#tpfosfic

~*~

Prologue I: At First Glance/Prologue II: Strays

Summary: Your arrival in Jackson, Joel’s view of your first few months. 

A/N: This story is technically set after season 1, though the timeline of Maria’s baby makes that a bit shaky, so… Maria’s just going to be pregnant for a loooong time. In the show it looks like Joel and Ellie get back to Jackson bordering on Spring/Summer, reader finds Jackson the following February. 

Prologues are purposefully written in past tense; the rest of the story is in present tense. 

~*~

Prologue I: At first Glance

At first glance, Jackson was idyllic. 

A safe haven. 

After a few months you came to know the shadows, the darkness that haunted it that everyone tried to hide. 

No one had come to Jackson pure, unscathed. No one who had gone through Outbreak Day or who had been born after that knew lightness, knew happiness the way the world had before that day, and it showed in every pair of eyes you saw. 

It had been a blessing when you ran into the two-man patrol, limping with a sprained ankle and what you were pretty sure was a broken wrist, out of bullets and two days with no food and only mouthfuls of snow for water. You’d fully expected to die there, in the snow, alone. 

From exhaustion or a bullet, it didn’t really matter to you how you died, as long as it wasn’t an infected.

But now you were here, wandering around what reminded you of a fake Wild West tourist trap crossed with a sitcom suburb as the snow is starting to melt in the throes of spring, hand wrapped up tight and a slight limp leftover that the doctor said would fade with time. 

Maria said you needed to find a way to be useful. To contribute. 

She told you that the first day, and every day since, sniffing around to see how fast your wrist was healing, how quickly she could get you on a work roster. She watched you try to sew and shoot and ride a horse. All the while, the same words repeating over and over while her eyes stayed cold. 

Be useful. Contribute. 

You didn’t like the way she said it, didn’t like the intonations she put on it. You were more than happy to pull your weight somehow: washing dishes or in the green house. You knew you didn’t have many useful skills for a place like this, but you’d find something given enough practice.

You absolutely needed practice. None of the skills they needed were things you would ever put on a resume. 

Still, the way she said it seemed more ominous each time. The way she smiled a fake smile at a group of men across the street from you just after the words fell from her lips one day, it made your spine crawl. 

You knew how some women were seen as useful now. 

You’d rather be back out in the snow with no bullets. 

At first glance, Jackson was idyllic. 

But the people were harsh. They were critical. They smiled out of one side of their mouth and gossiped out the other. They waved with one hand while hiding a dagger behind their back in their fist. They all had the same weary, dark edge that permeated the apocalypse and weren’t afraid to let it show if they thought no one was looking. 

Now, everywhere you looked, you saw the lurking shadows, and it made you wonder how much you wanted to stay.

~*~

Prologue II: Strays

Joel Miller would say, if asked, that he did not pick up strays. He didn’t collect people, didn’t take them under his wing, didn’t look out for them. 

The truth was, though, he hated seeing people struggle in this world if he could help. 

It was something he’d learned about himself the hard way from Austin to Boston and then even more so Boston to Jackson, something he would have rather kept a secret as he tried to carve out a little hole for himself and Ellie in the small town that seemed too good to be true. Everyone put themselves first in this world, and he couldn’t afford to do any less for him and Ellie. 

He kept to himself, mostly. Helped where he could. Took extra shifts when someone was needed. He knew how to make himself needed, how to make himself useful. 

Useful was always better than liked post-outbreak. 

Useful people were kept around. Useful people were left alone. Useful people got an extra share of coffee or got to keep the bottle of whisky they found. Useful people gained a little bit of power in being needed by others. 

But he watched you struggle as you tried to find your own way in the town, and it made him anxious more than anyone he'd ever seen before. 

He couldn’t get the image of you, slipping to the ground in the middle of the trees, cradling your hand to your chest and shaking, out of his head. He couldn’t get the little whimpering sound that you made when he picked you up and slipped you on his horse out of his ears. 

He couldn’t forget the way you’d whispered, “Please, no,” when he got on behind you, turning back for Jackson, or how you stayed stiff and shivering the whole way. 

He didn’t need you to say what had happened to you. He’d heard enough stories, seen enough in his lifetime, to be able to imagine what could make you plead like that. 

He remembered the relief in your eyes when he walked you into the small house that held the doctor, when you realized he’d been telling the truth and that maybe, just maybe, things weren’t going to be as bad as you were thinking. 

But he watched you struggle in Jackson, watched you try job after job in the rotation only to get bumped to the next one down the list for months. He watched you try to make friends at meals: the way some people passed you over as you smiled up at them reminded him of the clicks of high school lunchrooms past, leaving his food tasting sour in his mouth. 

He watched you flinch when the young men, the single young men, were the ones that did sit with you, did try to talk with you. You’d smile until they said something that didn’t sit right and then you’d shut down, the light of a new friend, a new connection falling from your eyes. 

He watched you flinch away when they reached for your hand or to touch your face, and it made his blood boil. 

He didn’t think you’d want to talk with him more than you wanted to talk to anyone else. 

But he was tired of watching it. 

He was tired of watching you struggle when you seemed like you were trying so hard to find a space for yourself in this town. 

Maybe he did take people under his wing. 

Maybe he did collect strays. 

He still wouldn’t admit to it. 

~*~

Chapter 1: The Weight of Reality

Summary: Joel meets you, and finds that it might actually be worth it to have a friend. 

A/N: Rest of the story is in present tense. Current time line is early June. 

~*~

“Anyone sittin here?”

You look up from your lunch, surprised at the soft, southern accent drifting over you. You remember it, remember the whispered words of comfort as you sat, trapped by his arms on his horse, cradling your wrist from every jolt on your way into Jackson the first time. You haven’t seen him since that day aside from glances here and there, passing nods and waves as you move through the streets, but you know who he is. You found out fast as soon as you were working and meeting people. 

Joel Miller has a reputation: Tommy’s brother, a hard worker, a good surrogate father… 

A good man. 

He may try to keep to himself, but everyone knows everyone here, and even you’ve heard whispers and gossip. 

You swallow quickly. “No,” you offer, holding your hand out to the two empty chairs around your table. You had started taking the smaller tables, your hope of making new friends dwindling with each passing day, with each failure at a new assigned job. “Help yourself.”

In truth, you expect him to grab a chair and drag it over to the table where his brother sits. You prepare for the sting of that rejection that never comes when he slides it out, setting his bowl down before sitting. 

He must see the surprise in your eyes, because he pauses. “You don’t mind if I join you, right?”

“No,” you shake your head, trying to will the surprise from your face as you look away from him to stir your stew. “Not at all.”

“Just thought,” he clears his throat, settling closer into the table, “thought we hadn’t been properly introduced.”

You laugh, a quick huff of air through your nose. “You mean because I was half alive the last time we were together?”

He almost smiles, setting his spoon into his own bowl. “Yeah, something like that.”

You skip the pleasantries: you know he knows your name, just like you know he knows you know his. “I didn’t get the chance to thank you, being terrified and nearly catatonic with pain and all by the time we got back here.” 

“Made getting you off the horse a little tougher, I’ll tell you that,” he deadpans, slipping a spoonful between his lips. 

You smile as he chews, surprised at how easy it is to talk to him. How relaxed he seems. It calms you, just like those soft whispers of You’re alright, just keep breathing and you’re gonna be okay did in your ear all those months ago. 

He just wants to talk. Share a meal. 

It’s the very thing you’ve been hoping for with someone, anyone in town since you got here. You just want to have someone to talk to. Someone to take up space so you don’t feel so lonely. Someone to share a meal with. 

So, you do. 

He asks you about how you’re settling in, and you sigh when you tell him that it’s not well. You try to keep it light: silly anecdotes as you tell him how you lost two sheep when you were working with the livestock, then burned the bread and managed to break the rice cooker in the kitchen, how you thought the green onions were weeds and managed to pull half the crop before someone told you otherwise when they assigned you to the greenhouse…

He doesn’t laugh, like you expect, or try to give you unsolicited advice like others have, he just nods along as he eats, genuinely interested. 

You’ve been subjected to so many judging eyes, so many raised voices nearly yelling as you failed task after task you didn’t really know how to do and hadn’t been adequately trained for, that this feels like heaven. He doesn't judge, just listens. He isn’t wary, like the women seem to be. He isn’t aggressive, like most of the other men. He doesn’t seem to have anything that he wants from you, at least not yet. 

You scrape at the bottom of your bowl, tearing your bread into little tiny pieces just to have a reason to stick around and listen to him talk about the construction he starts to detail that he and Tommy are planning for the spring to help sure up one of the houses when finally stops talking and you ask him if he only does patrols. 

He shakes his head. “Guard duty and patrols are what I’m best at, but Tommy and I head up construction in the spring when the weather breaks and everything needs to be fixed up.” He tilts his head, eyes boring into you. “Hey, you don’t happen to be an engineer by chance, do ya?”

You laugh for real this time: a big bark of a laugh that gets him smiling all the way up to his eyes. “No! No, I’m afraid I can’t help you with that. Why?”

“We’re talking about trying to build a water wheel in the creek, maybe get a good old-fashioned mill going.” He shrugs, pushing his bowl away so he can fold his arms on the table. “So, what did you do that made that seem so funny?”

“I was a writer,” you look down at your hands, twiddling your fingers and missing the click of a keyboard under them. “An indoors girl, through and through, which may be why I have absolutely no useful skills here.”

He skips over your self-pity, and you’re not sure if you’re thankful for that or if you were actually hoping for him to send you some reassurance you’d have some useful skills. His mouth quicks up in a half smile, “What did you write?”

“Anything,” you shrug, surprised by the fact that he seems genuinely interested. “It wasn’t very lucrative, so I took whatever work I could get. Mostly magazine articles. I ghost wrote some web content. I was shopping around a book, but publishers didn’t seem all that interested.”

His eyebrows lift, soft surprise on his face. “You wrote a book?”

You try not to blush. You haven’t even thought about your book in years, never mind talk about it. “I did.”

He opens his mouth like he wants to say more, but the sounds of scraping chairs get his attention. You both look up the clock at the front of the room, and start cleaning your places at the table. 

Lunch is over. Afternoon jobs are starting for those that have them. 

This little interlude, as nice as it has been, has come to an end. 

“Suppose we should get going,” he offers instead of whatever he had been about to say, standing. “I’m on front gate this afternoon. You?”

You look up at him, his face soft and sweet and the kindest thing in this town you’ve encountered so far, even if people call him gruff and rude and sharp behind his back. “Mucking the stalls,” you reply, trying to fill it with as much enthusiasm as you can as you stand next to him. “Hopefully, I can’t screw up shoveling shit.”

His half smile as you both walk to the dish room window is more than enough to make you feel like you want to seek him out again. “Don’t, uh- don’t count on that. Harder than it looks.” Something about the way he says it isn’t a dig, not a slight or a comment on your abilities, but it’s a tease. Something light. 

Something a…a friend might say. 

“I’ll keep that in mind,” you reply softly, shoving your hands in your jeans, following him out the front door and splitting your separate ways without a goodbye. 

~*~

Joel sits, fidgeting, next to Ellie as the movie is projected on the wall of the dining hall. He hasn’t seen it in a long time, he’d even been looking forward to tonight, but his attention couldn’t be farther away. 

You’re not the only one missing from the room, but the town is small and he can count the number of people missing. Movie nights are a big deal around here, and he’s never seen a new person miss the chance to see a piece of their past before. 

He tries to talk himself out of it, tries to tell himself maybe you don’t like Tom Hanks. 

Who doesn’t like Tom Hanks?

But then, he hadn’t seen you at dinner, either, and that makes him anxious. 

He’d expected you to be jumpier than you were when he sat with you, expected the conversation to be stilted and difficult, but it flowed soft and natural and it made sense in his mind when he learned you’d spent your life before all this working with words. 

He isn’t good at words, at least not the ones that mean anything, but he could bullshit with the best of them before. Now, he prefers to keep his words to himself. 

But with you, it was easy. Ebbing and flowing of ideas, no pressure, just thoughts and sentences that didn’t need to be great declarations or meaningless pleasantries. 

It was a real and true conversation. 

One that he actually enjoyed.

It makes him all the more curious as to why you are always alone, as to why it seems you struggle so hard with others. 

Across the lunch table, he could see the smile lines that reached your eyes, the folds by your cheeks where your lips turned up as you talked, the little silver highlights in your hair that told him you were older than he originally thought. You had a life, a job, and you remembered the before like he did, through the eyes of an adult who lost the future they’d been banking on, a future you’d all been promised.  

He’d hoped to find you at dinner. To keep talking. To introduce you to Ellie. 

Then he’d hoped to find you here. To enjoy the easy comfort you’d afforded at lunch. 

You hadn’t wanted anything from him. 

That’s rare. 

Most of the women in Jackson are attached to a man, those that aren’t attached desperately want to be. Sadly, there is a measure of protection that is afforded to the women that are attached. Jackson isn’t exactly dangerous for a single woman, there are rules and laws and everyone has agreed to a certain way of life. Those that break those agreements are punished… when the council finds out. If they find out. 

And so the women who talk to him often want things from him. Time. Labels. Commitments. 

People couple up fast in Jackson, and he steadfastly avoids it. 

He isn’t looking for a wife or a girlfriend. He’s perfectly happy the way he is. 

But the conversation… the conversation with you was nice. Something different. Something he hadn’t felt in a long time. 

His meandering thoughts make him even more anxious. Missing dinner he can rationalize: mucking out stalls isn’t exactly the most appetizing job. But now, it is dark out. There are dark corners and little side alleys everywhere that you could get lost in, that you could have gotten stopped in. He knows you’ve been here for months now, but it doesn’t stop the rush of protectiveness he feels. Some of the boys are aggressive, and even though he and Tommy have spoken to Maria about it on more than one occasion, there doesn’t seem to be much anyone wants to do about the pressure the boys put on the ladies to couple up, to commit and be just a little more subservient than seems necessary.

Maria had looked him straight in the eyes, not a single subservient bone in her body, protected by the power afforded to her by the council and her place in this society, and told him on no uncertain terms, “Don’t rock the boat, Joel. We got a good thing going here. You start pushing people out of their comfort zones and they push back hard.” 

The screen blurs, the parallel lines of the pause symbol shining bright as a break is announced, and snacks are put out for the kids. It pulls him out of his thoughts, springing him back in the present. 

Joel stands, unable to wait any longer. “You gonna stay here?”

Ellie looks up at him, head cocked. “Um, yeah.” She snips sarcastically, as if she has anywhere else to go. “Where do you plan on going?”

He isn’t sure what he wants to say. He doesn’t want her thinking things that she shouldn’t be thinking, or getting the wrong idea. 

“Gotta check on a friend.”

Ellie barks out a laugh. “Bullshit. You don’t have friends.”

He presses his lips together, shaking his head. “Just… stay here, ok?”

He doesn’t wait for her answer, just weaves his way through the crowded room and out the doors, pulling his jacket on. The Lodge is just down the street: a hotel that had been renovated right before the outbreak, it serves just as well as an apartment building of sorts for new residents or residents who don’t want or need a whole house. 

He looks in every alley he passes, down every street. 

It isn’t that he doesn’t trust you to be smart, to take care of yourself. 

It’s that he knows what some of those men say to their friends when they don’t think anyone else can hear. 

The alleys are all, thankfully, dark and quiet. 

~*~

The knock on your door makes you jump. You’re not expecting anyone, and the only person who has come to see you in the months since you arrived is Maria, stopping in every so often to change your assignment, to sigh heavily and tell you that you have to find a place where you fit here or else it’s gonna be harder to rationalize keeping you. 

They say it’s socialist, but there’s an edge to it that makes it a little less kumbaya than you’d like. It feels a little more “Lord of the Flies” to you some days. 

Maria should be at the movie tonight, something you’d hoped to see, so it leaves you wary. 

In the peephole is a face you don’t expect. 

You throw the door open, the towel slipping from around your wet hair so you have to fumble to catch it. “Joel?”

He looks uncomfortable, hands in his pockets and shifting his weight from foot to foot. “Hey.”

“Hey.” You ball the towel in your hands if only to give you something to do while you wait for him to explain why he’s at your door. He doesn’t say anything, just looks at you: wet, tangled hair, mismatched sweats that came from a community pile that are just a little too big through the shoulders and a little too short in the legs, bare feet on the threadbare carpet. You know you must look a sight. 

“What’s up?” You want to ask what’s wrong, what he’s doing here, but you try to keep it light, even though the words feel woefully out of place. The anxiety you felt at having to open the door melts. Something about him still puts you at ease, just like it did at lunch, despite the awkwardness of him showing up at your door. 

“Nothin’,” he lies, shaking his head and looking away. “Nothin’, I just…” He recenters himself, physically and mentally and you realize just how tall and broad he is when he takes up your doorway. “Didn’t see you at dinner, then didn’t see you at the movie and… wanted to know how the stables went?”

You almost laugh. He surprises himself with the end of the sentence, like he didn’t know where it was going before it came out of his mouth. 

There’s nothing to laugh about, though. “Great,” you mutter, suddenly embarrassed. “Fabulous.” You shake your head and lean on the edge of the open door. “Missed dinner ‘cause it took me so long to do, and you can’t leave ‘till you’re done. Then I just… I couldn’t go anywhere until I got that smell off me, ya know?” You shrug. “Just got out of the shower. I missed most of the movie, huh?”

“Yeah.” He scuffs his foot on the ground, and you can feel the palpable nervousness coming from him. He doesn't know what to say. 

Neither do you. 

You want to invite him in, you’ve been looking forward to maybe seeing him again, but you’re tired and sore and you want nothing more than to curl up in your bed and sleep. 

“Thanks,” you settle on, his head lifting to look at you, “thanks for checking on me.”

“Wasn’t—”  he starts to argue, but it drops when he sees your face, head cocked and eyebrows low, disbelieving. “I just… just wanted to make sure you were alright, being… new… and all.”

You’re not new, though. It’s been months of trying to find your place once your wrist healed and your limp faded. You’re starting to feel old; you’re starting to feel the weight of not having found a place that feels like it fits for you here. 

It’s like he knows that somehow, though, the way he says it. 

“I appreciate it,” you nearly whisper back. You want to tell him just how much you appreciate it, just how much it makes you feel real and seen to have someone care enough to check on you as opposed to telling you you’re not doing enough. 

You don’t. 

“I was gonna turn in early.”

“Gotta head back…”

Your words overlap, suddenly feeling like the awkwardness of a first date. But you aren’t waiting on a kiss goodnight. You expect nothing from this man that literally saved your life. He’s already given you far more than you expected today. 

With soft good nights, you close your door. 

Don’t Turn Around.

He can’t. He can’t turn around. He has to keep moving forward, has to keep dragging Ellie, squirming in his grip, as far as he can. 

He has to get as far as he can before you pull that trigger. 

Don’t Turn Around.

His throat aches to scream, his hands itch to hit something. After all this time, the world is still crumbling around him. 

Everyone leaves him. 

Sarah. 

Tommy. 

Tess. 

You. 

He looks down, hauling Ellie another step away from you, batting her hand away from his face as she screams at him. 

Don’t Turn Around.

Ellie. 

Them. 

Everyone leaves them. 

Ellie is all he has left. He’s the only thing she has now, too. He won’t take that away from her. Not with you already leaving them both. 

Don’t Turn Around. 

He won’t leave her. It’s the only reason he’s still moving. 

It’s the only reason he’s still treading away from you, heart pounding in his chest and every breath painful. 

Don’t Turn Around.

He would, though. If he wasn’t holding Ellie back, he’d turn around. 

Hell, he would have never left. 

He told you he’d never leave you, and now you’re making him break that promise.

Don’t. 

Turn Around. 

He would have stayed right by you, holding your hand, holding you in his arms, as the fungus took over and stole you from him. 

He fucking promised he’d never leave you again, and even as he walks away, it’s the last thing he wants to do.

Don’t. 

Turn Around. 

There is so little left for him in Jackson. 

Tommy left him a long time ago, and being nearer to him hasn’t repaired their relationship. If anything, it’s more broken now than when he first got to Jackson.

The house will feel empty now. Less. 

Don’t. 

Turn Around. 

He is just so fucking tired. 

Tired of loss. Tired of this life. Tired of this world. 

Every step that he takes brings him back to something he doesn’t even know if he wants. 

Don’t. 

Turn Around. 

But by god if he would love to just stop now, to just hold you in his arms and let you kiss him one last time, to let the fugus take him, too. 

To slip away in your arms. 

To finally, finally rest. 

He almost turns around…

…but the girl in his arms is what stops him, struggling against his hands, fighting for the rest of her life in this broken world. 

He takes another step away from you. And another. 

Don’t Turn Around. 

~*~

“Put me down you fucking mother fucker!” Ellie finally struggles from Joel’s arms once they’re back at the ridge, the shack and the carnage around it only just visible in the distance. “Why did you do that?”

“She doesn't want us there, Ellie!” He pushes her forward, trying to turn her and get her back on the path to Jackson, but she doesn't move. 

“Because she’s gonna fucking kill herself, Joel!” Her voice is harsh and broken with grief. “You didn’t even try to stop her!”

“So she can turn?” Joel spits the words at her, trying to push her forward again. “You think I fucking like this?” 

That stops her, stops her ire and anger. “No,” she croaks out. “But there’s-”

“There’s nothing-” Joel’s voice cracks and he stops, wiping his hands down his face as he tries to force anything, anything except sadness and desperation into his voice. “There’s nothing left to do,” he says finally, slow and measured and utterly broken.  

The tears fall from Ellie’s eyes, slipping down over her cheeks. She doesn’t even try to wipe them away. “There’s gotta be,” she whispers, desperately. 

Everything in him sours, because he feels the same way. Yet, he’s got to be the voice of reason. He’s forced to lead the march away from the one person he wants to be with more than anything. 

His chest hurts, his throat hurts, his head hurts. 

He wants nothing more than to just sit down and crawl back to you, letting you take him with you into oblivion if he can get there before you shoot that gun. 

If he can’t? Well, maybe it’s a good thing Ellie had to read Romeo and Juliet after all, because maybe there’ll be a sweet bullet left for him in the gun. 

He doesn’t want to live in a world where he has to justify leaving the one he loves in agony. But he does. And he will. For Ellie, he’ll march on, less and less of him left by the day. And it all roars out of him: the pain, the anger, as he yells at the last thing left he loves. “You think I want this? Do you?”

“No,” Ellie mutters back, taking the shouting, and looking at her feet. 

His voice drops as he gets in her face, rage still fueled by loss. “There isn’t any fucking thing we can do in the next few hours that the world hasn’t already tried in the last fucking twenty years, Ellie! She was right, okay? And she has the right to do this on her terms.” He roars with anger, all thoughts of being concerned about infected in the woods gone from his mind. “Fucking move. I don’t want to hear the-”

“Her terms…” Ellie pauses, turning back to the shack and shaking off his hand as he tries to turn her toward Jackson again. Her shoulders drop. The anger leaves her. She takes a heavy breath, and then another as her head cants to the side. Her eyes light up as she turns, wiping at her tears.  “Fucking… her terms!” 

She starts running back down the hill to the shack.

“Ellie!”

She stops, runs back up and grabs Joel’s hand and pulls him. “Her terms, Joel. She was coherent. She is coherent.”

He pulls her back the other way. “Ellie, I can’t-”

“That bite was on her fucking shoulder, Joel. Bullshit eight hours. You get eight hours at the wrist. She had two at most.” Ellie leans up, getting in his face. “She’s not gonna fucking turn, Joel! We gotta stop her!”

~*~

The world spins beneath you as you hold onto the door frame with one hand, the gun in the other. You want to be outside the small shack so maybe some of the people of Jackson will still use it. Ideally you can make it to the tree line, but even if you can just make it to the pile of bodies, it’s better than in the shack. 

But the sun is blazing and your head is pounding and if the world would just stop spinning…

You might not get your wish. You might have to do it here. 

You want to give them enough time to get far away, but each minute that slips away is another minute closer to a loss of control that will keep you from doing what needs to be done. 

You bring the gun up under your chin, resting it against the bone. 

You should probably sit for this. Your hand is already shaking. As soon as you let go of the doorframe you’ll fall, you know it. 

You have to do it soon. You’re hearing things: you’re hearing your name, over and over in their voices. Hallucinations. Wishes. 

It all signals that loss of control you’re dreading. 

Your eyes blink open, just for a second, and it’s not a hallucination. They’re there, Joel and Ellie, running down the hill at you. It’s both the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen and the worst. 

You don’t want to be alone, but you don’t want them here to see this. 

You don’t have any fight left in you to send them away again, though. 

But he’ll have to do it, now. Joel will have to.

He’ll have to kill you. 

Doing that might very literally kill him, too. 

“No,” you whisper to yourself, sliding down the doorframe, gun falling to your side. You can do nothing but wait as they make their way to you, calling out your name through the empty hillside. You didn’t want this. Your only saving grace was that they were gone, that they wouldn’t see you. 

It is a betrayal. 

Ellie slides in front of you, her young knees not caring as they shimmy in the dirt to grab your hands. “You’re not gonna turn!” 

“Ellie, please,” you slide the gun away from you, if only to belay her fears for the moment. Her eyes are so wide, so full of hope and panic and tears. “You can’t just wish-”

She shakes her head and holds your hands tight. “You won’t, I know it!” 

“She does,” Joel pants, finally catching up, settling himself in the dirt by your side. He pulls tugs at the edge of your sleeve to reveal your shoulder, to expose the bite you’ve kept covered since it was found. 

None of you wanted to see it spread, watch the tendrils of fungus pop up along your skin like pustulant veins as your time ran out. 

You still don’t want to look at it, at the future it heralds.

“She does, darlin,” he says, gentler and with a hint of home, still breathless. “Look.”

The turn of your head makes the world spin and you squeeze your eyes shut for a second before trying to look at the backside of your shoulder. The angle’s awkward, but it’s clear: the bite hasn’t changed. The uneven teeth marks are still there, the telltale beginnings of the tendrils of infection, but instead of angry red pustules and spreading lines marring your skin, it looks dried up. 

It looks like Ellie’s. 

“What?” You pull at your shoulder with your other hand, trying to get a better look at it. “But I’m…”

“You’re coherent.” Ellie calls your attention back to her. “You’re talking in full sentences, making sense and it’s been hours.”

“But I can’t…” You squeeze your eyes shut. Everything’s fuzzy. Everything hurts. You can’t hold your arm out without tremors and you can’t stand for more than a few seconds. Your brain feels heavy and your tongue is thick in your mouth. 

“The concussion, darlin’,” Joel pulls you to him, wrapping you in his arms. “Everything that asshole did to you is…” He kisses your head, and it feels divine. “You’re not well, but you’re not going to turn.”

You want to believe it. You want to put all of your hope in this, but you can’t make it make sense. Your brain won’t make it make sense. 

You’re going to turn. Even with the evidence in front of you, even with your dull bite scabbing over instead of blooming under your skin, you can’t believe there’s hope. You start to push him away. You’re weak and tired and the world tilts off its axis when you do, but it’s the only thing you want now: for them to leave. “No, go…”

“I am not. Leaving. Again.” He holds your face still, waiting to say the words until your eyes lock on his. “I am not leaving you again, and I shouldn’t have left in the first place.” 

He doesn’t wait for you to reply, doesn’t give you the space to protest, instead he lifts you in his arms with a grunt, standing and moving into the small shed and setting you on the cot. There’s no fight in you left, even if you wanted to, and so you let him settle you on the cot, let him readjust the shutters on the small windows until there’s no light on you and you can open your eyes. 

He knows. Joel always knows exactly what you need. 

You hear him talk to Ellie, something about how much noise they made and keeping watch, but it doesn't register in your mind. Exhaustion creeps up on you now that your brain is screaming safe with Joel here, even if you don’t fully believe that it’s true, even if you don’t fully believe that you won’t turn now as soon as you close your eyes, or tonight or tomorrow or some other day. 

He kneels in front of you, hand on your cheek until your eyes flutter open. “We’re gonna stay here for a bit. We gotta wait until you’re feeling better or a patrol finds us, ok? It’s a long haul back, too long to try to take you on foot like this, ok?” His voice is low and gentle as his calloused fingers brush the hair away from your temple. 

You nod, letting your head push into his hand for a moment. There’s nothing more you’d like right now than to be curled up in him, lying in your bed at home. This cot will have to do for now, his touch lulling you into sleep.  

You’re still afraid to fall asleep, you’re afraid that when you wake up you won’t be you, but you have little choice as oblivion claims you. 

~*~

Joel stands at the front of the small shack, eyes out the crack in the window. 

“You really think anyone’s coming?” Ellie asks from her spot on the floor, spreading out the contents of both of their backpacks. 

He nods, “Tommy’ll have to after a day or so, if they don’t send a patrol before that. We’re off the normal patrol route, so I don’t think anyone will stumble on us, unless they heard us, but that’s a long shot.” He sighs, rubbing his hand over his face. “They usually wait a whole day before sending anyone when people go missing.”

“Threat assessment,” she mutters. Joel catches her eyes and nods, knowing she’s thinking over all the things she was taught about patrols, all the things he downright ignored to come out last night. “We need a horse,” Ellie adds. “She can’t walk back, it’s too far.” 

“Not like she is now, no.” Joel’s eyes fall on the pile of bodies across from the shed, head shaking. “Mother fucker.” The curse falls from his lips, venom in every syllable. 

Ellie looks up, leaning against the wall, her own face blank. “At least he got what he deserved,” she muttered. 

“Doesn’t make what happened any better.” He paces back, bending by your side, brushing the hair from your face and pulling his jacket up over your shoulders. “Why?” He whispers out loud, more to himself than anyone. 

“Cause Robbie’s a sick fucking prick,” Ellie responds, turning her head. “No one fucking liked him. He shoulda been dealt with a long time ago.”

Joel almost barks out a broken laugh. He’d had Robbie pegged since the first time he met him: an entitled asshole with just enough crazy in his eyes that Joel knew to stay away. After all the shit he’d done, it was sad that it didn’t surprise Joel what had happened. Joel has always known what he was capable of. But no, that wasn’t what he was asking. 

“No,” he mutters, slipping the fabric around so he can see your bite, the breaks in the skin scabbed up, the tendrils of infection dried up and lumpy under his fingers when he touches it. It’s not hot and red or angry or festering. “This.”

Ellie sits up, sliding over on her knees until she’s next to you and Joel, and slides her sleeve along her arm to reveal her own bite. “Hers is even less,” she whispers with near wonder. “I don’t think you’ll be able to see it when it heals.”

“Can’t have been Robbie,” Joel muses out loud, his fingers running over the little lines of tendrils. “Human bite wouldn’t do that.” 

Ellie shakes her head, sliding back to her spot to continue to reorganize their packs, holding out the little pile of jerky and canteens of water to the side. “No, it wouldn’t.”

His fingers work in your hair for long, quiet moments, trying to get the tangles and matting out from being dragged through the woods, as Ellie sets the packs to the side before taking up watch. 

“I have a theory, you know,” Ellie mutters quietly. Joel hums low in his throat, looking at her before going back to your hair. “I heard Marlene talking to one of the other Fireflies once, about me. She said that my mom was bitten.” 

Her voice is low and cold, detached in the way it is when she talks about her life before she knew Joel. It stops him from his task, turning him so he’s watching her with all of his attention. “She was?”

She shrugs, not liking the importance of it. “I didn’t hear too much. Just that she’d lied to Marlene.” Ellie swallows, eyes still set on the outside. “I kinda figure if she got bit, and then I was born, maybe I got some of it, you know? Like all those damn vaccines they gave us in Fedra school- a little bit of it makes you immune, right?”

Joel knows they tried that for cordyceps: live vaccines, dead vaccines. He lived through it. They didn’t work. 

But he also gets flashes of books on his bedside table from another life he’d lived and VHS tapes he’d had to watch and birthing classes he went to, his mind screaming the word placenta over and over to him. He never fucking knew what it did, but he remembers it was important. Remembers hearing about it over and over again while they were waiting to bring Sarah into the world. 

Into a very different world. 

“You know, so I’m just thinking… if my mom was infected, but I’m immune,” she swallows, looking over at him, then eyes darting to you. “What if her babies were infected? Maybe that could make her immune.”

Joel didn’t know if it worked like that. He couldn’t remember, couldn’t bring up the words on the page or whatever that damn bubbly birthing coach had said during the Lamaze classes. 

But it was enough. 

It was close enough to a reason that made sense. 

More than hope, more than prayer, biology actually made sense. 

“Either that or her brain’s too fucked up from the concussion for the Cordyceps to live,” Ellie rambles out, shrugging, “but if that was true, you’d just have to hit an infected in the head and they’d be fine, so that can’t be fucking right.”

He almost, almost laughs at how contrary she is. “Jesus, Ellie.”

~*~

It’s the middle of the afternoon when you wake up, eyes flickering open to the cobweb covered ceiling of the cabin. There’s just enough light creeping in through the closed windows to see shapes: Ellie sleeping curled up against the wall opposite of you, Joel standing guard at the door, leaning cross legged against the frame. The day has marched on without you. You don’t know how many hours you’ve slept, but waking up with your own mind is a relief. 

Maybe… maybe they’re right. 

The cot squeaks when you try to stand and he’s by you before the world can stop spinning, hands on your shoulder to help you sit. “Hey, hey. Easy now.”

You let your head fall to his shoulder, waiting for his solidness to help to slow down the tilting sensation. “Just need to pee,” you mutter, wrapping your arms around his shoulders. 

He helps you stand with quiet affirmations, holding you under your arms and around your waist as he helps you shuffle out towards the trees, pausing every time you grip him tight and the world tilts until you relax and start breathing again. It’s farther than you think to the tree line, and each step makes you regret leaving the cot a little more. 

But each step is also a victory. You’re not shaky, not out of control of your body. Your body isn’t fighting you, like you’ve seen when people turn. No, you’re sore, and in pain, and your thighs and hips ache and it stings between your legs with each step and your shoulders burn each time you have to press down into Joel’s arms. You’ve never been happier to feel pain, to know exactly what caused each and every ache, to feel that the ache is different from your arms to your legs and know it’s not systemic. 

He helps you prop yourself up against a tree and then steps away as you relieve yourself. For all he’s seen, for all he’s done, there are still some things you want to be private. You wish there was more light in the shady canopy, you wish you could move enough to look at your body, confirm the bruises that you feel, but you keep losing your balance and the longer you stay out the longer you’re in danger from all the things that could be hiding in the trees. 

The trip back is somewhat easier with an empty bladder and his warm whispers in your ear encouraging you with every step. Some of the pains dull to an ache the more you move, but by the time you make it, you feel like you’ve walked all day instead of for a few minutes. 

He moves to set you back in the cot but you grip him. “Just… just sit with me?” You whisper, trying to avoid waking Ellie. 

He nods, slowly helping you to the floor and then climbing down next to you, soft grunts slipping from his lips as his knees click when they bend. It feels almost normal when he pulls you between his legs, wrapping himself around you, giving you his chest to lean back into. You sigh, happily, and he holds you tighter.

“It felt good to move,” you whisper. “Tiring, but good.”

“Good,” he drops a kiss to your hair, tucking you tighter against him. “Good.”

But there he is: Robbie. Hand around your wrist, pulling you away. “I’m tired of these games,” he mutters, dragging you. 

You dig your heels in, panicking. “Let me go, Robbie!”

He’s big enough he can move you, but not much, not unless he wants to let go of your wrist to pick you up. He stops, looking you dead in the eye. “You’re coming with me.”

“Fucking hell I am.” You pull again, but his hand is like a vice. Trying to pull back against him hurts. “Let me go!”

He steps closer to you, breathing heavy through his nose. “I’m done with this flirting you do, done with playing games. I told you I could have you any time I want you. I’m done playing. Now, you’re coming with me.”

You tug again, scrambling your feet to put as much room as you can between the two of you. “Fuck off! I’m not flirting with you. I want nothing to do with you.” You try to put one of the wooden barriers for the piles between your bodies, but with a tug he has you on your knees. 

He leans down and presses his face to yours, kissing you. It’s rough and almost painful, full of rage as he holds the back of your head to keep you from moving. 

You struggle against him anyway, throwing yourself to the ground and rolling, finally getting away from his grip. “You stay the fuck away from me!”

He smiles, running his fingers over his lips. “Or what?”

You don’t answer, only inch back, putting whatever space you can between the two of you. 

He laughs. “Good ol’ Joel gonna come looking for me?”

“He’s my husband,” you mutter, unsure what you even mean by it. Because he will. Joel will come looking for him and tear Robbie to pieces. 

…and then you're both out in the godforsaken wasteland that is the rest of the world now. 

He laughs again, taking a few running steps towards you. You back up, crashing into the wooden barrier of one of the bins. You scramble up and over it, eyes on Robbie the whole time. 

“Keep this up,” he finally mutters, sagging back, knowing you can outrun him if you have to, now that you’re on the other side of the long line of compost bins. “And we’ll see if you like what you get.” 

You watch him turn and walk away. You keep your eyes on him, not blinking, until you can’t see him anymore. 

And then you run. 

~*~

It’s a bad idea. 

At the very least, it isn’t a good idea. 

But you don’t have another one, you can’t think of fucking anything as you rub at your wrist, pacing outside the gate office, other than Joel. 

Joel. 

You need him right now. You don’t like feeling like you need him, but you do. 

It’s a bad idea, because he’s going to be absolutely furious. You don’t know what you’re going to say, what you’re going to tell him…

Hell, you don't know if you’ll be able to even say anything once you see him, you’re so tied up in knots. You just know you need him, need to be around him, need to find him…

…and you don’t want to be alone. Even in your house, with the doors and windows locked, it felt like you were still in danger, like Robbie would break his way in. 

It’s what led you here, pacing on the street, keeping your eyes away from everyone. You know he won’t try anything here. Not in front of everyone.  

And you can’t be alone. You don’t want to be alone. 

He’ll be back soon. Morning patrols are due back any minute. Your wrist aches and it’s red and it’s your good fucking wrist and if he sprained it, you’re fucked and Joel will be back any minute. 

It’s a bad idea. 

But it’s the only one you have. 

So, you pace, and you rub, and you wait. 

It’s only a few more minutes, shorter than you expect, actually, before you hear his voice coming through the gates, reaching your ears and perking your head up. 

He stops when he sees you, eyebrows crinkling together just a little, lips quirking just a hair, happiness at seeing you and confusion all at the same time. The smile doesn’t last, though. You know he only needs to see you for him to know something’s wrong.

You’re trying too hard to look neutral, to look like there’s nothing wrong. But there is. There’s so much wrong. 

Of course, he would see. He’s always seen. 

Joel has always seen you so much clearer than anyone else you’ve ever known.

The wrinkles on his forehead grow deeper as he crosses the space between you with long, heavy steps. “Darlin’?” He asks, low and heavy as he steps up next to you. 

You reach for him without thinking, without a second’s hesitation, just taking his hand and twining your fingers with his. He flexes his hand in yours, giving a little squeeze as he searches your face for some clue, any clue, as to what’s happened. 

“Home,” is all you can say, your voice cracking. “Please.”

“Okay,” he nods, cupping your head with his other hand and pulling you to him, pressing a tight kiss to your forehead before he starts moving, keeping you close. “Okay.”

He lets you stay silent the whole walk home even though you can feel how he wants to ask more questions. He doesn’t, he just leads the way with you tucked into his side, a valiant knight protecting what is his as he moves you through Jackson.

You manage to keep your breath steady the whole way through town, manage to keep the tears pricking at the back of your eyes at bay with each step. You’re not proud of how much calmer, how much safer you feel with Joel around, it gnaws at the part of you that had become independent and strong, but you push that down. Now is not the time for pride.

He moves you into the house with a glance around, eyes sweeping wide as he pushes you in front of him and then locks the door behind him. He deflates, just for a second, looking down at your hand in his, at the purpling bruise around your wrist, before taking a deep breath and pulling you into the kitchen.

“We don’t have any ice,” you say softly, words choking in your throat at his care as he opens and closes the freezer again after seeing the water filled trays that haven’t frozen yet.

“You see the doc?” He asks, feet shuffling under him with the need to do something as he turns to you. “How- how long ago was it?”

“No, I- I didn’t see-”

“We should see the doc.” He says over you, trying to turn you back towards the door.

You stop him, stop the desperation you can feel building up in him, with your hand on his chest. “I used the ice we had. Didn’t help.” You take a slow deep breath. “Was home for maybe 20 minutes, then I went right to the gate to find you.”

You can feel the frustration bubbling though him, his not knowing what’s happening, not knowing how he can help, physically making him vibrate as his words pour from his lips in a rush. “Why me? Why not the doc? Why not-”

“I didn’t want to be alone.” You take a shaky breath to calm yourself, to try to calm him. “I don’t want to be alone.”

His body sinks as he exhales, nearly crumbling from the weight of not knowing. “Jesus, darlin’,” he whispers desperately as he reaches for your unscathed hand, “will ya tell me what’s goin’ on?”

You hold his hand tight, his eyes boring into yours. “Before I say anything, I need you to promise me something.”

Your name falls from his lips in a frustrated, desperate plea to get to the point.

“No.” You bite out, harsh and angry and desperate as the emotions finally boil over. “I told you once that I wouldn’t play the wife card unless I needed it. I need it.” You close your eyes tight and take a deep breath and look at him with tears in your eyes. “No matter what you want to do, no matter what you want to say, I’m telling you right now, I need you here. With me.”

You can feel his hand shaking, the color draining from his face. His voice cracks. “What the hell happened?”

“Promise me!” You demand. “Promise me that you will not leave my side until I say otherwise.” The tear slips down your cheek and you see him crumble across from you, but it isn’t worse than what’s happening inside you. “I need you here, Joel,” you whisper, as broken as you’ve ever been. “I need you here.”

He gathers you to him desperately, possessively, as if his arms can save you from whatever it is. “I promise.” He whispers fervently. “I’d never leave you.”

“You’ll want to,” you whisper, hiding in his chest. “You’ll want to kill him.”

His body stills, as if he’s become something inanimate. “Him?” His voice shakes with emerging anger. “Who did what to you?”

You step back and slide your sleeve up your arm showing the rest of the hand-shaped bruise. “Robbie found me at the compost,” you say softly, focusing on the words you’d rehearsed in your mind. “He… he cornered me.”

He takes your hand in his, so gentle you barely feel his touch, and tenderly turns it, looking at the angry red and purple bruise, so much more than the little he could see from under your sleeve. His jaw ticks, his shoulders hike up, you can feel him tremble with emotions he fights to hold back. When he looks up at you, you see the murderous rage you knew would be there.

It stokes something primal in you, and instead of being afraid, or frustrated, or mad, you feel calm. You’re protected.

Joel will protect you, no matter what.

“Robbie did this to you?” His voice shakes, a dangerous timber under a fake calm.

You tell him, rote, plain, everything that happened step by step, his dark eyes watching you, your wrist cradled gently in his hands. Neither of you move but for your lips and his shaky breaths. When you’re done, neither of you speaks or moves for long moments.

He finally blinks, and slowly pulls you to him. He takes you in his arms, wrapping one across your back and then tucking your head under his chin with his other palm. He holds you to him like glass, like a ticking time bomb, with a gentle strength that belays the live current of anger you can feel running through his every muscle.

“Are you-” His voice cracks, and he has to take a heaving breath into the crown of your head. “Are you okay?”

“Wrist hurts,” you whisper. “More than anything I’m- I don’t want to be alone. I thought, I thought we were done with him.” You voce cracks. “I wanted to be done with him.”

He pulls you tighter at that confession, and you feel every ounce of the strength you know he holds in his body. “I’m here.” He rocks you gently, fervently pressing his lips to your hair. “I’m here and I’m not going anywhere.”

~*~

He’s fucking dead.

Robbie is a fucking dead man.

Joel sits against the headboard in the dark of the bedroom, your head in his lap, sleeping, finally, for the first time in two days. He hasn’t left your side, and you haven’t left the house in two days. They’ve told everyone you both have a stomach bug, and they’ve left you alone, but sooner or later you’ll both have to leave the house, you’ll both have to go to work.

Joel doesn’t want to let you out of his sight. He runs his hand through your hair again, happy you’re sleeping. He can’t sleep, though.

He’s going to kill him.

He spends his time thinking about how he’ll tear him limb from limb, how he’ll tie him down and drag a knife through his flesh, how he’ll dislocate his wrist and break his bones, how he’s going to tar and feather him and drag him through town by his fucking dick to show everyone what a piece of shit he is.

Harmless his ass.

~*~

With a deep breath, you raise your hand and knock. 

You hear the boots on the floor almost immediately, and you know you can’t turn and run now. Tommy opens the door, as surprised as you’ve ever seen him. “Hey…” There’s more behind the word, questions about what you’re doing here and if everything’s ok. 

You wouldn’t be here if everything was okay. 

You force yourself to stand tall, to be as confident as you can be. “Can I come in? I need to talk to you and Maria about something.”

“You have five minutes, or until he starts crying for his dinner, whichever comes first,” you hear Maria call from inside. 

Tommy steps aside, letting you in, but you’re both stopped when Maria meets you in the front hall, keeping you from moving any further in the house. Her arms are crossed, eyes narrowed. “What do you need to talk to us about?”

Her hostility has never been anything but open to you. Tommy at least tries to be cordial when he sees you, even with the months of silence between him and Joel. You knew this wouldn’t be easy, so you lay it out quick. “I need someone to talk to Robbie.”

She just quirks an eyebrow. “About?”

“He has to stop, if not for my sake then for Joel’s.” You turn your gaze to Tommy, knowing he’s far more likely to understand what you need. “Robbie’s following me, touching me, saying things… Joel is ready to go off on him and if he does…” You sigh. “I know you have no compunctions about tossing me out, but I don’t think people will take kindly to Joel no matter what he does around here if he goes off on Robbie.”

Maria shakes her head. “Robbie following you around like a puppy dog because he has a crush-”

“Robbie touches me when I tell him not to and corners me in the barn and says he’s gonna rape me when no one’s looking. Says I’m his to take whenever he wants.” You cross your arms, mirroring her pose and shaking your head. “He’s not following me like a puppy, he’s following me like a stalker.”

“Shit,” Tommy mutters, shaking his head. He doesn’t offer anything else, though. 

You turn your eyes back to Maria. “For all that Joel knows about, there’s twice as much that he doesn’t know, and I hate keeping it a secret from him.” She doesn't move an inch, so you turn back to Tommy. “He is ready to teach Robbie a lesson and you know and I know that if he snaps…”

“What do you know about Joel snapping?” He asks, mouth in a thin line. 

You can feel the defensiveness wafting off him, something you said triggering jealousy in him. “What do I know about my husband snapping?” You ask, unsure how to really answer that. His defensiveness prompts your own, and you fight to keep calm. “I know what he’s told me. I know about Silver Lake, and Kansas City, and New York, and Tennessee…” You start listing off the names of the cities he’d told you about, of the travels he and Tommy had shared as raiders. “And if even half the shit is true that he told me, then you know, Tommy, that Joel will be in trouble around here if he snaps.”

“If he can’t keep his cool-”

You interrupt Maria, holding up your left hand and sliding your sleeve down to show the bruise around your wrist. “He saw this and Robbie isn’t dead yet, so I think he’s done about as good a job of keeping his cool as anyone could when another man is assaulting his wife.”

Tommy reaches out but stops when you flinch as he tries to take your hand. With a deep breath you let him hold it, turning your wrist this way and that, looking over the bruising circling your wrist. He sighs when he moves his hand over it, showing just how he would have grabbed you. “Robbie did this?”

You hold his eyes, eyes full of conflict and doubt, and force him to really look at you. “What? You think, for a second, that Joel would have?”

“No,” he bites out, dropping your hand gently. “But I don’t know that talking to Robbie will do any good.”

You feel anger bubble up in you, the one thing you knew you didn’t want to happen. “So I’m just supposed to let him manhandle me? Joel’s supposed to just keep turning a blind eye?”

“Maybe,” Maria starts, “If you keep your head down and find a way to be useful-”

“I shovel shit, Maria!” You keep your voice quiet, but it still comes out with venom behind it. “I shovel shit every single day and I’ve gotten damn good at it. Joel does more than his fair share around here. You can’t tell me we’re not being useful, not pulling our own weight. I am sick and tired of hearing that.”

“Shoveling shit is one thing,” she says quietly, “Robbie doesn’t care about that. He cares about what he thinks is owed to him. So you do that for Joel, or you stop pretending about this farce of a marriage of yours and do that for Robbie, and maybe he’ll stop sniffing around.”

You flash back to this same house, to Joel yelling at his brother about fucking you in the middle of the town for everyone to see, and for all you’ve done for the last year, you realize you’re no closer to having her opinion of you change. “Farce of a marriage?” You parrot, jaw twinging with the effort to be calm. “Like you didn’t sit with us at meals. Like you haven’t spent time with us…”

She raises her eyebrow. “We all know why Joel married you, even if we don’t understand it.”

“You goddamn hypocrite,” you whisper out, shaking your head. “You’re ready to toss me out on my ass because there are too many mouths to feed, because I don’t shovel shit well enough, to let the man who I didn’t marry, and never wanted to marry, assault me, telling me to fucking cheat on my husband and in the same damn breath telling me that my only place here is to procreate? To be barefoot and pregnant and add another mouth to feed to this place?” 

Maria holds your eyes, but says nothing. Tommy’s jaw drops, his eyes flicking between you two. 

You can’t hold your tongue any longer, and it flies out full of venom and fury. “If you’d managed to spend five minutes talking to me about what I want, about where I thought I could help or fit in or do anything around here instead of trying to fit me into your fucked up little town, you’d know I’m not having anyone’s kids.”

Maria steps towards you, voice low. “That was the deal.”

“No, the deal was I got married.” You shake your head, stomach flipping in frustration and anger and fear. “It was never about having kids.”

“You were supposed to marry Robbie. Supposed to shut the fuck up and warm his bed and have his kids and keep him happy.” She points her finger in your face. “That’s what you were supposed to do.” She takes a slow breath and tries to calm herself. “You’re not too old. You just…”

“No,” you can’t stop the bark of a laugh that falls from your lips. “No, I’m probably not too old. But it makes really fucking hard to have kids once you’ve watched someone rip your uterus out of your body.” You step up to her, eyes blazing. “It wasn’t a part of the deal, never once did anyone talk to me about having children. And I never said I wouldn’t. I never said I didn’t want to. I can’t.” 

Silence sits heavy between the three of you as you catch your breath. You can’t help the tears that pool in your eyes, and you force the words out between clenched teeth. You look up to the sky, trying to hold back the tears. “After all this time, we’re still…” You take a quick, deep breath and shove all the emotions as far down as you can as you look back that them, as disappointed as you’ve ever been. “Will one of you talk to Robbie? Please?”

Maria doesn’t move, just stares at you, and Tommy watches her, silent. 

“Fine.” You turn, leaving and pulling the door quietly behind you. For all you want to slam it, you don’t need the town gossiping about you leaving their house in a fit of rage. 

Even if that is all you’re feeling: Rage. It’s bubbling up inside you, begging to be let out as you take long strides down to the street, hoping to calm yourself before you get back to your house. 

“Hey!”

Tommy’s voice stops you, but you don’t turn, you just wait until he jogs up to you, slightly winded. “Hey,” he repeats again. 

“Yeah?” You don’t even try to hide your irritation. 

He shrugs and swallows, a little anxious. “Why’re you doing this?” 

“Why did I ask you for help?” You ask, incredulous. He nods, and you have to laugh. “I laid it out, Tommy!” You throw your arm wide, gesturing back towards their house. “I explained it all.” You drop your voice and step closer to him. “Robbie won’t fucking leave me alone, it’s getting worse, and I don’t give a fuck for myself, but I’ll be damned if I let Joel or Ellie get tossed out of this place because he’s gonna put himself on the line for me. And you know him, Tommy.”

Tommy nods. “I know him.”

“You know him,” you continue, desperate. “He saw this,” you hold up your wrist, “and I had to physically stop him from going to find Robbie. One more damn stunt on that asshole’s part and you know and I know that Joel is going to teach him a lesson he might not survive.”

Tommy paces away from you, suddenly full of energy and frustration. “But why?” He paces back, whispering loudly to keep people on the other side of the street from hearing. “Why?”

You stare at him for long breaths, searching his eyes, your anger and frustration falling away to utter sadness when you finally understand his question. 

Why does Joel care? Why would Joel do that for you?

“Why?” You ask him, your emotion choking in your throat. “Why would Joel give a fuck about me, is that what you’re saying?”

“It…” he stutters out, “You…”

You know your face has fallen, that your sadness is written on your features by the way he looks at you, by the way he feels badly when you speak. “I love your brother, Tommy.” You shake your head and sigh. “He was the only person who made me feel wanted around this damn place, the only one who actually cared how the fuck I felt, who saw the panic attacks when other men would crowd me and touch me and want things from me.” You laugh to yourself, smiling. “Joel never wanted a damn thing from me, never touched me unless I said it was okay.” You hold his eyes. “We were just friends at first, you’re not wrong about that. But we liked each other and there wasn’t time for dates or getting to know each other when you were all ready to toss me out in my ass. But I love him, Tommy.”

He looks stunned, like you’ve somehow given him brand new information. “Does he know?”

You shake your head at his asinine question. “Does he know? Does he know? Yeah, Tommy, he knows. I tell him every fucking morning when he leaves for patrol and every night when we get in bed. In the same bed.” You scrub your hands over your face. “I wish… it was all different, Tommy. I wish… I wish I’d met him in Austin and I wish I’d met Sarah and I wish we’d gone on dates to the movies and concerts and that I’d gotten to know him slowly, ok? I wish I’d met him before the world went to shit and we could have just fucking dated.” Your voice drops, low and sad. “I wish I could give him kids, that I could give your kids cousins to play with and care about and grow up with, alright?” Your voice fills with manic anger, “but this is what we fucking have, alright? This is it.” You toss your arms out, spinning in a circle. “This is all we’ve got. But I fucking love your brother,” you drop your voice and step in his face. “I don’t know if you’re being willfully blind or you just don’t like me that much. You see us all the time, you see us together. We don’t hide it, not anymore. But I love him, and he loves me, and I will do anything to keep him here and safe, you understand?” Tommy blinks at you, unprepared for your rant. “I will do anything to keep him from doing something stupid that jeopardizes his and Ellie’s spot in Jackson. So you better fucking talk to Robbie, got it?”

You don’t wait for his answer. You push past him, more upset and confused than when you left his house. 

~*~

“What did I tell you?” Joel’s voice is low and dangerous, reverberating through the small storage shed.

Robbie just turns and flashes his too-white teeth at him before going back to coiling the rope in his hands. “Good morning to you, too, Miller.”

Joel steps forward, closing the door behind him, anger vibrating his every cell. “You got a lotta fuckin’ nerve, boy.”

Robbie just nods, not bothering to look at him, not bothering to even seem all that concerned he was in a room with him as he continues to straighten up the horse tack. “You always seem to think so…” he mutters, shaking his head. He keeps moving the bits and straps around, sorting piles as he talks. “You know, when this is all over, you’ll see-”

“It’s been over.” Joel steps closer to him, pushing his shoulder to spin him around. His hand itches to make contact again, fidgeting in and out of a fist that still bears a little scar from its last encounter with Robbie’s teeth. “She made her choice.”

Robbie takes both hands and shoves Joel back, tilting his head to the side, eyes wide and wild. “She doesn’t have a choice.” He takes a slow, heavy breath through his nose, lips pinched tight. “Council said she was mine, Miller.”

Fast as lighting, Joel wraps a hand around Robbie’s throat, pushing him back into the wall, his head bouncing off the wood. He fights back, but his hands stutter as Joel exerts more pressure, his other arm hard against his chest. “She don’t belong to you. She don’t belong to anybody.” Instead of fighting back, Robbie laughs. It’s stuttered, at first, then hearty as Joel eases on the pressure at his throat. Joel thrusts him into the wall again, fists in his shirt, voice low and deadly. “You think I’m joking?”

“No, no,” Robbie huffs through his nose, shaking his head. “Just think it’s funny you seem to think she don’t belong to anyone.” He drops his voice, leaning forward. “Why are you here, then, if you don’t think she belongs to you?”

Rage bubbles through Joel. “You leave her the fuck alone,” he growls through his teeth, “you don’t goddamn touch her,” he rattles Robbie against the wood again, “and maybe, just maybe, I’ll let you keep all your teeth.”

Robbie sobers, taking a slow deep breath. He raises his hands in defeat and looks at the ground. “You want me to stay away? I’ll stay away.”

Joel’s eyebrow raises as he lets the pressure up, stepping back a few inches. “I don’t trust you as far as I can throw you.”

Robbie wiggles out of his grip, side stepping to the other end of the small shed. “And I don’t trust you, old man.” He takes a slow, breath. “But what I do know,” he whispers, leaning forward, “is if you lay a hand on me again, you and that little cunt you call a wife, are out of Jackson for good.”

Joel’s jaw twitches in fury, his heart pounding in his chest. “Next time I lay a hand on you,” Joel starts, low and lethal, “won’t matter what happens to me, because you’ll be dead.” He takes a menacing step forward, and is rewarded with just the smallest of flinches from Robbie. “You stay the fuck away, or you’ll find out just how goddamn fast I’d give up this place for her.”

Joel’s down the stairs first, detouring to kiss you on the head. “Breakfast?” He asks around a yawn. 

“I think I’ll stay in this morning. I don’t have to be out at the stables until this afternoon, so I was going to spend some time outside before it got too hot. Maybe break in the hammock a little more. You go ahead though.”

He smiles before he heads to the kitchen. “I can grab something on the way then.” He starts sifting through the cupboards to make himself a cup of coffee. “I’d rather sit with you a while if you want the company.” He pauses and turns, waiting for you, as if you wouldn’t want him around.

“Always,” you smile up at him, waiting for his answering wink before you turn back to your paragraph, slyly hiding what you were working on under a fresh sheet of paper. You don’t think he saw, but you won’t chance it. You don’t get to surprise him all that much, so you want to keep this hidden as long as possible. You switch easily to scratching out the missing scene in the Agatha Christie mystery next to you while Joel boils water in the kitchen, slipping your secret project into your secret drawer as soon as he has his back turned.

The quiet bubbling of his boiling water and the scrape of your pen on paper is broken a few minutes later by Ellie bounding down the stairs. Ellie stops by your desk, fidgeting and holding the strap of her backpack tight as she slows.

“Good morning,” you look up and say, rather suspicious. Usually she’s out like a shot, headed to meet her friends, or dragging like she’d had no sleep all night, having to be forced out by you or Joel so she’d get something to eat before school starts. 

“Hey,” she answers, shifting her feet restlessly. 

You set your pen down and look up at her. “Hey.” She is acting odd. Odd enough that Joel turns, looking through the hall from the kitchen. 

“So, uh,” she shakes her head, like she’s gathering courage or telling herself to stop being stupid- both equally likely with the young girl- and pulls her backpack around to set on your desk. “So… they had us help the little kids with art projects this week.” She pauses, looking down at you, still unsure. 

“That sounds like a lot of fun,” you prompt. When she doesn’t move, you smile, more out of a loss for anything to do. “Better than animal husbandry.”

The joke makes her roll her eyes and she’s finally spurred back into action, pulling a piece of paper out from her bag. It’s thick: construction paper. It might have been white at some point, but from where you are you can only see the greyed body and browning edges that come with age. You can see Joel, hovering at the doorway, coffee in hand as he watches. “Yes, better than that for sure. But um,” she swallows hard and finally holds out what she has, as shy as a small child. “I made it for you.”

She lays the paper down on your desk, and it feels like the world stops, like all the air is sucked out of the room. It’s riotous, the colors involved. Bright and bold and contrasted but with the detailed sketching of a pencil or charcoal. It’s you. You and Joel and Ellie. The three of you, drawn in immaculate detail by the pencil and highlighted in eccentric and mismatched colors that make it feel like something out of the 80’s. But the words across the top… those are unmistakable. 

Happy Mother’s Day. 

“I um-” Ellie shrugs as you slowly lift it closer to look at it. “I know the colors are- but I was trying to let the little kids have the good crayons, you know? So, like, all that was left was the neon colors and like, olive green and puke yellow.” She’s full on rambling now, and you know your silence has caused it. She babbles on in your silence. “I mean, I don’t think I got Joel’s nose right- and I fucking hate doing self-portraits, but it’s not too bad and-”

“I love it,” you whisper out, looking up at her. You can’t really get the words out around the lump in your throat, so instead you stand and hug her, holding the portrait in your hands like gold. “Thank you, Ellie.”

Ellie pulls away, looking at the floor and shrugging, a little half smile on her face, trying not to bloom under the praise. “Yeah, well…” she looks up, sincerity in her eyes. “Thanks for being my not-mom.” 

She turns and walks out before you can even catch your breath. 

You close your eyes, tears finally falling, and when you open them again, Joel is there, confused and worried. 

~*~

Ellie stops on the sidewalk in front of the house, turning back to look through the front window. You’d smiled and you’d hugged her.

 So why were you crying now?

Why was Joel holding you like something terrible had happened? 

Fuck. She knew it was wrong. She knew she shouldn’t have brought up Mother’s Day. But she didn’t want you to feel left out when the moms were gonna be wearing the baked clay jewelry and showing off the cards their kids made them that she helped with and you were the closest thing to a mother she’d ever had. She’d wanted to make sure you knew that she cared. 

She didn’t know how to say thank you for all the nights you stayed up with her and all the stories you told her about your life and the way you didn’t treat her like a stupid little kid. There were nights when she’d look at you, holding her hand, sleeping across from her in her bed or yours, keeping her sane when it felt like there was nothing good left in the world, and all she wanted was for you to actually be her mother. 

But fuck she had known it was a bad idea because you really were a mother- except your kids were dead and here was a kid who wasn’t yours reminding you of that. 

Ellie drops her head, turning away from the house and trudging to school, frustration and failure roiling in her belly. 

~*~

Joel likes standing watch at the gate. It’s quiet and calm and he can pace the long platform in the spring sun and feel like he’s doing something. His back doesn’t hurt, not like when he’s on a horse, and even with his sight getting fuzzier here and there, he can sure as hell see a rumbling in the trees. From the high perch, he feels removed from Jackson, removed from the world, and finds a sense of peace he can’t find in the dining hall or patrolling the paths.

It’s the same sense of peace he has in your arms.

It’s the sense that, for a few minutes at least, everything is alright. Even on high alert, looking so hard into the trees he feels like he might forget to blink, things feel calm.

Which is why the sound of feet- familiar feet bounding up the scaffolding of platforms and stairs to the highest level- unnerves him.

“Joel!”

He turns, Ellie lumbering towards him along the elevated lookout path at the gate, school bag hanging off her shoulder. 

“What are you doing up here, kid?” He asks, turning his eyes back out to the trees. 

“Had to talk to you,” she replies, out of breath, before dropping her pack on the ground, limbs flailing. “How do I fix it?”

He double takes, making sure he really is seeing her serious, distressed face before he looks back out over his post. “Fix what?” He frowns, but tries to not to be accusatory as he adjusts the rifle in his hands.  “What did you break?”

Joel is surprised when Ellie whines out your name, throwing her arms to the sides. “I saw you hugging her after I left this morning. I knew it was a fucking bad idea. How do I fix it?”

Joel has to think about what he just heard because it doesn’t initially make sense. “Ain’t nothin’ to fix,” he mutters out of the side of his mouth, gripping his rifle, eyes still out into the trees.

Ellie bounces on the balls of her feet, filled with the manic energy of frustration. “Joel, I fuckin’-” Her mouth snaps shut as Joel holds up a hand.

He turns away from Ellie, calling out to the woman a few dozen feet down the gate. “Jean, you got eyes for a few?” Only once Jean nods back at him and starts moving towards them to keep an eye on the larger section of land outside of the gate does Joel swing his rifle over his shoulder and move towards Ellie. He picks her bag up from the ground and pushes it against her chest as he guides her back and away, silently down the stairs to the platform landing half way down that gives them a little privacy. “What are you talking about?”

Ellie drops her bag again, frowning. She has enough sense to drop her voice, too, as she lets it all huff out of her. “I saw you two through the window after I left for school. She was hysterical! I didn’t-” She paces the little space with a huff, fighting hard to hold back her own tears. “I didn’t mean to make her upset, okay? I just… I shoulda known!”

Joel softens as he starts to put together what’s happened, the corner of his lips ticking up under his moustache. “Ellie, she wasn’t upset.”

Ellie rears back, offended. “Don’t bullshit me, I have eyes.” She sniffs back the tears again, leaning into her anger. “I knew I shouldn’ta done it! It was dumb, her kids died and here I am like a total asshole-”

“Ellie!” Joel’s harsh whisper cuts through her rant, and he presses his hands down on both of her shoulders, waiting until she looks up at him. “She was crying because she was happy. She was happy that you wanted to do that for her.”

Ellie’s chin waivers for a second before she speaks, soft and low and unsure. “But she… she looked… she was crying so hard.”

Joel can feel the emotion welling in him, too. He had held you as you cried this morning, rocked you back and forth until the heavy tears softened into sniffles. There hadn’t been time to lay in the hammock after that, but he’d moved you over to the couch and held you close until your breathing evened out and you could talk again without your voice catching. If he’d known Ellie had seen, he would have pulled her right back into the house. “She was happy, kid, I swear.”

He watches Ellie shrink before him, still so wrong and not wanting to believe he could be right. “You don’t… you don’t cry that hard if you’re happy. You were holding her tight, like you do when she has those terrible nightmares.”

“I know that’s what it looked like, but…” He’s not sure how to explain this. Had Ellie ever been so happy she could cry? Had she ever been overwhelmed by an emotion that wasn’t fear or anger or hate? “She never thought… She never thought she’d have that, Ellie.”

“What?” Her voice is so soft and broken it hurts him.

“Have someone want to wish her a Happy Mother’s Day,” he says softly, letting his hands move to gentle reassurance rather than grounding pressure. “She thought she lost that a long time ago, and the fact that you wanted to do that for her, that… that you felt that… that you gave her a picture of all of us…” He swallows, hard, and fights to continue evenly. “Means more to her than you know, kid.”

Her eyes widen slowly as his words finally get through to her. “So… so I didn’t fuck it up?”

Joel shakes his head, smiling. “No, Ellie, farthest thing from it, I reckon.”

“She was really happy?” A smile starts to sneak onto her face, air rushing from her lungs in relief.

Joel steps back and wraps his hands around the strap of his gun as he nods. “Ya did good, kid.”

Ellie nods, body sagged in relief as she reaches down and picks up her bag. “Good. Good I- Yeah. Okay.” She swings the bag up on her back and then looks around, like she realizes for the first time where they are. “Shit, I’m sorry, Joel.”

He nods, serious again. “You know the rules.”

Ellie takes a slow breath and stands up tall, reciting the rules she’s learning as a part of her patrol training. “Gate is only for people on watch or those relieving them. No family or friends on the gate for any reason.”

Joel raises an eyebrow at her. “Why?”

This she doesn’t recite verbatim, but nods along with her words, her understanding deep and serious. “Anything that shifts focus from the tree line can make us vulnerable for problems. Not just infected, but raiders, slavers, or animals.”

Joel gives her one more serious nod, and then softens with a smile. “Good. Now get, and I won’t let Maria know.”

Ellie’s eyes widen again. “Really?”

“The less demerits you get, the faster I’m off patrol, so unless Jean opens her mouth, you’re good kid.” Joel watches her bounce down the stairs, nodding at him, slipping away and trying not to be noticed. He takes a slow, deep breath before turning back and heading back up the stairs.

Jean nods at him before taking a few steps back towards where she usually stands. He squints at her in the morning sun, watching as she stares out into the trees, wondering if he should say anything.

“As far as I’m concerned, you went for a piss,” she says, voice scratchy with twenty years of unfiltered, hand rolled cigarettes.

Joel nods at her, not really sure what to say. “She doesn’t think sometimes,” he mutters out, turning back to the trees, grateful for the woman’s discretion. They’re not friends, but he respects the long hours she puts on the gate, respects the handful of years she has on him, and how she shows the women of Jackson that being strong and a good shot and able to throw a clean right hook is worth something.

Jean’s quiet for so long he expects their conversation to be done even though she’s lingering a little too close to his post, but her voice is lacking the hard edge it usually carries when she speaks again. “You’ve done a really beautiful thing for that girl, Joel.” She takes a slow, deep breath, nodding to herself as she stares out into the mountains beyond the gate.

Jean’s never told him the story about how her daughter was on a school trip on Outbreak Day, how she never found her, never saw her again after that, but he’s heard. He’s never asked her to share that pain, would never, but he can see it in her eyes now. He isn’t sure what to say for a heartbeat, but the words tumble out of his mouth without thought. “She’s saved me more than I could ever save her.”

A little hitch of a smile flashes on the hardened woman’s face as she turns to him. “You talkin’ about Ellie, or your wife?”

“Both,” he replies automatically, slipping his gun back into his hands so he has something to do with them.

Jean nods solemnly before turning, silently heading back to the well-worn floorboards of her post, leaving Joel to try to clear his mind so he can focus on the woods beyond him.

~*~

You hover in the doorway to the bathroom, watching him look at himself in the mirror. “Thinking of shaving it off?” you ask quietly to avoid startling him.

His eyes lock with yours in the mirror, eyebrows furrowing and nose wrinkling up. “Good lord, no.”

You slip into the bathroom further, crossing your arms over your chest as he watches you. “Have you ever?”

He nods seriously. “I look ridiculous.”

“I think you’d look handsome,” you counter quickly, trying to imagine the smooth planes of his cheeks you’ve never seen.  

“’Course you would.” He chuckles out of his nose and runs a hand over his chin, looking over his reflection in the mirror. “You hated when it got long.”

“I didn’t hate it,” you roll your eyes and take a step closer, running your thumb over the soft patch of skin on his jaw that shows through the scruff, “I just didn’t love it.”

He huffs out of his nose again, tipping his head toward the counter and his real dilemma. “Trimmer’s battery won’t hold a charge anymore. Gotta start lookin’ for another. You might have to get used to my… winter look… for a bit.”

“You’ll be hot,” you counter, running your fingers over the edges where the beard is starting to get straggly. You drag your nails over it thoughtfully. And he lets you touch him, silently waiting as you roll thoughts over in your mind. “You could trim it with scissors,” you suggest, shrugging. “Plenty of men had well-trimmed beards before the electric shaver came out.”

Joel gently moves your hand off his chin. “Could try.” He holds it tenderly between his, suddenly pensive.

It makes your heart skip a beat at how easily you can tell something’s wrong. “You could let it grow.” The words croak out of your chest in reaction, hoping to smooth over whatever’s suddenly taken him over.

He looks down at how he holds your hand, fingers dwarfed in his, and leans down to kiss your knuckles. “Always trying to fix things,” he murmurs. His voice holds wonder, surprising and confusing you.

“Honey?” You drop your head down and try to catch his eyes. “You okay?” he doesn’t look at you, but nods. “You got awful sad there for us just talking about facial hair. I- I really don’t mind what you do with it.”

He smiles, a full, toothy smile and looks up, shaking his head at you. “Not about beards.” He surprises you by turning and taking your hips in his hands and placing you up on the counter in front of him, stepping in between your legs as you squeak in surprise. “’S about you,” he drawls, accent heavy in his happiness.

You wind your arms around his shoulders, still far from understanding. “Me?”

He leans forward, kissing you softly. “You.” He pecks another kiss on your lips before pulling away, reaching down into the drawer next to him to pull out a comb, razor, and scissors before holding them out to you. “Think you could help me out?”

You take then gently and set them to your side, nodding, still feeling a little whiplash at the swinging mood. You can’t push Joel, he’ll tell you in his own time, so you go along with it. “I could… I could try.”

He lifts the razor and hands you the little dish where he keeps the soap scraps that he uses for shaving. “You look at it every day, you’ll do just fine.”

It’s a daunting task, trimming his beard, and you’re still not sure why he gives it to you. You take your time wetting the slivers of soap and working up a little lather to cover his skin around the edges of his beard. You work slowly, gently, dragging the razor just at the edge of the thick outline of hair, cutting away all the scraggly new growth at the tops of his cheeks and around his chin. You’re pretty sure that his left and right sides don’t line up right, but he just smiles at you and lets you keep going.

You take your time slicing away each errant strand before setting the razor down and grabbing the towel from behind you to wipe away the excess soap. He says nothing, so you grab the little pocket comb and start running it through the hairs, trying to gauge the length of each and how you should cut it.  

“Ellie thought she upset you,” he blurts out when you turn to grab the scissors.

Your head whips to him, but you say nothing, still as you can be, waiting for what else you know he has to say.

“She came to the gate today, asking how to fix it. Seems she turned around this morning and saw me holdin’ you.” He slows, swallowing heavy. “She ain’t-” Joel has to stop, the words catching in his throat. You set the scissors down and reach out, cradling his chin in your hand. His eyes shine with unshed tears when he looks up at you. “I didn’t know how to explain to her that people can have happy tears. Don’t think she’s ever been in a position to have ‘em.”

“I’ll talk to her,” you whisper, heart breaking. You know what that scene must have looked like to her. You were sobbing big, heaving, ugly sobs into Joel’s chest, undone at the thought that Ellie cared enough to do what she had done, that she cared enough to want to do something for you, that she cared enough to want you to be a part of the celebration...

…that when she’d call you her “not-mom,” the “not” part sounded forced.

You’d fought hard to try to be a role-model, even if you couldn’t model much for her in this world. You’d tried to show her that she was just as much a part of the family as you were, that this found family was bound by things people couldn’t see and would never understand. You had hoped that maybe, over time, she’d come to care for you as more than just an older friend.

It happened far faster than you ever dreamed, and it had shattered you into a million pieces.

“I think she understands,” Joel whispers.

There’s more. There are things deep and broken and sharp under his skin he wants to say, you can see them fighting their way to the surface. But they don’t need to be said. You know. You know. “Joel-”

“You saved us,” he croaks out, eyes rimming red. “She hated me, and… and…”

You press your fingers to his lips, gently shushing him. “I know, baby.” You pick up the comb and start running through his beard, dragging long, calming strokes over his skin. “We all saved each other.”

He nods as you pick up the scissors and says nothing as you slowly and methodically trim the excess length around his chin using the comb as a guide.

Neither of you care about the tiny hairs drifting over your legs and down onto the floor. Practicalities can be dealt with tomorrow.

For now, only the sound of an occasional hitched breath and the sharp snap of the scissors can be heard as you slowly move around his jaw, evening out the whiskers there. It gives you time to both reign in the cacophony of emotions that welled up, to push back the fear and the anger and the overwhelming relief that comes with thoughts of what might have been versus what actually is.

You finally lean back, setting the scissors and comb back on the counter and running both hands over his cheeks.

You might have been… a bit overzealous. He’s not clean shaven by any means, but it’s shorter than he usually has it.

You do, in fact, quite like it. It’s sharp and tight and clean.

“Let’s call this slightly-too-close a shave my Mother’s Day present, shall we?” The joke only garners a quick lift of the corner of his mouth.

He leans around your shoulder, looking in the mirror, and smiles back at you. “Looks perfect, baby.”

You lift an eyebrow. “Baby?”

When he kisses you, the short hairs of his newly trimmed moustache slipping against your skin, you don’t need any more words. You just hold tight when he lifts you off the counter and wrap your legs around his waist as he carries you back into the bedroom.

You start to say his name as you turn the corner into the kitchen, but it falls incomplete from your lips as you see him bent over the sink, the maroon of dried blood smeared over the side of his face and across his shirt. 

“Now don’t panic-” He tries to placate you quickly, bone-weary as he holds his hand out to you. 

“Don’t panic?” You ask as you rush up to him, hands and eyes flitting over his hunched body.  The blood had been coming from a cut, something deep enough that it looks like the doctor stitched him up under crusted blood, just over his right eyebrow. “Joel-”

He gently pushes your hand away and goes back to leaning over the sink, picking up the kerchief filled with ice he’d been making when you came in and finishing tying it together before holding it to his head. “Got ambushed by raiders.” He sighs forcefully, stepping back and sitting heavily in one of the kitchen chairs. “Asshole sucker punched me before I knew what was happening.”

Your heart is pounding in your chest, still flabbergasted. “A punch did that?”

He tips his head back and shifts the ice, mumbling something that sounds like “butt of his gun,” before he looks back up. “Head wounds bleed. I’m fine.”

He’s not fine. There’s enough blood on him that either someone else’s blood is on your husband or he spilled enough to be worrisome. The side of his temple is already turning a sickening shade of purple. “You’re not fine,” you whisper, turning behind you and wetting a towel. You’re by his side in a few steps, slowly drawing the cloth over his cheek and neck, forcing him to hold the ice with his left hand so you can wipe down his hand and arm before you have to go wring out the cloth and get fresh water in it. 

You pause at the sink, trying desperately not to cry. If you don’t cry, you’ll scream, which isn’t productive right now, either. But his silence… his silence says too much and not enough all at once. With a slow breath you turn back, resolute in cleaning the blood from his hair and then lifting the ice, gently cleaning around the wound with a careful corner of the towel. 

You work slowly and quietly, and he lets you. It’s hard to keep your mouth shut, but you do. Nothing you can say right now will make any of it any better, and will likely only make it worse. It surprises you that he doesn’t speak, doesn’t try to explain anymore. Finally, you start to strip him, pulling the stained shirt off of him button by button, making him move when you strip the stained undershirt, as well. 

“You’re quiet,” you mutter, filling the sink and setting the likely ruined shirts in it to soak. 

“You’re mad,” he says back carefully. 

“Worried,” you correct over your shoulder, not looking at him but rather turning back quickly and focusing on the browned swirls that start releasing themselves into the water, focusing on the blood that was spilled. Joel’s blood.

“There’s nothing to worry about-”

You turn sharply, venom on your tongue. “There’s always something to worry about, Joel! If it’s not raiders, then it’s infected, if it’s not infected then it’s Fedra, if it’s not that then it’s Maria or Robbie or some other damn thing.” You shake your head at him, leaning forward. “That cut gets infected, you get MRSA or gangrene, there’s no coming back from that, Joel. Not anymore!” You turn back, hitting the edge of the sink. “Fuck,” you mutter to yourself before shoving your arm in the water, swirling the cloth and then opening the drain so the dirty water can run out. “Fuck,” you swear again under your breath. 

“Darlin’, I’m -”

“You say you’re fine and I might scream,” you say low and dangerous without turning. “You are not fine. You were fine when you left this morning, now you’ve got a two-inch gash on your head, and more blood is out of you than in you.” You finally turn, wiping your hand on your pants. “Do you have a concussion?”

He goes to shake his head, but winces, and any argument he was going to make dies in that moment. 

You sigh, it’s the only thing you can do, and push away from the counter. “I’ll get you a new shirt,” you toss out as you leave the room. 

You can tell he wasn’t ready for your anger. Fear? Tears? Probably. 

Anger? No. 

You grab a clean shirt from the laundry room and take a slow, centering breath before heading back out to the kitchen.

“Don’t think you’ve ever been mad at me before,” he says gently when you drape the shirt over his shoulder and walk past him.

“Don’t think I’ve ever had a reason to be,” you bite out, venomous. He watches from under the ice pack as you fill the sink again, swirling his shirt around in the water. “I’m not… I’m not mad at you.”

“Reckon you are,” he says gently, pushing you to open up, the twinkling sound of the ice shifting in its handkerchief against his face runs under his words as he looks over at you.

You drop your head at the sink, shutting off the water. The only noise that fills the room is the dripping of water from the end of the faucet into the basin below. You watch the water ripple, watch the brown swirls make their way from his shirt and dissipate into the water. It doesn’t calm you. “I am angry. I’m angry at this life. I’m angry at everything that led to this. I’m angry that I can’t go for two goddamn weeks without having to worry about something like you goddamn dying.” You turn and look at him, lips pressed tight. “I just… I just want to have one nice week, you know?”

Joel holds his hand out, and you reluctantly make your way over to him. His hand holds yours tight, and he tugs you into his lap gently, putting down the ice pack.

“No, no, you need that.” You pick the ice back up and press it to his forehead.

He takes it from you gently, his other hand running over your back as he places it on the table. “Need both eyes to look at you when I say this.” Ha pauses, and waits until you’re looking at him instead of the ice pack. “I’m sorry.” His voice is deep and low, a timber of sadness running through it. “I didn’t-”

“It doesn’t matter.” You cut him off. You can’t hear apologies or placations. “You came home, and that’s all that matters right now.”

He gently tugs your head down to his shoulder, dragging his fingers through your hair. “I always will.”

“Damn well better,” you mutter, tucking closer to him and reaching out for the ice, gently placing it back on his temple. “If you don’t, I’ll go out there, find you, and kill you all over again myself.”

He bounces with a chuckle under you. “I’d expect nothin’ less, darlin’.”

~*~

He is dizzy for about a day, and has a headache for three. It stings when the Doc pulls the stitches out of his skin, and itches like hell as the purple bruising disappears.

What annoys him more than all that, though, is you.

How you dote on him. How you hover around him. How you look at him like he might disappear.

He’s so annoyed that he very nearly walks into the Tipsy Bison one night when he knows Tommy’s there, with the thought that he might sit down next to his brother and just unload on him just to get it off his chest.

He doesn’t, though. Even the thought of just shooting the shit with his brother over a cold drink, of going back and forth about a girl like they had so many times when they were young, can’t tempt him from his silence with Tommy.

He hates that you look at him with a mixture of fear and pity and worry now. He hates that he knows that as soon as he goes back out on patrol for the first time you’re going to be mad with worry.

He hates that he worries about the same thing.

It’s why he wanted off patrols, off of gate, in the first place. He’s getting older and isn’t as sharp as he was anymore. Ellie’s taken one of his patrols a week, but he still has three or four, plus rotations on the gate. It’s a hard, long, unforgiving job. Some days he wants to take his shift back from Ellie, just so she won’t have to do it, other days he wants her to take all of his, he’s so done with it. You’re right: the wrong place, the wrong time, even the wrong damn little germ getting in a simple papercut now and he’s a dead man.

To make it through everything he’s made it through and then to be taken out by a papercut is a terribly morbid thought that he’s had a lot lately.

So, he’s kept his wound clean and rubbed the arnica into it and done his best to show you that he’s fine. He’s fine.

You still keep looking at him like that, though, and he feels like he’s going to lose his mind.

When you crawl carefully into bed on the fifth day, more careful than usual, and tuck yourself under the covers with only your fingers gently touching his arm, he can’t keep his thoughts to himself.

“I’m not gonna break,” he barks out into the dark of the bedroom, harsher than intended. He feels you shrink a little, starts to feel your hand slip away, and he reaches out and presses it to his arm, turning to you. He has to take a slow breath to control the snapping annoyance that wants to slip from him. His voice is gentle when he finally speaks. “I won’t break, darlin’, and I need you to stop treatin’ me like I will.”

“I haven’t-”

“You have.” He cuts you off, kind but assertive. He doesn’t want to pick a fight, but this needs to end. “I know it upset you, but the way you’re tip-toeing around me is driving me nuts.”

He lets you pull your hands back when you tug, heart pounding when you start to choke up and cover your face. “Can’t help it,” you whisper through your palms. “I keep seeing you getting hit- keep thinking that an inch to the left, or a harder gun, or a stronger person… you wouldn’t be back here, you know?”

He gathers you into his arms, pulling you tight against him. “But I am.”

“This time,” you bite out, bitter. “You’re fine this time, but what about the next one?”

He wants to tell you there won’t be a next time, but you both know that’ll be a lie. He doesn’t say anything, just holds you tight. He won’t lie to you.

“Damn town can’t let you rest,” you mutter against his chest. “Every hunt, every patrol, every time someone’s gone missing or something important needs to be done it’s where’s Joel and I’m fucking sick of it.” The words spill from you in a cascade, whispered and full of venom. “Let someone else risk their damn neck once. Let someone else go. I thought this was supposed to be socialist- all even, all equal. You’re doing the work of ten fucking men.”

“Now that’s an exaggeration…”

“And do they ever thank you? No.” You barrel on as if you hadn’t heard him. “What about me? What about Ellie? Huh? What about where you’re supposed to be?” You burrow deeper into his arms. “What happens if you don’t come back one day? If you die out there? Just a pat on the back and a push towards the stables? A little cross in the graveyard and a shabby ceremony and then back to school Ellie?” You sigh and clutch him tight. “Fuckin’ Jackson.”

“You’ve been thinkin’ about this.” He’s stunned at the sharpness of your words, and how little he can come up with to refute them.

“It’s all I can think about,” you whisper. “I don’t want to be.”

He holds you tight in the dark, your breaths slowing and calming with each move of his hand through your hair and over your scalp. He isn’t sure what he can say to make you feel any better, especially since he sees your point very clearly.

Jackson isn’t forgiving, it doesn’t allow much time to move on from anything, really. People around here work when they’re sick, they work when they’re tired, they work when their life is crashing down around them. Everyone demands it for the greater good.

Just another crack in the façade of Jackson, another distortion of the Utopia it purports to be.

He has no placations, so he says exactly what he’s thinking. “You’re right, sweetheart. Sometimes I just want a quiet week, too. But… I think… this is as quiet as it’s gonna get. Unless…” he lets the last word drip off his lips, leading, because he doesn’t want to be the one to suggest it.

“Unless…” You take a slow, steadying breath before you say it, and he’s relieved that you are on the same exact page. “Unless we leave Jackson.” You press your head into his chest, muffling your groan. “Ugh, we both know that’s an incredibly stupid idea.”

“Plenty of reasons to think about it, though.” He plays devil’s advocate, just for a second, even if he’d argue staunchly against it.

“Maybe, but plenty more to stay.” You roll on to your back and look up to the ceiling. “Silly how much these little creature comforts are worth.”

“Happiness,” he mutters, looking over at you. “Those are happiness.” He turns to his side, and hopes you don’t see him flinch when his temple rubs the pillow the wrong way. “It’s why we both want these good days so bad. We got a little taste of ‘em.”

“Used to think life wouldn’t ever be good again.” You may be looking up at the ceiling, but whatever you’re seeing is a million miles away. “A little short on food here or there, people with opinions I don’t agree with, hell, even Robbie and the council and raiders, they’re nothing compared to a QZ, nothing compared to being out there, alone.”

He reaches over and slides his hand over your belly, tugging the fabric of your shirt up just enough to let the pads of his fingers run over skin. He sees your eyes blink back to the here and now at the contact. “All you have to do is say the word, you know that.”

“And what? We’re out there with the people who gave you that?” You nod towards his temple. “I can put up with some assholes if you can. I just…”

He gathers you against him again, this time sliding his arm around you and slipping his hand under your shirt to glide across your side, to connect skin to skin. Something about the contact calms him, even though this whole conversation has been hypothetical. “Just needed to get it out?”

“Yeah.” He loves the feeling of you burrowing closer, of your nose against his chest and the soft puffs of your breath as you start to sync your breathing to his.

He can’t keep quiet, though, and lets the thought still swirling in his brain fall from his lips. “I didn’t like it, you know, you mad at me.”

“Wasn’t mad at you,” you grumble, sliding your hand across his chest, fingers moving gently with his breaths. “Believe me, you’ll know if I’m mad at you.”

Joel can’t help the way his lip curls up in a smile. You’ve come so far from the anxious, scared woman who entered his house like you were walking on eggshells all those months ago. “Well then, darlin’, I hope I never see the day you are.”

~*~

You can hear how carefully Joel twists the doorknob and you smile to yourself. “You don’t have to be quiet, I’m still up.”

He moves in more quickly, closing the door behind him as his eyebrows wrinkle up in confusion, looking over at you in the lamplight, notes in your lap as you sit up against the headboard. “Thought you said you were tired.”

You hold up your little plank of wood, long ignored but never forgotten, and the tattered copy of My Master the Prince you have open next to you. “Eugene stopped in today to tell me he thinks he has a fairly useable prototype for the rope. Said he’ll be done with it sooner rather than later, but he didn’t give me a full time frame.

Joel bounces as he sits next to your hip, smile wide on his lips. “Gonna need more details than that if I’m gonna get the right plans going!” He leans forward and starts kissing over your neck.

“The plan,” you squirm out from under him pushing him away, “is that I need to finish this sooner rather than later, and you know how I feel about Ellie seeing it. That’s why I came up here.”

Joel looks down at the book, serious. “He wants payment first.”

“Absolutely.” You take Joel’s chin in your hand and press a quick kiss to his lips. “Eugene is a smart man. And this book is a beast. I need to get cracking.”

Joel holds your hand steady and tips his head down, kissing the webbing between your thumb and pointer finger. “Need any help with that?”

You chuckle warmly at him. “As much as I would like to say yes, things have been quite a bit more… tame since I got past the middle.”

He frowns and stands, moving to the dresser to get ready for bed. “Damn shame, that.”

You settle the book and your notes and the page you’re working on back in your lap. “I promise you, as soon as I’m done and I can take a little break, we can reenact several scenes.”

His head pops up from where he was folding his jeans to be worn again tomorrow. “Gonna hold you to that.”

You can only laugh as you go back to the story. Truth is, most of the most salacious scenes were on the front end. As the concubine and the prince start to fall in love, it gets far less imaginative, a fact you’re almost grateful for. It’s been fun, playing in this world, but the grandeur and moving parts of some of the more involved scenes have left you frustrated. The orgy had taken several days to work out the moves of the characters to make the two missing pages make sense, and you’d had to put it down for almost a week after that.

This, a seduction in the court’s version of a Roman bath, is simple by comparison.

You will never look Gail in the eyes again without thinking about how faded the pages around the Shibari scene are, or with how there were several wrinkled and stuck pages where the prince drank the milk of one of his slaves straight from her breast while she sat on his cock.

It wasn’t that you were judging her. It was just that her taste in porn was not something you ever wanted to know about the woman.

Or Eugene for that matter.

“Will I bother you if I stay here?” Joel slips under the blanket next to you, looking up.

You shake your head and pull your notes closer to you, even though he was careful to not disturb them. “Will it bother you if I keep writing?”

He leans over and kisses you on the cheek. “Not in the least. You get us that hammock, baby!” You swat at his arm as he tucks himself into bed, chuckling. “I’ll just be drifting off, dreaming of all the different ways we can put it up and then put it to good use.”

He settles quickly next to you, and it’s easy to fall into the familiar rhythm of writing for half a page or so before you get stumped. You close your eyes and try to imagine it: the mirrored walls, the water basins and the large reflective pool, the opulent golden mosaics and shining tiles, the prince walking up behind the heroine, sliding his arms around her and slipping his hands over her body… and then nothing until he waxes poetic about watching the hard length of him disappear into her body in the mirror, looking up into her eyes and then back down to himself.

How?

You can’t find the motion in your mind. You can’t figure out how he goes from behind her to seeing that and then… it doesn’t…

“You’re huffing, darlin’,” Joel mumbles, half asleep.

“Sorry,” you shake your head. “I’ll be quieter.”

He cracks an eye open and looks over at you from his pillow, a smile creeping up on his face. “Need help?”

“Go back to sleep,” you mutter, closing your eyes again and trying to imagine the position. Joel hums and snuggles down, and you do your best to find the image in your mind. He comes up behind her and…

And what?

He’s taller than her, so he’d have to crouch, or spread his legs wide to position himself to enter her behind her. And if he does that, there’s no way he’s seeing anything in the mirror, not flitting back between where they’re joined and her eyes in the mirror.

You pick up the book and read the section that follows the missing pages. No, he’s absolutely behind her, but nothing about how he’s behind her. Nothing about how he’s seeing her pink, glistening flesh envelop his throbbing member while still looking her in the eyes. There might… there’s an insinuation that they’re close enough to some sort of table… something that holds a basin, maybe… to push up off it.

You slip from the bed, padding to the bathroom and flick on the light as you close the door. You have all you need here: a mirror and a table with a basin. You stare at yourself in the reflection, willing the image of the prince and his concubine to your mind. You lean forward, you twist to the side, you hike your thigh up on the counter- which is supremely uncomfortable- and yet you still can’t figure it out.

Could it be easy? Could it just be a poor turn of phrase? Could it be that the author herself lost her way while writing and she was just as confused as to where limbs went, too?

You jump when there’s a knock on the door.

“You been in there a long time,” Joel yawns through the wood. “You okay?”

You open the door and tilt your head. “Come on in, I need some help.” You can’t help but roll your eyes at the sleepy smile that takes over Joel’s face.

“In the bathroom?” he asks as you close the door, one eyebrow climbing high on his head.

“Well, the scene is set in a Roman bath type room, but the big players are a mirrored wall and some kind of table with a basin in it.” You spread your hands out, presenting the sink. “Ta-da.”

Joel nods and rubs his hands together. “Ok then, what’s the problem.”

You grasp his shoulders and set him behind you, before you turn and meet his eyes in the mirror’s reflection. “The prince comes up behind her, like this, and starts to drag his hands up her sides.” Joel obediently begins to move his hands over your body, gently but firmly caressing in a way that sends a distracting quake into your belly. “Then there are two pages missing, and we jump to him entering her from behind, but he describes how he can see her, and I quote, ‘pink, glistening flesh envelop his throbbing member’, but then he keeps looking up into her eyes in the mirror. I just don’t think I can get to that from this position.”

“Why not?” Joel asks, eyebrows knit as he steps closer, closing the gap between your bodies.

“Because… well…” Suddenly you feel a wave of shyness overtake you, and you have to stutter the words out. “I mean… you can’t see that from back there, can you?”

Joel leans forward, kissing down the slope of your neck. “Oh, I bet I could see a lot from back here.”

“No, no…” You pull away and turn to him, sure of yourself now. “There is no way you’d see anything pink and glistening from back there. You’re only view is… is asshole.”

He laughs, he actually has the audacity to laugh, and pulls you back to him so he can kiss up the other side of your neck. “Oh, the things I can see, darlin’.”

It infuriates you, and also sends a wave of arousal through you so sharply that you’re absolutely stunned. You let him kiss you for a minute, let him undress you, his hands moving over your skin as the fire in you start to build.

It would be easy to let him show you, to let him just take control and turn you back towards the mirror and let him have his way. But that wouldn’t be nearly as much fun.

“You want to help me, Joel?” You purr out, dragging your hands over his back and up though his hair. He hums into your skin as he continues to lick and kiss up behind your ear. “See, it would be really helpful if we could go through the whole scene.”

“You just tell me what to do, baby,” he says breathlessly against your skin.

“Well,” you gently push him away, turning his back against the door, “the prince, he was preparing to bathe in the waters, but the concubine, she was going to take advantage of this time to have the prince all to herself.”

“Sounds like a good plan.” His hands fist next to his sides, his muscles straining to keep still as you stand just an arm’s length away.

You step just a little closer, letting your hands rest on his shoulders. “So, she turns him against a golden pillar and falls to her knees in supplication before him, begging his forgiveness for interrupting his solitude.” You slowly slip to kneel in front of Joel, dragging your hands down his arms. “Because she couldn’t stay away, you see.” You press your cheek against his hip, the soft cotton warm against your skin as he swallows audibly. “She begs his understanding, and he takes her chin in his hand and looks down at her.”

“Like this?” Joel carefully slips his hand under your chin, turning it to look up at him.

You feel a hot rush of desire shoot through you. You’ve never knelt to him before, not like this, not with him looking down at you while you pretend to fawn at his feet. “Just like that,” you whisper, breathless with want as you look up to him.

He’s stoic, and still, eyes impossibly intense in the dim bathroom light, holding your gaze for long, shuddering breaths as he fights to maintain the illusion you’re building. When you don’t speak, he prompts you gently. “What does he say to her?”

You have to remind yourself to breathe before you speak, and your hand circles the wrist holding you, as if you’re asking for something, holding him there as you speak. “He tells her to prove her devotion.”

Joel’s voice is low and dark, a little hint of a hitch of restraint in it. “And how does she do that?”

You gently remove his hand and press it back against the door before turning back to nuzzle against his hip. You very carefully avoid the straining flesh tenting his underwear and switch sides, your hands running gently over his thighs as you press your cheek into his other hip. “She worships him.”

You lift your hands as you look up, sliding your tongue over your lips as you carefully guide his underwear down, bending low to help him step out of it. He’s gorgeous and naked before you, skin starting to hint bronze where the sun hits it, stomach and thighs still pale from hiding in the winter. You lean in, and in one long, careful lick, drag your tongue up the rigid length of him.

The sound of the shuddering breath leaving his lips excites you more, and you can’t help but narrate as you gently circle the base of his cock with your hand. “She licks every inch of him,” you start, making sure to show him exactly how by dragging your tongue over his turgid flesh, gently sliding it over every bit of him in long, slow swipes, “then kisses up and down him.” You mimic this, too, kissing from base to tip and back again. “She shows him just how much she’s willing to do for him,” you say slowly, matching the rhythm of your hand as it drags up and down his shaft to the rhythm of your words before slipping lower. First you kiss each warm ball, then gently swirl around them with your tongue, smiling at how he shivers above you, at how his hands whiten as he claws at the door when you take first one, then the other into your mouth, drawing them through your lips, all the while your hand moving steadily over and over.

“How… how long does this go on for?” He’s panting above you, his normally strong and sure voice shaky with need.

You let his balls slip from your lips and kiss across his inner thigh to look back up again, taking him in both hands and just holding him there. “Hard to say. It says it goes on for long, torturous minutes while he watches her and praises her.”

His eyes meet yours, nearly black with arousal, and his hand gently palms at the back of your head, fingers raking through your hair. You can see he tries to come up with something, tries to make words fall from his lips, but his cock is twitching in your hands, and you know what you must look like, naked and on your knees in front of him.

The fact that he can’t form words is more of a compliment than anything he could ever say.

You smile up at him and nuzzle your head into his hand, gently squeezing his cock before you start to move over it again. “Then he asks her to prove her devotion.”

“Prove?” he squeaks out, fingers tangling in your hair as they massage against your scalp.

You nod with a smile. “He tells her to stay still, to hold him on her tongue, but not to move, to barely breathe, and prove that she can listen to his commands since she was breaking rules to come see him.”

“Stay still?” His eyebrow quirks up, but you’re ahead of him, already moving into place.

You rise up on your knees, and with a few gentle strokes bring his cock towards your face. Slowly, keeping his eyes the whole time, you open your mouth and stick out your tongue, gently placing the head of his cock there before lifting your hands away and making a show of clasping them behind your back.

You feel the little tremors that run through him, the intense control he has over himself as you kneel there, his cock twitching on the flat of your tongue with every breath that slips out your mouth and over the sensitive head. You can see the way his abs ripple just above you, held tight with anticipation, how his Adam’s apple bobs with each shuddering breath.

With each breath you take, the anticipation grows. You didn’t think he’d let you stay here this long, but he’s staring down at you, hungry and aching, and the excitement grows in you with each second he lets his cock sit on your tongue, with each moment his eyes hold yours.

The trust he has in you is intoxicating.

He takes a slow, deep breath, his voice more controlled than you expect it to be with the way he shudders. “And when she’s proven herself?”

You close your lips around the head, sucking hard.

Hands still clasped at your back, just like in the book, you can feel the urgency, the desperation, to take him in you. You didn’t understand it, not fully, when you read it. It just sounded sexy and sensual, a little enticing. To have him actually stand over you like that, to have him trust you and let you hold him on your tongue… now that you’re released to move, you can’t get him in you fast enough. You suck him down greedily, trying desperately to get him deeper in your mouth, to drag his very essence from him with each long pull of your lips over his flesh. You press your tongue into the weeping slit at the end of his cock, eager for any taste of him you can get.

You hear the way his head slams back against the door, you hear the curses dripping from his lips, but it all falls to the background as you frantically try to get more of him in you. He slips from your mouth, cock bouncing over your nose and cheek as you suck uncontrollably at the base, letting his lurid moans guide you, sucking more and kissing less, saliva dripping from your lips every time you take a deep breath, every time you move to find a new spot to kiss, a new bundle of nerves to suck at, a new vein to follow with your tongue.

You don’t know how long he lets you suck at his cock, how long he lets you take him deep into your mouth and throat. Time feels like it’s standing still, like it has no bearing over anything. You don’t think about time, you just focus on taking him in your mouth, over and over, a little deeper each time, smiling around him with each groan that rumbles from his chest, only pulling away to kiss and lick when you have to breathe. Over and over you repeat the process, hands still clasped tight behind your back, worshiping him with your mouth and tongue and the gentle scrape of your teeth.  

His hands come to your shoulders when you pull away to take a deep breath. You look up at him, saliva dripping from the corners of your lips, eyes wild, heart pounding. He’s barely holding on, cock red and bouncing in front of your face, hands gripping your shoulders tight. “What happens next?” he asks, voice low and dark and full of promises.

“He fucks her.” You smile, licking your lips. “Hard.”

The muscles of his arm twitch under his skin, flexing even as he keeps his grip on you gentle. “Stand up,” he chokes out, sliding his hands down your arms and coaxing them to your sides as you stand. His eyes stay locked on yours as you stand slowly before him, unbothered, unafraid.

You feel powerful and feral and you would do anything for him right now to hear him moan again.

His eyes flit down to your mouth, and they don’t move as he lifts his hand and gently smears away the stray saliva at the corners of your lips with his thumb. He leans in, nose gently trailing over the side of your neck, taking a deep breath before he drags his tongue right over where your pulse is hammering against your skin.

You shiver. It’s a full body reaction you couldn’t stop if you wanted to.

He smiles against your skin, humming with the satisfaction that he pulled the reaction from you with relative ease. It’s your turn to stay still, to hold back the desire to reach out and touch him, to pull his warm body up against yours as he kisses down the curve of your neck, the tips of his fingers barely touching you. “Joel…”

His nose slips over your collar bone as he licks at the skin under it. “Yes, baby?”

“Take me,” you let out in a desperate, breathless rush, grabbing for his elbows. “I’m already all yours.”

He pulls back to look at you with the same carefully measured, intense countenance he’s carried through this whole encounter thus far. His eyes are dark and steady as they sweep over your face, the only betrayal of his own desire is the way his Adam’s apple bobs and the pulse in his neck twitches as he stares at you. You have to measure your breath with the passion in his stare, you can feel your nipples pebble under his gaze and a rush of wetness between your legs.

He lets his hand slip up your side, dragging the back of his knuckles over the curve of your hip before ghosting over your nipples and back down. All the while you hold as still as you can, reveling in the tease, high on the energy pulsing between your bodies.

He moves fast, faster than you’re ready for, winding his arm around your waist and turning you, pulling your back into his chest. He smirks at you in the mirror when you squeak in surprise. “You’re already mine?” He whispers in your ear, holding your gaze in the mirror, fingers spread wide as his large hand presses into your stomach to hold you back against him.

You fight how your eyes want to flick closed, keeping your gaze on the reflection as his fingers start to press into your belly, as they start to move lower. “You know I am.”

He kisses your shoulder before gently scraping his teeth over it. “Is that the character talking… or you?”

You lean back into him, arm sliding over his to hold him to you, your other hand tangling in his hair to turn his face to look right into your eyes, no mirror between you. You can’t help the way your breath heaves, you couldn’t calm your pounding heart if you tried. “Me. No characters, no lines.” You brush your nose against his, lips dragging across his mouth, breath mingling as you speak again. “I belong to you, Joel Miller. Body and soul. It’s all yours. It’s always been yours.”

He barely lets you finish before he’s kissing you, hot and hard and loud. His tongue licks into your mouth, desperate for entry at the odd angle, his hand holding you tight in place to him. You can feel the hard length of him nestling between the cheeks of your ass, rubbing with each little turn of your bodies to try to get closer, with each desperate kiss.

His hands slide down, clutching at your hips as he pulls his mouth away, nudging your face to look back in the mirror as he presses you forward. You lean into the cold counter, hands splaying as he drags one of his hands back over your hip and up your back. “Is that how you want it, baby? Hard?”

You’re not sure you’ve ever heard this tone from him before, low and dangerous and full of sex and passion and desire and the tightness of barely harnessed control. It sends a thrill coursing right between your thighs. You find his eyes in the mirror, nodding slow.

His hand tightens at your hip, gripping as he palms himself. You can’t see what he does, but you can feel the drag of his knuckles through your dripping folds, feel the way he drags the head of his cock there before notching it against you. He slides in torturously slow, a low growl rumbling through his chest as he seats fully into you.

You lean up, pushing back against him, smiling at him in the mirror. “Told you, cowboy,” you wiggle your hips back as he slides his arm around you, pulling you tight to his chest, “can’t see anything pink and glistening.”

His hips buck a shallow rhythm into you as he watches you both rocking back and forth in the mirror. His hand slides down your belly, slipping between your legs where he parts your folds. You can’t see much in the reflection, but you can feel his fingers rubbing, teasing. “I can see more than enough.”

You turn your head, smirking. “Still no pink, baby.”

He kisses you, slow and sipping at first, little pecks that pick up speed and intensity in time with his hips. His fingers slide away from your sensitive clit, holding you across your hips so he can drive up into you. The bathroom fills with the chorus of panting breaths and eager grunts, and you can’t take your eyes off the mirror.

You can’t see anything explicit, not like the book says, but what Joel said is true: you can see more than enough. It’s mesmerizing: the flexing of his hips into yours, the way his muscles ripple under his skin, the light sheen of sweat on his brow… all of it reflected back at you in the bright light of the bathroom in the middle of the night.

You’d want to record it, watch it back over and over if you had the chance. You’re well acquainted with what Joel looks like over you, under you, but you’ve never seen him behind you, never seen the look in his eyes so clearly as you can in the reflection across from you. It’s a kind of arousal you’ve never felt before, spiraling up in you as you watch you both move, as you see the way your mouth moves around the keening moans that he drives from you with each snap of his hips.

You can’t look away.

“Fuckin’ beautiful,” he huffs out next to your ear, breathless with effort. “You’re so goddamn gorgeous.”

“Us,” you breathe out. “We are.”

He smiles at your words in a way that feels secret and lewd and deliciously only for you.

Joel pumps into you and stills, catching his breath. He reaches out and takes your arm from around his head, pressing it to the counter in front of you. “Hands down, baby.”  The kisses he rains over your back as you lean forward to plant your hands on the cold slab of the counter feel like praise. “Now lift your leg, baby.”

You shake your head, laughing, even as you lift your right leg towards the counter. “I tried that, I don’t think-” The argument falls from your lips when he slides his arm under your thigh and tips you forward. It’s not perfect, but it’s undeniable, the view of where he enters you when he lifts your leg just right.

“You were sayin’?” There’s a teasing tone to his voice, a smirk on his lips, but his eyes are still drawn right to where yours are transfixed, to a sight neither one of you has seen in quite this way. He slides his hand up your thigh and drags his fingers down your dripping, exposed folds. “Something about pink and glistening?”

Anything you might say leaves you as a moan instead as he pulls out and slowly sinks himself deep in your body again.

“Fuck, that’s beautiful,” he whispers, wrapping his arm around your ribs and gently lifting you higher. It exposes you more, but you like it. You don’t want to hide this, you want to see it. You watch as he starts to move again, slowly pulling out and slamming home over and over, picking up speed with each stroke.

His eyes.

His eyes doing just what’s described in the book: flicking between your face and the wet, glistening pink of your pussy, watching his cock disappear into your body. It builds fast, the passion, the excitement, ratcheting higher and higher with every thrust, with each graze of that spot right inside you that he’s hitting as he holds you up.

With each bounce of your bodies in the mirror as he seats himself to the hilt in you.

You crash into your orgasm before you expect it, clenching around him and biting your lip to muffle the cry of ecstasy that your body is desperate to let out.

He keeps moving, pounding into you over and over as you come, your flesh turning hypersensitive as he pushes towards his own precipice. You’re struggling to catch your breath when he finally comes, burying himself in your body and curling his chest into your back, eyes finally closing.

He gently lets your leg down, though you can feel how the strength has been sapped from his body, how he wants to drop you and fall boneless to the floor. He doesn’t, though, he just gently sets your leg down and wraps himself around you, cock still buried deep in your body.

His lips press sloppily to your back as you finally catch your breath, his arms bracing across your chest, holding the both of you still upright. It’s a long time before you both catch your breath, before he slips from your body, soft and covered in his own come, come that’s dripping down your thighs as you stand there, starting to shiver with the cooling sweat on your skin.

You grab his hand, pulling it up to your mouth and kissing his knuckles. “Glad I asked for help.” He chuckles behind you, hugging you tight. “Glad you asked for help.”

~*~

It makes you smile, every time you see the little blooms on your way in the house and from the kitchen window. It’s a little reminder of the tiny oasis of happiness you’ve managed to build with Joel, a reminder that right now, there’s something to look forward to.

There are plenty of other little green stalks in your garden, little buds and leaves pressing up through the earth, but you don’t know which ones will turn into weeds and which will turn into real plants. You have an idea now, but you still can’t bring yourself to pull any of them out. You spent almost two hours hunched over the beds yesterday, trying to work up the nerve to pull some out, but couldn’t.

“You workin’ or you daydreamin’?”

Joel’s voice snaps your attention back to the rope in your hands. “Working!”

He makes an amused noise as he smiles and turns back to the little sawhorses he has set up. You’re not sure exactly what he’s doing with the long boards, but your job is to tie the endless knots. Your hands start working again, counting the inches with your fingers and tying the knots like he showed you over and over again as your mind wanders.

Not much else to do but daydream with the repetitive job.

You expected he would have something to say about you not knowing weeds from strawberries, scallions from lemongrass. Joel has an opinion about everything, and he’s not usually shy about putting it out there. You sure as hell criticize yourself every day over it, wishing you’d thought to snap out a line grid or try to label the rows or damn near anything to make it easier on yourself now.

You’d finally asked him, and he admitted that he didn’t want to step on your toes, and that he was proud of you for trying and didn’t want to make it any less fun and any more work for you, which is why he generally leaves you to the little garden unless you ask him for help, which you haven’t yet.

Your fingers still when you think of how he’d pressed his lips to your forehead and told you that if you wanted help, all you needed to do was ask. Low and dark, honey and whisky, full of Texas and promises, that tone is one of your favorites.

“You are slackin’ off!”

This tone, the slightly annoyed, slightly amused, completely playful side of him, is up there, too. You shake your head, both to shake away the memory and to refute his assertion as you hold up the veritable web of knots. “Absolutely not! I’ll have you know things are going very well over here!”

His eyes narrow, but you can see the tightly hid smile on his lips when he turns back around. “Best keep goin’, then.”

He doesn’t talk much after that, and neither do you. The warm May sun breaks a sheen of sweat out on your skin and over his shoulders as you both work. He drills and saws and makes complicated holes and grooves in two long, thick yokes while you spend hours just tying knots.

It puts a kink in your back, and after a while you’re standing and moving and twisting as you tie to try to alleviate the ache.

It doesn’t help much.

The hemp rope is heavy, and to make sure you’re keeping the pattern up you have to keep lifting and turning and manipulating it over and over. When the standing and sitting gets to be too much, you spread it out on the grass, crawling on hands and knees to tie and weave the rope together. Joel raises his eyebrow at you, but nods at your progress and goes back to his part of things when you wave your hand at him.

His plans are detailed. Incredibly so. He’s calculated exactly how big it can be based on the amount of rope you had managed to get. In order to make sure the both of you fit, he’d had to widen the plans for the wooden pieces, and then recalculate where and how deep the post needed to be if he was going to tie it off on the tree.  

It is easy to underestimate Joel based on his slow drawl, based on the way he presents as brawn and heft in town, but it is moments like these, with math doodled around the page and the sheer thought and intent that went into these plans, that reminded you how smart and complex he actually is.

Just another little hidden gem you want to keep for yourself: how brilliant your husband is.

Especially if it means he builds you things like hammocks.

It takes both of you to thread it through the heavy yokes, and then you have to hold it up while he climbs the tree and ties it off. You help him dig to an ungodly depth for the post, and then backfill all the dirt back in when he sinks the steel post in.

Joel just winks when you ask where he got the pole, and you don’t’ ask any further. You’re not sure you want to know what he had to trade or promise to get such a clearly valuable piece of construction equipment.

The sun is starting to set by the time he ties off the last knot and steps back, wiping his hands on his thighs.

“Well?” You ask, leaning your head on his shoulder.

He wraps his arm around you, pulling you in front of him and setting his chin on your shoulder to look at the hammock. “All done. She’s a beaut, ain’t she?”

You lean back into him and slide your hands along his arms, swaying in the cool breeze of the evening. It really is beautiful. Sure- the rope is a little rough, and some of your knots are bigger than others, but a blanket or two and you won’t notice it at all when you’re on there. The post looks like it has a slight lean to it, but Joel swears that’s because the tree isn’t level, and the post is, so it’s an optical illusion. The woodwork is smooth and symmetrical and beautiful, creating a gently curved, inviting little bed.

It’s clearly homemade, and you and Joel made it, and there’s something really beautiful about that. So much so, in fact, that you feel yourself well with emotion. “It really is, Joel.”

He squeezes you, but doesn’t otherwise acknowledge the hitch in your voice. You think it’s because you hear the same one in his voice when he speaks. “We make a good team.” He just holds you, swaying as the sun sets, watching the hammock swing gently.

“Why can’t we use it again?” You finally ask when your throat loosens.

He clears his throat and stands tall. “Gotta let the post settle. Might have to pack some more dirt in tomorrow, or even see if I can get some rocks in there.”

You turn to look up at him, to argue that there’s no way that post is anything but sturdy with how deep you dug it, but wince and grab your back.

“What’s a matter?” He instantly pulls you closer, hand moving to take the place of yours and rub over the tight muscles at your low back.

“Too much leaning over, I think, between trying to figure out weeds yesterday and tying knots today.” You groan and let your head drop into his chest as the palm of his hand kneads into the tight muscles of your lower back.

He drops a kiss on the top of your head and guides you towards the house. “Come on, take a hot shower, see if it helps.”

~*~

He’s waiting for you on the bed when you come out. He’d thought about sneaking in, getting a quick shower for himself while trying to rub out the pain in your back, but he decided against it, remembering your winces as you made your way up the stairs. He wanted to give you some time, so he’d toweled the worst of the dirt off in the kitchen sink and changed into his pajamas. “Feeling any better?” You’ve been in there a while, and if your back is anything like his back, he knows it’s not feeling any better.

You shake your head at him, even as the steam slips from your skin around your towel. “Not much. Took as hot as I could stand and it’s still locked up.” He watches you move over to the dresser and slip your underwear and pajama shorts on with the stilted care of someone who is hurting. It hurts him to watch you, knowing how the pain cramps through muscles and shoots through limbs. He’s far too well acquainted with it. He stands and moves closer, stopping your hands gently before you can get your pajama top on. “Come on, I think I owe you one.”

“One of what?” You ask, confused.

Joel smiles, and feels vindicated when he sees understanding dawn in your eyes.

“Oh, yes. Yes, sir!” You nod with a smile, letting him move you towards the bed. “I think I will be calling that in.”

He chuckles, and shakes his head as he watches you climb carefully onto the bed. “You might not be sayin’ that after you find out my level of expertise is none here darlin’.” You look up at him, cocking an eyebrow, and for a second Joel wants to abandon his plans to just pull your half-naked body to his and kiss that smile off your face. He reigns himself in tightly, though, and shakes his head at you while gently scooting you closer to the side of the bed when you wince at the angle you’d put yourself in to look at him.

“The last time I got a massage,” you start, pillowing your head in your hands, “was when I used a gift card a friend had gotten me for Christmas.” You pause, sigh, and shake your head. “That gift card would be old enough to drink now.”

Joel doesn’t try to hide the bark of laughter, and smiles at how easily you still talk about the past sometimes. “That long ago, huh?”

“You think they’d go for it? Setting up a spa here in Jackson?” Your voice floats to him as he walks over to your side of the dresser and looks over the little collection of bottles you’ve amassed from his gifts. “Massages, mud facials, pedicures…” He grabs two and shakes his head as he makes his way back to you. “I think it could work.”

“Wanna see you bring that one up to the council,” he mutters, leaning down and pressing a kiss to the crown of your head. “Now just relax, please?”

“Relax.” You turn your head to the side and lay your arms down along your body and close your eyes. “Yes. Relaxed. One hundred percent.”

“Miracle, that,” he mutters to himself with a chuckle. He knows you’re lying. He can see the tightness in your back, the way one shoulder is held higher with pain, but he won’t call you out on it. No one is relaxed anymore, not for longer than a few minutes at a time, at least. The illusion of relaxation is enough, he supposes. Anything he can do for you here will be better than nothing, he tells himself.

Joel rubs his hands together, trying to get the chill from the air off them. He looks at you, laid out before him, miles of enticing skin of your bare back staring at him, the swell of your hips disappearing under your soft pajama shorts.

He takes a slow breath. It would be easy to make this sexual, to let his hands slide just a little too far… and maybe, eventually, he will. But he has to control himself. You’re hurting, and he is long overdue in repaying the favor of the nightly massages you bestowed on him when his back went out.

He holds two bottles in front of you, “Which one?” He watches as you open one eye and think for long seconds, the decision looming.

“Strawberries and champagne,” you finally say, snuggling your head back down and closing your eyes again.

“You don’t like this one, then?” Joel takes the nearly full bottle of Love Spell and sets it back on the counter, shaking the nearly half-gone strawberry scented lotion.

“No, I like it the most,” you say into the mattress before turning your head. “Have to ration it.”

Joel leans forward, dropping a kiss to your nose. “Those are the things I wish you’d tell me, darlin’. There’s a whole case of that one just sittin’ in a storage closet.” He laughs at how wide your eyes get and reprimands you with a tap of his fingertip on your nose. “Been bringing you different ones ‘cause I thought you weren’t using it ‘cause you didn’t like it. Next time.”

He stands next to you, putting the information to the back of his mind for the next time he’s out, and turns his attention to your back. It’s smooth except for the three thin scars that run across your mid back.

He knows whip scars when he sees them.

He’s seen them surprisingly far too often the last two decades.

It’s a story you’ve never elaborated on, but he doesn’t need to know, doesn’t need another villain to be mad at, not when he has you in his bed and there’s a hammock in the yard and no one is ever hurting you like that again.

He takes the strawberry lotion and drizzles a puddle in his palm, rubbing his hands together and then leaning down, spreading them across your back. You startle at the initial coolness of it, then relax as he drags his hands up and down over your torso.

It surprises him, how easy it is to relax into what he’s doing. The lotion makes his hands slick, makes his fingers glide over skin and feel the muscles deeper. He feels almost like he does when he’s working with wood: he can feel the knot, feel the tension, without having to see it. He lets his palms drive deep and heavy in long strokes up and down, digging into the thick cords along your spine. Then he starts in with his thumbs, mimicking the little circles he remembers you made on his back, right at the dimples of his hips, right over his ass, and how good it felt. He’s rewarded with your happy sigh, and digs just a little deeper when you melt into the mattress.

He’s never done this before, not for anyone. Little shoulder and foot rubs here and there for ex-girlfriends, soothing passes of hands over bare skin after sex, but never something this intimate, never something this pointed and healing.

He finds he likes it, likes how he can see you relax with each stroke of his hands, likes how he knows he’s helping you to feel better, like show your breathing starts to smooth out instead of hitch when he presses the knots away into nothingness.

Joel lets his fingers start to play, poking and prodding at your flesh, feeling for the differences in tension, feeling for the softness of skin and muscle against the thick and hard bone of your spine and hips and ribs. He spends time up higher, kneading around your shoulder blades and at your neck, relishing in how your ribs gently rise and fall with the soft breaths of full surrender under him.

Even the sweet strawberry scent doesn’t bother him as much as he expects it to, the lotion and how slick it makes his hands integral to what he’s doing. He didn’t realize how easy it would be to feel the tension, to feel where the pain was. The scent fades to nothing in the background as he slowly goes deeper.

~*~

It’s heaven.

His hands are heaven.

You’ve always known this. They’re large and strong and capable of such softness and such violence. You’ve surrendered to their touch more times than you can count, and not once have his fingers against your skin ever been anything other than bliss.

His hands are so wide you can feel where his thumbs meet over the middle of your spine and the tips of his fingers skim where your breasts bulge at your ribcage as he moves up and down. He runs them around the tight borders of your shoulder blades, loosening up that ever-present knot in the middle of your back. His thumbs make tiny circles at the base of your skull, widening slowly, maddeningly, as you feel the little muscles bounce and pop with how taught they are. He’s firm and strong and absolutely fucking perfect.

The lotion was cold at first, but now you swear that his hands are as hot as asphalt in the summer sun, dragging over your skin. He goes slow, almost maddeningly slow. You feel your breathing slow, matching the rhythmic dragging up and down, over and over, lulled by the little circles and the large, sweeping pressures he rolls over your body.

It’s like the most rhythmic hug, the most calming pressure, you’ve ever felt in your life.

You may be biased, but you’ve never had a massage as good.

“There,” you mutter out when he finds a particularly tight spot right by your hip bone. “Deeper.”

~*~

He smiles at how you slur the words, something sitting between sleep and pleasure on your tongue. “Yes, ma’am,” he responds softly, digging his thumbs in deeper.

Your moan of pleasure is like music to his ears.

He doesn’t get to see you like this often. Little glimpses here and there of happiness when you’re at your desk, or sitting on the porch in the evening, but rarely this calm and relaxed. There were far less moments like this in the winter, you thrive in the spring and the summer with the sun hitting your face.  

It’s why he wants the hammock, why he wants a little window box of lilies for you to look at and smile towards. He wants there to be little things for you to find happiness in at home, even if the world around you is crumbling, he wants to give you what he can for as long as he can.

A hammock. Lillies. Love Spell lotion and massages.

He digs the heel of his palm in, feeling the tight band of muscle start to relax as he does. There was a time when these little things would have seemed like nothing, would have seemed too little to him to even be a blip on his radar. Before the outbreak it had all been about success: how fast he could have a good business that could get Sarah all the things she needed like cleats and tuition to good schools. After the outbreak, nothing seemed worth anything and comforts were overrated.

He’d never thought about rubbing Tess’s shoulders. Getting her flowers.

This was…

Sometimes it blindsided him still, the way life in Jackson brings a sense of normalcy and illusion. He lets up off the pressure as you let out a rush of breath, and goes back to long, heavy strokes as his mind continues to wander. He can’t imagine this life he has with you anywhere else, not Boston, not Texas, not anywhere else he’s ever been or lived.

Is it that this life only works in Jackson, with its creature comforts and room to really breathe, really be in love?

Would he have fallen in love with you if you’d wandered into Boston instead? If he came across you in Pennsylvania or in that little settlement he’d spent time in in the Carolinas?

Would you have loved him, the guy who forgot birthday cakes and bailed his brother out of jail, in Austin if the world hadn’t fallen apart?

He looks back down, eyes falling over the three thin scars on your back, and gently traces them.

What ifs don’t matter now.

He has you, and that won’t change.

Not if he has anything to say about it.

“How ya doin?” He asks, voice thick with all the questions he just asked himself that he refuses to ask out loud. He keeps his hands moving slowly, even when you don’t answer. He says your name softly, and leans over.

Joel smiles.

You’re fast asleep under him, warm and pliable and relaxed.

He doesn’t stop moving for a moment, just slowly softens the pressure with each sweep, treating you like a napping newborn that will startle awake with any change. Slowly he lifts his hands and waits, but you don’t stir as he rubs the little leftover lotion back into his own skin.

He makes his way back over to the dresser and takes your shirt in his hands, tilting his head as he looks at you, laid half bare in the dim light of the bedroom. He’d rather not wake you, but he also knows there’s still a chill at night, and you won’t stay comfortable for long. Slowly he moves back to the bed and presses a soft kiss to your head. “Wake up for me, sleepin’ beauty.”

He smiles at the little grumble you let out, “No.”

“You’re half naked, darlin’,” He chuckles to himself.

“That’s never been a problem for you before,” you mutter before turning your head away.

Joel smiles and tosses your shirt on the side table before turning out the lights. It takes a little careful maneuvering, but he has you tucked against his side, still only half dressed, and the both of you under the covers fairly quickly.

“See?” you slur out against his shirt, “told ya it wasn’t a problem.”

“Never, sweetheart.” He kisses the top of your head and holds you closer, arm sliding only a little against the slick, lotioned skin on your back. “Now get back to sleep for me, will ya?”  

“I’m not afraid.” Ellie pushes past him, shaking her head. “I’m not stupid. I know what we might find.”

He follows, tense as he pulls his gun off his shoulder. “Doesn't mean you have to see it.”

“Thanks for that, I guess,” she mutters as they start to crest a small hill, “But I… Fuuuuck.” The curse drips from her lips as she ducks, her voice falling away. 

“What?” Joel whispers, ducking and moving to her. He looks around blindly until she points to the small shack they are headed towards. 

It’s not much, the shack: just a few slabs of plywood with a cot inside that patrols use when weather gets bad or they need a stop for the night on longer routes. What catches his breath, though, is the clicker hovering over a body a few yards away from the door, tearing at it with its teeth, while another person sits motionless against the far wall of the shack, blindfolded with their wrists tied. 

He pulls the rifle up to his shoulder, and breathes a sigh of relief when he sees it’s Robbie’s body under the clicker. He scans across until he sees you, pressed tight against the shack, shaking. “She’s alive,” he breathes out.

“Thank fucking god,” Ellie whispers, relaxing just a bit. “Can you get it from here?” Ellie whispers, pointing to his rifle. 

“Too fucking far,” he curses, moving between looking over at you and taking in the area through the scope. 

“But she’s alive, right?” He doesn’t answer, and Ellie just stares at Joel while he looks at you through the scope for long seconds. “Right?”

“Yeah,” he blurts out quickly, trying to force himself to believe it. He takes a few deep breaths and then looks around. “We’re out in the middle of fuckin' nowhere here. Exposed.”

“Fuck,” Ellie mutters, looking around for the first time at how the trees had opened to a clearing. “There might be more.”

Joel nods. “Back to back, nice and slow. Even scans across, you got it?”

They hadn’t moved like this since they’d been in Jackson, they haven’t had to, but it comes back easy: slow, quiet steps, heads up, eyes and ears taking in everything like they used to do on their way across the country. 

Ellie feels Joel pause at her back. 

“I can get him from here.”

“Then fuckin’ do it.”

~*~

You could have dealt with the sounds of the clicker and the clicker alone. 

But you’d never heard one feed before. 

You aren’t even sure if that was what you could call it. It is disgusting: squelching and tearing sounds, shuddering breaths. The only saving grace was how quickly Robbie had stopped making noises, how fast he’d died. 

At least, without his groans, you can pretend it is a tiger eating in the zoo. A dog with a bone. 

Anything. 

Anything except what it is. 

You thank whatever is watching over you that clickers can’t smell. You are disgusting, coated in your own smelly, fear-drenched sweat, legs sticky with his release and piss and dirt. 

As long as you keep your breathing slow, you have a chance. 

The gunshot scares you. You aren’t prepared, you aren’t ready, and your body jerks. You hit the wall behind you, making a noise. 

The clicker lets out an ungodly sound, but it doesn't die. 

You’re almost ready for the second shot that rings out, knowing that if they hadn’t meant to hit you, they were aiming for the clicker. It screeches again, the sound closer and more strangled. 

The question is, who is behind the gun?

An infected is always a common enemy. Everyone aims for a clicker. 

A helpless woman is always, always a prize.

A third shot rings out. 

Silence. 

Nothing. 

Nothing except your ragged breathing through your nose. 

Then: footsteps. Two sets at least.

You hear them racing towards you and while you wish someone would say something, you know they can’t. 

Clickers are so rarely alone. 

You sit, focusing on your breathing, in and out, in and out, until they’re close enough that you can hear them. 

You’d know that breathing anywhere. You sleep by it. 

And then he says your name. It slips from his lips quietly, like a whisper. 

Finally, you break. 

You can’t cry, not really, but your chest heaves all the same as you hear him skid to his knees in front of you. You don’t know the words, can’t make out what he’s saying through the sheer relief coursing through your body, but he’s there and his hands are touching your face and you feel something drape around your shoulders and it is all fucking over. 

His hands bounce over you, touching your face and hands and wrists and ankles as he tries to figure out where to start. He turns away from you, voice muffled as he asks for a knife, and then he’s cutting your hands free, cutting the wide band around your eyes until you blink and hide your head against him at the bright sun. 

You’re fuzzy, so fuzzy. The world is spinning and the nausea is rampant and you can’t quite hear what he’s saying but he takes your face in his hands and he pulls you to look at him and he smiles. 

Joel smiles, relief and fear in his eyes as he holds you close. “I’ll be gentle, okay?”

You nod, confused about what he’s referring to until you feel the pull of the tape at your lips. He goes slow, tries to slowly pry the duct tape from your skin, but it pulls and irritates and he’s mumbling apologies the whole time until it finally falls free of your skin and you’re taking big, deep breaths, coughing with the effort. 

Ellie slips into your view, putting her canteen in his outstretched hand so he can hold it to your lips. You want to protest that she’s here, it should be Tommy or Rick or Eddie, but you’ll make a fuss about it later. 

“Easy, easy,” he whispers when you try to drink greedily, holding it back. “Sips first, okay? We got as much as you want, just…” he trails off, letting you take small mouthfuls, the hand that isn’t supporting the canteen trying to card through your matted hair. “I’ve got ya, alright?”

You nod, squinting when the sun hits your face as he leans down, cutting the rope around your feet. He hands the blade and the bottle back to Ellie before slipping his hands around you. “We gotta get inside, in case there are more. Can you stand?”

“I don’t know.” The whispered words croak out of your lips, your throat raw and dry still. 

“Okay, let’s try.” You keep your eyes on his, his confidence and small smile enough to get you to believe that you might have enough strength. 

You’d try anything for this man. 

With his hands under your shoulders, his arms around you, he stands and starts to lift, doing more work than you as you stumble to your feet like a baby deer. He pulls you close to his chest, holding you tight as you sway in his arms. “My head,” you mutter, squeezing your eyes shut and grabbing on to him as the world lurches. 

“He hit ya?”

You nod, hiding against him as he growls under you, the jacket he’d slipped around your shoulders for modesty falling to the ground, pulling what was left of your shirt with it. You don’t care, though. Your modesty will survive until you can get the world to stop spinning and you get inside. 

Ellie dashes around to the other side of the two of you, moving to pick up the coat where it slipped, but she stops, eyes on your shoulder. She’s never been good at hiding her emotions, and panic fills her voice even when she tries to keep it from shaking. “Joel?”

~*~

You sit against the wall, taking small sips of water in his flannel shirt and what’s left of your jeans, the monstrosity of the clicker’s bite on your shoulder hidden from view. 

Ellie and Joel sit across from you, both trying to hide their own tears. 

“I told you,” you can’t make your voice loud or forceful, the emotions and your throat are still too raw, “leave me a gun and go.”

Joel sniffs back the thickness in his voice. “And I told you I ain’t fucking doing that.”

You cover your face with your hands. The concussion is still making everything fuzzy, still pounding in your brain, and the mid-day light streaming in around the covers on the windows is still somehow too bright in the small shack. “And just what the fuck are you going to do here, huh?”

He says nothing, staring, eyes full of sadness and loss already. 

“We’re not gonna let you turn alone.” Ellie replies confidently. “No one deserves that.”

“And you deserve to watch me turn into one of those things?” You spit out, fighting to hold back a sob. “You deserve for your last memory of me to be one of you fucking shooting me?”

Joel roars, his fist slamming out against the wall next to him, making Ellie jump. 

“You can’t fucking change it, Joel.” You wish there was more bite to the words, you wish you could make him hate you in these moments so he would leave, but there’s too much sadness. 

You’re leaving him. 

You never want to fucking leave him. 

Especially not like this. 

“Please,” you beg, slipping to your knees and crawling across the space between you. You put one hand on his knee and take Ellie’s hand. "Please. I need you to leave. I need to know I won’t hurt you.”

“Ellie, go outside.” Joel’s voice is low and calm and garners no argument, so she doesn’t even try. She just sniffs back her tears and squeezes your hand and slips out the door. All the while he holds your eyes with his, something dark, something intense in them. He waits until the sound of her boots on the dirt fades. “I’m not fucking leaving,” he whispers out. 

“Joel,” you plead with him as you crawl between his legs, hands on his shoulders as much to keep his attention as to ground yourself. 

“I can’t,” his voice cracks as his eyes fill with tears. “I can’t without you.”

You tuck your head under his chin, curling into him even though your body aches as you do. “You can. You have, and you will again.”

“There ain't much left, darlin’,” he mutters, burying one of his hands in your hair, pressing his lips to your forehead. “I don’t have a lot of fight left in me.”

“And what about Ellie?” You wrap your arms around him and settle into his embrace, sitting in his lap. “She still needs you.”

“She don’t need me.” He says it as if he almost believes it.

You shake your head against him, tears dripping freely from your lashes. You don’t want to be alone. You don’t want to turn. But you don’t want him anywhere near you when you inevitably do, so you have to stay strong one last time. “She does. And so does Tommy. And Billy.” You kiss his chest, waiting for a particularly sharp dip in your senses to right the spinning room. 

He says your name like his heart is breaking. 

You know it is, because yours is, too. 

You pull away and look him in the eyes. “I need you, too, Joel.” You take a slow breath, fighting for control of your voice. “I need you to… to leave me a gun and… and I need you to walk away. I need you to do that.” He shakes his head, trying to pull you back against him but you resist. “I know what I’m asking you to do,” you choke out, “but we’re running out of time, Joel-”

“Don’t,” he whispers, broken, as a tear slips over his cheek, “don’t do this.”

“It’s too late,” you whisper back, settling down in his arms again. “It’s already been done.”

“You can’t ask me to let ya go.” His voice is thick and soft, his lips moving against your hair. “I can’t let ya go.” He holds you even tighter. “I told you I was never leavin’ you, and I meant it.”

“I almost wish you hadn’t found me,” you mutter, fresh tears spilling out. 

“And I wish I’d gotten here sooner.”

~*~

Ellie sits on a log a few feet away from the shack, eyes drifting over the body of the clicker where it lays on top of Robbie. She can’t see much from where she is, but the puddle of blood drying in the mid-day sun under the bodies tells its own story. 

She can’t get the tears to stop, they keep falling over her cheeks no matter how hard she tries. 

You aren’t her mom, not really, but you slipped in her life so easily, and you fill a hole she hadn’t realized was there. She likes how fucking tough you are around everyone but how relaxed and soft you are at home. She hates to see you cry and loves how Joel does everything he can to make sure it almost never happens. 

She loves the way you smile at her when she talks about the last book she read or she shows you her newest sketch. 

She doesn’t want to be exactly like you, but you were the first person who showed her that being a badass doesn’t only mean running and shooting and being a part of Fedra or a raider or like Joel. 

Being a badass sometimes means working really hard at something you hate. Being a badass means filling in missing pages in books so people can enjoy stories. Being a badass means fending for your family by learning to grow a garden. Being a badass means not complaining about sitting up with her when she has nightmares and she can’t bear to be alone. 

Being a badass means giving the middle finger to Jackson and marrying Joel to stay. 

And now, just as quickly as you’d come into their lives, you are leaving.  

Ellie doesn’t realize she has been rubbing at her own bite mark until she starts to irritate the skin. She draws her finger over it, the pattern ingrained in her brain. 

Late at night, all alone, Ellie likes to pretend you are her mom, that she’d been your first baby and that her blood had helped save the world. Ellie likes to pretend that she’d been able to do that, that you’d both been able to do that and you got to live happily ever after in your little house in Jackson with Joel. 

It is her favorite fantasy to indulge in, and the one that makes her feel the safest. The most loved. 

She always kinda knew Joel cared about her, but Ellie didn’t feel love until you’d moved in, until you asked her warm questions full of curiosity and you actually cared what the answers were. Until you helped her see past Joel’s gruff exterior to the true softness in him, a softness she got glimpses of but never really understood before.

Ellie scratches at her bite, drawing blood. 

It isn’t fair. 

The unfairness of it all turns her stomach, makes her want to cry or scream or vomit or run.

She turns when she hears the door of the shack open, Joel standing on the porch, his eyes red and swollen. “You should,” he coughs, trying to keep the tears out of his voice, but failing. “You should say goodbye.”

Ellie doesn’t move, the finality of it freezing her in place. 

“She understands if you can’t, though,” he forces out, harshly wiping the tears from his face. “Either way we have to get moving.”

“No, it-”

Joel shakes his head. “Been almost five hours, we have to go.”

You have seven, eight at most. Though with where it is on your shoulder, every minute you are still with them is a gift at this point. Some people have less. Ellie stands slowly, pulling her jacket over her arm. 

She doesn’t look at Joel as she walks past him and into the small shack. 

You’re still on the ground where Joel was sitting when she slips in, hiding your face in the darkness of your hands. You look up when she comes in, smiling a little. 

Ellie hates that this will be her last memory of you: so dizzy you can’t stand, eyes swollen, clothes torn, bruised and battered and looking so much more broken than she’s ever seen you. She’ll have to draw Joel a picture of you, something nice, so he can remember you some other way. 

Ellie steps closer, kneeling. “Joel said we gotta go.”

~*~

Ellie is trying so hard to hold it together for you, she’s shaking. “I need you to go, Ellie,” you whisper, taking her hand in yours. “I need you to not be here for this.”

“It’s not fair!” Ellie sniffs, her words whiny and high so it reminds you of a teenage tantrum. 

You pull her to you, hugging her tight. “It’s not. Life isn’t. But I’m so glad I got to know you.” You pull back, smiling through your tears. “To be your ‘not mom.’ You’re so special to me, Ellie.”

“You’re my mom!” Ellie crashes into you, crying hard as she falls apart. “You’re the only thing like a mom I’ve ever had.”

Her words break the last pieces of you that are held together. You hold her tight as she cries, there are no words you can say to make this any better. 

“Don’t go,” she cries out into your shoulder. “You can’t go, please!”

“I wish I didn’t have to, honey,” you pull her away from you and look into her eyes, but they’re wild with grief and she isn’t listening as she keeps repeating her words over and over. Your own words slip out full of desperation, of the grief you feel. “I don’t want to either.”

She’s gripping you tight, pulling at your shoulder and your arms and trying to bury herself in you as you try to push her away. Between the heartache and the vertigo you can’t hold her back and do the last thing you want to do. 

“Joel!”

You don’t need to tell him. He knows. He steps in and wraps his arms around Ellie, hauling her off of you even though she fights him and screams and kicks as he struggles his way out the door with her.

He doesn’t look at you as he leaves. 

You don’t know if that makes it better or worse.

Once they're out of sight you let the damn break, heaving tears pulling you into a ball on the floor. 

His gun is only an arm’s reach away. You just need a minute. Just one. You just need to let this emotion out. You need to grieve your own death. 

You need to be able to hold the gun straight when you pull the trigger. 

~*~

It takes everything in you to push down the panic and focus on what you can feel, what you can discern. You can’t open your eyes, something’s pushing up against them, and your mouth is taped shut. You’re being dragged by your hands, tied together overhead, your legs bouncing over what feels like dirt roads, something under your hips and back, keeping you tied to it. Your feet are tied together, and even if you could move them, they feel heavy and sluggish. Everything’s quiet except for the sounds of you dragging and the huffing of whoever’s pulling you. 

There’s only fear coursing through your veins. There is nothing else. You grip the fear tight in your mind: letting it run free will speed up your breathing, will make your heart pound even faster, will send you in a spiral you can’t afford right now.

The council. Robbie. Maria. Fedra.

Someone’s decided you’re not worth it. 

You must be on the other side of the fence, because you can’t imagine anyone allowing someone to be dragged through Jackson like this, no matter who they are or what they’ve done. 

The world feels like it’s spinning, and there’s pain radiating from the back of your skull.

Concussion? You’d never had one, but this is what it would feel like, right? Someone must have hit you. You don’t remember falling. 

You don’t remember anything except Joel’s kiss goodbye from the breakfast table where he was sipping his bitter coffee. You kissed him, his hand sliding over your hip and pressing just enough for you to have second thoughts about getting to the barn on time. 

You should have stayed with him. 

You should have stayed. 

It never crosses your mind that it would be Joel pulling you. 

He would never. 

And so you focus on that. It’s not Joel. He doesn’t know. 

If he’d known, he wouldn’t have let it happen. 

If he’d known, he wouldn’t have been able to look you in the eyes this morning. 

He could barely look at you when he knew you were being kicked out a year ago before you were married. Now? 

You’d have known. 

You know everything in his eyes now. Pain. Love. Ecstasy. Loss. Fear. 

You’d only seen love this morning as he tried to convince you to sit in his lap and be late. 

No, he hadn’t known. Which meant Tommy hadn’t known. 

For all the shit you give Tommy, he loves his brother, and he tries with you now. He’s sat with you for a few meals, tried to chat about the day. He smiles. He tries.

Which means it probably wasn’t Maria or the council, either, because Joel’s made it quite clear she tells Tommy everything, and Tommy has no problem telling it all right back over to Joel when it serves him or when it’s important. Especially now that they’re trying to rebuild bonds, Tommy spills everything.

You can’t imagine this would be a secret Tommy would try to keep, not with how hard he’s been trying to build a bridge back to you both.

“You awake yet?” Robbie speaks right as you start to figure out that he’s the only person left, his low voice that so many women might have found sexy striking fear into you. “You should fucking be.”

You try to speak, but it comes out as a muffled moan against the tape.

“Good.” He pulls you along the road roughly. “I want you to be awake for this.”

He doesn't say anymore, he doesn’t wax poetic about his plans or give you a villain's soliloquy as he pulls you through what you assume to be the woods outside of Jackson. You try to talk, try to get him to pull the tape off with muffled pleas, but it only earns you a kick to the ribs or to the hip any time you try. 

After three of those, you decide that being quiet is, at least, going to prevent more bruises. 

You’re not sure how long you've been gone for, it could be hours by now, but it doesn’t matter. 

Joel isn’t expecting you until dinner. It will take him time to figure out you’re gone, and by that time it’ll be dark. They won’t send anyone out in the dark with the threat of hoards. The earliest they’ll send a patrol out to look for you will be tomorrow morning. 

The dirt shifts to asphalt and then to concrete, you can tell the difference in how it drags along your jeans, the asphalt and concrete ripping them up as he pulls you on the makeshift sled. You’re sure there’s road rash on your calves by now, they have to be bleeding, but you don’t say anything, you just try to bend your knees and hold them up as he trudges along, stopping only every so often to catch his breath. You hear him take a drink, you hear him stop to piss after tying you to a tree so you can’t try to stumble away, but he always keeps going, always keeps you moving farther and farther away from Jackson. 

You try to dredge up the ability to disconnect, to disassociate, to fly away. You haven’t had to use it in so long…

You just keep telling yourself to not expect anything, to stop daydreaming about valiant rescues. You want to believe that Joel will come.

But that’s only if he can find you… and if Robbie hasn’t done something to him, too.

~*~

Joel’s first stop is the stables, finding Eddie in the paddock when he doesn’t see you in the barn. 

“Miller,” Eddie starts, leaning on the fence. “How are you?”

He shakes his head, unable to voice the feeling of dread low in his stomach. “My wife still here? She missed dinner and I can’t seem to find her.” He pauses, trying to hide his fear and looks back towards the barn. “I thought she was mucking stables today?”

Eddie sinks, and immediately the little pocket of worry in Joel’s stomach starts to grow. “Would have been, yeah, if she showed up.”

“What do you mean? She left for work this morning just like always.” He can’t help it now, the fear wraps around his heart like a vice at the way Eddie’s eyes grow wide. 

“I just assumed she was laid up with a migraine, she’s about due for one how she gets ‘em every few months and what with the rain we just had…” Eddie stops, face just a little white. “I guess I shoulda checked- she never misses a day without sayin’.”

“Never,” Joel huffs out, turning away from the stables and ignoring Eddie’s calls after him, eyes open now as he starts to retrace every inch between the barn and the house, hoping you’re sitting in some corner with a twisted ankle. “Never.”

~*~

You fill time by wondering why he doesn’t have a horse. It would have been far easier for him to tie you to a saddle, to toss you over his lap and ride out wherever he plans on going instead of dragging this makeshift sled he has you tied to. 

But if he took a horse, people would know who had it. 

Jackson’s small, but not small enough that you could tell right away who was missing. It would take maybe a full day or two to account for everyone. 

That must be what he’s counting on, that must be his plan. 

You wonder just how far he’ll take you, legs aching, bladder full, head pounding, before he’ll at least stop for the night. 

Except you don’t want to stop. 

Not if Joel’s been right. Not if there are infected out here. He’s come home anxious every day from his patrols, checking locks and keeping a bat by the bed since they won’t let him keep a gun outside of the armory, sugarcoating and truncating his reports about what he’s seen. 

There are infected around here. Robbie does patrols. He should know. 

It’s the only thing that gives you some solace: Robbie does patrols. He should know where it will be safe to hole up for the night, where to avoid infected, what signs to look for with raiders and hunters. 

You don’t know what his plans are with your life, but you’re fairly confident he would at least want to save his own. 

Finally, he stops. 

“Here will do. And we’ll be gone by morning, anyway.” 

~*~

“You’re gonna get on a fucking horse, and you’re gonna come with me right now!” Joel grabs Tommy by the collar, pulling him out of his house as the sky starts to turn from pink to purple with dusk. 

Tommy twists out of his grip, pushing Joel to arm’s length. “Joel, you know what the fuck is out there right now! In the dark we got no-”

Joel stops, pushing into his brother, nose to nose. “Yeah, Tommy, it’s getting fucking dark out. She’s been missing since this morning and no one’s-”

“What are you going to do in the fucking dark, Joel?” Tommy seethes, his voice dropping. “I don’t like it, either, but we’ve been finding more and more of ‘em. You stumble onto hoard in the fucking dark and then what?” Tommy shakes his head at Joel’s dark stare. “You get yourself killed, then who is gonna find her, huh?”

Joel pushes him away, knowing he’s right but not caring in the least. Some things you risk everything for. “Fine.”

“We’ll go out at first light!” Tommy calls out after him, but Joel doesn’t turn back, doesn’t even entertain the idea of waiting that long.

~*~

It’s a cabin or a tent. There’s some kind of wood floor under you, you’re inside something by the way the sound bounces and the wind stops. He still hasn’t untied you, hasn’t taken the band from your eyes or the tape from your lips. 

When he starts to touch you, starts to undress you, he keeps those things in place. It’s all you can do to focus on breathing through your nose, on trying to keep the panic out of your body so you don’t suffocate. You fight every instinct you have to kick and punch and fight because you know you won’t be able to fight and breathe at the same time tied up like this, you know that he’s got enough weight on you to easily overtake you, and you don’t want to fight now and lose an opportunity later. 

So you breathe. You focus on slow in and slow out and not on his hands on your body, his fingers pulling at your clothes and the ripping sound of the knife slicing through them. You try to ignore the pain of him flipping you on your stomach and bouncing your already painful head off the ground, you pretend you can’t hear his rant about the scar that splits you hip to hip. 

Joel loves that scar. 

He kisses that scar. 

Every time you try to cover it or hide it, Joel reminds you that that scar is how you’re here with him. He reminds you that scar is your resilience and your perseverance. 

Tears fill your eyes when you think about how fucking gentle Joel is with you in those moments when you doubt yourself, when you hate yourself, when you feel like you’re not good enough. 

Hope fills your heart when you think about just how goddamn brutal he’s going to be when he finds you. With each slow breath you think about what Joel will do, how he’ll pull Robbie off of you, how he’ll hurt him. 

You know it’s a dark place neither if you might come back from, but in this moment, the bloody revenge fantasy is no worse than the deep, dark pit that awaits you if you let yourself feel his hands on you, his body in and against you, as Robbie takes what he thinks is his. 

He knows you’re Joel’s. You’ve told him. Joel’s told him.

Robbie knows you’re Joel’s. 

He just doesn’t understand what’s coming for him. 

~*~

“You shoulda stayed back,” Joel mutters, hand on his gun, trying to follow the odd scratch marks in the ground with his flashlight. 

“Yeah, well,” Ellie follows his steps exactly, avoiding adding any confusion to the tracks he’s trying to follow. “I wasn’t gonna let you go alone, and we make a pretty good team.”

“Yeah,” he mutters. All the horses were accounted for, so that meant he was on foot, which meant he’d be harder to follow but that he couldn’t have gotten that far with you. 

“You’re sure it’s Robbie?” Ellie asks quietly, evening settling into night now and making all the dangers just that much easier to sneak up on them. 

“He’s the only one been bothering her, and he ain’t around.” Joel pauses, looks at the ground, and keeps moving. 

“You think she’s okay?” Ellie asks, hesitant. 

Joel keeps moving, never breaking stride. “If she ain’t perfect, he’s a fucking dead man.” 

~*~

You don’t sleep. Even when he leaves you alone, huddled in on yourself in your shredded clothing, you don’t sleep. 

You can’t see, can’t really move now that he’s tied your hands to your feet to keep you from getting up, and you can’t speak with the tape still on your mouth. 

You’ve pissed yourself more than you care to think about, though it doesn’t seem to stop him or bother him. You're thirsty. Your stomach rumbles with hunger. He doesn’t feed you. Doesn’t give you water. 

It makes you wonder what his goal is when he treats you like this. If he wanted to steal you away from Joel, get you to be his, he’d have to make you want to stay with him. 

This? This is cruelty. 

You can only see death at the end of this road. 

His is preferable, but yours is more likely. 

~*~

“Fuck!” Joel curses when he loses the trail to asphalt, the dragging in the dirt disappearing into the street. 

The old road is broken, the way forward pitch black with only a sliver of the moon in the sky. “We keep going,” Ellie says quietly, stepping onto the street even as Joel paces next to her. 

“How?” He asks, tired and frustrated and the adrenaline finally ebbing enough for his fear to seep through, his voice climbing louder than a whisper in his frustration. “How the fuck are we gonna find her on this?”

“Dunno,” Ellie sighs, reaching back and grabbing Joel’s arm, “But we’re not stopping.”

“No,” he finally agrees after a deep breath, falling in next to her. “We’re not stopping.”

“You do patrols more than me, you know all the little hidden places and trails,” she whispers, sweeping her flashlight back and forth, looking for any sign on the road of where anyone might have left a track. “Where would he go?”

“I don’t fuckin’ know,” he sighs, eyes higher, looking for signs of smoke or lights, hints of any of the dozens of dangers they could run into out here. 

“Yeah, you do,” Ellie prods, stopping. “If you were gonna fucking kidnap someone, where would you take them?”

“I wouldn’t-” His protest dies on his lips. No, of course he wouldn’t kidnap anyone, but he knows what is out this way. He knows that if he wanted to stay away from the patrols, he’d have done the same damn thing. The realization hits him like a freight train, taking his breath. “Mother fucker.”

Ellie smiles, a little flicker of hope blooming. “Then lead the way, man. Let’s fucking go!”

~*~

It’s familiar and foreign all at once. 

You pull your hand from the doorknob, turning around to look at the little backyard. It’s small, and the sun is warm on your face as you turn, squinting. 

Something swishes around your legs, and you look down to see you’re wearing a dress, little flip flops on your feet. Your eyes flit back up at the half-finished woodworking project on the lawn. Sawhorses hold up long planks of wood, and there is a pile of tools next to them. 

It makes your brain itch. 

You start to step towards it, but something tells you to go into the house.

As soon as you move past the threshold, you feel right. Something is familiar and perfect about this place, even though you’ve never been here before, can’t recall it from a memory. 

There’s a table by the back door, handmade, with keys and a wallet and a very familiar watch on it, ticking away the seconds. You only pause for a moment, looking at it, running your fingers over it, because you need to move further into the house. You need to find out what that sound is. 

It’s laughter and light and happiness. 

It’s soft singing. 

There’s a teenage girl with her back to you as you move into the kitchen. She has a baby in her arms, holding the little one and bouncing them gently. There’s another baby in a bassinet, just next to the table. 

“You’re not supposed to be here yet, you know,” she says, turning to you. Her riotous curls bounce around her face as she smiles at you. Her eyes are warm and soft and you see something in her, something so familiar…

She looks like Joel when she smiles. Just a little. Just around the eyes and the curve of her lip and the shape of her jaw. 

“They’ve been so good.” She steps over to you and sets the child in your arms. You take him, because you know it’s a him and that he’s your him as sure as you know the girl before you is Sarah, and cuddle him tight. 

“They were always so good,” you whisper, remembering the ease of the pregnancies, remembering the hours you whispered your hopes and dreams to the little beings in your belly and how they summersaulted as you talked to them. 

Your only companions. 

Your only lifelines for so long. 

She takes the baby back, holding him tight. “He’s coming, ok?”

“Who?”

“Just, just hold on a little longer.”

“Who?”

“I promise he’s coming. They both are.”

She turns away from you, and no matter what you say, she can’t hear you as everything fades into a dark, empty void. 

~*~

You must have drifted to sleep at some point, because you come to to him on top of you again, hips rutting into yours, pushing against torn and bruised flesh as he grunts his release. 

You focus on your breathing, on the nothingness that is the blackness behind your eyelids, on the remnants of the dream or the vision or whatever it was that are quickly vanishing.

On the clicking sounds that come every so often. 

It doesn’t register, at first, because for fifteen years those clicks surrounded you day in and day out. 

But when he’s done, when he’s lying on you and panting in your ear and struggling to tie your feet together again, you hear it. 

Only one thing makes that sound. Only one thing can. 

You move your hands, lashing out, searching for his mouth to try to stop him from making any noise, hoping you can cover his mouth long enough for him to hear what you hear. 

Instead, he curses and kicks you, drags you by the tied hands over the rough wood and out the door. 

It must be morning; you feel warmer immediately. 

You don’t know what happens next. You can only hear the screeching and the screaming. You get pulled and tossed and there are more than just two hands on you and there’s fucking pain in your shoulder before you finally wiggle yourself to the ground, and as you’re rolling away you hear Robbie screaming. 

It’s the only chance you have. You roll as far away from the screaming as you can until you hit a wall. You slow your breathing even as you hear Robbie’s death cries.

You make yourself as small and as quiet as possible as you hear the clicker tear at his flesh, slowing the breaths from your nose until they’re barely there.