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When Joel’s in his twenties it seems like something he’d never do.
Sure, the work is hard. It hurts, it’s so fucking repetitive. He ends the day with an aching back and his neck sunburned even though with his complexion he’s never bothered with sunscreen before (although he read something about how skin cancer is usually detected less in people with darker skin tones so he slathers Tommy in the stuff before his soccer games). One day working on a roof his mouth gets so dumb and dry he has to sit hunched in the shade with a bottle of water for an hour before he goes up again, but he’d never need anything extra to get him through the workday.
And yes, it’s exhausting. It’s exhausting all the fucking time. And it never ends. A shift goes on for an extra few hours because some asshole did a step wrong five steps ago and they’ve got to pull apart everything and fix it, and he still has to get up to do it all again tomorrow. But he’s seen what happens when people get sloppy.
A year into the job he’s doing a stint roofing. It’s hot, hard work. They scrabble up shingles carrying heavy tools in steel-toed boots not made to grip this kind of surface at an incline. Some jackass came to work with his pupils blown wide, the same jackass Joel knows has two kids at home to support. The idiot took on overtime shifts that his body couldn’t handle so now he’s only half here on the job, eyes barely tracking and fingers clumsy.
Joel doesn’t baby the bastard: they’re both getting paid to work hard. Three hours into the shift they’re ripping up ridge tiles when the guy stumbles. He reacts too slow and falls. It’s less than 40 feet. That’s all it takes. The sound haunts Joel for years (until later, until the sound of bone popping out from skin and joints snapping becomes commonplace).
They only take an hour long break: just long enough for the ambulance to cart the guy away and everyone to give a statement. Then Joel’s back on the roof. They’re contracted to work the full day and Joel’s getting fucking paid for the full day.
They stay later, to make up for the missed time.
Joel isn’t here to judge. He gets it. The longer he works the job the more he gets it. He sees the smaller signs of people who can function on just a little. Hell, everyone, even him, takes more than the daily recommended dose of ibuprofen, but he’s not going to become addicted to any of the stronger shit. All it takes is one mistake to lose a livelihood. It can come in the form of a sour-faced foreman who’s got to do a certain number of mandatory drug tests to stay certified. He’ll line up whoever he can grab to piss in a cup. There’s rumors down the line they’re going to start testing hair follicles. The drugs live in the hair. You can be years clean and have it all be lost, like that. You look wrong, it means more than a lost job, it means jail time.
Or, it’s falling off the roof. It’s hammering wrong and getting your hand and being laid up with medical bills that cost more than a year’s salary. By the time you’re all better, your spot’s been filled on the crew. Shit out of luck.
So yeah, Joel doesn’t use, because he’s not a fucking idiot.
Until he turns thirty Then he becomes a fucking idiot.
It’s not magically on his birthday. He didn’t blow out the sad, already half melted candle on his birthday pancakes and suddenly start popping pills, but he wakes up one day not too long after and can’t get out of bed. Every muscle is screaming in pain, his spine feels like a rubberband.
He’s got to get up. He’s got a precious hour of time with his daughter before he’s driving her to school. Then he’s working for a shift on a site: moving shiplap and siding, bending and squatting, and lifting, then getting it up on the wall once it’s in the right place. Then he needs to be fully aware to soak in Sarah’s presence for the too-short drive to after school daycare. Then he’s got another shift doing god-knows-what. Then he gets an hour or two with Sarah before bedtime. Then he’s going to do it again. And again. And again .
But he can’t get out of bed.
Everything hurts.
He takes a too-short hot shower. He takes a few ibuprofen just to get the day moving. He white knuckles that shit until the next day.
Eventually, he talks to a guy on a site and goes to a local doctor who prescribes him something stronger for the pain. The look the doctor gives him, like Joel’s an infected dog, makes Joel go to a local guy when his prescription wears out.
He stays in control. He takes nothing - fucking nothing - w hen it could put Sarah in danger. He never takes more than he needs to keep his body moving. It’s not noticeable. Tommy doesn’t seem to suspect. Sarah remains oblivious even when he’s helping her through the D.A.R.E. program.
As he hits his mid-thirties it starts to become a problem. He’s becoming used to the dosage, but he refuses to up it even when it’s doing less and less. Any more and he’ll fry what little brains he has and do something stupid at work. Then Sarah’s out with no parent to pay for health care or soccer cleats. He’s noticing more symptoms. Some he chalks up to aging: tiredness, changing food cravings, rising anxiety.
It’s a problem but then, so is the sputtering truck engine that’s going to take at least 500 bucks to fix even if he does the labor himself, or the looming prospect of getting his smart girl into a solid college in a few years.
It’s his shitty decision making that got him into this mess. He’s handling it. It can simmer on the backburner a little while longer.
He’s stone cold sober the night his baby dies. It’s a cold comfort: that even at his best, his most mentally acute, he failed her. Every moment is carved into his goddamn gray matter, for him to always remember.
Obviously there’s no moderation after that. There’s no fucking point. The only test FEDRA cares about is the scanner for cordyceps. Most people are on something to get through daily life: if not to kill hunger pangs then to deal with scraping by in a city that smells of dusty sweet decay.
He still has to be functional: for Tess, for Tommy. Knowledge of building weak spots gets them out of tough scrapes more than a few times. It takes steady hands and technical know-how to shoot the way he does. He can’t burn all his brain cells, but the pills help him stay alive, as oxymoronic as that sounds. They keep him strong for Tess: he can absorb more damage in fights, act as her shield for a few more precious seconds until her whip smart mind comes up with a new step.
He explained it to Tommy once, how he needs the drugs sometimes, how he has it under control, but Tommy just looked up at him with those big sad eyes that always felt so judgemental.
Tess gets it. She and Joel are alike, in so many ways, so it doesn’t surprise him that with a few words she shows she understands the grim necessity of needing something to keep living.
“If you can’t find your own motivation, store bought is fine,” she jokes one morning, taking an unmarked pill along with an expired vitamin C, and a women’s gummy multivitamin that needs to be soaked before it even can be chewed with how it’s dried into a hard unappetizing nugget. Joel grunts. They spend that morning in companionable silence, which is about as good as life gets these days. The apartment is always stocked: with pills, with booze. The refill it with the same grim acceptance as they refill the medicine cabinet.
Then Joel meets Ellie.
Then they leave Boston, with everything Joel needs sewn into the seams of his backpack.
His supply lasts until Bill and Franks. Their place is filled with drugs of course: Bill’s goddamn prepping and Frank’s wasting condition. The truck’s filled with supplies: more than enough for the trip to Wyoming.
Joel’s fine until Kansas City.
He’s fine for a few days after Kansas City, where they lost near everything. The adrenaline blankets any early withdrawal symptoms. For a short while he can pretend everything he’s feeling is grief for the two boys they just buried.
Then he’s the exact opposite of fine.
He thought he’d outlived shame: he’s done everything from pissing his pants when he’d had to hide in a foxhole to avoid FEDRA patrols, to shoveling human corpses for ration cards. Still, the hot kernels of shame burn bright as he fights his lungs to keep his breathing steady, as he struggles to hide everything from Ellie, from the little girl he already knows too much about and he’s starting to orbit around.
He keeps the mood swings in check at least: letting everything simmer under the surface as she talks away.
She calls him out on it. Stupidly, he never expected her to put the pieces together. Sarah, for all her intelligence, would’ve guessed her dad picked up a cold, but Ellie, bold as brass says on fucking day two:
“So, you out of fentanyl or something?”
It’s said casually. Joel’s immediately- blisteringly- angry. He’s angry at the world where a little girl knows how to pronounce fentanyl but can’t pronounce Cheyenne, or some of the bigger words she says sometimes he has to puzzle out that she learned in books but had no one to talk to about. He’s angry at the fucked up FEDRA school where she learned to recognize symptoms well enough she could hit the ballpark of the opioid he maybe, sometimes, used.
Mostly, he’s feeling a burning anger towards himself, towards a promise he made so many years ago that he’d never be so obvious or lose control like this.
“It’s not like that,” he says through teeth he refuses to acknowledge are shaking. “It’s just a chill.”
She eyes him skeptically, but doesn’t fight it, even with the day being mild and sunny.
He’s still a relative stranger. She’s all alone with a big, unstable man. Is she scared? For some reason, the thought of this scaring her makes Joel’s breathing come even faster.
She doesn’t back away. If anything, she moves closer, as if there’s some sick comfort in familiarity. She regales him with tales of teachers who were addicts. Things that would set his heart beating fast if it wasn’t already racing. When he can barely keep food down she’s happy enough to eat his portion, at least for the first few meals. Then she’s pushing a bit onto his plate with a determined expression.
He doesn’t think about Sarah pushing orange juice on him: the one semi-plant based part of his diet for way too long. Obviously Ellie needs him alive to keep her safe. There’s no sentiment involved.
They deal. There are no other options. Joel gets the runs and Ellie tells him puns through the bathroom door. She somehow has less shame than him: maybe kids these days are so busy surviving they aren’t even born with it, which makes sense considering how blase she is about her period.
After his stomach finally settles something else hurts. They hobble along for weeks, covering distances that should take days at most. It ends up being a good thing: Ellie’s unused to walking more than a few miles a day, and with how short her legs are she needs the time to get used to it: the constant ground-eating way to move forward, not stopping until there’s no more light.
When the withdrawal symptoms finally abate enough to not immediately impact their schedule, the normal pain comes back, amplified. Years of ignoring his knees, of drowning out the screams of his spine, haven’t done him any fucking favors.
Everything hurts all the time. He watches Ellie scamper around their campsite and wonders if he ever felt that young.
And of course there are cravings. Of course there’s the screaming urge to do whatever he has to do to get more, now. He ignores it. He’s done a lot of shit over the years. He’s never let a chemical be his lodestone. That’s always, always been family.
He ignores how that tugging feeling pointing the right direction is guiding him to the person next to him, more than Wyoming these days. He’s already ignoring so many things, might as well add that to the pile.
They find pills on the road, obviously. But they’re usually unmarked, usually next to a dead body, and Joel is still trying not to be that much of a giant fucking idiot. Sure, maybe if he was alone, if it was dark, he’d listen to that screaming voice in his head, but he’s got Ellie with him who watches with too cynical eyes any time they find anything drug related.
He always crushes it in front of her, then casts it into the dirt. Then he casually makes them leave, find somewhere else to scavenge or bed down.
Because he’s not that strong, actually. Already his mind is rationalizing it. It makes sense to keep anything they find. Joel knows a few ways to test pills, they could figure out what’s good. What if Ellie gets hurt and needs pain medication? What if they run into someone and need to bribe or trade their way out? It almost sounds rational the longer he thinks about it, so he makes sure he doesn’t.
They move on.
They find Tommy.
Joel gets drunk. Tommy doesn’t mention drugs, but then he never liked to talk about ugly things, and he’s out here playing happy family, sweeping everything under the rug. At least that’s what Joel tells himself. He meets his brother’s eyes in the thin morning light and imagines he sees acceptance there.
They keep going.
Joel gets stabbed. He feels the needle go into him and he waits for the cool rush of oblivion. It doesn’t come. He later learns it’s medicine. He shoots the other doses into big muscles with muscle memory that comes to him like an old friend, just like how easy it felt to beat a man’s face in for daring to even think about touching his family.
They keep going again. Joel stays sober through Salt Lake and he’s so fucking grateful for his failing body for being fast enough, strong enough to carry his daughter out of that hospital. He doesn’t fucking look at the drugs, doesn’t even think of looting the biggest supply of medical blunder he’s seen in years, not with that too warm weight in his arms and a gun in his hand.
In Jackson the work shifts are four hours long. Max. The only exception is emergency situations, like manning the dam if something goes wrong, or pulling double duty during storm season. Even then, there’s support in place: everyone eats, everyone sleeps, anyone can call in sick and someone who’s sick too often gets pulled aside, talked to, and potentially assigned another job.
It makes Joel angry. Where was this level of care 26-27 years ago, when he made that decision to keep himself functional? How many more precious hours would he have had with Sarah then? Still, he takes advantage of it now. He’s lucky Ellie is just as codependent as he is (even though Tommy gets that same judgemental look in his eye about how close they are sometimes) because he sticks to her for months after they settle, or as settled as feral people like them can be.
Ellie’s watching him, he knows. That thought, that his girl is looking to have to manage him in case he becomes weak, is what keeps him from using late at night when his pain is bone deep and he knows he could be in and out of the clinic without anyone suspecting it was him.
When Tommy’s son is born, Joel’s little baby nephew, he and Tommy have a talk about it.
It’s hushed, it’s in the corner of the baby’s nursery. It’s deathly serious and they both confess to things that no ears other than a baby too young to understand should have to hear, but when it’s done Tommy feels safe handing Joel his baby, and Joel understands Tommy isn’t as innocent as he’s pretended all these years, even when he wanted to be a big brother and keep Tommy safe, it didn’t always work out.
Turns out, Joel isn’t the only one good at hiding things.
But they’re both better now. Not fixed, never fixed. They both know to watch for each other, because the cravings, just like their guilt, never really goes away. It’s a shroud that never fully allows for unobscured vision, even on singular summer days when the air shimmers and Ellie’s doggy paddling safely in a slow running bend of the river, unafraid to show off her newly tattooed arm as she laughs with her friends and they’ve got melon in the cooler.
Some days he wakes up and he can’t get out of bed. Ellie, his girl who’s seen him at his worst- who relaxes when he shares the broken parts of himself because she can’t stand him lying about anything anymore, sits on the edge of his bed when she finds him staring blearily out the window. The slight dip of the mattress at the weight of her shifts his spine and makes it worse.
He doesn’t hide from her. He wants to, but she doesn’t deserve that, and he’s not lying to himself, or her, anymore.
She calls him in sick, for all calling now means literally yelling down the street and not using a phone.
He gets out of bed a few hours later and takes a long hot bath. He forces down some food. Everything tastes like shit, his taste buds burnt out. Ellie puts a cushion in his wooden rocking chair with a comment about “his bony ass,” that little gremlin. To add further insult, the cushion fucking works too, making his spine unkink a bit more.
They watch a Star Trek movie: the one with the whales. Ellie asks endless questions about how all the 80s references and they spend hours talking about sea creatures afterwards. Sarah used to get so sad watching this one, worried about the ocean, about overfishing. Somehow it feels good to know that Sarah got her way: a world empty of people means an ocean full of fish. He wishes he could’ve gone to the beach with her more. As he stares at Ellie making increasingly worse sounding whale noises he knows he’s got to get Ellie there somehow.
One of the guys on the construction crew comes by in the afternoon to get directions from Joel because for some reason they want his input. Tommy comes over with a godawful casserole. Ellie stays by his side all day.
He takes three days off and does shitty yoga and a cursed exercise tape Ellie found and loves subjecting him to.
He wakes up on day four and feels, not perfect - never perfect, but good enough to get up, to hug his kid.
It’s enough.