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In another life, Joel would be in awe of the fact that the giraffes aren’t silent—they emit low, guttural hums that should be more unsettling than they are. But in this one, Joel’s attention is focused on the little girl standing in front of him, her jaw set and gaze unflinching.
“After all we’ve been through,” she’s saying, “everything I’ve done…It can’t be for nothing.”
And that statement, more than anything, is what finally shatters all of what is left of his heart. But, of course, she’s not done.
“I know you mean well. I know you want to protect me. You have . And when we’re done, we’ll go wherever you want—Tommy’s, a sheep ranch, the moon.” She’s smiling like the offer is supposed to be enough to get him to drop the argument, and damn it that he can’t help but chuckle. “I’ll follow you anywhere you go,” she adds, just a little more quiet.
(Joel hears something else entirely. Joel hears something that sounds a whole lot like I love you.)
“But there’s no halfway with this. We finish what we started.”
His small smile falters then dies. What the hell is he supposed to say to that, when she’s looking at him like he’s just supposed to agree, like she isn’t fourteen, an innocent child ?
Slowly (because she’s right with all her teasing, he’s old , and his knees crack), Joel squats in front of her. He picks at the weeds growing between slabs of concrete. He—he isn’t quite sure where he’s going with this, but it feels important that Ellie knows this trip has grown to be so much more than the smuggling run it started as.
“Ellie,” he begins, staring at the ground, his voice low. Not little shit not kiddo, not baby girl. The use of her given name has the desired effect, because she takes a step back and looks down at him with an expression almost like fear. He levels her in his gaze. “Listen to me very closely. No matter what happens? What you’ve done will not be for nothing. It can never mean nothing. It has already meant everything.”
Ellie stares at him, open-mouthed. There’s a joke here, somewhere—Ellie, silent?— but the punchline doesn’t quite form.
“Joel, you’re freaking me the fuck out,” she says, finally. And yeah, it’s not her fault he hasn’t made it abundantly clear exactly what she has come to mean to him.
Joel closes his eyes. He takes a long breath. Then, he heaves himself back to standing.
He can’t take her any further in good conscience, not if she thinks that her life has been completely inconsequential up ‘til now. He knows a thing or two about feeling like the world wouldn’t miss you if you were gone. Who woulda thought the girl to finally knock some sense into him might need some sense knocked into her right back?
(But that doesn’t mean he wants to explain it to her; it’s not a pleasant story. Not for him to tell, not for her to listen to.)
When he speaks, his voice doesn’t seem quite right to his own ears, echoing as if from the opposite end of a long tunnel. Hollow, distant. The old Joel. “It was me. I was the guy who shot and missed.”
He opens his eyes. Ellie is still staring at him, her own slightly wider. “Oh. Shit,” she gets out.
With a sigh, he sets his rifle aside and transfers his weight to the crumbling concrete balustrade, leaning forward on his elbows and staring out at the little family of giraffes. “There’s no story. Sarah died, and I couldn’t see the point anymore, simple as that. And I wasn’t scared, you know. I was ready. I couldn’t have been more ready. And, well—when I—when I went to pull the trigger…I flinched. I still don’t know why.”
It may be the longest string of words he’s managed for Ellie in all the time they’ve known each other. Several beats of silence pass, and then suddenly she’s hopping up to sit on the wall, her back to the giraffes and all that open space—all that possibility. He can’t quite meet her eyes. “Anyway,” he continues, “the reason I’m telling you all this—”
“I know why you’re telling me all this.” Her eyes are wide, brows raised, lips pursed—but not with pity. Not gratitude, either. More like…relief.
“Yeah,” he murmurs. “I reckon you do.”
Only when the silence between them begins to settle just a little too heavy does Ellie tap his knee with the toe of her boot. “So time heals all wounds, I guess.”
He appreciates the direction she’s trying to steer the conversation—somewhere safe, somewhere light—but she must, totally and completely, pick up what he’s putting down.
She’s sitting up so precariously on that ledge, but she’s still shorter. He has to duck his head to make sure she’s really seeing him. “It wasn’t time that did it.” He meant the statement to be sure and steady, but he can’t help that his voice shakes a little there at the end.
He holds his breath, but Ellie doesn’t flinch. If anything, her gaze hardens. A taunt, a dare: So then tell me what did.
“Ellie. What you have done has already meant…everything,” he repeats, spreading his hands palm-up in front of himself. You mean everything to me, baby girl. A few breaths pass in strained silence, and then he reaches out, slowly, and places hand on her knee. She blinks quickly and worries at her lip. Good…good.
(“I’ll follow you anywhere you go,” Ellie had said.
“What you have done has already meant everything,” he has, finally, answered.)
She breaks eye contact, fidgeting, and he steps back. She clears her throat before she answers him. “Well, I’m glad that…that didn’t work out.”
He wants to smile at her, but his eyes suddenly begin to sting, and if he succumbs to what must be tears, he’ll be forcing the poor kid to bear witness to over a decade’s worth of them. Traumatizing. “Yeah, me too,” he mumbles, twisting to look back out at the ruins beneath them. The breeze dries his eyes, and when he does finally blink—
That’s when he sees it.
Ellie cries out as he grabs her arm and yanks them both down behind the scant cover of the stone balustrade.
“What the—?!”
He brings a finger to his lips and, bless her, she falls silent. He listens, much as he can, being half deaf. There’s the jostling of the giant animals moving away, the wind gently rustling the grass. Nothing else. But he knows what he saw.
“There’s someone down there,” he mutters.
That’s all it takes for Ellie to revert to the knock-out-drag-down fighter he first met all those months ago, buzzing with adrenaline and eager for a brawl. Good. That’s the side of her that’s kept her alive.
“So, we’re gonna…what?” she whispers.
He hesitates. He’s mean, but he isn’t stupid. No sense in picking a fight with someone who has no reason to want them hurt. “We’re gonna wait. We’ll see if they’re after us, and then…”
Ellie grins. “If they are, we can fuck ‘em up?”
Joel closes his eyes. This kid. “Yep. That’s the idea.”
***
The strangers are, indeed, after them. Shocker.
The first explosive comes from directly beneath them, rattling the foundations of the overhang. It’s obviously meant to scare, maybe to incapacitate, not to kill. But they can’t just wait here, sitting ducks. Against his better judgment, Joel stands. The succeeding flicker of movement in the brush is almost too obvious, so Joel takes aim. He pulls the trigger. He does not miss.
He crouches back behind the protection of the stone wall. There’s no way his victim was acting alone. “Let’s move.”
Ellie nods once, and they stay low as they move back into the relative protection of the crumbling warehouse. As soon as they step inside, they break into a run. They barely make it ten steps—they waited too long, they should have taken off the second Joel spotted movement—before another shot rings out. Then, the thud of a body hitting the ground without even a yelp.
The sun darkens. The warehouse fades away, leaving only the inky night sky and the faint scent of burning gasoline and the shouts of scared young soldiers…and he spins, bracing for the scene: Ellie on the ground, Ellie bleeding, Ellie dead—
Ellie is scrambling to her feet not ten yards behind him, half her backpack blown to pieces but otherwise unharmed. But in the time it takes Joel to process this, a man jumps from the shadows and yanks Ellie backwards by her hair. The man has a wild look about him, dirt on his face and tangled brown hair, as he hides behind Ellie and presses a knife to her throat before she can even yell. Even dizzy with adrenaline, a chill shoots through Joel—their assailant was so close. Joel had overlooked him, and he could have killed Ellie if he had wanted to.
Joel draws his gun anyway.
The stranger braces Ellie in front of him, even as she whimpers and thrashes and spits out every curse word under the sun.
But Joel’s hand is steady, and Ellie’s too tiny to be a proper human shield, anyway. All he has to do is take the shot.
“There’s more of us. Right outside,” the man sneers.
“Who’s us?” Joel presses, taking a small step forward.
The man has the audacity to scoff. “Marlene sends her regards.”
Ellie stomps down on her captor’s foot, and he releases her with a curse. But he isn’t an idiot. Before Ellie or Joel can blink, he sweeps her feet from beneath her with a reflexive kick, training a gun on her instead of a knife.
“You ain’t gonna shoot her,” Joel hisses. “You need her.”
“I’m not gonna kill her,” the Firefly corrects him. “But my friend back there might just kill you.”
Joel fights the instinct to spin around and check whether it’s a bluff—he’d be leaving himself totally exposed. Right now, he’s gotta keep his gun trained on the guy whose barrel is trained on his little girl. Everything else is a problem for later. Besides, he doesn’t need to check behind. Ellie’s breathing heavily from where she’s sprawled on her stomach on the floor, but her eyes are focused and clear as she repeatedly flicks her gaze over Joel’s right shoulder. Two, she mouths. Okay, then. Not just one friend.
“No one needs to kill anyone,” Joel answers slowly. He doesn’t lower his gun.
“Good. We’re on the same page,” says their new friend, who…also does not lower his gun.
“Joel,” starts Ellie.
“Ellie,” warns Joel.
The Firefly takes a step even closer to Ellie. “Put down the gun,” he tells Joel. “Put the gun on the floor, and walk away. We’ll let you—Marlene’s orders.”
“It would be a lot easier to believe you if you didn’t just try to blast us off the balcony,” Joel mutters.
Several heavy footfalls echo from behind him, but Ellie remains calm, her gaze merely cautious as it follows the movement.
“Trust doesn’t come easily in these parts,” says their new friend—a woman—from behind him. A few more steps and she crosses into Joel’s line of sight. She’s surprisingly short, with dark hair gathered into a neat bun—and an infuriatingly easy gait as she approaches Ellie, who glares up at her from her spot on the floor. “I figured we’d save some time if you weren’t conscious for the tough goodbyes.”
“Is that so?” bites Joel. They’d be idiots to think he would’ve just gone home after waking up outside the city walls somewhere, no Ellie at his side.
“We all want the same thing,” the woman says evenly. “A cure. Marlene says—”
“Did Marlene not mention I’ve never given a damn what she says?”
(Is Ellie rolling her eyes?)
“I’m Jones. This is Martin,” she jerks her head towards the Firefly with his gun still trained on Ellie (and Joel’s gun trained on him).
“Great. Who’s your other buddy behind me?”
Surprise flickers across Jones’s face. It quickly settles into amusement, and she glances at Ellie, who just screws her face up in her fiercest glare. Jones shrugs. “That’s Moore. And the three of us, we’re gonna take Ms. Ellie back and run some tests. You’re going to walk away.”
Joel might have been willing to try to negotiate the situation into something more favorable if it all didn’t feel so…wrong. “Is that right?” he asks. “And when you're done running your tests, you’re gonna bring Ellie back to Jackson?”
“When we can spare the men, sure,” Jones says immediately. She either already knows all about Jackson…or she doesn't care.
“What tests?” He gets another step closer.
Jones and Martin exchange a quick, inscrutable look. It’s Martin who answers. “Doc didn’t tell us that.”
“Right,” Joel says. He could take out Martin, easy, but he’s pretty sure Marlene’s orders to spare him won’t stand once he starts shooting.
“Joel,” says Ellie.
He ignores her, still focused on the best way of freeing her without getting himself immediately killed twice over. Jones must not like what she sees on his face, because she draws her gun.
“Joel,” Ellie says again. “Stop.”
The Fireflies are caught off guard as much as Joel is, judging by the inches their weapons drop, if only momentarily.
Slowly, Ellie sits up, hands in the air as she glares between their three captors. “Just—drop the gun, Joel. And then you will too?” she asks the Fireflies. Jones gives one short nod. What is Ellie playing at?
Do you trust me? he’d asked her, not that long ago, really. But now it’s her eyes practically boring through him, and it’s his turn to give her a single, short nod.
He lowers his gun.
True to their word, the Fireflies do, too—even Moore, who’s barely made it out of his teens, Joel sees when he finally spares a backwards glance.
Ellie is still watching Joel. Her voice is soft but sure when she breaks the unstable silence. “Joel, I want to do this. I mean, I know they didn’t make the best first impressions or whatever.” She shoots a glare at Martin. “But this is why we came. So I can help. So they can find the cure.”
His stomach drops. Hadn’t she understood? He thought she understood. Why hadn’t he just said it? You already saved a life, my life, and I really, really can’t lose you.
I love you, kid.
“Nu-uh. Not without me,” he says firmly, because there’s no time for those kind of platitudes now. He takes a decisive step forward, intent on hauling her all the way back to Jackson like a sack of potatoes, so help anyone who tries to stand in his way. But of course it’s only a fraction of a second before the Fireflies raise their guns, two pointed at him and one at Ellie.
He stops, hands in the air, takaes a breath, tries again to explain to Ellie—but he—he can’t. “Ellie…Ellie, you know this don’t make sense. If they wanted to work with you, they wouldn’t try to capture you, they would know what tests they’re gonna do, they—”
“Joel,” she says again, so, so quietly now, her eyes trained on the floor like he’s not even worth lookin’ at anymore. “I changed my mind. I know I told you what I wanted like five minutes ago, but I changed my mind. Okay?”
It can’t be for nothing.
She looks up.
We finish what we started.
So now…they don’t.
“Ellie…” Agreeing to this, even with the understanding he isn’t agreeing to it , goes against his every instinct, and his words are choked. “Okay, darlin’. Alright.”
Ellie blinks quickly, shooting a final glare at the Fireflies as she heaves herself to her feet. “If you don’t let him go,” she tells them, squaring her shoulders and turning her back to Joel entirely, “I’ll just kill myself. You can try to stop me, but I’ll be pretty fucking creative about it. And then no one is happy. ‘Specially not Marlene.”
Joel knows Ellie’s false bravado when he sees it, but the Fireflies are strangers to it and exchange tense glances, an entire silent conversation passing between them. Joel wills Ellie to look at him, to communicate with him in just that way, but she staunchly refuses.
Jones turns back to Joel without warning. “Start walking.”
“What?”
She gestures towards the door with her gun. “Go.”
He swallows thickly. “Ellie, Jackson will be waitin’ for you. Okay?”
At his question, Jones glances at Martin. The sadness in their eyes sends chills up Joel’s spine.
“Okay,” Ellie whispers. She’s still focused on their captors, not on him, but that’s okay. It means she heard the Fireflies’ silent confession loud and clear.
***
There are surely more of Marlene’s lackeys outside the building, but Jones must have radioed down—true to their word, no one appears to take him out.
Well, he just spent quite a while staring out over the city, and he now starts down the path he knows they’ll best be able to see him leave. He walks and walks, never once looking back, begrudgingly giving them exactly what they expect to witness.
Then, he turns around.
***
It’s almost too easy. Sure, the Fireflies have probably let their guard down at least a little—they’ve almost made it to the hospital by the time Joel’s able to catch up—but they don’t put up much of a fight.
He picks off three of them before any are able to return fire, and then when the last two focus all their attention on him, Ellie procures her knife. She must have hidden it on her when she fell, back in the warehouse, and she doesn’t hesitate now to lunge at the Firefly nearest to her. She gets a good deep slice into the man’s abdomen, and his friend glances back at the accompanying scream. It’s enough; Joel takes care of them.
When he makes it to Ellie, her hands are shaking. He reaches for her, palms on either side of her face, and realizes his are, too. She speaks, and voice is eerily steady; she’s too young to be this used to death. “I was starting to think you didn’t understand, you dick,” she mutters.
He closes his eyes and breathes out something almost like a laugh. This. Kid. “I’m old. Can’t move as quick I used to, that's all.”
***
They walk for three days before they find a car, and then they waste half a day while he scavenges for parts to fix the engine. Gotta find some gas, too. It’s all worth it to see Ellie curl up like a cat in the backseat and get for the first real sleep she’s had since the night before Salt Lake.
***
On the last day of the trip, she’s sitting in the front seat. But she’s staring away from him, out the window, so the rattle of their slowly, painfully dying engine almost obscures her soft words entirely.
“What?” he asks distractedly, peering at the dash to see if one of the maintenance lights is on to clue him in on what, exactly, needs fixing. But they’re all lit up, so…
“I think they were going to kill me.”
His pulse stutters and he finds himself gripping the steering wheel like a lifeline, his knuckles actually turning white. What the hell is he supposed to say to that, when she refuses to look at him, when she says it with such a tremble in her voice, when it’s so crystal clear that she’s just a child who doesn’t want to die?
He clears his throat. “I think they were going to run their tests,” he says carefully. She whips around to examine him—opens her mouth to accuse him—and he can’t blame her. After all, hadn’t he tried to convince her of that very danger to her life just days ago? He holds up a hand to keep her quiet. “And I think they didn’t much care what those tests led to, as long as they got their cure.”
“They didn’t care where Jackson is,” whispers Ellie. “They wouldn’t say what the tests were. They—” Ellie cuts herself off in some twisted form of self-preservation. She draws her knees to her chest, wraps her arms around them, and frowns.
“I know,” he murmurs, looking over at her as best he can without running off the road.
She swipes at her eyes quickly, just once. “I—I still want to help. I just…”
“Don’t wanna die? I’m real glad to hear that, baby girl.”
With a sudden, sharp movement, she jams her feet up on the dashboard (exactly like he’s asked her dozens of times not to). “Only ‘cause you’d get so bored without me,” she mutters.
“Yeah. I reckon I would.” She doesn’t seem to have anything to add, which scares him a little. “We’ve got time. Your immunity ain’t going anywhere.”
She responds with a question, and her voice is so small he wouldn’t have placed it as hers if they weren’t (hopefully) the only two people within a fifty mile radius. “Can you tell me again?” she asks.
“I—sorry, what?”
“It’s not…this hasn’t all been for nothing?”
Joel opens his mouth. All that comes out is something between a laugh and a sob, so he closes it again. Ellie stares at him, horrified, like she’s convinced she has broken him. He quickly waves her off. “It’s meant everything. You mean everything,” he repeats, his voice gruff but at least even-keeled.
“Promise?” she whispers.
“I swear.”
***
They get back to Jackson in the middle of the night. Tommy gets food. Maria brings fresh clothes. Neither of them asks a single question until Ellie is curled up on the couch, asleep.
His hesitation is intense but brief. He isn’t blind. He sees the way they’re looking at him, remembers the care they’ve shown Ellie since the moment that little girl rode through the gates. So—slowly, carefully, every word like taking a step onto ice that’s already cracking beneath his weight—he tells Maria the truth (and Tommy the rest of it). They sit in silence for minutes on end when he’s done.
“Marlene’s gonna come after her,” mutters Tommy, finally.
“If we hadn’t found the car…” Joel finds he can’t quite voice the fear he’d all but entirely existed in during those first few days of their journey back to Jackson. They make a tough pair, him and Ellie, but they would only be able to do so much against half an army of Fireflies.
“But you did,” Maria says firmly. “And she’s safe now. No one gets in these walls unless we let them—and we won’t let them, Joel, not ever.”
Joel glances at Ellie, her form barely identifiable beneath a mound of blankets. Neither Tommy nor Maria would believe him if he gave voice to his real fear: it isn’t keeping people out they’re gonna have to worry about. Ellie’s a lot of things, but patient isn’t one of them.
He turns back to the couple. Even if they laugh in his face, he has to at least try to explain, for Ellie’s sake. She needs more people looking out for her than just him. “No one spared a second thought for that girl until she got bit and then lived to see the sun rise again. No one cared about Ellie until they decided she was gonna save the world, and then they—we all did.” Of course she’s so much more to him now (she’s everything ), but he was just as guilty as Marlene in the beginning. Drive the kid, get the battery. Cargo.
Tommy frowns, clearly trying to parse what Joel has stopped short of saying. Maria, however, finds and holds his gaze. “Well,” Maria says with a single nod, “we’re just gonna have to make sure she learns real quick that her immunity is the least special thing about her.”
Joel thinks he remembers not really liking Maria at first. In this moment, he isn’t quite sure why. “Yeah,” he whispers, then clears his throat. “We are.”
And if they can’t get her to believe it? Well, he’ll just have to follow her anywhere she decides to go.
***
He spends the night sprawled on the floor beside the couch, reintroduced to consciousness by a foot to his ribs, a reflexive apology, and a how-was-she-supposed-to-know-he-was-sleeping-on-the-floor-like-a- fucking-idiot?
Too early. He closes his eyes again. “I was doing some readin’ last night,” he mumbles.
Ellie laughs. He doesn't, and she goes quiet real quick. “Shit—what?” Genuine fear has crept into her voice, so he cuts to the chase.
Cracking open an eye, he says, “Well…I didn’t retain much. Just that people are makin’ apocalypse jokes like there’s no tomorrow.”
A beat of silence. Two.
“You dick.”
“Too soon?”
“That was terrible. Go back to sleep, old man.”
Joel closes his eyes. “I’d love to be paid to sleep, you know.” Silence. “It’s my dream job.”
Ellie throws a pillow at him, and he laughs.