Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Ellie knows before she’s even told that the woman is a former FEDRA officer. There’s a way she carries herself that raises Ellie’s hackles at once, makes her stand up straighter, makes her hyper-aware of the dirt on her shoes and the way her ponytail is slipping out, both infractions that would be punishable under FEDRA regulations. 

In an instant, Ellie knows they’re destined to hate each other. 

“-llie?” 

She jumps at a touch to her shoulder, pulling in instinctively, expecting a blow, expecting a jolt from an electrostaff, expecting-

“What’s wrong?” 

She centers herself back in the here and now at the same moment Joel tugs her into a little sidestreet face crinkled in concern as he nudges her chin up gently to make her look at him. 

“Talk to me,” he says. “What’s wrong? What hurts?” 

She could almost laugh at that last question. It had become common enough in the hospital that she thinks it’s just reflexive for Joel at this point. Now, though, she just feels embarrassed. How can she explain that someone just looked like they’re FEDRA and suddenly Ellie is an orphan back in a concrete building with no one to braid her hair back or make sure she eats or sit up with her after a nightmare or teach her guitar on a porch swing in the cool evening air? 

Even in her own head, it sounds pathetic. 

“Nothing,” she says with a smile, tugging her chin back. She scrambles for an excuse that won’t make Joel stress out about her; he’s done more than enough of that for a lifetime. “Thought I forgot to do something for school, but I remembered it’s not due until next week.” 

Joel looks uncertain for a moment–she realizes only too late that she usually gives him a full report of what happened at school so a suddenly remembered assignment would be suspicious–but she loops a hand around his arm and tugs, groaning dramatically as she bends backwards, her mass practically nothing against his. 

“Now c’mon,” she says. “Or I’m gonna fucking starve.” She looks him in the eye and makes her expression grave, still tugging on him with enough force that she’s fucked if he moves too suddenly. “To death.” 

He rolls his eyes but finally starts walking, tugging her up when she stumbles. 

“Alright, alright,” he grumbles, “enough with the drama.” 

On the way to the dining hall, she keeps herself tucked on the side of him that keeps her from seeing the woman at all.

*

She doesn’t find out until her math study period what the woman’s name is, not until she enters the room she usually spends the time in and finds her waiting there with the school’s director, Ms. Erin. She freezes at the doorway before she’s even been noticed, thrown and wondering if she’s in the wrong room. Because the winters get so harsh, Jackson’s school year starts in spring and runs through fall, which means they arrived in time for Ellie to start class after she’d had time to recover from playing labrat. It had been fine for the most part, if a little strange to be in a school system so different than the one she’d grown up in. 

The one thing that had been absolutely intolerable, though, had been her math teacher, a man named Mr. Carl, who seemed friendly and inoffensive, but from the moment she’d sat down in a seat, the only thing she could think about was, Are you dangerous the same way he was dangerous?

She’d started ditching on day three. 

Joel had been called in for a meeting with Ms. Erin about her ditching on day six. 

It had been a surprise, the fact that someone else would be informed about her breaking the rules. She’d just expected to pay for it later, to take her punishments and keep going until she earned them again. She hadn’t foreseen them bringing Joel in to talk about it. 

She also hadn’t foreseen Joel taking her side. 

She doesn’t actually remember telling Joel about David being a math teacher. From what she’s gathered since, she’d told him at some point in the days right after Silver Lake, the ones that are fuzzy for her now. She’d been startled when he brought it up after what she’s been informed is called a parent-teacher conference–the first part of which she has deliberately not thought about further–and she’d been even more startled when he immediately took her side. It had been nice, an adult sticking up for her and even finding a way to make things easier for her. The end result had been her “independent study” of sitting in a classroom by herself to work through some math books. There hadn’t been a teacher free to instruct her, but she’s done her assignments pretty faithfully and left them on Mr. Carl’s desk each morning. 

The system working well means she has less than no idea why it’s being disrupted now. 

“Ellie!” Ms. Erin says brightly, turning and smiling. It’s kind of strange, still, adults automatically smiling when they see her. Joel and even Tommy kind of make sense, at least, but even people she doesn’t know well smile the same way when they see her, like they’re happy to see her just because. The woman with Ms. Erin, though, doesn’t smile, and it’s almost a relief to receive a reaction she’s used to. 

“Uh, hi,” she says, and she doesn’t miss how the woman’s lips thin for a moment. Unable to help it, she meets her gaze in an automatic gesture of rebellion. 

The immediate annoyance she sees there at the audacity is a cold kind of comfort in how familiar it is. 

“This is Janet Mason,” Ms. Erin says, either not noticing or choosing to ignore their brief staring contest. “She’s new to town.” 

“From a QZ,” Ellie says. 

It’s not a question. 

“Great guessing!” Ms. Erin says, as cheerful as she is about everything. “Got it in one. She just got here a couple of weeks ago, and after having a little time to settle in, she’s agreed to supervise your independent study. She was a math teacher back in the Boise QZ, and since we already have classes sorted out for the year, I was thinking it would be helpful for her to work with you on your math time. What do you think?” 

She sees Janet give Ms. Erin a sharp look, like she’s shocked by Ellie being asked her opinion about it. Ellie’s almost relieved to see that at least one other person understands that Jackson’s system is strange. 

“Ellie?” Ms. Erin prompts, smile fading slightly. She leans forward and lowers her voice. “Is that okay with you, sweetheart? I know your dad,” the use of the term for Joel startles her, but she manages to keep it under control, “said you had some problems in the past with a math teacher. If you wanna think it over or talk to him-” 

“No,” Ellie says at once. Her own thoughts about this Janet person aside, she absolutely does not want to have to pull Joel into more stuff because of her own stupid hangups. “No, this is fine. I just wasn’t expecting it. That’s all.” 

Ms. Erin hesitates a moment, but finally she gives Ellie a small smile and whispers, “Let me know how it goes after, alright?” before leaving. 

The second she’s out of the door, the other woman turns to her. 

“You will refer to me as Ms. Mason or ma’am. You will never use my first name. Do you understand?” 

Ellie grits her teeth. 

“Yes, ma’am.”

*

“Wrong,” Ms. Mason says when Ellie’s halfway through a problem only a few minutes into their “class” together. 

Ellie grits her teeth. The woman’s been lurking over her shoulder for the entire fucking class period, and it’s made her nervous. She’d been doing fine until now, though, when she started solving a math problem the way she saw it out of a book. She makes herself remain calm, and even though she very highly doubts it’ll make a single difference, she tries to explain. 

“I saw in the book where-” 

The whistle of air past a switch is a noise she’s known as long as she’s been able to remember, and the shock of pain as it cracks down over her shoulder blade is as familiar as her own reflection. 

Still, after months of its absence, it makes her freeze. 

“I didn’t ask for excuses,” Ms. Mason says, tapping the ruler in her hand over the paper. “Start over.” 

Ellie feels her anger in her chest like a solid thing, like a burning coal just behind her breastbone. 

Still, she knows how this game goes. 

Gritting her teeth, she erases her work and waits to be told how she’s supposed to do it. 

*

Her back is on fire by the end of her math period, but she still makes herself stay in her seat, not even packing her stuff, until Ms. Mason has gathered her things first. She keeps her eyes fixed on her desk, back throbbing with pain, until the bitch finally leaves the door, and then she throws her things in her bag and leaves the room as quickly as she can, filled with a desperate need to get away. She feels humiliated, and–stupid as she knows it is–faintly betrayed. This is the system she’s used to, the system she’s always known. 

But it’s not the system she thought she would have here, not after weeks of lulling her into a false sense of security only to yank the rug from under her later. 

“How’d it go, sweetpea?” 

She turns at the sound of Ms. Erin’s voice and finds the woman smiling at her. The pet name feels like a mockery now, but she knows better than to call her on it. Ellie understands who she is now. She’s met her type before, after all, many times: the adults who like to call themselves kind because they let someone else do the hitting for them. 

“Fine,” she says, looking down at her shoes so the woman won’t see the simmering resentment in her eyes.

Ellie’s gotten more than a few beatings for that particular offense, after all.  

From under her lashes, she sees the woman pause in her approach, and when she starts moving again, she walks to Ellie and leans in, voice low. 

“Are you alright, Ellie?” She asks. “You look a little flushed, sweetheart. Do you need to visit the clinic?” 

She barely resists the urge to snort. Joke at her expense or not, Ms. Erin has no way of knowing that Ellie would literally rather die in the street than ever set foot into anything remotely medical again. She makes herself look up, squaring her shoulders despite the way it makes her back scream with pain as the skin stretches and her backpack settles against it, all of the corners of her books suddenly seeming ten times pointier. 

“I’m fine, ma’am,” she says, in the same robot voice that got her in the least amount of trouble back in Boston. 

Ms. Erin blinks before leaning in, brow creasing slightly in concern. 

“Do we need to have a conversation in my office, sweetheart? Did Ms. Janet do something? Do you want to go back to your solo study? I thought you would like having someone you could ask questions to, but if you prefer studying alone, that’s completely fine.” 

Ellie’s smart enough to know a trap when she sees it, and it’s an effort not to sneer at the woman for trying to trap her in such an obvious way. Jesus, she hasn’t been dumb enough to fall for something like that since she was six. She puts on her blandest smile and meets the woman’s eyes. 

“No, ma’am,” she says. “It was very…” She searches for the right word. “Educational.” 

Ms. Erin still doesn’t seem convinced that Ellie hasn’t fallen for the trap, but when she walks around her to get to science before she’s late, the woman doesn’t stop her. 

*

“I’m home,” she calls that afternoon when she’s back from school. She sits down on their hall bench to take her shoes off, barely resisting the urge to hiss when leaning forward pulls at her sore back. God, she’s forgotten how to accommodate this kind of hurt. Months without it have made her soft. 

“Good day?” Joel asks, appearing around the corner. His smile fades slightly when he gets a look at her. “You feeling okay?” 

“Fine,” she says, only remembering at the last moment not to shrug. “Why?” 

“You look a little pale,” he says, stepping close and pressing the back of his hand to her forehead and then her cheek. 

She pretends it doesn’t make her eyes sting, such a gentle touch when her body still hurts so badly from an angry hand earlier. 

“Not getting sick, are you?” Joel asks, stepping back. 

“Nah,” she says. “Just got a little nauseous looking at your face too close.” 

She grins when he rolls his eyes before flicking her nose. 

“Swear to God one of these days, I’m rehoming you,” he grumbles, returning to the living room. 

Despite the threat, when she tucks herself down beside him on the sofa–almost desperate for more soft touches to help her forget how badly her back hurts–he doesn’t push her away. 

*

She considers telling Joel that night about Ms. Mason. He falls asleep during their movie, and instead of coming up with jokes about how old he is for when he wakes up, she sits and studies him, trying to decide what she should do. He’s protective over her–over-protective, Maria and Tommy often say under their breath–and she knows if anyone else raised a hand to her, Joel would probably chop the hand off. 

And yet she hesitates. 

Part of her hesitation is because she knows she can’t technically defend herself, not really. She understands the reasoning behind Ms. Mason’s actions, after all. Ellie got shit wrong and then started to argue, polite as she tried to make it. She knows those things mean pain. It’s a lesson she’s known since she was a little kid. The only person she has to blame for the way her back hurts is herself.

The other part of her hesitation is a reluctance to make Joel involve himself in her problems again. She hadn’t asked him before, hadn’t expected him to do anything, but he’d still gone to Ms. Erin of his own accord, had taken care of the problem for her. At the time she’d just felt relief, but now she wonders if it was just to make his life easier. After all, he was the one who had to deal with getting called down to talk to Ms. Erin for her playing hooky. The part of herself that was tended to for months in the hospital tells her Joel cares, tells her Joel will do anything she needs of him, tells her Joel would want to know if someone hurt her. 

But the other part of her thinks about how much she’s already given Joel to do on her behalf. It’s not fair, dragging him into something else, especially when it’s something she’s already used to. And what if it’s too much? She’s always afraid of reaching the final straw, of getting to the point where whatever affection Joel has for her is outweighed by how much of a hassle having her is. 

And what if this is how he expects things to go? FEDRA couldn’t have come up with all of it in a vacuum, after all. What if they got their system from how schools worked Before? Jackson is different from Before; Joel told her that. What if their school system is like communism? What if it’s the exception and not the rule? If Joel already knows that Ms. Mason’s way is how school should go anyway, what would he think about Ellie complaining about it? 

In the end, she doesn’t tell him. 

She just lays her head down on his shoulder and closes her eyes. 

*

Her best guess for why she’s been assigned to Ms. Mason in the weeks that follow is to make sure the woman still knows her stuff, to make sure she was telling the truth when she said she had experience teaching. The Jackson school system has been lackadaisical since Ellie got here, and it’s not a surprise they’d need to straighten up at some point. Hell, she’s even heard students laughing in class. There’s no fucking way that would have flown in the QZ, when even smiling might get you a punishment for not taking your assignments seriously. It had to happen, sooner or later, Jackson realizing they needed to try out the way school worked Before. 

She just wishes she hadn’t been pushed into being a guinea pig yet again. 

*

“Everything okay, kiddo?” 

She looks up at the sound of Joel’s voice, finding him studying her. She’s in her usual spot in the corner of his workshop, curled up in what she’s been told is called a papasan chair. When they first got to town, she didn’t go anywhere without him, and she spent hours in this very spot, reassured by the very childish superstition that if she just kept her eyes on him, then she’d be safe. She’s ventured out now, made friends, gotten to know people, but she still spends at least an hour or so a day hanging out with him in here, working on a school assignment or reading a book or drawing in her sketchbook. She likes their Joel And Ellie Time, some quiet togetherness listening to music and working on their own stuff. She’s not sure why he’s disrupting it now. 

“Yeah?” She asks. “Why?” 

Joel has that squinty look he has when he’s focusing hard on something he thinks she’s hiding from him, and despite herself, she feels the back of her neck get prickly with nervous anticipation. 

“You winced when you went to sit back just then. You hurt yourself?” 

She barely resists the urge to wince again. She hadn’t realized she was moving stiffly. She’s gotten used to the background noise of her back hurting at this point, but Ms. Mason had come to class in an extra-bad mood today and used even more force than usual. 

Along with a fucking yardstick instead of a ruler. 

“Just…” She scrambles for an excuse. “Cramps.” She says. 

Joel, though, just frowns. 

“Still?” 

Shit. She forgot. She had her period last week, which he knows because she drinks the tea Maria gave her, and he makes it for her in the mornings when he makes his coffee. 

“Leg cramps,” she corrects, stretching one out in demonstration. “We had a race at school.” She makes herself stop before she goes too elaborate with her lie, already feeling like shit for deceiving him. 

It’s just that telling him the truth would feel worse. 

“You win?” Joel asks, apparently satisfied and going back to his work. 

She smiles and hopes it doesn’t look like as much of a grimace as it feels. 

“Not this time.” 

*

Before they leave for the dining hall for dinner that night, Joel pulls her up short in the house. She tilts her head at him in question, wondering if she missed some dirt on her face or something. For a guy who didn’t care about manners on the road, he’s gone full good behavior on her here. 

“You sure everything’s okay?” He asks. 

“Yep,” she says brightly. “Be better if I had some honey butter and cornbread in front of me, though,” she adds in a completely transparent effort at ending this conversation and replacing it with a meal.

“Ellie,” Joel says, cupping her face in one hand. “I’m serious, kiddo. You’ve been acting off recently. If something’s wrong, you can talk to me. I don't care how bad you think it is. We’ll figure it out. I’ll handle it.” 

As if taunting her, she can feel every bruise on her back throb. 

She could do it, she knows. She could tell Joel Ms. Mason’s been hitting her, but even in her own head, it sounds juvenile as fuck. Yeah, Joel, I got shit wrong or talked back, and then I got punished for it. It might not be how he handles stuff with her, but he’s the one who was all pro-school from the start, and if this is just how school was Before, then he knew it was coming. 

And what would he think of her if she had to tell him she’s so fucking bad at it that she gets hit every single day? 

“I think it’s just pollen and shit,” she says. “Like what Tommy was talking about?” She is allergic to pollen, as it turns out, and she’d spent more than a few weeks earlier sneezing her brains out in sniffly solidarity with Tommy. It’s settled down now, but it’s the only thing she’s got to offer as an excuse that isn't just telling him that she sucks at doing something he wants her to do. 

“You promise?” Joel asks, and she can tell he doesn’t believe her. “Super promise?” 

She smiles faintly. “Super promise” is a shorthand of theirs, an “I need you to tell me the real truth” thing she started back in the hospital when she could tell there was stuff he was trying to hide from her. It doesn’t get brought out often to preserve its integrity, and it getting deployed now means she doesn’t want to break it. 

“Just some stuff I’m figuring out,” she says. “I’ll tell you, I promise. Just…not right now.” 

Never would be preferable, but she’ll settle for “until I figure out exactly what Ms. Mason wants so I won’t need to get hit so often” if she must. 

Joel is quiet for a long moment, and she’s afraid he’s going to insist, but finally he just sighs, pulling her into a hug and resting his chin on top of her head. 

“Whenever you’re ready, kiddo,” he tells her. “I’m here to listen.” 

Her eyes sting, and she pretends it’s just because he’s pressing too hard against the marks on her back. 

*

In her stupid smugness, she thinks the switch is the worst thing Ms. Mason can do to her, and she’s old friends with pain. She knows how to handle it, especially after she’s had time to get used to it again. 

And then the bitch figures out how to make the equivalent of The Hole. 

“You’ll return here after school,” Ms. Mason says, and Ellie looks up, staring at her. 

“What?” 

She knows the hit is coming before it lands this time, though this time it catches her across the cheek, and she presses a hand to the spot, surprised and praying it doesn’t leave a mark. It’s bad enough that she can feel the others hidden by her clothes. She can’t bear the idea of other people being able to see one on her face and knowing what she did to earn it. 

“Clearly,” Ms. Mason says, like nothing’s happened, “corporal punishment isn’t enough for you. You will return here after school.” 

“I can’t-” She starts, and the blow lands across her shoulder blade this time. She grits her teeth and stares at her hands. “Yes, ma’am.” 

*

She spends the rest of the day trying to come up with an excuse for Joel about why she’ll have to go back to school in the afternoon. She’s started doing more work with the art teacher on a mural, but if she uses that as an excuse, he’ll want to see it, or he might tag along to watch her work. She could also say she has to work on a group project, but then he’ll want to know more about it or ask who she’s working with. She could lie to Tommy and ask if he’ll cover for her–he’s jokingly offered before to help out with any “fun teen delinquency” she might be up to–but she doesn’t know if he’ll actively lie to his brother. 

In the end, though, she doesn’t end up having to come up with an excuse, a note on their chalkboard by the door removing the need.  

E, 

Headed out to help with a watchtower collapse. Back late. Eat a vegetable at supper, brush your teeth, don’t play with matches, etc. 

-J

She stares at it for a long while and tries very hard not to feel faintly betrayed. 

*

She follows Ms. Mason silently when she’s led away from the school, trying to ignore the way she feels like puking at the unknown of what’s coming. She tries to reassure herself that it can’t be too bad, but she has a lifetime of experience to contradict the assertion. When they arrive at an abandoned house, Ms. Mason leads her around the side and pulls open a cellar door, and Ellie sees stairs leading down to absolute blackness. She stares at it. 

“In,” Ms. Mason says impatiently. 

Ellie doesn’t move. 

“In,” Ms. Mason says, harder. “Don’t play stupid with me. I’m sure you’re very well acquainted with The Hole.” 

She can barely hear her over the ringing in her ears. She’d stopped being afraid of The Hole when she was 8, used to it by then, but she’d never liked it. 

And now she knows all about the things that can live in dark cellars. 

“It’s not safe,” she hears herself say. 

Ms. Mason snorts. 

“Really?” She asks. “You don’t think you’re a little old for that behavior?” 

Ellie clenches her jaw. 

“It’s your choice, Cad-Miss Williams. You can accept your punishment, or I can let the school authorities and your guardian know that you’ve been incapable of meeting class standards and that you’ve also now refused to accept the consequences of your behavior. I imagine they’ll be fairly displeased.”

She imagines what it would feel like, having to face people and say she refused to go in the dark because she was nervous about what might be inside. She’s too old to be such a fucking baby, and she knows it. 

Squaring her shoulders, she walks down the steps, her feet feeling like concrete blocks. She begs her knees not to buckle on her, to not add another level of humiliation to this whole thing. 

When the door shuts above her, the darkness is absolute. 

*

She doesn’t know how long Ms. Mason keeps her in the cellar. Alone in the dark, her mind fills in the possibilities of what could be just out of her sight in a way she’d thought she’d learned not to. It’s the smell, she thinks, so different from the cold concrete scent of The Hole back in Boston. The smell here is sickeningly familiar, the same musty damp of that cellar in Colorado, mold and rotting wood and dust, and without the ability to look for herself, her brain keeps telling her that Joel is just out of sight, bleeding out on a mattress, infection creeping through his bloodstream, trying to take him from her. They’d spent an entire night that way, not that Joel remembers it. The snow had picked up in the middle of the night, blocking every little bit of light from the moon, and she’d been too afraid of someone seeing them to use her flashlight. She’d crouched there in the dark for hours, tracking every single one of Joel’s rasping breaths, keeping a hand on his chest to feel the rise and fall, her single touchpoint in a world of complete darkness.

She knows it’s not true. She knows she's in Jackson. She knows Joel is safe and whole. This isn’t a dark cellar in Colorado with enemies all around her.  She knows it. But the smell and sensation of earth above and around her is too deeply written in her brain, burned in like a brand. After a while, she thinks she starts hearing things, whispers, shuffling, hands reaching for-

She jumps when the door opens, early evening light filtering in. 

Forcing herself not to scramble out on all fours with haste, she climbs back out. 

Ms. Mason asks her some things, and she thinks she answers. The woman seems pleased enough to leave her alone without striking her again, at least. She stands in place a long while after she’s gone, unable to put action to thought enough to make herself move. Finally, though, she manages to get herself home, walking into the empty house, locking the door, grabbing Joel’s jacket off the hook, and laying down on the couch with it wrapped around her like a blanket. 

*

She wakes an unknown amount of time later to hands on her, and she’s about to reach out and start clawing when the sensation of the arm behind her back registers, familiar as her favorite flannel at this point, and it lets her calm enough to pick up the scent of Joel’s soap and the faint trace of wood that lingers on him these days. Before she’s even consciously registered that it’s him, her body has already untensed, not needing her input to know that she’s safe. 

“Just me, kiddo,” Joel says as he lifts her. He’s still in his patrol clothes, and the smell of horses and leather and sweat still clings to him, but she can still pick out his Joel Smell beneath it all, and she focuses on it, trying to make it chase out the horrible mud smell of the cellar, inhaling deeply like she can clean her lungs with it. 

She curls herself up against him and lets herself be carried to her bed. He sets her down gently and goes to leave after an affectionate touch to her head, but then he pauses, frowning, and steps closer again, taking her by the chin carefully and tilting her face. She allows it, meek both from surprise and trust, but she doesn’t know what he’s noticed until she feels a gentle finger trace over her cheek where Ms. Mason hit her earlier. She panics, flailing for an excuse, and she uses the first one that comes to mind. 

“Ah, shit, did it bruise?” She asks, and his frown deepens as he lets her go, sitting on the edge of her bed. She resists the urge to curse. She’s too tired for a “sitting on her bed” level of interrogation. “Roller skates are fucking hard, man.” 

“Roller skates?” He asks, and she can hear the doubt. 

“Yeah,” she says with a heavy sigh that would usually make him tease her for being dramatic. “Some kids were skating after school. I asked to try and totally ate shit like five seconds in.” 

“You hurt anything?” He asks. He reaches for her head. “You didn’t hit your head, did y-” 

She grabs his hand and lowers it, keeping possession of it when she does. 

“I was wearing a helmet,” she says. “No worries. Just did some damage to my moneymaker.” 

Joel blinks, and then seemingly despite himself, he smiles slightly, amused the way he always is when she pulls out one of the little bits of Before knowledge he didn’t know she knew.  

“And where’d you learn the word ‘monkeymaker’ from, young lady?” 

“Dude, I know tons of shit,” she says with a dismissive wave of her free hand. “Just like I know that skating is not for me, apparently.” 

“Well, dude,” Joel says, and Ellie can hear the affection in it, “be careful, alright?” He rises, and she lifts her head subtly in a silent request that he grants, kissing the crown of her head before squeezing her hand and pulling his free. “You ain’t got much going on up in there in the first place. Can’t risk you knocking the rest of it loose.” 

“Asshole!” She calls after him, flinging a pillow at his head. 

When he’s gone, she feels a weird mixture of relief and disappointment. 

Turning and burying her face in the jacket she’s still wearing, she does her best to ignore it. 

*

Ms. Mason put her in The Hole on Thursday, the last day of Jackson’s school week, and on Monday, she plays sick, unable to stomach the idea of risking another school day in a row in that darkness, worse even than the one in Boston because she could at least reach blindly and feel that there was nothing else with her in that small space. 

“Rise and shine, kiddo,” Joel says, knocking at her door, but his smile fades when he sees her still in bed but awake. “Hey, you feeling okay?” 

“Kinda shitty,” she says as pathetically as she can, ignoring the way it feels to lie to him. She hates doing it, but she just can’t face the possibility of The Hole again today. She just can’t. 

At once, Joel crosses the room, pressing the back of his hand against her forehead and cheek. When he does, he frowns and checks again. 

“You do feel a little warm,” he says, sounding like he’s mostly talking to himself. 

She doesn’t respond, just really hopes she’s hidden the extension cord to her heating pad well enough for him to not notice. She fakes a shiver–she’s had plenty of practice, after all, from being so cold constantly in the hospital–and Joel immediately tucks her comforter up around her better. 

“When’d you start feeling bad?” He asks, sitting on her bed at her hip and rubbing a hand up and down her arm through her blankets in a gesture obviously meant to comfort her. “You did go to bed pretty early last night.” 

She shrugs, trying to look very pathetic and sick and keep-home-from-school-able. She sees Joel hesitate for a moment, and she knows what’s going to come next even before he says it. 

“You want me to get someone from the clinic? That Ginger woman was pretty nice.” She could almost laugh at the way he says that last bit, the same way she’s heard parents in the dining hall try to coax their little kids into eating vegetables. “Could get her to stop by, just-” 

“No,” she says, quietly but firmly, and when she sees him about to insist–his worry about her health going up against his wish to give her what she wants–she gives him her most pathetic puppy dog eyes, the ones that have a 99% efficacy rate of getting her her way with him, the ones she only pulls out when she really needs them. “Please?” 

He sighs, but then he reaches up and squeezes her arm gently before rising, leaning over to kiss her head. 

“Alright, kiddo,” he says softly. “Get some rest.” 

*

She milks her sick routine for three days before she can feel the strain she’s putting Joel under, and then she makes herself knock it off. She still doesn’t want to go to school, but she can tell her being out of commission again makes Joel nervous, especially since she won’t agree to seeing anyone from the clinic. She’s also making him miss work because he insists on staying home with her, and the combination of having to play sick all day and the guilt of making him get behind on the house he’s helping fix finally makes her suck it up and experience a miraculous recovery. 

“Hey,” he says, surprised when she goes downstairs the morning of the fourth day. “You feeling better, kiddo?” 

“Yep,” she says, popping the p. She shoulders her backpack, and he frowns. 

“You sure you’re up for that?” He asks, moving to lean against the doorway as she sits on the hall bench to put her shoes on. “Ain’t no harm in taking another day. You can start back on Monday.” 

She wants it so badly she can almost taste it, having a whole week without having to interact with Ms. Mason. 

But she also has the growing unease that putting off doing her work is just going to make her consequences even worse when she does finally return. 

“I’m good,” she assures him, and under the guise of letting him check her for fever, she puts herself in range for a kiss to her head, a little something she can take with her even when she’s back under Ms. Mason’s switch. 

“If you’re sure,” Joel says, a little uncertainly, and then he does press a kiss to her head before cupping her face in a hand and angling her head up to look at him. “But if you get there and change your mind, tell Ms. Erin I said you could go home, alright?” 

How novel, still, getting to use one adult’s instructions against another’s. Back in FEDRA, it had been understood that all adults were supposed to present a united front. If Ellie had tried to say that one had contradicted another, it would have been trouble for her. 

But here, Joel’s choices about her beat everyone’s else, and she wraps the security of it around her like a blanket before she makes herself give him a smile. 

“Will do.” 

*

Ms. Mason only puts her back in The Hole a couple times after that, both for only the length of her class time with her, but unable to stand even that, always so convinced she’s back in that basement in Colorado, she starts carrying a small flashlight in her jacket pocket. 

It works great until she forgets to take it out when Joel’s doing laundry one day. 

“Hey.” 

She looks up at the sound of Joel’s voice, barely resisting the urge to wince when the turn away from her desk pulls at her back. Ms. Mason had drawn blood today, and though they’ve scabbed over now, they’re still tender. Joel holds the flashlight up, a bemused smile on his face. 

“Y’all got a spelunking club at that school?” He asks, clearly teasing her. 

She can feel her face heat with humiliation. It’s beyond childish to be scared of the dark. She should be able to take The Hole on the chin and keep going. 

(But it’s also so fucking easy for her brain to fill in the blank spots of what could be in the dark with her.) 

“Just being careful,” she answers as lightly as she can. “You never know when you might need a flashlight.” Despite her attempt at sounding casual, Joel’s expression goes a little more serious, and he enters her room, sitting on the edge of her desk. She barely resists the urge to fidget under the scrutiny. 

“Everything okay with you, kiddo?” He asks in a gentle tone that makes her want to spill her guts immediately. 

The thought of how ashamed she would feel at admitting she’s bad enough at school to need to be hit so often, though, stops her. 

“Fine,” she says, giving him a smile. “Everything okay with you? That Earl guy still getting on your nerves?” 

“God,” Joel says, scrubbing a hand over his face. “Swear to God he goes to work every day just to come up with a new way to do something wrong.” 

She pretends she isn’t at all disappointed that he was so easily switched over to a different topic. 

*

She worries, in her other classes, about how the other students are going to respond when Ms. Mason’s system is spread through the school after the other teachers see how effective it is on her. They’re soft, these Jackson kids. They laugh in class and make jokes with teachers. They all but lounge at their desks, relaxed and comfortable. They leave their papers and books in messy piles on the floor instead of tucked neatly right under their chairs in a large to small stack. They raise their hands to ask questions even when a teacher has already given an explanation, and they make guesses even when they’re not sure of the answer. They commit half a dozen punishable infractions each class period, and Ellie feels more and more wound up with each one she notes. She almost wants to warn them, wants to let them know to practice the way they’ll need to behave in the future. She doesn’t want to watch any of them get punished more than they have to. 

But she also doesn’t have the heart to tell them what’s coming for them.

*

Selfish as she knows it makes her, she’s relieved when Ms. Erin tells her that a new addition to Jackson–a girl named Belle, who’s about her age–will be joining her to “play catch up” with where the math classes are at in Jackson. Her family was part of a different settlement before, but they’d had a family member here in Jackson who had convinced them to make the move, and for her own part, evil as she knows it makes her, Ellie’s just glad for a second person to take some of Ms. Mason’s focus off of her. 

“Pretty cool, I guess,” Belle says when she walks with Ellie to the classroom. “Having a class for just the two of us, right?” 

She almost pities the girl for her optimism. 

*

When Belle gets a problem wrong and Ellie hears the ruler come down on her back, she moves her head to subtly exchange a commiserating look. Belle’s been nice all day, and she hates it for the girl that her punishment started so quickly in the class. It had been the only comfort to offer someone back in the QZ, this little exchange of “can you fucking believe this?” eye contact. Open defiance or compassion would only make it worse for both of you, but a quick look-

She blinks in surprise when Belle stands so abruptly that she knocks her chair back. 

“Sit back down,” Ms. Mason snaps, and in her head, Ellie begs the girl to just do it, to not make it worse for herself and for Ellie, too. Ellie’s had her periods of rebellion, but Jesus, Belle’s old enough to know when to keep her head down. There’s no one else here to take the teacher’s attention off of them. If she doesn’t-

“Do not,” Belle snaps, grabbing Ms. Mason’s wrist when she goes to hit her with the yardstick again, “touch me.” 

And to Ellie’s absolute shock, her classmate storms out of the room. 

*

Ms. Mason brings the yardstick down on her back fifteen times before the door to the classroom opens, the woman’s hand raised for a sixteenth. 

Ms. Erin and another teacher from the lower levels stands there, faces more serious than Ellie’s ever seen them. When they take in the scene before them–Ellie hunched forward, braced for the lashes to get them over with, Ms. Mason with her arm drawn back to deliver them–their faces go what Ellie could almost call dangerous. 

“Ellie,” Ms. Erin says, voice very soft despite the hard look on her face. “Come here, sweetheart.” 

Ellie flicks her eyes back to Ms. Mason, wondering if this is a test, wondering if they’re trying to see if she’ll disobey like Belle. She’s reluctant to risk making things worse for the other girl by being the only one who can stay in her seat and listen, but she also can feel a hot trickle of liquid down her back that suggests that Ms. Mason has drawn blood again, the woman not pulling her blows at all today. 

“Is there a problem?” Ms. Mason asks, voice deferential. She holds her yardstick in front of her with both hands, every inch a subordinate awaiting orders. It's her second of the day after she broke the first one on her fifth hit.

Ellie hates her so fiercely that she can almost taste it. 

“If you’re here about the other girl-” Ms. Mason starts, but Ms. Erin cuts her off, voice like acid. 

“Be quiet,” she snaps, sharp as a blade. When she looks back to Ellie, her face gentles, and her tone is kind. “Ellie, sweetheart, grab your things and go with Ms. Una.” She tilts her head to the teacher, who gives her a small smile. 

Ms. Mason puts a restraining hand on her shoulder, squeezing so hard that Ellie can’t help but lean into it, trying to lessen the pain of the hard fingers digging into soft tissue. 

“I’ll thank you,” Ms. Mason says, voice slightly more officious now, “not to undermine-” 

In the blink of an eye, Ms. Erin is across the room, snatching the ruler out of Ms. Mason’s hand and all but throwing her other one off of Ellie. Ellie watches, stunned, as the woman forces Ms. Mason back, crowding her away and standing between her and Ellie. She turns her head at movement in her peripheral vision and sees that Ms. Una has followed and is gathering up her things from their perfect, orderly stack right under her chair. 

“C’mon, honey, let’s get outta here,” the woman says, and her accent is so similar to Joel’s that Ellie moves at once to obey, purely from habit. She pauses when she’s on her feet, though, and turns back to Ms. Mason and Ms. Erin, half-expecting them to be looking at her with distaste for failing the test. A soft gasp makes her turn back to Ms. Una, but doing that makes Ms. Erin gasp, and she feels wildly absurd, trying to glance between both of them at the same time. At the touch of fingers to her back when she’s looking at Ms. Una, she spins, lips drawing back in an automatic snarl, but it’s just Ms. Erin, who looks horrified before her expression goes vicious, turning back to Ms. Mason, who is watching the whole thing with a cooly placid expression, the only sign of her anger lurking in her eyes, which stare at Ellie with pure hatred. 

“Una,” Ms. Erin says, “take her to my office, will you? Get someone to bring her dad.” A dark look at Ms. Mason. “And a representative from the council.” 

Ellie, bewildered, obeys the gentle arm that settles around her shoulders and lets herself be guided from the room. 

*

Ellie waits in Ms. Erin’s office for an unknowable amount of time, feeling sick with anxiety. She’s refused to see anyone from the clinic without Joel with her, but she doesn’t even know if he’ll be willing to go down to the clinic with her when he gets dragged here for no reason. She has no fucking clue what in the fuck is going on, and she replays the day in her head over and over, trying to work out what in the fuck she could have done wrong. FEDRA believed in collective punishment, but surely Belle’s rebellion couldn’t include her, could it? She’d had a note in her file as a troublemaker, but that hasn’t followed her here, surely? There’s no way they could-

She jumps when the door opens hard enough to rebound off the wall, and she’s scarcely had a moment to register who made such a dramatic entrance before she’s being lifted onto her feet and folded into familiar arms, surrounded by the smell of Joel, familiar and comforting. As soothing as it is, she can’t help but hiss and jolt forward in reflex when his hand presses too hard on her back, and at once, he lets go. She tries to open her mouth and apologize for making him interrupt his day for this, but Joel isn’t looking at her. 

He’s looking down at his hand, red and sticky with her blood. 

She feels her shoulders draw in, face heating and ears ringing. She wants to get ahead of this, wants to explain exactly what happened to have made her deserve something like this. She’s always tried so hard to be good for him, and she’s humiliated and angry for him to find out like this that she’s still the same fuck-up that she was back in Boston, no matter how hard she’s worked at being better.

“It was Belle,” she says at once. “I think-I don’t-” She fumbles. She doesn’t want to make things worse for the other girl, but she’s also pissed that weeks of her best behavior have been all fucked up in a single day because of her. “I didn’t think Ms. Mason hit her that hard, but she-” 

Ellie doesn’t get a chance to finish explaining before they’re joined by Tommy and Maria, and it’s only the fact that they’re blocking the door that means she doesn’t just make a run for it at that point. 

She’s startled when Joel puts an arm around her, tucking her against his side, and she leans into it automatically, just in case he did it on reflex and is about to take it away when he remembers he’s only here because of her bad behavior, deserved or not. Joel, though, just squeezes her gently, the same way he does when the world goes fuzzy because something’s reminded her of Silver Lake or the hospital. 

“I,” Joel says, voice deadly calm, “am going to kill that woman.” 

Ellie turns her head up to look at him, confused beyond belief. 

“Who?” She asks, frowning. 

Joel looks back at her, still obviously angry but softening when he faces her. 

“Ms. Erin didn’t hear what happened,” she says on her best guess. Killing seems like a far stretch for interrupting her class, but it’s the only thing she can make make sense. The explanation, though, just makes Joel look confused. 

“Let’s get all of the facts before we do anything hasty,” Maria says, but she looks pissed, too, and now Ellie really can’t make it all fit. 

“Oh shit,” Tommy says as an introduction into a third branch of the conversation, because why should anyone make sense apparently, and she follows his gaze to see that he’s looking at the back of the chair she was sitting on. 

The chair that’s now smeared with her blood. 

She grimaces, feeling stupid. She’d thought she was sitting up straight enough, but she must have leaned back a few times, enough for her shirt to touch it. 

“Shit,” she says, moving back to the chair and lifting the edge of her shirt to wipe at it. “Sorry, I-” 

Joel’s hand closes around her wrist gently and pulls it away. His face looks almost…pained? 

“Leave it, baby,” he says quietly. 

Head still spinning while she tries to make sense of what the fuck is going on, she obeys, unsure what else she’s supposed to do. 

Chapter Text

There is… a lot of yelling happening in the hall. 

“Bet the other kids are having a field day listening to this. Probably the most exciting thing this week,” Tommy says lightly, leaning enough to bump shoulders with her companionably. 

She stares straight at the wall in front of her, miserable and ashamed and wishing she had never gotten out of bed this morning. She hadn’t thought about the rest of the school finding out what happened, everyone else looking at her and knowing she fucked up enough to get beaten. It was one thing back in FEDRA, back when everyone had gotten hit at some point, but here, in soft, friendly Jackson, where she doubts half these kids have had worse things happen to them than stubbing their toes…it feels shameful, for reasons she can’t really put words to, the idea of everyone else knowing. 

“Hey,” Tommy says, nudging her shoulder with his again. “You alright, little miss?” 

“I just want this to be over,” she says, more honest than she meant to be. “I wanna go home.” 

“You will,” Tommy says. He reaches up and hesitates for a moment before putting an arm around her shoulders. He’s clearly waiting to see if she wants to be touched or not, but when she doesn’t respond, he commits to it, squeezing gently. It feels similar enough to when Joel does it that despite herself, she feels it calming her down, just a bit. “Trust me, once they’re done duking it out with each other, Joel’ll take you home straight away.” 

“It’s not a big deal,” she mumbles, in the low voice that Joel usually misses her making comments in. 

Tommy’s ears, though, are sharper than his brother’s. 

“Ellie girl, I need you to listen to me, okay?” 

She flicks her eyes to him briefly in acknowledgement. 

“What that woman did,” he says, slowly and clearly, “was not fucking okay, you hear me?” 

She pulls into herself, desperately wishing she could just disappear like in her comic books. 

“She was-” 

“-and what I’m fucking saying-” Comes Joel’s voice through the door, loud enough to carry over everyone else’s and through the wood. 

“That’s just how school works,” she tells the wall. “It’s fine.” 

“Ellie,” Tommy says, and his voice sounds pained. “Honey, that ain’t how a school should work, and it certainly ain’t fine. That woman had no right laying hands on you. There ain’t nothing you could have done to deserve that.” 

The wall blurs as her eyes fill. It’s stupid, for that to hit so hard, for the simple fact of someone going, “I know what happened, and you didn’t deserve it” and meaning it the way Tommy seems to, but the novelty of it makes it hit all the harder, and before she can stop it, she feels a tear slip down her cheek, followed in quick succession by more. She sniffles, embarrassed, bringing her shirt collar up to wipe her eyes on, trying desperately to make it stop. Tommy holds out a handkerchief without comment, and she takes it, scrubbing at her face furiously. 

“Thanks,” she says, voice tight. “Shit, sorry, I don’t know why…” But she does. She does know why. 

“It’s fine,” he says gently. “You cry if you need to, kiddo. I won’t tell.” 

*

Despite Tommy’s assurance, she’s managed to get a hold of herself by the time the combatants in the hallway are done, and he gives her a gentle squeeze with the arm he has around her before standing. She does a quick scan of faces and finds two new ones: women from the council, if she’s not mistaken. She looks to Maria for an explanation as Joel–face angry but in the way that means he isn’t going to do anything about it right this second–takes a seat beside her, his arm replacing Tommy’s around her shoulders. Maria gives her a small smile and moves further into the room, taking a knee so they’re more at eye level. 

Despite the clear attempt at consideration, it kind of just makes her feel worse, like a little kid. 

“Alright, so here’s what we’re gonna do for now, and you can let me know what you think about it, alright?” 

Ellie flicks a quick look to the people also crowding the room–Ms. Erin. Ms. Una, the two council members, and a third teacher she doesn’t know the name of–and Maria follows the look, turning to the group. 

“Would you all mind giving us a moment to speak privately?” Maria asks. Despite the fact that it’s a question, there’s a command to the sentence that means “no” isn’t actually an option. 

Obediently, everyone else shuffles out. When they’re gone, Maria turns back to her, Tommy hopping up to sit on the desk. 

“This issue will be brought up before the council-” Maria starts, but Ellie cuts her off. 

“You don’t need to do that,” she says, feeling her face heat. “It’s not a big deal. She just-she just can’t hit so hard in the future or something. We don’t need the council for that.” 

It’s only because he’s sitting right behind Maria that she notices Tommy’s hands tighten around the edge of the desk at that, knuckles going white. 

“It is a problem, Ellie,” Maria says gently, and Ellie prickles at the tone. She doesn’t want her pity, doesn’t want anyone to feel bad for her. The only person she’s used to being gentle with her is Joel, and she’s realizing now that she hates it from other people. 

“It was just-” She starts, but Tommy interrupts. 

“It’s against our rules here, kiddo,” he says. His voice is less careful than Maria’s, though it’s still kind, and the combination of the tone and familiar accent makes it grate a little less. “Teachers ain’t allowed to hit anyone.” 

She’s almost glad for the topic being brought up, finally given a way to ask something she’s been wondering for a while. 

“Then how do they make the kids listen?” She asks, discomfort forgotten for a moment under the possibility of finally working out a mystery. 

For some reason she doesn’t understand, this makes the adults exchange looks with each other that she can’t read. She hates it, and it makes her prickly. 

“What?” She demands, going to cross her arms over her chest and wincing when it pulls at her back. 

“How a teacher manages their class is up to them, Ellie,” Maria says. “But we don’t allow corporal punishment. If Janet had a problem-” 

“She’s about to have a big fucking problem,” Joel grumbles under his breath. 

“-she should have gone to Erin. She should never have raised a hand to you.” 

“Technically, it wasn’t a hand,” she says, a kneejerk reaction to dispel the tension with a joke. 

The statement, though, just makes all three faces go tighter. 

“We’ve got two other members of the council here to take Janet into custody, and we’ll take pictures of what she did-” 

“No,” Ellie says at once, feeling her heart rate increase at the idea of anyone else seeing the evidence on her back. “It’s fine. Just fucking-just let it go. I don’t care.” 

“You should, Ellie,” Tommy says. “What she did-” 

“I don’t care,” she snaps, shoulders drawing in. “It’s fine. We don’t need to make it a big deal.” 

“Ell-” Maria starts, but Joel interrupts. 

“Can y’all give us a second?” He asks, and as much as she doesn’t want to talk about this with him, she does want fewer eyes on her right now.

Maria and Tommy pause and exchange a look with each other, but then they both nod and leave the room. She keeps staring at the door even as she senses Joel turn towards her, gentle fingers tucking stray strands of hair behind her ear. 

“We can play this however you want, kiddo,” he says gently, and his sympathy goes down easier than Maria’s did. “But I think we should do what Maria said.” 

She turns to face him at this, betrayed. 

“They have a system,” he says. “It ain’t a bad idea to do it their way.” 

“We don’t need a fucking system,” she says, and it–annoyingly–comes out as a near-whine. “It’s f-” 

“It ain’t fine, Ellie,” Joel says firmly, and she looks down, keeping her eyes fixed on a smudge of dirt at the knee of his jeans. “That woman-” He cuts himself off for a moment, and she hears him swallow. “She hurt you, Ellie. She doesn’t get to get away with that.” 

“It wasn’t that bad,” she says, too low for him to hear, and she repeats it when he prompts, still not looking up. 

“And I think it was,” he says, and she clenches her jaw. “Will you try doing it their way?” He asks softly. “We get into it, and you hate it, we stop. But can we try first?” 

She still wants to say no, wants to refuse, wants to go home and curl up in her bed and close all the blinds and lock her door, wants to burrow in the comfort of the first place that’s ever been hers, where she can hide away from anything and everything she doesn’t want to face. 

But she also knows Joel wants her to say yes. 

“Fine,” she says finally. 

When Joel pulls her in to press a kiss to her forehead, she lets him. 

*

She’s horrifically uncomfortable as one of the women from the council takes pictures of her back on a digital camera, still not sure what in the fuck this is supposed to achieve and hyperaware of the air against every inch of her exposed skin, even with her, Maria, and Joel the only other people in the office. Joel’s in front of her, and she buries her face against his chest as much for the ability to hide it as for the simple comfort of it. He cups her head in a hand, the other still holding her shirt up for the pictures. 

“Almost over, baby,” he says, voice low and soothing. 

She wants to ask what in the fuck this is all for, but she doesn’t want to look stupid in front of witnesses. 

“Was it just hitting your back, Ellie?” Maria asks, and she feels a gentle tug that’s apparently a signal that her shirt can be lowered, which Joel does, careful not to press or drag the fabric over sore skin. “Or did she hit you anywhere else?” 

Her instinct is to say no, to say that hitting her back was the only thing she did, but at this point, she thinks it can only be worse if she hides stuff that Ms. Mason might mention. 

“I mean the rest of the stuff was just The Hole.” 

She feels every adult in the room go tense. 

“What,” the other councilwoman asks, “in the fuck is The Hole?” 

*

It’s similar to Silver Lake, the process of Joel cleaning her back for her after he takes her home. He leaves her long enough to get her bra off and then rejoins her, putting a towel down on her bed so they won’t get blood on it and then patting it for her to sit down. There’s a brief flicker of discomfort at the exposure when her shirt is lifted up to her shoulders in the back, but the shirt is big enough that her front is only exposed up to her bellybutton, and her only witness is Joel. 

And if she knows absolutely nothing else, she knows that she has no need to fear Joel. 

She tries to stay as quiet as possible as he cleans up her back, but he accidentally rubs at a rough edge, and she jerks forward, unable to help it. 

“Sorry,” Joel says at once. “Shit, kiddo, I’m sorry.” 

“‘S fine,” she grits out. “Just…just give me a second.” She breathes until the pain stops and then nods. “Okay. Go ahead.” 

He still waits until he’s given her some of the pain medication he took from the hospital, and his hands are extra gentle as he works after that, but she can practically feel the weight of the conversation he wants to have. She knows he’s holding back for her benefit, and cowardly as she knows it is, she doesn’t want to push. 

“Some of these are pretty old,” Joel says as he’s smoothing salve over the cuts. “The bruises, too.” 

“Yep,” she says shortly, begging him in her head not to push any farther. 

He doesn’t. 

*

He gets her to lay down on her front and then puts ice packs over a towel over the worst of the bruising. She keeps her eyes shut while he works, feeling her tight control unravel with each gentle touch, each small gesture of consideration. It feels kind of like being back in the hospital, when Joel put any one of the nurses to shame with how much he did for her. 

“I’m sorry,” she says quietly when he’s gone to sit down on her window seat, one of the books from her nightstand in hand. She likes when he reads to her, likes tuning out and just soaking in the sound of his voice. Now, though, she’s painfully aware that he feels like he has to tend to her again, and she hates that she’s managed to drag them backwards. 

“Ain’t gotta be sorry, baby,” he says gently. 

She buries her face into her pillow, not bold enough to insist even if she feels like she should. 

He reads to her until she finally falls asleep, her last awareness a kiss to her temple and a soft, “Dream something good.” 

*

When she wakes, she startles slightly at something landing beside her in the bed, and muzzy and slow with sleep and pain medication, it takes her a moment to realize it was an ice pack. It’s got a thin shell of frost on the side that wasn’t against the towel, so she knows it’s fresh, but the clock on her bedside table says it’s been at least a few hours since she fell asleep. 

The idea of Joel changing out ice packs for her while she was asleep to keep her from hurting fills her with something that makes her throat feel a little tight. 

She’s distracted, though, when she registers what woke her up: raised voices from downstairs. 

She leverages herself up slowly, wincing a bit, sliding out from under the other ice packs and leaving them stacked on the towel so they won’t make her bed wet. She shuffles to the door stiffly, still more than a little sleep-clumsy. When she pokes her head into the hall, she can tell that the participants–Joel, Tommy, Maria, and Ms. Erin, if she’s guessing right–are trying to be quiet, but she’s spent too long having to be alert to be a solid enough sleeper to snooze through an argument, even with the help of pain medication. She creeps closer to the top of the stairs, cursing under her breath when she sees that the light is on in the kitchen, meaning they’re out of her direct line of sight. The walls also muffle the conversation now that they appear to have gotten quieter again, and she steels herself before slowly making her way down the stairs, trying to avoid the dual challenges of her aching back and the creaky steps. She’s teased Joel before about not being a very good contractor if he lives in a house with squeaky stuff, but he’d just told her it was to keep her “shifty little ass from sneaking out.” She suspects it has more to do with his paranoia about someone sneaking in than her sneaking out, but she doesn’t call him on it. 

They both make their own allowances for each other. 

“-not how we do things here,” she hears Maria say as she gets close enough to pick up voices. She’d like to poke her head around to see if there’s anyone else she hasn’t heard, but she doesn’t know which way they’re facing, so she doesn’t dare. “We’re a community, Joel, there are rules and procedures we have to-” 

“Rules and procedures that left my child alone with someone abusing her?” Joel demands, and she lifts her eyebrows at the rage she can hear in his voice. He apparently was doing a fucking amazing job of keeping hold of his temper before. 

Without her around, though, it would appear he’s slipped more than a bit. 

“You saw her back, Maria,” Joel says. “And now you’re telling me we know who did that and we’re gonna sit and twiddle our fucking thumbs while the goddamn council decides if anything is gonna get done about it? No.” 

“Joel-” Ms. Erin starts, voice tentative, but Joel doesn’t let her get any farther than that. 

“There is nothing,” Joel says, voice absolutely vicious now, “that I wanna hear from you, Erin. I told you Ellie needed a math period on her own because of the shit that’s happened in the past. I trusted you to look out for my kid at that school of yours, and then this happens. I don’t give a shit what you have to say about it now.” 

Ellie feels a little bad for Ms. Erin, honestly. She now knows that she likely didn’t know what Ms. Mason was doing, and after watching her stand between them to protect her, she feels more than a little guilty about her getting the full force of Joel’s anger. 

Not enough to break her cover, though. 

“Joel,” Ms. Erin says, and she sounds close to tears now. “I swear to you, I didn’t know. As soon as Belle came to get me-” 

“As soon as a child,” Joel all but snarls, “told you you left her and Ellie with someone dangerous-” 

“She told us she was a teacher!” Ms. Erin cries. “And I asked Ellie-” 

“Get out of my house,” Joel snaps. “Don’t you dare blame this on Ellie. It is not her fucking responsibility to tell you not to put a fucking abuser in your school. You were supposed to look out for her, for a child under your care. That’s your fucking job. And the fact that-” 

“Hey,” she hears Tommy say, and from the noise, she thinks he must have gotten up to push Joel back some from an advance on Ms. Erin. He does that, Ellie knows, crowds people when he gets mad. It probably came in handy back in the QZ when he needed to scare the shit out of people as often as possible. 

Here in Jackson, though, she doesn’t imagine it’s quite as acceptable. 

“Let’s all calm down a notch or two,” Tommy says, placating. “There ain’t no sense in-” 

“Tell that to me after you bandaged up-” 

“We already have the council-” 

“-really didn’t know, I swear-” 

They all devolve into a wall of noise, everyone talking at once and no one listening. Finally, she hears a shrill, piercing whistle, and everyone stops talking. When Maria’s the first one to start speaking again, Ellie guesses the whistle must have been her. 

“We are all on the same side here-Joel, let me finish.” Ellie almost snorts, very clearly imagining what Joel’s expression must be doing in response to that. “What’s done is done. There’s no sense arguing about that now. We only came over to let you know that the council wants Ellie to give her testimony tomorrow.” 

Ellie feels her heart rate increase. 

“Why do you need her for that?” Joel demands. “You’ve seen what that woman did, and you said she’s not denying it.” 

“We’re just trying to make sure the story is clear,” Tommy says, still in peacemaker mode. “You said it yourself. It’s been going on for a while. We just wanna make sure everything ends up out in the open, so we can act from there.” 

“What else needs to get out in the open?” Joel demands. “She’s told you what that woman did, and you’ve seen it with your own eyes. Ellie shouldn’t have to go in front of the council for that. That woman hurt her, and now she needs to pay for that. I don’t know what in the fuck there’s left to discuss beyond what we’re planning on doing with her body.” 

Ellie closes her eyes and presses a hand to her chest where it feels like there’s a bubble inside, growing and pressing against her breastbone with every word Joel speaks in her defense. It’s not a bad thing, the sensation. It’s warm, like a hug from Joel is warm, and it makes her stomach fizzle pleasantly. 

It’s just still not something she’s used to. 

She doesn’t know who’s more surprised when Joel leaves the kitchen and almost trips over her when he turns towards the stairs just then: him or her. 

As it is, they just blink at each other for a moment from where he’s braced his hands on the wall to avoid falling on her. She gives him a half-hearted little wave. 

“Howdy, partner.” 

He doesn’t smile at her imitation of his accent, but he does push himself off of the wall. 

“Shoulda known you would have snuck down to eavesdrop,” he grumbles, but he pulls her up carefully when he offers her a hand. 

“I mean, you guys were kind of loud,” she points out, resisting when Joel goes to gently guide her back up to her room. “I wanna listen,” she tells him, and she sees him press his lips together briefly. 

“I’m handling it,” he says, brushing her hair back from where it’s loose around her shoulders, her back making it hurt too much to reach up to do anything else with it after he took it down for her earlier. “We’ll figure it out, kiddo, you shouldn’t-” 

“Hey there,” Tommy says, poking his head out of the kitchen. “You feeling better?” 

“Fine,” she says, feeling a little shy, her hair down and a worn-soft shirt stolen from Joel on over some fuzzy flannel sleep pants, her feet in the dinosaur slippers Joel found for her in the community clothing building that she loves despite him teasing her about them. She trusts Tommy by this point, but Joel’s usually the only one who sees her like this, and she feels like a clam pried out of its shell, her soft, squishier parts exposed. 

“Ellie?” She hears Ms. Erin call, and then she doesn’t have to worry about feeling squishy in front of additional witnesses, because Joel immediately begins crowding her back up the stairs. 

“Do not,” he snaps over his shoulder, “talk to her.” 

“Joel-” Tommy starts, but Joel makes a short, sharp noise she hasn’t heard from him before, and Tommy stops. 

A little mystified by the sheer power of a wordless command, she lets Joel put her back in her room. 

*

Trying to lay on her back proves too painful, so she’s back on her belly, Joel arranging the ice packs on her again. She’s not as tired now, not quite so ready to sleep, but she gets the feeling that Joel needs to feel like he’s doing something, so she lets him. When it’s in range, though, she grabs his hand and tucks it under her cheek so he won’t be able to pull away until she gets some answers. Joel’s face goes softer at the move, and he lowers himself to kneel beside her bed, reaching out with his other hand and stroking gently over her hair, moving it off of her neck without her even needing to ask. 

How overwhelming, still, to be so well-known even without words. 

“You’re kind of being a dick to Ms. Erin,” she tells him casually. 

“After this, she’s lucky I’m being as civil as I am,” he tells her, and she can hear everything else under the words, all the things he won’t say because he doesn’t want to put them on her. 

Still, she’s not ready to let go of what she overheard just yet. 

“Maria wants me to talk to the council about it?” She asks, as quietly as she can without it being inaudible to Joel, unable to say the words too loudly out of some vague sense of shame. 

“Maria can figure it out,” Joel says at once. “Don’t worry about it.” 

“But why?” She presses. “Why does the council need to know at all?” 

Joel sighs, a heavy exhale, and leans forward, stretching his neck for a moment before moving back, shifting from kneeling to sitting more comfortably, obviously readying himself for a longer conversation. 

Still, he doesn’t pull his hand back from her. 

“You know the council has rules they make people follow?” He asks, and she nods, her cheek rubbing against his palm in the process, his callouses a familiar comfort even as they rub at her skin. “More than a few of them are about child abuse,” she can see it pains him to say the words, and she feels a sick swell of guilt. She did that. She made him feel bad. He wouldn’t be in this situation at all without her. “And they haven’t had too many cases before, and none with a teacher. Back Before, a big thing with lawyers was something called precedent-” 

“When you have laws based on stuff people decided in the past?” She fills in, a little proud that she can after she asked Maria about it a while ago after she heard the word in a movie. 

“Exactly,” Joel says, looking a little proud of her briefly before he continues his explanation. “Well, Maria thinks this is an important precedent to set for the town: what happens when a teacher hurts a kid.” 

Ellie frowns. 

“None of them have ever disciplined a kid before?” She asks, disbelieving. 

For some reason, that just makes Joel look pained. 

“What that woman did ain’t discipline, Ellie. That was abuse.” 

She pulls into herself a bit. It feels like too big a word to apply to her. It makes it too real, too heavy. It wasn’t that bad, after all. She’s seen worse beatings in her life, and those could definitely be abuse, but what Ms. Mason did was just what Ellie’s always experienced. It’s not abuse. It’s just…it’s just how things go. 

She doesn’t know what Joel reads in her expression, but he leans forward, cupping her face with his free hand, expression serious. 

“You know that, don’t you?” He asks, tone urgent now. “Baby, I don’t give a fuck what you did. There is nothing you could have done that would have given that woman the right to treat you the way she did.” 

The assurance is overwhelming, too much for her to feel all at once, and she reaches up to wrap her fingers around the thumb of the hand she has trapped beneath her head, turning her face into it in some instinctual, childish urge to hide. 

“Ellie,” Joel says, sinking the fingers of his other hand through her hair. “Baby, you didn’t-” 

“It’s just how school goes,” she insists into the darkness she’s created for herself. “It’s not-it’s not abuse. It’s just school. That’s just what school is.” 

“Ellie,” Joel says, and it sounds like someone punched him, the way it comes out. “Is that why you didn’t tell me? You thought I knew?” 

He sounds horrified, and she wants to take it back at once, wants to figure out a way for it to be her fault. She’s caused him too many problems, and this one just keeps getting bigger and bigger. 

She gets the feeling, though, that this whole mess might fall under an implied super promise situation. 

She nods. 

“Ellie,” he says, and she tries to resist when he uses his hold on her head to try and turn her face to look at him again. “Baby girl, please. Look at me.” 

She grants him a single eye peeking out, and he gives her a pained smile of thanks, moving his free hand enough to stroke his thumb gently across her temple. 

“If I had known what that woman was doing,” he says, clearly and deliberately, “you would never have been in that school. Not for a single goddamn second. If anyone had had a problem with that, we would have left. No one gets to put their hands on you, Ellie. Not ever.” 

Her eyes sting, and the way his touch is still so gentle doesn’t help. 

“You,” he says, softer now, earnest, like he’s trying to make sure it sinks in, “did not deserve that, baby.” 

When she hides her face again, he doesn’t push her, even though she knows he can feel the tears she can’t stop from hitting his palm. He just pushes himself up and sits next to her, letting her curl around him as best she can, soaking in the possibility of someone like him caring about someone like her. 

*

After she’s finally gotten herself under control, Joel slips his hand from under her head gently and then brings her a cloth to wipe her face off with without a word. She takes it, scrubbing it across her face with enough force that he catches her wrist and tells her a playful, “Easy now, you still need that skin.” When she’s done, he takes it back, and she gives him a soft cheer as he throws it into her laundry basket, landing it right in the middle. He smiles at her softly, and she smiles back, strained as it still feels. 

“So,” she says, looking down, and they both ignore that her voice now sounds a little stuffy, “they wanna do this whole trial thing in front of the council so no other teacher will get to hit kids?” It feels impossible as a concept, the idea that they haven’t dealt with this before. She doesn’t think she ever had a teacher who didn’t use physical punishment at least to some degree. 

An entire school of teachers who have never raised a hand to their students feels like a fucking fairytale, something pretty and sweet but ultimately false. 

“Pretty much,” Joel says, moving a hand to the other side of her legs and leaning. 

“And if I do it-” 

“You don’t-” Joel starts, but she interrupts him. It’s like the hospital, when she’d had to tell him to stop reminding her they could leave. She’s not that brave; she can’t give herself an out for something important. 

“If I do it,” she continues, “then it could help other kids? If a teacher ever tries to hit them?” 

Joel’s looks at her for a long moment and then sighs.  

“That’s the idea, yes,” he says, sounding resigned. 

She still wants to say no. She knows he’ll let her. He’ll go tell Maria–in less polite terms than he probably should–that she’ll have to figure it out. But if that happens, then the next time a teacher hits a kid, there won’t be a precedent. 

Someone else will be in the same situation she is right now, all because she couldn’t be brave enough to go talk to some people for ten minutes. 

She takes a deep breath. 

“I’ll do it.” 

*

She’s only been in the council building a few times. Life in FEDRA has made her authority-figure-averse by nature, so the only times she’s gone in before have been to run errands for Maria between council sessions. Maria is one of the three council members who handle communication and trade with other settlements and even some smugglers from the QZs, so she often stays at the building later than other people. She even has something called a bassinet in the corner of her office for when the baby needs to stay with her, usually delivered or picked up by Ellie. Today is the first time Ellie’s gone into the “chamber” room where the full council is assembled, though. 

She hates it immediately. 

Joel walked in with her, but she’s standing on her own now at the edge of the circle, all eyes on her, each face solemn and grave. 

It feels like a cull panel. 

Logically, she knows it’s not, but she can’t make the words come out, the ones she’s rehearsed with Maria, not with a circle of adults around her in the worst familiar way, her back hurting the way it always was before a cull panel from everything she'd done to earn a potential death sentence. Her chest is too tight, and she has the sudden surety that she’s about to die. She can feel it. She knows it. She blew it, destroyed her one chance at a happy life. She’s fucking wrecked it. They’re going to vote to kill her because she can’t listen to a teacher like she’s supposed to, and then it’ll kill Joel, or he’ll get himself killed-

“-scuse us,” she hears a voice say, and it takes her far too long to realize it’s Joel. 

She tries to make her breath work right as she’s guided out of the room by a familiar arm around her. 

“Alright, baby girl,” Joel’s voice says, low and soothing while his hand rubs along her arm gently. “You’re alright, baby. Just breathe.” 

And really, what is there for her to do but obey? 

*

When she’s gotten hold of herself, her embarrassment weighs her down like a physical thing, crushing her down from the bench she’s sitting on in a side hall, Joel crouched in front of her. 

“You back with me?” He asks gently. 

She nods, miserable. 

“Good,” he says, and she closes her eyes when he kisses the top of her head. “You wanna tell me what that was about?” 

“‘S stupid,” she tells her hands. 

Joel’s hands come up to hold them in his, warm and strong. 

“Ain’t stupid if it scared you,” he says gently. 

She ducks her head some more, embarrassed. 

“It was just…” She bites the inside of her lip. She knows Jackson doesn’t do cull panels. She knows it. That’s not how stuff goes here. 

But she hadn’t thought FEDRA school was how they did stuff here, either, not until it happened to her. 

“It was just?” Joel prompts, squeezing her hands gently. 

“Itfeltlikeacullpanel,” she says in a rush of words, feeling her face burn. 

It seems to take Joel a few seconds to work out what she said. 

“What,” he asks, but it doesn’t come out a question. 

“I know,” she says, pulling her shoulders in. “I know they don’t do that here, but-” 

“No, baby,” Joel says, and she closes her eyes briefly. Surely if he can still use a petname on her, he can’t hate her? Surely that “baby” means she hasn’t completely fucked this all up? “What do you mean it was like a cull panel? What in the Sam Hill is a cull panel?” 

She stares at him blankly, wondering if he’s fucking with her. 

“A cull panel?” She repeats, like he just didn’t hear her or his old man brain is taking forever to load, like some of FEDRA’s ancient computers. “Like when…when they decide if you’re gonna die or not?” She doesn’t know how the fuck she’s supposed to explain a cull panel. It’s just something she’s always known about. It’s just…it’s just a cull panel. 

Joel stares at her for a long moment and then drops his head forward. 

“Jesus fucking Christ.” 

She stares at the back of his head, wondering if she should…pat it or something. He seems upset. He’s muttering something she can’t catch, but she’s also not quite bold enough to ask him to speak louder. 

Things seem a little precarious for that at this particular moment. 

“I always won my argument,” she offers weakly, and he looks up sharply. 

“Exactly how many times were you in these ‘cull panels’?” He demands. 

She gets the feeling that answering “four” might actually set him over the edge. 

*

After she explains how she ended up in front of each of her cull panels and then talks Joel down from going back to Boston and slaughtering every last FEDRA official in the orphanage–a kind offer but probably ultimately a bad thing–he cups the back of her head and presses his forehead to hers briefly. 

“Wait here,” he says, rising. “Lemme go see what we can do.” 

“It’s fine,” she says at once. “I was being stupid. I can-” 

“Ellie,” Joel says, cutting her off. “Lemme see what I can do, please? I’ll talk to Maria.” 

There’s an edge to his voice now that she can’t quite read, and she frowns at him trying to puzzle it out. He sounds almost…she doesn’t know. Restless, maybe? 

“Okay,” she agrees, taking a guess at what’ll make him feel better, and he gives her a faint smile, strained as it is. 

“Thank you,” he says quietly, and she blinks at him as he returns to the room, wondering what the hell she’s done that she’d need thanking for. 

*

She doesn’t wait alone for long before Tommy’s head pops around the corner, and she’s torn between relief to not be sitting all alone in a building she’s not used to and the mortification of the idea that he saw her freak the fuck out about nothing. Tommy, though, just smiles warmly and sits next to her, stretching his legs out. 

“There you are,” he says easily. “Was wondering where you’d got off to.” 

She’s grateful for the phrasing, like she just walked out of the room and forgot to go back when she should have. She goes to sit back and remembers only at the last moment that she can’t, her back still too sore. She sees a muscle in Tommy’s jaw tick when he clocks it, but when he notices her watching him, his expression relaxes and he looks around like he’s never been in this part of the building before. 

“Bet you could have an amazing paintball fight in this joint,” he says thoughtfully, and she perks up at the combination of words, completely foreign to her but wildly compelling. 

“Paintball fight?” She repeats. “What’s a paintball fight?” 

Tommy looks to her and grins. 

“Something I will be definitely keeping an eye out for supplies for on patrols from here on out,” he tells her. 

As he explains the concept and starts telling stories about playing paintball with Joel when he was growing up, she forgets where she is and what might be waiting for her. When Tommy casually extends an arm across the back of the bench, she doesn’t even realize she’s leaning against it until he shifts slightly, and she realizes the positioning of it has let her sit back without putting pressure across her shoulder blades. 

“You should have seen his face,” Tommy says with a grin. “Didn’t even see me hiding in the bush-” 

She doesn’t really follow all of what he says–he’s not quite as used to accommodating her lack of Before knowledge as Joel is–but that’s okay. 

Him sitting here with her is enough. 

*

After Joel’s intervention, she ends up giving her “testimony” to a smaller group of council members in a small office, Maria and three other women. She suspects Joel’s influence in this, but the majority of council members are female, so maybe it really did just work out that way. 

She certainly won’t be looking in a horse’s mouth, or whatever the fuck she heard Joel say the other day. 

Joel is sitting beside her now, a warm, steady presence at her side. She’s a little nervous about saying everything in front of him, but she knows that trying to do it without him would be even worse. She tucks herself a little tighter against him and tries to draw courage that it’ll all be fine by the way he immediately moves to accommodate her better. 

“So, Ellie,” says Sarah Lynn, a plump, friendly-looking woman who wears thick glasses on a chain and usually has candy in her pockets. “Why don’t you tell us about your first class with Janet?” 

Taking a deep breath, she does. 

*

She can tell from the tension in Joel’s body as they leave the building that he’s angry. No, not angry. That’s not the right word. 

Joel is fucking pissed. 

She walks along at his side silently. It’s not that she thinks she would be in danger if he remembered she was with him, but avoiding angry adults is too deeply ingrained to forget the habit now. She’s still moving pretty stiffly–Ms. Mason really did some damage on this round–and it’s making it hard to keep up with the way he’s almost marching back towards their house, but she doesn’t ask him to slow down. Joel, though, notices when she starts lagging behind, and he stops at once. 

“Sorry,” she says. “It’s just-” 

“It’s fine,” he says, and she can practically see him making himself calm down. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have been walking so fast. I didn’t even think-” He doesn’t finish the sentence. 

He does match her pace all the way home, though. 

*

Joel gets her some more pain medication when they’re home. She protests the use when it’s not unbearably bad, but Joel’s face goes tight and pinchy the way it does when she’s stressing him out with something, so she takes her medicine obediently. She’s not quite ready to go back to her room, though, so she goes to their back porch to stretch out on their bench. 

Joel takes a decidedly less relaxing course of action. 

With her head propped on a pillow Joel grabbed from the couch, she watches him chop wood with a fury that would suggest they’re mere weeks away from winter and not months. His face is dark in a way it almost never is these days, and it’s not a stretch to work out what he appears to be imagining is on the chopping block each time he swings his ax, splitting each piece with a single, ruthless swing. 

She dozes off to the compelling thought of Joel splitting Ms. Mason like a log. 

*

She wakes an unknowable amount of time later to raised voices downstairs, disoriented by waking up in a different place than she fell asleep, and it takes her a moment of frowning at the ceiling before she’s able to place them. 

Joel, Tommy, and Maria. 

Given recent events, this seems an especially important time to drop some eaves. 

Swaying just a bit as she rises–goddamn, but she’s forgotten how strong some of those Firefly drugs are–she creeps out of her room and to the top of the staircase, wiggling on her belly the last few feet to avoid being seen. From this angle, she can see a light on in the living room, but the angle means she can’t see anyone in there. 

She can certainly hear them, though. 

“-fucking serious,” she hears Joel say. “Or did you miss the part where she beat my kid bloody?” There’s a snarl to his voice she hasn’t heard since the hospital, the kind of snarl that means it’s only a forbidding word from her that’s going to keep someone from dying. 

For Janet fucking Mason, she’s not sure she’s going to be bothering. 

“We can’t engage in vigilante justice here, Joel,” Maria’s voice says patiently. “We have to-” 

“Let her off with a fucking slap on the wrist?” Joel demands. “Did you not see her back? Didn’t catch it in those pictures of yours? Didn’t hear what she said? That’s been going on for weeks, Maria. Weeks of her hurting Ellie. She’s gonna pay for that.” 

“Wouldn’t mind a little parity myself,” Tommy says, voice harder than Ellie’s ever heard it in her presence. 

“She’s not being let off with no punishment,” Maria says, sounding almost insulted by the very idea. “The council is just debating-” 

“Why?” Joel demands. “Ellie’s my child. Why shouldn’t I be the one responsible for taking care of someone who hurt her?” 

She desperately wishes she had the current non-drugged capacity to feel the full force of the “my child” in that sentence. She’s never been someone’s child before. She’d like to bask in it a little more. 

Unfortunately, pain medication and a continuation of the argument are kind of putting a damper on her chance now. 

“This is a community,” Maria says. “We-” 

“A community that stuck my kid with an abuser in a room by themselves for fucking weeks,” Joel says. “She couldn’t even tell me what happened to her, not until today. That fucking bitch-” 

“The council will make a decision by tomorrow evening,” Maria says. “I promise, Joel, no one takes this lightly. Child abuse is a serious issue. We’ve rehomed children before because of it. The only reason she was ever put with Ellie in the first place is that Erin thought Ellie would be able to give an honest opinion on her as a teacher. She feels horrible about it now.” 

“Oh, what a relief,” Joel says, mockery clear in his tone. “She feels horrible about it. Guess my kid’s back being torn up is all fixed now.” 

“Joel,” Tommy says now, but Joel is clearly in no mood to be appeased. He starts in on another sentence in a tone that says this is about to escalate by another several degrees, but Tommy interjects before he can really get going. “I think we need to be done with this conversation for tonight.” 

She hears the murmurs of goodbyes and contemplates retreating to her room, but in the end, she stays where she is, and when Joel sees her, he doesn’t look surprised, just helps her up and steadies her when she sways. 

“We really need to have a conversation about you listening in on other people’s conversations,” he says, but there’s no heat to it. 

“How else would I hear about stuff?” She shoots back, just as mildly as he walks her back to her room. “You guys don’t tell me anything.” 

“In fairness,” he says, holding up her covers for her to slip into bed, “you didn’t really give me a chance on this one. I just found out, too.” 

“You could’ve come and gotten me,” she points out. She moves gingerly to her side. Her back is still too painful to sleep on it, but her side is okay as long as she’s careful. 

“Seemed like you needed the rest,” he says, sitting at her hip carefully so he won’t jostle her. “You been looking pretty rough recently, you know.” 

“Pretty rude thing to say to a lady, dude,” she points out, and he snorts. 

“Good thing I ain’t talking to a lady, then,” he says, amused, though it fades far too soon. He reaches out, resting a hand on her upper arm and squeezing gently. “Speaking of talking,” the segway is weak, but she lets it go without commenting, “seems like you and I might need to do some of that at some point.” 

It’s a suggestion, not a demand. If she says she’s too tired, he’ll let it go for now. 

But she also doesn’t relish the idea of dragging it out longer than she has to. 

“I didn’t wanna bother you,” she mumbles into her pillow, guessing what he wants to know the most. Her hair is stuck to her neck, but like a prey animal, she’s wary of moving, of drawing attention to herself. 

When Joel gathers it up in a hand gently and smooths it back without her even needing to ask, her throat goes tight. 

“You wouldn-” He starts before stopping. “Why would you think you’d be bothering me?” 

She wonders if she could just pull her covers up over her head and pretend he’s not here until he gets the hint and leaves. She doesn’t want to point out all the ways she’s made his life shittier than it could be if he didn’t have to deal with her and her problems. 

“You already had to do school shit for me,” she says quietly. “I didn’t want you to have to do it again.” 

“Did I say that it bothered me?” He asks, and she looks to him at that, frowning. 

“What?” 

“Did I say that it bothered me?” He repeats. “Going down to the school and talking to your teachers?” 

“No?” She says, trailing off, wondering where he’s going with this. “But you wouldn’t have had to if I didn’t make you.” 

“You didn’t make me,” he says. 

“Okay, well if Ms. Erin didn’t make you,” she corrects, a little frustrated. “She’s not-” 

“Ellie,” he interrupts. “Nobody makes me take care of you. I wanna do that, kiddo. I wish you’d let me do it a little more, honestly.” He gives an exaggerated look to her back. “Might be helpful, you coming and talking to me when you have a problem, not just gritting your teeth and being a tough girl until you can’t anymore.” 

“But I didn’t know it was a problem,” she says, a little more heated than she means to be. She’s frustrated at knowing she’s not doing whatever this is with Joel right, but she also doesn’t know how to fix it. “That’s just how shit goes at scho-” She sees the correction coming and beats him to it. “-FEDRA school. How the fuck was I supposed to know she wasn’t supposed to do it here? I’ve never done stuff like this before.” She feels whiny, and it just makes her more frustrated. “It’s fucking hard, man, trying to guess what I’m supposed to be doing all the time. There’s not a rule book or anything.” 

She knows. 

She’s looked. 

Joel opens his mouth and then closes it, and if she wasn’t already a little embarrassed by her outburst, she might make fun of him for it. As it is, she keeps her mouth shut and waits. 

It doesn’t come naturally to her, but she does her best. 

“You’re right,” he says, and she frowns. That wasn’t what she thought was coming. “I was assuming stuff I shouldn’t have, and it got you hurt, kiddo. I’m sorry about that.” 

Oh God. He’s already packing for a guilt trip. 

“It’s not your fault,” she says, and a little more grudgingly, adds, “you tried asking.” She just couldn’t make herself answer. 

“I should have tried harder,” he tells her. “I’m your pa-your guardian here. I thought you would tell me eventually, but I knew something was wrong. I should have pushed you more, and I didn’t. I’m sorry for that.” 

Joel telling her sorry is still uncomfortable, even now. He was the first adult who ever apologized to her, and it’s one thing between them that hasn’t gotten easier to understand. It still feels foreign, an adult admitting a mistake. 

She almost wishes he would just find a way to twist it around to be her fault like a normal adult. 

“Can we make a deal?” He asks. 

“A deal?” She repeats. 

“Somebody hurts you in the future–and I don’t care how small you think it is–you tell me about it immediately. Can you agree to that?” 

“I can handle it,” she protests, even though she wants to agree, despite the way it feels so strange to try and think about, a world in which adults aren’t allowed to put a hand on her lest they risk the wrath of Joel Miller. It’s a pleasant thought, a world like that, but it also sounds pretty fake. “Now I know they’re not supposed to. You don’t have to…do that.” It’s a lame end to the thought, but she doesn’t know how to say, “take care of me” that won’t leave room for him to consider if he’d rather not. 

“It’s my job to look out for you, kiddo. You got a problem, you come to me, and I handle it. That’s the deal.” 

“I’m not a baby,” she protests, though her heart isn’t in it. “I can fight my own battles.” 

“So can I,” Joel counters. “And I think they might feel a little less like battles if you didn’t have to fight them on your own.” 

It’s overwhelming, a statement like that, and her immediate kneejerk urge is to deflect. 

“Awful lot of work for cargo,” she teases lightly, curling into her blankets a little more like they can hide her from emotions, but Joel is genuine when he answers, voice soft. 

“You ain't been cargo in a long time, Ellie.”

The words, silly as they are out of context, might be one of the most overwhelming things she's ever heard. She doesn’t know what he finds on her face, but Joel smiles, cupping her cheek in one hand. 

“We’re a family, kiddo, you and me and Tommy and Maria. Families take care of each other. Next time you have a problem, you let us all take care of it together, alright?” 

Ellie closes her eyes, leaning into both the warmth of his hand and the warmth in his voice. 

Family, she thinks. I have a family. 

*

In the end, Tommy comes to tell them that Janet Mason is to be exiled, finding them when they’re having Joel And Ellie Time in his workshop because she’s yet to return to school. Joel’s pissed about the decision, and apparently more than a few people are worried that she’ll end up leading FEDRA or a raiding party back in revenge, but apparently the council doesn’t want to set a precedent for killing people for every infraction. 

Still moving gingerly to account for the injuries on her back, Ellie disagrees, but she keeps her peace on it.

Joel, however, does not.  

“So what?” He asks. “She beats the shit out of my kid and throws her in solitary, and she goes on her merry fucking way?” 

Tommy doesn’t look much happier about it, but he wears his murder feelings less obviously than Joel, so it’s a little harder to tell. 

“She argued that no one told her what methods she was supposed to use,” Tommy says, and feels nice, the disgust she can hear in his voice. “Wouldn’t think you would need to get told that sort of thing, but here we are.” 

“When is it happening?” Joel demands, and she can practically see him making plans. 

Tommy smiles wryly, apparently seeing the same. 

“You openly defying the council’s decision to go kill somebody ain’t a great look, big brother,” he says, and Joel scowls, though Tommy keeps speaking before he can answer. “She’s being blindfolded and dropped off out towards the old hospital complex with no supplies besides what she brought with her. We ain’t had any patrols out there in a while, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s more than a few infected hanging about. She won’t last long.” 

“You don’t know that,” Joel says. “I should-” He seems to remember that Ellie’s in the room and stops himself. It’s kind of funny, the way Joel tries so hard not to say things in front of her that he thinks might make her scared of him. 

As if there’s anything he could do that could scare her, as if his violence on her behalf hasn’t filled her with reassurance since the first time it happened back in Boston. 

“Ellie, can you go grab me that chair from the house that needs fixing?” He asks, and she lifts her eyebrows, wildly unimpressed by such a transparent attempt at getting her to leave. He lifts his back. “Alright: Ellie, can you go in the house for a bit so I can talk to Tommy without you? Was that better?” 

“I’m the person who got hit here,” she points out. “Why don’t I get to hear what’s going on?” 

She regrets it when she sees that it hurts Joel, the reminder that someone put their hands on her while he didn’t know about it. Sighing, she rises. 

“The squeaky, wiggly one?” She asks rhetorically, walking to the door. “I don’t know, man. I kinda like never knowing if a chair is gonna fall apart or not. Keeps things interesting. Who wants a whole house of chairs you can sit on without being a little scared? Sounds boring to me.” 

She doesn’t wait for an answer before she leaves. 

*

“I’m not a little kid, you know,” she tells Joel that evening as they sit on the back porch and watch a storm roll in. Despite the words, she doesn’t move from the way she’s leaning against him on their porch swing, him swaying them idly with one foot on the ground, the other propped up on the bench, caging her in where she’s sitting sideways. 

“I know,” he says quietly. “You’ve seen more shit than most people twice your age.” 

“But I still don’t get to know what’s going on?” She asks. “Even when it’s about me?” 

Joel sighs. 

“We’re not trying to keep things from you, kiddo,” he says. “You just shouldn’t have to worry about this shit.” 

She thinks about that for a moment, soothed by the slow movement of the swing and the white noise of the storm around them. After so many nights of getting soaked on the road, it’s nice, still, the ability to watch it while staying completely dry, a blanket over her legs against the slight chill as the rain lashes beyond the screen. 

“Is this like the hospital?” She finally asks. “When you said there was stuff you didn’t think I would wanna know?” 

“Kind of,” he says. “I just don’t want you to have to think about that woman again, that’s all. She’s done enough. She shouldn’t be your problem anymore.”

She drops her head back against his shoulder, thinking. 

“If it’s something important,” she finally says, “will you promise to tell me?” 

“Define important,” he says, tugging her blanket up for her a bit when the wind tries to blow it down. 

“If she’s coming back to town or something,” she clarifies. “Or if someone is talking about her maybe having a point.” Now that she knows so many adults are pissed about it, she’s a little less worried about FEDRA practices making it here, but long years of experience make it a little hard to trust in something like that too blindly. 

“I promise,” he says. “Something like that comes up, I’ll tell you about it.” 

She tilts her head back to look up at him upside down. 

“Super promise?” 

He smiles, and the way it softens his face makes her feel even warmer than the blanket across her lap. 

“Super promise.” 

*

She hears the whispers at breakfast three days later, about Janet Mason’s body being found by a patrol. Apparently they spotted it at the bottom of a ravine, her neck obviously broken even at a distance. 

“Torn up to hell and back,” she hears a patroller say in a low voice when she walks past him into the dining hall. “Must’ve been an animal got to her or something.” 

“Serves her right,” she hears a dining hall worker tell another when she’s going through the line. “I thought we should have killed her from the start.” 

“-had to have been an accident,” she hears when she passes a table. She misses what’s said in response, but she catches the, “No, her dad was here the whole time. I asked Vee, and she said he stayed in the walls all weekend.” 

By the time she makes it to the table their group usually takes in the morning, she’s managed to get what the whole story seems to be. Janet Mason, after her exile, was found in the path of a patrol, her neck broken, and her body torn up. Her stuff was missing, which would suggest raiders, but the condition of her body had people suspicious. 

What has her suspicious, though, is the way her number one suspect was very definitely home with her the entire time. 

“Janet’s dead,” she says when she sits down, looking directly at Joel’s face when she does. There’s a brief flicker of satisfaction, but it’s not the same way she thinks it would look if he’d actually done it. “Heard it was pretty bad,” she says, hoping to get some kind of response. 

“Good riddance,” Joel says with a shrug, reaching over to scrape some of his potatoes onto her plate before taking her sausages, which are still too much for her most days. She leans back, still watching his face. She lowers her voice. 

“Did you-” 

“I think we should just let it go and not look a gift horse in the mouth,” Tommy says. “Sounds like she got what was coming to her.” 

She looks over at him, a little annoyed to have her interrogation of Joel interrupted-

-and then she sees the way the knuckles of his right hand are bruised. 

Her eyes dart back up to his face, shocked. He gives her a wink and then reaches for the little pot of strawberry jam to start spreading it on his toast. 

“Accidents happen, especially when you’re out alone,” Maria says lightly, and it’s only when she looks to the woman that she notices a scratch across her cheek. “Tommy and I went out hunting on Saturday,” she says calmly. “Trust me, the weather was bad. She probably tripped and fell and then something got to her after. It happens all the time.” 

Ellie stares at her until Joel gets her attention by reaching up to squeeze the back of her neck gently, leaning in to whisper to her. 

“She’s gone,” he says softly. “Let’s leave it at that, alright?” 

He pulls back and tucks a stray piece of her hair back before he turns back to eating his breakfast. At a gentle nudge to her foot, she looks up to see Tommy smiling slightly. He gives her a small nod. 

“All’s well that ends well, or whatever that Shakespeare guy had to say,” he says lightly. “Eat your breakfast, kiddo.” 

When she finally recovers enough to be able to process any of that, she finally picks up her fork after a pointed look from Joel and starts eating. 

*

“Um,” she calls to Tommy and Maria when they go to separate outside the dining hall, and they both turn back to her. “Thanks. For…” She trails off with a shrug, careful not to dislodge the arm Joel has around her shoulders. 

“No clue what you’re talking about,” Tommy says with an easy smile after exchanging a satisfied look with Maria. 

“Have a good day, Ellie,” Maria says, before turning and linking an arm through Tommy’s and letting him walk her to the council building. 

She watches them go, still overwhelmed by the idea that there’s now three people who have killed for her. She wonders if it ever stops feeling crazy, something like that. 

“So,” Joel says, catching her attention. “What should we do with a day of skipping school and being delinquents?” 

She grins. 

“I’ve got some ideas.”