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“I have something you have to tell Ellie, but it has to be after you both leave.”
He narrows his eyes slightly, suspecting a trap. He’s wanted to leave since the very start, but this is the first time a Firefly has mentioned it, let alone the Queen Firefly herself.
“And what might that be?” He drawls with a deliberate air of unconcern, even as he registers potential ambush points in the room.
Marlene takes a breath before she looks him in the eye.
“That her immunity isn’t because her mother got bitten when she was giving birth to her.” The weight of Marlene’s words tells him this feels like a confession to her, but he can’t help but scoff.
“So what?” He asks. “How’d she get immune then? Put something in her mouth when she was a baby that she shouldn’t have?” He smiles slightly, a mean, hard thing, still grinding a particular ax on the subject and eager to take a swing. “Not that you would know that, of course.”
“We’re gonna have this fight again?” Marlene asks with a lift of an eyebrow. “Big bad Marlene dropped off itty bitty baby Ellie to be raised in an orphanage, and sweet, gentle Joel Miller,” each word drips with derision, “came along and saved her. A new daddy coming to the rescue.”
He flexes one hand, imagines how good it would feel for his fist to connect with her smug face.
But Marlene sporting a shiner–no matter how deserved–would make Ellie ask questions, and then continuing to fight would upset her.
And he won’t do that.
“Tell her yourself,” he tosses over his shoulder as he turns to leave, “if you’re so-”
“I can’t,” Marlene says, and there’s an actual edge of pain to her voice now. He’s mildly impressed. He didn’t know she was capable of it.
“And why’s that?” He asks, crossing his arms across his chest. “You scared of a 14 year ol-”
“Ellie’s immunity isn’t because her mother was bitten,” Marlene says again, and he stops short.
“What are you talking about?” He demands. “You said her mother was bitten while giving birth to her, and somehow,” he doesn’t bother to hide his lingering doubts on the point, no matter his argument, “that means she’s immune.”
“Ellie’s immunity is genetic,” Marlene says, and Joel sees the slightest crack in her veneer of self-control, usually so faultless. “It is from Anna. Just not the way we thought.”
“How do you know that?” He demands. “What? She just comes from a miracle line of magically immune people?”
“It’s one of the things they’ve been studying,” Marlene says. “We want to derive something like a vaccine from her immunity, but we also want to understand how it happened in the first place, and they-it-” She stops and looks away, gathering herself.
If he thought her capable of it, he might think she looks almost pained.
And then something dawns on him.
“You shot her mother,” he says. “Because she was infected. If she was immune-”
“I thought she was infected,” Marlene snaps, eyes flashing, and then she looks down, taking a deliberate breath. It’s more emotion that he’s actually seen from the woman before. “I-when we got there, she was holding a knife to her own throat to keep herself from changing. I thought that meant she could feel it happening. She had the marks on her from infection spreading, she was-” She cuts herself off, and Joel realizes she sounds like she’s asking for him to agree, whether she knows it or not.
He remains silent.
“She lasted so long,” Marlene says, and Joel feels like she might not even be talking to him specifically right now. “She…I’d never seen anyone last that long before, but she was holding Ellie. I thought it was-was ‘mom instincts’ or something, her fighting it to keep the baby safe.”
It’s an aching kind of thought. He’s seen a picture of Anna Williams by this point, one of the ones Marlene’s given Ellie in what he suspects is a reward for good behavior as a labrat. He knows her face, so similar to Ellie’s. He can picture it, that woman from the photo, probably shaky after giving birth the same way Sarah’s mother was, but holding a knife to her own throat with one hand to protect the tiny newborn she’s holding in the other. He thinks of that desperation, thinks of what it must have felt like to second guess every sensation, to wonder if each small twitch of a muscle meant she should slit her own throat because lying beside her dead mother in an empty house would have been safer for a newborn Ellie, tiny and helpless, than a mother who was a mindless shell driven by hunger.
“She begged me to shoot her,” Marlene continues, and Joel knows now that it’s not for him. These are just words that need to be said, and he happens to be here. “Gave me the baby and told me to find somewhere safe for her,” he graciously bites back the automatic barb that comes to mind at that, “and then…then she asked me to shoot her. She thought she was infected.”
“And she wasn’t?” Joel asks. The story isn’t new, not really. Ellie’s gotten the rough shape of it before, and so he’s heard it, too, because there’s no fucking way he’ll let Marlene be around Ellie without supervision, no matter whose best friend she used to be.
“It would seem not,” Marlene says, and the tone of her words says she’s remembered she’s talking to someone who’s barely a step removed from an active adversary. “If I hadn’t shot her, the doctors think she would have been fine, just like Ellie.” As clinical as she makes the sentence, Joel can hear what lies behind it: guilt.
Joel knows a thing or hundred about guilt.
He'd been the one driving in the car accident that killed his wife, after all. He'd chewed that guilt like cud, far before he'd carried the kind of guilt that can kill a person. It hadn't mattered that the police had judged it not his fault. If he'd just reacted faster, if he'd pestered Julia to wear her seatbelt, if if if. There was a reason he'd let Tommy do so much of the driving Before. He just hadn't been able to take the risk of more guilt to crush him to the earth, not when he had a little girl who needed her daddy to be present for her.
A little girl whose daddy had still let her die.
Still, despite the way he understands what Marlene must be feeling, he doesn’t beat around the bush.
“So you’re the reason she’s an orphan,” he surmises.
He sees a muscle at her jaw tic.
“Tell her,” Marlene says, visibly pulling herself back together, back into the cool, calm, collected, emotionless leader she usually is. “After you both leave. She should know it wasn’t…” She trails off, not finishing the thought. Joel doesn’t need her to.
He leaves with a noncommittal grunt.
*
“Where were you?” Comes Ellie’s sleepy accusation when he slips back into her room. She woke up as soon as he came in, quiet as he tried to be, and the eye she isn’t rubbing with a clumsy fist glares at him accusingly.
“Sorry, kiddo,” he says, softly in deference to the headache she woke up with this morning. “Marlene wanted to ask me something.”
He catches a flicker of unease, there and gone again, as she clearly expects him to follow that statement with a new idea the Fireflies have had. He’s played middleman from the start, and as much as she might needle at him for being overprotective, he knows she dreads each new experiment. She’s a tough kid, determined to see this mission through, but he knows it’s wearing her down day by day, this miserable grind towards nothing much at all.
He’s had a front row seat for it after all.
“Sit up,” he says, hiking a knee up on her bed and helping nudge her vertical as he reaches for a brush to start working at her frizzled rat’s nest of hair. ”You look like nobody looks after you.”
She grumbles something too low for him to hear but obeys nonetheless.
“What’d Marlene want?” Ellie asks with what’s clearly forced bravado as he starts picking at the first snarl of hair.
“Wanted to know about an old FEDRA outpost we passed on the way here,” he lies, the excuse he’d already decided on. He hasn’t decided if he wants to tell her or not, if that would be just an additional burden for her to carry or if it would finally be the thing that got her to agree to leave. He needs to think about it more, and he can’t do that if she knows there’s something he’s keeping from her. He imagines the only thing that’s keeping her from calling him on a lie immediately is that she feels too miserable to pick up on it the way she usually would.
He brushes her hair out carefully. She's been stuck in bed for a couple days now, still too weak to be up much, and her fretful tossing and turning has gained her more than a few knots because she’d been in a mood and refused to let him braid it for her before. He thinks longingly of the days of spray bottles of detangler and then carefully picks at each knot, working each through from the bottom. He apologizes the few times he accidentally ends up yanking it, but she doesn’t complain. Thinking of what he’s seen of FEDRA minders with kids on supervised forays into the QZ, he imagines she’s had way worse.
The thought makes him even gentler.
“Will you braid it?” Ellie asks quietly.
“Sure,” he says, gently tilting her head back and gathering the first section. He's gotten the muscle memory back for this since the first time he tried again after Silver Lake. His callouses still catch on strands now and then, but he doesn't end up yanking by accident. “It's getting long,” he tells her, mostly just for something to say.
“Mmm,” she hums, and he smiles slightly at how sleepy she sounds. He's learned by now that playing with her hair sends her right to sleep, and it's a relief to have something tangible to do when he so often feels so useless to her. It's not fair, a 14 year old suffering the way she does for a world that doesn't deserve it.
But unfortunately, she's as stubborn as she is kind, and trying to tell her as much would just end in a fight she doesn't have the energy for.
He secures the end of the braid with an elastic, and it lands against her back with a soft thump when he lets go. He hears Ellie yawn, and he snorts when she leans back against him like he's a recliner.
Still, he just shifts slightly to let her lay more comfortably.
“Did you learn how to braid for Sarah?” Ellie asks in what's clearly a kid’s attempt at talking so she won't fall asleep again, stubborn thing.
“Got better at it with her,” he says, resting a hand on her arm and rubbing gently, firm, slow strokes, something that can also sometimes get her to settle the same way it did Sarah. “Learned for my mom when I was a kid, though.”
“Damn,” Ellie says around a badly-suppressed yawn. “They had moms that long ago? When we still had dinosaurs?”
It's only the fact that he's gotten so close to getting her down again for a very needed nap that saves her from a disciplinary yank of her braid.
*
In the days that follow, he considers going ahead and telling her, Marlene’s request be damned. He knows there are some things kids just don’t need to know–it’s one of the reasons he’s always careful to keep her away from the wing of the hospital where the Fireflies have their human test subjects–but he knows what it would mean to her, the knowledge that her mother didn’t die because of her, that her immunity was a gift from her mother, not a miracle bought with Anna’s life. They’re not ones to talk feelings, but he knows how to read her by now, knows from her expression when they got the story from Marlene that she filed it right away in the “My Fault” column that’s far longer than it needs to be.
The other part of him, though, hesitates, not wanting her upset, especially not when she’s already so weak. He doesn’t think she’s the vengeful type, not for something like this, but he knows by now how big her heart is, how ready she is to love, how much she treasures the memory of her mother. He doesn’t want to risk her trying to go after Marlene.
Even if Marlene would absolutely deserve it.
“Yer thinkin’ too loud,” Ellie grumbles, turning her face in against his arm. They’re supposedly watching a movie together, but Ellie started nodding off about fifteen minutes in, no matter the frequent explosion scenes. He makes a noise of apology and slouches slightly to make himself a more comfortable pillow. Ellie inhales deeply and then yawns, propping her pointy little chin on his bicep in a gesture he knows is meant to be annoying. “What are-” Another yawn. “-you thinking about so hard?”
“Nothing,” he says, and he thinks it’s only her exhaustion that keeps her from poking at him further. A glance at her says she’s still considering kicking up a fuss. “I’ll tell you later,” he promises.
“Promise?” Ellie says around another yawn, pressing her cheek against his arm again.
“Promise,” he says softly.
There’ll be time enough for hard conversations later, he decides.
*
It’s six days later when the Fireflies find their cure.
It’s thirteen days later when they try to kill Ellie.
*
“Take that IV out of her arm as soon as we leave the room,” Marlene says in an undertone after nurses came in to do some readings, and he looks to her sharply, both of them at the edge of the room. He’s reluctant to look away from Ellie–she’s been out of it since this morning, fuzzy and confused and tired, and some prickle of instinct has had him on edge ever since–but he needs to figure out what Marlene’s going on about. For a moment, he thinks he imagined her speaking at all, a side effect of the vaccine he just received the day before.
“What?” He demands, voice low, and Marlene gives him a look, speaking from the side of her mouth.
“Just do it. The second we’re out of here, take that IV out of her arm. I’ll be back later, but you have to do that first. Just trust me.”
He doesn’t. He doubts he ever will.
But the gravity of her tone makes him think this is one time he should consider it.
*
As little as he trusts Marlene, he still obeys her instructions as soon as the Fireflies have left the room, crossing to Ellie’s bed and gently slipping the IV from her arm, grimacing in apologetic sympathy as he does.
She doesn’t stir.
A cold trickle of unease spirals down his spine.
“Ellie?” He asks, even as he bandages her arm after dabbing away the trickle of blood that followed the needle. “Hey, kiddo, wake up for me.” His voice is gentle despite the rock in his stomach. He sets her arm down gently and reaches up to tap at her cheek. “Baby, c’mon now. Just for a minute.”
Ellie remains quiet, lax and limp.
In an instant, he decides it’s time to leave.
*
He’s just shrugging into his pack–Ellie’s clipped to his, her small assortment of decorative knick knacks swinging every which way–when Marlene returns, a small, battered cooler in one hand. They’ll have to leave behind some of the things they’ve managed to collect over the weeks, but that’s a sacrifice he’s more than willing to make to get his kid out of this hell.
“Good,” Marlene says briskly when she sees him ready to go. When she approaches, he automatically takes a half-step back, readying to move between her and Ellie, and she rolls her eyes. “You carry her,” she says with a jerk of her chin to Ellie, still quiet and nearly as pale as her sheets. “I’ll carry your bags.” She lifts the cooler briefly. “I even have some vaccine doses per our agreement. Now come on. We don’t have much time.”
“Time for what?” He demands, even as he hands over their packs. He doesn’t trust Marlene even slightly, but this appears to be getting them closer to the goal he’s had since they first stepped foot in this shithole: leaving.
“I’ll explain on the way,” Marlene says impatiently. “Now pick her up and let’s go.”
For once, he obeys her orders without complaint.
*
After she explains on their way down to the garage, he thinks getting him to carry Ellie was only partially about expediency.
The other part had to have been about having his arms too full to kill every last goddamn Firefly in this city for planning to kill his kid.
“You-” He starts with a growl, and Marlene hisses at him to be quiet.
“Not me,” she says in an undertone, peeking around a corner before she gestures for him to follow. “I already told you that. The decision came from higher up.” She gives him a look over her shoulder when he scoffs. “Believe it or not, I answer to other people, too.”
“Other people planning to kill a kid for fucking politics,” he says, barely resisting to spit, the very idea leaving a rancid taste in his mouth, that Ellie could give and give of herself only for a decision to be made that she needed to die to make sure that FEDRA wouldn’t be able to get the same answers from her that the Fireflies did.
“Sometimes revolution means doing ugly things to get there,” Marlene says absently, and he just knows it’s something she’s told herself enough times that it feels like truth by now. For the sake of getting them out of here, he bites back his commentary.
“Why are you getting her out then?” He asks.
Marlene glances at Ellie briefly before shoving her way through a door, holding it open enough that it won’t hit Ellie.
“Because I made a promise to someone else first.”
*
They make it to the garage before the alarm gets raised, a distant blaring that makes him and Marlene both curse, though Ellie doesn’t so much as twitch.
“Come on,” Marlene says, ripping a ring of keys from a labeled rack on the wall and sparing enough time only to grab the others and scatter them across the garage. He follows, straining his hearing to try and decide if there are footsteps getting closer or if it’s just his imagination, Ellie limp and vulnerable in his arms, making him feel more vicious by the moment. If the fuckers think they can just kill her without consequences, they’re going to learn a valuable fucking lesson.
Too bad it’ll be one they won’t survive long enough to benefit from.
“Tell her-” Marlene cries out when a bullet pierces her side, staggering against the car.
He goes to duck to cover Ellie with his body, but Marlene manages to get her gun in hand, firing off two shots that take down the two Fireflies who were shooting at them from the doorway.
“Tell her-” Marlene gasps, turning back to him. He’s seen more than a few gunshot wounds in his life, and he can tell from the amount of blood already staining her shirt that this isn’t one she’ll walk away from. “Tell her about her mom,” she says, wrenching the back door open for him to put Ellie in. “And tell her-tell her I’m sorry.”
“I will,” he says, setting Ellie down in the back carefully and then climbing into the driver’s seat.
He and Marlene lock eyes, an entire conversation exchanged in a moment as he starts the car, the engine taking a moment before it catches.
And then he puts it in drive and floors it out of the garage.
He knows already that they won’t be seeing each other again.
*
“Is Marlene okay?” Ellie asks later that day, one of the first questions she managed after finally regaining consciousness. She’s wobbly, still, and the haze to her eyes tells him she’ll probably be out of it for a while yet, but the fact that she’s awake at all has finally eased the tension around his throat, letting him take full breaths for the first time in hours.
“She’ll be alright,” he lies, handing her a bottle of water and keeping a hand under it when it takes her a couple of tries to even grip it. It speaks to how lousy she still feels that she doesn’t bitch about being babied as he provides the majority of the strength needed to lift it to her mouth enough to take a sip. “Don’t think they even noticed us leaving. She’ll have time to come up with something.”
The lie rolls off of his tongue easily. The truth–that Marlene is likely dead by now or will be soon enough, killed for the heinous sin of not aiding and abetting killing a child–is an ugly thing.
And his girl has had more than enough ugly things in her life. He won’t burden her with one more.
“There is something she wanted me to tell you, though, if you’re up for it.” Marlene asked him to, after all. Even if it wasn’t for Ellie’s ultimate benefit, he would owe her that much. “It’s about your mother.”
Ellie’s head tilts slightly in question, a gesture so endearing he can’t help but reach out and smooth her hair back, pulling her in to lean against him. She goes easily, far more trusting than he has any right to ask of her.
Taking a deep breath, he starts to tell Ellie that it’s not just her looks that her mother passed on.
*
When he dreams the next night, both of them settled into their house in Jackson, he knows it’s a dream. He’s in a house he’s never been in before, but he’s not confused about it. He knows there’s someone waiting for him. He doesn’t know who, though, not until he sees a woman sitting on the floor, a woman he only knows from the picture that lives in Ellie’s book of puns for safe keeping.
Anna.
She smiles at him, and it’s Ellie’s smile. She looks cleaner than anyone who doesn’t have the benefit of a place like Jackson in an apocalypse should, and he’s pretty sure the jacket she’s wearing is one of his that Ellie stole from him. He wonders what it says of his subconscious that Ellie steals his clothes even in his sleep, if only to pass them on to her mother.
He’s distracted from thoughts of theft, though, by a baby’s squeal, and he looks down to see that Anna’s holding an infant wrapped in a soft yellow blanket.
He knows without needing to be told who she is, too.
“She’s a talker,” Anna says, looking down at her daughter. Her voice is a little lower in pitch than Ellie’s, but it’s familiar to him, still, the same way Ellie’s is, even when there’s no way he’s ever heard it before.
“She won’t grow out of it,” he says, crossing the room and sitting next to her.
Anna huffs a laugh, looking at her daughter with open adoration. One little chubby baby fist escapes containment to flail wildly, and he reaches out automatically, feeling it wrap around one finger with a baby’s inordinate strength.
“She’s a fighter, too,” Anna says. “I can tell.”
“She won’t grow out of that, either,” he says, rubbing his thumb along Ellie’s tiny knuckles, his calloused skin rasping across her pudgy, baby-soft hand. “You made a hell of a kid.”
Anna’s eyes fill, but he doesn’t comment on it. Dream or not, that would feel rude. She looks at Ellie’s face like she’s memorizing it, like she needs to take in every last detail. Infant Ellie, with her elder self’s predilection for chaos, reaches out with her other hand and manages to snag a piece of her mother’s hair, yanking it with enough force to tug Anna’s head towards her. He goes to reach out automatically to help get it loose, but Anna shakes her head as best she can when her daughter still has a grip on her.
“It’s fine,” she says. “She’s only got so much time to get the teenage rebellion out early.”
“She’s not such a rebel,” he says. “She can find trouble like nobody’s business, and she'll sass you to hell and back, but she’s a sweet kid. Kinder than I can believe sometimes. Even when she’s being a little gremlin.” The last comment is a gamble. They don’t know each other, after all, and affectionate as he means it, he knows she could take it as an insult to her daughter.
Anna, though, just grins, the same way Ellie looks when she’s up to something.
“Giving you gray hair?” She asks with a playful look to his head, and he rolls his eyes, playing along with the joke.
“Every chance she gets,” he says, and the baby babbles, like she’s throwing her own opinion on the subject into the conversation.
“You tell him, Ellie,” Anna says, voice warm. “He can’t talk about you like that. You fucking tell him.”
He smiles as Ellie appears to take her mother’s instructions to heart, kicking her tiny, pudgy feet while she squeals all about it, shaking her hand as best she can with a grip still around his finger as she lectures him in a shrill babble. Anna watches her daughter with so much love that it’s a palpable thing, and he ignores when a tear slips down her cheek, her rubbing her face against her shoulder to wipe it away.
“I didn’t know I could love someone this much,” she confesses, voice a little softer. “I was never sure about having kids, but after I found out I was pregnant, I couldn’t help wondering who she would be, what she would like, what her life would end up looking like.” Her voice breaks, and she pauses, swallowing hard. “And then I didn’t even get to find out.”
“She looks like you,” Joel tells her, and Anna looks to him, head still tilted from the grip Ellie has on her hair. “Smiles like you, too, from what I’ve seen in your photo.” There’s no point in not telling his dream that she’s a dream, after all. “She’s got a great laugh, makes you wanna laugh, too, no matter what it’s about. She loves puns. She has a book full of ‘em, and sometimes she can’t even finish reading them because she’s already laughing about the punchline even though she’s read them all at least a hundred times by now.” He gives the baby Ellie an affectionate look. “You’re gonna grow up to be a little dork,” he tells her, and Anna snorts. He looks back to her, trying to figure out how to summarize everything her daughter will be. “She loves dinosaurs, loves everything science, really. She wants to be an astronaut, and if it were still Before, I wouldn’t put it past her. She’s smart like you wouldn’t believe, soaks everything up like a sponge. She’s curious about everything, asks about a thousand questions a day and still comes up with more. She’s been talking my ear off because she learned about mitochondrial DNA saved in amber and how it could be used to clone dinosaurs, and I swear to God she’s going to figure out how to do it herself just to-” He realizes he’s rambling and cuts himself off, but Anna’s face is soft, her expression grateful.
“You really love her, don’t you?” She asks, voice rough.
“Like she’s mine, too,” he says, swallowing. “More than anything in the entire world.”
“That’s what I wanted,” Anna says, scrubbing her face on her shoulder again. “I told Marlene to find her someone who would love her.” She makes a fond, annoyed noise. “Forgot who I was talking to, I guess, Miss Greater Fucking Good.” She shakes her head, but the move is resigned.
“She got it right in the end,” he offers, an absolution more for Anna's sake than Marlene's.
“And she got her to you,” Anna says.
“She's the best thing in my life,” he confesses. “Didn't think I could love someone like I love her, not anymore, but she loves proving me wrong.”
Ellie squeals, like she's agreeing, and he and Anna both smile.
“Here,” Anna says, tilting to pass Ellie over and then carefully pulling her hair loose, Ellie shrilling her disapproval as she does. “You take her.” She leans over to kiss Ellie's tiny head before she sits back, watching the two of them.
He accommodates the weight of the little bundle easily, his body remembering what to do even so many years later. Ellie doesn’t fuss about being handed over, like she knows it’s him. She settles the way Sarah always did, wiggling a bit and blinking up at him with those big, curious eyes. He smiles down at her, tracing her tiny, round cheek with a gentle finger. He looks up at motion in his periphery and finds Anna staggering to her feet. He reaches up automatically to help her when her legs start to buckle, but she waves him off.
“It’s fine,” she says. “Just pushed a whole human out. Give me a second.”
When she’s gathered herself, she pushes away from the wall, moving with a stubborn stiffness he’s seen from her daughter before. As if reading his mind, the baby in his arms shrills, and he looks down to her automatically, smiling faintly as he reaches to gently tap her tiny nose with a fingertip, making her go nearly cross-eyed trying to track him. When he looks back up, Anna’s just reaching out to a door that Joel knows leads to somewhere other than the next room.
“When you’re over there-” He calls out, knowing it’s stupid even as he says it to make a request of a dream.
“Sarah,” Anna says with a smile, turning back, hand on the doorknob. “I know. I’ll keep an eye out for her, I promise.”
His throat is so tight it feels like choking.
“Tell her…” He manages to get out, trying and largely failing to clear his throat. “Tell her I love her, and I am so, so sorry. Tell her I miss her and…” What else is there? What else can he ask a dream to deliver?
Anna's smile is kind, understanding.
“We've spoken before,” she says. “She misses you.”
His grief at those words is a physical thing, heavy in his chest, snaking up to close his throat completely, and it's only Ellie's warm, reassuring weight that keeps him where he is, keeps him from launching himself to the door on the stupid, impossible chance that Sarah's waiting for him, his girl just on the other side.
He can't, though. He knows instinctively that that door isn't for him to step through, not just yet.
Not when he still has a little girl in his arms who needs him.
“Tell her…tell her her daddy loves her,” he says simply, the most he can manage.
“I will,” Anna says. “And I'll keep an eye on her, I promise. I could use a little soccer practice. I haven't played since college.”
“She'll like that,” he manages to get out. He manages a laugh that feels kind of like a gasp. “Don't think yours got the soccer genes from you, sorry. I gather she’s not big on team sports.”
Anna lets out a dramatic sigh.
“Guess her dad had to pass something on,” she says with a look of feigned resignation.
When she looks back to him, though, her face is serious.
“Thank you, Joel,” she says, “for taking care of her.”
“Don't think I could do anything else,” he says.
Anna smiles and then turns the knob of the door. With one last, longing smile at Ellie, she turns and walks through.
*
Joel wakes with a sense of panic at finding his arms empty. The baby, where's the baby, did he drop her-
A very non-infant Ellie turns towards him in her sleep, making a soft noise at being jostled. Immediately, he reaches out, smoothing a hand over her hair until she quiets again. She’s wrapped herself up like a burrito in what’s technically his comforter, but he just rolls his eyes indulgently and reaches for the quilt she’s almost completely kicked off the end of the bed.
I've got this one, Joel thinks to Anna as he drifts off to sleep again, and he swears he can hear a faint whisper of and I've got our eldest.
He turns, settling, and Ellie rolls slightly, her back pressed to his through the bundle she’s made of herself.
He falls asleep smiling.