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He takes her out of the hospital on Sarah’s birthday as much for his own sake as for hers. Even miserable and sick from playing medical mystery, she’s intuitive, and he feels her watching him as the day approaches. She doesn’t ask, too aware of all of the painful spots he hasn’t told her about, but she presses closer to him in a way that feels like she’s doing it more for him than for her.
It’s on Sarah’s birthday, then, that they find the butterfly house.
They had gone looking for the giraffes originally. They roam as they want, but they tend to stick near the old zoo where there's still a stable for them to shelter in. He hadn’t wanted to wander too far for Ellie’s sake, fresh out of a trial of yet another failed drug. She’s leaning on him pretty heavily today, dizzy from blood draws and the lingering after-effects of the medication, and she’s frustrated with herself that she keeps needing breaks. She’s an energetic kid, and he knows the physical weakness grinds her down as much as the pain, forcing her to stop them every few minutes to catch her breath.
Then he sees a bright painted wing on a building.
“Hey,” he says, and she looks up at him, face tight with pain and frustration both. He nods his head to the building. “You like butterflies?”
*
The butterfly house is a bit of a miracle, in all honesty. The building is still largely intact and water still flows in a little trench around the inside, watering the flowers that have pollinated and reproduced on their own for twenty years.
And it’s completely full of butterflies, who have apparently thrived left entirely to their own devices.
Ellie inhales sharply when they enter, and he looks to her at once, afraid her symptoms have gotten worse, but he softens when he sees her wonder as she looks around.
“Holy shit,” she breathes. She turns to him, like she’s including him in her joy.
And just by smiling, she is.
“C’mon,” he says, leading her to a bench. The glass casing has kept the building warm, and he knows she’ll appreciate it as a break from the blood draws and IVs that make her cold all the time. It’s easier to get her to agree to a break when they’re surrounded by butterflies, and it’s not long before the bugs start investigating them. Half to tease her and half to hopefully draw them closer, he tucks some flowers in her hair. She makes a face at him for it but doesn’t protest, and soon enough a few butterflies come to explore.
She laughs when one lands on her nose, and he smiles, laughing when she goes cross-eyed to try and see it.
“It tickles,” she giggles, nose wrinkling at the sensation.
They don’t go looking for the giraffes that day, but they explore the butterfly house more, and he tells her what he remembers from Sarah telling him butterfly facts the same way Ellie does with dinosaurs and space. Some of it’s gone from sheer time, but he remembers more than he expected, and what he doesn’t know, Ellie fills in for herself with wild creative liberty.
And, of course, puns.
“Hey Joel,” she calls, with a quality to her voice that tells him he’s about to be treated to a pun whether he responds or not. “Did you know baby butterflies have special beds?” She’s nearly vibrating with excitement to get to her punchline, so he knows she made this one up herself.
“Oh yeah?” He responds, playing along.
“Mhm,” she says, beaming. “They’re called caterpillows.”
He snorts.
“4/10.”
“That was a 10, and you know it!”
*
They stay until the sun is about to set, and then he reluctantly starts herding Ellie back to the hospital. She looks brighter than she did this morning, which settles something in him, and he knows already he’ll be taking her back.
For all that the spirit is willing, though, the body is weak, and she fully passes out only a third of the way back. One moment she’s on her feet, reaching for him and swaying, and then the next she’s down, dropping so fast he barely has time to get a hand under her head so she won’t crack it against the asphalt.
He carries her the rest of the way.
*
He’s come close to violence several times since they arrived at the hospital, but the closest he’s come so far to jumping to homicide is when they switch Ellie’s MRI contrast with no warning.
And of course they’d picked one she had a reaction to, because that’s just their fucking luck.
She’d started squirming almost as soon as the flow started and then had teared up, saying that it felt like it was burning. He’d immediately told the nurse to stop it, but she’d decided to turn it into an argument, all the while Ellie’s breath went shallower and shallower. Within minutes, she’d gotten to the point that she’d ripped her IV out herself, unable to take it anymore, and he’d had to hold her while she panicked so they could set up another with saline to dilute the contrast. She’d ended up on oxygen because her panic had made her feel like she couldn’t breathe, and he’d had to hold the mask in place while she begged for the IV to stop, unable to realize the contrast had stopped with it still in her veins. She’d kicked a nurse for getting too close, and so he had been left to keep his hand over her new IV port to keep her from ripping that one out, too.
She’d been apologetic afterwards, embarrassed at freaking out so spectacularly, but it’s not like he would judge her for it.
He saves that for Marlene, mostly.
“You’re fucking torturing her,” he snaps once Ellie’s asleep and the woman has come by for her daily progress check. “You told me you got a cure you think will work. She’s done.”
“Think being the key word here,” Marlene snaps back.
“Then test it already, and stop torturing her.”
“Joel,” Marlene says, and the condescending patience in her voice makes him want to punch her. “This is too important to-”
“To stop making a kid sick? To stop pumping her full of drugs? To stop draining her like the blood sucking leeches you are?”
“It’s a part of the process. It’s unfortunate that she’s experienced so many side effects, but sometimes that’s the cost of progress.”
What really pisses him off is that he can tell she believes it.
“She’s supposedly the child of your best friend, and you haven’t done a single goddamn thing to make this any easier on her.”
“Who do you think signed off on your little field trips?” She snaps, and apparently the mention of Ellie’s mother has actually hit a nerve. “You think the other people here like that the one key we have to saving the world leaves the building in the care of an immoral smuggler when she’s having a bad day?”
“A bad day?” He is fuming, nearly shaking with rage, at Ellie’s pain being minimized, like she doesn’t choose every fucking day to stay in this hell, taking what’s dished out for her because she carries too much fucking weight on her shoulders, like any other person on the planet wouldn’t have been out by day 3.
Marlene seems to recognize that she’s crossed a line with him, and she puts her hands up in surrender.
“It won’t happen again, alright?” She says. “We’ve made a note.” Another fucking note. Another addition to the list of medications and sedatives and painkillers Ellie can’t take because the same quirk of her biology that makes her immune also makes it a bitch to find things she won’t react to. Another painful lesson in a fucking series of suffering because Ellie has it in her head that it’s all worth it if the Fireflies find their alleged cure.
He doesn’t even bother responding before he returns to her side.
*
The butterfly house ends up becoming a regular place they visit, usually a pit stop before they go to see the giraffes. It lets Ellie recover for a bit on the days she’s really out of it without feeling too much like an invalid, and if he really focuses on deluding himself, he can pretend it’s just a day out, going to a zoo for no other reason than fun.
The daydream generally lasts until he gets a look at the bruising on her arms or the sharpness of her cheekbones.
It’s the latter that really worries him. She’s had a hard time eating since Silver Lake, and playing lab rat hasn’t done her any favors. A doctor tried to scold her once for her low body fat percentage, and it had been all he could do not to toss him out of the window for condemning her for things beyond her fucking control. The protocol they follow for Ellie includes her food chopped small enough that she won’t choke, because for all of the things they’re willing to put her through, they don’t want to risk their test subject dying from poorly chewed potatoes.
The precaution, though, also means that Ellie sometimes can’t even eat what’s put in front of her because she needs to see exactly what it’s come from before she can convince herself it’s animal and not people. It’s a fight he’s already gone round and round on with the staff at the hospital, and the shitty compromise they’ve come to is that they’ll bring whole pieces of meat to the room, and one of the nurses will stand there while they cut it, Ellie if she isn’t shaky and him if she is.
Still, there are some days even that isn’t enough.
He’s hoping today will be a good food day, and he doesn’t say anything as Ellie pulls her sandwich apart and then rips the chicken inside into pieces, examining each one. It’s white meat, which is a point in its favor, but it’s still often 50/50 whether Ellie will get a bite down or not.
“Chicken?” She still asks him despite her investigation, and he nods, reaching out to brush her hair back. Her hair is in a loose braid today because a medication yesterday has left her with a headache that’s lingered, and she couldn’t stand to have it in a ponytail pulling at her.
“Chicken,” he confirms. It’s a routine exchange for them now, this assurance. She knows, academically, that it’s chicken, because she asked as soon as a nurse dropped the food off this morning.
But knowing and knowing can be two very different things.
She hesitates, still, and he extends a hand, palm up. She doesn’t look at him when she hands part of the sandwich over, but she watches while he takes a bite of the chicken and then swallows and hands it back.
“I’m sorry I’m so-” She starts, but he pokes the sandwich at her mouth to make her scowl and snatch it from him so he won’t have to hear a sorry he doesn’t want or need.
“You’re fine,” he says, grabbing his own food. And she is. He’s been far worse things than a taste tester.
He doesn’t know if she believes him, but she doesn’t apologize again before she starts eating, which he can accept as progress.
*
The one thing the pediatric ward has–because it most certainly doesn’t have things like clothes or equipment Ellie’s size, which makes him grit his teeth each time he sees them used on her anyway–is games. Some of them are too damaged to be of any use, but on their third day, he found a section of what looks like it was once a playroom with a shelf of them, and he’d relocated them to Ellie’s room to give her something to do besides look ready to climb the walls.
Monopoly is thrown out of a window for the sake of both of them after a four hour game culminated in a shouting match, but the rest of them are less prone to ending in violence. He likes playing Trivial Pursuit just to mess with her, and they both like Clue, mainly because Ellie likes doing voices for the characters and he likes watching her laugh at herself. They play Jenga when her hands are steady enough, but sometimes medications and blood draws make her shake, and she shuts down for an hour one time when she accidentally knocks the entire tower over on her second turn, so he banishes it to the back of the pile so it’ll be out of sight and hopefully out of mind.
Where she really shines, though, are word games.
As he’d thought she might, she kicks his ass at Boggle, and wanting to see her proud of herself more, he hunts down more games with words. He’d thought she might be a reader by nature, and when her head doesn’t hurt and she has the focus, she devours the books he brings her from around the hospital.
Including dictionaries, because she’s a goddamn Scrabble shark.
"Will you knock it off with the fucking xi?" He grouses as she smugly scribbles the points on the notepad with their ongoing scores.
"The fuck else am I supposed to do with my X's?"
"Set their shit on fire?" He asks dryly, hunting for a g for goof.
"Badum-tsh," she says, a habit she picked up from Gloria, the single nurse he doesn’t actively hate in the hospital, who lets Ellie distract herself during painful procedures by listing off all the puns she knows. They’d met in the first week when she hip checked another nurse out of the way on his fourth try for a vein to run an IV on Ellie.
“If you don’t know what you’re doing,” she’d snapped. “Then move the hell out of the way for someone who does.” And then she’d gotten the vein on her first try smoothly enough that Ellie didn’t even wince.
Joel likes Gloria a great deal.
She’s also been a lifeline for letting him leave Ellie for short periods of time. He still doesn’t trust any Firefly with her, not completely, but Gloria had once dragged a doctor out by the ear when the fucker made Ellie cry when she couldn’t keep down a medicine they were trying to get her to take.
(A lucky break for the doctor, really, given that Joel would have done worse, but the “She is a child!” he’d heard from Gloria ringing down the hall had done much to esteem her in his regard.)
Gloria really earns a place for herself in his good opinion during the period in which Ellie is so sick she can’t be off of an IV or monitoring equipment. She’d had a bad reaction to the sedative they’d used during a bone marrow harvest and had flatlined, and it had taken them what felt like forever to get her back while he white knuckled the frame of the window he was using to keep an eye on them during the procedure.
“C’mon, baby, c’mon,” he’d coached, even knowing there wasn’t a chance in hell she’d hear him. “Don’t you do this, baby girl.”
They’d gotten her back, but it had left her sore and nauseous and barely able to lift her head up, and he knows she’s getting frustrated with how weak she feels. For his own part, he still just sits and stares at her heart monitor while she’s sleeping, unable to get the sight of what it looks like to watch her body jolt under electricity to restart her heart out of his head.
The one blessing, if it can even be called that, of the entire fucking ordeal is that she has a brief reprieve from more procedures until she’s had time to recover. If it were up to him, they would be gone by now, but the only response he’d gotten to that was her gripping the rail of her bed as hard as she could while so weak, like he was going to try and pull her away.
“This can’t be for nothing,” she’d said, and he’d seen the desperation in her eyes, the need for her pain and suffering to mean something.
He hated it then and he hates it still, but he had unpacked their bags again and resumed his watch at her side, sitting beside her on the bed and reading to her from the book she was working her way through until she fell asleep.
On day four of still feeling rotten, though, her resolve to act like a tough girl about it is starting to waver a bit, which he can’t blame her for. It’s beautiful outside, and if she weren’t still in bed, they’d likely be at their butterfly house by now, or up on a platform to feed their giraffes.
But instead, Ellie is still in bed, drowsy from something for nausea in her IV but still about ready to cry.
“I can’t even see the fucking butterflies,” she mutters against his shoulder, and he can hear everything else she’s angry she can’t have in the sentence, too. The ability to walk on her own two feet right now. The ability to eat what she wants.
The ability to leave this fucking nightmare behind.
He’s nearly buzzing with helplessness. All he can do is stroke her hair and rub her back and let her rest against his chest to listen to his heartbeat, but he can’t give her her strength or make the pain stop or find the cure so she can be done and move on with her life.
It’s after a sleepless night of nightmares that barely let Ellie–and thus him, by extension–rest, that he has a crazy idea that takes hold of him and won’t let him rest until he does it. He grabs Gloria the moment she pokes her head in the room, and leaves her with a sleeping Ellie, who finally passed out around dawn.
*
When he comes back, as fast as possible, he has a butterfly in one of the cages from the zoo’s gift shop, a mesh enclosure around wooden dowels. He has a few sprays of flowers in the cage to keep it going for a while. It’s probably stupid, this idea, but he has absolutely nothing to offer to help Ellie, and he’s more than a little desperate.
He feels guilty when he enters the room and finds her eyes puffy, knowing that she cried without him there, but then she notices what he’s holding.
“Here,” he says, handing it over. “Brought you a visitor.” The pipevine swallowtail inside–picked because she thinks the poisonous butterflies “are so fucking cool, Joel!”--climbs the wire of its enclosure sedately, seeming to investigate her in turn as she nearly presses her face to the mesh.
“You brought me a butterfly?” She asks, voice wondering, and he feels something settle in him at the joy on her face.
“Tried to get a Blue Clipper,” and he did, because she thinks they’re the prettiest, “but they were a little too fast for me today.” He sits down in the chair beside her bed, taking a subtle look at her vitals to make sure nothing too catastrophic took place during his bug hunt.
“Gonna need a walker soon, grandpa, getting your ass kicked by a butterfly,” she teases, but she’s nearly glowing with pleasure, and she brings her knees up to prop the cage on them to look at the butterfly again. She extends her hand for his and then presses it to her cheek, closing her eyes. “Thanks.”
He squeezes her hand.
“You’re welcome, kiddo.”
*
They set the butterfly loose two days later, perched on a window ledge with his arm around her waist because he can’t get the idea of her falling out of the window out of his head. She’s clearly regretful about letting her butterfly go, but finally she sighs and reaches in, letting it crawl up her arm. She’s a little shaky today, but the butterfly doesn’t seem to mind, crawling up until it’s on her shoulder.
“Think pirates ever carried butterflies on their shoulders?” She asks, grinning.
“Maybe,” he says, smiling purely because she’s happy, “parrots are overrated.”
She snorts and then moves to let the butterfly crawl onto her hand, extending it out the window and waiting for the wind to send it into flight. She tracks it as long as she can, and then she lays back against him.
And for all that he knows she won’t quit until the job’s done, he knows she wishes she could fly away from the hospital, too.
*
He retrieves more butterflies for her while she recovers, and soon she and Gloria make bets on which one he’ll bring back.
(And if he might put a little extra effort into making sure Ellie’s right, well, he never claimed to be unbiased.)
He only ever goes when Gloria can stay with Ellie while he’s gone, and he always leaves Ellie armed. Even sick, he knows she’s dangerous when she needs to be, and on their excursions, he’s made sure to fit in a little target practice.
Butterflies and bullets, he thinks once, amused, what a perfect description for Ellie.
*
While Ellie recovered, the medical team moved some equipment around because electrical in part of the hospital failed, and so on their first test after she’s been judged healthy enough to proceed (far ahead of when he thinks she’s ready, but he’s doing his best not to pick a fight because he knows she doesn’t want him to), they’re led in a new direction through the hospital.
Which involves walking past a construction project that was never finished, chain link partitions still cordoning off concrete and rebar.
Ellie freezes when they have to step through one to proceed, and the sudden stop nearly clotheslines him and the nurse carrying her IV.
He’s at her side in a moment, taking a knee so he can look up at her, even though her eyes are fixed ahead.
“I can’t,” she breathes, white-faced, and she starts to back up until she bumps the nurse and startles, nearly making a break for it until he grabs her wrist just to prevent her from yanking her IV out.
She still hasn’t told him exactly what it is about chain link that sets her off sometimes now, but he doesn’t need details to know that if she says she can’t do something, she means it. He’s her guardian for all intents and purposes, but he usually defers to her about what she wants to have happen. She likes to stand up for herself, likes to feel mature and in control of what goes on, and so he usually lets her speak for herself, but sometimes her words leave her, and it was in their second week that they came up with a code to let him know when he needed to step in and speak for her, three taps against his wrist for SOS.
Three taps against his wrist from trembling fingers, and he’s in action.
“We need another way around,” he says, putting an arm around Ellie as casually as possible. Flight off the table, and fight out too because she’s just gotten back on her feet, he can see her giving it her all not to lose herself in her head, and if he ends up needing to lead her around, no one else needs to know that his arm is around her to prevent her from wandering off.
The doctor–a condescending fucker he absolutely cannot stand and deals with as little as possible–rolls his eyes.
“We are not going to go around the entire hospital for the whims of a child afraid of-”
His words cut off when Joel grabs him by the jaw, squeezing in silent threat of how very easy it would be to break it.
The doctor seems to get his priorities in order after that.
The other route’s longer, but when the doctor inhales to sigh, a sharp look shuts him right up.
*
She’s exhausted once the tests are done, and he ends up carrying her back to her room when her legs buckle on the stairs. She doesn’t even have it in her to protest, and she just curls up against him, arms around his neck and head down, almost limp.
“I don’t feel good,” she confesses quietly, and she sounds so young in the moment that he wants to just keep walking, wants to get her out of here once and for all. But he also knows she’d crawl back on her hands and knees if she had to, committed to seeing this thing through.
She’s tired, but after an hour of laying perfectly still for the tests, she doesn’t want to get back in bed when they’re in the room, and so he settles in the recliner he dragged in a few weeks ago with her across his lap, head on his shoulder.
She falls asleep like that, watching the luna moth he managed to catch yesterday as her blinks get longer and longer, until she’s finally out.
He stays awake, watching the moth crawl around, looking for an escape that isn’t there.
*
The day they finally get the news that a successful vaccine has been developed using her stem cells, she’s still recovering from sedation from an MRI and another blood draw, stuck in bed because she’s dizzy.
Still, when he leans over to kiss her forehead, she’s grinning.
“We did it,” she says, pressing her hands over her face. “Fuck, Joel, we did it.”
“You did it,” he corrects, resting a hand on her head. “All you, kiddo.”
*
Even after he’s gotten his dose of the vaccine, they still can’t still leave just yet, Ellie still recovering from how much it took to get to the cure. She’s impatient with it, he can tell, but he does his best to distract her.
And at least the tests are finally, finally over.
*
He’s coming back with a monarch butterfly a few days after he’s gotten his dose of the vaccine when he sees Marlene waiting for him right at the entrance to the hospital.
His stomach fills with dread immediately.
“Ellie-” She says, and then he’s off at once, butterfly discarded on the ground as he dashes to Ellie’s room, skidding to a halt at the door.
Gloria is slumped on the floor at the foot of the empty bed, and a bloody gash on her head says that she was taken out in a fight to protect Ellie. He doesn’t have the focus for much, not really, but he still kneels and finds her pulse, just to know that she’s alive out of gratitude for at least trying to stop her colleagues from hurting a fucking child.
Two bullet holes in the wall opposite the bed show that Ellie had time to get a couple shots off, and blood spray says that one of them was true.
And the knocked over equipment says that a very sick kid still gave it her best shot in a fight.
“What’s going on?” He demands of Marlene, gun in hand and aimed right for her when she makes it to the door.
“They’ve taken her to surgery,” she says, hands up.
“You’ve already got your cure,” he says, eyes narrowing with confusion, hold on his gun tightening. “Why the fuck would she be in surgery?”
“Because one of the doctors suggested that biopsying her brain might allow us to study how to cure those who are already infected. We already have intel that FEDRA is saying they have the vaccine, too, and even though it’s bullshit, some of the higher-ups think that being able to say we can also cure those already infected will give us the push we need against them.”
“We’re leaving,” he says at once. “You’re not killing her for your goddamn propaganda.”
“Why the fuck do you think I was waiting for you at the door? I delayed them as long as I could, but they’re prepping her now.”
“You haven’t cared this entire fucking time. Forgive me if I don’t trust you now.”
Marlene’s face goes tight.
“Despite what you’re so fucking convinced of, you’re not the only one who cares about her.”
“Could have fooled me,” he spits, seething.
“I was the second person in the world to hold her after she was born,” she says, voice hard. “I get it. You’re pissed at me because I let her go through hell so we could get the cure that would save the world. I get it, alright? But I never agreed to killing her.”
“And why should I believe you? For all I know, you’re just here to delay me.”
“I told them I’d kill you myself when you got back.”
“Then why haven’t you?” He asks, finger edging toward the trigger.
“Because who else is going to help me get her out?”
“Where?” He demands.
“Follow me.”
He doesn’t trust her, will never trust her, but he also has no other option.
He follows.
*
He makes sure to keep her in range as he follows her. If she is tricking him and trying to keep him from Ellie, she’s going to be the first one to die.
She certainly won’t be the last.
His caution, though, is apparently unfounded.
With Marlene telling them to put their guns away, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel until they get deeper into the hospital, when the sound of gunfire means the other Fireflies are a little less willing to listen to someone telling them nothing’s wrong. At that point, she steps back to be at his side, and together they make their way through.
For all that they could barely be in the same room together until this exact moment in time, they work together well. They don’t trip over each other, don’t need to talk. He’s not used to working with anyone else, not since Tess, but she is, and if he’s the better shot, she’s quicker to hear someone coming.
He’s too focused on the goal of getting to Ellie to pay attention to details like how many people he has to shoot to achieve it, and it’s all a blur of duck, load, fire, move, duck, load, fire, move, until they’re at the door of an OR. With a jerk of her head, Marlene indicates she’ll go first, but he has no further patience for teamwork, not when his kid is right there.
He shoves through first, and the sight makes him freeze.
The first thing he takes care of is the doctor holding a fucking saw near Ellie’s head. It’s not on, but the very idea of it, of someone cutting open his child’s skull, makes him want to rip the man apart with his bare hands.
As it is, he has higher priorities, and the man is dead with a single shot.
Marlene has come in behind him, and she aims at the terrified nurses with him. When one’s nerve breaks, and he tries to bolt, they both shoot him before they turn back to the remaining people near Ellie, tiny and pale on the operating table, a mask still over her face and an IV running from her arm.
“Unhook her,” they say at the same time.
Shaking, the nurses obey.
*
He scoops up Ellie up with infinite care, and before he can even suggest it, Marlene kills the remaining nurses, one shot each. He raises his eyebrows in question, and she shrugs.
“We’ve already sent people to other outposts with doses and instructions. They were no longer essential, and I don’t like loose ends.”
It’s cold blooded, but they were also people willing to kill Ellie, so it’s not like he cares.
Ellie is deadweight against him as they make their way back through the hospital, breathing slow and steady but clearly deeply out. He’s already worried about how she’s going to react to the anesthesia given that it was administered without needing to make sure she woke up, but she seems stable enough, and he takes reassurance with each inhale and exhale he feels. It’s eerily quiet now that the gunfire has stopped and there are probably a good 40 fewer living people in the building than there were an hour ago. They stop only briefly to collect a bag of the vaccine and Ellie’s belongings. He had taken his pack with him, but hers had been taken from the room, and he feels a renewed surge of rage knowing that they had planned to redistribute her belongings, taking every last fucking thing they could from her.
“Make sure-”
Marlene cuts him off and holds up Ellie’s knife with a raised eyebrow before tucking it into a side pocket of her backpack, swinging it over her shoulders.
Well then.
*
“Why did you even do this?” He asks when he’s capable of speech again, when they’re in a garage in the basement and a getaway car is in sight.
Marlene opens her mouth and then shuts it before she inhales and opens it again.
“Anna made me swear that I would find someone to raise her, to love her and keep her safe.”
He could be snide, could mention the little tidbits he’s gathered of what Ellie’s life looked like until a bite changed the trajectory of it to see if she’s capable of guilt or not.
But he figures betraying her people for the sake of his kid buys her a little grace.
“And yeah, I know,” she says, looking to him from the corner of her eye with a wry look. “I fucked it up about as badly as I could have. It was easier, when she wasn’t in front of me, telling myself that I was keeping her alive. That it was all Anna could ask of me, really. Her daughter was alive, and if she wasn’t happy, she’d still get to grow up.”
“And then suddenly your heart grew three sizes in one day?” He asks dryly.
“Suddenly she showed up again with an asshole who doted on her like she was his,” Marlene says, and that shuts him up. She snorts at the look on his face. “And I saw someone being what Anna wanted me to be for her.”
Well damn, he thinks, the stone cold bitch has a heart after all.
She opens the door of the car for him and lets him settle Ellie on the seat before she sets the backpack on the floorboard and pulls off her jacket, the one Ellie had called badass once, resting it over Ellie like a blanket. He gives her a look, and she rolls her eyes.
“She can grow into it. Humor me. I’m trying to keep a promise to my dead friend here.”
Fair enough.
Marlene looks at Ellie for a long moment and even reaches out a hand, but she just hovers over her cheek before she pulls back.
“God, she looks like her mother,” she says, and it’s so quiet he thinks it’s mostly to herself. She turns to him then. “You have to swear to me you’ll look out for her. This world is a shitty place, especially for girls.” A significant look at that. He hasn’t told her about Silver Lake, and he doesn’t think Ellie has either, but it’s not like it’s hard to see the signs when Ellie about jumps out of her skin when someone touches her unexpectedly, especially if it’s a man.
Still, he doesn’t comment. It’s not his pain to share.
“You take her out of here, you get her somewhere safe, and you keep her happy.”
He could point out that that’s what he’s been trying to do since day fucking 1 in this godforsaken hospital, but he’d rather not fumble this close to the finish line.
“I will,” he promises, and when she extends her hand, he shakes it.
He moves to climb into the driver’s seat and hesitates, just for a moment. He doesn’t want to offer to let her go with them, would rather ditch her here and now and never see her again, but he now owes her Ellie’s life, which is a debt beyond anything he can repay.
“You could come with us,” he says, and for all that he tries to sound genuine, he can hear that he doesn’t quite achieve it. “She’d like to hear more about her mother. You could get to know her.” His temptation is to enumerate the many ways Ellie’s a great kid anyone would be lucky to know because parent instincts run deep, but he’s already feeling stretched to the edge of his ability for civil conversation with her.
She just gives him a grim smile.
“Someone has to tell them you were both fatally injured,” she says, and then she tilts her head, her smile going a little calculating. “Besides. A few top slots just opened up. I think it’s about time for a promotion.”
*
Ellie comes around in hour 2 of the drive away, and he has to pull over at once, wrenching the door open as she gags. Nothing comes up, but he still kneels beside her on the ground while she dry heaves, eyes watering.
“Happened?” She asks with a gasp, and she slumps to the side, resting against him.
“I’ll tell you later,” he says softly, still slowly rubbing her back.
“But-”
“It’s not important, baby. Trust me. It’s over now, alright?”
He can see she still has questions, but she also has a fuckton of sedatives in her system, so she doesn’t have it in her to push. She freezes when she realizes she’s in a hospital gown and not the scrubs he last saw her in, and she clenches a fist in his shirt.
“My clothes,” she says, looking to him with wide eyes.
“It’s okay,” he says as soothingly as he can. “It was nurses, I promise.” It was still her being changed into something else without her knowledge or consent–a fact that makes him wish he could kill the fuckers all over again–but it’s enough to let her untense the slightest bit.
“Okay,” she says quietly, willing to believe him.
When he’s sure her stomach is settled for now, he picks her up and puts her in the passenger seat, buckling her in while her eyes slowly close. She’s fighting it, and he leans forward to kiss her forehead after he gets her to drink some water.
“Sleep if you want,” he says softly, cupping her face. “I’m right here. I won’t let anything happen.”
Even as he says it, he feels a stab of guilt at the fact that he almost did let something happen, something that would have killed him right along with her.
Ellie, though, just falls asleep.
*
The car, miracle of miracles, gets them all the way to Jackson, and if Ellie weren’t still deeply asleep, he might even lay on the horn just to fuck with Tommy. As it is, the sound of a car beyond the gate is enough to get word through the town fast, and it’s no time at all before his brother is there. He doesn’t move far from Ellie still in the passenger seat, but he lets himself have a few seconds to embrace his brother.
“Welcome back, big brother,” Tommy says with a grin as he pulls back. “How’s-” His smile drops when he sees the state of Ellie, the hospital gown showing the many bruises on her arms, and her thinness especially evident in how the gown swamps her. “Fuck,” he says. “What happened?”
“I’ll tell you later,” he says, even while he’s not sure he will. “For now, I just want to get her in a bed.”
Tommy accepts that and even shrugs off his jacket to help cover Ellie, a gesture he appreciates. The gown covers everything important, but he knows she’ll appreciate any additional fabric she can get, especially being carried through a town of strangers.
“C’mon, baby girl,” he says softly as he picks her up. “Let’s go home.”
*
He settles her in the same room she stayed in before, cleaning the IV marks on her arms and then settling her under the comforter. She stirs as he’s tucking it up to her chin, and he sees the brief panic at being in a place she doesn’t recognize.
“Easy,” he says softly. “You’re alright. You’re with me.”
That’s enough to settle her, and she manages to get one clumsy arm free to scrub across her eyes. She frowns and makes a grumpy noise, and he smiles, just a bit. Her reaction to this anesthesia hasn’t been as bad as it’s been before, but she usually wakes up some degree of confused and grouchy.
“Why…” She asks, and she flops her arm over her head, eyes closed in concentration. “I remember…nurses came?”
“Yeah,” he says softly, rubbing a hand along her arm until she moves it to hold his hand.
“I…” She opens her eyes. “I kept asking for you, and they said you were gone.”
There’s a question in her voice, and he feels the same surge of guilt. All of this time, all of this distance, and once again, when she needed him the most, he was useless to her.
“They wanted to do another procedure,” he says. “They didn’t wait for me to get back.” He’ll tell her, eventually, what the actual plan was, but she has enough problems with nightmares without him giving her new material when she’s still drugged.
“They always wait,” she says, confused. That had been one of the first rules they’d established: nothing gets done to or for her without it going by him first, and she’s clearly distressed at the idea that he wasn’t there to keep them in line.
“I know,” he says, squeezing her hand. “But it’s over now. You’re safe, and you are never going back there.” If he knows nothing else, he knows that much at least.
She still clearly has questions, but she’s also still tired, and she seems willing to accept his explanation for now.
“Stay?” She asks, already half-asleep.
“Sure,” he says, toeing his boots off and swinging his legs up to sit beside her, back to her headboard.
She turns onto her side and snuggles close, and he exhales a laugh when she wraps an arm over his legs.
“Hair, please,” she asks around a yawn, and obligingly, he cards his fingers through her hair until she’s asleep.
*
When he manages to get loose of his koala of a kid clinging to his legs, he leaves her with a kiss to her temple and her door cracked so he’ll hear if she needs him.
He makes his way downstairs and only pauses a moment when he finds Tommy waiting for him. He hugs his brother again and then follows him to the living room, discovering that he’s brought a housewarming gift in the form of whiskey. He only takes about half of what he actually wants, still too on-edge about needing to be alert for Ellie, but the ritual of it is almost as nice as the buzz, and it’s a relief to do something that feels as unbelievable as sit on a couch next to his brother with a tumbler in hand.
“The hell happened to you both out there?” Tommy leads in straight away, and he buys time with another sip from his glass.
“Got a cure,” he says, and he jumps when Tommy’s glass drops right to the floor. He jolts forward to catch him when his brother bows forward, but he just leans enough to rest his elbows on his knees.
“Shit,” he breathes, and when he looks up, his smile is disbelieving. “You really did it, you crazy son of a bitch.”
“Wasn’t me,” he says at once. He looks up to indicate Ellie. “All down to her. She went through hell to make it happen, Tommy. More than I would ever have put her through.” More than he knows if he can live with, honestly, but that’s something to be sorted out after he’s gotten to enjoy the simple pleasure of Ellie out of the hospital and truly safe, for the first time since he met her.
“She gonna be okay?” Tommy asks, and he feels a warm rush of affection for how genuine his concern is. It’s one thing he’d missed about his brother, not a bit of artifice–a word Ellie has fucked him over with twice during Scrabble–about him.
“She will be,” he says.
He’ll make sure of it.
*
Ellie sleeps so solidly that he ends up hovering in her room for the next couple of days, more than a little worried about her. She rouses enough to drink some water, down some food, use the bathroom, and then she’s out again, dead to the world enough that she nearly falls off her bed when she flops down too close to the edge.
He gives the doses of the vaccine he brought back with them to Tommy to give to Maria. His condition is that she and Tommy get vaccinated first, and then he tells them what he can about Marlene and her potential ability to secure them more. The meeting takes place in the doorway of Ellie’s room because he refuses to go too far from her, and they accommodate him, Tommy even smiling slightly like he’s pleased by him being more than a bit of a helicopter parent.
Given that Tommy was the one who got him to the field hospital after his failed suicide attempt twenty years ago, he supposes he can suffer through a little teasing about hovering over his kid.
It’s on the fourth day that Ellie actually wakes up enough to be at least partially sensate, and she follows him downstairs and even eats at the table before she drags him to the couch and lays down against him, her blanket from upstairs dragged down with her. He’s amused and doesn’t mind, especially so soon after he faced the prospect of losing her, and he lets himself be arranged until she’s comfortable.
When she’s settled with her legs over his and her head against his shoulder, she speaks.
“Is Gloria okay?”
“Yeah,” he says. He doesn’t know, really, just knows that she had a pulse the last time he saw her, and part of him feels guilty about not having a sure answer, but that’s not something for Ellie to worry about, especially now. “Good,” she says with a little nod. “I didn’t know why she was so upset, but she kept saying they couldn’t do anything without you there, and then she tried to push them back when they got close, and one of them hit her on the head with something. I don’t know what happened after that. It’s kind of fuzzy.”
There’s a dark bruise on her upper arm that suggests someone injected her with a sedative with great haste and little care, so that’s not really surprising.
“I know you gave them hell,” he says. “Room was a wreck, and you got at least two shots off. One of them definitely hit.”
“Damn straight,” she says, and he snorts. “But then…why?” She asks, tilting her head up to look at him. “Why’d they do that? And why are we here now? If they were going to sedate me for something, shouldn’t we still be there?”
He considers, for a moment, lying to her. He could tell her they were going to and then the hospital was attacked. He could let her live in a world in which a little girl sacrificing herself to a cause through pain and suffering gets rewarded. He could let her believe that a group of adults wouldn’t choose to kill her because it suited the agenda they were looking to push.
But Ellie has already seen how ugly the world gets, and she deserves to know the truth.
“They had some half-brained scheme about how to cure people already infected,” he says, editorializing just a bit. He would hope if they got to the “kill a child” stage of a plan they would have some research to back it up, but he’s not holding his breath when it comes to people who treated his kid like a medical experiment for months. “Wouldn’t have worked,” a little fib, probably, forgivable, “but you know how they are.” How they were, but he won’t tell her exactly how she got out of that hospital unless he needs to.
She’s seen more than enough ugliness. He wants to spare her what he can.
“But why not wait?” She asks, frowning. “I mean, even if it was stupid, they weren’t supposed to do anything without you there with me.”
“It would have involved killing you,” he says, and he keeps his temper admirably even when he says it. “They knew I wouldn’t let that happen, so they waited until I was gone.”
“But…” She starts and then trails off, and he can fill in the rest. But I did everything they wanted. But I gave them everything I had. But I did absolutely anything I had to do to help them.
“I’m sorry, baby,” he says, and he is. He hates them for what they tried to do to her, and he hates that they ruined her victory.
She suffered for their cause, and they repaid her by trying to kill her.
“Fuckers,” she says under her breath, tucking herself a little tighter. He hums an agreement. “What about the cure now?”
“What about it?”
She looks up at him again, and her expression is dubious.
“They tried to kill me, and you found out about it.” She doesn’t elaborate, and she doesn’t need to.
There’s only one way that could ever have ended.
“Brought a few dozen doses with us here,” he says. “And Marlene will take care of the rest.”
“Did Marlene know?” She asks, and he can hear her keeping her voice neutral. He knows she feels a form of attachment to Marlene, no matter how little he thinks she deserves it, and he understands it. She’s a child who never knew her mother. Marlene is the one link she has.
“No,” he says. “She got me as soon as I was back and helped me get you out.”
She doesn’t respond, clearly thinking hard. He waits for her, rubbing a hand softly along her back.
“What…” She starts. “What’s next? What do we do now?”
He smiles. That, he has a good answer for.
“Whatever the hell we want.”
*
What Ellie most wants to do while she recovers, predictably, is widen her pool of word game victims, and he gladly tags in Tommy and even Maria to distribute a bit of the losing, inviting them over when Ellie’s able to stay awake for more than hour at a time. Ellie’s still shy around strangers, but apparently Tommy and Maria are familiar enough not to make her tense, and so he’s willing to make peace with Maria for her sake if nothing else.
Besides, Maria is finally a worthy opponent to knock her off her Scrabble high horse.
*
As Ellie gets stronger, they start taking short walks around the neighborhood immediately surrounding their house. She’s jumpy, at first, and sticks close to his side, but she’s an adaptable kid, and she settles with time, soon even waving to neighbors when he does it first. She’s not up to meeting them just yet, but she’s willing at least to smile.
They work up to the dining hall, Ellie nervous about her food issues with an audience that isn’t him, but they stick to corners at first, and if Tommy and Maria find it strange when he moves a piece of meat to her plate now and then after taking a bite first, they don’t mention it. There are still days she can’t eat or can’t eat meat, but with time, she slowly regains weight and stops looking so fragile, which makes it a bit easier for him to breathe when he looks at her.
She also has grand plans for their house, which only grow in aspiration by the day to his amusement. Having never had a house before, she’s apparently letting her dreams run wild. He doesn’t reel her in because he doesn’t need to with how fast she changes her mind, and her stack of ideas grows by the day on their kitchen table.
The one idea that does make it to fruition is a butterfly garden, right beside their back porch.
When it’s done, she sits up straight and groans, stretching her back.
“Now who’s the senior citizen?” He teases, rising first and offering her a hand.
“Still you,” she says immediately, but she leans against him while they survey their work. She’s stronger now, less prone to passing out on him, but even without need, she’s a physically affectionate kid, which he enjoys. He wraps an arm around her shoulders and squeezes gently.
“Well,” he asks, “what’s the verdict?”
She’s quiet for a long moment, surveying their work, and then she looks up at him, smiling.
“I think it’s perfect.”
With his girl beside him and a whole future ahead of them, he has to agree.