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It’s a weird feeling, finding her old comics in the attic. For starters, it’s the fact that Ellie’s now older than Dr. Daniela Star; as a kid, she’d always felt like by her thirties she’d have it all figured out, like she’d understand what she was supposed to do when life came at her. She’s had time to wise up about that belief, though; it had crashed down fast after JJ was born and she realized she almost never knew what to do.
It’s also weird because- well, it doesn’t feel the same. When Ellie leafs through them, it’s fun to remember her favourite scenes and lines, sure, but she notices all the little details that, at fourteen, hadn’t been that important. Misspelt dialogue, retconned names and uniforms that made it all feel like the writers had been making it up as they went along rather than the carefully-planned adventure she remembers. She shuts the issue she’s reading, Messenger Particle , and shuffles it gently back into the stack.
It had been one of her favourites. She’d read it probably six times back-to-back after Sam and Henry had-
One thing Ellie did learn was that things didn’t work out like they did in books. Once people sacrificed themselves for you, they didn’t get to magically come back.
She turns back to her sorting. Dina had asked that she clean out the attic, and so she would.
“Hey, buddy,” she says, carrying the last couple boxes through the living room.
“Hi.”
JJ’s too engrossed in his homework to pay much attention to her. Ellie watches, trying not to laugh as he glares at the math worksheet with his fingers on his temples, knowing that he’s trying to set it on fire with his mind more than he’s actually concentrating. She puts down her cargo and ruffles his hair, and he laughs and swats at her hands before grabbing her left and pointing her remaining fingers down on a multiplication question. “What’s this one?” he whispers so Dina won’t hear them in the next room. “I’ve been doing it for fifteen minutes-” probably closer to five, Ellie bets- “and I can’t figure it out.”
“It’s forty-two,” Ellie whispers back. She figures if his teacher is mad at her for helping him cheat, then he can fuck right off; she hated math, too, back when she was his age. Kid deserves a little grace after how hard he’s been working.
He’s never been frightened of her. She was terrified he might be, after everything: every time she had a panic attack with him in her arms, all of her scars and her rough hands, after everything she’d left them to do and failed at finishing. He’d been apprehensive the first time he saw her again, but the minute she let him touch her hand, he’d grinned, a big, toothless smile, and she knew he didn't care. Kids were fun like that.
“How many more do you have?” Ellie asks. She sinks into the chair next to him, grunting at an ache in her knee but leaning in to look at his work.
“Two more sheets,” he mumbles, frowning. “Mr. Cole is a… the worst.”
Ellie purses her lips, trying not to smile. They were trying to get him not to swear at people; as much as she might not care, there were people in town who definitely took offense to being called a “stupid motherfucker” by a ten-year-old, and nowadays it was important to keep friends around when they could.
“Do you want to take a break?”
The first syllable is barely out of her mouth by the time his pencil drops. She laughs and hauls the box up onto the table.
“Found these in the attic,” she tells him, shuffling through the comics. “I used to love them growing up, and I thought you might, too.”
JJ plucks one at random out of the row, looking at the back cover. He looks interested, at least.
“They’re about this scientist in space,” she adds, just to fill the silence.
“Is it kind of like Alien ?” JJ asks her.
It is, of course, the perfect moment for Dina to walk into the room and catch them. “Is it- where did you even see that?” she asks.
“Evan found a copy.” With that, he sets to finding the first issue. Ellie looks at her wife, shrugs and gives her an apologetic smile that she only half means. Dina rolls her eyes in return, but she’s smiling.
“It’s not that much like Alien . It’s kind of more like Star Trek . There’s a lot of exploring and meeting aliens, not a lot of chestbursters.” Ellie mimes the scene dramatically, making faces and gurgling noises; she decides JJ doesn’t find it funny enough for her tastes and latches her hand onto his face, gently shaking his head. He’s screeching with laughter, Dina’s trying to pretend she doesn’t find it funny too. That’s Ellie’s marker for success, joke-wise.
She had asked Dina once why she didn’t laugh at her jokes anymore. “Someone has to be a good influence,” Dina had told her, smirking, before adding, “and someone has to keep that ego in check, too.” Ellie knew, secretly, that it was just so that when Dina did break and laugh, it would be all the more special. God, she loved her.
“You can keep those, if you want,” she tells JJ. “Something to keep you out of trouble, at least.”
“I don’t get in trouble. Mom, tell her I don’t get in trouble.”
“I will if you help me with the dishes.” Dina tilts her head, considering, and holds up the dishpan.
Ellie watches her son’s eyes dart around for an excuse. “I have too much homework,” he tells her. He then shrugs deeply, sighs, picks up both his sheet and Termination Shock and heads for the living room where he conveniently can’t be watched.
“Too much homework for dishes?” she asks.
“School is very important,” he tells her sagely.
Blood or not, there’s never been a doubt in her mind that he’s hers.
Ellie leaves him to his deeply important work and decides to practice one of her favourite pastimes: bothering her wife. Dina is just putting the soap in the basin when she wraps her arms around her and plants a kiss on her neck, right where it meets her shoulder.
“I can’t believe he’s still hanging around Evan,” Dina gripes. “I’m telling you, his dad is a maniac. There’s no reason to give a nine-year-old his own gun.”
“I know, but what can you do? If we tell him they can’t be friends he’s just going to want it more.” Ellie starts swaying, head still resting on Dina’s shoulder.
“I just don’t like it,” she sighs. “At least keep an eye on him when you bring him in tomorrow, will you?”
“You know I will.”
It hits her in odd moments, these days. Not quite grief, but awe. There is no reason that Ellie Williams should be standing here, in a safe house, happy and as healthy as she could be, kissing the woman she loves. However many years ago, she’d get lost imagining ditches she could’ve died in and counting the things that she could pick up and take once it all came crashing down again.
These days, she’s able to just stop there. There is no reason she should be here, alive and happy, and isn’t that a miracle of sorts?
She tries so hard not to think too much about how it could be a prettier picture without her in it. It’ll never be gone, but it’s certainly quieter.
The last thing Ellie expects is a knock at the door, and judging from Dina’s indignant squinting at the source of the noise, neither did she. Ellie exchanges a glance with her- did you ask someone to- no why would I have ever - before kissing her on the forehead and going to answer the stupid door downstairs.
She stops at the top of the stairs, though, because JJ’s bedroom door is open. He can’t sleep with it open; he’s always told them that monsters get in that way, and if he wakes up, Ellie knows he’ll stay awake for hours terrorizing himself about how it got that way despite knowing he doesn’t shut doors firmly enough to stick. She figures whoever’s willing to bother them at two in the morning can wait a moment more, so she walks over to close it for him.
First, though, she lets herself stand in the doorway, making sure he’s sleeping well. It’s a silly habit, but she’d done it every time she’d woken up after coming home from California until he was old enough to tell her to stop. Joel had done the same for her, once upon a time, and she’d said just that to him.
Ellie watches for the rise and fall of his ribs.
It doesn’t come. His small body is still.
She feels the panic in her hands first, going cold and beginning to shake. She rushes to his bedside, her mind a whirlwind of infection allergy pneumonia someone hurt him , and puts her hand on his shoulder. She shakes him.
His body shifts, turns. His head doesn’t.
Ellie yells and steps back, hits the dresser on her way to the floor. This is a nightmare, this can’t be real, someone hurt him , hurt her son, she’ll kill them. Dina’s in the room, calling her name, holding her hand, the door was open, the door is still banging and-
“Ellie, it’s okay, look-”
“What the fuck-”
And it’s not JJ. There is a fucking mannequin in her son’s bed, head detached from its neck, wearing a shitty little wig.
She suddenly understands how Joel felt when she was young, sneaking out to Dina’s and Jesse’s, and curses herself for raising a little hellion just like the three of them.
“Fuck,” she mutters. “Scared the living shit out of me.”
“I know.” Dina’s half-laughing, halfway to crying. Ellie hugs her tightly, catching her breath.
There’s still knocking coming from downstairs, though, more insistent now.
“If that’s some little asshole playing ding-dong-ditch,” Ellie mumbles into Dina’s hair, “I’m getting the gun.”
“Do you want me to-”
“No, let’s- let’s both go.”
They make their way down the stairs, Ellie’s bruised hip twinging at each step. With all of the lights off, the house is still familiar but strange in a way that feels uncanny, like they aren’t supposed to see it like this, unprepared for the coming day.
Dina’s the one to reach for the doorknob first, and Ellie hangs back, still a little shaken from the last few minutes.
There’s three boys on the other side of the door, and none of them are her son. She sighs internally.
Luckily, Dina’s thinking the same way. Ellie watches her cock a hip and threaten, “Give me one reason I shouldn’t go get your parents right now.”
“JJ fell out of the treehouse,” the smallest one says.
“Well, is he okay?” Dina keeps the same firm tone, but Ellie’s bad feeling hasn’t stopped yet.
A blonde pushes to the front of the group. “It’s on the other side of the fence- he climbed out and-”
That’s all either of them needs to hear. Ellie’s rushing back inside for their guns before it even seems to fully process for Dina. Somewhere inside the house, she hears her cursing, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing else matters right now, and nothing else is going to until their boy is back under this damn roof and safe again.
Ellie didn’t even tie her boots, and she’s thinking to herself, tearing through town with the boys and Dina, that that could’ve been a mistake. She hadn’t been thinking straight. When she was sixteen, she watched a man trip over his own shoelaces and get grabbed by a clicker in less than two seconds. There’d been no worries of him turning, at least, because there was so little left of his neck that her patrol group hadn’t had to consider wasting bullets on him.
JJ can barely tie his own damn shoelaces.
What was he thinking ?
The boys lead them to a part of the chain fence she knows too well, patched many times but always ripped open again. It’s far too small for her to fit through anymore.
“JJ?” Fuck, Ellie’s trying so, so hard not to sound as panicked as she feels. “Buddy, where are you?”
Her worst fear is not that there won’t be a response, but that the response won’t sound human anymore. It’s unrealistic, she knows, nobody turns that fast, but what if-
She hears him groaning, still human, and a little hiccup that makes her heart hurt.
“Jesse Joel, answer your mother!” Dina calls out, and she isn’t hiding it- she sounds terrified. “We’re here, come on out, baby!”
“Can you move?” one of the boys asks.
JJ sniffles, then answers, “No. My leg hurts.”
Ellie’s stomach drops. Before anyone can try to stop her, she finds a foothold and starts to climb, because she can’t fit through that hole but she will be dead in the fucking ground before she leaves him out there in the middle of the night. It’s not safe in this area, not safe on that side of the fence, and she doesn’t give a single fuck how tall it is, JJ is going to be safe if she has to die for it.
This is a blindspot, she knows; not every watchtower has a perfect view of the entire border. She had snuck out of it in her teenage years, but that was when she was well-armed, physically capable and had more life experience than she hoped JJ ever would.
“Ellie-” Dina starts.
“I’m gonna go get him,” she grits out.
She vaguely registers the conversation her wife and the boys have on her way up: they had snuck out to see a movie- must’ve been how they saw Alien , too- and someone had, for reasons only ten-year-old boys understood, started throwing other people’s sneakers out the window. JJ had volunteered to get them out of the branches, and one had snapped under him.
Halfway to the top.
Ellie’s not fucking fast enough. Never could be, right now.
She can see him, though, through the branches; he’s laying down, looking a little pale, and his fucking leg is broken. Compound fracture, bone sticking out of the calf, and she is praying he didn’t look because it looks bad .
In the moment, she is only thinking of getting him back home, back in their arms where he’s safe and away from these boys. She doesn’t remember what she said or did, and it isn’t the first time. She’d always been good in a crisis.
JJ tells her, sitting on the cot at the clinic, that she was telling him she loves him and that he’d be safe now. Dina says she put JJ on her back and started climbing back over again like nothing was wrong. Ellie believes them; that sounds like what she would’ve done.
Dina tells her, a week later when they’re all in their own beds again, JJ’s leg in a purple cast covered in painted stars and names, that she had heard something in the depths of the forest the moment Ellie’s foot had stuck in the wall to make that second climb.
“I was so scared. I was loading the gun and thinking that if anything happened- if he had slipped, if you hadn’t been-”
And Dina bursts into tears.
Ellie holds her, whispering whatever she needs to hear. Her gut twists and she feels it pull towards Utah.
JJ’s never even seen infected in real life before. Someday, he will.
They don’t bother to discipline him for the first few weeks; the broken leg has to be punishment enough. After that, he’s placed on dish duty for a month and set a strict bedtime again, complete with check-ins until the two of them go to bed.
Ellie watches him furiously scrubbing and dunking the plates, standing on crutches, and can’t even bring herself to laugh when Dina tells her he’s pretending to interrogate them.
She and Dina don’t keep secrets anymore. Still, it’s hard to look your wife in the eyes and say you don’t feel worthy of being alive for the millionth time in your relationship.
Somehow, on a bright Tuesday afternoon, a couple hours before JJ is due to come home from school, she manages, “I’ve been thinking about Salt Lake again.”
Ellie is luckier than she ever should be. She’s known that for years, but it solidifies in Dina as she immediately gets up from her book to sit on the couch together. Dina sits right on her lap and leans into her- not quite a hug, but free enough that Ellie could move if she needed to.
“I…” she tries. “It’s- just, after everything with JJ back in May, he…”
Fuck. it’s hard to word it right.
Ellie settles on, “You said you heard infected. I just can’t stop thinking that if they had- made the cure, if Joel had let them- we wouldn’t have to worry about any of that.”
“Oh, Ellie-”
Once it’s out, she can’t stop. “I could have stopped it. Ending up on the wrong side of a fucking wall shouldn’t mean he’s got to worry he’ll get killed, Dina, he’s ten . You would both be safe if-”
“Ellie, no.” Dina lifts a hand to her jaw, forcing her to look her in the eyes. It’s hard to do.
“I know, it’s not my fault,” Ellie whispers. “I know it shouldn’t be, but it feels like it is.”
Dina pulls her into her arms, lets her cry. Wherever Dina is has always been one of the only places in the world where Ellie’s sure nothing is going to hurt her, and for a moment, just until she catches her breath, it’s quiet.
When she finally does, Dina kisses her, then does it again, like the first one didn’t have enough feeling in it for her. “We wouldn’t be safer if you weren’t here,” she says, and her hand is scratching over Ellie’s scalp.
“If you had died there-” Dina pauses. She shakes her head, breaks eye contact for a second. “I could never do this alone, baby.”
“You’re strong, I know you could-”
“No, I could not. Don’t talk about yourself like that.” Gently, Dina smacks Ellie’s arm. It’s something she’d done since they had first met, since Ellie had started trying anything- up to and including making a damn fool of herself- to get her attention. The memory is enough to get Ellie to smile, a little weakly.
“I would be miserable without you,” Dina whispers. “And probably dead, because you’ve saved my life about ten times over-”
“Eh, could be a little more.”
“Shut up,” she laughs. She meets Ellie’s eyes again, and what she finds there is so genuine and soft she has to sniffle again. “I mean it, El. I love you so, so much, and we’re both better for having you.”
Ellie manages the first deep breath since all of this began- maybe since JJ fell out of that tree. She closes her eyes, nods. “I love you, too.”
It isn’t gone. Maybe it never will be. But start to finish, she only cried for fifteen minutes; four years ago she’d had a half-hour-long breakdown on the same topic that had hung over for two days after the fact. Now, she can nearly believe Dina when she says she’s worth all the bloodshed she’s caused.
It’s something, at least.
JJ comes in like the month he was born, whacking his crutches against every baseboard he passes (Ellie winces, knowing she’ll be the one repainting them), and he heads straight for her. Well, not exactly straight- he passes through the kitchen first to hug Dina and try to grab a handful of strawberries to snack on. Ellie, now focused on her sketch, grins when she hears her wife’s indignant gasp, cries of burglary accusations and the sound of JJ cackling as he hobbles away. Dina will let him think he’s too fast to catch; it’s what they’ve always done.
“Are you drawing?” he asks, squishing himself into the chair. It’s made for one person, but it’s been shared more often than not in their family.
“Yeah. Wanna see?”
He nods, and Ellie shows him the page she’s working on. The view out their window meant that she could see the town square, and for a few weeks now, she’d been drawing whoever passed by, getting their features down as fast as possible. Today, it was the line of toddlers from the daycare, all holding onto a rope to prevent escape attempts.
“I made a drawing today too,” he tells her. She knows he’s going to give it to her already: besides the fact that he always seems to (unless he’s really too proud of it to give it away), he’s wiggling in his seat with excitement.
“Oh, really? What did you make?”
With some difficulty, he leans down and pulls a piece of yellowed construction paper out of his backpack. It sheds glitter as he does, and Ellie suppresses a laugh; JJ had had a phase where he put it on everything, and Dina had since referred to it as “craft herpes” and banned it from the house. He must’ve found more at the school.
“Tada,” he says, and gives it to her.
It’s done in pastels, marker and (of course) glitter, and in his drawing, their little family smiles up at her. JJ’s drawn himself with little lines around his head, showing his surprise, and his cast on his leg. Dina is on the other side, holding what she assumes is her gun and wearing a cape. As for Ellie, she’s in the middle of the picture. He’s given her a cape, too, and far stronger arms than she has in real life, and underneath the two of them, he’s written, “thank you mom and mama”.
The idea of purpose is so difficult for her to even think about, because for a year in her teens it had been so clear, and then all of a sudden it wasn’t anymore. Maybe this is it, though- make him happy. Keep them both safe.
“I made you superheroes, because you saved me.” He points at the page. “Like Dr. Star.”
Ellie isn’t the most outwardly emotional on the best of days; it had taken years to stop pushing shit down when it hurt. Today, though? All she has it in her to do is try not to start crying (again- that’s got to be some kind of record for her, three times in one day).
She pulls her son into a hug and plants a kiss on his head. “Thank you so much, baby.”
“Can we go show Mama?”
She grins, gives him back his paper and scoops him up, grabbing his crutches before racing for the kitchen. He laughs the whole way, and it feels so fucking worth it- all of it.