#peachesofteal

The hesitance, the discomfort, caution all sank back in as the reality that he had found his brother who hadn’t been in danger at all settled in. They’d offered them food. The soup from the older couple had reawakened her taste buds after months of eating questionably aged canned goods or whatever small animal they’d managed to kill. Her mouth practically flooded at the warmth of the meal put in front of them.  She knew how they looked. Ellie barely breathed, she was shoveling food into her mouth so fast and even Joel was having a hard time, standing on the border of looking respectable and desperately sating the hunger they’d felt for weeks. She didn’t bother and had long since given up caring about what looked respectable. But that didn’t stop her from eyeing their hosts, keeping track of everyone around them, feeling the eyes on their backs. 

Tommy hadn’t outright questioned Ellie or her presence but there was a hint of one towards her when he introduced himself. A prodding that made her itch as to what her relationship was with the gruff man next to her and the kid between them. “I keep the kid safe,” was the answer. Nothing more, nothing less. She had joined them because of Ellie and Joel had made it clear he let her come along because of Ellie’s attachment. It hadn’t been his choice exactly. But there was no need to delve further into her and Joel’s connection. 

They’d butt heads from the start and continued to even after that night where he’d helped her relax to sleep, making her come on his fingers and then on him, and then subsequently had done so frequently after in the small private moments they could get. There was hardly anything gentle between them. They weren’t anything. She watched his back and he watched hers, both dragging each other along through life against the other's wishes. 

She knew about Tess. Ellie had caught her up, told her of the smuggler who had been Joel’s partner and how she was no longer around. In the spaces between her words, she could see exactly what Tess had been to Joel and how that role, in a way, had switched to her reluctantly. Someone to have his back, help release the tension and satisfy that need for another person even if it was only through sex and her presence. But the woman whose ghost lingered had been smart, calculated, using Joel as a battering ram rather than get her own hands dirty but wasn’t against doing so. That wasn’t her. She wasn’t clever. She was nothing but instinct and claws and rage. So often it was Joel pulling her back, leashing her, telling her what to do even while she gnashed her teeth even at him. It was him in control. She was a weapon but somehow one he so often didn’t want to use. He yelled at her for her recklessness, for each scrape and bruise and cut she received like it was his job to keep her safe as well as Ellie. Each morning he checked her over, making sure her weapons were in the correct spot, the straps of her bag secure, enough bullets in her cartridge. And now, she noticed Joel’s back stiffening at her answer and the obvious lack of connection to him. Caught his eye and the furrow of his brow. They’d learned to read each other so well over the months and could communicate silently and she could see the slight flicker of anger in the line of his jaw. Maybe it had been the wrong answer. Maybe she shouldn’t have answered at all, had put too much emphasis on Ellie or downplayed Joel’s role as the protector and escort. People weren’t her expertise and she was already on edge from there being so many of them and having Joel’s brother of all people staring down at her. She didn’t know what she was to him, but could at least define what she was to Ellie. And that’s what she answered. She wasn’t sure why that tick of anger was on his face and wasn’t going to get into it with him while Maria was staring them down, particularly Joel. Especially after he tried to excuse the woman, saying the conversation he wanted to have was for family. Except he didn’t excuse Ellie or her from the table as if it didn’t register that they weren’t.  Then Tommy shared the news that Maria did, in fact, fit in that category. More so than she did.

Somehow Ellie was the most cordial of the three of them, nudging Joel into congratulating them with gritted teeth. She kept eating, head down, ignoring the itch of too many eyes.

Throughout the tour of Jackson she could see the wall that had been slowly unraveling around Joel come back up. He stayed behind with his brother, brow furrowed, distance between him and the two girls with him. She watched Ellie take everything in, laughing at the sheep, loving on the horse, but her companion only seemed to withdraw more.

That silent communication they had was gone, cut off.

Maria had suggested they get cleaned up, giving the boys the opportunity to split off and catch up. Instinctually, her eyes went to Joel to see what he thought of the suggestion. They never split up, were never far from each other, and now this woman she didn’t know wanted to take her somewhere else away from him. Ellie was hesitant too, looking at the man as well.

But his eyes stayed on the ground and he walked away.

She didn’t see him for a while after being carted away by Maria.

They both took a shower, a hot shower, and the girl in the mirror staring back at her afterwards was unrecognizable. No longer a girl, but a woman in her middle age. Twenty years, come and gone. Scars, so many scars, and spots dotted her skin all over. Her eyes were a little dull and hair lackluster, a bit too long. There was a faint fading bruise on her collar bone under the stars tattooed there from where Joel’s teeth had bit days before. Buried underneath that flesh had once been a girl who was shy and smiled at strangers for no reason and was warm. A rose, all blushing and bright, who only worried about her military family’s approval and writing down her songs in her journal. Now she was all thorns and crumbled petals. Meant to draw blood and nothing else. She’d gotten dressed quickly before she could shatter the mirror. Finding out about Sarah from Maria…a part of the picture that made up Joel snapped into place and things began to make sense. He was a dad, was always going to be a dad because it was engraved in him, and the young teenager traveling with them was a constant splinter in an open wound. No matter how much he pushed and yelled and raged, he always made sure Ellie was okay. She’d caught him on more than one occasion staying up to keep watch when the girl was anxious. He taught her to make a fire, how to use and take care of her gun properly, what to look out for. Joel Miller was a dad to the very foundation of his being and he was terrified because he’d already lost one daughter. The panic attacks were making sense. They would flare up at the possibility of danger, of uncertainty, not for him but for them. All the close calls. After the older couple’s house. The infected that almost got her in the woods. All had triggered one and she hadn’t known why, only that she had to calm him down and be there to center him. If anything, the knowledge made her feel more protective of him and their small group. It was a vulnerability and that meant something she had to guard it. It’s what it meant to watch each other’s backs. She didn’t miss the way Maria didn’t trust him and accused him of being a bad person. The things she had heard were probably no different than what she still did. Survival was ugly and Maria knew that from the bodies scattered alongside the river, but couldn’t seem to let that go for Joel.

If Maria only knew what she was capable of doing, the blood that covered her own hands. Killing meant so little to her now. The movie theater made her skin crawl, filled with sound and laughter and too many bodies. Ellie was the one to give her permission this time, telling her she was okay to go back to the house where it was quiet. She’d fought hard with herself over that. Joel was who knows where and letting someone else watch Ellie felt like blasphemy, but her heart was in her throat and she couldn’t focus with so much sound. 

So she’d gone back, huddling on the worn dusty couch with her knees against her chest, and unable to stop feeling her clean skin as if it were someone else’s. Her mind didn’t stop imagining every awful situation that could happen while she was gone. Ellie came back first and barely managed a nod at her, mouth tightly pressed together and silent as she climbed the stairs to the room that had once belonged to another teenage girl. Another dead one. She tried not to think about that, how Ellie always seemed to inhabit the echo of another dead daughter. First Sarah and now the room’s owner.

Even for her, Ellie was an echo of her younger sister.

She understood that. Inhabiting the shadow of a dead Tess herself. 

Joel came back next. He stopped, looking at her still with her knees drawn up. His face was darker, more heavy, like he had aged five years in the time she’d last seen him. Grief and pain and indecision lined the crow’s feet around his eyes and her fingers tightened, feeling like a bomb was about to drop. “She good?” he asked in a voice that was all gravel. “She’s whole. Upstairs in the room on the right,” she replied, eyes on the ground. He nodded, hands on his hips, and silence took over. Joel’s presence always felt like a cold fire. She could feel where he was in the room constantly. “You're gonna stick by her, right? Protect her?” Joel’s voice was harsh but not angry, just tired. 

She frowned, brow furrowed, and looked at him fully. There was a look on his face that she had only seen during his panic attacks. Like the weight of the world was crashing down on his shoulders and he was a second from not being able to hold it up, about to be crushed from it. “Is that really a question?”

“Just answer me, Red.”

His eyes were dark and he looked so tired and she was overwhelmed by this place. So she nodded, sighing out a simple, “Yes.”

He seemed to chew on the word, rolled it around his mind before nodding in answer, “Good.”

His steps were loud drum beats in her ears as he ascended, a door opening a bit later followed by the distant sound of Ellie and his voices.

She didn’t know if she should follow. Didn’t know if she’d be climbing into his bed that night or take the separate room on the first floor so far away from them both. Finding Joel’s brother had been the goal, was supposed to be a good thing, but all three of them only appeared to be in worse moods.

The bomb dropped a few moments later.

Ellie and Joel’s voices raising drew her from her spot on the couch and up the stairs. She could hear them arguing and hear the pain in the kid’s voice.

Joel was handing them over to Tommy.

Joel was handing both of them over.

Joel was leaving. 

It felt like a limb had been chopped from her. The ghost of where it was still there, a phantom pain, but its absence felt even stronger. He was leaving them. When he rushed out the door of Ellie’s room, he stopped abruptly at seeing her in the hallway standing stock still. The air had frozen around them dangerously, her anger a silent thing poised to strike and his own tinged in grief. “Just like that, huh?” she bit out, face blank and voice eerily emotionless. A muscle in his jaw ticked, teeth clenched as he spit out, “Just like that.” He moved to go to his room across the hall but something had snapped, urging her to follow like a shark scenting blood. She slammed the door behind them and it reverberated throughout the house, enclosing them in the room together. Something like betrayal coated her tongue and in the back of her mind she wondered at it, wondered if it was her trust or the trust of the teenager across the hall. “Are you really that fucking stupid, Miller?” she hissed at him, “She’s followed you for months and you’re just going to kick her out the door at the first chance? We were supposed to get her to the Fireflies-” He whipped around to face her in the dark, taking an angry step towards her, “I’m sending her with Tommy! That was the job! He knows where he’s going, he can take you both, but there’s no we. Never was.” The smile that slid onto her face was aggressive, canines showing, and he was reminded of those images of wolves snarling and licking their fangs, “Wouldn’t have pegged you as being a quitter, Tex, but glad you cleared that up.” “What’d you think was gonna happen, Starshine? A happy fucking ending?” His tone was mocking, condescending, and it was one of the few times he used his height on her to his advantage to look down his nose, “You, me, and the girl settling down somewhere while the Fireflies cure the world?” She had never thought that far, never allowed herself to think that far, because she hadn’t wanted to think about what the end of the journey would mean. For years it had been surviving one day to the next, long term plans were meaningless. But she knew enough that she wasn’t ready for this to be over and it made her angry. Because Tommy wasn’t Joel. Tommy was good and cared about being good and that wasn’t her. Joel chuckled bitterly, “You that girl’s protector? Then go protect her with Tommy. It ain’t got nothing to do with me. Jobs done.”