Chapter Text
Some parts of the Before feel more like a dream, to Joel. One of those rare good ones, all hazy and warm until you’re thrown back into the real world. One that you let fade, because this wretched, gaping, split-lip world is your home now.
Some things he lets himself forget. Some things he needs to forget, or he’ll forget the most important thing, how to survive. So he does forget. He forgets sunny mornings and late, late nights. He forgets cheap ramen and box mac and cheese, and where they both are in the store aisles. He forgets how much was left in paying off the house.
Or, he thinks he forgets.
He and Ellie have been in Jackson for three months now, and are finally starting to make it feel like it could be a home for the both of them. It’s in this third month that the memories, pushed to the back of his brain, start to bubble back up to the surface.
He slides a plate of eggs in front of Ellie, and all of a sudden he’s back in his old kitchen, making breakfast before the sun comes up.
He and Tommy start putting the frame up for a new house with the rest of their team, and all of a sudden it’s a workday from Before, only the people they’re with now are slightly more competent than the old guys he used to know.
He reads the written one-month report from Ellie’s teachers, and all of a sudden he’s smiling his way through Sarah’s report card, knowing that his baby girl’s gonna be smarter than him when she’s big.
It hurts sometimes, remembering. But sometimes it feels good. Most of the time it’s somewhere in between.
If there’s one thing he’s remembering right now, though, it’s just how much of a germ fest public school is.
Jackson’s school is small, nowhere near the size most schools used to be. It makes it better in a lot of ways, honestly, lack of resources aside. And it also means Joel can get a pretty good idea of what’s going on there whether Ellie tells him anything or not, just by listening to the talk around town.
Way he’s heard it lately is that some kid from one of the younger age groups caught a bug from god-knows-where, maybe a parent who had participated in an external trade, and it’s been going through the school ever since, leaving Jackson with a bunch of snot-nosed kids.
He hadn’t been too concerned about it at first, though he’d kept a closer eye on Ellie. Then she’d told him that both Dina and Jesse were out sick, and a very familiar worry squirmed in his stomach as he remembered Before, when Sarah would report that one of her friends was out with a stomach bug or a cold. She was always sick within the week.
And now, there’s this. He wakes up in the middle of the night. That sort of heart-pounding, “holy shit, I’m awake,” type of waking up. And he doesn’t know why. He opens his eyes, heavily blinking as he scans the right side of his room for any threats.
He’s in his bed. His soft, creaky bed in his house in Jackson. The lights are off. The old, rattling fan is on, facing towards the wall as its blades spin and spin. He’s laying on his side, one arm wrapped around his chest and the other splayed out, fingertips brushing the edge of the mattress. It’s not actually the most comfortable position, at least to wake up to. His bones creak as he pushes himself up to sit, his heart still pounding wildly in his chest.
He probably had a nightmare. He’s been having them a lot, lately. He remembers pieces of them, glimpses of Sarah’s perfect, limp body in his arms, her light purple shirt riddled with bullets. Then Ellie in his arms in the hospital, tiny and cold, only he was too late, and she’s…
No. No, his thoughts are spiraling. He shakes his head to clear it. He just woke up from a dream, a nightmare. He’s safe. Ellie is safe. Maria and Tommy are safe across the street.
He scans the room one last time, then sinks back down in his bed, into his pillows that still feel impossibly soft, but are probably objectively crappy. He closes his eyes.
And then he hears it. Coughing. Coming in short, hoarse barks. Joel’s eyes open. He gets out of bed, walking to his door. He bridges the hallway gap between his and Ellie’s room in a few short steps, the floorboards creaking slightly under his feet, which are cold even with the ridiculously thick socks he’d put on before bed.
He reaches out and pushes Ellie’s door, which she always leaves cracked, open. Huh. He hasn’t been inside of it in a few days, and it seems she’s scattered every item she owns across the floor since then. She usually keeps things fairly clean, but she’s still a kid, she has her moments. Joel treasures those moments. She’s more than earned them.
Joel walks over to her bed, where she’s currently still passed out. Her lips are parted, a bit of drool running down her face. He watches her for a moment. Then her body tenses as she lets out a few more hoarse little coughs. She remains asleep, though.
Without a second thought, Joel presses the back of his hand to her forehead, a move that feels painfully familiar. He’s met with cool skin. That’s good, at least. She coughs again and Joel leaves the room, coming back with his extra pillow.
He slides an arm under her and lifts the top part of her body, shifting her until she’s suitably propped up against both her pillows and his. She stirs at this, tossing her head to the side,
“Mmph.”
“It’s just me. Everything’s alright,” he whispers, pulling her blanket back up to her chin. She lets out a raspy little breath, falling into a deeper sleep.
He leaves her room, cracking the door behind him before going back to his own. The best thing he can do right now is let her sleep.
He lays back down in his bed, closing his eyes. Sleep doesn’t come. His body is too tense and his mind is racing too quickly. He rolls onto his right side, so that the ear he’s hard of hearing in is the one against the bed.
It takes an hour, but he finally falls asleep in that position, left ear pointed towards the ceiling.
Just in case any threat approaches.
He wakes up at dawn to the piercing crow of the nearby rooster. Some days, he wants to strangle that bird, and other days it’s a damn good alarm. He slowly gets up, letting out a small grumble as he stands. His knees are always stiff in the morning.
He goes downstairs, starting on breakfast. He and Ellie usually eat in the house in the mornings, having a steady supply of eggs because she helps out with the community poultry fairly regularly. It’s nice to eat together, just the two of them before they go their separate ways for part of the day.
Ellie comes downstairs just as he gets out the pan, her footsteps quick and light. He turns to look at her with a quiet, “hey, kiddo.”
She gives him a nod in response, sitting down in the chair she usually watches him cook in, her elbows against the small table in front of her. She’s careful not to lean all of her weight into it, as the table has a bad leg that’s an impending disaster.
Joel scans her over. Her hair is tied back in its usual ponytail, strands sticking out in some places. She’s wearing a shirt that he’s never seen her in before, and is way too big on her. A faded flannel. His shirt, he realizes after a second. One of the sleeves is rolled up to her elbow, the other dwarfing her arm at full length. Her eyes are droopy, the ends tinged red, same as her nose. And, most noticeable of all, she’s sniffling up a storm. Great.
He’s never seen her sick before, he realizes as she leans her cheek against her hand, the table giving out a warning groan at the shifted weight. She’s been hurt before, or exhausted, or terrified out of her goddamn mind. But she’s never had anything more than an upset stomach from bad food, which they both knew how to power through without complaint.
“You feelin’ okay?” He asks, tapping the table to signal for her to move her elbows off. She does so, looking up at him,
“Yeah, fine.” There’s a rasp in her voice that matches the rasp in her breathing. He glances at the stove, then walks over to her, smoothing her hair out of her face and feeling her forehead like he did last night. Still cool. She bats his hand away, “what the fuck are you doing?!”
“Checkin’ for a fever.”
“I don’t have one.”
“I know that now.”
He goes back to focusing on breakfast, Ellie flipping through the comic she had brought to the table, in the middle of rereading it for the millionth time. She coughs into her arm after a few minutes, the sound louder than the night before, almost croupy now. Yeah. She’s definitely got whatever it is her friends have had. And she’s also in the fun part of the illness spectrum where she’s sick enough to be grumpy and miserable, but not sick enough to necessarily need to miss school.
He remembers when Sarah was like that, all of a sudden. All gross and whiny, clinging onto his pant leg when she was younger or snapping at him when she was older. He’d been relieved back then, that he could still send her off to school without worrying about him or Tommy missing work. Life had moved too fast to worry about it.
His stomach clenches in regret now that he looks back at it. He knows that he did what he needed to do to keep her fed and stay on top of the house payments and bills. He just wishes he could have taken one extra day to stay home with her and hold her close.
“You don’t have to go to school today,” he says, pulling himself back to the present, “if you don’t want to, I mean.”
“What?” Ellie frowns, snot dripping down her face, oozing toward her lip.
“Think you’ve got the cold that’s been going around, kiddo. You don’t gotta go to school if you don’t want to.”
“I’m fine. And I'm going. We finally reached the space unit in science. Someone found this huge fucking book about the planets while they were out foraging and they gave it to the school. We’re finally going to look at the second half today.” And just like that she’s chattering away about the first half of it, throwing out fun facts about space travel that he’s never heard before.
She pauses once to wipe her nose against the sleeve of the shirt she’s wearing. Joel’s shirt. He internally groans, getting up and digging through the drawers in the kitchen until he finds the extremely old handkerchief they have, buried under the handguns they may or may not have stolen back from the armory one night. He tosses it over to her.
She catches it, meeting his eyes, “you’re on patrol today, right?”
“Yeah,” he nods. They go over where they’ll both be that day with each other every morning, both for safety reasons and out of habit. It still feels odd to be apart from her for more than a few hours, even after three months. “Tommy and I have a border patrol first thing. After that I’m takin’ a look at the Evans’ place. They’re putting in a new window and keep running into trouble. I’ll be done before you’re done in the stables.”
“Okay,” Ellie nods, “I’ll be in school, then in the stables.”
“Alright. Bless you,” he says as Ellie leans forward and sneezes, half-covering it with a hand. “Do it into the crook of your arm, girl.” She crosses her eyes at him in response. Lovely. He tugs lightly at the back of her ponytail before setting her plate in front of her to eat.
The next twenty minutes are fairly uneventful, Ellie sniffling incessantly while talking about the new kittens born to the cat that lives in the stables. Her nose starts to run again, Joel internally cringing. He’s almost forgotten how gross kids can be. Half-feral kids raised in post-apocalyptic military schools are no exception, it seems.
Joel picks up the handkerchief as she moves to wipe her nose on her sleeve again, pressing it against her nose instead, “don’t use your sleeve.”
Ellie lets out a muffled, “fuck you,” but finishes wiping it across her face as he pulls his hand away. She sniffles after, her elbow coming to rest on the table again so she can lay her cheek against her hand. She gives a few heavy blinks, the table creaking from the pressure.
“Elbow off,” he says, Ellie moving it off with a grumble. “I’ll get around to fixing the damn thing one of these days. Or I’ll just build a new one if I get enough wood for it.”
She perks up, “can I watch when you do?”
“Yeah,” he smiles, “yeah, you can.” He likes having her in the old garage he and Tommy have turned into a workshop. Yes, she gets underfoot, and yes, she’s a little too interested in anything sharp. But he’s found there’s few better feelings than having her beside him while he works, fidgeting and talking from the floor, or sometimes reading a book or doing homework.
He looks out the window. The sun is fully up now, early morning mist still clinging to the grass. “You’ve gotta get out the door soon. I know you ain’t feeling well, and if you feel worse at school, you can come back here. Get Maria if anything feels really wrong, she’ll be round the council building and the gardens today.”
Ellie’s expression shifts to a carefully guarded one, “I feel fine.”
“Your nose is drippin’ down your face again, kiddo.”
Ellie wipes it on her sleeve in response. Joel is going to burn that shirt once she’s done with it. She opens her mouth to say something, leaning forward instead. A few harsh coughs escape her, her head bobbing forward as they do. They sound wet and bubbly now, leaving her doubled-over for a solid ten seconds.
Joel takes a few steps forward, putting a careful hand on her shaking back, “hey,” he starts, Ellie jolting away, running off towards the front door.
“I’m gonna be late for school, bye!” She calls back to him once she’s caught her breath, darting off.
“Ellie -” he sighs, the door swinging open, then shut. Alright then.
Great.
An hour later finds him and Tommy on patrol together, a few others behind them. Joel’s focused on their surroundings. The well-worn trails they ride down are usually free from trouble, but there’s always a chance of something going wrong. His gun is strapped safely to his back, ready if he needs it.
It’s a chilly day, the frequent breeze biting and cold. Much of the local wildlife seems to have elected to stay curled up that morning, save for a few squirrels that scream at each other from the tree tops, and the regular morning birds who sing their usual songs.
“How’s Maria?” He asks Tommy after they ride for about an hour with silence between them, the guys behind them talking quietly. It’s not exactly a necessary question, as he sees Maria everyday in the dining hall, but it’s also not like he talks to her outside of forced formalities. She isn’t a huge fan of him, and the feeling is mostly mutual.
Tommy’s face lights up when he mentions her, though, and if she makes his little brother happy he can push through awkward dinners every night. “She’s doing well. Well as she can, anyway. Baby’s due in two weeks, she looks like she’s about to pop with it.” He pauses for a moment, checking behind for anything trailing them, “maybe don’t tell her I said that, by the way. She’s more than ready for that baby to be out, she already had me sleepin’ on the couch half of last week.”
“What’d you do?” Joel refrains from chuckling.
“I still don’t know, for most of it. One time it was for chewin’ too loudly.”
“Gotta agree with her there. You do chew too loudly.”
“Asshole.”
They start on the downhill trail, Tommy stopping, “one of the teenagers claims to have seen a small group of Infected round here.”
“You believe them?” Joel stops his horse beside him.
“Nah. Couple of patrols went up and didn’t find anything but a stray runner. Sounds like he was just tryin’ to impress the girls his age. Bet Ellie wasn’t impressed.”
“If the kid was old enough to be outside the walls, he’s too old to be tryin’ to impress her,” Joel says.
Tommy laughs as they head further down the path, the area around them quiet and clear, “she ain’t a big fan of any of the guys, is she? Other than Jesse. Not that I blame her, I know some of the boys her age. Speaking of Ellie, how’s she doing?”
“She’s sick right now,” Joel says, quickly adding, “nothing serious. Just was coughing last night, woke up all gross this morning.”
“Ah. Poor girl.”
Joel lets out a hum of agreement, “she’s actin’ off too. Jumpy’s probably the right word. I’ll keep her away from the dining hall for a bit, anyway, Maria doesn’t need to catch what she’s got.”
The rest of the patrol goes by smoothly, not a single Infected or hostile person spotted along the route. He’s off to the Evans’ after, spending three hours in general amazement at the people’s lack of ability to do basic measurements.
And then he’s home.
There’s another memory somewhere in the back of his mind as he steps inside, untying his boots by the door. A memory of another house he returned to after a long day of work. He shakes his head and ignores it.
Ellie is in the living room when he walks in, curled up on the couch. She’s got a book on dinosaurs in her hands, theropods specifically, that he’s seen her read practically a million times now. It’s from Jackson’s tiny library, and it’s been checked out over and over again by her.
She meets his eyes, her own red and runny. Her hair’s sticking out even more than it was that morning, shadows under her eyes. Honestly, she looks about ready to pass out.
“Hey, kiddo.” He keeps his voice quiet as he speaks, reaching out and feeling her forehead. Her skin’s a little warm now. She glares, but doesn’t pull away. “How’re you feelin’?”
“Amazing.” There’s a bite to her tone, one that he knows is pointless arguing with. He moves his hand away.
If she were Sarah, he would have pushed it further. If she were Sarah, he would have already scooped her up into a hug. But she’s not. She’s Ellie. She’s the little girl he’s watched fight tooth and nail to cross the country. The little girl he’s watched shoot someone. The little girl he’s seen be torn apart and remade by trauma, who’s saved his life and lost her innocence and bled and fought and screamed.
He loves her so much that it hurts. But there’s still an uneasiness between them, an uncertainty about where exactly they stand with each other. And it’s not something they talk about particularly well.
Joel clears his throat, looking towards the doorway to the kitchen, “I, uh, brought back food from the dining hall, if you want to come eat. Also, wipe your nose.”
She follows him to the kitchen, wiping her nose on her sleeve. Yep. He’s definitely burning the shirt later. “We got to see the planet book today,” she rasps as she sits down at the table. Her nose is already running again. No amount of wiping it on her sleeve is going to get it to stop, it seems.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. It was so fucking cool. The pages are huge and the pictures are in color and clear,” she leans her elbow against the table, letting out a few barking coughs.
Joel suddenly wishes it was Before. That there was still widely available medicine to give his sick kid, even if a lot of it was still ridiculously overpriced. Jackson has medicine, yes, but it’s saved for the worst cases of illness or injury. An older kid’s cough is the last of their worries.
He sits with Ellie and eats, listening to her talk in her croaky little voice about space, her teacher, and some stupid older boy who keeps bragging about seeing Infected while on patrol. It’s almost normal. Almost close enough to a night from Before that it hurts.
And then Ellie leans into her elbow a little too much. And the table leg snaps forward from underneath her.
The table immediately plummets and leans into the floor, the two bowls on top of it tumbling to the ground. One of them shatters, the other remaining remarkably intact. Alright then. Joel takes a moment to process it, then quickly lifts Ellie up and sets her down to the side, away from the glass. Ellie stays frozen in place, her eyes wide. Like a frightened animals.
“It’s alright,” he says quickly, “thing was a piece of shit anyway, right?” He repeats what she always calls it, hoping to get a laugh from her. He gets a blank look in response.
She remains where she’s standing, near the broken table and shattered glass. Sick, exhausted, and at the end of her rope.
“Ellie -” he starts.
A tear slips down her face.
And then she bolts.