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It starts—
Well, theoretically it starts before Ellie can even remember. She does know that she’s been a problem child from the start; records of behavioral reports indicate that before she could talk she could scream, before she could walk she could hit, and she always laughed before saying no.
They also indicate Ellie was a biter from hell.
Ironic in the world she grew up in.
Nevertheless.
Theoretically, it started there. And granted, biting has always been a solid line of defense; she’d sent kids running with the snap of her jaw. And there’s also David. Despite that she could hardly eat or drink water or breathe through her mouth without dry heaving for nearly two weeks after Salt Lake, the bite she gave him bought her enough time to save her.
So. She’s a biter. As a fourteen year old, it’s now only in extreme circumstances.You don’t make friends by biting them, something she learned the hard way at a ripe three years old.
But, you know. Mistakes are made.
-
The first time it happens it isn’t exactly conscious, and is arguably a joke.
She’s finally starting to routinely get hungry, and she sees the way Joel relaxes every time she tucks into food like she used to. Also—and this is a big deal—it’s mac and cheese night and goddamn if that isn’t something she looks forward to every month.
Joel likes to get her plate for her and fill it. It’s an arrangement that works well for them both because Joel already knows what foods Ellie’s not comfortable touching, and it saves Ellie from having to socialize, which is something that, even a few months in, she’s a little too raw to attempt outside of Joel’s immediate family. It also means Joel can correctly portion out what she needs. Ellie has the sneaking suspicion he always gives her a little more than is strictly necessary, which isn’t something she’s going to complain about on mac and cheese night.
In the meantime, she’s meant to practice putting her napkin in her lap and keeping her elbows off of the table, but what Joel doesn’t know can’t hurt him and also if Maria’s telling a bitching story about old airplanes landing in rivers, she’s gonna lean in to listen.
“Elbows,” Joel says, short and gruff as he slides on the bench next to her. Ellie brings her elbows off of the table and into Joel’s side, which earns her a grunt. He sets her plate down in front of her.
She’s not telling a lie, the pasta looks divine. It’s all golden and shiny and littered with crunchy looking bread crumbs and melty cheese that’s all crispy in places. She wiggles a little in anticipation—she’s been out helping Joel with a building job and is fucking starving, and looks to Joel to start.
This bit is new, both because Joel is nothing if not insistent on table manners and because most of the people in Jackson pray before eating. Obviously Ellie is not fucking doing that. Once the first few heads pop up from where they were bowed over their plates, Joel gives Ellie a nod and she digs in.
The first bite is a solid contender for the best. Salty and cheesy and warm and damn good. She looks at Joel as she chews and he smiles. She swallows and nosedives into Joel’s arm.
“Damn hellcat,” he says, ruffling her hair.
Still smiling and entirely unthinking, she bites, softly, at his bicep, over his thick jacket.
“Tuck in, kiddo,” he says, petting her hair back.
Looking up at him, she smiles and gets back to her plate.
“What the motherfuck is this?” she asks, noticing a grey and limp asparagus that Joel had hidden behind the mac and cheese.
“Language.”
“Joel—”
“It’s asparagus.”
“It doesn’t look like any asparagus I’ve ever seen—”
“Kid, sometimes Vivian is on vegetables and we gotta be polite anyway.”
“I’m not eating that, I don’t give a fuck.”
Despite that, she counts it as a victory that she goes home with a full stomach and marvels that she can joke about skipping out on certain foods and Joel doesn’t tense and get all sad.
Later that night, when Ellie is sprawled on the floor paging through a new comic book and Joel is peering over blueprints, she catches him with his left arm over his chest, gently rubbing over his bicep with his thumb.
He meets her eyes and his eyes crinkle when he grins.
-
They’re out hunting one late morning. Joel swapped patrols specifically for it, and Ellie has still staunchly refused to go to school, so when they left at midmorning, the streets of Jackson were practically empty.
“Might as well teach her somethin’.” Joel had pitched it to Tommy.
Something about that settles her, when it’s just Joel and her. She doesn’t have to keep tabs on him to make sure he doesn’t forget her.
The first time they had done this, Ellie had been quiet with the spring snow, but the ground has thawed since then and the world is green and brown the way it’s supposed to be. Like this, with the sun pale and leaves sprouting bright green over the world, David feels further away. Joel, too, moves with a surety and balance again, injury all but forgotten except for a scar, and Ellie feels invincible again, as long as she can see him.
Joel carries the rifle, slung across his back, and Ellie gets to carry a very rudimentary revolver. She feels like a cowboy.
“Hey, Joel, check it—” She whips out the revolver from a holster she gets to wear today and starts spinning it around her finger. “This town ain’t big enough for the two of us,” She says, in her best Texan accent. She’s addressing a tree when she stops the spinning gun and points it.
“Ellie!”
“What? It’s not loaded.”
“Ellie,” Joel starts, then sighs. “Ellie, I know you’re a smart girl. I hope to God I don’t gotta teach you again about gun safety—”
“It wasn’t loaded,”
“Doesn’t matter. Don’t do dumb shit like that again and I won’t take the gun away.”
“Honestly.” Ellie grumbles.
They’re not walking for two minutes before she pipes up again.
“Hey Joel,”
“Yeah?”
“What did the ghost cowboy wear?”
There’s a beat.
“What?”
“Boooooo-ts.”
Joel shakes his head, but his shoulders are shaking so she knows he’s laughing. She sidles up to him and shoves him lightly with her shoulder.
“What did you think, huh? Pretty good?”
“Goddamn awful.”
It’s a little while until they’re far enough past Jackson that animals are comfortable. Once they get to that point, Joel signals to Ellie to be quiet, and despite that she’s bouncing on the balls of her feet, she shuts up and follows Joel’s lead.
They track a moose by following its tread. Ellie’s so intent on the path of hooves in the forest that she runs bodily into Joel when he puts his arm out to stop her.
She opens her mouth to complain but Joel flicks his head to the riverbank where she can just make out the moose. It’s so far away it’s the size of her hand.
They position themselves behind a fallen tree and Joel gestures for her revolver. She frowns.
“I’m letting you try the rifle again today,” Joel says, and Ellie lights up.
“For real?”
“No, I just said that. Yes, for real. I’m right here.” He says, giving it to her. The assurance is probably meant because the last time she handled a rifle didn’t go all that well, even if she did make the shot.
She thinks she doesn’t need it, until the rifle is in her hands and she’s reminded again of how damned heavy it is. Immediately, it droops in her hands and her arms ache and she feels small and helpless again.
“Alright, baby,” Joel mutters. “You’ll get there eventually, but for now, rest the rifle on the log. That’s why we’re behind it.”
“I can carry it.”
“I know you can, but you’ll be more precise like this. Hell, I rest it when I can.”
She positions the gun. Joel is right beside her, which means it reminds her more of leaving Jackson the first time than it does the past winter, which is helpful.
“You know what to do.”
Deep breath in,
Slow breath out.
She breathes.
You squeeze the trigger like you love it.
She holds the trigger tight and rigid and locks her finger around it.
Gentle, steady.
Her eyes flick to Joel watching her.
Nice and slow.
She looks back to the moose, which has moved slightly. She adjusts the rifle softly and peers through the scope.
She takes another breath, squints again through the scope, and shoots.
The recoil hits her shoulder harder than she expects, but she can tell she got a hit.
“No biggie,” She says, grinning up at Joel. He takes the rifle from her and peers through the scope, then quickly reloads and shoots again. The moose is down.
“Look at that,” He says, meeting her eyes. “Damn good shot, Ellie! Damn good shot.”
She’s grinning ear to ear, and smiles wider when Joel ruffles her hair and then gathers her in a hug. She throws her arms around his neck.
“Knew you were good at this.” Joel says, and Ellie’s elated. Fact is, she’s real proud of herself, and her smile stays big and bright and she bites at the shoulder her face is pressed against because or else she would shake apart at the joy of it; that she’s with Joel, they’re safe, he’s proud of her.
They approach the moose, and from there, Ellie gets notes. While she made the shot, her grip was too tight and too stiff on the trigger, and her shot went very slightly wide; she hit the flank of the moose instead of its chest. Joel’s bullet hit true and was probably the one that finished the moose. But Ellie still did good.
“Alright, field dress then we’re bringing it back.”
“Ew. This part fucking sucks.”
“Proving me right here, kiddo.”
“No, no, I can do it.”
Joel’s meant to be wrestling with the leg and a rope because for all that Ellie wants to be independent she’s still fourteen and Joel is a hell of a lot stronger than her. Once he’s got the thing tied, he runs a thumb, just once, over the front of his shoulder. The leather is pockmarked very slightly in a crescent where her teeth briefly sunk into it. It’ll fade, but.
Ellie turns towards the moose and ducks her head until Joel calls her to help him with turning the animal the right way. Before they start, he ruffles her hair again.
-
It’s not something she really thinks about. Hell, there used to be times with Riley where they’d sit on one of their beds and read or work or whatever, and if Riley’s arm or hand or, once, ankle, was close enough, Ellie would gnaw on it as a joke until they ended up on the floor, wrestling. Ellie learned how to make pretty damn convincing clicker noises in those fights.
So, whatever. Some people love with gentle words and little gifts and some people bite.
-
The next time she does it, it's a late weekday evening, and Ellie knows Joel needs to be up early the next day, but she hadn’t seen him all day and that always makes her a little cagey.
And if she’s being honest, there’s definitely a manipulative side to her motivations. She fully plans on falling asleep on the couch so Joel has to carry her up the stairs. Those things are insurmountable when you’re tired, and if she can outsource the task she will.
As soon as he sees her, she can tell he’s in some sort of mood. For starters, he doesn’t throw anything soft at her to get her to scoot over, he just lifts her head from where it's laid on the couch cushion and settles down so she’s lying on his lap. She’s gonna fall asleep even faster than she planned. Secondly, he starts playing with her hair, which is very sentimental for him, and thirdly, because he starts talking.
“Some kid got hurt out there today.” He means on patrols. She’s been eyeing them with interest since the day they stepped foot in Jackson, but hasn’t yet asked to join one. He knows she wants to, though.
“Kid was only seventeen. Short freckled guy. I think his name was Will, or maybe Freddy.”
“Is he okay?” Ellie asks.
“He will be.”
His hands move gently and rhythmically in her hair and she’s already toying with the idea of falling asleep. It’s still light outside, though, and she wants to be awake for as much of that as possible.
“Star Wars?” She asks, eventually. It’s honestly that or pass out—nothing gets her eyelids falling like Joel scratching her scalp.
“Which one are we on?”
“Episode six—Hey Joel, what did the cashier say when I wanted to exchange Return of the Jedi?”
“What?”
“It’s not possible without receipt of the Jedi.”
Joel’s hand stills in her hair and she looks up, laughing, as he runs it over his jaw. “Jesus Christ, kid.”
“That one was actually really good—”
“No,”
“You’ve gotta admit.”
“Admit this,” and he’s digging his fingers into her sides and she’s squealing trying to get away, breathless with laughter.
“Truce! Truce, truce,” she says, from where she’s fallen on the floor. Joel raises his hands in surrender and she can’t pass up that opportunity. “You’re just agreeing because you don’t want to get your old man bones off the couch—” she cuts herself off with a shriek when he lunges for her; she rolls away breathless, saying between giggles, “No, no I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it!”
By the time they start the movie, Ellie is entirely confident she’ll stay awake. As is her wont, she peppers the entire movie with her personal commentary, which Joel claims is annoying except his voice is soft when she asks him to remind her what happened in the previous movie and he says “You don’t remember? There’s the Jedi training bit and then the whole ‘I am your father’?”
Ellie goes very still.
“What?”
“Tell me you weren’t asleep for that bit.”
“I definitely wasn't, I just forgot.”
“Darth Vader? Luke’s father?”
“Sorry, what?”
“Kiddo, if you’d just pause the movie when you’re tired—”
“Nah, you’re fucking with me.”
“Find out yourself.”
Later, Yoda corroborates Joel’s crackhead theory and Ellie bodily turns around to stare at Joel. “No fucking way.”
“Watch the damn movie,” and he pulls her back so she’s curled up against his side, his arm over her shoulders.
“Look, shortstack, they’re just like you,” Joel comments when the Ewoks show up. Ellie glares up at him but it’s not all that effective because she’s grinning. In the interest of defense of character, she starts gnawing on Joel’s forearm and giggling.
“You ain’t helping your case here, kid.”
She bites down and keeps his forearm in her jaw. He doesn’t move it away.
And even though she isn’t entirely asleep by the end of the movie, she’s dozing convincingly enough that Joel carries her up the stairs anyway, so she counts it as a win.
-
Joel starts going out on patrols the way every other adult in Jackson does, and Ellie’s confronted with the specifically confusing 50/50 where she’s both terrified out of her mind by the thought of him going and jealous beyond belief.
He suggests she goes to school during the day while he’s on patrol and it’s a mark of how uniquely distressing the development is that Ellie actually considers it.
One of the upsides is that Joel brings her things and stories, books about space and dinosaurs and a novel about a secret conspiracy communicated by a long dead artist that Ellie fully believes is nonfiction until she asks Joel if he knew anyone who joined Opus Dei and he looks at her like she grew a second head. So, she’s adjusting well enough to the change.
“I gotta surprise for you.” Joel says one evening after patrol. He’s been caught in the rain and looks kind of like a drowned dog, which Ellie makes sure to inform him of, and his hands are empty.
“I don’t see a surprise.”
“It’s not a thing. You free on Saturday?”
“Am I ever not?”
“Maybe if you went to school—”
“Very funny. But okay.”
When Saturday rolls around, Ellie wakes up early and knocks on Joel’s door until she hears his old man grunts.
“What are we doing?”
He grunts again so she opens the door. He’s sleeping on his stomach with his face mashed into the pillow, which Ellie smiles at because it means he slept well. His left ear is also pressed to the bed, which is an incredible opportunity.
“Boo!” She says, as close to the edge of the pillow she can get before revealing herself. He whips around so his left ear faces her but she jumps on his back before he can turn all the way around.
Still, the way his shoulders relax even as he begins to wrestle her off means he knows it's her, which is a lesson she learned the hard way and why she always wakes him up now before attempting to practice her WWE skills.
“Alright,” Joel says, managing to send her back-first flying into the mattress. She shrieks and scrambles up and shoves at him and he lets himself fall back, but not before putting his arms, gently, around her so she falls too. Laughing and throwing insults, she starts shoving his shoulders until he grabs a pillow as a shield and starts battering her off with it. (“How’s that for old man?”) He gets them both standing and Ellie brings her fists up.
“Good, left hand forward,” Joel says, and Ellie adjusts, before Joel barrels forward and grabs her upside-down around the middle, braces himself against the mattress, and flips her entirely around so she lands with an oof on her back.
“Not fair!” Ellie insists from where she landed. Joel reaches up and ruffles her hair.
Eventually, they make it to the kitchen, where Ellie attempts to help make breakfast but ends up dropping three eggs on the floor and so is made to sit and watch.
“Alright,” says Joel, placing a plate in front of her. “After you eat, you’re gonna pack an overnight bag and figure out what you want to bring for dinner. We’re gonna leave at around noon.”
“Leave?” Ellie asks.
“Just for the night. I found something I think you’ll like.”
Any of Ellie’s further questions are staunchly ignored so instead, she starts telling him about the last book he got for her, an alien-invasion horror novel that she admits is “a real page turner,” on account of the parasitic aliens and use of telepathy.
“You sure you should be reading that?” Joel eventually asks, but Ellie backtracks enough to keep the book.
They end up being ready to go about an hour after they said they would, and, armed with her pack that’s significantly lighter for only needing to last one night, (though she made sure to pack extra just in case,) and a few cans of Chef Boyardee, Ellie waits by the door.
“You have your gun?”
“Yes.”
“Then we’re off.”
They meet Tommy by the stables, where he gives them two cloth bags which upon investigation contain their lunch, and as he hands off the reins of a large, gray spotted horse to Joel, he says, “Now listen, I’m only giving you one horse because it’s not that far. If you get hurt, give her a tap on the flank and she’ll come running back, and we’ll know to come find you.”
Ellie looks at Joel when Tommy mentions danger, but he doesn’t look too worried.
It ends up truly being an anticlimactic ride; they aren’t in the saddle for an hour and a half before Joel swings his leg off and helps Ellie down. Ellie hasn’t even had a chance to snack on her dried apples.
“Where are we?”
“Wait and see.”
It turns out, they’re near a building with some sort of round room. Joel tethers the horse.
“You’re gonna stay out here with the horse while I make sure it’s still clear, then I’m gonna come get you.” Joel says, and he’s in and back in less than five minutes.
It turns out, the building is called an observatory-and-planetarium, and Ellie finds out that that means it’s a building entirely dedicated to space. Clay and glass mosaics map out constellations on the walls and ceiling, and Ellie tries to find the ones she recognizes from what Joel taught her, but is swiftly distracted by the models of the solar system, faded but still present photos of swirling, glittery things Joel says are galaxies, and information plaques about stars and supernovas. She finds a big plastic ball allegedly filled with 1.3 million tiny blue balls, and she loudly doubts the plaque that says that’s the amount of Earths that can fit inside the sun until she looks at Joel and he’s smiling.
She finds a glass display case when she turns a corner and nearly brushes it off as just rocks when Joel says “Ellie, wait.” and she doubles back to join him in front of it.
Joel taps at the side of the display case with the butt of his gun until it shatters, and then he uses the gun to brush away most of the glass so he can reach inside.
There are about six rocks in the case, two of them are encased in their own blocks of glass, and Joel painstakingly gets three out and lays them on the floor.
“Sit down.” he says, and Ellie sits next to him cross-legged, up against a wall.
“Okay,” Joel says, gingerly picking up a jagged and pockmarked black rock and putting it in Ellie’s lap. She picks it up. “This,” continues Joel, “Is a little bit of a meteor.”
“Woah…”
“That’s when bits of rock fly around a lot in space, and sometimes they crash into Earth.”
“I know what a meteor is,” says Ellie, but she’s breathless.
“So, that one was found in the seventies, I guess, because it crashed somewhere in New Mexico. So, this one’s got a lot of iron in it and a shit ton of other elements and minerals and things, and, uh, I don’t remember if it broke off as it hit the ground or later, but, anyway.” As Joel is speaking, Ellie runs her thumb reverently over the meteor until Joel picks it up off of her lap and puts it on the ground beside her. Ellie keeps a hand protectively on it.
“This one,” Joel says after a little while, gently placing one of the other rocks, encased in glass—silver and tough and riddled, too, with holes, in Ellie’s lap, “is a moon rock.”
“No fucking way.” Ellie blinks and tears which have been gathering, unbeknown to her, in her eyelashes, fall onto the glass casing. Ellie wipes them off immediately.
“So, they got this one on loan from NASA a few months before the outbreak, and then obviously they never had to give it back. Back before everything happened, NASA would send little robots up to the moon and sometimes they would bring things back. So this is a bit of rock that they took from the moon to study it. It’s different from Earth rocks because of something about the iron content, I actually don’t have a clue what—“
Ellie interrupts him by crawling entirely into his lap and planting her face decisively in his shoulder. She wraps her arms around his shoulders and tries to squeeze out her thanks hard enough, but she can’t. The moon rock, in its glass pyramid, is squeezed between them, and even though one of the points is probably digging into Joel’s side, he doesn’t say anything but “So you like it?”
“Joel—“ Ellie starts, but words fail her, so she wipes at the tears which are falling freely down her face and plants her face back in Joel’s shoulder. He brings his hand up to pet her hair.
“That’s not even the best one.” Joel says, and he lets her stay curled up on his lap even as he guides her face away from his neck so she can see. He leans over to grab the other rock encased in glass. It’s a shinier, reddish and greenish rock that looks sort of streaky. He puts it in her lap next to the moon rock, and Ellie reaches over to hold the meteor too. “That one’s from Mars.”
Ellie’s breath comes out reedy and thin, and tears double their pace falling from her eyes. She plants her face right back in Joel’s neck so she can cry out her thanks. When she thinks she’s ready to hear Joel’s explanation, she turns her face to her lap, but upon looking at the three rocks there, she dissolves again into tears. She repeats this process two more times as Joel leans back into the wall they’re up against and pets her hair.
“Okay,” she says, eventually, hiccuping. “I’m ready. How did they get this one?”
Joel’s voice is soft and reverent when he says, “That one’s also supposed to be on loan from NASA. Far as I know, they only did one trip to Mars before shit hit the fan, so they only brought a few rocks back. That’s a piece of one of ‘em. Don’t have the foggiest what it’s made out of, but apparently it’s pretty much the same as rocks on Earth.”
“Yeah, but it’s from Mars.” Ellie says, and gets verklempt again and has to bury her face back in Joel’s shoulder.
Ellie tries to carry the rocks in her arms the rest of the way through the museum part of the observatory, but she keeps nearly dropping them because they’re so heavy, so Joel offers to put them in her backpack.
“Am I gonna get to bring them home?” Ellie asks.
“Not like anyone else is using them.” Joel says, smiling. He tucks them securely between her extra jacket and sleeping bag. Ellie keeps reaching behind her to try and feel for the pointed bits of the pyramids nestled in the pack.
She completely ignores the section on the history of the museum but spends nearly an hour gazing at a satellite. Joel is never far behind her, and when she asks questions, he always has an answer, even if they’re probably equally as incorrect as they are correct. More than once, she corrects him with information on the plaques scattered about.
There isn’t much left of the gift shop when they find it, but Ellie finds hoodies with the NASA logo on them and pulls one on. She wheedles Joe into getting a matching one so he does, and then says “Matter of fact, these could be useful for Tommy,” and starts tugging a few more down until Ellie puts a hand on his forearm and he stops.
“Can we give him the other designs?”
“Huh?”
“I want to be the only ones with NASA.”
Joel shrugs and collects hoodies with ‘Wyoming’ scrawled across them in cursive instead. Ellie notes with pleasure that the stitching on NASA hoodies is a better quality.
By the time they’ve completed the tour, the sky is a dusky purple.
“Ready for the best part?” Joel asks, and he leads her to a bench outside the circular room.
“Nice bench.”
“Hang on a second.” Joel starts tugging out Ellie’s pillow and sleeping bag and she puts a hand protectively on her rocks. “Stay here a minute.”
When he comes and gets her, he lets her go through the door first. She enters a domed room with the lights cut. Some chairs are scattered throughout the room, but the middle space is cleared and in the center, Joel has arranged their sleeping bags and pillows. There’s a massive machine—she realizes, with no small amount of wonder, that it’s a telescope—that’s the size of three horses.
In the low light, Joel stabs the top of a Boyardee can for her and then slides over a can of mixed vegetables that Ellie winces at.
“Eat the veggies first.” Joel says.
With time, Ellie’s become a slower eater, which means she can actually talk at mealtimes.
“What’s your favorite part?” Joel asks, and Ellie doesn’t even think before answering “The rocks.”
“Wait for this bit, I think you’ll like it too.”
After a beat, Ellie asks, “So, light has to travel to be seen.”
“‘Spose so. Never really got how that bit works.”
“So, if we look up and see stars, we don’t see what’s actually there. We see what was there in the past, when the light was emitted, but it had to travel, which takes time. So we’re really looking into the past.”
“You got it better than me.”
“So if you were standing, fuckin, twenty light years away, you’d be looking at Earth that wasn’t infected yet.”
“Guess so.”
Ellie’s eyes flit to Joel. His eyes are deep and black in the low light, and he’s frowning at the line of questioning.
“And I wouldn’t exist yet.”
“No.”
“Hmm.” Ellie contemplates, then she shouts in the direction of the telescope. “Hey, alien fuckers! I’m Ellie! I exist! Get your shit straight!” and Joel shakes his head and chuckles.
“Okay, you ready?”
“I think so.”
Joel collects her empty cans and moves them to the side, then gets up with a grunt and offers his hand. He moves over to the telescope and peers out of it, then says “It’s still a bit light out for the telescope, why don’t we do the projections first?” And then he tells her to lay down and goes to the back of the room, where there’s apparently a projector. He doesn’t fiddle with it for long before the whole room lights up.
“Oh, holy shit!” Ellie crows. The diameter of the circular ceiling lights up rainbow, and she stares, wide-eyed, as tinny music plays from some sort of speaker and colors shift and blur slowly into galaxies, planets, stars. “Joel,” She whispers, and he’s at her side in a second, holding her when she leans into him and watches the ceiling zoom through a world of space so big she can’t hold it all in her mind. The last frame is a view of the constellations all drawn out in blue, as drawings of what they’re supposed to be are overlaid in green.
“It’s a clear night tonight.” Joel says. “We’ll be able to see all these for real.”
“Oh, cool!” Ellie says, gazing up. One of the constellations is a flying bird with a long, twisting neck. “Play it again.” She says, just as the bird settles into its star cluster.
“Now hang on a minute.” Joel says, and helps her up so she’s facing the telescope. “Ever used one of these before?”
“When would FEDRA school ever have given me the opportunity—”
“Yeah, yeah. Do you know how it works?”
Ellie shakes her head and crams her eye into the eye slot and blinks a few times. She can see her eyelashes moving but nothing else.
“Joel, I think this one’s broken.”
“It’s not broken. Let me show you.” Joel says, and he crouches behind her to fiddle with the scope and where it’s pointing and the way she’s standing, and god dammit it feels so safe Ellie forgets to wonder at it.
Eventually, he gets the telescope to work, and Ellie gazes into it and frowns. What she’s seeing is massive and gray and pockmarked slightly. “Did a rock get stuck… Oh motherfucker.” It’s the moon, she realizes, so big and blown up and she can see all of it. “Oh, my God.”
“See any sheep ranches?” Joel asks, ruffling her hair.
“Oh my God,” Ellie says instead. She never wants to leave this room again, she decides. She wants it to be her and Joel and stars forever. “Look!” She insists, and passes the view onto Joel, who peers into it for a few moments before giving it back to her.
“Pretty damn cool, huh?”
“Hell yes.”
“Want to see planets?” She nods, eyes still fixed on the moon. “Here, let me adjust it a little for you.” Joel says, and he disappears to the side of the machine for a moment before the thing heaves itself up and the scope goes out of reach.
“Hey!”
“Alright, this ain’t gonna be as detailed as the moon because it’s further away.”
“Okay.” She leans on her toes to try and get a look but falls short. “Joel, I can’t reach.” Joel looks to the floor frowning as if he’s willing a step stool to materialize.
“Okay,” he says. “You can go on my back.” He crouches in front of the telescope and Ellie scampers up to peer once more through the lens.
Jupiter, it turns out, actually does have stripes and a giant red spot. And Ellie loses her breath completely at the sight of Saturn, her and her rings hovering, a pale gold against infinite blackness. When Joel hoists her back up to gaze at Mars, Ellie tries to burn the image permanently into her retinas, gazes at the red planet like she’s starving for it.
“I want to go back to the moon.” Ellie says eventually, but when Joel lets her down, she hangs on for a brief moment and bites at the back of his shoulder. She’s trying to say thank you and I love you and this is the happiest I’ve ever been in a way that doesn’t make the words stick to her throat.
When she drops to the ground, Joel gathers her in his arms and drops a kiss to the top of her head.
“The moon it is.” And he adjusts the telescope so she can examine all its little craters and pits.
“You’ll get there, sweet girl.” Joel says eventually. “Anyone I know could do it, it would be you.” Ellie smiles from where her face is still pressed to the telescope and imagines, like she used to, herself in a chunky white space suit and a whole moon ahead of her to explore.
In her head, she misses Joel.
“We’ll have to get space suits for all your sheep,” she says.
In time, Joel brings her outside and hoists her up so she can climb on top of the domed roof of the planetarium. He joins her with no small amount of huffing, but when they’re finally both in the center of it, Ellie surveys the gray world of night surrounding her and isn’t scared.
“Can’t beat that damned view,” she says, nudging Joel and looking at the black fields and trees.
“One above you’s even better.” Ellie looks up and nearly steps right off the roof. She’s seen the night sky before. If not in the Boston QZ, she and Joel have camped under enough clear nights that she’s fallen asleep to twinkling stars dozens of times, but even still, the sky takes her breath away.
It looks nearly all black at first, with only a few shining stars, and then her eyes adjust and it’s like the sky dawns with light. The stars are in their millions. Beside her, Joel sits on the roof and then lays on his back, and she follows him.
She stares out at the sky above her, splayed out like a buffet, and her curiosity is ravenous. She roves over them all, taking in the whole picture until it’s too overwhelming and she has to focus on individual clusters of stars. They are brighter than anything she’s ever seen, and she looks at the millions of little pinpricks and imagines that one of them is Earth from so many years ago. She pictures zooming in on Joel, then, before she was even a thought in her mother’s head, only thirty six years old and the father to a kid that was actually his. She sees Sarah--or, she hasn’t the foggiest what Sarah looked like except that Joel’s told her she had a ‘damn good head of hair,’ so she pictures a girl-shaped blob with good hair, and bites her tongue as she measures herself against it.
It’s different, she thinks, for her. The world with infected is all she’s ever known. Joel was the best thing that ever happened to her. But for him… she can’t imagine he wouldn’t trade her alongside the twenty years of horror and violence for a chance to go back twenty years, and show his own girl a planetarium.
And then Joel huffs out an old man groan as he adjusts, and he presses his arm up against Ellie’s and points up.
“So, that one,” He says, pointing at a cluster of stars. “Is Hercules. He did twelve impossible tasks when he was alive and so they put him in the sky.”
“What do you mean impossible?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Shit like strangling huge snakes and riding flying horses. And probably looking after little-shit fourteen year old girls.”
“Hilarious.”
“I think you can find the horse he rode—Pegasus…” Joel trails off as he searches the sky, then finally says “I can’t find it. But the horse is up there too. That one, you see,” he sweeps his finger from one edge of the sky to the next. Ellie rests her head against his shoulder so she can follow the line better. “Is supposed to be this huge snake—”
“You’re fucking with me.”
“--called Serpent, or some Latin bullshit that means snake—”
“After that whole thing with Hercules, they just drew a line and called it a snake?”
“Hey, I don’t make the rules.”
Joel explains his way through Cassiopeia, Andromeda, gets real quiet around Ursas Major and Minor and Leo and Leo minor, (“Um, so that’s the Lion, you see how he’s looking up? That bit right there with the five stars is his mane. And above him, you see those smaller, five stars? That’s his baby. She’s riding on his back.”) and is halfway through explaining Virgo when Ellie gets fed up with the cold and turns her body into his and rests her head on his shoulder. She isn’t awake past Libra.
She’s not asleep for long when Joel is gently shaking her shoulder and saying “Hey, baby, I can’t have you sleeping on the roof. You need to climb down, okay? I’ll help you.” and as soon as she’s passably off the roof he picks her up and murmurs, “You can go to sleep now, okay? I’ve got you.”
She wakes up when the sun’s already up the next morning to the quiet music of the projection video and smiles when spinning planets and galaxies are the first thing she sees. She and Joel pack up rather quickly, and Ellie double and triple checks that she’s remembered her three rocks before they go.
“Can we go back soon?” Ellie asks on the way to Jackson.
“Sure we can. I cleared the place out for you. It’s yours. We can go back whenever you want.”
“Okay.” And Ellie leans the point of her jaw on Joel’s back and then moves to fit her teeth, gently, over the spot on his shoulder she bit the night before.
“Troublemaker,” Joel says, voice soft.