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Shimmer stays gone.
The others turn up at the gate near the end of day two, panting and stiff-legged, skin bone dry and hot to the touch. It’s what they’re trained to do, if their riders run into a snag and need to stay out for longer than they have the resources to sustain themselves and three full-grown horses.
Or.
Or if their riders are…
The west ridge patrol route is dense forest smacked down against a wall of towering Grand Teton. No river, no water. It makes sense that Dina and Jesse would have turned their horses loose if they’d had to hunker down for some unknown hangup. Send the horses home, turn back on foot. S’why they’re taking so long.
But Shimmer…
Shimmer wouldn’t have left Ellie out there for all the oats in the storehouse. No way, no how.
There’d be no tearing that horse away from her girl. Tommy’d made sure of it, had a hand in both their raising and did his damndest to give Ellie one of the greatest assets a patroller can have outside the walls- a horse that’ll give its life for its rider. All those extra hours in the corral, working with the two of them long enough that they both slept like rocks the night after. All the little treats he’d turned a blind eye to, slipped from the pocket of Ellie’s favorite work shirt after what was supposed to be the last feed for the evening.
Those two have a bond that only comes from growing up together. It makes sense that Shimmer’s still out there, even after four going on five days of radio silence from the three-man patrol.
If it’s a comfort, it’s a cold one. Tommy’s not sure that horse would be able to leave a body behind any easier than his living, breathing niece.
People pass him on the street with wide eyes and tight smiles, like Ellie’s already tucked into the cool earth next her daddy and god’s one swing closer to hacking down the Miller family tree. Tommy’s got sulfur on his tongue, acid in his throat and he wants to spit it back at them, make them pay for being the latest in an endless list of fuckers that have counted that girl out before her time.
Ellie, and Dina, and Ellie, and Jesse, and Ellie. Christ, what a blow that would be- for the whole damn town.
But there’s not a lick of sense in wasting time waiting for a blow that ain’t ever gonna land, not when the one that did is still aching like a gut shot.
He splits off from the sanctioned search party late into the third day, appreciates the effort but doesn’t need to be held back by newer volunteers that don’t know these woods like he does.
Don’t know these kids like he does.
Benji’d wailed when he’d gone, a serrated knife thrust into the hollow of Tommy’s chest. Poor kid’s had a rough string of his people leaving the walls and not coming back, doesn’t want his daddy to be the latest. Tommy can hear him in the keen of the sandpipers, stirred up by Justified’s quiet footfalls as they venture further off the well-beaten patrol route.
It doesn’t take long for him to cotton on to the fact that they’re hiding from him.
Jesse and Dina are, at least. Ellie would know better than to try to knock him off her scent with a few suspiciously uniform prints and cleanly broken branches. He’ll knock Jesse upside the head for the sloppiness later, when he figures out why the fuck they’re on the run and why Ellie ain’t cognizant enough to make them better at it.
Every couple of minutes, he jabs a thumb into the talk button on his radio and listens for the crackle of static from another Jackson receiver. He claims the high ground for himself and looks through scope for any sight of them, ignoring the tremor in his limbs that comes from the combination of back-in-a-sniper’s-nest and being awake for longer than any sane person ought to be.
C’mon, Ellie, he thinks as he reluctantly boxes himself in for a couple hours of shuteye. I can’t do this again.
Dina’s helping herself to the remaining jerky from his pack when he rolls over three hours later and damn near shoots her.
“Hi,” she says with a halfhearted wave. “Don’t shoot me unless you want to take my shift at the greenhouse tomorrow.”
His muscles unspool into a tangle of relief. Ellie’s fine. Dina wouldn’t be fucking with him if she weren’t.
“Well, then you’d better have a pretty good fucking reason for not being dead,” he hisses, twisting the knots out of his back. Then, softer because he had been worrying out of his mind about all three of them, “You alright?”
Dina swallows. “Yeah.”
“Yeah? And the other two musketeers? Alright too?”
As the sleep’s receding, he gets a better look at her and stills. Her eyes are swollen, jaw working itself back and forth even after she finishes off the stolen jerky.
“Dina,” he says sharply. “Report. They’re alright?”
Her head bobs, face still far off somewhere even as she untwists her legs and scrambles to her feet, brushing the dirt off her jeans.
“You have to come with me,” she orders, handing him his pack and hastily stamping out the remains of the fire. “It’s Ellie.”
Because of course it is. It was always going to be Ellie.
Dina’s tightlipped on the horse, terse directions spat out at his prompting but no other explanation no matter how fiercely he demands it. He wasn’t too far off from the little bunker they’re holed up in, probably would have ferreted it out himself the next day. It’s small, not something they usually advertise for patrol use considering it’s too far off the approved route to be convenient. But Tommy’s heard tell of teenage shenanigans out this way and the rumor mill once churned out that one of the little ones in Benji’s nursery class had been conceived in this very hideout.
Shimmer’s outside, looking more pissed off than worse for wear, untethered because they’d probably told her to go on and get when they’d shooed the others off.
“Atta girl,” Tommy croons under his breath, pausing to stroke a hand down her nose before going for the door.
At the last second, Dina slides her way between him and the door. Tommy’s outstretched hand retreats to his side where it clenches into a frustrated knot.
“I’ve been real patient now, Dina. I’m not sure how much more-”
“Ellie got bit.”
The world wavers in front of him, vision dwindling into a pinprick as blood rushes in his ears.
Christ, she’s already dead. Jesse sent Dina away so she wouldn’t have to hear the shot. Ellie’s laying dead in that bunker- the little head that Joel used to curl his palm around, shattered by a Jackson-issued bullet.
“Move,” Tommy grits out.
Dina shakes her head. “Give me your gun first. Listen, it’s okay, I know it sounds-”
“Move, Dina.”
She moves.
And then there she is. Ellie’s got her bloody leg propped up in front of her where she sits on what has to be the world’s most disgusting futon. She looks up when the door hits the wall, eyes wide.
She’s alive, scowling something fierce at him but god, she’s alive.
Tommy tries to get closer, but Jesse holds position in front of her, weapon held tightly across his chest. Good kid, protective for all the wrong reasons. He’s not there to put her down. In fact, he shudders at the thought- knows he wouldn’t have been able to do it himself even if she were on the verge of taking a turn for the rabid. Worst Tommy’s gonna do is shake her for getting complacent, getting sloppy and letting them lay eyes on that bite. She knows how important-
Hang on.
He gets a look at her face, a real look at her face, and the thought dies clawing at his throat.
He’s seen that expression before, he realizes, bile rising.
He’s seen that expression, but not on her.
“I told you not to get him,” Ellie bites out through gritted teeth.
Dina jabs a finger back at her, smile like razorblades. “And I told you to shut the fuck up. Tommy, listen to me. She’s not gonna turn.”
It slams into Ellie like a punch, her eyes clamping shut as her arm folds across herself, holding herself together as the rest of them fall apart.
“How did you find out?” Tommy hears himself ask, voice ragged in denial.
“What?”
“About the bite.”
It’s on her leg, it couldn’t be that hard to keep the goddam thing covered. Certainly not for a girl that walked across the fucking county with her death warrant indented into her arm. “How did you find out about the bite?”
“You have to believe us,” Jesse adds. “I know it’s crazy, but it’s been almost five days. No one lasts that long, she’s not going to-”
“Of course she’s not gonna fucking turn!” Tommy spits. “How did you find out she was bit?”
Jesse rears back, baffled and a little alarmed. He uses the hand not clutching his rifle to reach back and swipe blindly for Ellie’s shoulder, clamping down gently when he finds it.
“She told us.” He’s patient now, careful. Like he’s talking someone down off a ledge they’re too confused to be on. “She came clean, like the second it happened. She did everything right.”
Ellie wilts, eyes rolling back into her head as she lets it hit the wall behind her with a quiet thud. Her lip is trembling between her teeth where she’s clamping down hard enough to draw blood.
“Ellie?” He can barely get the words out, strangled by the force of something that might be rage or abject terror. “That true?”
Say no, he silently pleads. Tell me they think they’re covering for you, that you hid it until they found it, begged for your precious life once they did, tell me-
All Ellie manages is, “Fuck you, man.”
Jesus H. There it is. It’s true, it’s all true. She really…
Ears ringing, Tommy digs a thumb into the pain between his eyes. The nausea doesn’t register before he’s retching into the corner.
Dina moans in sympathy, reaching for him in vain from outside the splash zone. “No. Tommy, no, she’s okay. Ellie tell him!”
White-faced, Ellie doesn’t look like she’ll be telling anyone anything anytime soon. She’s got her eyes clamped shut, lips moving around a silent refrain of what looks like fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck…
Fuck indeed.
“Your little friend’s immune,” he says quietly. “That ain’t news to me, and it sure as hell ain’t news to her. Bit twice before she lost her last fucking baby tooth.”
“Christ, Tommy. You didn’t have to-”
He whirls on her, feels his nostrils flaring as he does it. “What number is that, Ellie? Four? Five? How many times were you bit before you decided this was the big one?”
Before.
He’d known she wasn’t turning before he knew her favorite food, her favorite bands. Before Tommy knew how tough she was, how bright and funny and stubborn and dorky. Before he knew how terrifying and easy it is to love her.
Before he knew she was her father’s daughter right down to the goddamn, fucking-
Not exactly alike, a twisted little voice sounds from behind the door his head he’s doing his damndest to keep shut. Doesn’t sound like Ellie did much flinching.
Jesse fumbles his weapon in shock. They all cringe before he recovers it and lowers the gun to the floor with a soft click.
“Immune?” he repeats, head on a swivel between Ellie and Tommy- looking for answers from a steel reinforced wall and an impending nuclear meltdown respectively. “Like immune immune? It’s real then, you’re not infected?”
Ellie, not a bone in her body capable of reading the everloving room, rolls her eyes. “I’m not sure where all the fucking surprise is coming from, dude. That’s what you’ve been telling me for the past thirty-fucking-hours and now you’re clutching your pearls?”
Like a fucking bobcat, she gets mean when she’s cornered, always has. Her friends know her well enough to shake it off, to not take it for personal when a bomb doesn’t have the power to hold back an explosion just because there’s friendlies in the blast radius.
Jesse scowls back. “Really, you think you get to be pissed right now? Because from where I’m standing, it looks like you’re in fourth fucking- oh shit!”
Because silent, ashen, process-ing Dina is gone, and in her place, fully-processed Dina is lunging at Ellie with venom in her eyes. Jesse catches her around the waist and hauls her back a few steps, away from where Ellie is scrambling onto her good leg.
“You were going to let me put you down?!” Dina screeches, feet scrabbling for purchase on the ancient concrete floor.
“It just happened! It’s not like I planned- you weren’t even supposed to be out with us! You just wouldn’t stop trading shifts-”
Dina scoffs, shoving Jesse’s arm off her and nearly knocking him over in the process. “Because I was worried you were going to do something stupid! I was worried you were going to do something just so incredibly fucking stupid-”
Choked off with a sob, Dina hits the door at a run. As she goes, they’re covered in honey-colored sun for a flicker of a second before the door bangs shut and they’re back in the musty half-dark. Ellie stumbles, falls more than sits back on the futon, head in her hands.
With a raised eyebrow and an answering nod, they figure out that Jesse’s going to go after Dina quickly and leave Tommy in the thick of it. Alone with Ellie and her demons, the smell of antiseptic and rot from the army field hospital in his nose.
“Tell ‘em at the gate that you got turned around,” Tommy sighs. “Lost a horse in that thunderstorm on Sunday and took off after it or something, I don’t fucking know.”
Wincing, Jesse hauls his pack onto his shoulder. “That’s…humbling.”
Jesus fucking christ, he’s too tired for this.
Tommy glowers. “Well shit then, Jesse. Tell them the truth, that better? Less embarrassing for you?”
“I’ll go with the horse story,” Jesse says, chastened. He hesitates at the door, eyeing Ellie with less fury and more of the helpless grief Tommy feels churning in his own stomach.
“You want me to toss the garage when I get back?” he asks softly. “Make sure there’s nothing…”
Tommy shakes his head, Ellie’s cussing a blue storm fading into background noise under the pulsing of his own blood. “Don’t matter none. She ain’t going back there for a long, long time.”
Jesse nods, stepping out into the daylight with one last backward glance. “I’ll be over tomorrow, Ellie. Dina too, I bet.”
The door shuts.
And now they’re suffocating.
Privacy turns the crank for the floodgates. It’s just the two of them now, just family, and now that they’re no longer in polite company, the things they’re free to say to each other come rushing- get caught in a bottleneck and choke off the oxygen.
He joins his niece on the futon, and motherfucker is he ever too old to get this low to the ground and ever expect to get back up.
“Can you just…tell me why?”
Ellie scrapes her hands across her face, too hard, leaving red marks in their trail. She doesn’t answer right away, but that’s nothing new to him. That’s Ellie for you, either she says it without a lick of thought or she rattles it around up there until it comes out polished and smooth from wear.
“I promised…I promised him that I’d never…do it myself.”
Tommy swallows.
They don’t…they don’t do a ton of talking about Joel. That’s mostly her doing. She was more or less raised to stuff all her feelings down into the little mental lockbox Joel had painstakingly handcrafted for her. And Tommy…shit, it’s like he doesn’t want to remind her that he’s gone. As if she ever fucking forgets.
“I’m not dignifying that with a fucking lecture on the spirit of the law,” he says firmly. “Tell me why.”
“You know why!”
“No, I don’t,” he barks. “I really don’t, Ellie. You gotta spell it out for me, ‘cause for the life of me, I don’t understand why you would do this.”
Here’s what he doesn’t say.
Joel saw this coming from a mile off.
It’s been the subject of his brother’s anxieties for the last five years of his life. And Tommy’d shut him down at every turn.
The night she’d burned her arm- the second dose of painkillers had her flat on her ass seeing bugs that weren’t there, and Joel pacing the room beside her, worrying about what it meant that his child had turned a hand against herself.
“These were pretty extenuating fucking circumstances,” Tommy’d scoffed, gently restraining Ellie’s futilely swatting arm. “I don’t love how the plan shook out either, but you gotta give her points for results.”
God, it had him in a chokehold, the idea that Ellie didn’t value her own life. That she’d been toeing the edge between life and death for as long as he’d known her and showed no signs of stopping until one of them bowed down. His brother had feared this day for a long time.
And Tommy had talked him down, convinced him the mountains were molehills and that Ellie was taking all the extraordinary shit the world was throwing at her and magicked it into normal, teenage wild.
“Joel would not have wanted this for you.”
He says it instead of, he knew. He knew the whole time, and I didn’t.
Ellie traces the edge of the wound on her leg, jeans torn away at the bloody bend of her knee. It’s been cared for, the bite itself. It stands out against a stark white background of pale thigh, the area cleaned and sanitized. Tommy squints, pretty sure someone took the time to throw a couple of stitches into the edge of it where her skin must have torn.
“Yeah, probably not,” she admits. Then, “but he got his chance to make that call. He doesn’t get to do it twice.”
“Ellie!” Tommy barks before he can rein himself in. The decay in her voice sends ice water down his spine. It pools and sloshes in his ears.
She waves him off, and christ, that eyeroll ought to be criminal. She does it like no one else.
“I know, I know. I get it. I just…I had like a really bad couple of minutes there, and I did something dumb.”
It’s hard to watch, her pulling the mask back into place, covering all the jagged edges with something softer. Something that will allow her to curl up small enough to slip through the cracks, away from people whose attention she can’t stand the weight of.
“S’that right?”
Ellie bobs her chin, smiling at him like he’s Benji and she’s trying to pull off an early bedtime out of an offer to play sock monsters in his room.
“Yeah,” she says easily. “Fuck, I guess I really lucked out here. That they wanted to, like wait it out or whatever. Good thing, too. That was really stupid, huh?”
Tommy feels his stomach turn again.
Listen to her.
Saying exactly what she thinks he wants to hear for once in her damn life. Face sheepish on the surface with an edge of something so subtle, he thinks he might be the only one with a prayer’s chance in hell of seeing it.
The only one living at least.
Tommy’s left feeling stupid. Like all those folks from when they were growing up, the ones that thought Joel was the brains of the operation and he was just the smile, they might have been right. Because he’s thinking back to all the times he’s seen her like this since Joel’s…since Joel, and he wants to gut himself for letting Joel’s little actress con him into thinking she was anywhere close to fine.
She was never going to be. Not without a direction to point herself in. Good people to save, bad ones to kill.
Someone who looks for purpose the way Ellie does is not someone that will be content with living life for the enjoyment of it.
Tommy shakes his head. “I don’t think it was stupid of ‘em to stick around. Wish they would’ve sent for me, but…I get it.”
Ellie frowns, scooting away from him until she’s ass-half-off the goddamn futon. “You get what?”
“I get why those two shitheads broke every goddamn rule in the book and sat here for four days, prayin’ for an out.”
“I told them-”
He puts a hand up to stop her. He’s not sure he can take whatever fucked up ending that sentence was going to have.
“I don’t care what you told them, honey. Doubt they gave a shit neither. Y’know why?”
He’s got her rattled. He can tell by the way she’s clamped down hard on that bottom lip, eyes wide and vacant and fixed on the filthy fucking floor. Good, she needs to hear this. Needs to understand, finally understand what Joel’s been trying to gently hammer into her hard little head the whole time he’s known her.
“Same reason I’ve been losing my everloving shit back in town, thinking about what could have been happening to you.” He hears his own voice getting damp, swallows back against the flood. “Because the idea of you being gone was too fucking awful to face.”
She takes her sweet time letting that sink in. A lesser man would be red in the face, left in silence after carving out a bloodied window to the deepest parts of himself. But Tommy’s been the only Miller capable of showing an emotion for longer than he’s been most other things. A little uncomfortable silence has never hurt him before.
He feels her shifting on the paper thin cushion beneath them. Ellie’s looking at him again, looking like she’s got something rattling around inside that’ll keep cutting her up until it’s released.
“Go on,” he encourages. “Spit it out, kid.”
It’s a risk, but one he can’t resist. He slides into her space so that he can gently palm the side of her face, thumb resting against the apple of her cheek. Amazingly, Ellie melts into it like she wasn’t spitting venom at him not twenty minutes ago.
“I’m…I’m alone, now.” She bites it out between breaths that are coming faster than they ought to. “I know not technically or whatever, but it used to be me and…and now it’s just me. And I did that for a long time, like a really long fucking time, it should be fucking fine! But it’s not- and, and-”
Tommy lets his hand fall to her shoulder and hangs on tight. “No. No, darlin’, no. You’re not. Listen, listen to me. Me and Maria, and Dina and them- we’re not him, I know that. And sometimes we’re gonna be piss-poor substitutes, I’ll give you that. But Joel’d be the first one to tell you, the people that come after matter just as much as the ones you lose.”
Ellie breaks.
“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” Huge, wet sobs now. Her thin little back is heaving under his hand. “It hurts so much all the time and I can’t-”
“Shhhh, shhhh, honey. You can. You will.”
She’s trying to pull away but Tommy’s learned his lesson, knows better than to let her.
“I want to go home,” she wails, and it’s Benji begging him not to leave the walls again, and it’s Sarah cradled in the ditch, and there’s nothing he wouldn’t do-
“I’ll take you home,” he promises. “C’mere, sweetheart. I’ll take you home.”
“No, no, not like that! I want to go home!”
He knows exactly what she means. He can’t give it to her anymore than he can claw it back for himself.
Tommy holds her by the back of the neck, puts a palm around the back of her head and crushes her to him. The girl that’s never been able to admit to her pain, cracked open and bleeding it out into the open.
He remembers when she was fourteen- god, five years ago. They’ve had her for five years now, forever and not enough at the same damn time.
He remembers when she was fourteen with the worst double ear infection the clinic had ever seen. It went untreated until it got so bad that her goddamn ear drum ruptured and left a trail down the side of her face for Joel to catch sight of.
“You tell someone,” Joel had chided. “You’re ever in that much pain again, you tell someone. No exceptions, Ellie. I mean it.”
Shamefaced, Tommy holds her tighter, wishing he could kick his own ass. He shouldn’t have needed to be told. He knows that for Ellie life falls into before, with Joel, and he should have realized that she wouldn’t have much use for an after.
He’s the one that’s always moaning about her and Joel being the ‘same goddamn person.’ He should have realized that meant they’d deal with loss the same goddamn way.
“I know, honey. I do.” Tommy dips his chin and tilts his head, makes sure he’s not inadvertently smothering her in his desperation. “You’re right, I can’t take you home. But I can take you someplace good in the meantime, yeah? With me, and Maria, and Benji. And Jesse and Dina-”
“I think Dina wanted to kill me after she found out I wasn’t turning,” she mumbles into his chest.
Tommy can’t argue with that. “Dina’s had kind of a hairpin trigger lately, and you did something pretty shitty. You two will get it worked out.”
Dina has been weird lately, but he’s only got the bandwidth for one young person crisis at a time, so someone else will have to get on that.
Maria. Probably Maria.
He clears his throat. “I know it’s not what you want to hear, darlin’. But you have to give it a little time.”
Ellie shakes her head, greasy hair tangling in his shaking fingers. “Time’s not gonna do it.”
Stubborn, he thinks fondly, humming a smile into the top of her head. That’s your girl, Joel.
“Then I guess you’re gonna have to go lookin’ for something better than time.”
It’s almost dark by the time he leads her back out into the woods, but after five days in the dim, even the faint sunlight has her squinting under a cupped hand.
“Is that-?”
Tommy grins. “Sure is, honey girl.”
The kids must have made off with Tommy’s horse, who would have left his ass without turning back for a hot second.
But Shimmer’s still there. Ready to carry her girl to someplace good.