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The sound of a guitar that she had once found so soothing had begun to grate on her nerves. Ellie had heard Joel play that stupid song so many times, she knew it by heart - and he’d even taught it to her. She couldn’t bring herself to play it anymore.
So why was her heart tugging her in the direction it was coming from?
With tired feet that drag her towards the music, she approaches the porch accompanied by a sinking feeling in her stomach. The scene before her is exactly like she imagined; he’s sitting on the same plastic outdoor chair, one leg crossed over the other to support the guitar as he played (he had never used that stupid strap, anyway). Joel is absorbed in his own world for so long that he doesn’t even notice her there, at first. She walks up the wooden stairs and stands there, waiting for him to notice.
He’s surprised when he does realize she’s there. “Hey,” he says, barely above a whisper. He can hardly believe Ellie is really there.
Ellie stands there, leaning against the railing, practically feeling everything she wants to say melting away. Everything she’s gone over a thousand times in her head, everything she’s imagined telling him. When she thought of this conversation, it always went differently. Sometimes she cried, sometimes he did, sometimes they both did. In some renditions she yelled, in some of them she just walked away without ever saying anything. These imagined scenarios could never prepare her for it being right in front of her.
So she says nothing. She walks forward and faces away from him, leaning fully against the banister this time. Joel follows reluctantly, holding a mug in his hands. The steam is visible, rolling off of it in waves as it combats the cold air of winter. Ellie is desperate to say something, anything. “What are you drinking?”
It’s as if Joel is taken aback by the fact Ellie didn’t immediately begin chewing him out. He wouldn’t have blamed her. “...Coffee.” He punctuates the one-word-sentence by taking a sip.
She’s already irritated by the fact that he didn’t preemptively answer her follow up question, as if he was supposed to read her mind. She knows it’s an irrational thing to be upset with him for, but she can hardly help it. She doesn’t really care, either. “...Okay… Where did you get that?”
“The people that came through here last week,” Joel explains. Ellie responds with a quiet ‘oh’. “A little embarrassed at what I had to trade to get it, but…” He’d offer her some, but he remembers how much she’d hated it. He could never forget these little things about her. They were all he had to remember her by, at this point.
Ellie has half a mind to make some witty remark and tease him about that. How he was probably willing to sell his own soul for a cup of (what she perceived to be) the worst drink imaginable. Of course, she immediately shakes herself out of it, and her urge to be playful with him just makes her even angrier. Things can never be the same. He doesn’t deserve for them to be the same.
“I had Seth under control.”
“I know.”
“So why did you get in the middle of it? It had nothing to do with you.”
“It had something to do with you. So it had something to do with me, too.”
At that moment, she wants to deck him. She practically shoots up from the spot that she had been leaning on. “Are you fucking serious?” Ellie asks. Joel can’t get a word before she starts near-yelling again. “You are un-fucking-believable. Just because - just because it involves me, okay, doesn’t mean that it involves you. You and I? I told you we were done. You don’t fucking get,” she takes a break from her ranting, feeling the familiar burn of tears pricking the corners of her eyes. “You don’t get to do that. You can’t - you can’t just try and… act like you’re my fucking dad after what you said, what you did.”
Joel blinks at her. Of course he had always thought of her like a daughter, loved her like she was his own. “...What?”
“Of course you don’t remember. The ranch? ‘I sure as hell ain’t your dad?’” She makes finger quotations and mocks his southern accent.
Oh. He hadn’t remembered that, actually. He’d forgotten all about it - after it had happened he had hoped everything he did for her would make up for it. Treating her like she was his would fix that, Joel thought. Apparently it had only made that worse.
“Back then, when I said that… I was hurting, and I-” “As if I wasn’t?” If everyone wasn’t preoccupied with the dance, she was sure there would be people staring. “I was angry about that too, Joel. When you told me that I had no idea what loss was, as if that wasn’t what my entire life up to that point had been. We have been through the same shit, Joel. My entire life has been this shit .” Joel just lets her rant. It’s what she deserves. The way that he's sitting there - looking understanding, of all things - for some ugly reason, it infuriates Ellie even further. An image of what she’s always wanted, but could never have. To be loved by someone that was family. By a father.
“And then - then I lost again. You. Because you couldn’t fucking let go! You wouldn’t call me your daughter but you wanted to act like I was. You wanted the perks of having a kid, without actually being a dad. You ruined everything! And now you’re just sitting there, acting all - all understanding.” She spits the word out like it’s a bad thing. Ellie wipes her hands over her face. “It was so fucking stupid of you. You should have known you were going to lose me either way. You took away the one thing that would have given my life meaning, would have made me fucking matter, and then refused to give me the only other thing I could want.” The unspoken word in that sentence is family. She deflates, turning away from him and leaning over on the railing again.
Joel takes a deep breath. Everything she’s said is true. He’s not sure if there’s anything he can say to fix it.
“I wasn’t ready. To move on. To call someone else my daughter.” Joel confesses. It’s perhaps the most vulnerable he’s ever sounded to Ellie. “I thought that I couldn’t give you that. Thought it would be better if I didn’t even try. But what I did in that hospital…” He pauses, swallowing the lump in his throat and attempting to ward off the tears that threaten to burst from his waterlines. “If the Lord somehow gave me a second chance at that moment, I would do it all over again.” Ellie side-eyes him like she wants to start berating him again. He notices, and backs off for a moment in case she does, but she stays silent.
“I realize now that I did that because I love you. Because I couldn’t lose again. And if that meant you were angry at me ‘til the day I died… Well, that was okay. As long as you kept goin’.”
Ellie really is crying now - not sobbing, not taking the deep heaving breaths usually associated with it, but her cheeks are wet with her own tears. She sniffles, aggressively wiping away the tear tracks. “I don’t know if I can ever forgive you for that.”
Whatever hope Joel had for their future as a family is immediately squashed.
Ellie stands up straight, facing him fully. “But I’d like to try.”
He lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding, sighing in relief. He doesn’t know what’s appropriate to do next. Thank her? Hug her?
Thankfully, she takes initiative. Hesitantly pulling him into a hug. She’d missed the feeling, as much as she hated to admit it.
“Okay,” Joel says, perhaps the least eloquent response he could have given, and he rests his head on hers. Ellie allows herself one sob before recomposing herself and pulling away. “So… I’ll see you tomorrow?” She asks, voice smaller than she’d like. Joel nods. “Yeah. I’d like that.”
Maybe there really is hope for their future.