JOEL
two and a half months later
Two and a half months... Joel could hardly believe he was alive after walking for that long.
And the journey still wasn't complete.
If they kept going at the pace they'd been moving, he'd hopefully find clues to his brother's whereabouts in two weeks time. Wyoming felt so close, and yet still so far away.
"Can you tell me another story from the QZ?" Ellie asked as she and Laura sat around the fire in the mineshaft they'd found. They'd gone in as far as possible, to make sure no one would find them. If needed they should be able to slip through a gap in the collapsed wall behind them that would hide them completely. Well, Ellie would definitely fit through that gap, but he wasn't so sure he'd be able to.
"I think I'm fresh out, kiddo." Laura replied before she had a mouthful of freshly cooked rabbit.
"Really?" Ellie asked, a disappointed tenor on her voice. "Do you have any you want to share, Joel?"
"No." He answered simply. It had been enough listening to Laura tell her stories to the kid, some were familiar to him and some weren't. Others answered questions he'd always had, like what happened to the leader of the QZ before the one currently in power. Apparently that poor bastard had threatened to expose Laura as a Firefly if she didn't bend to his every whim... his mistake was thinking she'd comply and not get rid of him as an obstacle.
"You still suck then," Ellie said. He just shrugged his shoulders and took a bite of his own bit of rabbit. With a little friendly competition between him and Laura, they hadn't gone hungry. The rabbit they were currently eating never stood a chance against her arrows, and it brought her two kills behind him. He'd have to step up his hunting game. "Well, what else are we going to talk about all night?"
"How about you get some sleep instead?" Laura said, a smile on her face. Between her and Ellie there had scarcely been a moment of peace. Only when they slept did he have time to think without either of them speaking louder than his own thoughts.
"Do I get to do a watch tonight?" Ellie really didn't want to let that idea go.
"No-"
"You promised that I could if we found somewhere safe for my first one. We're literally in a mine shaft where no one can see us, it's about as safe as it's ever going to get. Don't you want a little extra sleep?" Ellie asked. God, what wouldn't he give for a couple extra hours?
"She does have a point, Texas." Laura looked up at him with her damned hazel eyes and he buckled. As he'd kept doing over the last few months.
"Okay, but you can do the middle shift so Laura and I are on either side. And only for an hour or two." He agreed, even though it put him through mild panic at the thought of leaving the girl to her own devices—at the thought of leaving his life in the hands of that girl.
"Really?" Ellie didn't seem to believe he'd agreed to it, but he guessed he couldn't really believe it either.
"That means you actually have to sleep once you finish eating." Laura pointed out, and the girl nodded.
"Okay." Ellie agreed before she attempted once again to put off sleep. "So neither of you have a story you want to tell? Nothing you want to get off your chests?" This kid was relentless. The plan had been to let the kid do a watch so he and Laura could get more rest, so training her to be ready for that meant she'd stayed awake with them for short periods of time to learn the ropes of it. Whenever he'd been stuck alone with the kid while Laura slept, Ellie liked to interrogate him over and over with the same questions. Did you love Laura? Will you two stay in contact after this? Do you still like her? He'd never given her an answer.
"Well, all I have left to tell is before," Laura said. His body tensed at the words. She wasn't serious... was she? "But you're probably not interested in that."
"Uh, why wouldn't I be? I only know little bits, you've never told me the whole thing." And unless Laura had lied to him back on that staircase in Kansas to make him feel better, she wouldn't give the whole story now either.
"And I won't be now, either, but I could give you most." Laura offered, and his breath got caught in his throat. "Do you have anywhere you want me to start?" Joel was sure the question was directed to him as well, but he couldn't bring himself to say anything. To talk about their lives from before the fungus had meant to cross a line, it had been that way for the three years they'd been together for. And now... now she was...
"Well when we made the code words, you said silver was from hospitals... how do you know that?" Ellie asked, and his heart hammered in his chest. If she answered this then Laura was really about to hand him her past on a silver platter.
"Well, I told you about Nolan before, but I don't think I told you he was a doctor." Laura really was going to tell them everything, well, maybe not everything but she was going to let them in. Jesus, Laura was going to let him in. "He was actually on the path to becoming a neurosurgeon, it's what he'd always wanted to do. I visited the hospital a lot when I had the time, so he told me the code words they used so I would always know what was going on." Shit, a fucking neurosurgeon? She'd been engaged to a neurosurgeon? He crossed his arms over his chest and tried not to give away how he felt. A neurosurgeon... and Joel had been in construction.
"What did you do?" Joel asked, and Laura looked over to him with wide eyes.
"Technically I didn't do anything," she replied with a grimace. "God, you would have hated me if we ever met before this all happened." Impossible. It would be physically impossible for him to have hated her.
"What do you mean you didn't do anything?" He asked. Laura took a sharp inhale as it all pieced together for him. Engaged to a neurosurgeon, got into archery instead of guns... "Don't tell me you were a trust fund baby." The grimace on Laura's face softened to a strained smile.
"What the fuck is a trust fund baby?" Ellie asked. The question snapped Joel away from Laura's eyes. Damn it. Even after two and a half months of practice, he still got distracted by her far too easily. Or maybe that distraction had become worse.
"Rich families could set up these things called trust funds which were holdings of money or investments made by a person, such as a parent, for a third party, such as a child. Trust fund babies were a stereotype for kids that had a trust fund in their name. They were seen as adult-children who had no responsibilities at all and just did whatever they wanted whenever they wanted to do it." Laura explained it before she turned to look back at him, and he had to hold his breath. "I was a trust fund baby, yes, but I swear I wasn't pretentious."
"That's impossible," Joel replied. It was, usually, impossible for anyone who was rich to not be a pretentious asshole. But he guessed he'd never thought of Laura as one...
"No, really. There were terms to my trust, if I wanted the money then I had to work. So I started working at sixteen." Laura should have been smiling as she spoke. Why wasn't she smiling?
"At what? A Chanel store?" Joel asked. It was half a joke and half a jab, but it didn't make Laura break a smile like he'd hoped. Her face was stone cold as she looked at him, shaking her head briefly.
"I had to work for the, um... family business." Family business? Why did she say it like that? She was from Canada, so surely her family wasn't mafia related. "I managed to weasel out of the terms after I turned twenty with a good lawyer, left the business behind and moved to America to make my own way. I got into investing and when I kept making a fortune I started donating as much as I could. I met Nolan at a charity dinner for the hospital he worked at in Boston." What the fuck was this family business? Why did she distance herself from it?
"Back then I didn't have a purpose, I existed by growing money and spending all my spare time on archery. Nolan helped me grow into a better person, helped me find my passion, which was history and forced me to get a degree so I could work in a museum which was all I'd wanted back then." Laura took a deep breath, her hands rubbed against each other slowly for comfort.
"But, I was still killing it in the finance industry so I was very well known. I was also a woman in a male dominated field so I did a lot of photoshoots and modelling stuff to make myself worthy of being in that field. The reason I was late to get home the night the world fell apart was because I'd been stuck in a photoshoot... I had to kill Nolan because he'd picked up an extra shift at the hospital after I told him I was going to be stuck in New York for an extra day. He got bit during that shift." Shit. How was he supposed to respond to that? What was he meant to say? All he'd wanted four years ago was for her to open up like she just had, but now he didn't know how to react.
"Oh, shit, I'm sorry-"
"Don't say 'I'm sorry for your loss'. This happened twenty years ago, I've had plenty of time to move on. Yeah, it still hurts but... it's okay. If he'd still been around I never would have joined Marlene, Nolan's moral compass was far too perfect to be a Firefly. If I'd never joined Marlene, I never would have met you, kiddo." Laura finally smiled, and Joel's tight chest began to relax. "I wouldn't have met Joel either, so it seems like it wasn't all bad." There was silence for a few moments, filled only with the crackle of the fire with them. Was Laura truly okay with her past or was she lying to make herself feel better? And what did any of this have to do with her being something along the lines of a spy?
"So you did photoshoots..." Ellie trailed off. "Like for magazines? Like the one I found in Bill and Frank's car?"
"Not exactly like that one, but kind of..." Laura answered.
"How famous were you then?"
"Famous enough that I'm sure Joel knew who I was back then." His eyes snapped from the fire to meet hers, a smirk on her face. "He probably just forgot because remembering celebrities wasn't as important as staying alive once the infected turned up." No, there was no way he would have forgotten her face. If he knew her as a celebrity before then he would have recognised her that first night they met in Boston... right?
"No, I don't think I knew who you were," he said. The smirk on her face grew into a smile he didn't like the look of.
"No, you knew who I was, I just looked a little different back then so I'm not shocked you don't remember." No, not possible. He shook his head. "I would actually be willing to bet I could jog your memory by telling you exactly where you would have known me from."
"Oh?" He asked, eyebrows raised as she finished her food and wiped her mouth.
"Yep, I would have been in a magazine you kept in your bedside table. I'm also sure I know the exact one you would have owned too," she said. She really wanted to go there? Alright.
"I doubt you-"
"It would have been one of those men's magazines. You know the ones where they pretend it's made to communicate information but it's actually just light porn?" Joel could already feel his neck burning.
"Laura..." He warned. Had she forgotten that Ellie was sitting with them around the fire, watching far too intently? There was a reason the kid hadn't spoken for a while, and he was sure it was because Ellie was memorising this all to use as ammunition against him later when he denied feeling anything for Laura... again.
"I did a two page spread in one of those once. It was an interview about investing and whatnot, but we all know that's not what people bought it for." Laura kept pushing forward. Maybe she enjoyed watching him sweat as much as Ellie did. Fuck. There was no maybe about it, he already knew for a fact that she did.
"I didn't have any-"
"To get that interview in I had promised a photoshoot. I sat... you know what, close your eyes." God, this was not happening.
"Laura-"
"Close them." He swallowed hard. This would end badly, he knew it would, but he closed his eyes anyway. "Alright, now imagine me twenty years younger, with caramel brown hair and some soft highlights." He tried to picture what she described to him, but all he could see was her as she was now.
"Now imagine me facing away from the camera, no shirt on, only my arm covering my naked chest as I look over my shoulder at the camera. The heading would have been 'Laura Richards on How to Dominate the Investment Market' like anyone would actually read the article." As she described it he realised she was fucking right. She was fucking right about the exact magazine he... wait. Laura Richards. As in the multimillionaire, Laura Richards. His eyes snapped open. "That's what you had in your bedside table, I know it is Joel, you can't convince me otherwise."
He couldn't let her know that she was right. It was far too late to cover up the flush on his neck, but he could play that off as being too warm from being next to the fire. Hell, he had let this go too fucking far.
"I'm going to check the perimeter," Joel said as he stood up from the ground. "You need to be asleep by the time I get back." He looked at Ellie who nodded and somehow refrained from saying anything until he'd walked away with the rifle in hand.
"I think you guessed right, Laura." Ellie said quietly, maybe she thought he wouldn't hear, but her voice echoed off the mineshaft walls. As did Laura's sweet tone as she responded.
"Yeah, I think I did too."
Fucking damn it. Now they both had evidence to use against him, and denial wouldn't help him anymore.
***
Joel looked down at Ellie and Laura. When the snow first hit they had zipped together their sleeping bags, which meant they could share the bag and therefore their body heat. That night was no different. Even deep in the mine shaft it was still fucking cold, but they seemed perfectly warm in their bag, backs pressed against each other as they slept.
He wanted to leave them for longer, to let them rest for a few more hours, but the cold was draining him. And if he didn't tap out now he was going to fall asleep and potentially fuck them all over. He'd contemplated waking Laura up instead of Ellie, but thought the better of it when he realised that the kid would wake up with Laura's movement anyway. He had made a promise, and it would be shitty of him if he didn't follow through.
"Hey, kiddo..." he whispered, gently nudging Ellie's shoulder to wake her up. Her eyes begrudgingly opened, and after a few seconds to let her come to, those eyes filled with excitement.
"You're not changing your mind?" She whispered, and he shook his head. Even though he'd given her that assurance she still rushed to get out of the bag to follow him a short distance from the fire so they could talk without waking Laura. "Do I get to have the rifle?"
"What do you think I'm going to say?" He asked. As he had discovered, this was the best way the kid learned. There was no point in telling her things, it was best she came to the conclusions herself and he confirmed if she was right or wrong.
"No, because I'm not practiced with it." Ellie replied, and he nodded. "But you won't let me practice with it so how can I-"
"Ellie, we're learning one thing at a time," he said. She nodded. "A rifle down here isn't necessarily the best option anyway, so you can stick with your pistol. Now, tell me what you're going to do."
He listened to Ellie as she ran through each of the steps they'd gone over previously. Perimeter check, look for any ways people could sneak through, listen carefully for any signs of movement.
"And when are you going to wake up Laura to do her shift?" Joel asked next, still unsure over whether this was a good idea.
"In two hours." Okay, so the kid remembered what they'd agreed on. Good.
"And what do you do if you hear something?" He asked. He was procrastinating leaving her alone, but he was already out of questions.
"Wake up either you or Laura. No investigating alone." Right. He nodded, took a slow deep breath and held her shoulder.
"Alright, are you sure you're good to-"
"Yes, I can do this. Go to sleep." Ellie seemed to have bridled her excitement, which was good. She would be able to focus better if she could keep a handle on her emotions. He let out another breath and let go of her shoulder. She could do this. No one would find them in the mine anyway, the watch was just a precaution.
"Okay, good luck." He turned and walked away before he could talk himself out of letting Ellie do this.
"She'll be fine." Laura's voice reached his ears as he looked over his shoulder to see Ellie was gone to check the perimeter.
"I know, I just..." he didn't know what to say to make Laura understand. While he'd spent two and a half months keeping his distance from Laura, or trying to, Ellie had been a little different. He wouldn't admit it, but he did care about the girl.
"She wants to help and she's capable of doing it. If she needs us then she'll get us, don't panic." Laura sat up in her sleeping bag as he sat down next to the fire. "You need sleep."
"I might just stay up for a bit and make sure-"
"Joel." She cut him off. "I know you haven't been sleeping well. At first you were just anxious, but now it's the cold as well. I might not be able to do much to help with your anxiety, but I can help with the cold aspect."
"What do you..." he trailed off as she patted the empty space in the sleeping bag next to her. "Laura." If he did that it would be crossing the invisible line he'd drawn for himself.
For two and a half months he'd been doing well. Any advance she made towards him, which happened nearly every day, he'd turned down. He had to. Soon enough and they would part ways... even though every advancement became harder to deny. Even though every smile that warmed her face had torn away a piece of his resolve. She never stopped, never gave up, even though he'd given her absolutely nothing back. Although, maybe that was a lie, because just like a few hours ago it was hard to hide how his body reacted. It was hard to not play along with her little scenarios and little games...
"Come on, your joints must be killing you in the cold." They were, but if he was that close to her there would be a whole different issue he'd have to resolve. "I'm cold too, you know. My living heater just left and now there's a cold empty space waiting to be filled. You'd be helping me as much I'd be helping you."
"Laura, it's-"
"It doesn't have to mean anything. We're cold, and sharing body heat is a good way to stay warm." Damn it. How was he supposed to argue against that? Well, he could keep arguing but it would get him nowhere.
"Okay," he said as he stood up again and walked over to her sleeping bag. "Am I even going to fit in there?"
"You'll fit just fine," Laura said. He took off his jacket and boots and slipped into the bag, sitting upright next to her. "See?" She asked, patting his leg through the bag. Already her warmth was seeping through to his bones, and it was the reason he didn't say anything as he laid down. He tucked himself as far away from her as possible, which wasn't far at all. Their backs were touching as they each faced away from the other.
"You know it'll be warmer if you spoon me, right?" He stared at the wall of the mineshaft, his body tense. "And don't just say my name again as a warning, it's become rather repetitive of late." Well, that put a stopper on the word that was going to leave his dry mouth.
"Then how about I just say 'no'?" Joel argued, and he felt her silently laugh against him.
"Fine then, be cold." Fucking damn it. He let out a sigh and rolled to his other side with an arm around her, his chest against her back, her ass against his... fuck. "Isn't that better already?" Jesus Christ, this was not better. This was worse. This was so much worse. He shuffled his hips away from hers, so she wouldn't be able to tell how his body was reacting to the proximity to hers—to feeling her body heat warm parts of him that had been frozen for four years.
"No," he answered. Until they parted ways, he would continue denying her. He had to. And he would continue denying himself after she'd leave.
"You're lying. You feel like a god damn block of ice against my back, but you're warming up slowly," she said. He smiled, only because he knew no one could see.
"Well, I can feel my fingers and toes, so that's a nice change of pace." He answered honestly, but as he did she shuffled closer to him. She settled her hips against his once more and it meant she couldn't miss how hard he was as she pressed against him. This was a bad idea, because he had no room left in the sleeping bag to pull away from her, not that he wanted to.
"So tell me..." Laura whispered, her hand wrapping around the forearm he had over her chest. "Was I right about the magazine?" God, he should have known she wouldn't let that go.
"Shut up," he whispered which made her laugh again.
"I knew I was right." Her laughter eased off, and then they were left in silence again. "Are you... are you looking forward to this being over? We don't have much further to go now." He wanted to say he wasn't. He wanted to say no.
Instead, he didn't say anything. Because while he couldn't bring himself to say the truth, he didn't want to lie either. Laura stopped holding his forearm, and instead tucked both of her hands beneath her head. It seemed like she didn't know what to say either, and instead of talking they settled into the silence.
Once her breathing slowed enough for him to think she'd fallen asleep, he pulled her tighter against his chest. Only when she stayed still to prove that she was actually asleep, he rested his forehead against the back of her head and whispered into her hair, "no, I'm not looking forward to this being over. The terror, yes, but this..."
And while he could have sworn her breathing changed, that it had sped up and was shaking, he knew it had to have been because she was dreaming. She wasn't crying, because she was asleep.
Nevertheless, he held her tighter again, and he slept better than he had in months.