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The sun hasn't been up for an hour before the daylight sees Ellie pounding her fist on Joel and Tess' door. She knows it'll only be Tess in. She saw Jesse speaking to Tommy and Joel by the stables. They'll be out for hours, and Ellie imagines this conversation will only take minutes.

When the door doesn't immediately open, Ellie knocks louder and calls up towards the upstairs windows.

"Tess! Tess, get up!"

She doesn't give a fuck if it sounds like something's wrong because something is wrong. She's known it since they returned to Jackson. It's been eating at her, always in the back of her mind, and that last outing with Joel has lit a fire. She hasn't been sleeping. Last night, she couldn't manage more than a few minutes at a time before the conversation would replay in her mind, over and over and over.

Not so much the words, but the look in his eyes as he said them.

She's always been able to tell when Joel is lying to her even before she realized it.

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Ellie nods. "Yeah. They said to let them know if we need anything. I think they're with Maria and Tommy, now."

"You're going to need extra hands moving your stuff back home."

Back home slips easy.

It is home. She's not going to correct her on that.

"I don't have that much stuff." Boxes of comics, other books. Art supplies. A growing shoe collection.

“Well, we’ve got time until he’s ready to come home,” she replies. “Take your time getting packed up. Maybe keep the garage for a little bit anyway, in case you need some space still after all.”

"If I'm going to be honest with you, I don't think I'm going to want to leave the house once he's there."

She walked away from him too many times. That last time, leaving the porch, is going to be the last time.

"I'm so dumb."

Tess opens her eyes at that, and she watches the back of Ellie’s head like a hawk.

“You’re not dumb,” she says, as a fact. “You’re just stubborn. And hurt, too. You needed that time apart.”

"Yeah. And I stopped talking to him because I knew it'd hurt him. I wanted him to feel like shit for--what? Making sure I lived?"

It all seems so stupid now.

“For not giving you a choice,” Tess replies, pointedly.

She hauls herself to her feet. It feels like she had to extract herself from the chair cushion, like she’d put down roots in it from exhaustion alone.

She looks over when Tess moves, and then back to Joel. She feels like if she takes her eyes off of him for too long, that rise and fall of his chest might stop.

"I know why he didn't."

She's always known.

“You weren’t going to understand that choice,” Tess says. She puts her hands on Ellie’s shoulders from behind, bracing.

She's probably right. She sighs, wishing it would release some of the tension in her body.

"... is this why you asked about my shoulders?"

Very maternal, Tess.

“No,” she says, but it is, at least a little. She and motherhood fit together surprisingly well, but she still doesn’t like to say it out loud, not when she can show it.

"I won't tell anyone." Her way of joking, even now. Tess is the one her friends give wide berth, not Joel. Little do they know.

“You’d better not,” she murmurs, stooping to hug her — Ellie may not be her kid, but she’s still her kid, if that makes any sense. The desire to protect her runs deep, even if it’s not always the same as Joel’s take on it,

But god, she does not want to be doing this alone. Joel has to recover. He has to.

A hug makes it real hard not to bawl like a baby, grieving for Joel's quality of life and feeling sorry for herself, but she manages to keep it together. She leans into it, hands on Tess' forearm.

Tess sighs into Ellie’s hair.

“Makes you miss a little bit of rebar, doesn’t it?” she murmurs, but truthfully, that had been worlds scarier in other ways. At least in Jackson they have resources.

"That was nothing compared to this." He'd been lucky, then. "He recovered from that fine."

Tess lets her go slowly, straightening up.

“Mmhmm. We didn’t have doctors, though. If you hadn’t found that penicillin, we wouldn’t be here.”

"Yeah. Pretty shitty if I only bought him four or five more years."

The rebar only left a scar. He'll never be the same after this, but he could still live a good life if he can find peace in a slower one.

Tess gently ruffles Ellie's hair back.

"Four or five years is a lot," she remarks. Especially for a guy his age, especially for a world like theirs. "But I'm telling you... it's gonna be at least fifteen, twenty if we're lucky."

She didn't go through all this fucking shit just to find a modicum of peace and domesticity just to lose him.

"Maybe not twenty. You don't want diaper duty," Ellie grumbles, rubbing at her face. Hey, if his brain got smashed, there might be diaper duty anyway, right?

Diaper duty.

"By mid-70s? God forbid," she replies, shaking her head. "Just take the vote of confidence, Ellie."

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