Archive of Our Own ^beta

If she had joked two days ago that eventually he would miss her incessant chatter and seemingly endless well of terrible puns, he would have shaken his head and rolled his eyes in a decidedly ‘ never gonna happen ’ fashion. But today he was eating those nonexistent words.

They were halfway through their second long day of walking after leaving Kansas City and the kid was still quiet. Too quiet. It had been a welcome reprieve in the immediate aftermath, when talking felt like a betrayal. But now there was an eeriness that seeped into the silence spreading between them and each step they took together felt farther and farther apart.

And - more irritatingly - it felt wrong.

It shouldn’t feel wrong. Silence, survival, came as naturally to him as breathing these days. That’s all there really was; survival. And he’d fucked up and she’d seen it, felt it. He couldn’t blame her for taking a step back, for relying on herself a bit more than him these past few days.

That instinct to fix - to smooth the rough waters between them was strong.

But she was just cargo. Cargo didn’t need to be coddled or comforted, cargo needed to be moved, to keep going, consequences be damned. Physically she was fine. Emotionally? Not part of his job. He stamped out that instinct with reason; they were only together for now anyway. So, if she hated him now, all the better actually.

The midday sun beat down on them and cast heat ripples across the horizon. Some echo of a long gone joke about frying an egg on the pavement cropped up between his thoughts. It had been a cringeworthy staple in the unbearable heat of Texas summers. He ignored the quiet idea that it was just the kind of joke Ellie would love.

Logic dictated that these temperatures in northern Kansas weren’t as severe as those summers Before. But his old bones had spent too many years in Boston winters to remember.

He swiped beading sweat from his temple. No shade in close proximity. They would have to be lucky not to get heat stroke at this rate - a thoroughly underwhelming way to go in the apocalypse.

He checked back on his lagging cargo. Her gaze was fixed on the ground, mouth set in the same scowl she’d had since they left. Rosy flush colored her cheeks and sweat beaded across her brow. A barely detectable limp on her right side hitched with each step.

“You alright?” he called back.

His voice cracked over the question, dry from disuse and heat. It felt strange to break the silence after so long.

“Fine,” she grunted.

It was an incredible impression of his own monosyllabic communication style and if he were a better person he would have pulled Will Livingston out and completed the role reversal until that smile shined as bright as the damn sun.

But he didn’t.

~~~

The limp was worse the next day. So was the attitude.

He started them early, before the sun was really up, so they could rest during the peak heat. He’d expected the early wake up call would get some kind of hostile response. A muttered ‘fuck off’ or an incoherent groan at the very least. She hadn’t made a sound. Unless he counted the rough noise of her aggressive packing and heavy steps.

He didn’t.

They’d only been going like this for a few days and it was already wearing on him. He couldn’t remember the last time he hadn’t woken up tired. The exhaustion set in somewhere between Texas and Boston and never really left. Always moving. Always surviving. Never really living. It was a monotonous reality that he’d grown used to a long time ago. But he was getting too old for it now, too tired to keep it up. Judging by the way she stopped looking at him, she knew that now too.

Maybe when he found Tommy again, when he passed her off to be someone else’s responsibility, maybe then he could rest.

He only made it to early afternoon before the heat and pain in his knee made them stop.

Refilling their water supply was necessary but also served as a conveniently timed excuse. It felt wrong to waste daylight in the shade of the small copse by the river, especially when they were looking at walking through winter if they didn’t make good enough time. But they had to survive this late summer heat if they were even going to make it to winter.

Ellie immediately dropped onto a large, shaded rock to stare at the rush of water. Joel passed her fresh water and a bundle of jerky. All he had to offer. She took both without comment. She hadn’t spoken since the single word yesterday afternoon.

The silence chafed at him, the reminder of that hotel room clinging to the air like sour milk.

If he could focus hard enough on the heat and the sun glare off the water and the birdsong in the distance, he could pretend for a moment that the world hadn’t gone to hell on one late September evening.

If he could ignore the darker than dirt stains in the creases of his hands and the two shadows that had followed them and the way she still wasn’t looking at him, he could pretend the grave he dug hadn’t brought back memories of the first one.

If he could look at the blue of the sky instead of the crimson coating his memories then for a moment he could pretend he wasn’t such a goddamned failure.

If only he could.

When he stood to set them off again, she jumped up without a word. Avoiding even directional instruction if she could help it. Her limp was worse on those first few steps and he eyed her right foot.

“You okay?”

“Never been better,” she hissed.

She fought and failed to hide the limp.

“You roll your ankle?” he asked.

“Nope.”

“Let me see it.”

“It’s fine.”

“Ellie.” He reached for her arm as she passed.

She shrugged away and tripped. “ Fuck . I said it’s fine! ”

She stomped off, a flash of red smeared her heel.

“Shit, kid, then why’s your foot bleeding?” he snapped at her back.

“I don’t know-” she spun, arms swinging wide “-maybe because some asshole crashed our truck and now we have to walk three hundred miles everyday!”

“We ain’t walked anywhere near three hundred miles yet.”

“Then get your old ass moving! ”

He bit down on another angry retort, having already toed the line of petulant teenager himself.

She certainly knew how to pick the sharpest words when she wanted to. That particular failure, and all the subsequent consequences were still chafing at him. The crash, losing their supplies, the kid she had to shoot, Sam, Henry. All of them, his fault. If only they had just turned down a different street then maybe…

He shook his head.

That’s not how this world worked. And now she knew it. Had learned the hard way because of him. Of course she hated him. Of course she didn’t want his help. Because now she knew what he had always known; he was too old and too slow, his help would always be too little, too late.

~~~

Their pace started to decline as early evening faded into dusk and the temperature dropped with mocking speed. The hissed breaths that trailed behind him increased in frequency until they turned into swearing.

“Ah, fuck,” she said, “fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“Time to let me look at it,” he said, trying to keep the note of annoyance out of his voice.

“It’s fine.”

“Yeah.” Impatience sharpened his words. “Looks it.”

“I’m still fucking walking, aren’t I?” She threw the words wild, without looking as she stomped past him.

“Maybe for now but you leave it like that and it’ll get worse.” His voice grew louder as his irritation got the better of him. “You’re not immune to all infections and I sure as hell ain’t carrying your ass across Wyoming because you’re too damn stubborn to wrap a blister!”

“Good thing we’re still in fucking Kansas!”

“And if you don’t want me to leave you in fucking Kansas you’ll turn around and let me look at your damn foot!”

It came out sharper than he intended but she was ignoring the ‘do what I say, when I say it’ rule and it had gone on long enough. Pissed at him was fine, but stupidly stubborn was unacceptable.

She stopped abruptly and he half expected her to wheel around and tell him where she’d like to put her foot. Instead she dropped to the ground right where she stood and pulled her shoe off. A small wave of relief rippled through him as he slung his pack off and knelt down, ignoring the protest from his knees.

Her expression pinched with discomfort when she peeled her sock back. The top of the elastic was stained pink. She leaned back on her hands and turned pointedly away, her face still set in a scowl, brows knit together.

It was more than a blister.

The back of her heel was rubbed so raw that it was slowly seeping blood. The quip about an infection potentially crippling her foot had been a reach at the time but now he was kicking himself. They had a lot of walking ahead of them and some of it was certain to be running.

He couldn’t even bring himself to chastise her for letting it get this bad, because he shouldn’t have let it get this bad. He should have forced the issue sooner, when he’d first noticed. But he’d let it fester in the silence between them, silently dissecting the shift in her demeanor rather than being objective.

Cargo wasn’t afforded time or space. Cargo wasn’t afforded the luxury of stubbornness. She was cargo, not a companion - cargo . He damn well needed to remember that or he was going to get both of them killed.

He dug the small stash of first aid supplies out of his pack. Cargo. Fix it and move on. The stark contrast between the mostly-white gauze and his hands caught him for a moment. Despite multiple attempts to wash it away in the river, blood and dirt still lingered beneath his nails. Some things just couldn’t be washed away.

He heard a sharp inhale while he cleaned the raw area. Her foot twitched as he covered the wound in a thin layer of gauze and he wondered briefly if she was ticklish. He pushed the thought away after imagining the inevitable flail that would send her heel straight into his nose. Either that or she would just opt to stab him with her switchblade. Although, the latter might actually improve her current mood.

“That should do it,” he said as he released her foot. “Let me know if it’s still rubbing.”

She grunted, already pulling her sock and shoe back on.

No quips. No questions.

No Ellie.

Spurred by the compulsion to fill the silence with something, he said, “We’ll find some better shoes.”

The dry grass snapped beneath her feet as she hopped up and started off again; hissing notably reduced. Still no acknowledgement. His jaw clenched. Cargo. He didn’t need acknowledgement from cargo.

It drove a wedge of discomfort between his ribs, all this silence. He begged for it in the beginning, shutting down every attempt she made to carry a conversation. And now it mocked him. It mocked him with a twisting feeling in his gut that he refused to acknowledge was familiar. An instinct he couldn’t use because he didn’t possess it anymore.

That’s what he told himself, even as it pulled the words out of him.

“You know why you got such a bad blister?” he asked, repacking his bag.

“Because my shoes are shit,” she called over her shoulder.

The corner of his mouth ticked up. “Because you’re a sensitive sole.”

She stopped and turned back, her scowl twitched and slowly lifted.

“Dude.”

He stood and slung his pack back on.

“Bad?”

“So bad. Fucking terrible,” she said through a laugh. “The blister isn’t even on the sole of my foot.”

“Then why are you laughing?”

“Pity,” she said with a shrug. “This is what pity laughing sounds like.”

He could tell the smile didn’t quite reach her eyes, not the way it did before the hotel. Maybe it was a pity laugh, but it sounded damn good compared to the hollow echo of the last few days. It was the closest thing he’d seen to her being herself again and he’d take what he could get.

~~~

The quiet between them returned the following day, and by mid-afternoon it had shifted. The blister pun lightened things for a brief time but she still wasn’t herself. The edge of her silence had dulled into something else. Something that felt too much like apathy or resignation. Ellie was either snapping teeth or cheshire smiles. She warmed with her fire or set people ablaze. She was always something but now she was nothing. No smirk, no swearing, no spark. Just silence.

Joel had gone twenty years without worrying about anything other than survival. Silence was better, he tried to tell himself, silence meant less distraction. Transportation. That was the job. Managing attitude or enthusiasm didn’t fall under transportation. As if he might actually believe it.

He glanced back when the lagging footsteps halted. She was leaning heavily against a tree, chest swelling with labored breaths. He’d already slowed their pace earlier when she first started lagging farther back than he liked.

“You alright?”

She lifted a middle finger in response.

The corner of his mouth twitched. “Then quit hugging trees and keep up.”

Part of him was poised, waiting for a smart ass remark about leaning on trees rather than hugging them. But she pushed off and kept walking without a word. Her face pinched again with discomfort. That expectant part of him was left hanging.

She picked her pace up a bit and his eyes tracked her gait.

“Your foot bothering you again?”

“Yeah,” she scoffed, “fucking blisters have taken my breath away.”

There was a little glimpse of her that had his eyes rolling reflexively.

“Something other than your foot bothering you?”

“I’m fine.” She waved a dismissive hand. “Still walking and everything.”

“Barely. And I can see you’re flushed from here.”

“Well we have been walking all day. You’re pretty flushed too,” she said.

If he didn’t know any better, he’d think she was just being a little shit. But after days of silence it was a glaring smoke screen.

“Are you sure you’re-”

“We gonna chit chat all day, old man, or keep fucking going?”

His fist tightened on the rifle strap. Fine. The limp was gone and nothing else looked off other than her pace. Must just be the heat catching up to her. Cooler temperatures today were a godsend but they weren’t cool enough to erase the exhaustion of the past few days. He kept walking.

She still wasn’t looking at him. Of course she wasn’t. Hell, he hadn’t been able to look at himself in two decades. Had she realized yet that they were doomed from the start? That all he was, all he would ever be, was that broken shell of a man Tommy had dragged out of Texas? One piece but never whole again.

The last time she’d looked at him she was a shaking mess on the floor. His name was a broken plea for help that went unanswered. His fault. His failure.

For a moment he might have acted on instinct, might have pulled her into him and offered something of the comfort she’d desperately needed. But then Henry had sent them reeling again and Joel was back in that damn field, his ear ringing and his world ending. He’d been trying to escape it for twenty years now but he always ended up back in that damn field.

Of course she was quiet now, disengaged. She knew now how woefully inadequate he was. She must be counting down the days until she never had to see his sorry ass again.

~~~

“I can see every time you look back here, asshole, fucking stop it,” she said.

He shook his head. He definitely hadn’t been looking over his shoulder more than usual. And if he had been, it was just to scan for threats.

“If you were keeping up I wouldn’t have to look back,” he said, looking pointedly back for emphasis.

The loud scrape of a shoe against the ground met his ear, with enough force to send stray bits of gravel rolling past his feet.

Obnoxious brat.

Her lagging steps slowed to a halt. He tilted his good ear back, knowing a set up when he heard one.

“Still fine?”

He was anticipating a snarky, swear laden response despite not actually looking back to check on her. But all he heard was a muffled, two beat thud.

He twisted, nearly missing a step. For a heartbeat he didn’t see her at all, just that damn field. Again. Then he was rushing over to where she had collapsed, face down in the dirt.

“Ellie?! Hey, Ellie?!” His knee cracked against the dry ground as he rolled her over. “Hey, kid, you hear me?”

She groaned and her eyes fluttered briefly before falling closed again. Her face was pale beneath the flush in her cheeks, despite the milder temperatures.

Her small frame shuddered and for one brief, terrifying moment he thought her immunity must have run out and she was finally turning. His chest tightened and Tess’ words echoed through his mind: Our luck had to run out sometime.

Another field, another failure.

Oh god, he couldn’t-

His chest was too tight to draw breath as he pulled the sleeve of her shirt up in a panic, certain to find it raw and red and spreading. But it was still smooth, unchanged.

He scanned for signs of any other infection spot. It had been days since they’d been near any, but maybe it was delayed somehow. Resistant, not immune. One bite too many. 

There was nothing. A cut across her palm, scuffed from the fall, and a graze across her chin. Just normal abraded skin. Benign childhood scrapes. A shaky breath rattled from his lungs.

Infected didn’t pass out before they turned. He clung to that fact like a life raft while his mind kept spinning for other answers. Even if she wasn’t turning, that didn’t mean she was safe. Flushed with whole body chills and passed out in the dirt didn’t bode well when all they had was a scavenged first aid kit.

Another, almost equally terrifying thought gripped him. He couldn’t move. He’d pushed her too hard. She’d been lagging and instead of making her rest he’d just kept pushing. And now it was already too late.

And he was trapped, on his knees, in the dark, another lifetime superimposed itself. Living that moment a thousand times over. Failing again. Failing forever. Not one body but two. The sickening thud as the second hit the ground. Two graves. No Tommy to stop him this time.

She groaned and it pulled him out of his head.

“Ellie.” He shook her shoulders firmly but gently. “C’mon, kid. You gotta give me something here. Wake up.”

Her eyes fluttered open, unfocused and glassy toward the sky. Her brows scrunched.

“Oh… I’m on the ground now. I bet that’s what teleporting would feel like.” Her eyes slid back into focus and found him, looking right at him for once. “Hey, Joel.”

“Hell, Ellie.” He couldn’t help the half laugh of relief that came out with it. Conscious didn’t mean she was in the clear but it was a hell of a lot better than unconscious. “You said you were fine.”

“Yeah.” She curled onto her side and pulled her knees up with a grimace of pain. “I lied.”

“I gathered. Your stomach hurt?”

She stared at his knee on the ground and nodded.

Maybe not heat stroke after all, maybe just exhaustion. But maybe -

The urgency in his heart rate spiked again. “How long?”

She pressed her face toward the ground. Pain creased her eyebrows and one arm slung across her stomach. Her mouth twitched to one side.

“Few days?”

“A few days?” It was harsher than he intended, sharpened by impatience and something else he refused to acknowledge. “Where?”

She gestured vaguely at her stomach.

“Right side or left?” he asked.

“Both?” she said. “What does that matter?”

Both. Both was good. The racing cadence of his heart slowed down a clip with another fatal possibility ruled out. But even with the worst case scenarios dismissed, there were so many relatively minor things that became a lot less minor without access to the right treatment.

“Shit, this is embarrassing.” She pushed herself up to a seat, scooting back at the same time.

“Embarrassing?” He scanned. cataloging the spill of her hair, the dirt on her cheek, and the tension in her body. Even in a pile on the ground, she still wasn’t taking this seriously. “It’s stupid is what it is. You should have told me you were feeling bad.”

“Why, so you could yell more? Pass. ”

“So we could stop it from getting worse.”

“What’re you gonna do, asshole, shoot it out of me?”

“You’d rather die of your own stubbornness?”

“People don’t die of period cramps, Joel.”

He blinked, eyes tracking to the one arm still slung across her stomach. He stood and turned away. Tangled butterfly sheets. An electric heating pad. Tylenol for the pain. Dormant memories, echoing forward again. And a feeling of helplessness that was unparalleled at the time.

That feeling was nothing compared to what he’d felt later. What he still felt now.

He pushed it aside. Not helpful.

He dragged a calloused hand over his face as the tension slowly seeped from him, leaving him drained but exceedingly light. 

“Shit, do they?” a note of panic slipped into her voice.

He could have laughed. He nearly did.

“No.”

She wasn’t dying in any of the three or more ways he’d just imagined, which meant she’d nearly given him a heart attack for no reason.

“Just-” He faced her again and it was an effort to keep the edge out of his voice. “Tell me before you pass out next time.”

“Didn’t know it would happen this time,” she grumbled.

“Well, now you do.”

She gave a half hearted salute.

He scanned the horizon. They couldn’t just sit here for hours, let alone a camp for the night; too exposed. He weighed their options, which was honestly only one.

“You think you can keep going? Just for a bit - til we get out of the open.”

“Yeah.”

The thinness of her voice wasn’t convincing but she moved to stand. He offered a hand, expecting it’d be ignored, and ended up doing most of the work to pull her up. She swayed, eyes dropping closed, breathing measured. Her grip on his hand tightened.

“Easy.” He steadied her. “Dizzy?”

“Just… up to fast.”

She relinquished her grip and started walking. Within two steps she was hunched forward again.

“Ellie.”

“I’m fine- ” Her words faded into a hiss and her hands went to her knees. She let out a whimper of pain. “Shit, Joel, I don’t think I can-”

It pulled at some long dormant part of him, a part he thought had died a long time ago.

“Here.” He swiveled his pack around to his chest and dropped to his good knee. “Climb on.”

“Dude, no-”

“Ellie, we are not camping out here in the open. Get on.”

She sighed but didn’t argue further. Her arms wrapped around his neck and a knee tucked into each side. He hauled them up and adjusted his grip on her legs. The additional weight settled into his joints, most notably, that knee. He probably wouldn’t last longer than an hour or so.

“Don’t strangle me,” he grunted.

Her only response was to adjust her grip away from his throat. Hands clasped to each other, rather than him. The looming threat of silence settling in between them again was what really threatened to strangle him.

“What, no old man jokes?” The question was out of his mouth before he could consider what it meant to egg her on. A wellness check on the cargo from time to time was reasonable, this cargo just happened to need a different sort of wellness check.

When she still didn’t respond, he craned his neck to look back. She disappeared from his periphery, turned over his other shoulder. It stung. And the realization that it stung, also stung.

“The least you could do is grunt.”

She pressed her forehead against the back of his neck. Her measured breaths passed through his flannel.

“Ellie, what-”

“I’m sorry.”

Her voice was muffled and thin and small and nothing like Ellie. It almost made him stop. His heart might have.

“It’s-” The words were thick in his throat. Cargo, he reminded himself, even as it didn’t quite ring true. “-it’s not your fault.”

Her breathing hitched and he thought she might say something else. As if she had something more to atone for. The same words she’d scrawled across that damn tablet. Haunting her the same way they haunted him.

Her arms tightened. His mouth dropped open, words poised to spill.

“If I’d known this was an option, I would have passed out sooner.” Her voice was still muffled but there was a hint of laughter.

He swallowed the words, taking the out she offered. He owed her those words, that and much more for how badly he’d failed. But words were never his strong suit anyway.

“This is a limited time offer, kid. I’ll be a pumpkin again at midnight.”

“A pumpkin?” Her face lifted, chin resting at the back of his neck instead. “Why the fuck would you be a pumpkin?”

“You never read Cinderella?”

“Oh, yeah, a hundred times.”

He scoffed. “Well, don’t be expecting this again tomorrow.”

“Cause you’re too old for this shit?”

“As long as you got two good legs, you’ll use them,” he said.

“Nothing’s wrong with them now.” She squeezed his sides.

“What’s that? You can suddenly walk again?”

He knew the cramps weren’t gone just based on the occasional hitch in her breath. And it must have been bad for her to have collapsed the way she did. Silently suffering through it, trying to tough it out without complaining. Without asking for help.

Of course she didn’t ask for help, he had nothing to offer her.

“You need a break already, grandpa?” she asked around a laugh.

He breathed a laugh that he told himself was to humor her. He did need a break but not in the way she meant. And he’d never admit it anyway. Joel wasn’t getting any younger but carrying Ellie for a bit was nothing compared to the past two decades. And he found that while he had her weight directly on his back, the rest of it wasn’t quite so heavy for once.

“So much for not carrying me across Wyoming,” she quipped.

“We’re in Nebraska.” Maybe.

“What happened to Kansas?” Her head lifted and her hair whipped the back of his neck as she looked around, as if she might see Kansas behind them.

“It’s still there.”

“Hardy-har.”

“You stomped across the border sometime yesterday.” When we weren’t on speaking terms, he finished for himself.

She thumped a small fist against his collar bone. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Easy,” he chided. “I look like a tour guide to you?”

“More like a dinosaur.”

“Careful or this dinosaur just might drop you.” He pretended to let her legs down for a second and she squeaked out a laugh.

“Better fucking not.”

He turned, angling deeper into the woods along what might have been a forest road before the outbreak.

Her grip tensed, tiny fingers curled into his shirt. “I’m gonna die,” she groaned.

He let out something between a scoff and a laugh. “No, you’re not.”

“It would be my luck, you know. Surviving an infected bite just to die of cramps.”

“Stop being so dramatic, you’ll be fine.”

“You are not feeling what I am feeling, man.”

He’d rather if he was. He didn’t linger with the thought long enough to contemplate the why behind it.

“Good thing. You’d look real funny carrying me like this.”

“ You’d look funny being carried. I’d look like a badass.”

He hummed something like agreement.

“Hey, what did you think was wrong?” she asked.

The first thing his mind jumped to was her silence. The way she’d been avoiding him since they left KC. What did he think was wrong? Him. The way he’d ruined everything, just like he always did. Forget smuggler, he was poison. A wake of destruction trailed out behind him.

Then the context caught up with his thoughts.

“Figured you had heat stroke, or your appendix burst.”

“What’s an appendix?”

“Extra organ,” he grunted. “Doesn’t do anything but cause problems.”

She scoffed. “Extra organ? C’mon, man, just admit you don’t know.”

He shook his head. “Maybe it does something but it ain’t nothing you can’t live without.”

“That’s so… weird,” she said. “It just, like, floats around until it explodes inside you? Why?”

“Don’t think it’s floating but, yeah, something like that. They’d try to take it out before that happens.”

“What happens if they can’t take it out?”

“Nothing good.”

She didn’t ask what that meant.

~~~

He walked longer than he’d planned, following the maybe-forest road, naively hoping to find something like a hunting cabin. May as well be looking for gold at the end of a rainbow. Ellie’s breathing had slipped into the steady cadence of sleep about ten minutes ago, though her grip didn’t slacken so he wasn’t sure.

It was still early evening but the shadows were stretched long across the ground and the extra weight really was wearing on him now. He was just beginning to resign them to another night sleeping on the ground when they cleared a line of trees and a small cabin came into view. 

There wasn’t much surrounding the structure other than a half fallen fence that wrapped partially around the perimeter of the small clearing. No lights, no smoke from the chimney stack. The front door didn’t even look like it had been broken in. A small wind chime still hung from the roof of the porch. A good sign that no one had been here, possibly since before the outbreak. Though it was certainly no guarantee.

Too good to be true was his first thought. But too tempting not to at least check it out.

He let Ellie’s feet slide to the ground. Her arms trailed over her shoulders and down his back, clutching for support as she found her footing again. He shucked his pack down to her feet.

“You good?”

He brushed a piece of dry grass that clung to her hair.

“Mhmm,” she hummed.

Definitely dozed off for at least a bit. He cast around for any sound or sign of movement that wasn’t them.

“Stay here.”

Her grip fisted at his sleeve. “Where are you going?”

“To clear our room for the night.”

“Oh.” Her grip relaxed.

“I’ll be quick. If you feel like you’re gonna pass out again-”

“Sit down first. Got it.” Her own gaze swept the small cabin, steering clear of him.

Back to this tug-of-war they were doing. The oscillation between ease and tension, tension and ease, it was wearing on him. But it would have to wait.

Joel walked a circuit of the perimeter twice, trying to assess how objectively good this place was for the night. If they weren’t forced to hole up here, would it seem as appealing as it did now? Sturdy, small, only two main entry points. Abandoned. There wasn’t much else he could ask for at this point.

After hearing nothing but the wind chime, he moved inside. The door swung free to a single room interior that appeared untouched by anything but time. A small kitchenette was tucked up on one side, complete with a little wood burning stove. Across the opposite side of the room was a single bed, still made up with a plaid quilt. Directly to the right of the door there was a display of old pamphlets on a small table.

A ranger station, he realized.

“C’mon,” he said when he returned to a partially upright Ellie. “We’ll stay here for the night.”

“Are you sure?” she asked.

He slung his pack up again and steered her by the shoulders.

“It’s still light out,” she still protested.

“You gonna report the weather next?”

“Fucking hot,” she said. “Which means we should be going while it’s not.”

“Not today,” he said. “Hopefully tomorrow.”

“I can keep-”

“No.”

It was a small win but a win nonetheless. Actually finding a defensible place for them to spend the night. It even had a bed for her. Pure stroke of good luck, but he would take it.

Once he steered her inside, he directed her toward the bed. “Lay down. I’ll get some food going in a bit.”

She didn’t protest. Dropped her bag and then herself onto the bed with stiff movements. Her cheeks were still flushed and those stray curls that always managed to wiggle loose from her pony were sweat slicked to her forehead. She stared at the ceiling briefly before curling onto her side and closing her eyes for a bit longer than a standard blink. Her body shivered.

“Nebraska?” she said, like the word was foreign to her. “Is that near Alaska?”

“Not even close.”

“How far is Alaska?”

“Far,” he grunted.

Joel moved through the kitchenette first and practically struck apocalypse gold when he found an emergency supply stash in a footlocker at the bottom of the pantry cabinet. It wasn’t much but there were enough cans to keep them fed for a while, a stack of bottled water and a first aid kit. A true stroke of luck that had him glancing back to the door as if an infected would break it down to set the balance back. None came.

He passed a water to Ellie with a grunted direction to drink and rifled through the kit. Nothing but bandages, antiseptic, and other rudimentary supplies. Useful but nothing to help their current predicament specifically.

“Joel?”

“Yeah.” He braced himself for a terrible pun.

“Are you sure it’s not my appendix?”

His brow furrowed. “You said it ain’t that kinda pain.”

“I’ve never had an appendix burst before. How would I know?” The words spilled out in a rush.

“Appendicitis is sharp, only on your right side, and a bit higher,” he said. “I think.”

She pressed up to an elbow. “You think? ”

He snapped the kit closed. “Christ, Ellie, I’m not a doctor. This ain’t the first time you’ve had cramps, right? Is it the same pain or not?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You guess? ”

“Well, it’s worse than before.”

He didn’t miss the note of genuine fear that lined her words. His chest didn’t like that.

Worse could mean a fibroid or a cyst. Endometriosis. She was pale, clammy skin sticky with sweat, and she kept shivering like she had a low grade fever. Worse could mean a lot of things, or it could just mean worse. And he had no way of figuring it out, except to wait.

“The same but worse or different and worse?” he asked.

She paused, considering. “The same.”

He nodded. “Then it’s not your appendix.”

“How do you know?”

Fear. Fear he needed to assuage, cargo or not.

How did he know? A memory echoed through, as if summoned: It’s different , dad -

“As you love to point out, I’ve been around forever .”

Her lips twitched like she was fighting back a smile.

He rose from where he knelt next to the footlocker, drawing a deep breath in through his nose at the pain in his knee. He’d be paying for all this walking for a while. He just hoped they would find Tommy first. He crossed to the front door.

“Joel, wait.” She sat up higher, legs tensed up like she might run after him if he didn’t stop. “Where’re you going?”

“To get some firewood. Unless you want cold beans for dinner.”

He didn’t wait to see her only half relax back onto the bed.

~~~

When he returned, admittedly gone longer than he’d planned, he caught her coming out the front door. She jumped back.

“What are you doing out of bed?” he said, perhaps sharper than necessary.

“Making sure you didn’t collapse collecting firewood,” she snapped back. “You were taking too long.”

A derisive huff was his only response.

She sunk back onto the bed as he opened the stove door and started arranging a pile of kindling. Once the fire was burning well, he arranged their canned dinners close enough to soak in some of the heat and dumped the little mound of rocks he’d collected in the cooking basket suspended over the flames.

“Are you burning rocks?”

He glanced back at her. “Rocks don’t burn.” As if that answered her question.

She hummed her disagreement. “How far to Tommy’s?”

“Far.” Too far, was the full answer.

“As far as Alaska?”

“No.” Thank god.

The silence fell thickly between them again. The stilted conversation took too much effort after the long day. He was stiff, drained, like he might actually sleep an entire night without supplements for once. He glanced her way, wondering briefly if she could tell how tired he was.

“Would you stop looking at me like that,” she said.

He blinked, not entirely aware of exactly how he’d been staring. “Like what?”

She hadn’t even looked at him in four days, how the hell would she even know whether he was looking at her some kind of way? Even now her gaze was on the floor instead of him.

“Like you wish you’d left me in Kansas.”

She may as well have kicked his feet out from under him with that. “I don’t-”

“You never wanted to take me in the first place.”

His jaw set. “I thought we settled this.”

“You’ve been trying to pass me off the whole time.”

He was so dumbfounded by this conversation pivot all he could think to say was, “That was always the job.”

“You’re such an asshole.”

“And you’re a little shit. What the hell is this?” He gestured between them.

“If you’re gonna leave me then just fucking do it already.”

It came out with a flash of anger. It wasn’t always visible but she carried so much of it. Hidden beneath her pestering questions and terrible puns, it boiled just beneath the surface. He recognized it, a sort of reflection of his own. That was how he saw it for the grief it really was.

If you’re gonna leave me-

That’s exactly what he was planning to do, what he’d been trying to do since Tess convinced him to take this pointless job. Pass her to the fireflies. Pass her to Bill and Frank. Pass her to Tommy. That was always the plan for them. Together for now, not forever. Just carrying out the plan. Keeping his promise to Tess. He couldn’t abandon what didn’t belong to him.

That was always the plan. But - but she was looking at him like she was afraid he might actually walk out the door and just never come back. He wouldn’t admit how much that idea hurt him too. Wouldn’t admit, even to himself, that it was already too late to stick to that part of the plan. Probably had been for awhile now.

He wouldn’t.

He couldn’t.

“I ain’t leaving.”

Her gaze swept up, lingered on him for a moment before shifting away. “Not yet.”

He bit down with a shake of his head. It wasn’t worth arguing just because she wanted to argue. He grabbed her can of Chef Boyardee and dropped it roughly on the bedside table before returning to his own by the stove. Suddenly the long expired pasta wasn’t as appetizing as it normally was. He picked at his can between stoking the fire.

“It didn’t work.” Her voice was small and barely carried across the room. If he’d been facing the other way he wouldn’t have heard.

“What didn’t?”

Half propped on the flattened pillow, she was picking at the contents of her own can. The contrast to her normally feral manners was stark.

“My blood.”

His eyes slid over, one brow lifted. Hers were still downcast, dim in the waning light.

“I tried…” She was absently stroking the hand holding the can. “With Sam. But it didn’t…”

He pieced together the fragments with the cut on her hand. She tried to use her blood to save him and it didn’t work. And now she was blaming herself. Four days of brooding silence suddenly made a lot more sense.

Christ . Like a damn mirror.

“That’s not your fault,” he said.

“Sure fucking feels like it.”

“Nothing more you could have done.”

“It was supposed to…” The words died over a hitch in her breath. “That was the whole point.”

That’s what Tess died for , he thought she might add.

Before he could argue, she continued, “All the fireflies want is my blood and it doesn’t even work.”

“Hate to break this to you, kid, but you don’t know jack shit about making a vaccine or a cure.”

“Oh, and you do, Doctor Joel?”

His eyes rolled at the smartass emphasis she drove into those last two words. “I know it’s more complicated than smearing your blood on an open wound.”

“Really?” Her voice was skeptical but a glint of hope lit her eyes.

He nodded. “Fighting an infection is always ten times harder than getting one. The science is… It’s complicated.”

She looked hopeful but not convinced. He had never wished he knew more about how vaccines worked.

“I’m sure the fireflies still have lots of stuff to look into. Blood, antibodies, DNA, spinal fluid, tissue biopsy, bone marrow, stem cells-”

She snorted. “Okay, now you’re just making shit up.”

He stretched out his bad knee with a grimace. “Those are all real things.”

The distinct tone of the ‘uh-huh’ she gave made her doubt perfectly clear.

He stoked the fire and added another small log.

“Even if the fireflies still want me…” she hesitated, worrying her bottom lip. “You don’t need me to get to Tommy.”

You could just leave me, she left in the silence.

She wasn’t wrong. They’d long past the point where he’d be getting anything in return for carting her along. But that didn’t mean he would just abandon her.

He sighed, scrubbed a hand over his face. “I told you, I ain’t leaving.”

“You said you would yesterday.”

The words were quick and quiet and it took a moment to remember. But when he did, they hit like a bullet: If you don’t want me to leave you in fucking Kansas… He hadn’t meant it, not really. There was a time when he would have gladly left her behind. Even now if he had the opportunity to leave her with someone else, someone more capable than himself, then he would take it. But leaving her alone in the middle of nowhere? That was never going to happen.

He should apologize. Tell her he didn’t mean it. That he only said it because he didn’t know how else to get her stubborn ass to stop stomping around and let him help her. I’m sorry. It was two words. He could manage two words.

But they were heavier than just that one off hand comment.

“I-” How much were words really worth anyway. “You were being a brat.”

She made a small squawk of disbelief. “Only cause you were being a dick first.”

He shook his head but a smile tugged at his lips. He pulled the basket off the fire and dumped the rocks over an old torn shirt.

“What’s that for?” she asked, sitting up a bit.

“You still hurting?”

“You still old as shit?”

“Walked right into that one, didn’t I?”

She made a face: yeah, you did.

He made one back: answer the damn question.

“It’s not so bad,” she said.

“Hmm, same way it wasn’t so bad earlier?” He held the small bundle out. “Here.”

“Not as bad as it was.” She blinked at the bundle, squinting through the low illumination of the firelight.

“They’re warm. Should help.” He gestured to her stomach.

Her eyebrows rose and her lips formed an ‘oh.’ She took the bundle and settled it over her lower abdomen.

He blinked and it was Sarah, tangled up in her teal and purple sheets, fuzzy blue heating pad. The memory pulled on his heart in a way that only Sarah ever could. He blinked and it was Ellie again. That pull in his chest didn’t change.

He tucked the blanket up to her chin. Brushed a loose curl off her forehead. Her eyes closed as she leaned into the touch. She wasn’t as warm, fever already on its way out. Instinctively he drug his fingers back through her hair. Once. Twice.

He pulled his hand back like the touch burned and stepped away. “You should finish eating and get some sleep.”

Everything and nothing had changed. Twenty years and so much death separated him from that long dead version of himself and yet, there it was, coming alive in his chest again. No matter how hard he tried to smother it.

He felt her eyes trained on him as he settled himself across the room, rifle within easy reach as always. He watched her watching him; not avoiding the sight of him at all costs anymore. Maybe it was because she thought he couldn’t tell in the dark but maybe not. Like she believed in him again.

“Hey, Joel?”

The glint was back, nearly glowing in the darkness. He knew a set up when he saw one.

“Yeah?” he asked over a sigh.

She was already cracking up.

“This rocks.”

He huffed a laugh. “Stupid.”

“You’re laughing!”

“Pity laughing,” he said, even as his smile grew.

She was cargo, alright. Precious cargo.