Work Text:
and your name carved over the door.
facing out to the tallest view
from your place on the second floor.
sound it out to an empty house:
was it just like you had before?
The windchimes are what tipped her off.
When she woke up, she’d been so warm and so content, she simply kept her eyes closed and stayed as still as she could. Maybe if she didn’t move, she thought, this feeling won't go away. Maybe she could stay this healed forever.
But the windchimes twinkled outside her window, and she lurched up in fear.
No one in Jackson had windchimes, and last she checked, she and Joel were nowhere near Jackson. She racks her brain on where she could possibly be, ruling out things one by one. This room couldn’t be one of the Firefly hospital rooms, being so oddly lived in. The walls were blue and the ceiling was covered in glow stars, most stuck in some lame approximation of real constellations. It looked like someone had tried their best.
On the walls were posters for movies and video games, some she recognized, some she didn’t. There was a Mortal Kombat poster on the wall across from her bed, glinting with its shiny newness. A gaggle of Savage Starlight comics were strewn across the top of a shelf, and the rest of the shelf was filled with books, so many untouched by water damage and age.
The scariest thing, though, was the plaque above the door that said, Ellie.
She kicks off the blankets, puffy, blue things that wrap their arms around her legs as best they can manage, and when she finally frees herself of them, she blasts to the door. She puts her ear to it, trying to hear what she could possibly be dealing with.
She hears nothing.
No talking, no music, no sharpening of knives. It’s completely possible that there is no one in this house.
Before she opens the door, she leans back and observes the room once more, scanning for her knife among the water bottles and trinkets on the bedside table. She tries not to panic when she doesn’t find it there. She doesn’t find it anywhere, in fact, when she rips apart the entire room looking for her last piece of her mother.
“Ellie, honey?”
It startles her so much, she yelps, knocking into the chest-of-drawers she was formerly searching.
By the time her heart stops beating out of her chest and her fists unclench by her sides, the voice calls again, expecting an answer. In its cadence, though, Ellie finds something: familiarity. It’s Joel calling her name. He’s here too.
She forgets the knife in favor of rocketing out into the hallway and taking the stairs two at a time to find him.
“Ellie I-” he stops talking, a sort of oof noise making its way out of him as she squeezes all the air from his lungs. Something clatters as he sets it down, and then his arms are around her. She doesn’t want to pull away, and something tells her he’d let her hug him as long as she wants, but she finds she has to if she wants answers.
“Joel, Joel,” She says, in that sort of breathless way things always come out after something even mildly adventurous happens. “What is this? Why are we here? Are we back in Jackson?”
“Ellie, Ellie-girl, slow down.” He waves, turning the heat off of a pan of eggs. Then he’s got his full attention on her, and it's a bit scarier than usual.
His face is free from exhaustion. It’s uncanny, and odd, to see him not weighed down by constant anger and fear.
“What? I- Joel, what is this?”
He sits her down in the nearest chair in the dining room, feeling her forehead with his hand. She gives him a wild look.
“Are you feeling okay, Ellie? I have to go to work, but I can ask Maria to come check on you later if you need to stay home?”
“Stay home?” She feels her throat close up, eyes beginning to water. He’s not answering her, and she is so, so confused. Her hands begin to shake, despite her efforts to pull them close to her chest. She refuses to cry.
“Ellie, it’s Wednesday. You have school.”
“School?” Ellie whines, teardrops finally escaping despite her attempts at staying tough. “Joel what’s happening?”
He can’t seem to stay still at the sight of her tears. He leans forward, wrapping his arms around her once more. “I don’t know babygirl, you tell me,” he whispers gently in her ear. That’s the breaking point then, and she begins to sob.
She’s mumbling something, she knows now, because Joel squeezes her tighter when he hears where am i where am i where am i. He seems at a loss, which only makes her chest squeeze tighter. He’s supposed to know these things. He’s supposed to tell her.
She could stay here forever, tears and all, but she flinches violently when the front door shuts.
“I’m here Joel!” Someone calls, stomping through the house. Joel just sighs, shaking his head. “Is Ellie not up? Figured she’d be out and about by-”
“Morning, Tommy,” Joel concedes.
“What’s wrong,” Tommy asks as he scans Ellie’s tearful face. Ellie sniffles, burying her face into Joel’s shoulder.
“I don’t know,” Joel acquiesces, sighing. “I reckon she may be sick. She woke up confused this morning, didn’t know where she was.”
“Didn’t know where she was?” Tommy repeats, completely out of his depth.
“Yeah, I don’t suppose you could cover my shift this mornin’? I’m worried about her.”
Tommy’s gaping mouth closes. “Yeah, yeah, you got it. What about Sarah? Need me to take her to school?”
“Sarah?” Ellie asks, suddenly up again. Joel gives Tommy a see? look and she ignores it. Then, in the next second, she hears someone else bounding down the stairs. She shakes her head, back and forth and back and forth.
When Sarah enters the kitchen, she gasps. It seems as if she’s breaking some law of the universe by just being near her. She waits for maybe the entire world to explode. Instead, all she gets is a splitting headache from her constantly swiveling head.
Joel and Tommy are still watching her with twin looks of concern.
Sarah doesn’t say anything as she enters the kitchen, absolved with something on the glowing black box in her hand. She clicks it off as she grabs a plate, leaving the box on the side of the counter. “Dad, you’ve been getting better at them, but this doesn’t even look like scrambled eggs this time.”
When she doesn’t receive a reply to her joke, she finally looks up, gathering the scene with furrowed brows. Ellie just keeps staring at her, her brown curls shining in the morning sun. She looks everything and nothing like Joel described her.
She’s cleaner than Ellie thought she’d be. It slipped her mind that Sarah would have access to steady showers and a washing machine. She’d forgotten that kids before the apocalypse didn’t constantly tie up grimy hair and push on blackened shoes. Her face is clear too, free from any scars or blemishes. Ellie drags a hand up to her own face, feeling for her eyebrow scar. When she can’t find it, her breathing speeds up a little.
“What’s wrong with Ellie, Dad?”
“Uh, we don’t know. Woke up confused this morning, is all.”
“Woke up confused?” Sarah squints, concern and curiosity warring on her face.
“Didn’t know where she was.” Tommy interjects, quelling the curiosity and amplifying the concern. Suddenly Ellie wants to go back under her elusive covers, pretending not to hear windchimes and instead to hear the morning work she’d heard so briefly in Jackson.
“Is she sick?”
“I’m not sure,” Joel answers. “I think I’m gonna keep her home from school just in case.”
“Aw what? Unfair.” Sarah whines. Ellie’d also forgotten how selfish kids could be back then. Not in a terrible way–no. Sometimes she wished she got to be selfish.
“Sarah, you’re not sick.”
“Am too.” Sarah coughs into her hand, clearly fake and only succeeding in making Joel raise an eyebrow and Tommy smile a bit.
“Only sick kids get to stay home. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.”
“You literally do! Dadddd, I have nothing important to do today and clearly Ellie needs my emotional support so I think you should just let-”
“Please,” comes Ellie’s quiet request, silencing the room.
She feels the tears roll down her face again. She doesn’t know what this is, where she is, why she’s here, but she may as well make the most of it. She will never, ever, get to see Sarah in the flesh again.
“Please don’t make her leave.”
Ellie can tell just as well here as she can normally when Joel’s made a decision. He exhales, the fight leaving him with all of the carbon dioxide in his lungs. He brings a hand up, letting half of Ellie go to rub at his face. “Fine.”
Sarah gives Ellie the happiest expression she thinks she may have ever seen on a human being before. It strikes her that it’s over something this small. She tries to offer Sarah a smile back, but all she can muster is a grimace. Sarah sobers up a bit at that.
“Okay, me and Ellie are gonna go watch a movie,” she says, forgetting her plate and ambling to the threshold to the living room and beckoning Ellie through it. Joel kisses her on the head before he evicts her from his arms, whispering about making some calls. Tommy blows a kiss to both girls before he fades from Ellie’s view of the kitchen.
Sarah grabs her arm, pulling her further through the house, and Ellie instantly grimaces. This is her infected arm. Sarah’s going to see it and let go, pull back and scream. Ellie’s going to ruin all of this, all over again. She looks down, hoping to catch it first, to tug her sleeves down over it– then stops.
There’s nothing on her arm. There’s nothing on her eyebrow, and she’s willing to bet there’ll be nothing anywhere else.
She’s thinking this over silently, wide eyed and terrified, when Sarah snaps under her eyes, obstructing her view of her scar-free hands. When she looks up, Sarah is looking at her with such scrutiny, she wants to look away.
“Are you okay, Ellie?”
“No.” Ellie swallows. It’s the only thing she can get out.
“Do you really not know where you are?” Sarah says, grabbing her hands now as if by some miracle she can transmit normalcy by skin to skin contact. Unfortunately for her, Ellie’s never known normal and that won’t start today.
“No,” Ellie answers again, tears falling and head pounding.
Sarah hums out of uncertainty, rocking back and forth on her feet. Ellie can tell she doesn’t know what to say or do. She must be like Joel in that way: she only wants to snap and make things better.
“Well,” Sarah starts, then chews on her lip for a moment. “You’re in our house. We’re in Austin, Texas, and… um. I don’t know what else.”
Ellie just nods, tears still rolling down her face.
The stories about her attention span must be true, because seconds later, they’re watching Jurassic Park. Apparently, it's been her favorite movie since she could walk. And it’s stranger than she expected, someone remembering her first steps. She wonders, suddenly, if somewhere here, there's an entire album of pictures of her and Sarah as children. As babies, crawling around on the floor. As toddlers, playing together in a sandbox.
Her heart pangs, instantly aware that in the likely scenario that this isn’t real, Sarah will never be her sister again. She will never have anyone left that she grew up with, Riley long gone to the wind.
She looks over, watching Sarah watch the screen. Her nose is scrunched in a way that Ellie is surprised to find she knows means Sarah’s disinterested. Or disgusted, either of the two. When she looks back to the TV, lighting strikes in an action shot and she jumps. This time, it’s Sarah who gives her a look. Pity and confusion are warring on her face, and it makes Ellie more uneasy than the loud noise had.
Sarah snakes her hand into Ellie’s, and it's the most tender, sisterly thing she’s ever felt in her life. A wave of emotions wash over her, and she’s got tears in her eyes again. Waking up here was confusing enough, but add in the grief over lost memories of a life she never had, she’s a wreck. Sarah opens her mouth to say something probably half comforting and half worse, but Joel walks into the living room carrying two plates.
He stops and stares at the TV for a moment, getting distracted in that Dad way Ellie’s seen several times before, just… never this bad. She thinks she could get used to this softer Joel. Her Joel is her Joel of course, and she loves him more than anything, but she often wondered what their relationship would have been like if he hadn’t been bogged down by years of trauma and anger.
“Dad,” Sarah deadpans. “Did you want to put those down?”
“What?” Joel says, distracted by the dinosaurs roaming freely on the screen. “Oh, yeah, sorry. I brought you girls breakfast. Didn’t think you got any earlier.”
He set the plates down on the coffee table, each girl grabbing one. The scrambled eggs from earlier lie on them, now fully cooked, surrounded by bacon and toast. Sarah’s has butter on it, and Ellie’s is smeared with something red that she can only assume is the strawberry jelly stuff she’s seen in movies before. She means to eat slow, she always does, but she’s never had food like this before. Plus, she’s never had bread. Tommy, her Tommy, had told her they usually have some in the fall made from wheat grown on-site, but in the winter when they came, there was a shortage of flour. The strawberry stuff just makes it ten times better. This must be her favorite, which is another weird thing to consider. Someone knowing her well enough to know her favorite things.
“Thanks Dad!” Sarah chimes.
Their heads naturally swivel to Ellie, after that. She supposes in this world, she’s supposed to have manners too.
“Uh,” She says, swallowing. “Thanks, Joel.”
She knows Joel would never judge her for the way she eats, in this world or the next, but he gives a look to her nearly empty plate. It’s only been a minute. Sarah’s is still mostly full. He seems to be getting more concerned by the second.
“Girls,” he says, addressing them both. “I’d told Tommy and Maria yesterday we could have dinner with them tonight, but Ellie, if you’re not feeling well and you’d like us to do it another day-”
Ellie nearly chokes, she swallows so fast. “No! No, uh. Can they still do it tonight?”
Joel gives her an odd look, but still, he concedes. He gives a slight nod. “Yeah,” he says slowly. “As long as you’re feeling okay, Ellie-girl.”
Ellie only nods.
“Alright then. I’ll-” He makes to walk away, but Ellie shoves her empty plate down and grabs his wrist.
“Will you- um. Can you stay and watch the movie with us?”
“Yeah,” Sarah says, throwing her a bone. She scoots over, patting the spot beside her, in between the two sisters. “It’s your favorite part,”
The camera pans, and it shows a sunrise cascading over a jungle-esque landscape where dinosaurs roam. The boy, the girl, and the man are in a tree, dirty and weary. It still manages to be a beautiful scene, though.
Joel, in lieu of standing in front of the TV and pretending he wasn’t actually watching when they ask him to move, sits down between them. Sarah leans her head on his shoulder, and Ellie does the same on his other side. He wraps his arms around both his girls.
_______
Ellie only knew Maria was pregnant, before they left.
Not what she would name the baby, not what it would look like, not even its gender. Yet, here, in this world she’s beginning to wonder isn’t just true reality, there is a six-year-old child standing in front of her.
“My name’s Ben. You already knew that but Mom and Dad told me you forgot.”
“What?”
“Dad told me you got confused.”
“Oh. Uh. Yeah.”
“Are you un-confused,” Ben said, absentmindedly running a small toy truck up and down his arm. “Did I help?”
“No,” Ellie laughed a bit. Her mood had definitely improved since this morning. Jurassic Park and making cupcakes with Sarah helped, a bit. “But you did help a little. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. Miss Samson told me to say that when people say thank you.”
“Who’s that?”
“My teacher. I told you, Bellie.”
“Oh, sorry. Um. Why Bellie?”
This time, it was Tommy who piped up. “When he was first talkin’ he couldn’t say Ellie,” He laughed. “Kept accidentally saying Bellie for some reason. It stuck for him.”
“Oh.”
Maria frowned a bit at Ellie, sending a concerned glance Joel’s way that was clearly not intended to be seen by Ellie. She saw it anyway, and drummed her fingers nervously on her jeans. The jeans that, as Sarah said, Ellie usually hated. Said an ex-friend let her borrow them, and she didn’t know why Ellie still had them, as she explicitly told her sister she hated them before. Unfortunately for them both, Ellie didn’t know either.
Before anyone could get any more concerned about Ellie, Sarah suggested they eat. Joel began cooking at noon, and the smells had permeated throughout the house. Ellie’d been looking forward to this since Sarah declared a movie marathon and they watched everything from Indiana Jones to Little Women. Plus, if she knew anything from the road, Joel was a pretty okay cook with only survival tools to work with. She wondered what he could do with a regular kitchen, if this morning was anything to go off of.
She’d sort of worried, about halfway through Little Women (she only remembers which movie because both she and Sarah had cried when Beth died), how this dinner would go. These people aren’t her Tommy and Maria. Of course, they had known this version of her since birth, probably, but she had no recollection of them. Only the faintest whispers from versions in a different place, in a different time.
Her fears were quelled with her hunger, though. There was not a single lull in conversation. Maria, Tommy, and Joel together made quite the lively bunch, she found, and on the other end of the table Sarah, Ben and herself sat. When they weren’t actively talking to the adults, Sarah was teaching Ben things like how to catch food in his mouth and how to get a kindergarten girlfriend. (Or boyfriend, Sarah chirped, startling Ellie a bit. Don’t let anyone ever tell you you have to like girls, Ben. To which Ben had nodded sagely, stowing away the information for later in that quick brain of his. Ellie can’t blame him. She did too.)
After dinner, the group of them sat around in the living room for a bit. Ellie was beginning to notice that theirs was one of those families that genuinely liked each other and wanted to keep talking. Her heart panged a little when she realized that for now, she was a part of this too.
Somewhere along the way, watching a movie had gotten suggested. Joel groaned, said he’d watched enough movies for one lifetime today, even though he’d only watched about one and a half out of the five. Sarah and Ellie were instantly on board, though. Tommy and Maria graciously let them pick the movie, to which they resolutely picked Tangled because it was Sarah’s favorite as a kid. “Also,” Sarah whispered, “This amnesia thing means you can watch everything all over again.”
Ellie didn’t tell Sarah that she had her memories, just not the ones Sarah expected her to. She didn’t have the heart to tell her she remembered watching the Princess Bride the one night in Jackson, just never anything more.
Sarah popped the movie in, plopping herself back on the couch in the spot Ellie began to assume was her regular spot. Joel in the middle, Ellie and Sarah on either side. Tommy, Maria, and Ben all found their places, and the moment felt just as warm as this morning had.
She fell asleep with the same contentment, resting on a happier Joel and possessing the knowledge that her sister was on the other side.
_____
When she woke up, she was sprawled out in the backseat of a truck.
She blinked awake slowly, consciousness coming to her in waves. Something about a movie. A blond girl with long, long hair. Sarah’s favorite. Her sister’s favorite. School in the morning. Did Tommy’s family go home?
“Ellie?” Joel called from the front seat. “You’re with me.”
“Did Ben leave?”
“What?”
“Tommy and Ben and Maria,” She said, and she could hear the words slur a bit. She wondered what that was about.
“Ellie, what?”
Ellie glanced to the front seat, eying Joel with furrowed brows. He was in a ratty old flannel, white-knuckling the wheel. He looked older than he had yesterday.
“Where’s Sarah?”
Joel pulled over. He kept glancing at her furtively, expecting what, she didn’t know. Her brain was still catching up to her. Something about a surgery, now? That would explain the hospital gown. But, why were they in a truck? Where was Sarah? Her head hurt.
It hit her when Joel opened the backseat door to feel her forehead.
His thumb had that scar on it, from something. She asked about it and he never told her.
“No.” She mumbled. “No, no, no.”
She shook her head warily back and forth. She sat up, looking around wildly, trying to gather her bearings. It didn’t work. It only resulted in catching Joel’s eye and bursting into tears. She sobbed hard, and Joel pulled her to him so that she was leaning on him and halfway out the door.
“What’s wrong Ellie? What’s wrong?”
Apparently, in these sorts of situations, she had a bad habit of mumbling to herself. Not again not again not again not again.
She thinks she may have screamed.
“It’s okay. It’s okay.” He changes his tactic when she sobs harder.
“It’ll be okay, Ellie.”
Not here, she thinks. Not really.