Archive of Our Own

Joel died on the Saturday after the world ended.

The next day he put a gun to his temple to make it official, but he flinched and then Tommy heard the bang and that was that. No second chances. When he looked at his brother’s tear-streaked face he thought he might as well hang around in purgatory for a little longer, if only to keep this dumb kid safe in a world where that was increasingly becoming a precarious concept. Man, his brain corrected him, Tommy was a man who’d been through hell and back already and left a piece of himself out in the barren Iraqi desert, but in Joel’s heart, Tommy would always be the kid who forgot to do his math homework unless his older brother reminded him and got shoved into a locker once in the third grade.

In the old world, the blood would’ve been a pain to clean out of his shirt. In the new world, nobody gave a damn if you walked past them soaked in red.

“I’m not going fucking anywhere with them!”

Jesus, this girl had an attitude. Fourteen years old, five-foot-nothing, and already a pain in Joel’s ass.

“Yes, you are,” Marlene told Ellie, in a tone that brokered no argument. Marlene was the type of woman who was used to being obeyed, and this time was no different.

At first, inconvenient as it was, carting Ellie out of the QZ didn’t seem like it was going to be a problem. It was just another smuggling job, really. Joel let Tess do most of the talking, and he kept to lurking menacingly in the background while Ellie called him an asshole.

Then a FEDRA guard pointed his gun at Ellie’s face, and something came over Joel that he hadn’t felt in twenty years. He punched the man’s face again, and again, and again, until what he was hitting resembled burst-open fruit more so than a man. He punched him until one of his own finger bones fractured, and he would’ve kept going if the alarm in Tess’s voice as she checked the guard’s scanner hadn’t stopped him. He flexed his fist and wiped the worst of the blood off on his coat.

He caught Ellie staring at him afterward, her eyes alight. Enthralled, was the only way he could think to describe the expression on her face.

Looking back, that was the first warning sign, but Joel had never been very good at seeing things for what they were.

Tess left first, and soon Bill and Frank were gone too. Strange how his count of people to rely on in the world could drop to near-zero so quickly. He still had Tommy, though, and getting to Wyoming to find his brother had always been the only goal.

Ellie read aloud Bill’s farewell letter when she found it, sitting at the kitchen table of their curious little white-picket-fenced sanctuary. With any other kid it would have been strange to hear such ferocity coming out of their mouth, but not Ellie. “God help any motherfuckers who stand in our way,” she read, with a quirk of her lips. From her, it sounded right.

Everything was exciting to her, from Bill’s firearms collection to the old pickup Joel found in the garage. “I’ve never been in a fucking car before, man! It’s like a fucking spaceship, this is cool! What’s this do?”

Joel slapped Ellie’s hand away from the dashboard without looking. “Don’t touch anything. Just put your seat belt on.”

“Huh?”

“Your...” Christ. What were they teaching FEDRA kids these days? Before he was even fully aware of what he was doing, he reached over and pulled Ellie’s seat belt across her lap. She grinned at him, and he resolutely looked back out the windshield.

When they stopped for the night so Joel could take a break from driving, she asked—trying so hard to sound unbothered, even though she obviously was—if anyone might find them out there, in the middle of the northeastern wilderness. “No one’s gonna find us,” he told her. When she finally fell asleep, he hefted Bill’s rifle over one shoulder and paced through the trees, suppressing his own fatigue. He was just doing his job, he told himself. Sure, finding Tommy was the goal, but Tess had asked him to do this for her too.

Joel made sure to keep his distance from Ellie, always. Keep one foot planted firmly in the grave.

Ellie almost killed a man for him in Kansas City, and Joel kept his distance.

When he saw Ellie running from the swarm of infected, spilling out of the ground like some sort of biblical plague of locusts unleashed upon the damned, he felt the same as when he beat the FEDRA guard to death. This time he was able to name the feeling for what it was: fear. It was all-consuming, the kind that made your hands tremble and your forehead break out in a cold sweat.

He kept watch over Ellie with his rifle, picking the monsters off where he could. He should have been down there with her. He should have picked her right up and carried her out of that hell, leave Sam and Henry to their squabble with the Kansas City resistance because their lives were clearly a lost cause and it wasn’t his goddamn problem anyway. But instead Joel was stuck up on the third story of some poor old man’s rotting house, sniping from the window.

Henry put a bullet through his own brain the next morning, and Joel was too far away from Ellie to save her from watching that, too. She let out a horrified, anguished noise he didn’t think he’d ever heard her make before. It hurt him, to hear her like that; to see her look so frightened as she kneeled in a pool of her friend’s blood. He didn’t want to ever hear her make that kind of noise again.

Having these sorts of thoughts disturbed Joel.

Ellie didn’t notice any difference in him, or at least, she didn’t react if she did. He still sat stiffly at a distance when she twitched in her sleep from bad dreams. Sometimes she called out for Sam or someone named Riley, or even worse, for him; but he never went to her and they never discussed it. When she complained about her bag feeling so heavy her arms were about to fall off during a thirty-mile stretch through the mountains, he offered no sympathy, just said, “Might as well get rid of that shitty joke book, then,” but that only prompted her to immediately bring it out for a half-hour-long recitation of mountain-related puns (“I would love to climb to the peak of Mount Everest someday, but I’ve never seen the point. Ha, get it? Like, the point of—” “Yeah, I get it. Jesus Christ, that was terrible.”). When she asked him questions about pre-outbreak times, or his work as a smuggler, or pretty much anything that crossed her mind (“Have you ever been to Mount Everest? Where is that, anyway?”), he’d grumble that FEDRA clearly wasn’t teaching kids anything in school these days. But that didn’t stop the questions.

Had he ever had a dog? What about a cat, or a turtle? (“A turtle?” “Yeah, dude, I’ve always thought it would be pretty sick to have a turtle.”) What did schools used to be like, since he hated FEDRA schools so much? Did he have a favorite subject, because hers was science even though her teacher this year was kind of a bitch. Did he know that some lady named Amelia Earheart had once flown across the whole freakin’ ocean on a plane by herself, and then she disappeared and nobody ever found her body? (“I wish we had a plane right now because I’m fucking tired of walking. Not that I’m complaining or anything. Just saying.”) Had he ever been called for jury duty, because it would be pretty fucking cool to try to figure out who the bad guy was and vote on it (definitely cooler than FEDRA’s approach of hanging people, anyway) and she would probably have been really good at it. Had he ever been to a zoo, like, a real one with tigers and stuff? What about an aquarium? She’d read about those in books and she wasn’t sure if they’d been real or not—how could you fit a whole whale or shark or dolphin into a little glass tank? Wouldn’t it get bored? (“Imagine having the whole wide ocean to yourself and then getting stuck swimming circles in a tiny tank forever—it’d be like, I don’t know, growing up out here and then getting dumped in the Boston QZ. Oh shit, I guess that’s your life story, huh?”)

At night, out under the black velvet sprawl of stars that no Boston QZ kid would ever have grown up seeing, Joel watched Ellie gazing up at the Northern Lights with wonder on her face.

Sometimes resurrection doesn’t require any sorcery. Sometimes it’s just a series of quiet realizations, a shovel kicking up a few more piles of grave dirt with every grin beamed your way or bad joke shared.

It hit Joel all at once when they left the elderly couple’s cabin on the outskirts of the Grand Tetons. “What’s across the river?” he’d asked, and the woman had looked at him and said, “Death.”

Ellie put on a brave face because she always did, but Joel worried. When they walked back out into the frigid mountain air, snow crunching beneath his boots, without warning his heart seized up in his chest.

It was as though his hands, long cold and dormant, had suddenly clawed up involuntarily out of the dark earth. Digging their way out of a forgotten grave by highway 71. He froze. He tried to draw in a breath and couldn’t, feeling dirt fill his mouth. He was having a panic attack, he realized distantly. He was panicking because he hadn’t felt this alive in twenty years. His heart didn’t remember how to pump fresh blood anymore, but somehow he could feel it flowing hot in his veins again; his lungs didn’t recall how to fill and deflate like they once had, but somehow Ellie made him laugh anyway.

“What’s wrong? Are you okay?” Ellie hesitantly reached a hand out to his shoulder.

He grasped at a fencepost in front of him, willed himself back underground. If only they had fucking SSRIs in the apocalypse. “M’fine.”

Her hand retreated. Joel almost sighed at the relief. “If you die, I’m fucked,” she said.

Joel shouldered his rifle. “I’m fine.” He made sure not to meet her eyes as he walked away, even though he was deluding himself. Once you bring a dead thing back from the other side, you can’t just bury it again.

He tried to explain the situation to Tommy, after he and Ellie made it to Jackson. The cautious hope on his brother’s face when he heard Joel talking about Ellie with warmth in his voice was only the last nail being ripped out of his coffin.

“You’re not my daughter, and I sure as hell ain’t your dad,” Joel told her anyway, as though saying it would make it true. Ellie’s expression shuttered, eyes wet with tears she barely held back. He left her room and slammed the door behind him so he wouldn’t have to look at the hurt he had put on her face anymore.

By the time the sun rose the next morning, he’d given up on trying to stop the inevitable and packed his bags to take Ellie to the Fireflies’ university.

For a while, living again was okay.

He wrapped an arm around Ellie to steady her from the kickback during shooting lessons, and he let her rest her head against him while they rode on horseback.

“You know, when I was growing up, I always wanted to be a singer,” he told her, the horse swaying underneath them as they meandered through the empty university campus. Dead men don’t have dreams, but he wasn’t one of those anymore.

She burst into peals of laughter. “What’s funny about that?” he said, trying to sound offended, even though all he could think was, I made her laugh. He could feel her shaking with giggles against his back.

“Nothing’s funny!” she assured him. “Now you’re gonna have to sing something for me, though.”

He thinks he could, someday.

When things went south, as they always do, he didn’t notice the splintered baseball bat in his stomach until he saw Ellie’s horrified gaze. What was making her so scared? He didn’t want her to be scared. Then he looked down, saw the red already staining his flannel, and realized. Never pull out an impaled object, he remembered, even as he reached down to tug it out of himself with both hands. Well, he had to get back up on the horse somehow, and it wasn’t happening with that shiv still in his gut. The spurt of blood when he yanked it out didn’t look arterial, at least, so that’s a start.

Ellie was panicking, and he could hear more men running toward them as she fired off a wild gunshot behind her, and she was saying “C’mon, c’mon, we’ve gotta get out of here,” and he knew he just had to keep it together enough until she was safe. Surely he could manage that.

Then he was lying in the snow, and he didn’t even remember falling from the horse, and he knew he had failed. A teardrop fell onto his face. He had made Ellie cry again. “Get the fuck up, come on, Joel, please—I can’t fucking do this without you—”

For the second time, Joel was dying.

He passed his days in the basement in a fevered haze, in and out of consciousness with no sense of time other than the broken watch on his wrist. Once he felt a soft weight on his shoulder and turned his head to look. It was Sarah, her head pillowed on his arm. She gazed up at him sadly, eyes big and dark and hurting like the way a deer looks right after a car hits it on the backroads outside Austin. Joel knew, then, that he could join her if he wanted. Hadn’t that been all he wanted for twenty years?

Then he blinked, and it was Ellie sleeping on his chest, one hand resting over his heart. He could feel her shivering. Her hand was very cold. Or maybe that was just in contrast to Joel’s fever-flushed skin.

I saved him, and then I protected him. That’s why men like you and me are here. He could hear Ellie’s voice reading him that letter, ringing in his ears as clearly as if they were still standing in that white-picket-fenced house turned tomb. We have a job to do, and God help any motherfuckers who stand in our way.

He felt his old highway-side haunt calling to him. He resisted. He dug his hands into the dusty, drought-cracked earth of his crypt and clung on. He wouldn’t let himself be buried again. Joel never would’ve thought he of all people would fight so hard to stay alive. Maybe when you’ve already been resurrected once, you have a newfound drive to stick around.

When Joel woke up again, he knew something was wrong.

He’d gotten one of those weird fever hallucinations you see sometimes when your temperature’s above 103 degrees and you’re not really sure what’s real anymore, and fever-dream-Ellie had hovered over him, face pale and terrible as an angel. She’d pressed her knife into his hand and told him to kill any motherfuckers who came down the stairs.

The knife was still there. Ellie was not. He heard footsteps coming down the stairs.

Joel heaved himself up and staggered into the shadows, and he waited.

Falling into this routine was easy. When he had been drifting for all those years, aimless and gray and still tethered to this side only for Tommy, he had learned how to cause people pain. He was efficient. He was methodical. He got good at hurting and he didn’t let it haunt him, because he was already haunting this earth himself. Sometimes he thanked God that he hadn’t been the one shipped off to the Gulf to “spread democracy” or whatever bullshit the TV recruitment ads fed his brother, because he would have been too good at it. He could turn it off—empathy, compassion, whatever part of your brain makes you look at another person and understand that they are a human being. He was better at that than Tommy.

He shoved his knife deeper against a stranger’s kneecap, feeling the bone creak. The man screamed, tossing his head back and forth with the agony of it. Joel looked at him and thought that this man, too, probably had people he was watching over. Maybe he had a kid back home. It felt different now, more acute, more real. Joel hadn’t done this since he’d been dragged out of his grave into the world of the living, and everything, even killing, felt new.

Joel looked at the man and cataloged the finger joints, the eye sockets, the parts where he could wiggle a blade in easy and get him to talk before he bled too much. But he told Joel where Ellie was after only a minute or two, so the eyes went untouched.

Pathetic, a part of him thought, as he wiped the blade on his shirt and dragged a lead pipe over to the remaining man in the corner. If someone had tied Joel to a chair, trying to get him to confess where Ellie was, he’d take that shit right back to his grave. They could go ahead and carve out his eyes, his tongue, the beds of his fingernails, take it all. He’d never give her up. Even now, the wound in his side burned poisonously, and it only made him feel more alive.

God help any motherfuckers who stand in our way, fever-dream-Ellie whispered. The angel on his shoulder.

He swung the pipe down. The second man didn’t even have the wherewithal to scream.

Joel went out into the cold.

By the time he arrived at the Silver Lake resort, the biting Colorado wind had sapped the last of his feverish haze away. Fear rose in his throat with a stunning clarity. He found Ellie’s backpack in a barn of butchered human bodies, strung up and salted like pigs. None child-sized.

He heard a little girl screaming. He ran.

Back out into the cold. Snow drifts up to his knees, wind burning his exposed skin, stab wound starting to leak trickles of blood down his side. He smelled smoke before he saw a wooden lodge, aflame. The choked screams cut off.

For a moment he felt the phantom press of gunmetal against his temple, cool and unyielding.

Then the door to the burning building swung open, billowing out a gust of hellish black smoke and Ellie. The gun lifted away; the fear receded. She was alive, and that meant he still was, too.

He stumbled over to her, feet gone numb in his boots (cold, he hoped, not blood loss). She was facing away from him, staggering through the snow, wearing only a thin cotton sweatshirt and her jeans.

Joel needed, desperately, to make sure she was alright. He grabbed her shoulder.

She screamed, raw and horrified, and flailed in his grip, trying to shake him off. “No, get off me, get off—”

“Hey, hey, it’s me,” he said. “Ellie.” He forced her to turn to look at him, hoping that if she just saw his face, she would snap out of it. “Look, it’s me.” He looked at the blood splattered across her white face and the wild, unseeing terror in her eyes. Her hair was tangled in a halo around her face as though it had been grabbed. There were the beginnings of bruises forming on her cheekbone, her throat, disappearing underneath the collar of her sweatshirt. He pressed his hands to her cheeks to cup her face. She was such a small girl. Barely even looked fourteen to him, sometimes.

Ellie stared up at him, eyes huge. She stammered out something that sounded as much like Sarah’s infant babbling as it did words, no sense to it, just fear. She threw herself into his arms.

Joel held her to him. He burned with anger at whoever had done this to her, then with shame because he hadn’t been there to stop it. What had he been dragged back onto this earth to do, if not protect her? But he shoved those thoughts down, took inventory of what he could still do for her. “I got you, baby girl,” he said. “It’s okay, I got you.” She sobbed into his shoulder.

Joel was going to take her away from here, and he wouldn’t fail her again.

Ellie was different after Silver Lake. Quieter, except in her sleep. For the first few nights she’d woken up shrieking. At least comforting her was something Joel knew how to do, however much he had resisted it before. He let her sleep curled up next to him and smoothed her hair back when she cried. Sometimes he talked to fill the silence: stories about when Tommy was little, like when he smuggled out a frog doomed for dissection from his seventh-grade biology lab because he thought it was sleeping, not already dead; recounting the old movies they used to watch, Terminator and the first couple Matrix movies and all those Norah Ephron rom-coms Sarah loved; making ridiculous shit up about pre-outbreak times to try to get her to laugh (she never did, only the occasional half-smile). He was a father resurrected. He knew how to play the part.

Eventually Ellie stopped screaming in her sleep and just wept silently, so Joel didn’t wake up. He would only notice her puffy eyes in the morning.

She was never cruel to him, just distant, and that made it so much worse. He wanted her to yell at him, to act like a teenager. She should have been furious with him. God knew he was. But she was too good of a kid for that.

She never talked about what had happened to her before Joel found her. The closest she came was when they raided an abandoned Target for goods, and she immediately grabbed an armful of clothing and dashed off to a dressing room to change. He told her there was room in his bag to take her old clothes, too; they could wash them so she’d have a second pair. He didn’t say it out loud, but he knew she got attached to things. Probably had to do with only having a backpack’s worth of belongings.

Ellie shook her head. “Wasn’t my sweatshirt,” was all she said.

Joel would never call himself a smart man, but he knew how to put the pieces together. The names she screamed in her nightmares were different now.

He didn’t ask for more because he didn’t want to push her. She never offered. He supposed he had himself to blame for that. “We keep our histories to ourselves,” he remembered telling her, months ago, before he realized that this little girl was going to crack open his heart and make a home there. He wished he could take it all back, but what’s done is done.

He kept talking to her, even when she went away inside her head to somewhere he couldn’t follow. He thought it was best to treat her like normal when that happened, even though it scared him. He tried not to show his worry. Ellie was relying on him.

“You’re a little quiet today,” he mentioned offhandedly as they trekked up the interstate toward Salt Lake City. She’d probably said three words in total since that morning.

“Sorry,” Ellie mumbled, eyes downcast. Joel wanted to strangle himself.

“No, no, it’s okay,” he said quickly. “You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.”

He found a game of Boggle in a dilapidated trailer they passed and made room for it in his pack, just in case.

Right when Joel was starting to give up, Ellie spotted the giraffe.

He’d given her a boost up to the next floor of the building they were checking out, and when the ladder she was supposed to lower came clattering down instead, his heart froze in his chest. He hadn’t cleared the building, someone (something) had found her, even now she was probably terrified, in pain, needing him to help—

Then he heard her laughing. “C’mon, you’ve gotta see this!” she called. Her footsteps pattered away. Joel righted the ladder and heaved himself up.

Ellie was hanging over a rusty metal railing, gazing out over the ruins of Salt Lake City. A few feet in front of her, a giraffe grazed on the vines growing along the side of the building. Her eyes were full of a childish wonder that made Joel want to weep. How had the animal survived out here, through the frigid Utah winters? It was a small miracle.

“So fucking cool,” Ellie breathed. For a moment, it was September again, and he was pulling a seatbelt over her lap as she told him that Bill’s car looked like a spaceship.

He handed her some leaves to feed the giraffe, and she giggled when its velvety lips brushed her fingers. Joel had been so scared he would never hear that sound again.

Life’s full of second chances, he supposed.

Later he told her, as best he could, about what she had done for him. About the bullet scar on his temple, and the healing that eventually followed twenty years later. “It wasn’t time that did it,” he said. He wanted to say more, but he didn’t know how to, or even what he wanted to say at all. You healed me. You brought me back from the state I was in and reminded me what living can be like. If I lose you, I wouldn’t even make it a day before I shoot myself again. I love you.

Ellie was a smart girl, so he suspected she could read all of that with a single look at his face. He didn’t know how to describe her expression, then. He might’ve almost called it fear.

In the end, the Fireflies found them before they could find the Fireflies.

He heard the rattle of a grenade rolling past his feet, and he grabbed Ellie and threw her to the ground before everything exploded into smoke. He rolled over, coughing, saw a man in combat gear dragging her away as she flailed and screamed—not again, not again—

He woke up in a hospital bed with a pounding pain in his right temple, just beneath his scar. Marlene was waiting for him.

She wanted to know how they had survived a cross-country trek with just one man and a teenage girl when her teams of armed freedom fighters had failed. He ignored her questions. “Where’s Ellie?”

Marlene drew in a deep breath. “The doctor thinks...”

Maybe that hit to his head had knocked something loose, because there was static ringing in Joel’s ears as she spoke to the point where he could barely make sense of it. There was cordyceps growing inside of Ellie since her birth, Marlene said. They were going to remove it. They were going to remove it all and give it to everyone. “But cordyceps grows inside the brain,” he said. He’d seen diagrams of it, they all had: the way it laid roots deep down to your brain stem, nestled between neuronal pathways.

Marlene met his gaze steadily. “Yes.”

Joel closed his eyes. For a moment he was back in the darkness by that TX-71 exit ramp, amidst the dust and buffalo grass and discarded highway-side litter, military helicopters roaring past overhead and flashlight beams blinding him. He was cradling his little girl in his arms. He didn’t even think to run when the soldier in front of him reached toward his gun.

He blinked, and he was sitting on a hospital bed in Salt Lake City.

He knew what he had to do. It wasn’t even a choice.

He waited until he spotted a hospital directory, with a sign pointing toward surgery. When the Firefly guards tried to march him past it down the stairwell, he wrestled away one of their guns, shot the first one in the femoral artery and the second between the eyes.

He went back up the stairs. He shot the woman behind the front desk and two figures in scrubs walking down the hallway. When someone fired back, he crouched down behind the desk and waited them out. He could hear them panicking, ammo clattering to the floor. It’s always the panic that gets them. When he heard the telltale click of an empty magazine he stood back up and fired. He proceeded down the hall.

He spotted a twitch of movement in the room to his left, a man raising his hands in the air. He fired. Headshot. He kept moving, tracking blood through the hallways.

He felt as though he were in two places at once, not fully present in his body. Was he alive or dead? Was he one of the corpses strewn across the floor? The fluorescent lights flickered overhead, bathing the plaster walls bone-white, and it felt like hellfire. Joel was never one for religion, but if there was ever any soul destined to be damned, he’d already crossed that line years ago. He’d crawled back from the depths once; hell had no hold on him now. When a dead man was raised to walk the earth, what could the living do but cry out in fear?

He killed a dozen more guards and took shelter in a stairwell to reload. His hands were too slick to hold the ammo securely so he wiped the blood off on his coat and shoved in another round. He heard screaming outside, so he fired a few times around the doorway until it went quiet. He swapped out his machine gun for a handgun when the magazine emptied.

He was efficient. He was methodical.

He cleared the hallway to the pediatric surgery ward and walked inside. There, through the glass observation windows—his little girl, lying on the operating table, three figures in scrubs hunched over her still body. Her face was pale and serene. She looked like an angel. She looked dead.

He kicked open the door. The two nurses shrieked, backing away. The surgeon grabbed a scalpel off the medical tray next to the table.

“I won’t let you take her—”

A bullet hole appeared in his forehead, and he collapsed to the floor. Blood pooled beneath Joel’s boots.

One of the nurses was weeping. There was an IV in the crook of Ellie’s arm; Joel didn’t know how to remove it without hurting her. “Unhook her,” he said, gesturing with his handgun. The nurse yanked it out and unstrapped the oxygen mask from Ellie’s face. A bead of blood appeared where the needle had been removed. “Bandage it.”

When Ellie’s arm was wrapped up, Joel stepped forward and lifted her up off the table. Distantly, he registered that the two nurses were crouched on the floor now, cowering, but they didn’t point any weapons at him so he ignored them. He focused on Ellie instead, cradling her head against his shoulder. Gently, his fingers pressed against her neck.

He felt the steady thump of a pulse. They were alive.

He got them out of the hospital.

Marlene finally found them in the garage, just when Joel thought they were in the clear. “You can’t protect her forever,” she said, gun aimed between his eyes. “You’ll die, or she’ll leave, and then what? How long before she’s torn to pieces by infected or murdered by raiders? All because she lives in a broken world that you could have saved.”

Joel just looked at her. He was holding the world in his arms. There was no other salvation.

Marlene lowered her gun. “We can find another way,” she said, placating. Did she think she could talk him out of this? Joel shot her in the stomach.

He carefully laid Ellie down in the backseat of an unlocked car, smoothed her hair back from her face and arranged her limbs so she would be comfortable. Then he went back to Marlene, who lay bleeding on the tarmac. She looked up at him. In that moment, he thought she understood exactly what kind of creature he was, and where he had come from, and what he had done. She stopped asking for mercy.

He shot her again, just to be safe.

Ellie didn’t look at him the same.

She knew he had lied about what happened, and he knew she knew it, and neither of them said so because the truth would be too terrible to face. She didn’t comment on the blood on his boots or the shrapnel wound on his neck. When he didn’t answer her on what had happened to Marlene, she didn’t press him on that, either, just rolled over in the backseat of Joel’s stolen car and went back to her anesthesia-induced malaise.

He was going to lose her because he had saved her. In a way, it felt only right: men like Joel were men who lost, again and again. Loss defined him. He wouldn’t know who he was anymore without it.

If not for Ellie, he would still be rotting in a hastily dug grave off of TX-71.

When the car ran out of gas they continued on foot, walking cross-country and sleeping under the stars like they always had. One night, he dreamed of Sarah for the first time since those fever-ridden winter nights in Colorado. She only watched him silently with her doe-like eyes, saying nothing. He felt her pity all the same.

In the morning, he looked at Ellie’s withdrawn, tired face, and he thought, I’m only what you made me.

He and Ellie traipsed back into Jackson, one dead man walking and the girl who had raised him from the grave. Tommy hugged them both. Even Maria, newborn baby swaddled in her arms, offered him a smile.

“You made it,” Tommy said, shaking his head in disbelief. “And the Fireflies? They get their cure?”

Ellie looked at Joel as though daring him to respond.

“No cure,” Joel said. “It wasn’t possible.” He met Tommy’s eyes, trying to silently convey that they could talk about this later.

Ellie watched him all the while, her gaze piercing. She’d always been too smart for her own good.