Chapter Text
The wall he is facing is not his wall. He frowns, staring at it through crusted eyelashes. This is not his bedroom nor his bed either. His tongue feels like leather, sticking to the roof of his stale tasting mouth.
“He’s awake,” someone says. The words sound as though they had to travel through water to reach him.
“Joel?” a voice whispers unsettlingly close to his ear. He tries to see who’s talking to him. God, why is everything so blurry?
“Joel?” the voice repeats. A slight shake at his shoulder. His brain starts beating inside his skull like some living thing.
“You with us?”
He recognizes a certain urgency behind the words, tries to locate the source of the voice again. His surroundings slowly come into focus only to turn unrecognizable again the second he blinks. It’s a slow process, the blinking, his eyelashes squeezing closed before he chances a glance again.
The clinic? It’s anyone’s guess at this point. Could be a basement as well, although it’s a bit too bright for that. He turns his head, burying his face in his pillow. Bad fucking plan. His throat starts closing up in that telltale way that might explain the sour twang sticking to his dry lips.
“Ffffuuuuuck,” he breathes.
A nervous chuckle is followed by a different voice than before, “Figured as much.”
Tommy? His brave attempt to call out for his brother strands as a confused “Bro?” that is half lost in the pillow. He turns his head a little to allow one eye to face the bright room, squeezes it back shut immediately. His arms feel like numb slabs of useless meat as he drags them across the cool bottom sheet and buries them under the pillow, pressing it more firmly against his face. “Cut them lights off,” he groans.
“No can’t do, big brother,” Tommy says lightly, in a voice he recognizes from previous times he hadn’t wanted to give away his nervousness. “Those ‘lights’ would be the sun.”
A hand settles at his nape, careful fingers sliding up and settling in his hair. It’s not his brother’s hand; Tommy would never touch him like that. It’s not any of the other hands he’s familiar with either. Still, his body subconsciously relaxes as nails scratch the back of his head lightly. He sinks deeper into the heavy numbness that’s causing his movements to feel like he is wading through chest-high water.
Someone snaps their fingers near his good ear. He presses his face more firmly into the pillow, struggling to turn the lower part of his body too so he can roll himself completely onto his stomach.
“Naw, ain’t happenin’,” Tommy says, keeping his legs in place as Joel tries to move them. Fingers curl around his shoulder and pull him back onto his side, a second pair of hands joining in to fold his arm flat in front of him on the mattress and place his hand under his cheek. “Need you to focus.”
Joel groans. He just wants to disappear inside his goddamn pillow, for fuck’s sake.
“I do not need you chokin’ on your own vomit again.”
Those are weirdly ominous words that bring back a whirlwind of jumbled memories. “Tess?” he whispers.
The hands manipulating his limbs into what feels suspiciously close to the recovery position, go still for a tense moment.
“No, not Tess,” Tommy says in a low voice. Someone bends his leg at the knee. Joel doesn’t think he could straighten it back out even if he wanted to.
He breathes heavily against the inside of his own forearm.
The hand returns to his hair, fingers now caressing carefully across his temple. It’s nice, slows the pounding in his head a little.
“Wha’ happened?” he whispers, words clicking with how dry his mouth is.
Tommy’s laugh sounds hollow. “Believe me when I say you don’t wanna know.”
The evasive answer only makes him more determined to find out. He knows it won’t be good. It’s probably real fucking bad, if he’s being honest. He’s not entirely new to the heavy sensation that has him wondering at random intervals if all his fingers and toes are still attached to their respective limbs.
“Well?” he slurs, fighting off a sudden wave of exhaustion that’s threatening to pull him under again. He tries to move his leg because his bad knee is starting to hurt, but his body won’t quite listen. His socked foot barely drags an inch across the mattress before Tommy grabs his ankle. The added weight makes his foot so heavy it refuses to move back or forth. Just as Joel thinks his brother is going to let him in on whatever the fuck happened, the sound of a door opening interrupts them.
He forces his eyes open, staring at the blurry outline of a person in the doorway.
“You sure as hell are the talk of the town,” Maria declares as she steps inside. The click of the door closing reverberates in his skull and he’s right back to forcing his eyes closed to keep the sun out.
“Wha’?” he asks unintelligently.
He can hear her as she approaches the bed. Instead of some much-needed clarification, he is met with gentle fingers shortly touching his arm. “Glad you’re still alive,” she says, voice surprisingly gentle.
Inside Jackson’s walls, it ain’t the kind of dangerous that would make it possible to die even if he wanted to. He might not remember much, but he is pretty damn sure he didn’t leave town last night.
“The fuck happened?” he asks with as much strength as he can muster, which admittedly isn’t a whole lot. He can almost hear the silent conversation that follows.
“You came out,” Tommy says eventually.
Joel wants to turn around to face him and look his brother in the eye as he asks, “Out of where?” but a hand easily keeps him turned on his side.
That’s Tommy’s hand, alright, now clasping his shoulder and squeezing lightly as if to give him strength. “The closet.”
The sound that escapes him isn’t quite a laugh. He feels a little hysterical as he asks, “I’m sorry?” He tries to force his eyes open despite the harsh light reflecting off the pale walls, but Tommy isn’t the person that comes into focus when he can finally make out more than a whitewashed blur. “Simon?” he croaks.
The hand in his hair stills. “Good morning to you too, Joel,” Simon From Across Town greets cheekily.
The actual fuck?
The door opens again. “I’ll tell the doctor he’s awake,” Maria says, at least having the dignity to not close the door as loudly this time around.
Joel stares at Simon’s bright blue eyes, dumbfounded. “I have so many questions,” he whispers.
Joel hated about every aspect of Before that Jackson’s residents happily had held onto in this new world. Yearly traditions were among his greatest grievances. He and Ellie had returned from Silver Lake early January, by which time the Christmas trees from the festive season were still being used as firewood. This winter, however, he hadn’t been as lucky. He had refused to sit around a table and be thankful for anything. Tommy had recognized his unwillingness and hadn’t pressed when Joel had passed on the jolliest day of the year, too, just like he had done for the past two decades. Ellie had stayed over at Tommy and Maria’s to celebrate with them, and apparently that had been quite the ‘celebration’—Ellie unusually hostile in his absence, and Maria so wary of him that Tommy had spent the better part of Christmas dinner playing referee in some heated discussions being held entirely on Joel’s behalf.
But this was New Year’s, and Ellie had been so curious about what Tommy had meant when he had mentioned a party—everything sounding achingly close to how it had been Before—that Joel had instinctively known sitting out another round of festivities wasn’t going to be an option. Ellie wasn’t about to go anywhere without him, and since the Christmas fiasco, Tommy and Maria were no longer viable options to go with her in his stead.
So, here he was, nursing a tasteless beverage that Jackson should stop proudly calling whiskey, standing with his back literally against the wall to make himself as invisible as possible, his attention divided between Ellie and the exit.
He feared he might never unlearn the habit of keeping track of the door whenever he was inside a building.
Ellie was dashing through the crowd with her new friends, some kids a little older than her who had not been too intimidated by Joel to be too afraid to talk to her—that or they had realized just a tad too late that Ellie belonged to him.
Tommy hadn’t tried to bother him apart from a strained greeting when Joel and Ellie had first walked in, and Maria was off doing her Townspeople Thing where she chitchatted with every other person she walked into. It was just him, and his drink, and the occasional glance at Simon From Across Town to privately wonder about the blueness of his damned eyes.
His first glass quietly turned into a second one, and then a third, and then he was finishing his fourth and Tommy still hadn’t noticed. Jackson was a small town, so drinking wasn’t exactly as easy as returning to the bar for a refill every time he hit the bottom. It was a bit more like scuffling past the wall, stopping at tables with left-behind drinks from people that had finally gathered the courage to make their way to the dance floor. It had never been his goal to get tipsy, let alone drunk—Ellie was right across the room, and he would never do that to her.
He blamed the stupid party, honestly, and her puppy dog eyes, and Tommy’s additional whining that had convinced him to go. No one had bothered to celebrate New Year’s straight after the Outbreak—Joel certainly hadn’t. The Boston QZ had never seen reason to draw attention to anything that could serve as reminders of exactly how long ago the world had gone to shit. This happy community bullshit with the laughter and the dancing and the happy smiles and the New Year’s resolutions people shouted at each other over the live music was just a little too much. Alcohol was the only truly familiar thing after so many years of having sworn off any kind of celebration. He didn’t deserve to celebrate anything for yet another year when Sarah had only gotten fourteen chances.
He didn’t think the next glass he picked up was the problematic one; it tasted just the same as the ones he’d downed before it.
He held onto the wall a little more firmly as he walked, almost tipping some woman and her chair backward when he grabbed its backrest to keep himself upright. She turned half around, smiling at him nervously. “Joel?” she asked.
He squinted, dragging his gaze away from Simon From Across Town to look down at her. “Maya?” he asked, and he liked to think he sounded just as gruff as always. Judging by her amused expression, it wasn’t going quite as he imagined.
“Margareth,” she corrected kindly.
Nervous laughter slowly trickled into his good ear. It was only then that he realized she wasn’t alone, the other chairs at the table having been taken up by her female friends.
It wasn’t tripping, exactly, but he did end up stumbling sideways and leaning heavily against the back of Sofia’s chair, one of Ellie’s few teachers. She looked less amused and a lot more concerned. “Joel?” she asked carefully.
First name. He reckoned that wasn’t a good sign. It had always been a polite ‘Mr. Miller’ when she had stopped him in the street to talk about Ellie and her progress at school because Ellie kept forgetting to remind him of any parent-teacher conferences.
He hoped Ellie was getting along with the other kids, that she wasn’t the odd one out with him for a single ‘parent’. They weren’t from around here, so surely that didn’t help.
Sofia placed a hand on his forearm, lightly nudging him toward the chair one of the other women had pulled over from another table. “Why don’t you sit down for a minute?”
He cocked his head. “Why?” he asked. He had meant to only think that part, to convey the absolutely not with his eyes, but right now, he seemed to be failing spectacularly at everything he had prided himself on mastering over the past twenty years.
She shared a quick glance with her friends, as if unsure what to tell him. She nodded at the empty chair beside her that had been already halfway angled his way as if they weren’t sure he would manage to sit down otherwise. “Just sit down, please,” she said.
He shook his head. At the bar, a bottle was sitting unattended in the far corner. It would probably go unnoticed by the barman if he tried to take it. He absentmindedly patted her hand. “’m good,” he said, pushing himself upright to follow the wall all the way to the unattended bottle.
He walked into about five abandoned chairs on his way over there. Despite his shitty hearing, he did overhear Sofia insistently asking her friends about Tommy’s whereabouts. Joel hadn’t seen Tommy in a while, so he must not be inside right now, and Maria would never try to face off with him like this, because that would mean the kind of embarrassment that was a Council-Member-unworthy.
He hadn’t seen Ellie in a while either, but that must mean she was with Tommy.
He was just sober enough to realize that his brain was entering that dangerous territory of not giving a fuck about anything. It was already too dead-set on chasing the old familiar void that he knew would make the hurt disappear completely. He couldn’t find it in himself to stop himself from reaching out and swiping the bottle right off the counter.
He stared at the cool glass in his hands, debating whether he should try to stuff it under his clothes or not give a fuck and wander around with it out in the open. He should probably just take it home with him, but then he could risk running into Ellie, and that would be real fucking bad.
He threw a quick glance around. Huh. Maria was gone now too. It made it a little too easy to bring the bottle up to his lips and take a few reckless gulps.
Sofia was still staring at him, which he didn’t fucking like. He stared right back, until she quickly averted her gaze. Another thick swallow and he was off across the room, bumping into more than a few people as he tried to find Simon From Across Town among the crowd.
“Joel?” some voice asked as he bumped into a dancing couple. The voice sounded familiar. The guy he had traded with for pills a few weeks back? He didn’t hang around to check, momentarily putting his hands on the guy’s hips from behind to maneuver himself between him and a group of laughing teenagers.
Ellie wasn’t among them, and while usually not knowing where she was at was a surefire way to freak him out until he’d laid eyes on her again, this time all he could think was a relieved good.
Simon From Across Town wasn’t as drunk as Joel—he didn’t think anyone was as drunk as him, honestly, not even Stewart, who was notorious for his addiction that even Jackson’s communistic mentality was failing to help him beat—but he was at least considerate and greeted him back when Joel uttered a thick “Hi.”
Joel was doing a very good job at letting his eyes stray to Simon’s lips repeatedly until Simon started eyeing him with a new kind of interest, something like pleased curiosity crossing his face.
Joel almost knocked himself in the face when he tried to brush his hair back. Simon grinned, taking the bottle from his hand, saying something that sounded a little patronizing and an awful lot like I think you’ve had quite enough, don’t you?
Joel wasn’t done with that until he was blackout drunk, until he was so gone from the world Tess would have had to wake up their neighbor back in Boston because the poor chap used to be something like a doctor, which in Tess' book had deemed him capable of helping her keep Joel from dying from alcohol poisoning about once a month.
That guy hadn’t been their neighbor for very long.
He was further gone than he thought, because it really helped him stay on his feet when Simon turned them around until Joel was sandwiched between the wall and the handsome fella he had secretly been eyeing for weeks—not so secretly that Ellie hadn't raised a curious eyebrow at him at least once, but just secretly enough that she had never said anything.
The community building wasn’t empty—more like the complete opposite, with half the town packed in here and the other half outside, celebrating around fires and setting off firecrackers one of the dads had made. Now that he thought about it, that was probably the reason Ellie had been gone from his sight for so long already. He didn’t really fucking care about who could see them when Simon leaned in a little, now the one to stare at Joel’s lips.
“You’re really drunk,” Simon breathed. The air between them smelled like alcohol. It made Joel feel a little less like a fuck-up for what he was about to try to do to forget about the dull pain throbbing in his chest.
“Yeah,” he admitted in a rare moment of honesty.
A hand next to his head. Simon leaned in closer, until Joel thought he could taste him if he breathed in deeply.
“You sure?”
Joel didn’t answer. His eyes dipped down to Simon’s lips. His mouth wasn’t too big, more on the small side really. It had been the blue eyes and the dirty blonde hair that had caught his attention. He lifted an uncoordinated hand, planted it on the back of Simon’s neck, and pulled him forward with enough force to knock their noses together painfully before their lips finally met.
He kissed like he wasn’t going to stay with this gang for long anyway.
Had it been another time, another group of people—no Ellie—he would have left. He would have made himself scarce with his head still pounding and the group’s rations stuffed in his pack the very next morning.
But this was Jackson, so more likely, he was going to be faced with consequences he was too drunk to even remember, let alone worry about.
Dr. V is one of the many many people in Jackson that Joel can’t stand. He doesn’t trust anyone who doesn’t have a proper last name. What’s V hiding, huh? Why can’t she just share her name like a normal person? Why—
“What pills did you take?”
Fuck Tommy’s stupid recovery position. Joel is working very hard on turning his body onto his stomach again, properly this time. He ain’t going to talk to no fucking doctor.
“Joel,” Dr. V says patiently, because Tommy must have told her that calling him Mr. Miller is not going to score her any points.
“Didn’t take no goddamn pills,” he grumbles into the pillow. He’s managed to turn his head, so all that’s left to do is twist his arms, and torso, and hips, and legs too, and then he’s going to starfish in this stupid hospital bed and hope they all think he died.
“Jackson has a very strict drug policy,” Dr. V reminds him calmly, like Joel doesn’t know that. Despite his best efforts to do better by Ellie, he had gotten back into the business of smuggling and trading whatever he could get his hands on. Weed’s fine—the Council must have realized that keeping that kind of relief from a town of traumatized people living in a prescription-drugs-barren land wasn’t going to do anyone any good—but pills were somehow a hard line no one was allowed to cross. Dealing in them had consequences, and if you kept distributing them after a hefty warning, getting kicked out wasn’t unthinkable—like Jamie two summers back, if Tommy was to be believed.
“Ain’t no snitch either,” which might sound incriminating, but if Joel had been the one to trade the pills, he wouldn’t have almost OD’d on them. This stuff going around in Jackson was of a whole different level than the watered-down pills he’d been trading in back in the Boston QZ. That stuff would pulverize if you pressed it between your thumb and index finger too hard, and he’d needed at least four to even get anywhere close to being able to fall asleep. The shit he’d traded for a bag of weed two weeks ago? Not to be fucked around with. One pill and a bottle of alcohol would have been pushing it. The three pills Joel suspects he had taken in addition to that? Possibly sufficient to soothe him to the kind of sleep he somehow had still managed to wake from, probably defying terrifyingly small odds.
It’s like he’s tranquilized. His leg finally slips and his hip slams into the mattress. Fully sprawled on his stomach, the pillow suddenly feels weirdly suffocating. He struggles to turn his head sideways again.
“Joel.”
He hears a familiar rattling that brings back some fragmented memories from last night. Himself, alone in his kitchen, calling back to who he suspects must have been Simon. I will be there in a second. The small glass bottle he had hidden underneath the one loose floorboard he had discovered between the kitchen island and the sink. He hadn’t been sure how many pills to take, then had taken four because he had always taken four before.
He will never take four of anything ever again.
“Imagine kids getting their hands on these,” Dr. V says, shaking the bottle of pills again. Someone must have taken it from Joel’s house along with his unconscious body while he had been in the middle of OD’ing.
The very same kids who are doing weed before they’ve even turned eighteen.
“You want Ellie and her friends taking the same pills?”
He knows how this will go. He’ll say a name, and it’s going to be passed on to the Council, and the person attached to that name is going to be in a whole lot of trouble.
Then, that person is going to know it had been Joel who’d ratted him out, because if he’s turned himself into the talk of the town last night, it will probably make it very easy to connect him to a high that had gotten out of hand and caught the attention of the Council. Especially with his fucking sister-in-law being on the Town Council—and Tommy busy making the necessary preparations to get himself appointed a chair right next to her.
“Max,” he tells the pillow, because no way in hell is he ever going to let Ellie get in any kind of situation that would let her get close to anything stronger than weed—if he had his way, she wouldn’t even so much as smell weed either, which he has to admit is a little ridiculous, with the whole weed growing business he’s got going on in the deserted town a two-hour ride from Jackson.
“Which Max?” Dr. V presses kindly.
“The Maxwell kid,” he says, barely intelligible toward the end of his answer. His tongue is feeling funny inside his mouth, and when he parts his lips, it slips out a little and presses against the pillow.
He tries to tell Dr. V as much.
Joel had never liked Seth much, but when the word faggot fell from that idiot’s lips, he was seeing red, and the added factor of the alcohol rushing through his veins meant that any poor self-control he normally had was out of the fucking window.
Simon was the only one who tried to keep him back, which he kept up for about the three seconds it took Joel in his drunken state to wiggle himself out from between Simon and the wall.
Judging by Seth’s surprised expression—mirroring just about everyone’s surprised expression, because Seth’s homophobic exclamations were always the kind of loud that drew the attention of everyone within a ten-foot radius—he hadn’t expected Joel, of all people, to be the one Simon had enthusiastically started groping some five delicious minutes into what had started out as innocent, albeit undeniably gay, kissing.
Simon tried to keep his arm back as Joel was preparing to swing his fist straight into Seth’s face; it didn’t keep him from doing exactly that.
Seth went down with a pained yell, gripping at his bleeding nose. Joel barely registered that the band had stopped playing as he followed him down. He grabbed Seth’s shirt, pinning his body between his legs. The sound of his fist repeatedly meeting flesh and bone filled him with a sickening satisfaction. Onlookers started shouting until about as many people were pulling him off Seth as people were pulling Seth out from under him. They rolled the bastard onto his side to prevent him from choking on his own blood.
Joel had been thrown out of establishments before. Not by this many people, because the kind of danger people thought a guy like him posed post-Outbreak had been very different from the kind of violence they knew he could exhibit nowadays. He had half a mind not to try to take on the five strongest guys that had been inside when fists had started flying as they kept a firm hold onto him and marched him straight to the front doors.
“You should go home,” one of them said as Joel turned around on the slippery snow the second he was pushed outside, debating whether to try and fight them instead.
“He started it!” he slurred, catching the attention of about every single person surrounding the bonfire. It didn’t help that he was swaying on his feet, barely managing to stay upright. For the first time in years, his feisty expression and fiery words were not impressing anyone.
They all knew he was the deadliest guy in town, that he was nothing but a wolf in sheep’s clothing trying to play along with the lambs. He could end up killing whomever if anything set him off. If he hadn’t been Tommy’s brother, and Tommy hadn’t been such a trusted member of the community, Joel doubted anyone would have let him stay. They would have welcomed just Ellie at most—and Joel suspected Tommy and Maria had been expected to stand surety for him. Maybe they had been forced to, even.
Simon slipped out past the group of men. “I’ll take him home,” he said placatingly, clutching two hands around Joel’s left bicep. He pushed insistently until Joel let himself be turned around and away from the Town Hall. “Jesus Christ,” he heard Simon whisper under his breath when Joel leveled the people still staring at him with a look so threatening some folks refused to even stay near the campfire as he was led past it.
Simon let go of him when they had left the festivities behind them; the streets further down from the town center almost empty. He said close to nothing as Joel insisted on stumbling around like a young deer on ice as they slowly made their way across town. He was walking far from a straight line, and if sobriety tests at the side of the road had still been a thing, he would have failed so spectacularly another car would have most likely hit him before he had managed to finish his imaginary line.
“How much did you drink?” Simon asked with bemusement as Joel tried to walk backwards in front of him to make it clear he was only letting Simon walk him home, and he nearly tripped repeatedly. If Infected breached the walls tonight, he was going to be so fucking dead even the Afterlife wouldn’t want him anymore.
How much he had drunk didn’t really matter, because unlike Before, he didn’t have the faintest idea about the ABV of any drinks served in Jackson. “A few,” he said as if the slurring he couldn’t keep out of his voice wasn’t betraying him constantly.
“A few?” Simon smiled. He seemed to feel a little sadistic, as he didn’t even try to catch Joel when he inevitably did end up tripping over his own feet. Snow, turned into a road by a hundred feet walking up and down it all week long, had turned the ground into a painfully hard surface. He couldn’t help the pained grunt that escaped him when he went down on his bad knee. Suddenly, Simon was rushing to his side and helping him up and apologizing for even allowing him to get into the position to be able to trip in the first place.
He guessed this was as good an excuse as any, so he didn’t let go of Simon’s arm until they made it to his house. He stumbled as he was helped up the porch steps. He felt extra fucking stupid, because the street was empty and the house was dark and Ellie didn’t seem to be home yet. So he asked Simon inside, and then he asked him upstairs, and as Simon waited for him in the hallway, looking around in curious wonder, Joel slipped into the kitchen to reach under the loose floorboard so he could truly shut his mind off for one blessed night.
He does not die. Not from the initial overdose, nor from the aftereffects which included a numb tongue that he could apparently have accidentally swallowed had he been lying on his back instead of his stomach at the time. Ellie is staying with Dina and her mom and has apparently been told as much as that Joel had food poisoning, which isn’t something you want to be around. Joel isn’t sure if he will ever find the courage to tell her the truth instead. He feels so ashamed and miserable that he decides to simply not think about the Ellie-shaped problem at all and shove it into the furthest corner of his mind.
The thing is, he’s finally sitting upright in bed, because Dr. V had told Tommy and Simon that he had to eat and drink something; the self-wallowing had dragged on long enough.
“We, uh—” Joel says awkwardly instead of accepting the bite Simon is holding out for him.
“Slept together?” Simon asks, sharing a look with Tommy that Joel doesn’t like in the slightest. He shakes his head. “Nah. You passed out on me before we even had our shirts off.”
Tommy lets go of Joel’s shoulders momentarily to wipe his hands on his jeans. Joel almost goes crashing flat onto his back, Simon grunting as he catches him just in time.
“Simon came to get me, actually,” Tommy says.
That somewhat tracks. It would at least explain why he’s still here. They had never talked before Joel had decided making out with him at the town’s New Year’s party was as good a new year’s resolution as any.
“You didn’t want to wake up when I went to get a piss,” Simon clarifies. “Turned out you had been lying in your own vomit for quite a while.”
Joel’s eyes shoot to Tommy. Oh, fuck. He’d promised him, promised Tommy he would never have to find Joel like that again. He was going to be more careful. He was no longer going to try and die. He’d promised Tess as much too—had tried to promise her at least. She had never let him finish the sentence because she had known words like those hadn’t been the kind he would have been able to keep. The darkness that had made itself at home inside his mind wouldn’t have let him.
“We carried you to the clinic together.”
Joel accepts the glass Tommy presses to his lips, taking a few tentative sips to buy himself some time. He smacks his lips, relishing in their wetness, grateful as the sour taste that had been sticking to them starts to wash away. “I’m sorry,” he says. He lifts a hand, barely manages to reach Tommy’s thigh. “I’m so goddamn sorry, Tom.”
Tommy stares at him like he isn’t sure if he should believe him. “Okay,” he breathes, his own hand landing on top of Joel’s. His thumb brushes across Joel’s raw knuckles. “It’s okay.”
Joel shakes his head. He swallows thickly. It’s not fucking okay.
“Ellie?” he asks.
Tommy smiles sadly. “She doesn’t know. Didn’t see you, somehow.”
Joel sighs in relief. “Thank God.”
“More like, thank Simon. He made sure you made it home.”
Joel looks at Simon From Across Town. He parts his lips, trying to say the words. All he manages is the tiniest nod.
Simon squeezes his arm in turn.
Simon and Tommy work together carefully as they ease him back into the pillows, having gotten more from God knows where to prop him up so he can sit semi-upright without help. Tommy pulls that face that means he has something to say but isn’t quite sure if he should say it.
Simon looks between them, then silently gets up. “I’m going home,” he says, already making his way over to the door.
“Thank you,” Tommy says, because they all know Joel never will.
Simon nods again. The silence they’re left in turns particularly tense.
“Maria’s been talking to the Council,” Tommy says, facing away from Joel, his gaze pointed out the window.
“About me?” he asks, already afraid of the answer. He doesn’t care if they end up banishing him, but he knows that would mean Ellie would want to go with him instead of staying here, where it’s safe and she can focus on other things besides surviving. Where there are kids her age and she gets to complain about homework and there’s much more stuff to learn than he could ever teach her.
“You made it kinda hard not to,” Tommy says, with a meaningful nod at Joel’s hands. “You broke Seth’s nose, among other things.”
“Other things?”
“Concussion. Bruised a rib, and his ego, probably.”
“He started it,” Joel says, offering the most petulant excuse as a righteous reason to have hurt another person like that.
“He said something he shouldn’t have said.”
Joel gives his brother a look, about to mock his words.
“You, on the other hand,” Tommy continues quickly, before Joel can do as much, “would have probably killed him if Ty and his friends hadn’t stepped in. Jackson doesn’t tolerate homophobia, but just like Before, murder is still worse.”
Joel rolls his eyes. He can totally see the logic there. But also, Seth had called Simon a slur. Joel wouldn’t mind if Seth wanted to call him a faggot—he could do so all day long if that was what would make him happy—but not guys like Simon, not anyone else when they didn’t fucking deserve it.
“They should’ve let me,” he grumbles.
“What?”
“Kill him.”
Tommy shakes his head again, smiling a little uneasily. “You don’t mean that.”
It’s only slightly unsettling that Joel knows that Tommy probably knows that Joel does mean it. If he had gotten the chance, he would have killed Seth. At least right after the deed, he wouldn’t have felt a single shred of remorse, maybe not ever.
He isn’t the good guy. He’s never said as much.
But he refuses to call himself a bad guy either.
“You’re not allowed inside the Tipsy Bison until further notice.”
He frowns. That’s weirdly patronizing. He tries to sit up straighter. That can’t be all. There must be more.
“Festivities can only be attended with me or Maria chaperoning.”
“You’re kiddin’.”
Tommy levels him with a look. “Deadly serious, big brother. The Council decided so. I’m just the messenger they think you’re least likely to shoot.”
It might have been an attempt at a joke, but Joel doesn’t feel like laughing right now.
“And it would be greatly appreciated if you and Seth could stay away from each other.”
“Seth came onto me.”
“And now the town’s asking you to be the adult in the situation, Joel, and not let it get to that point again. You see him coming, you walk away. Understood?”
He bristles, but when the alternative is apparently actual house arrest, just without the government-issued ankle band from Before, he’s happy to agree with anything. If he has to spend his days inside his own home, at most walking the perimeter of his own yard until the town feels like he can be trusted again, Ellie is certainly going to know something very fucking stupid had gone down.
He nods. “Understood.”
Tommy clasps him on the shoulder, relief bleeding from the gesture. “Happy New Year, brother.”
He wouldn’t call it happy, but it’s something, alright.