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They were supposed to be back before sunset.
Now the sun is setting, and they’re still not here.
Joel tries to avoid looking out the window, to the orange and pink that streak across the sky in watercolor. It’s a warm night with a pleasant breeze and a cloudless sky. On any other night, he’d be sitting out on the porch or standing in his yard, waiting for the stars, the one constant across all stages of his life. Now, he just feels sick. His chest tightens with each passing minute.
He closes the curtains in Maria and Tommy’s kitchen before lifting JJ from his highchair, wiping off his face, which is sticky with peach juice. The baby lets out an ear-splitting shriek the moment he does so. Lovely.
“Such a drama queen,” Dina says from behind him, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows as she washes the plates from dinner.
“He gets it from his great uncle.” Joel says. His chest goes tighter as he speaks.
Tommy is outside the walls right now, fighting alongside Ellie. Presumably, they’ve been wiping out the group of bandits that have been causing Jackson trouble for the past month. Maria is with the rest of the council, keeping track of the organization and communication surrounding the planned attack.
And Joel is here, with Dina and the children.
Ellie had been fighting for him to pull back from patrols lately, saying he was too old, she didn’t want something to happen to him, she’ll take his place. He hadn’t been listening. Until now. They needed two people to guard the boys. So Joel, being the oldest, stayed here. And maybe he wouldn’t have minded, if they had fucking come back on time, and he didn’t have a constant, creeping worry coiling and tensing inside of his stomach.
“I’m done, tio.” James slips down from his chair. He grabs the leg of the table and leans back, his feet sliding against the floor. He’s looking more and more like Maria everyday, but his facial expressions are all Tommy’s.
“You didn’t eat the crust.” Joel picks up the plate holding the shredded remains of a sandwich.
“Daddy doesn’t make me eat crusts.”
He shifts JJ to his hip. “What about your mama?”
The following silence tells him everything he needs to know there. He doesn’t push it, though. The last thing he wants to do right now is argue with an almost six-year-old whose father is presumably off in mortal peril. He sets JJ down on the ground, keeping a close eye on him. He takes a few uneasy steps before falling onto his butt and beginning to crawl.
Joel goes back to the window once Dina turns off the sink, pulling the curtains back a few inches. The sky has shifted to the gentle dark blue of the early night. Just a few patches of light remain.
The sunset is over. And they’re still not back.
“Hey.” He feels Dina’s hand press against his shoulder. “Close the curtains.”
He does so. “They should be back.”
“I know.”
“They ain’t.”
“I know. They probably just got stuck on some of the trails. It was raining pretty hard earlier, you know how they get when they’re all washed up.”
Maybe she’s right.
Or, maybe, they’re facing down the barrel of a gun. Maybe they were ambushed along the way. Maybe the men knew they were coming, somehow. Maybe they’re holding someone for ransom.
Maybe his brother and his baby are already dead.
Dina’s hand slides from his shoulder to his arm, moving further down to give his hand a little squeeze. “Want to turn on a movie?”
He snorts. “Think it would rile up this crowd a little too much right before bed.”
Not that the boys need any help getting themselves riled up. In the minute Joel and Dina had taken to talk, they’ve created a thrilling game that involves hitting each other over the head with a foam sword. Said foam sword had survived the apocalypse in remarkable condition, only to now be almost completely done-in by the boys in the span of less than a year. JJ likes chewing on the ends when no one’s watching enough to stop him.
“James, gentle,” Joel says as James thwacks JJ in the face with the sword, JJ laughing hysterically upon contact. “He’s littler than you.”
“But he’s laughing,” James says. “And he hits harder than me anyway.” He passes the play sword to the 1-year-old, who swings it around with reckless abandon. In Joel’s somewhat biased opinion as a grandfather, the baby will be a fine swordsman one day. He leaves them to it.
“Boys,” Dina says with a sigh while checking their guns back at the table, her fingers careful and well-practiced. He doesn’t know how she stays so calm, his eyes starting to drift back towards the windows again.
“Girls ain’t that different.” He sits down across from her. “Your wife used to go sliding down our hallway in her socks and crash into the wall. Thought it was the best thing ever.”
She gives a fond roll of her eyes, passing him his revolver. Jackson residents have special orders to keep their weapons on them today. Just in case.
“Sarah used to take flying leaps off the couch when she was a toddler. Head-first too.” His voice falters a bit as he speaks. But the tightness in his chest draws back ever-so-slightly. Dina’s known about Sarah for months now. Sharing her with one of the latest additions to the family had been beyond difficult. It never got easier, in that regard. But it was good too. That first girl was still with them, in a way, still there as long as they were.
“I used to jump from trees when I was a kid.” Dina meets his eyes. “Scared the shit out of my sister and mom.”
“There you go.”
The trotting hoofsteps of a horse click past the front of the house, rhythmic and quick. He holds his breath until they’re gone. Someone’s probably just going out to stand in front of the gate or guard the immediate area. Or they’re sending out reinforcements. Because it’s so bad that —
“Tio!” James is tugging on his sleeve. He blinks a few times.
“What is it, kiddo?”
“Do you wanna see my dance? I made it up all by myself.”
Joel watches one of the strangest dances he’s ever seen performed. He recognizes some of the moves from Tommy, though. Especially the ones that make the boy look like a strutting peacock. 10/10. Beautiful. Maybe they’ve got a swordsman and a dancer in their family’s future.
That seems like a good note to leave things off for the night, and judging by the way Dina’s gone to scoop up JJ, it seems like they’re in agreement.
They run through baths, pajamas, brushing teeth, and story reading, like the darkness outside isn’t growing, and the moon isn’t swollen and bright, and Tommy and Ellie aren’t still standing unprotected under that same sky that seems so sheltering here behind the walls.
He tucks a blanket over James as he curls up on the couch, everyone staying close for the time being. Just in case. Dina lays JJ down in his pack and play after he falls asleep in her arms.
They sit back at the table. Dina folds laundry. Joel tries to remember how to breathe. There are more hoofsteps from the front of the house, this time multiple joined together, rushed and chaotic. Maria hasn’t come back yet to inform them on anything.
Things are going bad. And he’s not there to help. He grips the table, his knuckles turning white.
“Hey.” Dina’s hand comes to rest over his. She gives him that calm, easy look, her eyes flickering back to the sleeping children. “If something… if something went really wrong, Maria would have come over and told us.”
He sucks in a breath. “She don’t know every little thing that’s going on. What if the communications have been cut off?”
“They haven’t.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Well, we don’t know that they have either, right?”
He goes back to the window, pulling away the curtain. The sky is pitch black now. Night has wrapped her wings around their home, enveloping them, and their enemies, in darkness.
He thinks about Tommy being ambushed from the shadows.
He thinks about Ellie being knocked to the ground, some towering man holding a gun to his little girl’s head, holding her —
“I’m going to the wall.” He turns around.
Dina stands up, laying the tiny unfolded shirt in her arms against the table. “No, you’re not.”
“It ain’t…” He rubs his fist against his chest. “It ain’t dangerous here. I’ll be back soon.”
Dina steps in front of him. He sidesteps her. She moves in front of him again.
“They’re in trouble, I can’t —” the words stick in his throat.
“You’re not leaving me.”
He goes to move forward once more. She grabs his hand, meeting his eyes. “You’re not leaving me.”
The forced easiness of her expression falls, for a moment, the wide-eyed girl flashing underneath. The girl who only became a woman two years ago. His daughter-in-law.
He looks at the gun at her side. The knives still spread out across the table with the laundry. The little boys sleeping in the living room with no idea what’s going on. He takes her hand.
He stays.
JJ startles in his sleep, and he lifts him up before he can cry and wake James, warm baby skin pressing into his arms. He rocks him, wiping away the tears that prick at the corner of his eyes with his thumb.
The baby looks up at him, one chubby hand stretching out to grip onto his shirt. He twists his head to the side, glancing around the room. “Ma.”
“She’ll be back soon. Abuelo’s got you, mijo.” He presses a kiss to his head like he has many times before, both to him and to the children before him. He moves him higher up on his chest, rubbing his back.
“He hungry?” Dina asks.
“Don’t think so. He misses her.”
The house falls into silence. JJ drifts back off to sleep in his arms, and he keeps him there instead of laying him back down.
The front door opens without warning a few minutes after midnight. Within seconds, Dina has grabbed his revolver and has it trained on the figure in the doorway, obscured by the night. Joel takes a step backwards and grabs a knife, JJ still in one arm.
“It’s me. Sorry, I should have knocked.” The figure steps closer, lifting up her arms.
Maria. Joel’s heart thuds in his chest.
“Are they —” he starts.
“There were some complications, but we got them all. We lost two men. Tommy’s hurt but alive, and he and Ellie are on their way back right now.”
Joel lets out a breath of relief. Tears prick in Dina’s eyes and she quickly wipes them away.
Maria steps further into the house, stroking her fingers across her sleeping son’s face as she reaches his side. He doesn’t wake up at the touch, but a slight smile flickers across his face. “I’ve got to go back in a few minutes, get everything sorted out for the night.” She takes JJ from Joel’s arms, pressing her face into his hair as he snuggles into her shoulder.
“When will they be back?” Dina asks.
“About an hour. They’ll probably spend another hour or two in the clinic after that, so around 3. It’s been a long night.”
She passes the baby back to Joel after a minute, pulling Dina into a hug before she leaves.
The dread in his stomach uncoils, drifting into calm. They’re alive. The horses aren’t dragging back corpses tonight. The boys won’t lose a parent. He won’t lose his brother or his kid. He sits down on the space left at the end of the couch, rubbing circles into JJ’s back.
“You can go to sleep,” he says, looking over his shoulder at Dina as she moves the basket of laundry to the living room.
She shrugs. “I don’t think I can. Not until I see her.”
They do put on a movie now, an old Disney one that has Dina’s brow creasing in confusion. The boys sleep through it. They’ve almost hit the end when they hear the sound of voices and slow footsteps across the porch.
Maria comes back inside, exhaustion visibly weighing down every inch of her body. She has a smile across her face, though. Ellie steps out behind her in a blood-soaked shirt, a long gash down the side of her neck. Tommy is last in the worn-out parade, a crutch under each arm.
“We live,” Tommy says with a wry smile and a dramatic brandish of one crutch, nearly falling over.
“And now we’re going to bed,” Dina says. Her face is pressed into Ellie’s shoulder, the other woman’s arms wrapped around her already.
James finally wakes up from the noise, rubbing his eyes and looking around. The slight smile on his face gradually shifts to a beam. Maria leads him upstairs to his bedroom once he’s gotten the chance to hug Tommy.
“Dunno if I can sleep yet,” Tommy says once his son’s out of earshot, sitting down heavily on the couch. “Might wait for morning. Gimme the baby.”
Joel passes JJ over, sitting next to him. Ellie, forever feral at heart, sits on the floor instead of the open armchair, Dina dropping down to sit beside her.
Joel’s gaze strays to Tommy’s injured leg, then to the gash on Ellie’s neck, still sluggishly bleeding down her chest. “What happened to y’all out there?”
Tommy and Ellie exchange a look.
“Well.” Tommy leans back, bouncing JJ as he lets out a whimper. “We wasn’t counting on them all running away at the first sight of one of our guys. Or, not all of ‘em. Just the men. They left the women and children at the camp with no weapons, no supplies, no nothin’. And, y’know, it was far enough out that it wasn’t safe, so we had to keep a few guys with them.”
Dina looks up. “Wait, are they here now?”
“Uh huh. They’re in the process of being vetted. Don’t think there’s a need for them to do anything now though, if that’s what they were sent for, seeing as we killed all their men. But once they were secure, we sent the rest after them in three groups. Knew they would circle back at some point, so it was best to just pick ‘em off, right?”
“And then it was dark,” Ellie says. She reaches over and steals her son back from Tommy, doing her best to shift him to the non-bloody part of her shirt. His eyes widen as he looks up at her, having apparently not realized that she had rejoined the family.
“Ma!”
She kisses his head, bouncing him up higher in her arms. “They tried ambushing us. They weren’t very good at it, but Infected got caught into the mix when a wandering herd saw us, and then things kinda went to shit. Tommy fell off a cliff.”
“A small one,” Tommy says with a huff.
“I think that makes it worse, dude, but yeah. He fell down a good, what, 10 feet?”
“15.”
“12, then.” She winces as one of JJ’s legs kicks out against her side. “I had to go down and get him. That was when a clicker came out.”
“Yeah,” Tommy snorts. “Show ‘em what you did.”
Oh, great. Joel bites back a sigh, not sure if he wants to know about what Tommy’s referring to as Ellie passes JJ to Dina. She tugs at the bottom of her shirt, pulling it up just high enough that they can see the outline of a bite, indents of teeth welling with fat droplets of red and stomach sprinkled with bits of dirt and rock. Above the bite, the skin is colored a mottled red and purple, the creeping expanse of bruises from higher up.
He sucks in a breath through his teeth. Great. She can’t go to the clinic with that on her skin. No wonder the cut on her neck is still open and untreated.
“She took the bite for me. Fucking mushroom was heading straight for me, and she got in between.”
Jesus fucking christ. This isn’t the first time this has happened. It won’t be the last. No matter how much he’s tried to instill some sense of self-worth in her, it’s always been his girl out there, throwing herself into harm's way for the sake of everyone else. Sometimes, he thinks that the best thing a parent can hope for in their child, is for them to be a coward.
Ellie raises an eyebrow. “I did. After you fell off the cliff because you tackled the dude about to stab me.”
“That guy hit his head on a rock,” is all Tommy says in response.
“Yep. Splat.”
Dina’s gone uncharacteristically quiet over the past few minutes. He looks down at her, only to find that she’s drifted off, head against Ellie’s shoulder. There’s blood in her hair now, from the cut on Ellie’s neck.
“I think that’s our cue to go,” Ellie says, pressing a kiss to her head. She goes to gently wake her wife, Joel shaking his head.
“I got her. Get the baby.”
Ellie lifts the baby up, shifting him to the less bloody part of her shoulder. She presses a kiss to Tommy’s cheek as she stands, Tommy giving her shoulder a gentle squeeze.
“Tell Maria we said goodnight.” Joel lifts Dina into his arms with a slight grunt, shifting her until she’s in a more comfortable position. She doesn’t even stir.
The sky is pitch black as they step outside, and he keeps his steps slow, not wanting to trip over anything while he’s holding his daughter-in-law in his arms.
“Dat?” JJ asks as they approach the fence of Joel’s house, pointing a tiny finger at one of the streetlights.
“That’s a streetlight.” Ellie bounces him higher up on her hip.
He seems delighted at the answer, pointing at the cat stretched out in front of the garage-turned-house. “Dat?”
“Kitty cat.”
“Key-ca.”
He sets Dina down on her bed as they go inside, turning to Ellie. “Y’all good, kiddo?”
She sets her son down in his crib, looking up. “Yeah, we’re good. Go get some sleep, old man.”
Joel goes back to his house. He doesn’t go to sleep. The nerves have died down at the sight of his family, safe and whole, but exhausted energy is still pulsing through his body.
He sits alone at his kitchen table.
Not even two hours later, there’s a knock at the front door., Right as Joel was in the middle of making coffee. He lifts his hands from the counter and goes to the door. Ellie and JJ are on the other side.
“He’s up for the day and I didn’t want him to wake Dina,” Ellie says. Joel nods, taking the baby from her arms. There are benefits to having the girls living in the garage, most of all being the fact that they’re close to the family. But ultimately, it’s only one room, and when the baby’s unhappy there’s no escaping the noise.
“To be fair, your wife sleeps like the dead.”
“Not when it comes to him. One whimper and she’s up.”
Joel sets him on the ground, JJ gripping onto one of his fingers as he determinedly toddles down the hallway, his other arm swinging wildly as he tries to keep his balance. “I got berries in the fridge if he’s hungry.”
“I think he’d love that.”
They head into the kitchen and he takes out the assortment of berries he’s collected over the week. They’re mostly out of the “could easily choke on a blueberry” phase with JJ, but he sorts through them and cuts up some of the larger ones regardless, the baby playing with a washcloth under the table, waving it around like a flag.
He turns his attention to Ellie once JJ is secure in the ancient highchair Joel keeps around his kitchen, berries scattered across the tray. She’s taken a seat beside said highchair, elbows braced against the table as she shifts uncomfortably. The cut on her neck is still open.
He gets out the medical kit from under the sink and takes the now discarded washcloth from the floor, motioning for her to lean her head back. She does so.
This much is familiar. Wiping blood and dirt from her face and cleaning her wounds. Her hair in his hand, her eyes half-lidded.
He looks at the hard-earned muscles that ripple beneath her skin and thinks of stick-thin little girl arms, hands getting into everything. He stitches up the cut on her neck and remembers wide, curious eyes, back when he was the one fighting for her instead of the other way around. Space, dinosaurs, fights, movie nights on the couch. A kid who was magnetized towards him when she was hurt, not calming down until it was him beside her, his hands against her shoulders.
All while time was slipping through their fingertips.
She pulls back as he reaches the bite. “Put on gloves first.”
“Baby, I don’t think —”
"Gloves.”
He does as she says, spreading more berries across JJ’s highchair tray before he does. The baby’s entire face is a mess of indigo and red, pieces of smashed up berries sticking throughout his hair.
His mind pivots away from the past as he starts cleaning the bite mark on her side, Ellie sucking in a breath through her teeth as he does. This is good too. Marveling at the sheer strength (and frequent stupidity) of the person he’s watched grow. Watching her raise her own tiny person, and love a woman with all of her heart. She’s one of Jackson’s best. She’ll be even better the older she gets.
“I’ll have to burn this one off too, I guess,” she says as he covers the wound, removing his gloves.
“Don’t even think about it until it’s healed, little miss.”
The look she gives tells him that she’s not listening to him, of course. Maybe Dina will be able to talk some sense into her later. He stands up, going to wash his hands. “Your ribs and stomach are real bruised. Tommy should take you off shifts for the week.”
She shrugs, lifting JJ up and wiping down his face, combing her fingers through his hair to pick out any remaining bits of berry. “Tommy’ll be off shifts for a while, won’t he?”
“Mhm. Broken leg, at our age? That don’t heal quick.”
“Maybe it’s a sign. Y’all are getting pretty old to be on patrols.”
He chooses to ignore the end of her sentence, quirking an eyebrow instead. “Y’all?”
“Shut up,” Ellie says.
“Yaw,” JJ says.
She moves into the living room, sitting down on the couch with him. He rests his head against her chest, fist in his mouth. He looks close to falling back asleep, a rare thing once he’s already up past midnight.
“I wasn’t gonna tell you this now.” Ellie looks up at him. “But Dina and I have been working on something. Maria’s the one who brought it up, actually.”
Joel sits down beside her, tilting his head.
“You know how we’ve been trying to establish farms a little out to the west? Connect them to the rest of Jackson with time?”
He blinks. “Yeah.”
“They need people to live on the farms and take care of them. There’s one the council wants to set up with sheep and grain. And, well, we’ve got a spot reserved. I’ve gone back and forth a few times, started repairing the house. It’ll need some more work, but it’s big and Dina loves the land.”
His stomach sinks. JJ snuggles in closer to Ellie, his eyes slipping shut. “You’re…?”
“Nothing’s finalized. But, yeah. We’re hoping.”
“Maria and Tommy know?”
“Uh huh. I’ve been waiting for the right time to tell you. Figured now wouldn’t hurt, we never fight when the baby’s in the room.” She lets out a nervous laugh, her gaze darting to her feet.
His heart aches. He won’t stop her. Not with something like this. He’ll just panic on his own time, in the safety of his room where his wonderful, grown-up kid doesn’t have to see him.
“That’s not all, though.” She scrubs a hand over her face. “I know it’s… god, I know it’s a lot to ask, but we were wondering if you wanted to come with us?”
What?
He blinks slowly a few times.
“We were just thinking, y’know, three pairs of hands are better than two? And, well, it’s sheep, your dream. But it’s still a bit of a distance away, so I understand if you —”
He takes her hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. “Yeah, baby. I’ll come. Of course I will. Gotta make sure you ain’t messin’ up the work on the house, after all.”
A smile breaks out across her face. “Hey, fuck you, old man, I know what I’m doing. I learned from the best.” She pauses for a beat. “Tommy.”
Jesus christ.
“Girl, you’ve seen the things that man has done to his sink.”
“That’s just plumbing. And hey, it still works to this day.”
She leans her head back, closing her eyes. One of her hands rubs circles into JJ’s back. His little body rises and falls with her chest. “I think you’ll like it on the farm. It’s quiet. Feels like your kind of place.”
Even if it wasn’t, it still would be in the end. His place is where his family is. He doesn’t say that, though, opting to rest his hand on her shoulder instead, as her own hand moves to JJ’s shoulder.
It’s everything he wants in one moment.