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ᴡʜᴇɴ ʏᴏᴜ'ʀᴇ ʟᴏsᴛ, ɪ'ʟʟ ғɪɴᴅ ᴀ ᴡᴀʏ, ᴀɴᴅ ɪ'ʟʟ ʙᴇ ʏᴏᴜʀ ʟɪɢʜᴛ

As the huge gates of Jackson become clearer and clearer with each step they take, Ellie can’t wait to get some real food in her stomach again. She wants to eat and eat, and eat again, she wants to fill her plate a minimum of three times. She wants to eat something that isn’t canned and twenty plus years old, or that Joel shot. She wants a shower, a real shower. With shampoo and conditioner —with real hot water. She wants to stay under the showerhead until she forgets about everything about the last six months.

Ellie can’t wait to be on her own again, at least for a while. To have a little bit of privacy for the first time since they left the town back in winter. She wants to be in that room again, and make it her own. Hopefully with time it would look like her room did back in the QZ. Maybe not exactly, but she hopes someone in town knows about Mortal Kombat, or Savage Starlight. Maybe they have a poster that she can steal when no one is looking.

Maybe doing something like that would make her feel something again.

Now that she doesn’t talk as much, she thinks a lot. Quite the surprising and unsettling thoughts are the ones that often creep up in her brain. With Joel’s sudden interest in letting Ellie know stuff about Sarah, she starts thinking about Riley, more and more.

It was like this spiral, each ‘Sarah liked–’ transforms in her brain into a memory of Riley sneaking out through their window, begging Ellie to go with her. ‘Come on El, don’t be a baby’.

Riley always knew she didn’t belong in the QZ, and she didn’t let that stop her. She looked and looked, until she found her place. Even if it was just for a little while. If only Ellie was the same, if only she’d snuck out too and met Joel before. If only she knew how to shoot a gun back then. Things would be so fucking different.

She doesn’t want it to happen but her eyes instantly track her arm, the scars in her wrist makes her mind wander off to Tess, and this one shouldn’t have hurt this much. Because what? They knew each other for a day and a half? It shouldn’t hurt in the way it did.

Then the soft line in the palm of her hand reminds her of Sam, and now she isn’t hungry at all. That boy didn’t deserve it. None of them did. Not, Riley, not Tess, especially not him. He was the ray of sunshine in the middle of the fucking storm, he was a rainbow. He had shown Ellie it was okay to be a kid again. And then he was taken from her, just like that.

Because she couldn’t be a kid. She hadn’t been one for ages, Sam was just a reminder of that. She wasn’t allowed to have good things. She wasn’t allowed to have a best friend, she wasn’t allowed to have a woman to look up to, a mother. She wasn’t allowed to save the world.

She was useless, to herself and everyone else.

“Ellie, give me a hand?”

Like most of the time since the hospital, and since winter, her spirals only stop when Joel speaks to her, although sometimes that doesn’t work either. Right now, the man is trying to walk over some sort of rock that he’s perfectly capable of climbing himself, Ellie knows that and Joel knows that. She still hurries to climb with her best of her abilities in order to help him balance over the rock.

“Why?” She’s not making full sentences now, unless she’s really interested in something, and she hates that she can’t speak more sometimes. She knows Joel is talking more with each day that passes and she wants to finally have real conversations with him, she wants to pretend things were going right, like before finding Jackson, before Silver Lake, and before the hospital. But she can’t speak as much, she doesn’t have her joke book anymore, and all she has is that stupid sweater that reminds her of that mangled mash of flesh and blood under her, that she’s slicing each time the machete slams back down as she screams for her life, and she’s not stopping because that piece of shit deserves it, and she just wants to leave, but she can’t stop swinging because it feels so good–

She blinks to the sound of Joel’s grunts, and she’s back in the rock, with Joel holding her hand as he stands up too. Then he shrugs. “I don’t know. Guess I wanted to feel the sun from a little closer.” He’s got that soft voice again, the voice that makes her feel all mushy and she doesn’t know why. Somehow this voice makes her breaths slow down, and it calms her down from any freak out that she might be experiencing.

Once he manages to stand on his own, he lets go of her. He’s always doing that, Ellie doesn’t mind if he holds her for a little longer, but he always lets go as soon as he gets what he wants. Of course, it’s not like Ellie can complain. It’s not like they’re family or anything. She watches as Joel puts his hands on his hips and looks at her.

“Do you feel it?” he asks as he smiles, then he takes a deep breath and stretches his arms, looking up. She shrugs, not sure of what Joel means right now. “The vitamin D?”

“What the fuck is a vitamin D?” She crosses her arms. Watching the man act like a child has become one of her favorite things ever. Being the only person she associates with in the last months, of course she has to find the funny in the little things to keep herself sane. As much as she can, at least.

The man puts his arms back on his hips, then furrows his eyebrows at her. “Forgot you’re a FEDRA kid.”

“Whatever man, just tell me.”

“A vitamin is a nutrient, or something like that. I don’t have a full definition before you say anything– go ask the doctor in Jackson. Vitamin D is what you get from the sun. It makes you happy, you know?”

“Oh, then I want to stay here forever, see if it works.”

Ellie thinks her own joke is hilarious, comedic gold. Someone should give her a medal for being such a comedy genius. Joel– he does not.

“Kid–”

“Alright, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She giggles for the first time since the giraffes, and she didn’t remember the feeling of actually laughing because you find something funny, lately all her laughs had been a pained attempt to make Joel feel good for trying to make her laugh and her not finding the humor in anything.

Her laugh actually reaches her stomach this time, and she feels it scrunches up and then it releases with her breaths. And she laughs so hard, especially at Joel’s reaction, that she feels the need to crouch a little bit. Bad idea, now she’s unbalanced.

Joel is quick to notice, like always. And he grabs her from the shoulders before she can fall.

She looks up to him, and for a moment she’s back there again, covered in blood, in that same sweater, the cold sneaking up in her skin so quickly right after the heat of the dining hall, of the fire –of David. Joel’s got that same look in his eyes, the one she couldn’t recognize the first time, and that she was so afraid would do the same to her. Of course Joel wouldn’t.

He’s looking at her with that worried look, the look of a father. The look of someone so afraid of something happening to their little kid. Of course she wasn’t his kid, but that was the look. Riley had described it so many times at night, on the roof. She often talked about how it felt having parents, even if she didn’t have them for long, she had always been grateful for the special moments she had with them. Ellie liked to listen to her, and imagine what it was like to have parents too, something she wasn’t allowed to have, something that she knew was impossible for her. She fantasied about what it would be like, how a father’s hug could feel, a mother’s embrace.

Nothing about her imagination, or Riley’s words could compare to the feeling of Joel looking at her like that.

“You almost fell.” he says, like it isn’t the most obvious thing in the world. Like if he didn’t say it Ellie wouldn’t have known.

“Your fault for making me climb over here.” She replies.

“You're right.” He lets out a huff, and for a split second Ellie thinks he’ll hug her, but he takes his hands off her again and puts them in his hips, again. It looked like he was going to hug her, Ellie isn’t imagining things. She’s not even sure she wants Joel hugging her, but all she can remember is how it felt walking out of Silver Lake with Joel’s arm over her shoulder, and the soft comforting whispers telling her everything would be okay, that he was going to make sure of it. “Let’s get down from here.”

He gets down first, then helps her jump off. He catches her and puts his hands under her arms. If she closes her eyes and imagines, she can pretend this is like one of the scenes of the books that Riley used to read. She mostly read books about family while Ellie read about space. One night she had been curious, and after Riley fell asleep she had taken one from her bedside table, and read a few pages. In the scene, the little girl and her father were playing in a park, and the little girl jumped into her father’s arms from the playground’s highest point, and the father caught her without a problem, just like Joel right now.

But in reality Ellie is not a little girl, and Joel is not her father.

It seems like Joel is having a moment to think to himself too, because when she opens her eyes she’s still in the air, and Joel is still holding her. Ellie wonders if he’s pretending that she’s Sarah just like she’s imagining her own impossible fantasies. She thinks that a little too often, whenever he looks at her that way that makes her feel all mushy inside.

“Come on, kid. You’re heavy.” He says, and then puts her back in the ground letting out a soft laugh. Ellie doesn't mind that. She keeps walking. They’re so close to Jackson now, they can clearly see the wooden doors of the town. If she’s honest, she kind of doesn’t want to go in. What if Joel doesn’t actually want her with him? What if she’s sent to a place like in the QZ where the orphan kids stay? Are there a lot of orphan kids in Jackson? Does going back to Jackson mean she’ll have to go to school? She doesn’t actually want to spend time apart from Joel, she’s had this fear since the winter, that he’ll disappear when she’s not looking, that his now fully healed wound will reappear and get infected again.

Without Joel, she doesn’t know how to keep going. Not when he was the one to clean the sweater, the one to scrub it again and again in the middle of the cold air just to make sure his blood was not there anymore. Not when he carried it in his backpack whenever she couldn’t look at it, not when he made sure she wasn’t physically hurt after Silver Lake. When he made sure she was eating, and made her ponytail the days she didn’t feel like it but her hair got in her face and it bothered her. All while recovering from a deadly infection. Joel is her family and she cannot possibly be apart from him.

But maybe Joel only wants to be with his family, with Tommy and Maria.

Maybe he wants to live on his own, not with a bratty teenager who had only ruined his life and gotten his partner killed, only for not being useful at all at the end.

“Ellie, wait up!”

“Hurry up, you old man.”

“Hey, Ellie. Kid!” Joel has caught up to her pace, and once again, he’s looking at her like that. “I still have that Boggle game, maybe we could teach ourselves to play it tonight?”

So he still wants to be close to her, maybe he doesn’t absolutely hate her for making them go through these excruciating months. Ellie smiles at him, and she knows it’s not the same smile that she gave him the first time he mentioned the game. This one is an actual smile, real.

“I’d like that” she says, and it’s honest. She means it. Joel knows.

“When we get home I can’t wait to get some sleep. Is there something in particular you want to do?”

Home.

Ellie thinks about it, of course she wants to eat, and shower, and be on her own. But right now? the priority? She feels like going home and playing some boggle with her Joel might be the right thing to do. Of course, now that she knows Joel does want her there, she would be happy doing anything. Even laundry duty.

“Anything?” Ellie says, and this conversation feels similar to the one they had after the giraffes. “Yeah, anything. Everything. I told you already, anywhere you go. I want to be there.”

“Are you up to going back to school? It’s fine if you don’t want to yet.”

“I don’t.” Not just because of the ‘being near Joel’ thing, Ellie doesn’t think she’s ready to look at other people her age again. People will want to be friends, she’s not allowed to have friends. Besides, Jackson kids must be awfully boring, if what Maria said is true and they don’t spit curse words like their lives depend on it. Well— it could be fun teaching them.

“Okay. I’ll have to talk to Maria about that– ”

“She hates you.”

Joel lets out a chuckle. “She doesn’t hate me. Civilized adults don’t just go around hating people.”

That only makes Ellie run a little faster so she can turn around and start walking backwards facing him. “She does. When she cut my hair she was only trying to get me to hate you too.”

“Oh yeah? What did she say?”

“She started saying that I didn’t know you and that you had done awful things, and of course I had something to say about it so she shut up.”

Joel rolls his eyes, “And what exactly did you say to her?”

“That Tommy had been with you when you both did those things so he shouldn’t have all that anger directed only towards you when he was also there, and she married him so– I told her that she should reevaluate her judgment.”

Joel stops walking, and so does Ellie, “In those words?” he asks with a raised eyebrow.

“Hell no. I was angry too.” Joel laughs, probably thinking that her words had come out a bit too respectful for Ellie’s vocabulary. “How is she gonna say she was a district something– whatever the fuck that is, and then judge you for wanting to literally survive?”

“What did she say?”

“I don’t remember. Something about me being –something.”

“You’re gonna have to start respecting her a little more if you want to start school a little later.”

“I’ll babysit the little demon spawn when it's born if she wants, I’ll do anything, but don’t ask me to be respectful. It’s part of my personality.”

“Ellie– ”

“I’m joking Joel, it’s a joke.” Ellie relaxes her hands in front of the man, then she turns around and keeps walking. She kicks the small rocks she sees as she walks forward. The gates are huge now, meaning they are almost home. “She’ll make me go anyway, better talk to Tommy first– then he’ll plant a seed on her brain and will think it’s her idea all along.”

“You know, that’s not actually a bad idea. I’ll talk to them both.”

“Thanks.”

“Would you really babysit for them?” Joel asks a little while after, catching up to her pace once again. He’s breaking the silence again, because Ellie always calms down and goes to this blank state in which if nothing happens the spiraling comes back.

Ellie doesn’t mind Joel’s efforts to make her stay present. She actually appreciates them, not wanting to think about anything else right now.

She just turns to him for a second to watch his expression. She puts a strand of her hair behind her ear and mentally thanks Joel for putting her hair in a ponytail this morning when Ellie couldn’t stop spiraling in her head, otherwise she wouldn’t have done it and sweat would be making it stick to her body in that way she hates that reminds her of PE, and Bethany.

“Sure, I’ve never seen or been near a baby, but sure. I can teach her all the swear words I know.”

“I don’t think Maria or Tommy will appreciate that.”

“But you will– ”

Joel hesitates to speak, but he tilts his head and ends up agreeing. “Maybe.”

“Excellent.”

“Did you say her? Are you hoping it’s a girl?” Joel’s voice is soft again, and Ellie really wants to hate his soft side. Because she goes red from the shame of him knowing she had been speculating about things that aren’t her business.

“I don’t know, maybe…” she mumbles, and Joel smiles. “I just hate men.”

“Alright then, I see how it is.”

“Of course I don’t hate you, Joel. Just– in general.”

Joel chuckles and shakes his head, like he can’t believe it.

They’re at the door now, and it’s so weird because as soon as they’re close enough to be seen, the gates start to open. Like they were waiting for them. And maybe they were. Ellie wondered if Tommy and Maria made people patrol around the gate just for them. She wondered if Tommy was worried about Joel for making this trip with Ellie. If he felt guilty for not agreeing to go with them. She wondered if he only got more worried each day when they didn’t return, or had he thought Joel had gone back to Boston?

“Come on, Ellie.” Joel’s arm points forward. And she snaps back from her little daydream. “You know, Sarah always begged for a little sister. Now, of course I wouldn’t have another child. I wasn’t seeing anyone. So she started asking Tommy for a little cousin when she saw his many many girlfriends. She’d always mention it whenever he came into the house. That was until she turned eleven, that’s when she realized Tommy wasn’t gonna get hitched any time soon.”

Of course I wouldn't have another child.

Just another reminder that they weren’t family, that she was the bratty orphan teenager he was forced to take care of. Cargo. Even if that wasn’t a word he used anymore, it still hurt sometimes.

“Now look at him, married, a kid in the way. Can you believe it Ellie? He’s a man now.” As they walk into town, and the men in charge of opening the gates walk behind them, she only nods at the man’s sudden sentimentalism with a weird attempt of a smile. “Now look at me, I guess Sarah finally got her wish.”

She doesn’t even want to dive into that one, so she walks quicker than him, trying to find someone she recognises. It would be hard because she only knows two people in the whole town. Tommy and Maria, and none of them are around to receive them.

“Hey!” she yells at a boy walking out of the dinning hall with two bags of what Ellie guesses is food. “Where the fuck’s everybody?”

The boy looks older than her, he’s tall and his hair is black, but he also looks nice, which isn’t something that happens a lot with teenage boys. That she knows. Because he smiles at her, even when he doesn’t know her at all, and when she just spoke to him like she was his superior. “Um, everyone’s eating. In there.”

“Be careful with her, boy. She hates men.” Joel jokes, and the kid only gives them a weird look before hurrying back to his home –or wherever he was going.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“I can make jokes too.”

“You certainly cannot. That is my job.”

Joel laughs. Ellie huffs, not believing the man as she starts walking towards the dining hall. Upon opening the doors the smell of food invades her stomach, and it growls in a way that makes it clear that it doesn’t want any of the things in the place. Even if it smells delicious, she might throw up if she actually eats right now.

Her eyes scan the room quickly, looking for the two people that she knows. When she spots them, they have already noticed they’re there and they’re on their way to Joel. Tommy is, at least. Maria only walks with her husband and looks over at Ellie, mentally checking she doesn’t have any visible injury.

Tommy and Joel hug like that other time, and this time Ellie can identify those feelings that invade her as jealousy. Because she’s been wanting that hug for ages, and Joel just doesn’t do it. He just never goes for it, even when it looks like he might. And no, that moment after Silver Lake doesn’t count, even if she so desperately wants it to. It doesn’t count because of what happened before. She doesn’t want winter to be the only reason Joel hugs her. She wants to be hugged all the time for every other reason, if it isn’t much to ask for. And she wants Joel to be the one to do it.

But she knows she’s not really family, so she won’t push, and she’ll let the brothers reunite in peace, again.

“Ellie,” says Tommy once he lets go of Joel, and just like with him, he pulls her into a tight embrace. Like they’ve known each other for ages, like she matters to him. It actually feels quite nice, even if she’s frozen in place while it happens, confused to be receiving the Joel treatment. “Glad to know you’re both fine. How did it go?”

The silence answers for them, and Tommy’s smile falters a little, just like Ellie’s did when she woke up in that car, still in the hospital robe. The disappointment clear in their eyes, Ellie just shrugs like it doesn’t hurt her deep in her soul, being useless. “We couldn’t do it. It’s fine.”

It’s not fine, the three of them know it. But they can just pretend it is, for her sake. For the sake of the poor little useless girl who couldn’t do the one thing she was supposed to. Her great purpose, the salvation of the world. All lies, apparently.

“Want to eat? While you were gone we started working in the house, so you can go there, make yourselves comfortable. It’s already nicer than it was before. We’ll bring you food, or you can eat here, with everyone else.” Maria speaks for the first time, she had been looking at her the whole time, examining deeply. Making sure she was still in one piece, making sure Joel hadn’t messed up deeply in whatever thing they were doing.

Joel gives Maria a faint smile before looking at Ellie with that soft look again. She returns it with her puppy eyes, the ones that aren’t forced but more just of a soft ‘I don’t want to be here’ that Joel understands at first glance. “We’ll be going to the house, if that’s okay.”

“Of course.”

As they make their way to the house, Tommy walks with them, and Ellie walks a little faster than them, letting them catch up on the easiest parts to tell about the trip, like– basically only the surface of what happened. But Joels tells him about the abandoned Firefly base, and the monkeys, and he stops before he can tell him about his injury and the start of the bad parts.

Ellie recognizes the way once they’re close enough, and she walks without needing to be told by Tommy where to go. Ellie knows Joel’s sudden excitement was only because he got to see Tommy again, and he felt that thing Riley felt whenever she talked about her family. It wasn’t because he particularly enjoyed being near Ellie, she knows Joel doesn’t like her still.

Even if he cares so much about her, he might not like her, and that is a real possibility. He will not like her like he likes being with Tommy, ever. And he will not like her like he liked Sarah. It’s selfish to even want that, she knows.

And she gets to the house and it’s locked, so she sits by the front porch and waits for the old men in care of her to open up.

“Alright then, I guess I should give you your keys.” Tommy takes two sets of keys from his pocket and gives one to his brother, then stretches his arm towards her, holding the other keychain.

“What?”

“Oh, you don’t want it?” Tommy teases, and Ellie immediately stands up to grab it.

“Didn’t realize you were gonna give me one, that’s all.” She says, admiring the little thing in her hand. She can’t look at Tommy right now, she actually has a set of keys, of a house that is her home.

“Well, you’re gonna live here, aren’t you?”

It feels weird to even think about it, to make it official, in a way. Sure, they’ve been spending every day together for the past four or five months, but having a house, having keys. It really solidifies Joel and Ellie´s friendship? Partnership? Whatever it is, it’s settled now. And it’s Ellie's first time owning a house, Having a set of keys. She doesn’t know what to feel.

She plays with the key for a little while, until she realizes Tommy has gone back with Maria, and now it’s Joel that’s by her side. “Want to open it, or do I?”

Ellie smiles, “I want to do it.”

She grabs the key, and she walks up the steps to reach the door. When she inserts the keys and twists it she can hear the sound of it unlocking. She opens the door, the house looks almost the same, except this time it’s clean and free of dust. And the light coming through the windows makes it look lived in instead of making it seem creepy like last time she was in the house.

Home. That’s what Joel called it, right?

“Tommy said there’s still some fixes to make in the house, but I think I can manage them.”

“Oh, right— The Contractor.” Ellie laughs as she walks inside the house behind Joel. She hadn’t even thought about Joel’s job before the outbreak lately. She’d been so busy with being blank and gone that she hadn’t made any jokes about that. About anything, really.

The man walks up to the living room and lets his backpack down on the coffee table. Ellie would have probably done the same if she still had a backpack. Joel sighs as he falls into the couch, Ellie chuckles at him for groaning as his back adjusts to the new position and cracks so loud she can hear it.

“Don’t laugh,”

“I can if I want to.” She rests her weight on one foot and crosses her arms. She can’t stop thinking she must look like him right now, she even does his mannerisms too.

He opens his eyes and looks at her, then he yawns a yawn so loud Ellie can bet the people from the dining hall hear him too. “Just come here, sit down a little.” He pats the seat next to him.

She does, and sitting on a couch has never felt better. It’s the first time she’s sat in something that isn’t completely flat and hard since the car. It’s bouncy, even when it’s old. It’s actually very comfortable if she thinks about it, and not only to her comfort deprived body, but in general.

Now it’s her turn to yawn, and it’s not as loud, but Joel definitely thinks it’s hilarious. As Ellie rests her back on the couch, she feels Joel’s arm wrapping around her shoulders and pulling her into his chest.

“Sleepy?” he asks,

“Tired, but I’m fine.” She tries to argue, because she won’t fall asleep, they have a Boggle game to learn. And it’s gonna take a while till they learn the rules, but she knows she will beat Joel.

“It’s alright, I’m sleepy too.” Joel just snuggles her up closer to him as he shuffles to be more comfortable around her too. He’s falling asleep, and she wants to say something about it, to make fun of him but she closes her eyes instead.

Ellie is suddenly too tired to notice the position in which she’s at, in Joel’s arms. She just instinctively wraps her arms around his torso and looks to feel the scar in his abdomen. Even through the clothes she can feel it. It’s a thick scar, due to bad care of the wound, but at least Ellie can call it as such now. Having to literally stitch it closed, she actually feels proud of the texture on his skin.

She doesn’t pay mind to the fact that she is in Joel’s arms, and that he is hugging her as they both fall asleep in the comfort of their own home. That they both have, and it’s theirs. Only theirs.

She’s too comfortable to listen to Tommy come back later in the day with the bags of groceries and some prepared meals. The man only walks in after having no answer and smiles as he sees them both fast asleep in the living room. He leaves the bags in the kitchen table and then leaves.

Ellie doesn’t know when this happens, only she wakes up hours later, still curled up against Joel, and she freaks out for a second, then she realizes Joel is already awake, and he’s smiling at her. She feels all mushy inside, knowing he’s not pulling her away anymore. Instead, he passes a hand through her back in relaxing motions, and those soft strokes make her go back to sleep in a matter of seconds.

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