Chapter Text
Joel turns sixty when the seasons change, when the hot summer days and sun burnt prairie grass are sloping down into damp mornings and brittle, golden leaves are beginning their downward spirals. He turns sixty, an age he never thought he’d get to see; Ellie makes him a cake, one that’s more edible than the ones he got for his fifty-ninth and fifty-eighths were. Tommy cooks a side of beef ribs and Rafa gives him a little book he’s illustrated himself, sewn together at the spine with blue thread, all pictures done in squiggly lines, crayon bright, captioned stuff like I like it when you throw me in the air and when me and you pet the goats together and me and Ellie and you like to go fishing.
Rafa’s almost four, Ellie’s eighteen. He’s sixty, and he’s happy.
And then two days later, when he’s sitting on the bench in the hallway, putting on his boots, Ellie comes down the stairs in her bare feet and pajamas and says, “I want to talk to you.” So he sits back up and tells her to spit it out, and she squares her shoulders like she does when she’s getting ready to cuss him out or get her ass chewed out by him, and she tells him she thinks he should stop patrolling.
For a minute he just blinks at her. Sits up, opens his mouth. Closes it again. Then asks, “What?” because his right ear might be blown to shit but there’s no way he just heard her say what he thinks he did.
“You're sixty now,” Ellie says. “That’s the age patrol becomes optional. Don’t you think it’s time you … you know, took it easy? You’ve got plenty of shit to do around town with the construction and woodworking and stuff. You don’t need to be going out there all the time, dealing with all that shit.”
Joel blinks again. Then he goes back to tying his boots, maybe a little more forcefully than he was before, but still. “I ain’t having this conversation with you,” he says, and Ellie goes on:
“Look, I’m not trying to pick a fight. Okay? Just that - well, you’re hearing’s all shit now, and your knee’s basically no good. And let’s face it, there’s a lot more people than Tommy knows what to do with on the patrol roster, and you’d actually be doing him a favor-”
“Did he put you up to this?” He’ll march over there right now and give Tommy an earful if he thinks that -
“I put me up to this, Joel, okay?” Ellie holds up her hands, palms out, like she’s trying to calm an excited foal. “Look, I just - I worry about you out there, okay?”
“I don’t need you worryin’ about me.” Joel stands, stiffly, yanks his jacket off the peg on the wall. He shakes it in her direction. “That ain’t your job, missy.”
“Oh, come on.” Ellie takes a step towards him, her hands balled into fists. “Don’t be like that. We’re a fucking team, Joel. That’s not fucking fair.”
“You know what ain’t fair?” Joel snaps. He stuffs one arm, then the other, into his jacket. “Is having to sit here and listen my own goddamn kid tell me they think I’m too old to do my fucking job anymore. That ain’t fair. That ain't right.”
“Joel -”
“No, Ellie,” he cuts her off. “I’ve been doing this longer than you’ve been alive. A whole hell of a lot longer. I don’t need you or anyone else trying to tell me that I’m no good at what I’ve been doing, not when everything else says otherwise.”
Ellie glares at him, her jawline sharp and stony-set, her eyes narrow. It’s a little goddamn intimidating, if Joel’s being honest with himself, but he’s mad enough himself to not let it sway him.
“I got a duty to this town,” he says. He stabs a finger in her direction. “A duty to you. To Tommy, to Maria, to Rafa. You know better’n anyone what the fuck’s out there, beyond those walls. You think just because I’m sixty fucking years old I’m ready to just sit tight here in my home and let that shit come to us? You got another goddamn think coming to you, girl. You better get it fast.”
Maybe it’s a little meaner than he meant it to sound, because Ellie’s eyebrows twitch a little, like she’s flinching, like some of the words have landed like nettles on her skin. It startles him. It’s been years since she’s stopped flinching or wincing or curling in on herself every time they fought. It makes him feel a little bit like a gutted fish now.
“Ellie,” he says, and she shakes her head, scrubs furiously at her face with her hands.
“You asshole,” she grinds out. “Why the fuck can’t you just listen to me? Goddamnit, Joel. I don’t care what you say, every time you go out there without me or Tommy I fucking worry. Can’t you give me some goddamn peace of mind?”
Pot, meet kettle, Joel thinks, but he just says, instead, “Last year when Jesse told me he thought you were ready for paired patrols, what did I say? Did I tell you no? No. I told you that if you thought you were ready, that I trusted you to make the right decision for you. Even though it scared the shit out of me, I trusted you to make that call. I need you to trust me. That’s only fair.”
Ellie lets her hands drop to her side. She glares at Joel, that pinched face that tells him she has a lot more to say, but all she does is take two big steps forward and wrap her arms around his chest. “Fuck you,” she says into his shirt. “You better be fucking careful. If anything happens to you out there because you’re too fucking stubborn to listen to me, the smartest person you know, I’ll fucking kill you.”
He pats the back of her head, lets her squeeze all the air out of his lungs for a minute. “Nothing’s going to happen to me,” he says into the crown of her head. “Trust me. That’s all I need you to do.”
“Fine,” Ellie huffs, and she lets it go.
And so of course, two days later, he almost kills himself falling through the floor in some old farmhouse six miles outside of Jackson.
It’s a stupid mistake. He and Tommy are partnered with two greenhorns, seventeen year old kids he knows vaguely from when Ellie was still in school. They’re assessing the state of the house and outbuildings, trying to decide if it’s worth it to get a team in and fix the place up for a community farm. He and Jonah are taking the house floor by floor, Tommy and Jenna are out in the barns, and he’s too fucking deaf to hear the rustling of the birds nesting in the eaves of the bedroom upstairs, so when they take flight, wings pummeling the air around his head in the too-small space, he startles, and jumps, and steps right through the patch of rotten floorboard that he was trying so hard to avoid.
He goes down, halfway through the floor, his right left caught in the jagged wooden teeth of the broken boards; his left, mercifully, is crunched into a supporting beam. It’s not broken, but it’s twisted, and it hurts, and in the seconds after the birds go screaming out the open window and the dust settles, he has enough presence of mind to recognize that this is a very bad situation.
The pain is unreal. Already, he can feel the hot trickle of blood inside his jeans. He grits his teeth, sets his hands on the beams he’s caught between, tries to shift enough to pull himself free, but the wave of pain leaves his good ear ringing and his vision blurry. He stops, fighting the urge to vomit, and then Jonah is banging into the room, gun drawn, eyes wide. He stops when he sees Joel, says, “Holy fuck,” and Joel tells him:
“Go get Tommy.” When the boy doesn’t move, just stands there slack jawed, he barks, “Now, Jonah.”
Jonah leaves. Joel listens to him clatter down the stairs, back outside, shouting for Tommy the whole time. Joel sets his teeth against the pain, the rolling waves of nausea, tries to lean on his hands to take the weight off his leg. His boot is fast filling with blood by the time he hears footsteps back on the porch, in the house.
Tommy takes one look at him and starts swearing. “Jesus fucking Christ, Joel,” he says, coming to his knees beside him. The floor creaks ominously. “How the fuck…”
“Rotted wood,” Joel tells him thinly. The pain is making it hard to keep Tommy even in his sight. “Be careful.”
“We’re gonna have to pull you up, I think,” Tommy tells him, and Joel nods once, jerkily, closes his eyes.
“Get to it,” he says.
Afterwards, he can barely remember it except for Jenna and Jonah flanking him on either side, arms underneath his armpits, and Tommy wrapped around him from behind. They move him, and the pain makes his vision go spotty, then white. He comes to and he’s on his back on the ground, his leg elevated on Jonah’s thigh and Tommy’s tying something around his leg right above his knee, saying “Keep the pressure, Jenna, good job, honey-”
Then he’s outside, carried between his brother and Jonah, and Jenna is loping towards them with their horses, and Tommy asks him, “Can you ride?”
“I’m gonna have to,” Joel pants. The pain is creeping up his back, burning like hot tar in his veins. His boot squelches every time he puts it down. The smell of blood is cloying, like overripe fruit left to rot.
Tommy eyes him. “We’ll take it as easy as we can,” he says, “but that tourniquet ain’t going to last forever.”
“I’ve had worse,” Joel tells him. He’s aiming for levity, but his voice comes out like a gasp and he knows Tommy isn’t buying it.
Getting him up onto Thurber is almost enough to make him pass out again, and he’s only dizzily aware of Tommy tying him to his saddle. “Keep your horses in a canter,” Tommy tells the kids as he swings up onto his own mount. “And keep your eyes peeled. We can’t afford to stop.”
Both of them nod gravely. Beneath the brims of their baseball caps, their faces are white and serious. Poor kids, Joel thinks. What a real shitty day to train. And then he thinks, suddenly, that Ellie is going to be fucking pissed.
He sinks in and out of consciousness as they make the ride home. Every step sends a bolt of searing agony through his leg, and he doesn’t even realize he’s started groaning till Jenna says, “Mr. Miller?” in a voice that reminds him of Ellie when she’s anxious, and it’s enough to get him to bite down on his lip, sweat silently through the pain.
They’re a mile and a half away from Jackson when Tommy pulls them to a stop. “Jenna,” he says, and his voice is serious. “I need you to ride ahead, as fast as you can. Don’t stop till you're in the walls.”
She shifts on her horse. “Mr. Miller-”
“I need you to do three things.” He holds up three fingers, ticks them down as he speaks. “You let them know we’re bringing back an injured person and to prep the clinic. Second, you send someone for Maria and tell her what’s happened. And then immediately, you go find Ellie. Don’t tell her what’s happened. You make sure she doesn’t find out. Am I clear? You stay with her till me or Maria comes for her, okay?”
She nods, her eyes wide. “Got it,” she whispers, and then thunders away, bent low over her horses’ neck, her fingers woven through his mane. Tommy watches her go till she disappears over the rise of the next hill, then nods to him, Jonah.
“Let’s go,” he says, and as they fall back into their loping canter, steady and even, Joel has enough presence of mind to think of Ellie clearly now. He’s so grateful for Tommy’s foresight - he can’t imagine coming through the gates looking like this to find Ellie waiting for him. There are a lot of times where he’ll remember, suddenly, the dim memory of her face, hovering over him while he lay on that mattress, her hands slick with his blood, sewing him shut. She doesn’t need to see him like this. She doesn’t need to ever see him like that again.
Joel’s brain fuzzes in and out, in cadence with the waves of pain from his leg. He’s barely awake when they come through the gate, and then he’s being manhandled off of his horse. There are people around him, hands touching him. It makes him feel all sorts of sick and hot, being pressed in like that, but then Tommy is there, under his arm, directing him where to step, how to step, his face close and his voice calm and even -
And then he’s on his back again on a bed with metal bars on the sides, and the room around him is bright and cold. Jackson’s resident doctor, a stern man named Gil, is speaking to Joel, or maybe to Tommy, something about quick thinking and how someone’s lucky as shit to have missed the femoral artery. Joel thinks they’re talking about him but he can’t be sure because the room is floating around him. His head feels like it’s been packed with cotton. There’s a ringing in his ears that’s sort of muting everything else.
He moves in and out, in and out, of that hazy state. The pain in his leg keeps ebbing and then pouncing. Joel vomits over the side of the bed, gags on the taste of blood lingering in the back of his throat. Someone gives him something to drink - moonshine, he thinks - and then he simmers comfortably for a while. There’s pressure in his leg, hands on his skin, but it’s all okay. It’s okay.
Then he blinks and Maria is there in the room, beside Tommy. She’s got one hand stuffed in her husband’s and another on Joel’s forearm. She smiles when she catches his eye, but it’s forced, out of place in this room that smells like alcohol and gore. “Good news,” she says, brightly. “Gil says you can keep your leg.”
He hadn’t realized it was a possibility that he might not get to keep it, and the thought makes him shudder. He closes his eyes, re-opens them. There’s still some people down at his leg, and there’s an IV in the crook of his arm. “What’s happenin’?” He asks, and Maria tells him:
“They’re picking something like nine hundred shards of wood out of your leg, Joel.” She shakes her head. “What the hell happened?”
But Joel has other things to worry about. “What time’s it?”
“Goin’ on five o’clock,” Tommy tells him. His skin is grey beneath his summer tan. A muscle in his jaw keeps jumping; Joel remembers him looking the same way as a kid, before a tantrum or a breakdown. He shifts his arm, grimacing, and locks his hand around his brother’s wrist.
“You oughtta - get Ellie,” he says. “Tell her. But don’t let her - don’t let her see me like this. Okay? She don’t need to see this.” Her face, fourteen years old and terrified, drifts into view again. He bats it away. Tommy is watching him with something akin to desperation on his face, but then he shakes himself, straightens a little. Tommy’s always been better when he’s had a mission.
Tommy leaves and Maria takes his place. Her hand stays pressed to his forearm and he’s strangely grateful for it. His head’s less fuzzy now, and he’s becoming more aware of what’s happening at the end of the bed: the pull of skin and needle, the sharp tug of tweezers in flesh and the burn of antiseptic. The sweet, sticky smell of open flesh and blood. He closes his eyes.
“How’s it lookin’?” He asks, and Maria’s fingers curl, hard, around his arm.
“It’s not great,” she tells him honestly.
“Don’t let Ellie see this,” he says. “She doesn’t need to.”
“She won’t,” Maria assures him.
Tommy’s gone a long time. Enough time for Gil to tell him they’ve got the splinters out, they’re going to stitch him up, does he want to be sedated? He growls, “No,” and Gil leaves it at that. He’s got his good ear aimed for the door, and so he knows the exact second that Ellie arrives, because she comes in shouting, like he knew she would. Something along the lines of fuck you, Tommy, and you can’t fucking keep me from him, and Joel listens to it for half a minute, his heart picking up speed in his chest, before he nods at Maria.
“He might need some back up,” he tells her, and she nods, slips out the door. He listens to her voice join the fray, firm but soothing, and Ellie’s voice rises higher. Gil comes to stand beside his head, casts a critical look at the door.
“Hope she’s not talking to my staff like that,” he says, and Joel grunts.
“Just her uncle.”
“Oh, that’s much better.”
Joel doesn’t reply - he’ll be pissed off over Gil’s criticisms later, when there are no needles in his fucking leg - and Gil says: “You need to calm down.”
“I am.”
“Your heart rate is elevated, beyond what it was two minutes ago. If you want us to do our best to make sure you can keep your leg, you either need to take something to calm down, or get your girl to knock it off.”
Ellie’s past the point of no return. He knows that, and the knowledge that he did that to her pushes his heart into the cold pit of his stomach. “Gimme something then,” he says, then swears, “God fucking damnit.”
Something pricks his arm and he feels a rush of warmth, heady and fast, and then he’s slipping away, again, with Ellie’s voice - Joel, wake up. Come on, wake up, I can’t fucking do this without you- pounding like a drum in his head.
*
He comes to in a haze of pain. The room is dim, lights turned low. He knows without asking that it’s hours later. He can’t move; his right leg is elevated on a stack of pillows, swathed to the middle of his thigh in tight white bandages. Someone’s cut off his jeans and changed his shirt and draped a blanket over him.
He takes a minute to breathe through the blackness on the edge of his vision before turning his head. Someone’s dragged a couch, one of those hospital grade ones with wooden arms and thin brown cushions, into the room. Tommy’s asleep on it, arms crossed, his head lolled back and his legs stretched out, feet propped up on an overturned wastebasket. Ellie sleeps beside him, curled into a ball with her head on Tommy’s thigh. Someone’s put a blanket over her too, and Joel can tell from the way her eyes are swollen and her face pocked with burst blood vessels that she’d been crying. He wants to reach out, to go to her and take her face in his hands and apologize, but he can’t move. He contents himself with knowing that she’s resting, that she’s safe, that Tommy’s there, and lets himself wander back into the soft expanse of sleep.
*
When he wakes up again, it’s to arguing.
“-I’m not leaving till he wakes up.”
He cracks an eye. Maria’s back, arms folded across her chest as she tries to reason with Ellie. Ellie’s on her feet now, her shoulders rigid and back stiff. There’s an edge to her jaw that Joel doesn’t like. Tommy’s awake too, sitting on the couch, his elbows on his knees and his fingers steepled beneath his chin, watching the interaction with tired eyes.
“It could be hours, sweetie,” Maria says. “You’ve been here for ten hours already. Just - come home with me, for a little bit. Eat something. Take a shower. You can come right back after.”
“No.” Ellie shakes her head. Maria sighs. “You can’t fucking tell me what to do.”
“Ellie-”
“No. What if he wakes up while I’m gone? No fucking way.”
“We’ll come get you right away,” Tommy starts, and Ellie whirls on him, fists clenched.
“Like you fucking did yesterday?” When Tommy sighs into his hands, she goes on, “Yeah, that’s what I fucking thought.”
It hurts, but Joel swallows a few times, tries to get some feeling back into his throat. “Ellie,” he croaks, and Ellie spins around. The look on her face would have sent Joel to his knees, he thinks, if he’d been standing. “Listen- to them-”
She’s at his side then, her fingers tight in his. “Shut the fuck up,” she says, and the tremor in her voice is all anger, like he knew it would be. “Shut up. You asshole. What did I fucking say? You would get yourself fucking killed out there, and you didn’t fucking listen to me.”
“Baby,” he says. He licks his lips, coughs. He fumbles with his other hand, manages to get it over her’s, despite the pull on his IV line. “Ellie, honey, I’m okay.”
“Bullshit,” she snarls. Tears glitter on the ends of her eyelashes. She looks so young all of a sudden, all of fourteen again, and terrified that she’s going to have to watch someone else she loves die. “Bull fucking shit. They said you could have lost your leg, you asshole. You’re whole fucking leg. You can’t fucking do shit like this. You fucking can’t.”
Tommy comes to her side then, puts his hand over Joel’s, over Ellie’s. “Ellie,” he says, and Joel doesn’t miss the rasp in his voice. “He’s gonna be okay.”
“Fuck you,” Ellie says. Her chin is wobbling, and there’s a trail of wetness meandering down her cheeks. “Fuck you both,” she says, angrily, but then she puts her face against Joel’s arm and cries. Tommy hesitates, then puts his hand on her back, holds it there. His eyes meet Joel’s over Ellie’s shuddering body and pin him in place. There’s a message there that Joel can’t quite stomach, not right now, so he closes his eyes, strokes the back of Ellie’s head.
Yeah, he thinks. Fuck me.
*
They keep him in the clinic for ten days. He asks, the second day, about going home, and Gil looks at him with a very beleaguered expression and says, “You have one hundred and seven stitches in your leg. I think that warrants more than two days of observation, don’t you?”
Joel just grunts. He doesn’t like sitting here, pissing in a bed pan because he can’t walk and twiddling his fucking thumbs, but his leg is hurting something fierce. He tries to remember if it hurt this bad to be shot, or stabbed. He thinks it might have been close.
People come to visit. Tommy and Maria are always taking turns swapping out shifts, but he suspects that’s more to keep an eye on Ellie than anything. Maria brings him a mason jar full of scraggly early fall wildflowers and a card made by Rafa. It’s illustrated on the cover with a picture of a very sad stick figure with pointy blue hair and a beard that looks like it belongs to a Bible character. It’s an unflattering image, but it makes Joel smile, a little. Inside, Rafa’s dictation - written in Tommy’s blocky hand writing- reads: Sorry you are hurt. I hope you get better soon. I miss when we see the baby cows together. I got some new legos. Please come see me soon. Love, Rafa.
He puts the flowers and card on the table next to his bed. Ellie reads it with a crinkle between her brow, almost like she might laugh. “This is the worst picture of you I’ve ever seen,” she says with a smirk, and Joel flaps his hand at her.
“Leave it be. I like it.”
“Going soft in your old age, Miller.”
He grunts. Tommy says, “And you think Rafa’s the one who did that?” Ellie scowls at him; she’s still mad at him, and she holds a grudge like she’s getting paid to do it.
People trickle in and out: some patrol partners, the guys from the construction detail, Seth, Jesse, Dina. Most of Ellie’s little friends, all of them who’ve grown up some in his house, taking up space in his living room and eating food from his cabinets. He likes that they come to see him now. Dina even hugs him, then says, “When I heard you were in the clinic, I thought for sure Ellie was the one who put you here.”
He laughs. “I think she’d like to have been the one who did it,” and Ellie snipes:
“Feel free to leave any time, Dee.”
Jenna and Jonah come to see him together, hovering anxiously in the doorway till Joel waves them in. Jenna sets a plate of cookies on the table next to the vase of flowers. “I don’t know what they feed you in here,” she says. “I hope this is allowed.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Joel assures her, and then Jonah asks:
“How’s your - how’re you feeling, Mr. Miller?”
He’s trying to look brave, unaffected, but Joel can still remember the way their faces looked with his blood on their hands, so he swallows and says, “I’m real sorry to have scared you like that.”
“We weren’t scared,” Jenna says, all youthful bravado, and Joel shakes his head softly.
“I sure was,” he tells them. “You both - you did real good, out there. You handled yourself real well. You’ll make fine patrolmen yet.”
They both nod, but they can’t hide the way their shoulders hitch a little at the praise. Good, he thinks, and then asks, “Y’all wanna help me eat these cookies?”
*
Ellie stays at the clinic with him all ten days. On the third day, when it’s obvious she hasn’t showered or changed her clothes or even really slept, Joel tells her to go home and they get into a fight so loud that Gil comes in and tells them both to shut the fuck up.
“Terrible bedside manner,” Ellie comments after he’s left, but her face is flushed with embarrassment. “Where the fuck did they even find him?”
Joel closes his eyes, grunts. He feels worse today than he did the day he got hurt, and getting into a shouting match with Ellie didn’t help much. He’s a little more woozy than usual, feeling a little more disattached from himself than he would like. “You need to take care of yourself,” he says, “because if you aren’t, then I’m fucking worrying’ about you instead of worryin’ about me, and that’s not not gonna get me outta here any faster.”
“You don’t need to worry about me,” Ellie replies stiffly. “I’m not the one with a thousand fucking stitches in my leg. I’m an adult now, I don’t need you babying me.”
“You’ve been eighteen for two months,” Joel says flatly. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, young lady.” Ellie scowls and kicks at the ground with the toe of her sneaker. Joke waits a second, then says, “You know I’m not gonna just expire because you leave the room, right?”
She sniffs. “I’m not takin’ that chance.”
He sighs. “What can I do to convince you that I’m okay?”
“Maybe try not almost losing your fucking leg on patrol.”
In the end, it’s Tommy who gets her to leave by threatening to bodily remove her from the clinic. “I’d like to see you try,” Ellie sneers, and the look Tommy levels at her is so flat, so no nonsense that even Joel straightens up a little. Ellie sets her jaw, squirms under it for a minute, then snaps, “Fine. But I’m coming right back.”
“Shower. Eat. Sleep.”
“I can sleep here, Tommy-”
“We aren’t negotiating this.”
Ellie glares. “You’re a real fucking dick,” she tells him, and the vehemence in her voice knocks Joel back a little. They’re all used to her mouth running away from her, but this sounds a little too close to real for comfort. But she’s gone before Joel can admonish her, knocking past Tommy and slamming the door behind her.
“She doesn’t mean it,” Joel says, and Tommy sighs, rubs his eyes with his fists, throws himself into the chair next to Joel’s bed.
“Yeah, she does.” He shrugs. “S’okay. She’s mad. She’s scared. This is a lot for her.”
“Still.”
They sit in silence a minute, then Tommy says, “You really scared the shit out of all of us.”
Joel feels that sharp wedge of guilt in his chest compact a little more. “Yeah,” he says. “I know. But I’ll be okay.”
“You better be,” Tommy says gruffly. He wipes at his eyes with his thumb, and Joel resists the urge to reach over and hold his brother’s face in his hands, the way he used to when Tommy was little and upset. “I know you know Maria and I’ll always take care of Ellie if anything happens to you, but Jesus, Joel, that girl is a lot.”
They both laugh. Joel’s not sure why it’s funny, but it is.
What’s not funny is later, when Joel drifts to sleep, shrouded in the gauzy haze of pain meds, and he wakes up and Tess is there, sleeping on the couch against the wall. Her blonde hair is loose and spilling over the edge, and her hands are folded beneath her cheek. Joel feels his breath hitch in his throat. His eyes burn, his vision swims.
“Tess?” He asks, and blinks, and then Ellie’s there, asleep, her face pinched even in sleep. Her hair is wet and loose, dripping onto the floor beneath her. Joel closes his eyes, tries to breathe through the wild eruption of guilt in his chest.
He thinks it might be the meds fucking with him, that maybe he’s just so fucking tired and weak that that was some sort of really shitty dream state he was in, but it keeps happening. He wakes up and Tess is smoking a joint with the window open and her elbows planted on the sill. He tries to talk to her, but his voice doesn’t make it all the way up his throat so he ends up spluttering, coughing, and when Tess turns around it’s Ellie, her forehead creased with concern.
“Joel?” She asks, and he shakes his head, waves her away to hide the trembling in his hands.
“I’m okay,” he says, but Tess keeps coming back. Worse, hestarts to sort of forget where he is. He keeps falling asleep and waking up and being shocked that he’s not in his apartment in the QZ, or on the ground outside with Tommy, sleeping next to a fire like they did in the early days. When he’s awake, he tries to be present, but his hands are shaking all the time and he feels sort of foggy, like he’s drowning in layers of static, and he can’t seem to get a grip on reality. If anyone notices, they don’t say anything, just chalk it up to the pain meds, but he knows what’s coming, knows what this is the start of, and it scares him so bad because he thought he was better. He really did. It’s been years since he’s had an attack like this, and he’s so afraid that Ellie’s gonna see or worse, that he’s going to get stuck in it and never be there for her again.
They let him out of bed on the fifth day, and he gets to hobble to the bathroom on the shoulder of a nurse, gets to piss standing slumped against the bathroom wall, and he’s so exhausted that when he gets back to his bed, his vision is going spotty again, the room warping around him. He closes his eyes to stop the spinning, feels Ellie’s hand close over his arm. “Joel?”
“M’fine.”
“Was that the best or the worst piss of your life?”
He has to chuckle, even though it aches, even though he thinks he might vomit. “Shut up,” he tells her, and is rewarded with her laugh. The fog recedes a little.
And then the next morning, when he’s not even sleeping, Sarah comes to sit on the chair next to him, to lay her head on his arm. She’s so beautiful, big hazel eyes and curls piled atop her head, her smile so soft and wide.
“What’re you doing in here?” She asks. Her voice is like a balm, like a broken baseball bat, like a bullet. “You don’t have anything better to do than lie around all day?”
How often had he asked her that, jokingly, on Sunday mornings when she’d come downstairs long after nine, yawning and sleep smudged and perfect? He can still see the way she rolled her eyes at him, with her whole head moving, the way she’d shove his arm before slipping underneath it, leaning in to demand a kiss.
“Baby,” he says, and the word feels strange, unwieldy on his tongue. Is that what he calls her? Or is that a name for someone else? “Baby,” he says again, and her head lifts off his arm, her eyebrows furrow together.
“Joel?” She says, and he blinks, and Ellie is there, and he blinks again, and Sarah is there, and he blinks again-
“Joel?”
He realizes he’s still talking, still muttering some long strands of nonsense. Ellie is standing frozen at his side, her eyes wide.
“Oh shit,” she says, “are you having a fucking stroke? Joel? Joel?”
M’fine, he tries to say, but Sarah is gone, again; he can still feel the brush of her curls on his forearm, can still smell the scent of her - coconut oil and strawberry conditioner- and the words don’t come. And before he can gather himself, Ellie is out in the hallway, shouting for Gil.
After that, he fades out. He lets Gil and the nurses come in, let’s them examine him. Ellie paces, shouts, crushes his hand in her’s. Tommy shows up in the middle of the chaos and somehow manages to get Ellie to sit down and breathe with her head between her knees. How he knows what’s happening, Joel isn’t sure, but he’s grateful. He lets his brother take care of things and he closes his eyes and tries to conjure Sarah out of thin air.
When he’s present again, it’s hours later. It might be days, he isn’t sure. His leg hurts something fierce. Ellie is nowhere to be seen, but Tommy and Gil are both there, talking over his body. When he stirs, they step back, look down.
“Where’s Ellie?” Joel asks, and Tommy answers:
“Sleeping in another room. Dina’s with her.”
“She- she okay?”
Tommy nods once, shortly. “Shaken up a bit, but you know her. Resilient as fuck.”
How he wishes she didn’t have to be. “What’d she say?”
“Thought you were havin’ a stroke.” Gil narrows his eyes. “You weren’t, by the way.”
“Yeah,” Joel says. “I know.”
They’re all quiet for a minute, then Gil says, slowly, “Your brother here told me you’ve had… attacks like this before.”
Joel grunts. The throbbing in his leg beats in time with his pulse. “It’s been awhile.”
“How long is awhile?”
“Couple years. Wasn’t - this bad.”
Gil nods. “You know,” he says, choosing his words carefully, “We can get meds. For stuff like this.”
Joel shakes his head. “No,” he says, brusquely. “No. No meds. I don’t - this don’t happen that often. I can usually work through them, just this - bein’ all laid up, it’s worse. Once I’m home and movin’, I’ll be fine.”
Gil’s eyes sharpen on his. “You scared the shit out of your little girl.”
And there it is again- the baseball bat in his gut, the bullet wound on his head. Nothing, not even those, hurts him like hearing those words.
“Yeah,” he snaps. “You don’t have to remind me.” He takes a shaky breath, fists his quivering hands in the sheets. “I know - I know how to manage this. Okay? I don’t want anything else. In fact, I want to ease off the pain meds, okay? I don’t like - I need to be in control of myself. No more of that trippy shit. We clear?”
Gil’s eyes narrow, but he nods. “Not a problem,” he says. “I’ll save them for someone who’s more grateful.” Then he turns and leaves. Joel blinks at the sudden departure.
“Terrible beside manner,” Tommy says, then asks, “you - you okay? What do I need to do, right now?”
Joel reclines his head back against the pillows, breathes in through his nose. “I need to take a piss,” he says, and Tommy snorts. “And then I need to talk to Ellie.”
*
In the end, Tommy does most of the talking.
“Sometimes, different situations or feelings can trigger these flashbacks, or hallucinations.” Tommy’s sitting on one end of the couch, Ellie on the other. She looks exhausted, bluish bags beneath her eyes, but she still has enough spunk to roll her eyes.
“I know what PTSD is, Tommy.”
“Then you know that it’s not always something that we can control,” he says, softly. “Even if we work really hard at managing it- at learning our triggers and recognizing the signs for when it’s getting bad- it can still take us by surprise.”
Ellie fiddles with the cuff of her sweatshirt. “What triggered it now?” She asks, and Joel sighs.
“I reckon just being injured,” he tells her honestly. “Laid up. I been thinking on it and - well, it puts me in mind of -of losing Sarah, and then being stabbed. Almost losing you. I guess that’s what brought it on.”
“Is that who you were seeing?” Ellie still won’t look at him. “When you said baby? Sarah?”
His throat feels all sort of tight and achy. “Yeah,” he says. “It was.”
Ellie nods slowly. She uses one finger to trace a button on the back of the couch. Her shoulders are stiff when she says, “Must have sucked to come to and realize it was just me instead of her.”
“Hey,” Tommy says sharply, softly, before Joel can even formulate a reply to that. “Enough of that, El. That’s - that’s not fair.”
She shrugs one shoulder. Joel can see her drawing away, curling into herself like she does when she’s scared but doesn’t want to show it. “It’s fine. I get it.”
Tommy looks at Joel, and there’s a look in his eyes that tells Joel he’s out of his depth here. Joel isn’t quite sure how to proceed either, but Ellie saves them both by squaring up her shoulders, wiping at her nose.
“Is this gonna happen again?”
“Maybe,” Joel says, then hesitates. “Probably.”
“Okay.” She clamps her hands on her knees, squeezes so hard that her knuckles flex white. “Okay. What do I need to do? Like - how will I know?”
“Baby,” Joel says, “it ain’t your job to manage this for me-”
“Shut the fuck up,” Ellie says fiercely. “We’re a team, Joel. We look out for each other, okay? Now tell me how to fucking help you with this, or I’m gonna do it my own way, and it’s probably gonna suck for you, all right?”
He sighs. Tommy, ever the traitor, chuckles. Ellie’s glare ricochets between them. “Joel.”
“I guess- ” He rubs a shaky hand over his beard, grimacing at its length. “I guess- it helps when you talk to me. Or someone talks to me, when I start to wander. Sometimes touching helps too- reminds me where I am, what’s real and what isn’t. But you have to be careful with that. If I’m ever in a real bad way, don’t try to touch me. Just go- get Tommy. Okay?”
Ellie’s face is totally serious. She nods, shortly, burrows her hands between her thighs. “How will - how will I know? You’ll tell me, right, if you start to feel that way or like - see people?”
She shouldn’t have to worry about this.
“Yeah,” he says, and the agreement tastes bitter, like iron, in his mouth. “Yeah, I’ll tell you.”
*
Night comes on. A nurse comes in to change Joel’s bandages, inspect the stitches. He can’t see much from his angle but Ellie can, and the contortion of her face makes his stomach turn.
“You’re going to have such a sick scar,” she tells him, but it’s all false confidence; she’s white faced and looks a little unsteady.
“Sit down,” he says, which she ignores, of course. The attending nurse offers to let Ellie help.
“You want to learn how to change a bandage?” She asks, and Ellie scoffs.
“I know how to change a fucking bandage,” she says, but she washes her hands and comes back to dutifully hold layers of white swathing. “Dude, you know they shaved your leg, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Want me to do your other one to match? Looks kinda stupid right now.”
He warns, “Ellie,” and both her and the nurse share a look of mutual amusement.
“Fine,” she sighs. “Stay looking dumb. No skin off my back.” The nurse leaves and Ellie fusses around, refilling his water glass, tucking the blanket around him, even watering the flowers from Rafa, despite the fact that they are long dead. Finally, she turns down the light and goes to her little couch, kicks off her sneakers. He groans.
“Ellie,” he says, “Go home. You can’t keep sleepin’ on that thing.”
“Sure I can.” She flops down on it, props her ankles up on the arm. “Watch me.”
“You’re gonna stunt your growth, laying all bunched up like that.”
“Oh yeah,” Ellie says, sarcastically. “Because we were holding out for me to grow so much taller.”
He sighs, then scoots over a little, groaning as his leg shifts, spikes. Ellie sits up immediately. “What’re you doing? Do you need to pee?”
“Makin’ room,” he says. “Come on.”
She looks for a minute like she’s going to argue, but then she slips off the couch and climbs onto the hospital bed, being careful to move slowly, not touching him. “Dude, there’s barely room for you on here.”
“I’ll be fine,” he tells her gruffly. “Can’t get a decent night’s sleep knowin’ you aren’t, young lady.”
She rolls her eyes as she settles down on her side, her back pressed into the metal side bars of the bed, her head on the end of his pillow. “Yeah, yeah.” She wiggles around a little, closes her eyes, then opens them again. “You’re- you’re okay, right? Right now?”
He nods. “Yeah, I’m okay.”
Her lips press together, almost disappearing. “I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “About what I said earlier, about me and - Sarah. I know you don’t think about it that way.”
“S’okay,” he assures her. “You were scared. It’s- it’s alright.” He takes a deep breath, looks away from her, at the dim squares of the drop panel ceiling above. “I’m sorry I scared you like that,” he tells her. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t- I didn’t want you to see me like that.”
“You can’t help it,” she says swiftly. “It’s not like you did it on purpose. I know - I’ve seen worse. I’m okay.”
And that’s the thing: she has seen worse. So much worse, which is why this, her watching him lose himself like that, is so scary. He doesn’t want to be one of the people scaring her, one of the memories she feels like she has to parcel away or recover from.
“Yeah, I know,” he says gruffly. “I’m still sorry though.”
“Stop apologizing,” she tells him firmly. “Okay? I meant what we said. We’re a team. We do this shit together. You- you’ve done a lot for me. I can do some stuff for you.”
“That’s different,” Joel protests. “That’s my job.”
“And this is my job,” she counters. She takes the edge of his blanket, pulls it over herself. He’s got barely any now, but he won’t tell her that. “Team work makes a dream work, dude. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that?”
When he just sighs, she cracks open one eyes, squints at him. “I don’t mind. I like taking care of you. It makes me feel…powerful. Omniscient.”
Joel laughs at that. “You’re a weird kid,” he says, and she smirks.
“You’re a weird kid.”
He reaches over, raps his knuckles lightly against her forehead. “Go to sleep,” he tells her.
“You go to sleep-”
“Ellie.”
She chuffs a laugh, but she settles down. Joel watches her fall asleep by inches, her face shifting into something more peaceful, her brow smoothing out, her breathing steadying. Joel feels a flicker of contentment kindle in his chest. He watches her a long time, before the pull at the edge of his mind - exhaustion, and nothing more- takes him captive and drags him away.