food and realizes once again that food other than the Loaf is fucking delicious, immediately wolfing it down.

“More if you want it, kiddo, calm down.” Joel chuckles as she practically chokes on it. It’s delicious, with meat and really-good-rice and beans and corn and tomatoes (she thinks?) and cheese, and she could die happy if she just got this food forever. He pats her back when she legitimately coughs.

“Okay, do we need to ration your bites so we don’t have to do the Heimlich?” Tess teases, taking a bite herself, and Ellie automatically shakes her head like it’s serious as she gobbles more.

When Tess ruffles her hair when she coughs again and Joel pats her back again, always keeping a hand on her whether in a side hug or just flat on her back, Ellie wonders if she can really have this forever. She wants to.

She decides that she’s going to. Somehow, she’s going to keep this. She’ll fight so hard that she’s missing all her teeth and her hands are completely fucked if it means that she gets to have this, have them.

Ellie used to get teased for being an alley cat and being feral. She’ll happily be domesticated by Joel and Tess, and she’ll happily be fighting like a wild thing again to have them with her.

See, Ellie’s rarely had anything to herself, let alone her own people and definitely not her own parents.

She will do literally anything to keep them.

Chapter Text

That night feels like Ellie’s a fucking princess.

She takes a hot shower (!!!) with soap and she takes, like, an hour before Tess knocks and tells her to start wrapping things up, and when she gets out, she gets to dry off with this super fluffy towel and brush her teeth with a new toothbrush and get dressed in clothes that Joel apparently left to get from the boutique (there’s a boutique?) that are her size, a long-sleeve shirt and leggings and underwear and these fuzzy socks that Ellie wants to rub on her face, all new and comfortable, and when she comes out and goes to sit with Tess and Joel where they’re talking in the living room, Joel takes one look at her and gets up and gets a comb, Tess going out the front door, and by the time she comes back with a bottle of something, Ellie’s sitting on the couch in front of him as he combs her hair out.

“You don’t need to.” Ellie grumbles, mostly to keep her face up, because it actually feels really nice, having Joel comb her hair.

“Kinda do, actually.” Joel says. “See, unfortunate for you, you got my genes, an’ that means your hair’s curly. Ain’t really curly right now ‘cause you’ve been brushin’ all of it out, but that ain’t good for your hair.”

Ellie doesn’t know what she’s thinking when she blurts, “Did Sarah have curly hair?”

Joel’s hands freeze where he’s reaching for the bottle and he inhales sharply, and Ellie’s worried that he’s gonna get mad, but after a second, he sighs and resumes moving again. “Yeah. Different, though. See, your hair’s got my curls, which means they ain’t really tight curls or anythin’, just… curly but not enough to have an Afro. But Sarah, her mama was Black, an’ she got her mama’s hair, which means that hers was just… phew.” He laughs a little bit, but it sounds sad. “Absolutely gorgeous, but they were real tight curls. Her hair was maybe three feet long, down to her hips, but it was so curly it hit her shoulders instead. First time I tried to do her hair, I damn near just cried, an’ I was this close to givin’ up an’ shavin’ her head. Took fuckin’ lessons from a hair place just to figure out how to do it, an’ then when she was in elementary school, was takin’ an hour in the mornin’ to get it done. Had to learn all of these different techniques an’ products. Bathroom was a mess half the time, had to go through and put all the products back under the sink every…”

Joel goes quiet, taking a deep, shuddering breath like he’s trying not to cry before he pops open the bottle. It smells really fruity, like… it’s close to the canned fruit that Ellie got on her birthday, but not quite. “That’s… enough ‘bout Sarah for the day, alright, kiddo? No more tonight.”

“Okay.” Ellie says simply as he starts working the stuff through her hair. “What’s that?”

“Leave-in conditioner. Curly hair don’t get oil all the way down like straight hair, so you gotta manually give it moisture. Helps your hair stay healthy so it don’t start breakin’.”

The word ‘moisture’ is apparently a sleeper-agent-word in her brain, because Ellie automatically blurts, “Thirsty rocks.”

Joel pauses as Tess chuckles where she’s taken up residence in a chair, quietly reading something while Joel does her hair. “‘Scuse me?”

“I- uh-” Ellie sighs. “There were these pond-ish things in the courtyards of the school because it didn’t drain right, right?”

“Mm-hmm.” Joel says, resuming the movement through her hair. God, it feels amazing.

“Well, they turned into ponds because frogs got in and laid eggs and there were a few mosquitoes and pieces of cement and algae, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, the rocks and cements that were half-in the water looked really dry because half wasn’t and half was in the water, so I’d go out with this old sock that I got banned from wearing because there was too much of a hole and mop water onto them because they looked really thirsty and needed moisture. So, uh… thirsty rocks. Moisture.”

The room is quiet for a minute, Joel’s hands stopping at the ends of her hair, before his hands start shaking, and Ellie knows they all think she’s an idiot or just a plain freak.

After a second, though, it processes that Joel is laughing, and when she looks over at Tess, she’s put down her book and has her face in her hands and is shaking too.

“Thirsty rocks?” Joel chokes, sounding like he’s trying so hard not to laugh. “You were waterin’ fuckin’ pieces of concrete like they were fuckin’ plants?”

“They looked thirsty!” Ellie protests, wriggling a little in her spot. “And not like plants, I just soaked the sock and ran it over the rocks until they were dark and not-dry. That’s a different way than watering plants.”

Joel absolutely loses it at that, fully belly-laughing as he sets the comb aside on the coffee table and wrapping his arms around her from behind, hugging her and pressing his forehead to the back of her head. “Jesus Christ, kiddo, you were givin’ the fuckin’ rocks a spa day?”

Tess looks up from her hands with glassy eyes from how hard she’s laughing, and Ellie can’t help but smile too. “Why- hff- you were- fucking- skincare for the courtyard?”

“THEY LOOKED SAD!”

They’re both laughing so hard that they’re crying, and Ellie starts laughing too, the look on Tess’s face and the vibrations against her from Joel’s hug too infectious to resist. It takes a long time before Tess is able to speak again. “Honey, rocks don’t feel thirsty-”

“How would you know? Have you ever been a rock?” Ellie half-glares with a grin, and that apparently breaks them again, because they start cackling again.

Ellie leans hard into the hug as it gets tight again and fixes something in her, and eventually, Joel finally releases her and grabs the comb, still wheezing. “Fuckin’ Christ, what am I gon’ do with you?”

“Love and cherish.” Tess mutters under her breath, wiping her face before going back to her book, still grinning and shaking her head and occasionally chuckling again. “Obviously.”

Ellie’s chest gets warm, and she gets even warmer later when Tess wanders off and comes back with a big blue blanket with white-and-yellow lightning bolts and wraps it around Ellie as she relaxes back onto the couch, done in just the right way so that Ellie’s burritoed and only her face and a few bangs are sticking out from the thick blanket. When she does a happy wiggle and a happy noise, Joel grabs her head and kisses the side through the blanket, and when they’re just laying on the couch later with Tess continuing to read a book that Ellie learns is titled ‘Game of Thrones’ (and is apparently Not For Her To Read Yet) and she’s given a book that’s called ‘Jurassic Park’ to read (wait, isn’t it a movie) and Joel just lays down and watches them read with big love-y eyes, Ellie feels so warm that she could burst.

She remembers the fairy tales that she read when she was little, where there were princesses. Most of them lived without parents, even once they ‘found their prince’ (which Ellie thinks is stupid). Ellie thinks she’d rather have this kind of princess-ish life than any of the fancy shit from the fairy tales. Forget about a castle or jewels or a prince (eugh) or a dragon (okay, the dragon would be nice) - she just likes having a hot shower and a lightning blanket and a dad who does her hair and parents who tease her for watering rocks and a book about dinosaurs.

She thinks she understands why Riley wanted a family so badly now.

Chapter Text

To be perfectly honest, Joel is having a hard time staying sane.

Over the new grief over Bill and Frank and the old, renewed grief over Sarah? Of course. Over the grief of having a second daughter and not only not getting to watch her grow up, not getting to see her first steps and hear her first words and not getting to just be there, but having her grow up in a horrible environment? Absolutely. 

Right now, though, it’s just because that second daughter is just… so goddamn perfect.

She’s hella weird, that’s for sure. She carries around a protractor (??) and waters rocks (????) and does all of this weird shit that’s just… perfect. And she has the sweetest little face when she’s wrapped up in the big blanket and it’s just her face pokin’ out and she’s smiling enough that her eyes squish shut, and she’s such a sweet lil’ thing, and with how clingy she’s being, it’s hard for Joel to not lose it from how perfect and adorable she is.

At the moment, even though he’s not even doing anything interesting, she’s glued to his side like he’s the most fascinating thing in the world, like she wouldn’t be anywhere else even though Jurassic Park is in the main house and all he’s doing is sorting through the boutique for clothes that’ll work for all of them, munching on a snack while he works. She’s still half-bundled in the lightning blanket, and she’s just watching him, all bright eyes and swinging feet and puffed-up cheeks because she’s fitting half a goddamn sandwich in there like a goddamn chipmunk.

Joel is, to be perfectly honest, struggling to not just lean over and grab her. He wants to squish her cheeks and hug her so tight that she can’t ever escape.

And, to be perfectly honest, he doesn’t think she’d mind if he did.

Since Ellie apparently deemed them safe enough to hug and have more-than-necessary-physical-contact with, she’s been a four-eleven, eighty-pound little satellite, orbiting them and randomly darting closer and just standing there, clearly requesting a hug without outright saying it. Last night at dinner, Joel damn near cried at how she was just clinging to him, staying tucked under his arm for easily two hours as he made dinner and they ate and the whole family just laid around reading.

Joel’s spent basically his whole life raising somebody. His mama was working eighty hours a week trying to keep the house afloat and his dad was an abusive asshole, so from when he was four years old and Tommy was born, he was the one changing diapers and getting up at one in the morning and trying to raise him to be good. And he kept doing it when Tommy was fourteen and Joel was eighteen when their mom died, he kept going to all the dumb parent-teacher conferences as a nineteen-year-old single father with a baby girl on his hip and dark circles from trying so hard to look after a fifteen-year-old boy and a newborn all by himself in a shitty one-bedroom. His girlfriend had said that she was pregnant when Joel was three months into being eighteen, when he’d been working for three years and had dropped out of school trying to maintain his family despite his mom getting sick, and she left exactly a year later, deciding that she couldn’t handle being a mom and leaving Joel with Sarah.

And even when Tommy had grown up and joined the army, even when it was just Joel and Sarah, even when it was just them and Joel had to ask the neighbors to look after his baby because he worked three 24-hour shifts as a firefighter-EMT a week so he could spend the other days with her, he was always raising someone. He looked after Sarah, he looked after her friends, he did his best to look after Tommy, even when he was in his twenties and stupid-

And then she was gone. And Joel didn’t have a smaller, more helpless human needing him for the first time since he was four years old. Maybe that’s part of why he just wanted to die after she was gone other than plain not wanting to live without her - the core of who he is - was - was being the one to look after someone else. Once that was gone, Joel was empty.

And maybe it’s been twenty years, but that never filled. Taking care of a kid is just part of Joel’s blood, and no matter how much he loves Tess, no matter how much he loves Tommy, they definitely don’t need him. Definitely not the way that kids need someone older to take care of them.

But then there’s this new kid - one who’s just this tiny little thing, who’s got his stubborn curls and who’s gloriously odd and who’s got this stubborn set to her jaw and who sleeps with her mouth open and her face smashed into the nearest surface in that ungraceful kid way - and he just feels… so different. Something in him is suddenly less hollow. Some part of him is no longer empty, that part of him that says taking care of a child is his life’s purpose finally fulfilled again. He doesn’t feel as dead.

It’s so strange. She’s so big, already thirteen and already snarky and loud, but she’s still so small too, still the age where she kicks her legs and has baby fat making her face soft and is still not even up to his shoulder and he can haul her around like a sack of potatoes.

He wishes he’d gotten to see her grow up. But God knows that this is enough for him.

“Hey, Joel.” Ellie says through a bite of sandwich, tapping him with her foot where she’s sitting on a table that used to hold jeans.

He hums in acknowledgement, folding another pair of pants that look about her size. Maybe a bit bigger - she’s too thin, but he won’t let her be for long. He comes from a family where they feed their kids. He’s the same way that his mama was before him, and Ellie - Estella, Jesus goddamn Christ, this is his baby - is going to be healthy and happy if it’s the last thing he fucking does.

“Geology rocks, but geography’s where it’s at.” Ellie half-giggles.

He can’t help but smile a little too. “That was bad.”

“You do better.”

Joel thinks for a minute, folding another pair. “...It’s amazing how different aspects of things are different levels of interestin’. For example, widenin’ a drilled hole is borin’, an’ fastenin’ two pieces of metal together is rivetin’.”

She blinks those big ol’ brown eyes at him, then grins and starts giggling. Joel’s actually a little proud that the joke landed until she cackles, “I have no idea what that means.”

Joel loves her. “Why are you laughin’, then?!”

Ellie’s laugh is coming out in these adorable little giggly hiccups. “Because you- snrk- you said it like it was so funny!”

“It is funny!”

She laughs harder, and Joel smiles too, though eventually she laughs so hard that she falls over backwards and smacks herself against the table.

“Hey- Ellie! Jesus, be careful!”

She keeps laughing, rolling slightly, and even as Joel goes over and, on some dad instinct, touches the back of her head, automatically making sure she didn’t get a bump or a cut or anything, he loves her so much.

But that’s dangerous, because if he lost Ellie too, he wouldn’t survive, especially if that love grows like he knows it will.

And as wrong as it is, Joel thinks that he’s glad that Tess had cancer way back when. Because not only does it mean that both of them survived being bitten by the Infected, but it means…

Well, maybe there’s less of a chance of him losing his little girl if she can’t get sick.