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The first sight of Ellie–well, the first sight of Ellie since infancy–freezes Marlene in her tracks, just briefly, stunned at the degree to which she looks like her mother.
You really just made a whole mini-me, huh? She thinks fondly, teasingly, to Anna. It’s a foolishness she’s never quite got over, this desire to talk to her best friend, even 14 years gone. Her dad gets to pass on ears and you get the rest? Selfish.
Maybe that’s what happens when you love someone.
The love makes you a little foolish.
*
It’s not that she wants to send Ellie on with Joel and Tess. Fuck, it’s about the last damn thing she wants to do, trusting them with the single person who can save the world.
(The single thing left of one of her most important people.)
But even if Joel especially is a ruthless bastard, she knows he can be trusted with a girl. His violence isn’t gendered, he’s never shown any hint of being a creep, and she also doesn’t miss the way he keeps his distance from Ellie on the floor, even though it would be easy to toss her around again to make a point.
Besides, she doubts Tess would put up with a partner who was that flavor of fucked up.
Ellie still looks to her, large eyes beseeching. She’s seeking comfort Marlene doesn’t know how to provide. She isn’t practiced, looking after a kid who trusts her like this. It’s one of the reasons she’d put Ellie safely away in FEDRA school.
Marlene was never meant to be a mother.
*
When she gets word that Ellie and a man have been captured and brought back, she puts down her paperwork and makes her way to the rooms they’re being kept in, heart in her throat. If Ellie made it, that’s all that matters, but a man? Not a man and a woman?
It’s almost a relief when she sees Joel knocked out cold in the bed, confirmation that at least it wasn’t just any random asshole with her.
She doesn’t get to speak to Ellie when they get back, which she only discovers when she goes to the room and finds her unconscious as well. A nurse explains that she turned into a little hellcat when they pulled her away from Joel, wrenching a rifle from one of the guards and bludgeoning one over the head with it before trying to turn it on the others, getting two shots off–one of them getting someone in the shoulder, only because they moved their chest at the last minute–before someone tased her and restrained her enough to get back. Any attempt at calming her had failed, and she bit someone on the goddamn face, they’d sedated her as quickly as possible.
She can see welts even now on skinny wrists where she still fought it until the last moment, and she undoes the restraints at once.
“Marlene,” the nurse tries, but she gives her a look that silences her.
“You surprised her after she’s been stuck with a smuggler for months,” she says, reaching for a cloth and some disinfectant when one welt proves bad enough to be bleeding slightly. “She’ll be fine now that she’s away from him.”
And in the moment, she genuinely believes it.
*
Keeping Joel and Ellie separate lasts for about five fucking minutes once they’re both awake. It’s almost funny, the way they work in tandem despite being apart. Joel manages to knock out all three guards at his room, Ellie manages to gouge someone’s goddamn eye out and incapacitate someone with a knife to the knee, and like homing pigeons, they end up finding each other in a hallway, pulling apart from a hug right as she turns a corner, stunned for the briefest moment at the sight of Joel–the hardest bastard she knows–touching Ellie like she’s something precious, hands gentle and attentive.
When he turns back to her, he’s all cold-eyed ruthlessness again.
Ellie’s been shoved behind him, and she has the brief, absurd thought of chickens she’s seen, chicks tucked up under fluff to hide them from a threat.
The gun pointed directly at her makes it a bit hard to hold onto humor, though.
Ellie glares at her from her place at Joel’s back, face peeking around his side. She’s shaky, still, from the sedatives she’s been given, and there’s an intimacy, a trust, to the way she’s holding onto Joel to keep herself upright.
Abruptly, trying to separate them seems to have been a terrible idea.
“Hey,” she says, hands out, “everything’s okay.”
“What’s going on?” Ellie demands, spitting like an angry cat, safe from her place behind Joel.
If she didn’t think she was probably about a minute away from getting her head bashed in if she doesn’t peace-make, she might find it cute. As it is, it’s sort of just fucking up her plan for how this would go.
“The scouts didn’t know it was Joel,” she says to her before she looks to him. Ellie’s her priority here, but Joel still looks capable of taking out any other threat he perceives, and she’d rather not be involved in a fight for her life. “You’re free to leave,” she tells him, and she doesn’t miss how Ellie holds on slightly tighter.
Or how Joel reaches back, just briefly, squeezing her arm in return.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he says, voice hard. “Not without her.”
“You did your job,” she says, a little confused. “We have vehicles here. Take your pick, we’ll give you whatever supplies you want.”
“I’m not leaving her,” he says. “You’re getting both or neither.”
Behind him, Ellie nods once, decisively.
She resists the urge to rub at her temples in response to the headache she can already feel forming.
*
Somehow, a single man got a teenage girl safely across the country. When she asks about the how of this given her own near-death experiences, he shrugs and says it was all Ellie. No matter how much she digs, that’s all she gets.
When she asks Ellie, she says it was all him.
It’s a mildly touching and very annoying display of solidarity.
That’s the other mystery she still hasn’t worked out: when the fuck Joel and Ellie turned into a unit.
She’d thought, at the very start, that it was just Stockholm Syndrome on Ellie’s part. Joel was her protector, after all, no matter that he was contracted for it. It wouldn’t have been surprising for her to feel some sort of attachment, and if it had just been that, it would have been an easy fix. Joel could have collected his payment, said his goodbye, and gone on his merry way to do morally dubious shit elsewhere.
But no.
Of course it couldn’t be that simple.
Because somehow, Joel seems to have gotten just as attached, if not more.
The how of this is a fucking bizarre mystery.
At first she’d held suspicions that it was just him attempting to extort more payment, leveraging a child’s attachment to raise his price to leave. Ellie’s distress could have been a bargaining chip, which she would have understood.
Instead, though, he acts like he’s her goddamn guard dog, always at her beck and call, always hovering somewhere in the room. He’s the first to speak up when he’s decided she needs a break from tests, the first to get in between her and someone else when she pulls back. Her room has grown a small collection of books and games she sees him playing with her, all found during the times he takes her out of her room for a break, either carrying her or supporting her on the days she’s strong enough to walk. She passes by the room more than once to find Ellie curled up against him, one of his hands stroking over her hair, like it’s never known violence at all, like his hands were made only for gentling a sick kid. They barely need nurses. Anything Ellie needs, Joel provides, from holding her hair back when she’s sick to making sure she gets fed when she’s hungry.
He acts…like a parent, she realizes one day in a flash of understanding.
For all of her plans, this wasn’t a complication she’d considered.
*
She’d thought she might actually get a chance to talk to Ellie after she was at the hospital, would have a little time to make up for 14 years of radio silence for her own protection. She has stories she thinks Ellie would like to hear. She and Anna knew each other growing up, after all; she has plenty of things to tell Ellie about what her mom was like when she was her age.
With Joel playing guard dog, though, chances are slim and far between.
“She’s sleeping,” he says now, immovable as a wall in her doorway, arms across his chest but body language conveying easily that he’s still ready for a fight if she tries to push.
Thinking of how easily he dispatched three men while still half out of it, she’s not really eager to try her luck.
“Joel?” Comes a sleepy voice, and she raises an eyebrow.
His expression doesn’t change, but his voice is less aggressive when he responds, even though he doesn’t turn around.
“I’m right here,” he calls back. “Just talking something through. I’ll be there in a second.”
“‘kay,” comes the response, stretched by a yawn, and for the briefest moment she manages a peek to the side. She sees Ellie settling down again, wiggling down under her covers, dwarfed by a flannel over her scrubs that she knows is Joel’s.
And then Joel shifts, blocking her completely again.
“I just want to talk to her,” she says a little impatiently.
“About what?”
“Girl stuff,” she says sarcastically.
Joel doesn’t react.
“Ellie,” she calls, circumventing The Great Wall of Joel entirely.
“I-yeah?” Ellie responds, but even without looking at her, she can hear the hesitation.
She thinks I’m here to talk about another procedure, she realizes. That’s what she is, after all. She’s the bad guy bringing forward new ideas for things that make her miserable, the chosen delegate from the panel of medical officials because the doctors look at Ellie in a way that makes her nervous, which makes Joel look at them in a way that makes them nervous.
Joel gets to be the one who throws people out of the room and holds her when she cries, gets to be the person who is on her side and her side alone.
It leaves a sour taste in her mouth, this realization.
Unfortunately, it’s not something she knows how to fix.
“No tests tomorrow,” she calls loud enough for her to hear, keeping eye contact with Joel as she offers an olive branch. She doubts the medical people will be happy about it, but she can threaten to let Joel deliver the message.
“Thank fuck,” Ellie says, voice more genuine now. She smiles, just slightly, at the sound of a flop, able to imagine it all too well from the times Anna did the same thing, always expressive with her whole body.
It rankles, this defeat, but finally she just gives Joel a nod and turns on her heel.
*
She dreams of Anna after the first time Ellie comes out of a procedure crying, sick to her stomach and confused from a poor response to the anesthesia. Joel bodily tosses everyone else out of the room, but she watches through a crack in the blinds to the room as he gathers her up like a baby, pulling her onto his lap and tucking her head against his shoulder. There’s an ease to it that says he’s had a child before.
There’s a devotion to it that says this is his child now.
She advises all of the medical staff to steer clear, sending in the single nurse who hasn’t been bodily removed before with food and to check on Ellie’s vitals and IV. Joel had been against the procedure in the first place after a different sedative for an MRI had given Ellie an allergic reaction, and she knows they’re all going to be walking on eggshells after this fuck up. She sees from the way Joel eyes their bags in a corner that he’s already considering packing Ellie up and leaving, and she’d rather not find out what happens when people try to stop him from that goal.
They’ve lost enough Fireflies. They can hardly afford the sort of casualties a pissed-off Joel Miller could exact.
(And though she doesn’t bring it up, seeing Ellie shake and cry pierces right to her heart, remembering her as a baby small enough to fit in one arm. She had been the one to push, in the end, the final vote to go ahead with the procedure. She’d thought it would be worth the risk, one step closer to a cure. Looking at Ellie now, though, she’s painfully aware that acceptable margins for the sake of the world and the sake of one child can be very different things.)
“I trusted her with you,” Anna says in her dream, face hard, tone accusing. “You swore you’d look out for her. How could you do this to my baby?”
She wakes in a cold sweat.
*
Joel makes the rule early of no male nurses or doctors alone with Ellie, not even around her if avoidable.
The request makes cold suspicion curl in her stomach. She’s seen how Ellie reacts to unexpected touch, a skittishness that wasn’t there before. She shies away from men, once fully flinching and rounding on a nurse who touched her back when she wasn’t expecting it. It had still been when she was in a hospital gown–before Joel made the executive decision that Ellie would be allowed scrubs and bullied everyone else into agreeing–and the rude presumption of undoing a tie on it without asking would have explained her being offended.
Doesn’t explain the way she about knocked him out cold with a haymaker, though, almost pouncing for a round 2 until Joel gently restrained her and ordered everyone else out in a quiet voice that nonetheless promised violence if he wasn’t heeded, and not from the wound-up 14 year old.
She corners Joel one day when he’d gone to get more food for Ellie on a rare occasion she actually had an appetite. He scowls when she blocks his path, but having his hands full of an offering for Ellie means he’s less likely to just shove his way past.
She doesn’t sugarcoat it, knowing she’s on a time limit before his “away from Ellie” timer runs out.
“Was she raped?” She asks, and she sees Joel flinch, just slightly.
“No,” he answers, voice almost a growl, as he tries to move around her.
She moves with him, blocking him again.
“Then what happened?” She demands, resisting the urge to shove him. After seeing him with Ellie, she can’t imagine a situation in which Ellie would have been at risk of it, not while she was with him, and the mystery of it is driving her crazy. “I left her with you to protect her.”
“You left her with me to get her here,” he dismisses. “Everything else was without your oh so helpful direction.”
The clear resentment is interesting.
“Fine,” she says, “then I’ll just ask-”
In one quick moment, the food is on the floor, and she’s against the wall, an arm to her throat.
“You will not ask her anything,” he says, voice terrifyingly calm. “You don’t have a right to her pain, and I’m not going to let you poke at her to satisfy your own fucking curiosity.”
“I just-”
“Just do as I say and trust that one of us actually gives a damn about looking out for her. No men in her room and none touching her during your fucking tests. I’m sure you can handle that.”
He doesn’t give her a chance to respond before he’s stalking off, food forgotten on the floor.
When she gathers herself enough to move, she pulls aside a nurse and has another tray sent.
She doesn’t try to speak to Ellie that day.
*
She does get a few chances later to actually talk to Ellie, mainly through sheer stubbornness.
Joel supervises all interactions no matter how she hints (and directly tells him) that she’s fine to keep an eye on a teenager for twenty minutes. It isn’t until the third time it happens that she realizes it’s not entirely him acting on his own prerogative, when she sees Ellie subtly reach for him when he goes to move from his place beside her on her bed. She grabs his wrist and squeezes twice, and he stops immediately.
Silent communication then.
Clever.
A subtle tilt of Joel’s head. Another squeeze.
Joel settles in the chair beside her bed, arms crossed, solid and implacable.
She leans back against the wall, gathering from the energy that she’s not really “take a load off” welcome and unwilling to risk her progress in actually getting through the door. Ellie’s clearly hesitant about her, no matter the brave face she puts on, and Joel reaches out a hand to rest on her ankle.
Immediately, she settles.
“Your mom always wore a ponytail when she was younger,” she says. As openers go, it’s not her best work, but she’s still aware that one wrong word is about to get her evicted, so it’s probably better to cut to the chase.
“Really?” Ellie asks, leaning forward just slightly.
Joel’s eyes narrow, just a bit, enough to convey that he’s suspicious about her motivations here. She resists the urge to flip him off.
“Mhm. About drove your grandmother crazy. Your grandma was a real girly girl. I don’t think I ever saw her leave the house without lipstick on.”
“What’s lipstick?” Ellie asks at once, and it stings, a bit, the way she turns to Joel to ask it. She doesn’t know if she’s ever been more aware of being a third wheel in her goddamn life, including when Ellie’s parents were dating, back when they once fucking left her at a restaurant because they were so focused on each other.
“It’s like a paint, kind of, pink and red and such,” Joel says. “Women used to put it on their lips.”
“Why?” Ellie asks, face scrunching, and Joel snorts.
“Hell if I know. To look pretty?”
“Hm,” Ellie says, turning back to her then. “Did my mom wear lipstick?”
“No,” she says, shaking her head, and she doesn’t miss the pleased little look Ellie gets at it. “Your mom was more of a tomboy-” She sees Ellie about to turn to Joel for clarification and strikes first. “A tomboy’s a girl who doesn’t like girly stuff. You’re a tomboy, for example, at least from what I’ve seen.”
“And my mom was a tomboy?” Ellie asks, feeling out the last word like she’s trying to decide if she likes it or not.
“Sure was. I used to joke that she only started dating your dad because she wanted to steal his clothes.”
“Oh, so being a clothing thief is a genetic trait,” Joel says, clearly teasing Ellie, and she wrinkles her nose at him and feigns a kick.
“You gave me the shirt,” she says haughtily. “Don’t bitch about it now, sucker.”
Feeling herself getting edged out of the conversation, she speaks before Joel has a chance to respond.
“Your mom wanted a dinosaur themed nursery,” she offers. “If she’d been able to have one. She said she didn’t want any ‘frou frou’ stuff telling you how to be a girl. I tried to argue t-rexes would probably give you nightmares, but she had a whole theme planned.”
“I like dinosaurs,” Ellie says. “She had good taste.”
“Your dad would’ve probably put bows on them all,” she says, smiling a little. “He was so fucking excited. They didn’t know if they were going to have a boy or girl yet, but he already had a few of those little bow headband things saved up just in case. He was really hoping for a daughter.”
This detail does something interesting to Joel, whose face goes pained for just the briefest moment before it goes blank when he sees her looking at him.
“Did…did he ever meet me?” Ellie asks.
“No,” Marlene says, shaking her head. “He died about two months before you were born. A hideout got raided. He stayed behind to give your mom time to get away.”
“Oh,” Ellie says softly, looking down. Joel squeezes her ankle gently, and she gives him a tiny smile.
They talk for about another half hour before Ellie begins flagging. It’s been a hard week for her, she knows, two spinal taps, an MRI, three blood draws, and an experimental drug trying to increase her white blood cell count. She fights it as hard as she can, clearly, but she slowly slumps further and further down, yawns getting more frequent and her eyelids clearly getting heavier. Joel doesn’t say anything about it, but he moves his chair up until he’s at the head of the bed, silently negotiating her into laying flat and then stroking a hand over her hair while Ellie yawns through her questions, in what seems like a calculated move by how it starts making her blinks longer. She’s about halfway through telling her about the time her mom pranked her office by filling the water cooler with Jello when Ellie’s clearly asleep, and she trails off.
When she’s about to leave, Joel speaks softly.
“Hey.”
She turns to him, eyebrow raised. She’d thought the little talk was innocuous, but she has a sudden suspicion that she’s about to get briefed on how to talk to Ellie better in the future. Instead, though, he just nods his head once.
“Thanks,” he says, and it’s an effort not to let her jaw drop open in disbelief. Joel “get the hell away from my kid” Miller thanking her for interacting? He must see her surprise because he rolls his eyes. “Don’t ruin it. I’m just saying. It was nice of you to tell her all of that. It’ll make her happy, knowing that sort of thing. So thank you.”
“I-” She starts, still fumbling a little with surprise. “You’re-you’re welcome.”
Then she beats a hasty retreat before they have time to get in another argument.
*
She thinks it might be frosty outside from hell freezing over when Joel actually approaches her one day, and then the unsure look on his face has her on high alert, standing at once, ready to summon help.
“What happened? Is Ellie-”
“She’s fine,” he says, seeming a little surprised by her panic. “I just…” He shifts his weight, clearly a little uncomfortable with whatever he’s decided to approach her about. “Would you mind writing some of it down? The stuff about her parents?”
“What?” She asks, truly stunned.
“I know you’re busy getting your Fireflies in line to do whatever it is terrorists do,” she gives him a look at this, “but I know she won’t want to forget anything. She takes notes after you leave so she won’t forget, but I know she’d like having real stories written out so she can look at them later. It would…it would mean a lot. To her.”
It’s an in, she realizes, this request. Joel’s offering her a chance to be something other than the boogeyman signing Ellie up for more torture. It’s clearly all for Ellie’s benefit, of course, but it’s still not a chance she was actually expecting to get.
“I-sure,” she says, finding her voice. “I can do that.”
With a tight nod, he turns and leaves, returning to Ellie.
*
She stays up late the next few nights, writing until her hand cramps. She wants to make it neat as possible, but when she gets into the swing of it, she loses herself more to the flow of memories than to her intention to have good handwriting.
She has to rewrite a few pages, when tears she’ll never admit to under pain of death drop and blur her ink.
She hasn’t allowed herself to think of these things for over a decade, hasn’t been able to justify the indulgence. She hasn’t thought about the time Anna laughed so hard she snorted milk out of her nose in front of her crush in fifth grade, hasn’t thought about the time they both decided to try putting on Mrs. Williams’s false lashes and nearly glued their eyes shut, hasn’t thought about how Anna was her date to prom because hers stood her up so Anna told hers to hit the road and went with her instead.
It’s one of the things she still carries with her, that prom picture, and she digs it out after she writes the memory down. It’s a stupid, goofy thing, both of their faces too serious while they stood in classic prom pose, Anna with a tie she either borrowed or fully stole from someone around her neck, no matter that she was also in a strapless gown.
They had no idea that within a decade, they’d be living in a world in which there were no more proms, accompanied or otherwise.
“I miss you,” she tells 18 year old Anna. “God, I fucking miss you.”
*
It was easier to tell herself that she made the best choices she could when Ellie was still a voiceless infant. At least as part of FEDRA she would eat. Not as much as she should have, to judge from her height and size, but at least she made it to 14. She didn’t know hungry nights or fleeing shelters from raids or seeing your comrades ripped apart by machine gun fire.
( She would have if she grew up a FEDRA agent, whispers a voice in her head that sounds like Anna. You left her to become one of the people you and the Fireflies kill. )
She’d thought she would have a chance to make up for it, here in the hospital. Ellie’s important enough now to them all that she can justify security measures. If this hospital is raided, there won’t be any discussion about who to get out first. Ellie will be a priority now, which means she can treat her like one. That had been her goal here, to make sure that the medical team kept in mind that they had one child, a one of a kind, and to keep her treated well, as healthy as someone can be while a medical experiment.
With Joel around, though, she’s pretty fucking useless in the task.
*
The first time she hears Joel call Ellie “baby,” she thinks for a moment she might be having a stroke. It’s 3 in the morning, and she’d woken from her doze in another room to the sound of an alarm from the equipment in Ellie’s, and for the briefest second, she thinks the “I’m right here, baby” is from Joel sneaking a fucking hook-up into the room.
But then she looks around the doorway to find him on Ellie’s bed, arms full of trembling teenager.
HIs face is so soft, so devoted, that she almost feels the need to look away. She’s intruding into something primal here, a parent and their child, and she knows absolutely that her presence will upset Ellie.
And upsetting Ellie, she’s learned by now, is a quick way to get a front seat ticket for a show of Joel’s wrath.
Instead, then, she hovers at the window, peeking through the same gap in the blinds she usually makes her observations through. Joel handles Ellie like an expert, gathering her up easily and moving her to the rocking recliner he dragged in weeks ago, snagging her IV stand with one hand and taking it with them. He settles with her across his lap and extends a leg to push gently off of the wall, rocking them slowly. Ellie shuffles impossibly closer to him, curling up with her face in the crook of his neck, her arms around his chest, one caught by him and adjusted so she won’t disrupt her IV port.
“You’re okay, baby girl,” she hears when she strains to listen. “I’ve got you, baby, you’re okay.”
“-you died,” she hears Ellie respond, voice muffled by the way it’s pressed to him.
“I’m fine,” he soothes, bending his head to kiss her temple. “Nothing happened to me, baby. You saved me.”
Ellie says something in response, but she backs away from the window quietly so she doesn’t hear.
Joel’s very clearly got it under control.
She returns to her room and scribbles out a few more stories about Ellie’s parents before sleep finally claims her.
*
Even Before, Marlene never wanted to be a mother. She’d respected Anna’s choice to bring life into the world–no matter that she thought it was a little stupid–but she’d been perfectly content with the idea of being an aunt, free to hand back over a sticky little bundle of noise when she’d gotten her fill.
Watching Joel and Ellie, though, she wonders, sometimes.
They’re so perfectly content with each other, living in their own little bubble no one else is welcome or wanted in. Every single time she enters the room, she feels like she’s interrupting, even if they’re not doing anything more than sitting on Ellie’s bed, her asleep against Joel’s chest while he plays with her hair.
She’d almost intervened once during what she’d thought was a struggle until she’d registered Ellie laughing and hung back. It had turned out to be a playfight over Ellie trying to steal half of Joel’s sandwich. She’d been weak from blood draws and a bad response to a new MRI contrast, but Joel had clearly been minding his strength and had let her shove his hands away like she actually had the power to do it. He’d even subtly used his foot to nudge the table closer to make it easier for Ellie to grab it, and despite the way he’d tugged at it all the way until it was in her mouth, he’d just grumbled when she took a massive bite and beamed.
“Don’t choke on the goods, you little thief,” he’d said, dropping back into his chair with a sigh that was clearly all performance.
Ellie had just taken an even bigger bite in what was clearly a petty and pointed demonstration of her response to being told what to do.
“Brat,” Joel had said, but he hadn’t been able to hide the clear affection in his expression.
She looks at Joel’s face sometimes–when she’s absolutely sure he won’t notice–at the perfect, all-consuming satisfaction she sees on it when he’s with Ellie. It’s abundantly clear that there’s absolutely nowhere else he would ever choose to be, regardless of the fact that staying at her side currently means he’s contained to a hospital room almost 24/7. It’s these moments when she wonders about everything she’s missed out on.
Everything she’s waited far too long to ever get.
*
It’s goddamn fucking Anderson who brings up the brain biopsy again, well after she’d thought she’d made it plain that it was off the fucking table.
The vaccine has been made and everyone in the hospital has gotten a dose, including Joel. Since the success, Ellie’s been free of more medical experiments, and her and her overprotective shadow spend the days in short trips out from the hospital, rebuilding her strength so they can get the hell out of dodge. It’s supposed to be over, objective achieved.
But it’s not enough to fix the problem and move on, not for a science type.
He wants to push it further.
“If we study her brain,” he says, eyes a-glow with scientific curiosity, regardless of the fact that his hypothesis hinges on killing a kid the same age as his daughter, “we could find a cure to reverse the process.”
Thinking of the faces twisted by fungal growth that she’s seen, she doesn’t know if she’d want to come back to a ruined body driven as a shell for cordyceps if it were her, honestly.
But she can sense that at least a few others are intrigued.
“Show me some studies,” she says, mind spinning for a way to buy time. She sees him open his mouth, clearly about to contradict her. “If we’re to do this,” and the spark of satisfaction at the idea that she’s even considering letting him do this makes her want to leave him alone in a room with Joel for five minutes, “then we should have a plan in place for how to best preserve her body when we do it. We shouldn’t be wasteful.”
“Of course not,” he says, all agreement now that he thinks he’s getting his way. “We will treat her sacrifice with the respect it deserves, and her body will be treated with dignity.”
Oh go fuck yourself, you righteous dickhead, she thinks, even as she makes herself nod.
*
It’s an easy thing to get Anderson alone in a dark corner of a lower level one night.
It’s an easier thing yet to sink a knife through his jugular. The spray of blood will be a pain to deal with, but it’s why she’s in borrowed clothes.
Once he’s stopped twitching, she removes her hand from his mouth, changes out of her bloody scrubs, and puts on her own clothes, checking her reflection in a mirror to get all the blood off of her face. That done, she gets backup.
“Hey,” she says, popping her head around the door. Joel looks up to her from his place beside a sleeping Ellie. “I need you for something.”
His face is clearly dubious, but he calls over the one nurse he gets along with, an older woman named Margot, and leaves her with orders not to let anyone else into the room until he’s back and to tell Ellie he’ll return shortly if she wakes up.
“What do you want?” He asks, the moment they’re out of earshot of the room.
“To help me get rid of a body?” She says lightly.
The look of consternation on his face is a sight she’ll treasure until her dying day.
*
Joel was an easy choice as an accomplice for this task. She knows to her gut that he’ll never be tempted to say a goddamn word, especially after she explains why Anderson needed to die.
To judge from the fierce, dangerous look Joel gives the corpse afterwards, she hopes Anderson understands that dealing with her was a mercy.
She doubts there would be much left of him if she’d left Joel to take care of it.
He’s impatient to get back to Ellie, she can tell, and he almost leaves her behind with the speed he walks after she directs him to the lower levels so they can dump the body in an old storm drain.
“You take that car,” she says to him, jerking her head to the corner of the garage as he carries the deadweight bundle over his shoulder. “And you get her out of here tomorrow night.” She knows she needs to sweeten the deal so he doesn’t decide to play it safe and wipe the rest of them out to keep his kid–and Ellie is his, she knows by now, as surely as if he’d played a part in her creation–safe.
Joel doesn’t seem like a man for half-measures, after all.
“I’ll arrange drops of the vaccine off. I know you two have plans for a town after this,” she gets a sharp, suspicious look at this, and she raises her hands in surrender. “I have no fucking clue where it is, alright? But we’ll set up a drop-off point, I’ll get you vaccine doses to take back, and we all go on our happy ways.”
The moment they’ve lowered the drain grate, he has her against a wall, gun to her head.
“Tell me, right now,” he says, face terrifyingly blank, “that you had no part in this plan.”
“Would I have killed him if I did?” She asks, willing herself not to sound afraid despite the way she knows she’s fucked if he decides she was part of it.
The safety clicks off.
“I know you don’t trust me. I know you hate me because I didn’t look out for Ellie,” she sees the faintest flicker of surprise at this, and she smiles grimly. “Yeah, I gathered, papa bear. You hate me for what I’ve let Ellie go through. I get it.”
“You got her involved in all of this,” he says. “Already got her friend killed. What’s one more girl against your grand plans?”
The fact that Ellie would tell him about Riley genuinely throws her for a moment. She knows they’re close, knows Joel is already fully devoted, but the information means that Ellie’s just as tied as him.
It makes it easier, the next part of this deal.
“Yeah, I get it. I’m a fucking demon sending little girls to their deaths. Get it out of your system. Go ahead.”
Joel doesn’t say anything, but the gun doesn’t leave its place at her head.
“I know this might be hard for you to understand, but sometimes progress means ugly choices. You think I liked seeing her sick? You think it was easy for me, either, when her goddamn heart stopped?” A side effect during a procedure, one that she knows had nearly killed them all from the way Joel’s face had looked until they got her back. “She’s yours, not mine, I get it. I never wanted her to be mine, not like that.”
A little flicker of expression, almost a sneer.
“I made her mother a promise,” she says, “and I get it. I fucked it all up. But I never asked to be responsible for a kid. You know exactly how dangerous that is in a world like ours.”
“So what?” He asks. “You just get to toss her in an orphanage, collect her when she’s useful, and then get rid of her again?”
“I get to keep my goddamn promise,” she says, a little impatiently. “I told her mother I would find someone to bring her up and protect her. That’s you, asshole. Somehow.”
The quick flicker of surprise is deeply satisfying.
“I failed, alright? Is that what you wanna hear?” When she pushes the gun away, he lets her, stepping back enough that she isn’t pinned. “I picked the world over her. I don’t regret that. I would do the same thing again, even knowing everything I know now.” She can tell she’s losing whatever little accord they had, and she hurries to finish. “But I know it’s different for you. I can see that.”
She’s seen how he looks at Ellie like she is his world.
“That’s why you have to take her. I thought I could keep her safe, but I can’t. So you have to.”
“I don’t need you to tell me to do that,” he says derisively, already stepping back to rejoin Ellie.
“I know,” she calls after him, making him pause.
He looks over his shoulder, just briefly, and though he doesn’t speak, it still feels like they’ve reached some sort of accord.
*
She goes to Ellie’s room the next evening. She’ll be too busy keeping everyone else distracted to see her off, not that she thinks she’s important enough that Ellie would want to see her off in the first place.
She turns over the little notebook of stories. There’s more to tell–growing up together tends to do that–but she’s gotten a pretty comprehensive little narrative together, spanning the big picture memories of Anna’s childhood, meeting Ellie’s dad, the few years of normalcy before cordyceps, joining the Fireflies, and all of the plans they made for Ellie.
“Here,” she says, handing it over. Ellie is clearly suspicious–obviously informed about what’s going on–but she takes it, and when she flips through the first few pages, her eyes go wide.
“You wrote this for me?” She asks, closing it and holding it to her chest.
“Yeah,” she says, not bothering to say it was Joel’s idea.
She figures she deserves at least a little credit.
She hands over pictures, as well. They’re not all of them–parents or not, she can’t stand the idea of ever forgetting Anna’s face–but they’re a good chunk, and Ellie’s eyes are bright with wonder as she flips through them. She sees her look to her reflection in the window and can tell she’s trying to pick out her features to compare them with her parents.
“Wait an hour and a half and then go,” she tells Joel, who nods. She turns back to Ellie then. This is almost certainly the last time they’ll ever see each other, she knows. She’s made vaccine drop-off arrangements with Joel, but it’s not as if she’ll be going on many of them, even if she thought Joel was the type to risk bringing Ellie around Fireflies after this. “Be…” She starts, unsure what to say. Safe? She has Joel for that. Well? She’s getting out of the hospital that’s made her sick. “I hope you live a very happy life,” she tells Ellie. “It’s what your mom wanted.”
“Thank you,” Ellie says, expression serious.
She takes one last look at her face, picking out everything she inherited from Anna, and then she smiles slightly and turns away, ready to play her part in getting them out safely.
“I think I have her nose,” she hears Ellie say once she’s out the door, as noise indicates that Joel is sitting beside her. When she glances back, just for a moment, she sees that Joel has settled with an arm around her, examining a picture when she holds it out. “Don’t you think?”
“Mm,” he agrees. “Cheekbones, too. Think you might have her chin, but that could be his.”
She pauses. She could directly tell them. She grew up with Anna. She knows these answers. Ellie does have her mother’s chin, which is also her grandmother’s chin. She has her dad’s eyes though, and his eyebrows. She has her dad’s smile but her mother’s laugh, loud and genuine like Anna’s, which she can tell from the rare few times she’s actually heard it while Ellie’s been stuck here in the hospital.
Ellie doesn’t need her for that, though, doesn’t need her to sit and pick apart what she’s inherited from who.
Not anymore.
*
When the alarm goes out the next morning that Ellie’s gone, she sends them west with a story about distant family in California, spinning a tale about telling Ellie about a great aunt and some cousins, relatives of Anna’s who’d moved west. She’s walking a fine line of enough detail to sell it against few enough details to make it seem genuine. It helps that she’s been so stone faced and focused this entire time.
No one suspects that she’d lose sight of the goal enough to risk letting their one test subject get away.
She hears cries of frustration when they discover that all of the tires of the remaining cars in the garage have been slashed, a quiet task she undertook in a ten minute gap in patrols, time bought because new recruits are eager to please and think nothing of investigating a strange noise four buildings over while she agrees to stand guard in their stead. She resists the urge to smile, wondering how long it’ll take them to figure out the sand in the gas tanks. It’ll be a pain in the goddamn ass to work out how to get around later, but in the moment, she figures Ellie deserves a solid head start.
That’s all I’ve got, Anna, she thinks. I got her out. I got her to someone who’ll love her the way you would have. I’m sorry it couldn’t be me.
It’s 14 years too late, she knows.
But better late than never.