Chapter Text
His first thought when he gets his pain in the ass little brother’s pain in the ass little note is an immediate, “Fucking typical.” Tommy had always left notes after they had fights, “I’m sori” scribbled in crayon and slipped under his door when he was young and a brief “Sorry I was a dick” scrawled in his chicken scratch penmanship when he got older, the latter always tucked away somewhere their mom couldn’t find so she wouldn’t make him lick a bar of soap for his language. Tommy’s never been good at discord, not ever. He’s almost always been the one to make the first overtures towards peace. The note, then, is to be expected after their fight.
The content of the note, however, not so much.
He scowls at it for a long time trying to work out what in the hell the catch is, but even when he gets home and hands it off to Tess, it hasn’t become any clearer. He’s a bit mollified by the way Tess squints at it in thought, reassured he’s not just the slow one here.
“He didn’t take anything of ours,” Tess says, reading the note again like she’s just missed something among the 13 words. It’s not a question, but he answers anyway.
“No,” he says, feeling an unhappy little niggle at the memory of how there didn’t used to be a “his” and “ours” between the three of them. They’d just shared everything.
But when Tommy had left, he had certainly not taken anything that couldn’t have been categorized as his if they’d bothered keeping track from the start. He tries very hard these days not to wonder if his brother had been doing exactly that, drawing invisible lines between them from the beginning, always carefully delineating his actions from theirs, slowly building up the resentment that had been plainly on display on the day he finally said he was leaving.
The day he made the same goddamn mistake he did at 18.
“Did you-” Tess starts, hesitating a moment before she commits to the question. “Did you…see him again after he left?” This is treacherous territory, and her tone says she’s clearly aware of that fact.
“No,” he says shortly. “He grabbed his shit and left. Didn’t have anything to say to him after that.”
(And if he still looks under the hood of everyone he passes at nights after that, simultaneously hoping for and dreading seeing his brother’s face at the same time, desperate both to see him to make sure he’s okay and to not face him on different sides, well. Tess doesn’t need to know that.)
“So what,” she asks, lifting the note to indicate it, “the fuck is this about?”
And ain’t that the million dollar question.
*
“We ain’t going looking,” he tells Tess. “If it was that damn important, he could have come here himself and told us.”
He’s decisive, sure about this. If Tommy wants to be so goddamn grown, then he can get used to Joel not running around after him. He can take whatever gift he left behind and shove it up his own ass as far as Joel’s concerned. He wanted to cut ties. The ties are cut.
It’s just that simple.
*
Tess decides the next day that they’re going looking.
*
Getting inside the Firefly’s super special secret base is almost embarrassingly easy. A few talks involving some knives and fire mean they knew in advance when they’d be moving people around, and they strike on a night the bugs’ll be most in disarray.
The dried oleander leaves Tess snuck in to drop in their food right before they were set to serve supper probably helped, too, he thinks as he all but flicks a man aside who was already wobbling on his feet, pale as milk, skin waxy.
“Surprised Bill didn’t use any of that on us the first time we met,” he observes lightly.
Tess snorts, stepping gracefully over the body in her path.
“Guess we’re just lucky Frank’s the one who likes plants.”
*
“The hell is this place?” He asks Tess in a low voice, looking around at the orderly stack of supplies and boots and guns against one wall when they’re about halfway in the building.
Tess shrugs.
“Re-supply point?” She says at a guess before he spots a head poking around a corner over her shoulder and pulls her down, rising enough to snipe the investigator and the Firefly who follows, just as wobbly and disoriented as her colleagues after Tess’s contribution to supper. When no one comes to investigate further, they both stand hesitantly. “Still no idea what the hell Tommy would think was important enough to leave?” She asks, like they hadn’t been interrupted.
Now it’s his turn to shrug.
“Who fucking knows,” he says, to himself as much as to her. He’d thought it would become more obvious when they got here, but while the supplies are relatively nice, it’s not anything they couldn’t have gotten through their usual channels. If Tommy wanted to apologize like this, he wouldn’t have dragged them down here for some boots or ammo.
“Well,” Tess says, consulting the map again, “fingers crossed for something good, I guess.”
He doesn’t bother to comment, just takes out two more wobbling Fireflies as he follows.
*
His brother’s little treasure map leads them to a room with a locked chest inside.
Because of fucking course it does.
“Are you-” he groans, putting his force behind the impromptu crowbar he’s using to pry at the lid, “-fucking kidding me?” He grits the words through his teeth, straining to get the trunk open. He stops, breathing a little heavier than he’ll ever admit.
“He couldn’t have mentioned where the goddamn key was?” Tess grumbles, seeming to mostly be talking to herself as she rifles through the drawers. She frowns, tossing aside yet another toy. “The hell is this stuff, anyway?”
He doesn’t bother to respond, just looks around at the small room with its little cot. There’s not a lot of toys, but there’s enough to suggest that a kid was here at some point, probably recently to judge by the unmade bed. He pointedly doesn’t think about where that kid might be now. It’s not his business.
He looks up sharply at the sound of raised voices what sounds like a few halls away, giving the crowbar another half-hearted shove.
The trunk remains steadfastly locked.
“How heavy is it?” Tess asks, giving up on the search for a key. She gives it a testing heave without bothering to wait for an answer and nearly overbalances herself, the trunk clearly much lighter than she was expecting. There’s a dull thunk on the opposite side as whatever’s inside hits it.
He gives it a testing lift himself and frowns. The shift of weight says there’s something inside, alright, but whatever it is, it doesn’t feel nearly heavy enough to justify such a large box. He shakes it lightly and feels the shift of weight as it moves side to side, but it doesn’t sound like weapons. The thunk of whatever’s inside hitting the sides sounds…softer, almost, like heavy fabric. He gives it a more vigorous shake, tossing the contents side to side, but it doesn’t clear anything up.
“Take it or leave it?” He asks Tess, though he’s already leaning towards the former. After this much fucking hassle, he’s certainly not looking to leave without what they came for.
“Take it,” Tess says decisively, already reaching for one of the handles. “And then kick your brother’s ass later for being a fucking pest.”
It sounds like a plan to him.
*
Getting the trunk home is a pain, and they drop it more than once on the way. They can’t take the most direct path because it involves alleys they wouldn’t be able to get the trunk through, and he almost says fuck it and leaves it in the middle of the road when they’re forced to route around a new Firefly bombing and then have to climb over a pile of broken stone with the damned thing.
By the time they make it to their apartment building, he’s certainly not gentle as he tosses it down the short flight of stairs into the courtyard around it, irritated and tired of carrying it. A faint sound–almost like a kitten’s cry–makes both him and Tess look around entirely on reflex, but the courtyard is empty, the single light that isn’t burnt out illuminating a little patch of crumbling concrete in a butter yellow circle. He lifts the trunk up on one end with the idea that they might have accidentally crushed something beneath it, but there’s nothing but concrete. He exchanges a look with Tess and shrugs, preparing himself to help carry it up the stairs.
*
Of all of the things in the entire goddamn world he could possibly have guessed for what Tommy left behind in the box, a kid would never have made the list.
Especially a kid with a goddamn knife.
The girl popped up the moment they finally managed to get the crowbar just right to crack the lock open, and her battle cry startled them almost as badly as the glint of steel in her hand. He’d grabbed Tess entirely on reflex to yank her back, and he barely registers the one hand she has fisted around his shirt as they stare in disbelief at the kid who appeared like the world’s worst magic trick.
“Hey!” He snaps as their surprise Jack-in-the-Box waves her knife around wildly, looking far more likely to stab her own eye out than come anywhere close to hitting him or Tess, especially when she’s still trapped in her box, too small to crawl over the side easily. “Knock it off.”
“Funk you!” The little girl cries, waving her knife with more fervor even as she struggles to try and get over the wall of the box. He darts forward to grab her when she tips over with a squeal, horrified without meaning to be at the idea of her landing on her knife.
The moment she’s safely on her feet, however, she’s back to being stabby.
“Okay,” he says, impatient and confused and irritated. “That’s enough.”
She attempts to charge him, knife held like a lance at Medieval Times, and he nearly rolls his eyes as he sidesteps her, grabbing her tiny wrist with one hand and plucking her knife away easily with the other. Stunned, she stares at her now-empty hand for a moment, bewildered at being disarmed.
And then she tips her head back and screams.
*
It’s a long moment of frantic negotiation before the kid shuts the fuck up, and even then, it’s only the return of her knife–ziptied shut for their safety as much as hers–that makes her pipe down, tugging at the blade and scowling when it stays safely shut, tucking it away in her pocket where it still half hangs out. She glares at them both as she creeps her away along the wall until she’s in a corner, and he feels slightly disgruntled that she gets to be the one with an attitude when they just got tricked into stealing a fucking child apparently.
He turns to Tess just as she turns to him.
“The hell did Tommy-” Tess starts, but Mystery Box Child perks up.
“Tommy?” She repeats with clear hope, looking around. “Tommy’s here?”
“And how in the hell do you know Tommy?” He demands, resting his hands on his hips, not entirely sure this isn’t all just a very, very weird dream.
The kid mirrors his posture in what’s clearly meant to be an attempt at sassing him.
“Tommy takes care of me.” She falters a bit, and pain flits across her features. “Tommy taked care of me,” she corrects, losing some of her confidence. “Then he had to go away and now stinky Vera takes care of me.” She pulls a face. “Tommy is better than Vera. I want Tommy back.”
He…does not know how to process any of that.
“How long did Tommy take care of you?” Tess asks, and he’s never been more glad for his partner in his life for jumping in when he’s still getting his thoughts together.
“For forever,” Ellie says with a shrug, wandering off to nose around the apartment, clearly uninterested in this line of questioning, calm enough by them knowing Tommy-
A horrible suspicion sparks to life in his mind.
She…no. Absolutely not. She cannot possibly be what a niggling voice in his head is suggesting. He glances to Tess, hoping for a look that says she’s read him and already come up with reasons why he’s wrong.
Instead, his partner is looking to him with an expression that asks if he’s thinking what she’s thinking.
And un- fucking -fortunately, he is.
It’s not possible. It’s just not. Tommy had been a (proud) perpetual bachelor Before, and he had always said he was content being an uncle. He had never mentioned having kids of his own. Not once. And the end of the world certainly wouldn’t-
There’s more than just this, Joel, Tommy had told him during that last fight, he remembers in one quick flash of clarity. I found something else worth my life.
At the time, he’d thought it was just the same bravado that had had him falling under the thrall of the goddamn military recruiter during career day, the same joiner tendencies that have dragged his brother into trouble all their lives. He’d thought Tommy was just being dramatic, just being Tommy.
Now…now he wonders if Tommy was instead operating on the same “my life was meant for you” feeling he himself had first had on the day Sarah was born.
“Don’t touch that,” he calls out as the kid reaches for a rifle.
She makes eye contact with him and then reaches out, poking it with a single small finger.
Well, if she’s Tommy’s kid after all, she certainly inherited his ability to be a pain in the ass.
*
“Is Tommy your dad?” He finally asks pointblank ten minutes into their interrogation–after Tess has been dispatched to reassure the neighbors that they’re not murdering a child after the screaming–uninterested in continuing to play 20,000 questions with Schrodinger’s Niece.
Ellie considers the question while eyeing the hunting knife she’s been told not to touch.
“Maybe,” she says, darting forward to try and grab it before he can catch her.
Unluckily for her, his legs are far longer, and he picks her up with his hands under her arms, holding her right in front of him, her legs dangling as she kicks at him ineffectually.
“Answer the question,” he tells her, shaking with very carefully measured strength. He’s not looking to intimidate a kid, but he’s not enjoying this paternity guessing game. “Are you Tommy’s daughter?”
She gives him a challenging look, crossing her arms across her chest as best she can while he’s still holding her.
“That’s priv-idged information,” she says haughtily, punctuating the statement with a haughty little “hmph.”
He decides that greeting his brother after this mess will involve a parenting book to the head.
*
They still haven’t gotten a straight answer out of her by the time it’s clearly bedtime. She’s been curious about the apartment and spent a good amount of time poking around–which means he’s spent a good amount of time having to follow her and take dangerous things away while she stomped one little foot at him–but she’d gotten increasingly close to a tantrum, clearly tired. They'd finally gotten some food into her and settled her on the couch. She’d tried to hold out to bargain for a story, but luckily exhaustion had gotten her before he’d had to keep arguing that there was no way in hell that was happening.
He studies her face while she sleeps, trying despite himself to pick out features. It’s impossible, his brother having a secret love child. It’s stupid. This is just some sort of nonsense Tommy got himself dragged into. This is not Tommy’s daughter.
…and yet he can’t stop looking.
Despite himself, he thinks she might have their grandmother’s nose, and something about the shape of her jaw looks like Aunt Carla’s at a certain angle. His memories of his father are faded from so long without any pictures, but he thinks his hair might nearly be the same shade as hers.
Tommy, I swear to Christ, he thinks to wherever his pest of a little brother is, if this is your goddamn child, I am going to wring your neck.
*
“You really think she could be Tommy’s?” Tess asks in a low voice as he joins her in bed after checking the locks again.
“I don’t fucking know,” he says, dropping onto the mattress. He scrubs his hands over his face, feeling exhausted. “He ever tell you about somebody he was seeing?”
“No,” Tess says, sounding thoughtful. “Caught him eye fucking that Jane person when we lived over in Back Bay, but I’m pretty sure she’s a lesbian just flirting for ration cards.”
He snorts.
“She get ‘em?”
“Probably. She had the nose piercing, remember? Your brother’s got a type.”
“Jesus,” he says, dropping his arms to the bed. “What a goddamn mess.” He stares at the ceiling, going over and over his brother’s behavior over the past four to five years. Ellie’s still maintaining that her age is a fucking state secret, but based on she talks, she’s definitely older than three. She’s on the small side–unusual for their family, but it’s possible she takes after her mother–but he’s pretty sure she’s around four. “The fuck do we even do with her?” The easy answer is watch her until he kicks his brother’s ass and gives her back.
Unfortunately, that’s also the difficult answer.
He’d like to say he can’t believe his brother would be stupid enough to have a kid in this shitshow of a world, but that would be a lie. Tommy’s always been an optimist, always been convinced things could get better, always been convinced he could make things better. If he had hooked up with someone and gotten her pregnant, the smart thing to do would have been to stop by a FEDRA clinic to get it taken care of immediately. It’s not fair, bringing a kid into this kind of life. It’s not right.
But it’s also far too easy to understand how his softhearted little brother could have convinced himself that this would be different.
“How do we even find him to ask?” Tess asks. “You still haven’t gotten him on the radio, have you?”
“No,” he says, shaking his head, still staring at the ceiling, tracing cracks in the plaster. Cosmetic, he knows from checking, nothing dangerous but still something he wouldn’t have tolerated Before. After his dad died, he’d taken pride in being the de facto man of the house, keeping it looking nice, making sure that no one would dare think their mom wasn’t doing a good job raising them on her own. It had continued when he was older, always wanting a nice house for his wife and then his child. Julia had teased him about it when they first moved in together, calling him Joel the Builder, but he’d taken pride in providing a nice house, the sort of place people would comment on being well-kept and maintained.
In this apartment, though, in this life, he’s never been able to give enough of a fuck to bother. It won’t kill him. It won’t hurt Tess. There’s no point in worrying about it beyond that.
“You okay?” Tess asks softly, and he turns to look at her, frowning.
“What?”
Tess takes a breath like she’s going to speak, but she lets it out, clearly weighing her words.
“Your brother having a daughter,” she starts after her moment of hesitation, uncharacteristically tentative about it. “I haven’t seen pictures of yours, but she-”
“No,” he says, sharper than he knows he should be with her.
“Joel-” Tess starts, reaching out for him, but he dodges, pulling away and standing, needing distance, angry at Tess for bringing this up. They don’t talk about their kids. They never have. They’ve both buried children. His was named Sarah and was shot by a soldier. Hers was named Charlie and was bitten by an infected. That’s as much as they know about each other, as much as has gotten out on drunken nights when liquor and pills have made tongues just a little too loose. It’s as much as they need to know. “Joel, don’t-” Tess says, rising to her knees, but he’s angry now and needs distance, and he walks away, catching himself only at the last moment before he slams the door behind himself as he walks into the livingroom.
The little girl asleep on the couch certainly doesn’t help cool his temper.
He’s angry she exists, he realizes, and not just because he’s now stuck with her by default. It means Tommy moved on. It means he found someone he cared about enough to have a child with. It means he opened his heart up to a new little girl.
It means he’s now the only one carrying Sarah with undiluted grief.
The kid snuffles in her sleep, curled around the blue blanket she’d been in her box with, and he swallows against the stupid tightness in his throat. Sarah had had a blanket, a soft, fuzzy pink one his mom had given her as a toddler. Sarah had refused to sleep without it, had dragged it everywhere. They’d had to perform a goddamn military maneuver when it finally got ratty enough that it had to be washed, putting her down for a nap and racing against the clock to carefully pull it out of her arms and get it washed and dried and returned before she woke up to find it gone.
Hell, after Julia had passed, they’d had to go to the house of their neighbor with frontloading machines to let Sarah watch it like a hawk until it was clean.
He’s seized with the crazy, cruel urge to snatch this blue blanket away, to toss it out of a window, to not have to watch another child curled up with a fuzzy blanket. It hurts, seeing it.
But he also can’t look away.
He and Tess don’t sleep peacefully, not really. They both have nightmares regularly, and between the hours they keep and the booze, what rest they do get is iffy at best when it comes to quality. Ellie, though, is a young child, and she sleeps like one, curled into a ball around her blanket, little face smooth and unworried.
Well, it was unworried, he thinks as he watches it crease at something in her dreams. She makes a whimpering sort of noise, curling up tighter like she’s escaping something. Her mouth twists to one side, and she flinches, body jerking. Before he knows he’s going to do it, he’s crossing the room and sitting on the coffee table, reaching out.
He pauses with one hand a scant half-inch from her shoulder.
He doesn’t know where it came from, the reflexive motion to tend, to soothe. The most he does when Tess wakes with a nightmare is put an arm around her and sit in silence. Any gentleness he once had got buried in a field off of Highway 35, left deep in the ground with his daughter’s body. What is it to him if a kid has a bad dream? It’s not his job to do anything about it.
And yet…
Ignoring the way his fingers shake just slightly, he rests a palm on the kid’s side, rubbing up and down.
“Easy,” he says softly. “You’re alright. Quiet now.”
As sweet words go, it’s dubious, but it works well enough. Her face smooths, and she exhales a long breath, going still once more, face turned in against her pillow.
He sits and watches her sleep for longer than he’ll ever admit to.
*
He returns to Tess without apologies for storming out, but she doesn’t call him on it. He knows it’s unfair, the allowances she makes for him, but they’re too deep into this now to go making changes at this point. He’ll find her something good on the next run and hand it over, and she’ll understand that it’s the closest he can get to sorry these days. It’s not great, it’s almost definitely not healthy, but it’s what they are, what they’ve been from the start, broken and ugly but still the best either of them can manage.
“You know if Marlene ever kept any other kids?” He asks as he slips back between the sheets. He won’t admit it, not ever, but something about watching the kid sleep has taken the edge off of his frustration.
“Not that I know of,” Tess says, and he tries not to notice how carefully she’s keeping apart from him right now. They don’t cuddle beyond collapsing against each other briefly after a fuck to get their breath back or creeping together in their sleep, but they don’t usually actively avoid touching. Right now, though, she’s keeping a very clear distance between them, even her icicle feet kept to herself. “But it’s not like we were that honest with each other.” There’s a slight edge of bitterness he can’t quite read. He knows Tess and Marlene were an item for a while after the outbreak and that it ended badly, but he hasn’t gotten many details beyond that.
He hasn’t asked for many details beyond that.
“Might have kept her as leverage,” he offers, unsure of what else to say. “Offer to keep her safe, keep an eye on her, and then not give her back unless he listens.”
From what he’s seen of Firefly tactics, they seem more than capable of it. He wants to follow it with a comment about how Tommy would have come to them–come to him –in that case, but…
You walk out that door, he remembers himself saying, and don’t you dare try coming back. You leave now, it’s for good. I don’t wanna hear you ask me for another goddamn thing.
Words spoken in anger, in frustration, in fear for his brother walking away.
Words that made it clear that Tommy would be a solo act from here on out.
“I dunno,” Tess says, shifting slightly to face him. “Marlene’s a cunt when she feels like it, but holding a kid hostage? Maybe if she were a FEDRA kid, but good at what he does or not, I don’t see why she’d pull that with Tommy of all people.”
“He knows all our trade routes,” he says on a guess. “Probably pretty valuable information for bugs crawling in and out.”
And if the idea of his brother offering that information up makes him feel angry at the betrayal, it’s tempered by the idea that it was for the sake of the kid currently snoring away on their couch. Annoying as she is, she’s a near-baby likely held as ransom. His own fault or not, Tommy would have just been protecting her. He and Tess would certainly be able to deal with threats better than her, stab-happy as she seems to be.
“You really think Tommy wouldn’t just tell us he had a kid?” Tess asks, barely suppressing a yawn as she settles down, tugging their ratty quilt up to her shoulders. “Why make us go through a damn scavenger hunt?”
He opens his mouth to respond, but he doesn’t actually speak. He still doesn’t know how he feels about her, this kid who’s apparently his niece, but it’s not that hard to imagine why Tommy would have kept her from him. His disapproval of his brother’s choices aside, he’s not the person he used to be, not a person who should be around a child. He’s not soft enough for it anymore. He’s too bitter, too broken, to ever be the kind of person a kid should be around.
But he doesn’t know if he can admit that out loud, no matter that Tess already knows it.
“I don’t fucking know,” he says in a tone that makes it clear he’s done talking about this for tonight. He turns away and reaches out, turning the light off.
It’s still a long, long time before he actually falls asleep.
*
He stares at the kid.
The kid stares back.
Tess has abandoned him to go cash in food vouchers (some earned through too-hard work and the rest from supplemental income earned with oxy and moonshine), so he’s stuck watching the kid.
The kid who is apparently his niece.
“What’s this called?” The kid asks, pointing at her upper lip.
“Your lip?” He asks, raising an eyebrow, and the kid rolls her eyes.
“No,” she says, like he’s the dumbest person she’s ever had the misfortune of speaking to. “The hair stuff on it.”
“A mustache?”
She nods.
“Yeah, a mustache.” She gives him a superior look. “Tommy’s mustache is better than your mustache.”
He wills Tess to work faster.
*
“It’s time for my vampire lamp,” the kid says two days into being with them, like that’s supposed to mean absolutely anything.
They both stare at the kid blankly, and she looks between them, clearly expecting them to both understand what she’s asking and to have an answer accordingly.
“Is that…a toy?” Tess tries on a guess. “A lamp shaped like a vampire?”
The kid’s face scrunches in confusion.
“No?” She says, like they’re trying to trick her with the question. “It’s a light, and I gotta sit in it so I don’t become a vampire.” She looks at them expectantly, like this should absolutely have jogged their memories.
“There’s a lamp over there,” he says with a wave of his hand to the one on their side table. “Sit under it if you want.” He guesses that this is some sort of game she likes to play, but even if he’s responsible for her until he can get her back to Tommy, he’s not looking to play preschool teacher.
“Is it a vampire lamp?” Ellie asks, frowning at it. “My vampire lamp has a bendy.” She illustrates with one little finger tracing a curve in the air.
“Think we have a desk lamp in the closet,” Tess says, sounding mildly amused. Ellie joins her as she looks through the junk they’ve stashed in there over the years, waiting fairly patiently for such a young child. When Tess makes a soft noise of victory and steps back with the desk lamp in hand, Ellie lights up.
“It’s a baby vampire light!” She says, sounding delighted.
“We can-” Tess starts, but there’s a knock at the door and their neighbor Roger’s voice. Tess hands him the lamp despite his look at her and goes to talk to Roger, grabbing the vouchers they have to trade for some clothes for the kid, Ellie having come to them in just pajamas. He gives her a look at being left to play lamps of all things, but she ignores him, patting his cheek patronizingly just to make him scowl.
He turns to find the kid starfished on her back by the outlet, clearly waiting for him to hurry up. He rolls his eyes but grabs a kitchen chair. Playing lamps is bizarre, but so long as it keeps the kid quiet and still for a bit, he supposes he can put up with it.
“What’s a vampire lamp supposed to do?” He asks, not really caring, just needing to break the weird silence.
“If you don’t see the sun, you turn into a vampire and you eat people,” she tells him with the air of an expert, clearly delighted with the idea of turning into a vampire no matter her words.
“And you don’t see the sun?” He asks dryly. “Seems pretty hard to miss.” He plugs the lamp in the outlet and then sets it on the chair, directing the bulb towards her and turning it on, putting her squarely in the circle of light.
“I’m not allowed,” she says easily, closing her eyes and wiggling a bit as she settles. “‘Cause I’m a secret.”
He frowns.
“What?” He asks, disbelieving. “You don’t go outside?”
“Uh uh,” she says with a shake of her head before pausing for a moment. “Well, Marlene letted me go to the room with windows on top sometimes with Tommy.” She opens her eyes and then crosses her arms across her chest in what looks like a self-soothing gesture. “I miss Tommy,” she says quietly, and he sees her lower lip wobble.
“We’ll find him,” he says before he knows he’s going to speak. He doesn’t care if she’s upset, he tells himself firmly. This is just so she won’t scream and make the neighbors investigate again.
“Do you promise?” She asks, eyes searching. “Super big promise?”
“I promise,” he says and then nudges her hip with his toes before he moves away. “Now finish cooking.”
For reasons he doesn’t know, this makes her giggle.
He decides very firmly that the sensation it causes in his chest must be down to something he ate.
*
They trade off staying with the kid for the first few days they have her, made easier by a stash of supplies and credits built up from a few good runs, but it’s not sustainable. Having the kid in the house limits what jobs they can take at night, and without taking work during the day, they won’t be able to offset the drain on their resources. Besides that, there’s profit to be made in turning people in. It just takes one of their neighbors whispering to a FEDRA agent they don’t have on the take about them having resources without them both working to get them both hauled to the wall and Ellie taken in as a ward of FEDRA.
So, finding a place for the kid to go during the day it is.
There’s a woman two buildings over named Janine who’s too old for FEDRA assignments and watches kids for the day, he knows. He’s seen parents dropping off babies and toddlers from households without a child old enough to look after siblings more than once. With how freely FEDRA makes IUDs available for population control, there isn’t a huge number of kids anymore, but there’s still enough that someone has to take care of them, and more than a few people too old for manual labor offer up their services in exchange for ration coupons. He’s reluctant to leave the kid with a stranger, but they also don’t really have much of a choice, not if they’re going to survive long enough to return her to Tommy where she should be.
“Anything happens,” he reminds Ellie as they walk down the stairs, “you find your way back here, remember?” It’s not ideal, a small child running through the streets of a QZ alone, but she’s feisty enough to make it.
(He hopes.)
“I ‘member,” she says, sounding fairly chipper for a kid about to be left with strangers.
“The other kids-” Tess starts, but Ellie stops suddenly, nearly making them trip over her with the way she’s blocking the stairwell.
“Other kids?” Ellie repeats, looking back at them and seeming suddenly nervous.
He and Tess exchange a look, trying to work out what’s going on. He remembers Sarah being anxious on the first day she was dropped off somewhere other than his mom’s house, but Ellie’s seemed pretty bold until now, something he’s chalked up to Tommy leaving her with strangers often enough for her to be relatively socialized.
“There’s gonna be other kids?” Ellie says, fidgeting with the hem of her shirt.
“Yeah?” He asks, not understanding what the issue is. “It’s a daycare.”
Ellie frowns.
“What’s a-the thing you said?”
“It’s a place where kids go during the day,” Tess explains patiently, still clearly confused but gentler than he might be able to manage with his answer.
“What about their han’lers?” Ellie asks, like they’re missing something very obvious.
“Their what?” He asks, frowning. “What are you talking about?”
Ellie lets out an exasperated noise, like they’re being deliberately obtuse.
“Their han’lers!” She says with an expansive wave of her hands. “The grown up who eats with ‘em and talks to ‘em and plays with ‘em.”
“Their…parents?” Tess says on a guess, and Ellie seems uncertain.
“Like…like Tommy,” she says tentatively. “Where’re the other kids’ Tommys?”
“They’ll get ‘em at the end of the day,” he says, understanding now, even if he still doesn’t know why the fuck she would have been taught ‘handler’ instead of ‘parent.’ He suspects it was likely some sort of Firefly bullshit. “The kids all get dropped off, they stay at daycare, and then their parents come get ‘em. It’s what-” He almost trips over the word, it seems so wildly out of place applied to his brother. “It’s what your daddy’ll be doing with you after we find him.”
“My daddy?” She echoes, looking more confused at this. He hasn’t missed this, how she only calls Tommy by his name, but he’s chalked it up as more Firefly nonsense, maybe meant to keep her safer. He doesn’t know when Tommy first started talking to them, after all.
“Tommy,” he says.
Ellie still looks slightly confused, but after a gentle nudge to her head from Tess, she starts walking again.
*
Accounting for tiny legs means it takes longer than usual to get outside, and he’s impatient to get going. All of the best work assignments will be taken by the time they get there, but he’d still prefer not to be the one at the very bottom of the pack if he can avoid it. He’s pretty sure they’re still doing wiring work at a new building, and he knows he can handle that better than the average worker.
His eagerness to get the day started, however, is complicated by Ellie’s reaction the moment they step out of the building.
They don’t notice that she’s not beside them until they’re already on the street and look down to find themselves lacking a small child. Alarmed, they both turn, only to find Ellie pressed back to the wall of the apartment building, eyes massive as she looks around, little chest rising and falling rapidly as she breathes in quick pants, clearly afraid.
At once, he’s back at her side, looking around for what in the hell could be causing this reaction. He expects a group of Fireflies marching their way over, maybe even Marlene herself leading the charge, but there’s nothing more than the usual traffic on the streets, nothing to explain why the kid would look like she’s about to break and flee.
“It’s too big,” Ellie all but breathes, little hands white knuckling the stone of the entryway stairs. “Joel, it’s too big.”
He has less than no idea what in the hell this even means. Tess returns to them then and squats down, voice gentle.
“What do you mean?” She asks, even as Ellie flinches at the sound of a FEDRA announcement coming over the loudspeakers. It’s loud, certainly, but the way she immediately puts her hands over her ears and presses down as hard as she can feels disproportionate, even judging by his shitty hearing.
“Hey,” he starts, “what’s-” But trying to tug her hand away from one ear so she can hear him just makes her squeak with the start of another announcement and tip forward, head against his chest.
He freezes.
He tries to back up immediately, but the kid follows, bringing one hand down to grab his shirt enough that he tugs her forward when he moves. He gives Tess a look to get her to fix this, but she looks as confused as he feels.
“Hey,” Tess says, ducking down and pushing at Ellie’s chin. “Talk to us. What’s up?”
“Too loud,” Ellie says, too quietly at first for even Tess to catch it. “It’s too loud!” She says again emphatically. “And too big! I wanna go back.”
“No,” he says at once, uninterested in indulging this tantrum, but when he pulls her hand free of him, he can feel she’s shaking.
Whatever the fuck she’s doing right now, she’s not faking it.
“Ellie,” he starts, but a passing FEDRA guard barking orders to get out of the way to a group shuffling along on the sidewalk makes Ellie fully flinch and then turn tail and bolt, fleeing back up the staircase far faster than she descended it.
*
They let Ellie back into the apartment so she won’t rip her nails off trying to claw her way through the door, and from there she darts to their room, scrambling under the bed and refusing to come back out.
“Come talk to us,” Tess–on her belly next to him on the floor–coaxes, but Ellie shakes her head and presses a little tighter into the corner.
“Ellie,” he starts, trying to reach her, but after a mere brush of his fingers, Ellie squeaks and retreats more, well out of reach. It would be possible to move the entire bed and grab her, but it would feel cruel to do it that way.
Even if they’re rapidly running out of time to handle this before they risk losing out on the jobs they have lined up for the day.
“You go.”
He turns to look at Tess when she speaks, lifting an eyebrow in question.
“I’ll stay with her,” she says, nodding her head to Ellie. “Your job pays more today anyway. I’ll get her out and talk it through. You go meet roll call.”
“You sure?” He asks, hesitating before pushing himself up. It feels wrong, leaving Tess to deal with this on her own. It’s his brother’s kid. Of the two of them, he’s the one who has the greater responsibility here. It’s not right to drag Tess into-
“I’ll play stay at home mom for the day,” Tess says with a slightly wry smile. “It’ll be fun. Just like old times.”
“You were a stay at home mom?” He asks, rising to his feet. He can’t quite picture it. People changed after the outbreak, but Tess doesn’t seem to have the temperament.
“Nah,” she says, rolling to her back and looking up at him. “I was the breadwinner. This’ll be a fun experiment.” She lifts a leg and kicks at his ankle gently. “Now get out and go bring back some bacon.”
“You gonna have supper and a whiskey waiting on me?” He asks dryly, even as he obeys and moves to the door.
Tess snorts.
“Just as soon as you bring me flowers.”
It’s flirting around the edge of the things that live between them unsaid, this repartee, and he makes his escape before they pry any more at things that have to stay untouched.
*
He arrives back that evening sans flowers, but he can tell the apartment has been picked up some when he comes through the door. He opens his mouth to call out for Tess, but he catches a glimpse of light off of tawny hair through the cracked door to the bedroom, and he toes his boots off without calling out, padding over to the door quietly.
Tess and Ellie are asleep on the bed, Ellie curled up against Tess’s side, head on her shoulder. It looks so domestic, so private, that he nearly feels the need to look away. This scene doesn’t belong here, in this apartment, in this city, in this world. This is the kind of thing that belonged Before.
Still, he’s careful not to wake them as he unloads the supplies he brought back with him.
*
“They kept her in a single room for most of her life.”
He doesn’t jump at Tess’s voice right behind him, but he does jump slightly when she presses a hand to his side to lean around him. She looks faintly amused at this but doesn’t comment, aborting her reach for an empty glass to take his instead. He gives a token protest but lets go, and she takes a long swallow.
“Have fun playing housewife?” He asks when his drink is returned to him, down a good finger and half.
“Please,” she says, sounding amused as she hops up onto the counter in a way she knows he hates. She ignores him pointedly sliding her down the counter to finish unpacking the jerky and ration cubes. “If anyone’s the housewife here, it’s you.”
He grunts in a lack of response.
“She’d never been outside before,” Tess says, and the levity’s left her voice. “Not during the day at least. She got freaked out by how much there is.”
“Kids are dramat-” He starts, but she cuts him off.
“She said Marlene always told her her existence is ‘priv-idged’ information,” he can hear her anger. “Apparently she always stayed inside except for when Tommy took her to what sounds like a courtyard.”
It’s a sad thought, a kid stuck inside all day, especially Ellie, who seems like she would give the Energizer Bunny a run for his money. He wonders what in the fuck Tommy was thinking, leaving his kid with such a bitch. Was the distance between them truly that great, that Tommy didn’t think he could come to them? Come to him? Was the better alternative truly leaving his kid to live like fucking Boo Radley with Marlene calling the shots?
He tries very hard not to think about how the answer is apparently yes.
*
For the sake of safety, they need Ellie to not freak out at the scale of the world outside of their apartment building, so taking the kid for a walk becomes a daily event.
(A task he gets stuck with more than he thinks is strictly fair, equitable distribution of labor speaking).
He jumps the first time Ellie takes his hand, jerking it out of her grasp completely on instinct. He hasn’t held anyone’s hand since Sarah was eight, too old and mature to do much more than loop their arms together after that. Ellie blinks up at him, startled, and she pulls into herself slightly.
“Tommy holds my hand,” she says, slightly petulant, slightly insecure. “It’s big out here.” A wave of one little arm to indicate the entire world. “Tommy would hold my hand ‘cause it’s big.” She says this like she knows it for a fact, and he wonders, not for the first time, exactly how much time his brother spent with his kid. He had never asked when Tommy disappeared for a while, writing it off as his brother looking for a little trouble or a little excitement. He’d been stricter at the start, barely letting him out of his sight, but Tommy had chafed at big brother wrecking his fun, and it’s not like Tommy can’t hold his own when it comes down to it. They’d had a ground rule of him never trying to pull deals on his own, but Joel had largely left him to his own devices beyond that.
Now he wonders how many nights he wrote off as his brother running off to fuck or get fucked up ended with him rocking his daughter to sleep.
“You look like you got the sads,” Ellie says, tilting her head slightly, and he startles at the use of the phrase he hasn’t heard for a goddamn decade.
“What’d you just say?” He demands, like he didn’t hear her, like his brain just put Sarah’s words in her mouth.
Ellie seems unsure of whether she should repeat herself given his response.
“What’d you just say?” He asks again, breathing against the tight pain in his chest. He’d forgotten Sarah used to say that, forgotten that it had been a family joke. He certainly hadn’t expected to hear it from Ellie.
“You-” Ellie starts, faltering. She lets out an alarmed noise when someone knocks into her as they pass, making her stumble forward, and before he thinks about it, he picks her up before she gets jostled more, glaring at the man’s back as he walks away, not even looking back to see if he knocked her over.
So busy trying to glare holes in the man’s head, he doesn’t notice how stiff Ellie is at first. When he does, he turns to her, wondering if she twisted her ankle or something. She doesn’t seem hurt, though. She just seems…surprised.
“You alright?” He asks gruffly. The weight of her in his arms is both familiar and foreign. He hasn’t held a child like this in almost 20 years, but his body remembers what he’s forced himself to forget, and it’s natural, propping her on one hip. Ellie, though, is tense in a way Sarah never was, slightly awkward like she doesn’t quite understand how to be held. “What?” He asks, jostling her slightly. “Tommy never held you?”
She blinks before she shifts slightly, like she’s testing it out.
“Tommy helded me,” she says. “But only Tommy.”
Despite himself, a flicker of teasing ‘Daddy’s girl’ runs through his head, the same thing Tommy used to say to him when a screaming Sarah only settled in his arms. The thought cuts like a knife, even now, the memory of trying to soothe her the last time he held her, pressing his hands tight against the belly he’d once pressed raspberries to-
“You look like you got the sads again,” Ellie reports. “Big sads.”
“I’m fine,” he says, pushing her head down to his shoulder. “No more talking now.”
She lets out an annoyed huff, but she obeys, and when he guides her arms up so she won’t feel so awkward in his hold, she goes easily.
*
He feels an absurd amount of nerves on the day they decide Ellie is finally comfortable enough outside to go to Janine’s. It’s not dissimilar to how he felt on Sarah’s first day of preschool, and he’s trying so hard not to think about that that he misses the first signs of Ellie’s nerves. Tess was supposed to come with them, but one of their plugs had decided to get cold feet about skimming a few bottles of penicillin from a new medicine shipment coming to FEDRA, and she’d needed to go talk her down from the ledge before her nerve broke completely.
So, he’s on kid dropoff duty.
“Joel?”
He looks down when Ellie speaks, her voice uncharacteristically hesitant.
“Yeah?” He asks, picking her up briefly to swing her over a big hole in the road.
“Are you-um,” she hesitates, pressing a little tighter to his leg when a group of FEDRA officers walk by. He hasn’t dug into exactly what she was taught about FEDRA, but she treats them like an active threat at all times; in a world like theirs, it’s not the worst practice, but it is noticeable.
“Am I?” He prompts when she doesn’t continue.
“Don’t leave forever, okay?” She asks. He stops, thrown, and it makes her nervous. “Please?” She adds, like his response was because he was worried about her manners.
“It’s just daycare,” he tells her. For the first time all morning, he allows himself to remember Sarah’s first day of daycare, how she clung to his leg and cried. She’d gotten over it in a week like the teacher had said she would, but he hasn’t forgotten it.
(Nor how he spent that week nearly feeling like crying himself when he was back in his truck.)
“You’ll be alright,” he says, moving to one side of the sidewalk and then kneeling down enough to meet her eye to eye. “It’s not forever, alright?”
“Tommy said he’d come right back, and then he didn’t come back,” she says, and her eyes go a little shiny. “Nobody ever comes back when they leave me.”
He notes it as another thing he’ll be taking out of his brother’s hide when they finally find him. Jesus, if he was going to have a kid, he at least should have fucking done it right. He kneels, displacing Ellie from her hold around his knee, and he dares to reach out and cup her tiny face in his hands. His brother might not be here to fix his mistakes, but he can make a start. She needs to know how their family operates, needs to feel secure enough that she won’t just be left.
Not anymore, at least.
“We will come back,” he tells her firmly. “You’ll stay there and play with the other kids,” not that the kids he usually sees look like the playful sort, wan and drawn in the way of children in this new, shittier world, “and then we will come get you. I promise you, alright? We will come back to get you.”
Ellie is quiet a long moment, her gaze intense, but finally she nods.
“Okay,” she says quietly. “I believe you.”
When he stands and starts walking again, he’s the one who reaches out for her hand first.
*
Ellie lasts a single day at Janine’s house.
From what he gathers, a kid hit her when she didn’t move fast enough out of his way, and Ellie bit the shit out of the kid in return, chomping down on his arm and then his face when he bent down. The fight itself doesn’t seem to be the issue, but the way in which Ellie ended it is “unacceptable, absolutely bestial” per Janine.
For his own part, he’s more than slightly proud of his niece, frankly.
He was alarmed when Tess first carried in a blood-stained Ellie, but the kid had been largely nonplussed, accepting what can only be called fussing until he was satisfied she wasn’t hurt. He’s a little worried about her coming into contact with blood, but it’s not like he can do anything about that now beyond hope.
“-and then-then-” She says while he wipes her face off, hissing between his teeth when he sees a dark bruise at her temple where the little fucker must have hit her. “-then he pushed me and said,” she deepens her voice, sounding a bit like a mouse doing an impression of a lion, “‘Move, runt.”” She throws her hands upwards with distaste. “I don’t even know what means.”
“Means you’re little,” he tells her, pulling her lip down briefly to check her teeth before she tugs her head back.
“I’m not little,” she says stubbornly.
He gives her a brief up and down, and she wrinkles her nose at him.
He catches himself right before he playfully wrinkles his back at her.
*
Apparently the few people running daycares out of their apartments all talk to each other, something they only find out when both of the other people they check with refuse to take Ellie on.
“Fights mean FEDRA,” says one woman, not even opening her front door fully, the chain lock still engaged. “I don’t need that hassle.”
“Janine says she’s a brat,” the second one says plainly, shutting the door before they get a chance to say anything in response.
(The way Ellie sticks her tongue out at the door wouldn’t exactly help their argument.)
With no other place to stash the kid, they end up deciding to take her with them. There’s a few people who take kids with them–sometimes because they’re little enough to be breastfeeding, sometimes because they clearly have separation anxiety, and sometimes because they’re finally big enough to start helping out–so they won’t be doing anything too wildly unprecedented.
It’s still not ideal, not by a long shot, but it’s not like they’ve got many choices.
For her part, Ellie seems to enjoy these field trips. She’s not quite as skittish outside anymore, though open patches of sky where parks used to be still make her stick close, watching the sky like a chicken looking for a hawk. For the sake of expediency, they usually end up tying her in a sling on the back of whoever has her for the day, and he grows used to having her chatter away in his ear all day, his own personal NPR.
“-then the chickens would get big!” She tosses her one free hand skyward at this in demonstration. “And then go nom nom nom, and then-then the trees would be gone.”
She leans her head around enough to show him her widened eyes to emphasize her point. He’s lost track of what the fuck she’s talking about, but it’s not like he has anything else to listen to while clearing up the wreckage of a Firefly bombing for far too few ration cards. Tess is tracking down an old source who owes them, so he’s on Ellie Watch today, which means boring manual labor that can be accomplished with a kid on his back.
(He won’t admit it, but he’s had far worse days.)
“Tommy says chickens used to be dinosaurs,” Ellie says, and he can hear she’s dubious about this. “But I think he’s lying. Dinosaurs are better than chickens.”
“He likes making jokes,” he allows, pausing briefly to shove a large pole loose of a pile of crumbling concrete, a feat of strength that makes Ellie cheer from her place on his back, his own personal little cheerleader.
He tries not to let it go to his head, though he can’t resist a small smile at it.
His brother made an endearing kid, he’ll give him that much.
*
He’s never interacted much with the guards–beyond selling pills or other contraband to more than a few of them, that is–but the presence of Ellie means a female guard named Lily starts remembering them. He’s suspicious of her motivations at first. He’s never personally sold to her, but he’s not unaware that word gets around. It’s possible she just wants a source to buy off of and thinks she can butter him up by talking to Ellie. After a couple of weeks, however, it genuinely just seems to be that she likes the kid.
“No way a stegosaurus could beat a t-rex,” he hears her tell Ellie today. He’s doing electrical work, so Ellie is sitting this one out on a nearby wall for the sake of not risking electrocuting them both by having her on his back. She’s close enough to call for him if she needs him, but she’s largely been content reading one of the three books Tess has found for her. After Lily came on shift and wandered over, however, they’ve been deep in a conversation he’s just heard bits and snatches of.
“Yeah huh!” Ellie insists with endearing enthusiasm, her book still open in her hands but clearly forgotten for the moment. “Their noses are pointy,” she pokes at her own nose in demonstration, “and-and they could stab ‘em!” She sees him from the corner of her eye and turns to him. “Tell her! Stegosauruses would win!”
Lily turns to him, looking amused.
“You heard her,” he says mildly, wiping his hands off on a bandana before reaching for his water bottle, left next to Ellie for safekeeping.
Ellie gives Lily a superior look, gesturing to him as if to emphasize his support.
“He has to agree with you,” Lily says with playful dismissal. “He’s your dad.”
He chokes on his water, and Lily jumps up, pounding him on the back.
He hasn’t gotten himself together enough to correct her by the time she’s called away to break up a fight.