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Animals loved Ellie. They just did. It didn’t matter how skittish a horse was, or how prone to headbutting Kebob the goat (Bob, for short) was to any other person that was idiotic enough to walk on his right side. Animals just acted differently for Ellie – they were more patient, more affectionate, and easier to handle when she was the one feeding them or herding them along.
“What can I say, man?” she preened one day, kneeling next to the ornery goat and scratching the side of his neck in that way that only she could do, because if anyone else tried they’d just wind up on their ass in the mud. “I’ve got the magic touch.”
“Animal magnetism,” Tommy countered, leaning with his forearms draped over the top railing of the fence.
“They just think you’re one of ‘em,” Joel scoffed. “Prolly ‘cause of the smell.”
He’d earned the middle finger for that one, but he had no regrets about it.
The skills that Ellie had for animals – and they were certainly skills, Joel would never be dismissive enough to not recognize this – didn’t quite make up for the lack of self-preservation she sometimes had when concerning the less…domesticated…creatures that also lived in Jackson, however. There were raccoons that ran the streets at night, their sharp little fingers prying at the lids of garbage cans and making an awful racket whenever they managed to tip one over, which always resulted in Joel jumping out of bed and instinctively reaching for his gun. He just about lost his mind one evening when he came home and found Ellie on their back porch, tossing small bits of meat out into the grass where four of the little trash bandits had gathered and were happily munching away.
“You ain’t immune to rabies, kid,” he’d told her, after he’d stomped his boots on the wood loudly enough to make them scatter – though one had hissed at him before making its escape over the back fence, and damn if he didn’t have to resist the urge to hiss right back at it. Ellie certainly grumbled about the loss of her faux-masked friends, but at least agreed to not feed them again.
Joel supposed he should at least feel relieved that she didn’t show as much affection for the mice that lived in their house. There was no love lost there, because apparently they were absolute fiends at the orphanage and then later on the FEDRA school she attended, and she didn’t bat an eye whenever he managed to kill one - though a lucky hit with a frying pan one morning did seem to make her a little queasy.
“We should just get a cat,” she said, and he immediately took note of how she was trying to make her voice calm and unassuming – as though it was a thought that had just occurred to her, and not something she’d been mulling over for weeks. “Tommy and Maria have a cat.”
“They don’t have a cat,” he corrected her, “they have access to a cat. Not the same thing.”
The cat in question was a mangy, sorry-looking orange thing that Joel theorized was probably at least as old as Ellie. He saw it sometimes, skulking its way down the street as though it wasn’t aware that it was allowed to walk in any other manner that wasn’t a prowl, never letting anyone but Tommy get within ten feet of it. It had…some kind of name, bestowed upon it just because Tommy and Ellie both reasoned that it should; something derivative like Fluffy, or Whiskers, Joel didn’t know or care. It didn’t live in the house because Maria would have an absolute conniption about it if Tommy even suggested the idea, but sometimes they got squirrels or chipmunks in their attic and Tommy would grab the cat and lock it up there for a night, and then those critters weren't a problem for a while.
“Just saying,” Ellie grumbled back. “We could borrow Apricot, let him come inside for a night and deal with the mice for us.”
Apricot. It was somehow worse than Fluffy or Whiskers. Joel briefly wondered if the teenager had ever tasted an apricot – seen one, even. Probably not.
“Rather deal with the mice,” he sighed. “The ca – Apricot would prolly just bring in fleas in, anyhow.” He palmed the back of her head when he passed behind her chair, mussing her ponytail as she scowled. "And we already got enough of those from you."
"Dick."
He thought this was enough – matter discussed, line drawn in the sand, decision made: no cat. For once, she didn’t push it – she didn’t constantly complain about it, didn’t endlessly wheedle him into trying to change his mind, didn’t even bring it up in front of Tommy while putting on those damn Bambi eyes in an attempt to turn his brother against him as a pressure tactic. The discussion was as dead as the next two mice that dared to scurry across Joel’s path.
And then one night, he woke up with a goddamn motherfucking son of a bitch cat on his chest.
He was sure he had to be dreaming, at first. There was a pressure on his chest, a vibration that was unfamiliar, and a sound like a struggling diesel engine heard from afar. It was too dark to see anything in his bedroom, but he experimentally lifted a hand – and his fingers touched fur.
“God damn it!”
It was a disaster, because of course it was. The cat disliked his loud voice about as much as it disliked the way Joel tried to quickly turn his body to the side to force the animal off his chest – but that’s just not how cats worked, because of course it wasn’t, so all that this resulted in was a freaked out feline digging its claws into his chest, carving out deep scratches across his skin and ruining one of his more comfortable t-shirts.
“ELLIE!” She was at his door in less than five seconds, hand reaching for the switch and bathing the room in light, her eyes wide and slightly horrified to find him standing in the middle of the room, bloody and angry and holding a scraggly gray cat as far away from his body as he possibly could while it struggled to kick its way free.
“Fuzz!” she cried, and then hesitated when all this resulted in was Joel’s expression growing even more furious. “Shit – I’m sorry.” She jumped forward to gather the animal into her arms, and Joel was relieved to be rid of it.
“Hell no,” he told her now, before she could get another word in. “It goes outside, now.”
“He’s an indoor cat, Joel!” The way she said it suggested that this somehow should have been obvious to him. He just stared at her, aware that he probably looked ridiculous; blood spotting through the center of his shirt, his eyebrows in danger of disappearing into his hairline, still breathing as harshly as if he’d just wrapped up a half-marathon. The animal seemed to have settled itself somewhat in Ellie’s arms – at least, it wasn’t kicking as much.
“Ellie –” He stopped himself, forcing a deep, calming breath into his chest before he could say something he’d later regret. “The cat goes outside. Now. And bring the first aid kit up from the kitchen on your way back up, will you?” He tugged on the loose collar of his t-shirt, pulling it away from his skin so he could better see his new battle scars while trying to remember if cat scratch fever was a real thing or just a particularly dumb Ted Nugent song. He barely noticed that Ellie had yet to take a single step until he glanced back up at her and saw her looking back at him with a familiar, stubborn expression that he both knew all too well and dreaded. “Ellie, c’mon –”
“His name is Fuzz Aldrin,” she snapped, holding the cat closer to her chest. For his part, Fuzz didn’t seem to mind this much. He even seemed to be purring again. “And he’s already lived here for like a week. If you haven’t noticed him yet, then what’s the big deal? I’ll just keep him in my room, like I already have been.”
Of course she’d been hiding the cat right under his nose for the past week. A week and a day ago he’d put his foot down about The Cat Issue, and she hadn’t bothered him about it since. No wonder. He at least let himself feel grateful that it wasn’t a raccoon that she’d been hiding in her room.
“Yeah, and that’s worked out so great for both of us,” he shot back, waving a hand toward the spots of blood on his shirt. “You live here. The cat does not. Outside. Now.”
≪ ◦ ❖ ◦ ≫
Joel did not like to be the Bad Guy.
It took effort not to be, though – it always had. Even with Sarah, it was always a fight to not be that guy, that dad that controlled every situation with harsh words and impatience. Joel and Tommy had both grown up with that guy, and as adults they both struggled not to fall back on the only example of fatherhood they’d ever had. Joel did pretty good at that, the first time around. It helped that Sarah was…Sarah; she never really gave him many reasons to become that guy in the first place, even in her tumultuous toddler years.
And Ellie didn’t give him many reasons now. True, she knew how to push his buttons, and there were days she brought him right to the verge of insanity before she took pity on him and began walking things back. There were quiet evenings together where dinners were tense, and mornings where he only got to speak to her though a closed bedroom door. Still, she didn’t deserve that guy in response to any of it, and so he fought that guy down as much as he could. She was an easy kid to love, even if she believed otherwise, even though they didn’t use the word.
The fucking cat, though. She did put it – him – outside that night. And then she treated Joel with icy silence for the next several days. It bothered him, but not as much as having a cat in the house would have. Sarah had wanted one, too. When he said no, she then tried to convince him to get a dog, as though suggesting an animal that required even more patience and responsibility was somehow the next logical step. Once the Adlers got Mercy, this thankfully faded away a bit; she had all of the dog fun without any of the responsibility, and that had been enough for her.
Joel wasn't a pet person, and had never met a cat that he’d actually liked anyway. His grandmother had one when he was young, and he still remembered reaching out to pet it and getting bit so hard that his hand bled. He still had the scars, two little white slashes on his knuckle.
Fuzz Aldrin was not gone, however. Joel assumed that after a week of being trapped in Ellie’s bedroom, the animal would have bolted at the first chance of freedom that it got. But no, of course not, because that would have been far too easy. It never strayed very far from their property. It meowed at their back door as they sat and ate their breakfast, it scratched at the front door every evening after he came home and refused to let it follow him inside, and he heard it howling on the porch at night. He wasn’t completely immune to the distress the animal was in, but after a few nights of this he began to consider if it would be cruel to dump a bucket of water over it from his window.
It didn’t take him long to find the dishes, tucked into a corner on the back porch. Ellie thought she was being clever, placing a large and empty ceramic planter in front of them so they couldn’t be easily seen. But he noticed the cat jogging away from that area only twice before he decided he needed to check it out, and lo and behold – there were two of their bowls (and they didn’t own many to begin with), one filled with water and the other with bits of meat.
“All this does is attract more raccoons,” he told Ellie, shaking his head as he rinsed the bowls out in their kitchen sink. “Which, by the way, eat cats.”
“Wait…do they?” Ellie’s tone suggested that she didn’t totally believe him. Frankly, Joel had no idea if this was true or not, but he was familiar enough with the ruthlessness of raccoons that it seemed plausible. And the one wonderful thing about the apocalypse was that, unlike Sarah, Ellie couldn’t immediately jump onto a computer and disprove the facts he was telling her.
“Violent little monsters,” he confirmed, glancing over his shoulder at her. “They’ll take down a goat, if there’s enough of ‘em to do it. So no more food left out for the cat, alright?”
Grudgingly, Ellie agreed.
It still didn’t rid them of the cat. Three days later, Ellie at the stables for a short shift and therefore out of the way, Joel went through every inch of the front and backyard looking for ulterior food sources that he was certain the teenager had hidden. It was the only explanation he could think of for why the cat was still there. He found nothing, though. As though to add insult to injury, the cat followed him around the entire time, twisting itself between his legs whenever he slowed, nearly tripping him several times in the backyard, meowing at him pitifully and blinking up at him with its creepy yellow eyes.
“Jesus fucking chri – scram!” He stomped his foot at the creature, only successfully driving it from the backyard once his voice started getting louder. It darted around the other side of the garage, forcing itself through a gap in the fencing, and then it was gone. It was the one thing the animal didn’t seem to tolerate – his angry voice.
For once, he had the front porch to himself that afternoon – no yowling cat to be found. Joel took advantage of this and the relative quiet of the rest of the house, and got himself settled in his rocking chair as the sun began to set. It was exactly what he needed, and he realized it as soon as he sat down, a drink poured into a short glass and sitting on the little patio table next to him, his guitar in his hands. It was easy to just…let the stress of the week melt away from him this way, his fingers moving their ways through a few sad songs, the sun disappearing behind the mountains and leaving the sky streaked in brilliant red and purple. It was...nice.
It didn’t last. He was alone, his hand placing his glass back on the table and then returning to the guitar. The next time he reached a hand out for another sip without looking, his fingers brushed against fur, instead.
“You gotta be kiddin’.” Of course the cat was back, standing on all four paws on the table next to his drink, yellow eyes raking across the guitar with a fair amount of curiosity. “Can’t get a goddamn moment’s peace, can I?”
The cat didn’t respond, which made sense, since it was a cat. Still, its gray nose inched a little closer to the guitar strings. Joel made a snorting sound and strummed them quickly, loudly, perhaps thinking that it would again scare the animal into leaving. The cat did flinch, in that timid way that only cats do, but was not deterred from the task at hand. Instead, it did something completely unexpected – it rubbed its head against the neck of the guitar, against the strings, and it did so with some force, the sound that resulted from this a little odd and stilted, but still there and vaguely musical.
Joel couldn’t help that he found this a little amusing. He wasn’t made of stone. And frankly, this was a much nicer sound than any of the other ones the animal had been making on his porch lately.
“She shoulda named you Cat Stevens,” he told the animal, and then he immediately felt like an idiot for saying this out loud. “Alright, now – go on.” He tried to swat the cat away from him, but all this resulted in was the animal headbutting his fingers with affection. “You’re not gonna make this easy for me, are you?”
This time it was almost like the cat did respond to him, if another headbutt against his guitar counted. “Yeah...alright,” he sighed. “Hope you like the Man in Black, then.”
That was how Ellie found them, bathed in the darkness of the incoming night, the only illumination on the porch coming from the window behind Joel as he strummed along. She didn’t even see Fuzz Aldrin at first; the animal’s dark fur nearly blended in with the shadows, but she saw the movement toward the head of the guitar, a little too odd and large to be Joel’s other hand, and then she saw the two pointed ears silhouetted against the light of the window…
“Nice,” she said, tossing her pack next to the front door. “A duet.”
“We’re still not feedin’ him,” said Joel in warning, his hands coming to a stop over the strings.
“Sure,” said Ellie, unable to hide her grin. “Whatever you say.”
≪ ◦ ❖ ◦ ≫
They worked out a nice little routine for themselves, Joel and Fuzz. Joel spent a little time on the porch every evening, strumming along to whatever songs struck his fancy that particular night, and Fuzz would always hear the music and find him before long. The animal would take his place on the table, just close enough to be able to reach out and rub his face against the guitar strings or Joel’s hand as he played.
“He likes the vibration of it,” Joel explained to Ellie one night. He strummed the chords with more force, almost experimentally, and as though he understood Fuzz immediately headbutted the strings, then dragged the side of his furry chin over them.
“Well, he’s got all that hair on his face,” Ellie reasoned. “It’s probably itchy. You know what that's like.” And he’d rolled his eyes, but continued his rendition of King of the Road.
He told himself that this little routine was something that was mutually beneficial – Fuzz didn’t sit on the porch and howl as much at night when he got a little attention earlier in the evening. And Ellie was happy to have a “pet,” which was fine since it didn’t come inside the house. Win-win.
After a few weeks, he agreed that they could feed the cat. Fuzz certainly didn’t seem to be suffering for a lack of free food; there were plenty of mice and chipmunks around, and Joel saw him chasing them around the backyard more than once, his frame never seeming to shrink. But Ellie swore that he was “getting skinnier,” and he could only be reminded of that so many times as they ate their own dinner before he couldn’t stand to hear it anymore. So he cut her a deal: Fuzz could get some of their leftovers every night, but Ellie had to stay with him on the porch while he ate and then bring the dish back inside after, to keep the raccoons away. Of course, she immediately agreed to this.
He was almost used to the cat being around. Life was hectic – Tommy and Maria had their baby, a colicky little thing named Artie that made Joel blink away tears the first time he held him, and Joel ended up covering for Tommy more often than not on patrol and supply runs because it turned out that bringing an entire human into the world and then keeping him alive after was both time-consuming and exhausting. It was sort of nice to trudge up the porch steps every evening, bone-tired and aching, to find the little gray cat with the big yellow eyes waiting for him. He always bent down to give the animal a scratch between his ears, and Fuzz always responded by rising enthusiastically on his back legs just so he could rub his face against one of Joel’s knees.
“I think I have a cat,” he told Tommy flatly one night. His brother then laughed so loudly that he woke the baby up, and they both had to spend the next half-hour trying to lull him back to sleep, which they were only successful at once they began singing to him. (Apparently, Artie was a Dolly Parton fan, because it was only through the power of Jolene that he finally quieted.)
It was all easy enough to accept, because there was a boundary there. The cat lives outside. Or at least it did, until the storm.
It was one of those late-summer storms that he’d enjoyed in the Before; one of those storms that made the house shake, that cast such a darkness upon the sky that you could be tricked into thinking it was nighttime even though it was barely two in the afternoon. They didn’t lose power, which was a minor miracle, and Joel was able to distract Ellie well enough from it with a movie and some popcorn. The storms were just different “out here,” she’d told him before, the bottom of the valley just flat enough that the wind ripped through the trees surrounding their house with a force that made her a little jumpy. Still, she was fine until the rain started.
It was thick, falling in sheets, the wind blowing it sideways so that it splattered against their front window in short bursts despite the porch overhang. He could see it on her face, the concern that was etched across her young features, the way she kept glancing at the window instead of paying attention to the movie (which was a damn shame; Sigourney Weaver deserved better than that). It didn’t take long for Joel to realize that he’d picked the exact wrong film, though.
“Look, Fuzz’ll be fine,” he told her, those sad brown eyes of hers staring at the screen as Sigourney held Jonesy the orange cat close to her chest. “It’s not his first storm, he’s prolly under the porch and nice and dry.”
“Mm-hmm,” she replied, not looking at him and clearly not really believing him. They continued this way for a while longer, both of them pretending to watch the movie while she grew more and more upset and he grew more and more frustrated.
There was finally a breaking point, when she was unable to complete hide the little sniffle that escaped her nose. Joel paused the movie with the remote and tossed it onto the cushion he’d just abandoned as he got to his feet, stalking out of the room wordlessly with his feet stomping on the wooden floorboards, his shoulders hunched. He practically tore the front door open, then slammed it shut behind him. She heard him on the porch, watched him walk back and forth in front of the window, his arm held in front of his face in an attempt to see through the rain, and then she watched as he disappeared down the steps.
He didn’t reappear in the house for a few more minutes, and when he did it was through the back door. He kicked the heavy wooden door shut behind him, walking through the kitchen with his hair plastered to his scalp and his clothing sticking to his skin – and Fuzz, looking half-drowned in the crook of his arm. Still, he didn’t say anything; he just dumped the cat into Ellie’s lap from over the back of the couch and then immediately swung up the stairway, his harsh footfalls still suggesting that he was severely pissed off even if his expression wasn’t already doing a pretty good job at spelling it out.
By the time he made his way down the stairs again, his hair still wet, but wearing dry, clean clothing, Ellie had the animal wrapped up in a corner of her blanket, only his face peeking out. Fuzz seemed happy enough (he was purring, anyway), and one look at Ellie’s newly-cheerful and appreciative face was enough to immediately make Joel's shoulders soften.
“Don’t get used to this,” he told her, and she nodded as though she had any intention whatsoever of following through with this order. She leaned against his shoulder a little more as they finished their movie, however, and he tried not to let on how pleased he was about it.
From that day on, Fuzz was an indoor-outdoor cat. He slept in Ellie’s bed at night (and damn if the feline didn’t have a sixth sense for when Ellie was gearing up for sleep; some nights she would barely get her first yawn out, and then he was already bounding up the stairs in anticipation). He also followed her downstairs in the morning, where he’d paw at the back door until she let him outside. They usually didn’t see him again until the early evening; sometimes Fuzz was waiting for them to get home from their respective jobs, and sometimes he didn’t show up until Joel brought his guitar out onto the front porch and started playing his songs. Either way, he always came back to them.
Until the evening that he didn’t.
“Prolly out chasin’ chipmunks,” he told Ellie, fingers strumming along his guitar a little aimlessly. She sat glumly on the top step, her chin in her hands. “Sure he’ll be along soon enough.”
And he’d actually felt pretty certain about this. He liked the cat well enough – well, tolerated him, if anyone asked about it – but unlike Ellie he also recognized the feral side of Fuzz; the version of the cat that left bits of chipmunk on the back porch (and, one time, a half-dead garter snake that he tried to bring inside with him), and sometimes got into a hissing match with Apricot when that mangy thing got a little too close to their front porch. Fuzz had a schedule he liked to keep, but Joel hardly expected strict punctuality out of it. Still, he and Ellie lingered a little longer than they usually would on the porch that night, the colorful sky turning to darkness and stars before they both finally, reluctantly, went inside.
Fuzz didn’t show up the next day, either. There was no small gray cat meowing at either door, no sharp little paws scratching at the wood. Ellie put out a bowl of food - some leftover bits of chicken - before she left for her greenhouse shift, and Joel didn’t even mention the raccoons. When he came home later that day, he glanced out on the back porch and saw that the bowl was still there, the chicken undisturbed. Fuzz didn’t show up that night for his music session.
“What would people do before, when this happened?” Ellie asked him.
“Make posters with pictures of their lost pets on ‘em, put ‘em up on electric poles,” he answered, but this wasn’t very useful information since Jackson had a tendency to lack spare cameras and a Kinko’s.
It didn’t stop Ellie from trying, though. She spent the rest of that evening at the kitchen table with her sketchbook and a box of colored pencils that Joel had brought back for her from patrol a couple of months previously, and what resulted from this was a pretty accurate drawing of a small gray cat with big yellow eyes. Joel walked with her to the Community Center the next morning, where they stuck it to the big bulletin board just inside the double doors. MISSING read the big block letters at the top of the page, CONTACT ELLIE OR JOEL ON RANCHER STREET IF FOUND in smaller letters on the bottom.
“Most people offered a reward if anyone brought their pet back to ‘em,” he advised her, and she snorted and replied, “Like my eternal gratitude isn’t enough?”
They walked back home together, Joel with one arm around her shoulders.
Ellie allowed herself to remain optimistic for at least a few days. By the end of the week, however, it was clear that she’d given up hope. She was a glum figure at their dinner table every night, and she no longer joined him on the porch in the evening while he strummed his guitar.
Privately, quietly, Joel asked around about their missing friend. If one of their neighbors had found a deceased gray cat, he wanted to know about it before Ellie found out. The raccoons in Jackson really were a ruthless bunch, and there were other dangers afoot; coyotes on the other side of the settlement walls, other cats that were far bigger and stronger than Fuzz – and more territorial. But no one had seen a small gray cat with big yellow eyes.
A month later, Ellie came home in the evening with the MISSING poster in her hand, and she shrugged at the curious look he spared toward it. “At least this way I get to still look at his face,” she told him, and she slumped her way up the stairs before he could even begin to think of the right way to respond to this.
She joined him on the porch a little later, however, taking her usual place on the top step as he sat in his rocking chair, a drink in a glass next to him. His heart wasn’t really in it tonight, though; maybe because she also didn’t seem that interested. He abandoned the instrument after just two songs, leaning it against the wall of the house and then joining her on the top step even though he groaned while he did, his left knee popping slightly.
“We can get another cat, if you want,” he said, and he couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of his mouth even as he said them. Anything to make her smile again, he thought. Hell, he’d bring the flea-ridden Apricot inside, if that’s what it took. She shook her head, but when she turned to look at him there was just the ghost of a smile starting on her thin lips.
“Nah. It wouldn’t be Fuzz,” she said simply, and he couldn’t argue with that. They sat together in silence for a little while longer, two pairs of eyes taking in the last bits of color as they slowly faded from the horizon beyond the walls and mountains. When she next spoke, it was with enough contentment that it made Joel’s twisted-up stomach settle just a little. “I don’t think I want any more pets. It just hurts when they’re not there anymore.”
He caught a brief flash of Sarah just then; a memory of tearful eyes and a dead goldfish floating upside-down in a big plastic tank, their one foray into pet ownership because he'd been stupid enough to let her play ring toss at the county fair. “Yeah,” he said, clearing his throat slightly. “That’s always the downside. You usually end up outlivin’ ‘em.”
“Yeah,” she said quietly. She was quiet for another moment or two, and then she told him with a certain amount of impishness, “Guess that means you’re kind of like a stray cat, huh? You know…’cause I’m definitely gonna outlive you?”
“Uh-huh,” he sighed.
“You get it? Because…you’re so ol–”
“Yeah, I get it.” He nudged her in the ribs with an elbow, just enough to make her pretend to sputter in pain, these forced sounds giving way to a sharp giggle quickly enough to make him grin.
“At least I had him for a little while,” she said once she calmed herself. “I got to love him for a couple of months, and that’s better than nothing.” He nodded when she caught his eye, and for the first time he noticed that she looked nervous. She wore it easily on her face, an expression that she wasn’t ever quite able to hide from him no matter how hard she tried. “And, I…love you, too. If that’s not, like, super lame to you.”
“It’s not,” he told her quickly. He could hear his own heartbeat rocketing against his eardrums, and there was nothing in the world that could have taken the smile from his face. He put his arm around her shoulder again, drawing her close and kissing the top of her head before she could pretend to be grossed out enough to wiggle away. “I love you, too, kiddo.”