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Settling into Jackson feels like a dream sometimes. As much food as she wants, a room of her own, a shower whenever she wants it.
She even has something kind of like a family now.
There is one complication to the peace of their life today, though: Tommy using his stupid height to keep a peach hand pie away from her, held high over his head while she tries to jump for it.
“Give it!” She demands, getting one hand around his bicep and trying to tug herself up.
“Say please, devil child,” Tommy says, and she laughs when he gets a hand around her waist and hauls her over his shoulder, pie held far out to the other side.
“I said please!” She protests. “I even said thank you!” The pie was a treat Tommy brought by in thanks for her help with the baby this morning, and she doesn’t appreciate the treachery of keeping it out of reach now.
“Prefaced with ‘fuck yeah, motherfucking peach pie!’” Tommy says. “Now what kind of manners are those?”
“QZ manners!” She says, grabbing the back of his shirt for balance when an attempt at a lunge makes her pitch too far forward.
“I swear to God Joel brought back a fucking wildcat, not a teenager,” Tommy grumbles, but she can hear the smile in his voice. It’s a newer thing, this play fighting, but it’s quickly become one of her favorite things to do with Joel and Tommy. Turns out, it’s pretty fun to wrestle with someone with the knowledge that they won’t actually hurt you. Who knew?
“Just admit you’re getting old, grandpa!” She laughs, trying to hit at his knee to make it fold. She runs the risk of landing head first on the ground with this approach, but she knows Tommy well enough by now to know he won’t let that happen, so the benefit far outweighs the risk.
“It ain’t got nothing to do with my age, you little hellion,” Tommy says, cursing when she actually manages to get a hit in, making him stagger a moment until he recovers, swinging her more over his shoulder to limit her reach. “It has everything to do with you having no goddamn home training. Joel,” he calls to his brother, who is watching them from the porch placidly, “tell your rugrat to stop being feral.”
“And what makes you think I’ve got any control over her?” Joel asks with a laugh. “She doesn’t eat with her hands and she says please once in a blue moon. That’s about all I’ve got in me.”
“Hey!” Tommy says warningly when she tugs herself up enough to fake a bite to his arm. “Better watch yourself, little lady, or I’ll make you go pick a switch.”
She rolls her eyes. If there’s one thing she knows for sure, it’s that there’s no way in hell that Joel would let someone hit her, not even Tommy, even if his little threat was anything other than play fight trash talk in the first place.
“I’ll make you go pick a switch, old man,” she shoots back, finally wriggling enough that he either has to drop her or let them both go down. He catches her by an arm so she doesn’t hit the ground as hard as she could, but he lets go at once when she fakes a kick to his ankle, grinning.
“Joel, do you even hear the little gremlin you’ve let into your house?” Tommy complains despite his smile, catching her foot by the ankle when she goes for another kick. “You’re really gonna let her go around representing the family like this?”
“Well when you put it that way,” Joel says, “guess I oughta start punishing her just so I can show my face around town. I’m thinking hard labor. Should work the sass right out of her.”
“Fat fucking chance!” She calls back, using the brief distraction to tackle Tommy to the ground, snatch the hand pie out of his hand, and book it, leaving him flat on his back calling out threats as she stuffs her mouth with some well-earned peach and pastry while making her getaway, handing Joel part of her reward when she passes.
*
The conversation, light-hearted as it was, stays with her afterwards.
Ellie’s a bit of a discipline connoisseur.
Half-rations, no rations, The Hole, latrine duty, laps, push-ups, dunking, paddling, lines, hell, she still has faint scars on her back from one teacher who had gotten so fed up he went after her with a belt. He threw her to the ground so hard she doesn’t remember everything that came after, but she woke up in the infirmary with bloody welts on her body and a pinch-faced nurse informing her that she needed to get her act together before she drove someone to kill her one day.
It’s still mildly surprising that a nine year old can make someone that fucking mad, but she’s learned since then that there are people with even shorter fuses. She knows now that coffee is pretty fucking precious (she also knows the name of it now, thanks Joel), but even with her limited understanding of adult values, she’d still like to think that was a bit extreme for a kid sneaking a sip out of curiosity.
It doesn’t beat the broken arm when she was 12, but at least she earned that one honestly with a wildly funny observation about her teacher’s bald spot. That one was fair game.
Surprisingly enough considering how rough things started with them, though, she doesn’t actually know how Joel punishes. He was full grumpy grumbles at the start and then everything after that was such a shit show that it’s not like there was that much chance for him to give it a shot. She was barely present at all after Silver Lake, and in the hospital, she was so fucking sick all the tie that he was more worried about her kicking the bucket than figuring out what to do when she felt so miserable that she did things like shove her food tray off of the bed because the very sight of food made her heave and she was so frustrated that she couldn’t think of another way to handle it. He had never been mad at her in the hospital, even when she knows she was being a brat. He was just steady and dependable and gentle. It was great. It was what she needed.
But it also means she has no fucking clue about what he’s like when he goes punishment mode, and once she’s thought about it, she can’t stop thinking about it.
She doesn’t think he’ll hit her. He’s not shy about violence with other people, but with her, even when he didn’t like her very much, she never got the sense that she was at risk of a stray slap. Then again, she had more than one instructor who would smack the fuck out of her out of nowhere, so she knows she can’t take it off the table completely. She can’t really see the hands that have gently sponged blood off of her skin and held her up when her world was fuzzy and gently detangled and braided her hair from a rat’s nest made of laying horizontal for multiple days in a hospital turning on her to hurt…but she’s gone too many rounds of getting knocked to the floor to discount it entirely.
She’s seen him with a baseball bat or just a convenient pipe. If he wanted to take a switch to her, he could make it count. She had one instructor who used a slender sapling as a rod, but she thinks with Joel’s muscle behind it, that might actually kill her, and she knows without a second thought that that’s never going to happen. Too risky, she decides. There’s nothing she could think to do that would make him “kill her” angry.
Communal dining means half-rations or no rations would be hard if other people don’t do it, but she’s been muscled out of enough meals at FEDRA school to know that she’s not a hard person to steal food from. He frets like a grandma about her being “just too skinny” so she doesn’t think he would contribute to that further. He also knows better than anyone that there are some days she fasts because communal dining means someone could sneak anything into the food, and when that thought takes hold of her, Joel has to take her home because her world starts to go shaky. He always sits her down in the kitchen and chops potatoes and cracks eggs and cooks them himself while she watches so she knows they’re safe, and if he wanted her to go hungry to teach her a lesson, he could just. Not do that. On her really bad days, she barely has enough presence of mind to eat what’s in front of her when he hands her a fork. Thinking of how softly he speaks to her on those days, though, she just can’t see him taking advantage of the chance. Not when he knows why it happens.
She works through all of her catalog of past punishments this way and in the end…she just can’t think of a single one she could see Joel doing to her.
The realization doesn’t fill her with relief, though.
It just makes her anxious about a punishment she can’t even imagine.
*
The stress of it doesn’t leave her, and Joel starts to pick up on it, which means she really needs to do something about it already. Her sleep has started getting disrupted, and she can’t even admit that it’s not Silver Lake or the hospital when she wakes up to Joel holding her and talking to her softly.
It’s the memory of every punishment she’s ever had, but dealt by him in her dreams.
She hasn’t thought about FEDRA school in months. After the bite, it’s not like she was ever going to go back, and beyond mourning the few belongings she left behind, it’s not like she liked it there. If anything, it was the one bright point in being kidnapped by the Fireflies: no more FEDRA. Now she can’t stop thinking about it, can’t stop thinking about the differences between what she’s always known and what she knows now.
In FEDRA, rationing meant lean days even when she wasn’t on punishment. In Jackson, food is plentiful, and even if it wasn’t, she knows Joel would still make sure she was fed, even if it meant he went without. In FEDRA, bad dreams were met with minders snapping to shut the fuck up. In Jackson, there’s Joel letting her crawl into his bed or going to her room the moment he knows she needs him, ready to soothe her back to sleep or stay up with her. In FEDRA, the only person looking out for her was Riley, who was limited by her own relative helplessness within the system. In Jackson, Joel’s basically her parent and acts as such, and even when he’s not around, she has Tommy and Maria if she needs them. In FEDRA, she knew exactly what would happen if she misbehaved, even accidentally. In Jackson…she just doesn’t fucking know.
The rest of life here makes her think it won’t be as bad as FEDRA punishment, but she’s old enough now to know that nothing in life comes free. This life is too good. There has to be a catch, has to be some price she has to pay for it. She’s brought this up before, and Joel’s face has gone all soft and he’s told her that she’s more than paid for a little peace with everything it took to get here, but that doesn’t reassure her, not really. There’s no price for this, nothing she puts up with to enjoy the good, the way she did in FEDRA for the sake of a relatively safe place to sleep and relatively reliable meals.
She put up with a fuckton of shit in FEDRA school.
She’d put up with way more for the bliss of Jackson.
She just doesn’t know what she’s going to have to put up with, and the more she thinks about it, the surer she is that she needs to find out, needs to have a resolution for the anxiety that keeps swirling in her stomach.
“You sure you’re okay?” Joel asks her one day when they’re hiking. It was a treat, skipping school to go hiking with him, and it’s one of the ways she knows how much she’s worrying him with how she’s acting.
“Yep,” she says, trying for chirpy and instead treading close to the muted monotone she has on her fuzzy brain days. She resists the urge to wince. Not very convincing. It occurs to her that she could just…ask, but it makes her cringe internally, the idea of going, “Hey Joel, out of curiosity, would you describe your discipline style as more starving- or hitting-based?” No matter what the answer is, she doesn’t see that going over too well. Besides, it’s possible he might not even know, might not have had a chance to learn what he does when he’s mad at a kid.
He parented Sarah before, after all, the seemingly-perfect girl who grins at her from the photos Joel has in their living room. Joel put their photos together before, him and Sarah and him and her, and she’s slowly nudged them apart, bit by bit so he won’t notice. She knows she can’t live up to the girl he wishes he had, his real daughter from Before. She’d rather he didn’t get a daily visual reminder to think about the ways she doesn’t measure up. A few more weeks, and she thinks she might be able to relocate herself to a side table, safely out of the way, there but not in an immediate sightline, away from the girl whose dad she took.
“Something bothering you?” He tries again, slowing to be at her side instead of them hiking single-file the way they usually do so she can use him to clear any spiderwebs from the path.
“No,” she says as innocently as she can, picking up a stick to use for web duty and busying herself with swiping it in front of them. She considers excusing her behavior with being tired, but too much of that excuse and she’s likely to end up in the clinic for another checkup the way she did when they got back and she was so anemic from blood draws that she passed out on their stairs on day 3.
She’d prefer they didn’t have a clinic visit repeat if at all possible. Given the way she bit a clinic worker when she woke up terrified at the scent of antiseptic, she imagines they’d like to avoid her, too.
“Just…thinking about stuff,” she hedges. It’s a weak ass excuse and she knows it, but she’s really counting hard on Joel not wanting to upset her by pushing.
“Any ‘stuff’ I can help with?” He asks, helping her down from a big drop in the path, offering a hand and steadying her when she jumps down after him.
“Nah,” she says. “Just teenage girl stuff.”
“Teenage girl stuff?” He repeats, raising an eyebrow a bit. “Such as?”
Well shit.
“Y’know,” she says with a shrug. “Having boobs and stuff.”
He gives her a look, but he also lets it drop after that.
She’ll take it.
*
She tries, subtly, to ask Tommy about it, as the only person who knew Joel Before.
The success of the endeavor is extremely limited.
“Having kids Before must’ve been different, huh?” She asks when she’s helping chop wood one day. Joel’s on a patrol shift he took to cover for someone who was sick, so he won’t be back until late, which means it’s an ideal opportunity to do some digging.
“Dunno,” Tommy says with a small smile. “Didn’t have any then.”
Right. His new baby is his first child. Bad opener.
“Joel did, though,” she says, trying as hard as she can to sound casual. “Was he, y’know, different then?”
Tommy stops chopping and turns to face her, and she curses internally. Goddamnit.
“This have something to do with why you’ve been acting all squirrely recently?” He asks, leaning on his ax. “You’ve been worrying him something awful, you know.” He pauses for a moment, tilts his head. “Me, too, to be honest. What’s up?”
“The sky?” She tries, a desperate ploy at redirection.
“1/10. Try again.”
“I’m just curious,” she says, a bit defensively. “Something wrong with that?”
“Not necessarily,” he drawls, moving closer and sitting down on a stump. “But you’re not usually so…off, when you’re curious, from what I’ve seen. And if it’s enough to make Joel worry, then it’s gotta be something pretty significant rattling around in that head of yours.”
She normally likes how close Joel and Tommy are, likes being part of a family that gets along.
Now she just wishes they talked a little bit less because their open communication is a pain in the ass for her right now.
She goes back to her chopping determinedly, but Tommy just sits and watches her.
“Hey,” he says after the fourth log, and reluctantly, she pauses, looking to him from the corner of her eye. “You know you can talk to me, right? I know I’m no Joel, but that’s one of the benefits of having a family.” He smiles a little. “You’ve got the uncle-niece privilege baked in. Trust me, I’ve pulled plenty of stunts in my life. I can guarantee you won’t shock me with any confessions, and I promise there’s plenty of shit I’ve never told Joel about. I can keep a secret if you need me to.”
It’s the first time he’s actually referred to himself as her uncle, and she desperately wishes she had the mental space to enjoy it. Unfortunately, she doesn’t think that asking “will your brother beat the shit out of me or lock me in a closet or starve me if I make him mad?” will fall under the umbrella of stuff Tommy would feel right keeping to himself.
“Well, Ellie Belle-”
“Nope, not a thing.”
“Ellie Belle,” he says more emphatically, grinning. “You-”
“No. We’re not doing the Ellie Belle thing. That dies here.”
“If you wanna talk, Ellie Belle-”
Any further discussion after that is cut off by Ellie tackling him to the ground, and if only for a little while, the rough housing to make sure Ellie Belle never gets said again distracts both of them from any further digging.
*
Ultimately, she decides she just has to rip the bandaid off and create a scenario to find out first hand how Joel will react.
The very idea of doing something to make him punishment mad so she can figure out what he’ll do makes her feel squirmy in her stomach like she has food poisoning. She likes pleasing him, likes making him proud. She’s even been trying extra hard in school because one of her teachers mentioned in passing at the dining hall one night that she had the best paper in her English class, and he had smiled at her and ruffled her hair, and she had felt warmth zinging through her body like it would radiate out through her pores. It’s new, an adult being proud of her, and she’s quickly become addicted.
She’s also become increasingly anxious about what it’ll feel like to be a disappointment again.
There are still days she feels nervous that she’s going to wake up and it will all have been a dream, this life in Jackson, and she feels a little sick, the idea of messing it up on purpose, even if it’s only for a little bit and for a very good reason.
It takes her a while to think of the right thing to do. She doesn’t actually want to do anything on the level of property damage or arson. She also doesn’t want to wreck anything in their house; it’s theirs, and it’s the first one she’s ever had, and it’s far too precious to damage. She contemplates picking a fight with someone. From years of practice, she’s a fucking expert at it, but especially after Silver Lake, she tends to go into what she privately calls Kill Mode, her vision whiting out with terror and aggression. If she goes Kill Mode on a Jackson kid, she might actually succeed, and while there are a few assholes, they’re not actually capital punishment level.
Finally she decides that her safest bet will be skipping school without asking. It’ll be simple, it’ll have limited victims, and she can make sure he finds out by running into him on a job.
Easy.
And then she’ll finally have an answer.
*
Skipping school does not work.
She picks a day she won’t miss any tests or big assignments, and she ducks out during second period, asking to use the bathroom and just not coming back. She feels a little conflicted because they’re doing a bitching experiment about chemicals and colored fire in science, but the rest of the week will have things she can’t actually miss for the sake of her grades, so it’s her only option. Hopefully Ms. Thomas will let her try out the experiment later.
Her regret about missing science is a little overwhelmed by how goddamn nervous she is as she walks to Joel’s jobsite. He’s helping enclose a porch to make an extra room for a family that’s having a baby soon, and it only occurs to her when she’s halfway there that she might not actually want witnesses for whatever’s gonna happen. Still, at this point she’s already missed enough class that she’ll be in trouble at school anyway, and she’d rather not have to do it twice.
By the time she gets to the site, she stuffs her hands in her pockets so they won’t shake.
Joel spots her before she calls out to him, and she sees him say something to Tommy before he jogs over, face concerned.
Joel being concerned was not part of the plan, and it throws her long enough that he gets the first word in.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” He asks when he reaches her, eyes scanning her like he’s looking for an injury. “You okay?”
“I skipped school,” she says in a rush, wanting to get it out. She’s rigid as she waits, waiting for either a threat or an explosion.
Instead, Joel’s expression softens, and he reaches out to cup her face.
“Bad brain day?” He asks gently, stroking a thumb along her cheekbone. Bad brain day is the shorthand they use on the days Silver Lake haunts her and makes her distant and prone to panic attacks, an easy way to let him know she’s not alright. It’s normally very helpful.
She just hadn’t anticipated him guessing it right now.
“I-um…” She says, frowning a little. She doesn’t know how to shift it from here. In her head, she told him she skipped, he got mad, and she finally figured out what would happen in the future. Easy.
She hadn’t planned on this.
“Hey,” Tommy says, also approaching because her life is a goddamn comedy show. “Everything alright?”
“Ellie’s not feeling good,” Joel says smoothly before she has a chance to say anything. He puts an arm around her shoulders and squeezes gently, his usual way of centering her in public. “I’ll be back later, alright? I’m gonna take her home.”
“Yeah, no problem,” Tommy says at once. “Framing’s already done. I can put up the rest of the drywall myself.” He looks to her then. “Feel better, alright?” He says with a soft smile.
For her part, she just nods once and then turns to hide her face against Joel.
Back to the fucking drawing board.
*
Joel stays home with her the rest of that day, and at a certain point, she’s just in too deep to go back. She feels wildly guilty, Joel being so attentive and gentle with her, but at least the guilt helps sell it with her not acting like she should.
“Something happen at school?” He asks her when they’re on movie number two and she’s laying down with her head on a pillow on his lap. She can’t actually look at him right now for fear that he’ll see right through her, and she’s about to drown in guilt by the way she can’t help but enjoy the affection, even given under false pretenses.
“No,” she says, unwilling to continue this lie tomorrow as well. “Just, y’know, a bad day.”
“Anything I can do to help?” He asks, moving a hand to her shoulder and squeezing lightly.
God, if it’s possible to die of guilt, she should tell him to make funeral arrangements now.
“No,” she says softly, reaching up to take his hand in hers and then tucking it under her cheek. “Just this.”
*
Her next attempt at inciting punishment involves not turning in her paper for her history class. It’s already written–it was about a Ukrainian sniper in World War II named Lyudmila Pavlichenko who was cool as fuck and she’d actually had a good time writing it, even taking it to meals with her to work on, which made Joel and Tommy tease her–but when Mrs. Rivers asks for it, she looks her right in the eye and goes, “I didn’t do it.”
Mrs. Rivers doesn’t look upset about it, but she asks her to step outside, and she does, sure that Joel is about to be called and she can finally just get punished and stop wondering.
And then her teacher joins her in the hall.
“Do you need an extra day or two?” Mrs. Rivers asks kindly.
She blinks.
“What?” She asks, frowning. Late assignments in FEDRA meant no evening rations at the very least.
Mrs. Rivers looks around and then ushers her to the end of the hall where no one will hear them.
“Well, your dad,” it takes her a split second to realize that she can only be talking about Joel, which sends her for a loop all on its own, “had a little meeting with your teachers when you started. He didn’t tell us much,” she hastens to say when she sees Ellie’s expression, “but he told us you had some things in the past that might make school a little hard for you sometimes. I’ve seen you with your books in the dining hall,” she says with a small smile, “so I know you’ve been working hard. If you need a little extra time, that’s completely fine. I have full confidence you’ll get it to me as soon as you can.”
It’s an effort not to throw her hands in the air with frustration.
*
In a wildly unexpected–and because of her goal, annoying –turn of events, it seems that she’s nearly goddamn unpunishable now.
Tossing her plate off the table at breakfast? Joel thinks it was because she’s in another “freaking out about meat” phase.
Refusing to leave the house when she’s told to? Joel’s going on patrol but says he’ll get Tommy or Maria to stop by and check on her later.
Grabbing Joel’s tumbler one evening and taking a sip of whiskey without asking? He laughs when she gags and coughs and says she’ll grow into it one day.
Moving his tools around without asking him? He calls upstairs to keep her grubby little mitts off his stuff, but she can hear he isn’t really mad about it.
She almost forgets her nerves entirely because she’s so goddamn frustrated. She tries and fails at a dozen different attempts, and if she weren’t winding herself up more about what the fuck it’s going to take to get a little punishment, it might almost be funny.
As it is, she finally just realizes she has to pull out the big guns.
*
She makes her move the next afternoon, the moment Joel is home. It’s a Saturday so there was no school, but Joel went out on a patrol that started early, so she didn’t want to do it before he left and risk leaving him distracted.
Instead she left herself a ball of nerves all day, too wound up to even leave the house.
Joel’s barely made it through the door before she strikes, while he’s still sitting down and unlacing his second boot, pulling it off.
“I hate the way this house looks,” she says, trying to go for forceful but coming out a bit wobbly. It’s not true. She loves their house. She and Joel have been decorating it little by little, so it looks more like them by the day.
“Alright?” Joel says, smile confused. “You wanna change the paint again?”
God damn him and his accommodations, frankly. It makes her feel even worse for what she’s about to do.
“It looks stupid in here,” she says as she raises the picture she has in hand. She sees the exact moment he realizes what she’s holding.
Sarah’s picture.
Before he can say or do anything, she drops it onto the side table. She judged the height carefully, high enough that it’ll definitely break the glass but not so far that it’ll risk damaging the picture. Her own twisted feelings about Sarah aside, she would never, ever do that to him.
Immediately, he’s on his feet and reaching out for her.
Hitter, she thinks with a flicker of satisfaction at finally having an answer amidst the kneejerk fear as she flinches. No blow comes, though, and when she opens her eyes, well.
Joel’s the one who looks like he got hit.
“Ellie,” he says, looking horrified.
“You didn’t-” She stops, exhales a short, heavy breath. “I just broke the picture.”
“I noticed,” he says, eyes searching her face. “You wanna tell me what that’s about?”
“It-” She stops and huffs another breath, stomping her foot once, so goddamn tired of not knowing. “What are you gonna do to me?” She asks plainly. There. It’s out in the open.
“What?” Joel asks. “Baby, what in hell are you talking about? You feeling okay?”
“I’m feeling fine,” she says, backing up a step when he reaches out a hand to feel her forehead. “That would have gotten me whipped in FEDRA,” she says. “What are you gonna do?” She wants an answer. She needs to know already. She can’t keep doing this wondering.
“Whipped?” He asks, physically recoiling.
"It's how I got the scars on my back," she says with a shrug. He'd seen them during her spinal taps in the hospital, but she'd put off answering any questions by virtue of clinging to his hands and squeezing her eyes shut while needles were pushed into her back. "I made one of my teachers spill his coffee. He said he'd beat the clumsy out of me." She makes herself laugh, but she only manages one that comes out weak. "I don't think it worked."
“Ellie-” Joel says, and her name sounds like it was punched out of him.
“I was just…I was wondering what you do. You know. For like…punishment.” She interrupts him. She needs to get the answer already, needs to know what to expect before she drives herself crazy with anticipation.
“Well I was more into grounding than goddamn child abuse.”
“Grounding like…” Her face scrunches in confusion as she dares to look at him. The word is foreign and the best guess she has doesn’t seem right, but she also doesn’t know what else it could be. “Like being…in the ground?”
Joel stares at her for a long, long moment before he speaks.
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
*
Joel steps out onto the porch without another word, and she peeks at him from behind a curtain. He appears to be focusing very hard on breathing, and the line of his shoulders and the way his hands keep flexing says he’s very, very angry.
Inside the house, she’s having a bit of a fucking meltdown.
God, she’s fucked it up. She’s fucked it all up. It was great and it was perfect and she’s fucked it all up.
She watches Joel pace, hands on his hips when they’re not at his sides clenching into fists, and she thinks if he doesn’t come inside and tell her what’s going to happen, she might actually die of a heart attack at 14. She doesn’t have a plan for this reaction, doesn’t know what it means. She hasn’t seen this kind of anger in him without a direct target, and at the moment, she knows she would be the target if anything. Him going outside, then, throws her. Usually when adults are mad at her, they just take it out on her and get it over with.
Just for the sake of something to do, she cleans up the broken glass from Sarah’s picture, gathering it into a little pile and then wrapping it in paper so none of the shards will escape. By the time that’s done, Joel is still doing whatever the fuck he’s doing on the porch, and she scrambles for what to do with the photo. She doesn’t want to just leave it in an empty frame, too afraid that something’ll stain it. While she’s looking around, she sees her picture with Joel where she’s gotten it all the way to the end of the mantle above the fireplace. After just a moment, she picks it up and turns it over, unfastening the back and sliding her picture out. She puts Sarah’s in instead and then closes it, setting it back where it belongs on the center of the mantle.
Her picture she keeps, sliding it into her pocket.
She doubts Joel will want it after this.
*
Finally, Joel achieves whatever he was attempting to accomplish on the porch, and he comes back in. From her place on the couch, she clenches her hands against her thighs. He pauses for just a moment, and then he sits in his chair, diagonal to her.
“Did you…” Joel starts and then stops. She tilts her head in a question in a way he’s said before makes her look like a puppy. It was just a natural reaction, the first couple times she did it, but she’s learned by now that he thinks it’s cute, so it comes in handy when she’s trying to diffuse the tension in a situation.
She knows he must be serious when there’s not even a flicker of amusement now.
“Did you really think I would hit you?” He’s keeping his voice very, very even, and she wishes desperately that she knew why. Joel doesn’t play mind games with her, so she doesn’t think he’s trying to get her to fill in the blanks, but it’s not like she’s that young. She knows how punishment works. You fuck up, you take what you get, you do it again.
She shrugs.
“I’m a difficult kid,” she says, making herself say it nonchalantly like it wasn’t something that made her cry more than once, an adult she was trying really hard for shaking their head and telling her she was difficult, like she was doomed to always be a disappointment.
The way it makes Joel look, sad, she starts to think maybe she always will be.
She hastens to explain.
“I don’t listen,” she says in a rush, trying to guess what the fuck he wants here. She has plenty of flaws to choose from. Every adult who’s ever dealt with her has listed them at length. “I’m a smartass. I’m a know-it-all, and I’m too blunt. I don’t get along with others, I’m pretty fucking stup-”
“You are not stupid,” Joel says, voice all but a snap.
She resists the urge to squirm.
She doesn’t think she’s stupid, either, but she’s had more than one teacher tell her she is because she can never pick a fight she’ll win.
“I’m hard to get along with,” she offers instead. It had been a constant one. It was the reason she hadn’t gotten another roommate immediately after Riley ran off. Jesus, Williams, and who the fuck do you think I’m going to find who’s going to put up with you? her advisor had said. You’re probably the reason that girl ran off in the first place.
That one, she has to admit, hit pretty deep, no matter how much she forced herself not to react at the time.
“You’re not-”
“I’m a bad kid,” she interrupts. She makes herself shrug again like it doesn’t hurt at all. Might as well get it out of the way. “But I…I wanna try. I wanna try to be a good kid.” For you, she doesn’t say, but God, does she want to be a good kid for him. She’s seen how he looks in those pictures with Sarah. She wants him to look that way because of her, wants to make an adult proud for the first time in her whole goddamn life.
Joel doesn’t look proud, though.
It’s all she can do not to bolt.
“If you just tell me what you want,” she offers, “I can-I can try. I promise, I don’t wanna be a bad kid, and if you let me-”
“Ellie,” Joel says, and her name is said so gently that it shuts her up at once.
No one has ever said her name the way Joel does. Not ever. She wishes sometimes that she could record it like a record so she could play it over and over.
He moves to the couch then and reaches out so, so slow, slower even than he does on her bad days after Silver Lake, and she wonders for a moment what the fuck he’s doing.
Then she realizes it’s because she flinched before.
She feels a liquid ball of warmth fill her belly at the consideration.
Not a hitter then.
“Baby,” he says, and that’s another thing she wants to record. She’s never had pet names before, never been important or…or precious enough for them. “You,” he says, squeezing her shoulders gently, “are not a bad kid.”
It’s fucking embarrassing, how fast her eyes fill at that, how fucking pathetic it is to be so touched by such simple words.
But they’re words she’s never heard before, not ever.
“You are a good kid who has been put in some real shitty situations.” He reaches up and cups her cheek. “You’re still a little smart ass,” he says with a small smile while she rolls her eyes entirely on reflex, “but sass aside, I couldn’t ask for a better kid. You make me proud every single day, Ellie. You are so smart and kind and helpful, and sometimes by accident you’re pretty fucking funny,” he laughs when she feints a gut punch before he gets serious again, reaching up to smooth her hair back and lingering, cupping the back of her head in a way that makes her feel so very small.
And so very, very important.
“You are not a bad kid, Ellie,” he says again, and God if it doesn’t hit as hard the second time. “You’re my kid.”
And well, it’s not like she can just not nearly tackle him with a hug after that.
*
Their talk is cut off after that when her stomach growls. She’d been so wound up all day that she’d skipped breakfast and lunch, and she cringes. Joel, though, just smiles slightly and brushes her hair back.
“C’mon,” he says, pulling her up. “Let’s get some food into you before you blow away.”
“But the picture-” She says, moving to gesture towards it.
“It can keep,” he says, even though he pauses for a brief moment when he sees that it’s been replaced in a frame. He looks to where hers was, and an expression she doesn't know how to read crosses his face. “Where’s yours?” He asks, still looking at the blank space.
She pulls it from her pocket and holds it out, a little shyly. It’s creased at one corner, and he smooths it out with a thumb before he moves to put it back on the mantle.
Leaning right against Sarah’s.
*
It’s good the dining hall is so empty this early because the quiet between them is a little awkward. Joel still passes over his pie and then gives her half of the broccoli she tries to offload on him back with a look that tells her to suck it up and eat some nutrients, and after what she pulled today, she doesn’t bother to argue. They’re already finished by the time Tommy and Maria come in with the baby, and she lets Joel make their excuses for them before she trails him home.
When they’re home, she follows him to the living room and then curls up in the corner of the couch, tugging the throw blanket over her lap just for something to do with her hands, rubbing the soft material through her fingers. Joel joins her, sitting close enough that she could stretch her legs out over his lap if she wanted. She doesn’t.
“You wanna tell me what all this was about?” He asks, leaning back. He reaches out and puts a hand over one of hers, and it’s only then that she realizes she’d shifted from blanket fidgeting to picking at her cuticles, one finger already bleeding. He squeezes her hand gently.
“I, uh,” she says, biting the inside of her cheek for a moment. She feels stupid now, and she still doesn’t actually know what he’s going to do. His reaction has told her that she’s not in immediate danger, but that still doesn’t clear up his punishment style. “I don’t-I mean. I realized you’ve never, uh, punished me.” She dares to look up at him, but his face is unreadable so she looks down again. “I just…I wanted to know what you’d do.”
“And asking me wasn’t an option, if you were really that worried about it?”
She shrugs, and she can feel her face heat.
“I thought I could just…do something. And then you’d punish me, and then I’d know, and then I could stop thinking about it.”
“And smashing Sarah’s picture was the first thing that came to mind?”
She resists the urge to wince.
“I mean, not the first thing,” she says, a little awkwardly. She doesn’t actually want to have to fess up to the fact that she’s spent several weeks being very bad at being bad.
“And taking yours off the mantle?” He asks. “That a part of the plan?”
“I didn’t think you’d, y’know, want it anymore.”
“And why’s that?”
She looks up at him at that, incredulous.
The way he raises his eyebrows tells her she’s been caught in a parent trap, tricked into looking at him.
Bastard.
“This have anything to do with the way your picture’s been migrating?”
Her irritation dissolves at once into embarrassment. And here she’d thought she’d been subtle about it.
“I’m not-” She starts, trying to look back down, but he reaches out and tilts her chin back up gently, making her look at him. “I’m not Sarah,” she says, almost in a whisper. “I know you miss her, and I’m in her spot now or whatever, but-”
“You are not in Sarah’s spot,” he says, and she shuts her eyes. Here it comes. “Ellie, your spot is yours, no one else’s.”
Her eyes snap open. He smiles slightly at her expression.
“I’m sorry if I made you feel like you were, kiddo.”
“No,” she says at once, not wanting him to feel bad for her own shit, especially not after today. “No, it was…” She doesn’t know what it was, is the problem. She’s never been someone’s kid before. She doesn’t know the rules.
“Well,” he says, pulling her against his side. She goes easily. “Just so we’re clear on this, you are not a replacement. You’re my kid, all on your own.” He exhales a laugh. “And maybe next time we skip the glass smashing if you wanna have this talk again.”
She wraps her arms around his waist and squeezes.
“You wanna talk about the other part?” He asks, leaning his cheek against the top of her head.
“Not really,” she says.
“Kinda seems like we need to, though,” he points out. “I’m thinking that’s why you’ve been wound up recently?”
She nods.
“I, um,” she says, tucking herself a little tighter against him. “I just realized I didn’t know what you do, you know, for punishment stuff. And then I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I just thought I could make you mad, and then I’d know.”
“And what did you think I’d do?”
“I dunno,” she says with a shrug. “That was kind of the point of the whole thing.”
“Well, you thought I’d hit you,” he says, squeezing her arm gently. “Which I would never do, just to get that out of the way.”
“FEDRA had a bunch of different punishments,” she hedges. “I just didn’t know which one you’d use.”
“Punishments such as?”
There’s a quality to his voice that makes her look up at him.
“Are you…mad?” She says on a guess.
“If you have kids one day, you’ll get it,” he says, rubbing a hand up and down her arm.
“That sounds like some adult bullshit like that Santa stuff Maria was talking about.”
He snorts.
“You’re my kid,” he says, and she can’t help but smile a bit at it. “The idea of someone hurting you…yeah, it makes me mad.”
“Is that why you did your little porch thing earlier?” She guesses.
“I didn’t wanna scare you,” he says. “I just needed to walk away for a minute.”
“I’m not scared of you,” she says, and it’s true.
“You flinched,” he says softly. “I didn’t wanna give you a reason to do it again.”
“That was…it wasn’t about you, really. I just had some teachers who would slap me-” She feels Joel tense slightly and hurries to continue. “I was just…I didn’t know what you would do. That’s all.”
“I never hit Sarah,” he tells her. “I don’t believe in that, never have. Doesn’t teach a kid shit except to fear their parents.”
“Then…” She swallows a bit. “I mean we don’t have The Hole here-”
“What in the fuck is The Hole?”
His tone tells her she probably should have kept that to herself, but the question has already been asked.
“It was a cement hole thing with a door over it. So if you misbehaved, they’d put you in and leave you there with it closed so it was dark and shit. The dark was kind of okay when I was old enough, but your brain does weird shit when you’re all alone, man. You start seeing and hearing stuff. If the guard didn’t like me, they’d leave me there for-”
She squeaks a bit in surprise when Joel picks her up in one sudden motion, but she settles when she’s on his lap, his arms around her, one hand pressing her head to his shoulder. The way he’s touching her tells her that it isn’t just her he’s trying to reassure.
“You okay?” She asks after a moment.
“Currently resisting the urge to head back to Boston and smash some FEDRA skulls in,” he says dryly, but with an edge to his voice that tells her he’s at least partially telling the truth, “but yeah. I’ll be alright.”
“So, um,” she says tentatively. “So what would you do? Just…hypothetically?”
“You planning on a rebellious phase?” He asks, tilting her back slightly so he can look at her. “You’re a pain in the ass, but you are a good kid, Ellie. I don’t see that much punishment in your future.”
“Just. Just so we can have it out there? Please?”
He sighs, but he nods.
“Alright, well. Depends on what you do, honestly.”
“For the grounding thing? Which is what, by the way?”
“Remind me how long it took to get here from Boston again?”
She snorts.
“Grounding just means staying at home and not hanging out with people or doing fun things.”
“Oh,” she says, frowning a little. “Well then that’s a dumb as fuck name for it. It should be called…I don’t know, housing or something.”
“I’ll kick it up to the parent council at the next meeting,” he teases, and she gives him a look before she sets her head down again.
“So I would be doing the grounding thing? With you?”
“Probably,” he says, rubbing a hand up and down her back.
“And that’s all?” She asks, still wanting clarification. Home is where Joel and her stuff lives. Getting stuck there for an extended period of time seems like a really bad punishment, honestly.
“Unless you really go wild,” he says. “Why? You got plans I should know about?”
“No,” she says, shaking her head. Not that it would matter, apparently. Not when it’s so fucking hard to get in trouble in the first place. “I just…it made me nervous. Not knowing.”
“Well,” he says, settling back a bit. “You break something, you fix it. You hit someone without reason, you apologize-”
“What are we counting as without reason?” She asks at once, wanting that clear.
“Someone hits you first, you make ‘em regret it. We can talk everything else over on a case by case basis.”
“What if I break something?” She asks. “Or if I make you spill something? More grounding?”
Joel is quiet for a long moment.
“Pack your bags so you can stay with Tommy for a bit,” he tells her, freeing one hand to scrub over his face. “I have a trip to kill some FEDRA instructors.”
*
They end up making a list of every transgression she can imagine and what the associated punishment will be. It takes quite a while, and it’s interrupted twice by Joel going out to work through a murder urge on the porch after she clarifies a few points based on past experience, but when it’s all done, she feels something in her settle, a clear, straightforward set of expectations and consequences right in front of her. It seems wildly lighthanded, these punishments, but when she thinks about how sick she felt with her attempts at breaking rules, she thinks it might actually balance out.
She dozes off while they’re reading that night, exhausted by the release of so much tension and anxiety. It’s a new thing, them sitting with their own books on his bed each evening and reading together, but it’s quickly become one of her favorite parts of the day. Joel’s different, when it’s just the two of them, and she likes feeling special, having this glimpse of him that no one else gets.
(Also he’s a damn fine target to snuggle down against.)
She rouses when Joel shuts his book and gently pulls hers from her hands, and she whines a protest on principle, making him snort.
“Unless you’ve learned how to read with your eyes shut,” he says, setting her book on top of his, “you were dozing, not reading.”
“‘m not even sleepy,” she protests, wiggling down to get a little more horizontal, face pressed to his bicep.
“Yeah,” he says, “I can tell by the way you’re about ten seconds from snoring.”
“You snore,” she says, opening her eyes at that. “Don’t you fucking blame that on me. Own your chainsaw impression.”
“And yet me and my alleged snoring still haven’t managed to free my bed of teenaged pests,” he says, poking at her side to make her flinch. She pokes him back and then settles. She decides tonight will be a Joel bed night, a special treat when it’s not being done because of a nightmare.
(There are Ellie bed nights, too, on days when she can tell the past is haunting Joel, and she can tell from the way he looks at her that his dreams have conjured her face in place of Sarah’s in his memories.) (She never comments, on those nights she wakes up to him sitting on the edge of her bed. If he weren’t as familiar to her as her own reflection these days, she might be alarmed when she wakes up to a strange shadow man at close range, but she always knows before her eyes even open exactly who’s next to her, like something in her just knows when he’s close.)
They settle down after their usual squabble over fair comforter distribution, and she curls on her side facing him, guiding one of his arms over her side to rest against her back. He traces shorter patterns than he usually does, and after a moment, she realizes he’s tracing the scars on her back. She closes her eyes and enjoys it, the sensation of a gentle hand where someone else left pain.
He settles after a while and is quiet for so long that she thinks he might be asleep. She’s close to following him when he speaks.
“Hey,” he says, and she pulls her head back slightly to look at him. He lifts the arm resting over her side and cups her face. “I will never, ever hurt you. You know that, right?”
Ah. So they’re not past that portion of the evening after all.
He searches her face in the dim light of the moon filtering in around the edges of his curtains, and then he pulls her head forward just slightly to kiss her hairline, lingering for a moment and brushing a gentle hand over her hair.
“If you wanna talk about it,” he says softly, with a tone that says he knows already that she likely won’t want to, “then I’m here. Always. But even without knowing any of it, baby girl, you didn’t deserve to be hurt by people who should have protected you. I don’t care what the fuck you did, knowing what FEDRA-” He stops, just briefly. “I know you’ve been around adults who have hurt you, but I swear, Ellie, I will not be one of them. Not for anything.”
God, it’s hard to believe he’s real sometimes. There are moments like this one when she feels the need to pinch herself, to make herself believe that he isn’t just an imaginary person made up by a lonely orphan who just wants to feel important. She wiggles forward to tuck her head against his chest, sighing in contentment when he wraps his arms around her and squeezes the way she likes.
“I…I love you,” she says quietly. For a moment, she thinks he might not have heard her, and then he tucks his head down, kissing her forehead.
“I love you, too,” he says.
Smiling, she closes her eyes.