#f/o: john doe | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

kiwisbell · 20 days

Text

helen ; chapter four

nowhere to run

Si vis pacem, para bellum. Or, the capture.

series masterlist | my masterlist pairing: joel miller x f!reader tags/warnings: 18+ (MDNI), john wick AU, hitman!joel, husband!joel, established relationship, artist!reader, love as worship (and blasphemy), sacrilege in the name of romance, flashbacks, graphic violence, guns, blood + injuries, tommy gets stuck with the babysitting gig, joel is still a bit of an idiot, childhood/religious trauma, joel in a church, violence against pastors, criminal underworld, secrecy/lies, betrayal, Big Angst, we're getting there though, the smut returns, fingering, conflicting emotions, kidnapping, Angry!Joel, cliffhanger (oopsie daisy), the typical alcohol/smoking/profanity, dividers by @/saradika word count: ~ 9k a/n: fucking hell. i'm so sorry for how long it took me to bring this chapter to you, friends! my thesis sucked all the life from me and i had to go on a quick trip to the underworld and back to get it back again. thank you so much to my baby @cavillscurls for beta reading and as always being the biggest goddamn help throughout the process. below is the moodboard that mya made for this chapter and the reason i'm her no. 1 lovergirl. prev | next

When he was young, he fed stray dogs on the street.

He would steal sandwiches, pluck out the meat to gnaw on himself, and toss the bread onto the pavement. He would sit back on his haunches just like them and lick his chops when he was finished. Being a runner earned him good money, but it was hard to find jobs that would take a scrawny eight-year-old with dirt on his nose. His memories of those days are far away, foggy around the edges, but he still smells the eye-watering prickle of trash, cigarette smoke, wet fur of the dogs. He still remembers the moist scratch of soaked-through denim after a night sleeping outside in the rain, the bone-deep chill that lasted for days in winter.

One night, a Sunday in July, a hand stretched out toward him. He had not eaten in days, and he’d begun to feel the stretch of his skin around his ribs. A skeleton haunting the wrong body. The face is blurred now, but he remembers the hand. Long-fingered and a little wrinkled, a bracelet dangling from the bluish vein-ringed wrist, a charm in the shape of a cross.

The hand brought him from his bed of ratty blankets and old newspapers to a giant cathedral. The bold lettering above the grand doors read The Sisters of Saint Eustace. Joel had been too small, too weak, to reach up and touch the golden words, but they were tarnished with age and buffed around the edges. He looked up at the owner of the hand—the hand which then lowered onto his shoulder, collarbones protruding, and squeezed just hard enough to sting.

He felt the warm soak of the daytime breeze on his face.

“You must come inside with me,” said the woman. He remembers that the hand belonged to a woman. There was a black hood around her head that made her appear as wraithlike as death itself.

The Creation of Adam was immortalised on the north wall. It was the first thing he saw when he walked inside.

“I can’t go inside,” he said.

“And why not?”

He turned his head away from the image of Adam and God, whom he did not know at the time, and could never have hoped to know. How could he, after all, when God had never appeared to him? Then, God was only a man, frail and old, reaching out a wrinkled hand. Why should the weak ask for aid from the strong?

“The dogs need someone to feed them,” he said.

He still does not know God. He does not suspect he ever will. But there’s a warm, soft palm encasing the skin and muscle over his heart, irradiating down to the bone. There’s an intermittent puff of air on the back of his neck, slow and ticklish, the way snow melts. The dog that still lives in the core of him shows its belly.

You’ve moved closer in the night, your soft skin warming his back where your shirt rides up. You breathe silently, catlike, as measured as the rise and fall of the winter sun. He listens for a while, his chest pushing out to match you. As he settles into the new rhythm, he feels for a moment as if it’s all been a dream. As if he never lost you, never lied.

His name leaves your sleeping mouth and his heart ceases altogether. It’s the breathless sound of need, of a desire he supposes you’ve forgotten. In your sleep, some stale withered flower blooms under a fresh rainfall, and he wonders what you’re dreaming about.

Before Joel put his mouth between your legs for the first time, you had forgotten what pleasure tasted like.

It was July, sweltering, and you were draped across the sofa with his head in your lap. It was date night, and his turn to choose the movie: some god-awful karate action film that was a sequel to a sequel to a sequel and so on, infinitely repeating. Neither of you were paying attention to the exchange of staged punches. You were occupying yourself with threading your fingers through Joel’s hair, and he’d taken to toying with the little bow that held up the waistband of your shorts. You watched him pull the strings until they unfurled only to tie them again with one hand. The white noise of on-screen blows lulled you into a gentle doze as you both lay idle.

“Joel.”

“Hm,” he said, the scratch of his beard tickling your belly.

“The door,” you said. “Someone’s knocking.”

“Hm,” he said again, his questioning pitch the only indication he was truly listening.

“You should probably get it.”

His sleep-soaked eyes fluttered shut, his lashes brushing your skin. He gently squeezed your hip. “I’m just fine here.”

“What if I told you I had a surprise for you? And what if I told you I worked very hard to find your surprise?” you cooed.

Joel blinked up at you. “You got me somethin’?”

Your heart swelled. “Yeah, I did. Come on, cowboy.”

Outside, Tommy lounged against the hood of the surprise as you guided Joel outside, your fingers over his eyes.

“I don't like bein’ blind,” he grumbled. “Can't you just tell me?”

“How about I show you?”

You lifted your hands. For a moment, Joel blinked, his eyes adjusting to the blazing light of the sunset, and his lips parted at the sight before him.

“Jesus,” he said under his breath. “You… got me a car?”

“It's not just a car. Boss Mustang 429,” you said sheepishly. “1969. You know, the one you never shut up about. I thought this might help.”

Joel’s breath hitched, and you watched him swallow it. “How…”

“Tommy called me a while back. He'd sourced it from another garage; it was bound for the dump, but I wanted to surprise you by fixing it up. So… surprise.”

Tommy tossed the keys to Joel, who caught them without even looking. “Your girl can get her hands dirty. Helped me fix up the whole damn thing.”

You tried to gauge his reaction, the slight hollow in his throat where he seemed to store the falling sunlight, a faint sheen of sweat turning him gold. Your heart plummeted into your stomach when he didn't say a word.

“It's too soon.”

His head whipped around, his brows curving up in the middle. “What?”

You wetted your lips, panic closing your throat in at all sides. “I know we haven't been dating long, but… I don't know, I couldn't pass up the chance. But now I know it's too soon. I shouldn't have presumed—”

Faintly, he shook his head, his eyes darting across your face as if he were trying to trace it, and closed the distance between you. You gasped as he slanted his mouth over yours, his hands cradling your face, old paper and salt and your perfume. You threw your arms around his neck, a buoy for the drowning man whose arms wound around your waist and pulled you so close he could disappear altogether. Maybe he was trying to. Selfishly, you would let him.

Tommy grumbled something—“You’re welcome, asshole,” probably—and his own car roared to life as it pulled away.

The car keys jingled in the bowl in your foyer as Joel tossed them blindly behind him, his heel shutting the front door. He kissed you like you were a fever he needed to burn out, and you felt the match strike where his hand curled its heavy weight around your neck.

“What time do you fly out?” he grumbled against your mouth.

“Not until morning,” you said breathlessly, watching him drop to his knees in front of you, taking your little shorts with him. Your chest heaved at the sight of your Joel, made humble at your feet, pressing his searing-hot lips to the bare skin of your belly. “Joel…”

“Nobody,” he said, his voice the velvety drag of night, “is like you. Not a goddamn soul.”

The admission caught in your throat the way a web ensnares dewdrops. The intricate folds of your brain would forever carry the imprint of the words—words no one else had ever said.

A starving artist, an old teacher of yours had said, remembers every kind word said about their art. They eat from them when there's no other food in the house.

“You're it for me,” he told you. “There's nothing else.”

You wake slowly, serenely, a yawning ache blossoming in the core of you.

Maybe that's why, even now, you cannot forget the way he touched you that night. You still recall every thumbprint, every stroke of his tongue, every soft cry into the otherwise empty room.

The fact is that nobody can love you the way Joel Miller does. Not even when his love hurts more than anything else.

He's watching you now. His eyes are half-open but alert, instinct pulling him closer to your side of the bed. Or, maybe you're the one who’s crawled closer to him.

“Joel…”

He doesn’t speak, but you feel the pads of his fingers on your belly, the soft fabric of your shirt bunching over his bruised knuckles, and his eyes shutter at the touch alone, a worn sinner.

“Tell me what you need,” he whispers, and it's chipped porcelain, the sound of his voice.

A part of you wants to cry, to let the pressure build until it crests, to feel the salt settle in the pores at the sight of him so close, so open. But you've shed your tears and he’s slept in your bed, and now his fingers brush the hem of your panties, not begging entrance, but asking, wondering—

You say so weakly, “I need you to touch me,” and he nods because he knows, because he's Joel, because your body has not become foreign to him even if you've made your heart a stranger.

You shiver as his hand dips beneath the cotton, two fingers sliding through the gathering wetness between your legs. Joel's gaze is fixed on you, black as the sky, his bicep flexing as he parts your folds with his fingers. Absently, possessed, you sling your leg up over his hip to spread your thighs.

The shockwave brings you down as he slides his middle finger inside you, sinking to the knuckle. The gasp that leaves your mouth feels like inhaling glass. You cup the back of his neck for purchase, tugging the little curls at his scalp, and watch as he bares his teeth.

“That's it, baby,” he says brokenly, the heel of his palm applying pressure to your clit as you writhe. Back in his arms, your heart thunders in your chest, the ache of his absence ringing in each rib like the aftershocks of a blow. He pumps his fingers inside you, curling up against the spot he knows as intimately as his own hand, studying your face as if he has become the artist and you the muse. For a moment, you think you see the reflection of your face in the whites of his eyes, and you’re overcome with a shudder that compresses your spine.

He’s too close. Too far away. Your hand curls around the scruff of his neck, a misbehaved dog. You’ve let him in, it’s too late, too soon, and you’ve assumed all the blood he’s spilled, taken it inside your body with the press of his fingertips past your begging entrance.

You hate that your body still sings for him, that your eyes cannot shutter, that you cannot shuck the curtains closed despite all he’s done. You hate that his eyes still hold the sorrow you’d seen in him since that very first night, and you hate that you existed so happily, so blindly, with him, in spite of the arid darkness that has always lingered just under the brown you thought you knew so well.

But he’s always known you, and that may be what hurts the most.

He’s always been keenly aware of your moods, your tastes, your body, and he plays you now like a pipe, lending his body to yours in supplication. Your heart aches as you let him inside, some feeble breach of contract, as if nothing is wrong, as if nothing was a lie.

He slides his fingers from you and spreads them before your eyes, the sight of the slick webbing eliciting a gasp you can barely hear. He licks his fingers clean and dips them back between your bodies, circling your clit with a renewed fervour.

“Fuck.” Your eyelids droop, your stomach tightens, and the glint of Joel’s bared teeth is that of a wolf’s in the dark. “I’m… fuck, I’m…”

“I know,” he says, “I know,” and you wish he wouldn’t.

The rhythmic, meticulous path of his fingers is nothing like the desperate writhing of your hips, the feverish grinding, the cries. Prey caught in a trap, you grasp the iron bars of his shoulders tight and beg for mercy.

And it feels so good, so right, that it slashes open your heart and spills the blood. The cold bite of his wedding ring bumps up against your opening as you blossom, brittle as a new bud, his fingers pumping in, out, in—

“Oh, God,” you whimper, burying your face in his throat, sinking into the familiar warmth.

Joel grunts, his nose sliding across your temple. “C’mon, baby girl, c’mon… I’ve got you… Can feel it…”

Normally, you would lick and bite and kiss the sweet, humid skin of his throat until you came, soft as dough in his arms. There’s a steel edge to the way you come now, fingers stiffly prickling his scalp, eyes bleeding tears into the crook of his neck. It feels good—good to slash at the bars that cage you in, good to weep over the loss of some willpower you let dissolve.

He doesn’t stop until he’s wrung every drop, inhaling the cloying smell of soiled linen and sticky perfume and saltwater. He closes his eyes against your temple and you can feel the caress of his lashes—wet, like yours.

His lips always carried the faint bitter bite of black coffee, and he always said yours tasted sweet. Like goddamn honey, he’d whispered into your throat the first night you let him inside, and you’d laughed—maybe the graze of his mouth was ticklish, or maybe you thought it was funny: the idea that you could be so sweet.

Now, you’re splintering as your eyes flicker down to his mouth, plush lips moist but split from the blow of an enemy. If you kissed him now, he would only feel a sharp sting. If you kissed him now, you’d let the blood win out. You would only hurt him and yourself alike.

“What are we doing, Joel?”

His eyes shimmer in the dark, his palm tentatively cradling the crown of your head. The hollow of his throat deepens, and you hold your breath.

“I’ll be anything you want me to be,” says Joel. “If you want me just to use me, then use me. You can have me whenever you want. I just wanna be someone you need—even if you don’t need me the way you used to.”

The sob lurches out of your throat, your forehead dropping to his as the climax burns out, smoke from a snuffed candle.

When you can breathe again, you push yourself upright and cross the room to gather your toiletries. “I’m not going to use you. I never should have done this.”

“Stop.” Joel grunts as he stands, apparently forgetting about his wounded ankle. “Don’t say it like that.”

“Joel, let’s just—”

“I don't want it to be like this,” he says. “I don’t want it to hurt when I touch you.”

“It doesn't,” you whisper, hugging your bag to your chest along with a bundle of clothes. “That's what scares me.”

His brows curve upward in the middle and you're overcome by the need to fix your eyes to the floor. “Baby, please… Please just look at me.”

You swipe your thumbs under your eyes and pin him with your gaze. “I feel like I’m mourning a marriage that didn't even end,” you tell him, and Joel lurches forward as if he means to grab the words in mid-air.

“And maybe we did lose it,” you say softly, though the words sting on the way out of your mouth. “But maybe that's… good. I don't want a relationship based on lies, Joel. I don’t want to wake up every morning next to the man I love and wonder what he’s still keeping from me.”

Joel lowers himself into the chair by the table like a weight is tied to his chest. He's still shirtless, his wound bleeding through the gauze around his arm, but he's staring at you. Suffocating you.

Twisting his wedding band around his finger, he says, “If there's even the smallest chance that you really could still love me… that this ain't over, even though I’ve done everything wrong by you… I’m gonna fight for it.”

Not everything, you want to say. Not everything, or I wouldn't be so hurt right now. It’s funny that the words won't take shape—wraithlike as the black ink snaking up and down his back. “I know you will.”

“And if you want all the truth I‘ve got, even if it's bloody, I’ll give it to you.” He leans forward, muscles flexing under inked skin. “You’re my everything. Nothin’ about that has changed. Not one goddamn thing.”

You chew on the inside of your cheek, the tang of iron flooding into your mouth. “It’s not just about the lies,” you say, dropping into the chair across from him. “You've put me on a pedestal. You may be strong and you may know how to fight, and everyone in the world may know your name, but… I don't think I can survive being all that you breathe for. Not if it leads to this.”

He remembers waking up each morning in the orphanage, sunlight turning technicolour through stained glass images of praying hands. He’d always thought the sun was so strong, gathering pieces of itself just to wake half the world, reviving dead plants, rattling the bones that stirred dead in the earth. He’d put his fingers through the many colours just to watch them dance. He’d wiggle his digits and remember he was alive.

He watched you walk down the long aisle toward him in a white dress, a bouquet of daisies in your hands, the sun carving your path. His hand flexed at his side like it did on those long-gone mornings, and he briefly doubted he’d be able to touch you at all—like you’d disappear, smoke curling around the contours of his fingers, a dream.

“My heart hurts, Joel,” you say brokenly, your palm flattening against your chest. “I’m not as strong as you are. I’m just a girl who married the man she loved. One day, you're going to realise that I don't bleed gold. I’m not a deity. I’m not someone you go to war over. I’m not fucking perfect, and if you keep treating me like I am, you’re only going to be disappointed.”

Joel just watches the tears fall, somewhat enraptured by the way they linger like dew on your lashes, until you blink them away and they cascade down the curve of your cheek. He wonders if this is how it feels to be the painter, desperate to capture even a brushstroke of the subject in front of him. He used to watch you paint for hours, holed up in your studio, covered in splotches of oils he would later take his time to wash away. The colours would curl around the drain, a snake poised to strike, and he’d kiss you, his canvas, tasting the poison of paint at the corner of your mouth.

He’s made something dark of the light that grew inside you. He’s tainted your image with the blood he’s shed, and every one of the thousand cuts has struck true. He thought he was protecting you.

He was only hurting you.

“I just wanted to have you. And you wanted to forget.” Your eyes no longer meet his, tracing the lifelines in the oak table back and forth. “So where do we go from here?”

There’s a troubled tic in his brow, punctuating the feverish flitting of his eyes between each of yours, always restless. “You think I fell in love with you because I thought you were invincible?”

You lift your head, the whites of your eyes gleaming. Joel brings his chair closer to yours, and you don’t make a move to pull away.

“I fell in love with you because you’re human,” he says. “Because you’re kind. Because you have a heart bigger than any I’ve seen. Because you’re funny, and talented, and you love to make art, and when you find something you love, you give your soul to it. I love you because you’re an angry drunk and you hate mornings and you’re so fuckin’ frustrating when you won’t give up. I fell in love with you because you were the only person who’s ever taken a real shot at lovin’ me.”

Your bottom lip quivers and he wants to coax the heavy ache from your very soul, venom from the wound.

“You are my everything, baby. You are. And I know it ain't healthy, but I don't care. If that means I see you as a god, fine. You think I can stop lovin’ you the way I do? I can’t. But I never once thought you were perfect. Perfect people don’t fall in love with men like me.”

You laugh a little, but it’s taut, stuck in the back of your throat.

“I don’t expect you to forgive me. I’m not even sure I want that. But I do want to be the kind of man you’re willing to love again. You’re my best friend, and I’ll do whatever it takes, you hear me? I’m not givin’ up.”

You sniffle, your quivering hands folded into one another atop the table. He wants to reach out and touch you, pull you back into his gravity, smell your perfume. He wants to do a thousand other things he does not deserve.

“You’ve killed Manuel’s son,” you say quietly. “There’s still a contract on your head.”

Joel nods. “And he’s gonna pull it.”

You shake your head, lips parted around words you choose not to say. Instead, you look away, and he feels he's lost something he'd been holding.

“Do what you need to do,” you say, and every syllable cuts him along the bias of the bone.

He has known your hurt, your anger, your sadness. Something in an artist’s heart has never seen a day of peace, you told him once. He thought it was a joke; he may have even laughed.

I loved you.

Joel swallows. “I need you—”

“—to stay here.” The corner of your mouth pulls up despite your sombre tone. “Yeah, I know.”

There’s a knock at the door before he can open his mouth to reply. You stay apprehensively glued to your seat as Joel peers through the peephole only to unlatch the chain on the door.

“Anyone see you come in?” he asks Tommy.

“I’m sure plenty of people saw me, brother. But they can’t do anything, now, can they?”

A muscle in Joel’s jaw feathers. “You bring everything?”

Tommy scoffs, gesturing toward the bags weighing down his arms. “Everything on your fuckin’ mile-long list? Yeah. You gonna let me in?”

Joel ushers him inside and triple-checks the hallway to make sure nobody is lurking nearby. Your voice brightens by a fraction and it feels like an electric shock tingling at his fingertips.

“Tommy.”

“Hey, sweetheart.” He squeezes your shoulder and drops the bags at your feet. “You hangin’ in there?”

Joel watches from the shadows of the hall, his heart leaden at the sight of you smiling for someone else. He’ll do anything to earn that. He’ll forsake all he has, all he is. He’ll crawl on his hands and knees all the way back through hell; he already knows the way.

“Brought your supplies,” says Tommy, kneeling at your feet and opening the bags. Your brows knit together at the sight of your oils from home, your brushes, your pallets long ago stained with colour. “Heard you were feeling inspired.”

Your gaze lifts to Joel, eyes narrowed. “Is that right?”

He’s sheepish, ducking his head. “Just… thought you might be goin’ crazy, stuck in here.”

“That's not why I’m going crazy,” you grumble.

Tommy chuckles. “Well, if anything’s missin’, it's his fault. Most of your canvases were destroyed, but these are all good.”

Your heart feels a little lighter now that you can smell the tangy, cloying scent of your paints and run your fingers over the bristle of your brushes. You give Tommy’s hand a pulse, your thank-you barely snaking past the lump in your throat. “Tell Maria I said hi.”

He gives you a knowing look. “I’m holdin’ you to your promise, y’know. You still have to paint the nursery.”

You cast your eyes toward Joel, who leans against the wall in the dark corridor. “Yeah,” you say softly, stripped to the bone by the way he watches you, unblinking. “I don't break my promises.”

His fingers twitch at his sides, and the gleam of his wedding ring lingers in your periphery long after you've torn your gaze away.

“Tommy’s gonna stay with you,” says Joel, “while I take care of the rest.”

The rest. Of course. “Why now?”

“He just killed Cabrera’s son,” says Tommy. “And we don't want to risk anyone comin’ around, lookin’ for revenge.”

“But you said no business can be conducted here.”

“For enough money, a person will break any rule.”

“That kind of undermines the entire concept of your entire Underworld, doesn't it?” you say. “Rules aren't really rules.”

“But there are consequences,” says Tommy. “Just… if you’ve got enough money, you can hide from ‘em for a while.”

“Until they hunt you down,” you utter, looking across the room at Joel. His silence feels like hot hands on your bare skin. You turn back to Tommy. “What about Maria?”

“She's with her mom this weekend,” says Tommy. “Won't even notice I left the house. You need someone to model, I’m your guy.”

“No,” says Joel.

“I didn’t mean I’d get naked,” says Tommy.

Joel clips Tommy’s shoulder on his way to you, and his brother takes the hint to make himself scarce, disappearing into the bathroom. Joel kneels at your feet and places his hand on your calf. The weight of it is warm, carrying words he has no time left to give.

“This will be over soon,” he says, and he sounds so sure that you almost believe it.

“And then what, Joel?”

He sets his jaw. There's little of the predator, of the boogeyman, in his eyes. All that rich brown betrays now is a quiet resolve. A promise.

“Home,” says your husband. “We’ll make another.”

You squeeze your eyes shut only to open them again and find the hand that rests on your skin. He's bruised, bloodied, and violent, but he does not squeeze or press. He never once has. You wonder idly how often he's put those hands on your body while thinking of a time he'd taken the life of another.

“And what if we can’t?” you ask him.

The first time you'd unveiled a piece to him—the first piece you'd ever painted of you and him, together—Joel had instinctively touched the supple blue skin beneath the woman’s breast, as quickly as a nurse finds a vein.

“She’s blue,” he said. “Is that… how you feel? Like you’re… blue?”

“Blue doesn't just mean sadness,” you told him. “It could almost mean serenity. Stability.”

He looked at you, puzzled, for a while, his hand still extended, pressed to the barely-dry canvas. “Where I grew up,” he said, “I was never really taught anything besides black and white.”

“Colours are different that way,” you said. “They mean a thousand things to a thousand people. They can all look at the same painting and feel something unique.” You gave him a wry smile. “You look at a painting of us having sex and see sadness. I’m trying not to read into it.”

He chuckled. “You should know that's not true. And I like the way you think.”

“You never told me what you think about the painting,” you said playfully. “Do you like it?”

Joel’s hand travelled from the woman’s breast to her hand as if pondering the wash of blues that coloured her skin. Her fingers, intertwined with her lover’s, squeezed down on him—a lifeline.

“It’s beautiful.”

“It's the way I feel when you touch me,” you said. “Like I’m falling apart and coming together at the same time.”

Joel tentatively reaches for your hand and turns it over in your lap, palm to the ceiling. “If you decide a home isn't what you want with me,” he says, tracing your lifeline, “then that’s all right. But I just… I want to know if—”

“Don’t,” you whisper, pressure accumulating behind the inner corners of your eyes. Joel meets your gaze and it takes all you have to suppress the shudder at the feeling of his thumb making its ghostly pilgrimage across your palm. “Don't ask me yet. Please.”

He bows his head and his hand slips from yours, and you choke on the memory of a love uncompromising, effortless, simplistic.

“Just come back alive,” you tell him. “Come back to me, okay?”

Joel rises to his feet, and a kiss plants its roots at your hairline. “Always.”

“When he said to watch me, I don't think he meant the whole time.”

Beside you, Tommy clears his throat, averting his gaze to the floor. “Sorry. Just… it’s impressive, what you do.”

You’re still outlining the tangled limbs of the man and woman, their bodies disappearing into one another, each line indistinguishable from the next. “Well, if it helps, I don't know how cars work.”

He laughs. “Yeah, all right.”

You set down your pencil, casting a glance out the window. Outside, the stars wink down at you. “Will he be okay?” you say softly.

Tommy sighs. Now that he no longer needs to hide the fact that it isn't his brother doing the books, the sting of the reminder rings in your chest with the sound of his binder closing.

“I don't blame you, y’know,” he says, “for stayin’ pissed at him.”

“Good,” you reply, “because he's an idiot.”

“Yeah, that's one thing that's never gonna change.” Tommy leans back in the chair, taking a swig from his beer. “I tried to tell him he was makin’ a mistake. He's a stubborn bastard.”

“He is,” you say, frowning at the curl you've drawn over your subject’s forehead. He looks back at you, brow furrowed, one eye visible, the other blending with hers. It's gruesome, in a way: the frenetic lines, the frantic way their fingers dimple one another’s flesh. “But I can be stubborn, too.”

Tommy leans forward, studying the beginnings of your sketch. “I know he's made mistakes, and Christ knows I’m crazy for defending my dumbass brother. But if you knew how much he loved you…”

“Tommy,” you cut in, setting down your pencil. “Loving me isn’t the problem.” The outline of the bodies on your canvas blur as your eyes burn with tears. “I wonder if he ever really left—in his heart, I mean.”

Tommy’s voice is quiet. He’s twirling a small switchblade in his hand. “All he's ever wanted is peace.”

You cast your eyes toward the ceiling to stop the tears from spilling over, or to find some answer spelled in stars you cannot see. “Then why couldn't he just stay out?” you whisper. “Why did he have to come back?”

“You know, when we were kids, Joel would take all my beatings,” says Tommy, flicking out the blade. It glimmers in a way that catches the light as easily as a flame on kindling. “He'd say everything was his fault when it was really me who knocked over a shitty old vase or vandalised a fresco. And he'd just fuckin’ grin and bear it because that's who he is.”

He’d just been a kid. Just a kid who wanted to protect his little brother, who took every beating, who grew up in a faith he never had faith in.

The fragile wobble in your voice betrays the steel wall of your back. “He let me fall in love with him, Tommy. He let me give my soul to him.”

He ducks his head, folding the blade back into its wooden hilt. “Yeah, I know,” he says softly.

“And Maria?” You let out an airy laugh. “How did she react when you told her about all this?”

He doesn't meet your eye, and you feel your stomach turn over as he sets the blade on the table, bringing his hand over his jaw.

“Oh,” you say.

“We all do things we’re not proud of. Anyway, I had it easier,” he says, lifting one shoulder in a shrug. “I’m just a mechanic.”

“And my husband’s a killer, right?”

Tommy sighs. “I know you shouldn't take my word for it. But he does want peace. And he came back because he didn't see another choice.”

On the canvas, the man holds the woman close, pulling her tight to his chest, as if he knows she's about to fall. “I hate it,” you say softly, “knowing he's felt so much pain, and I can't make it better. I hate that this is something he needs to figure out himself, Tommy. I hate that I can't be the person he thinks I am.”

“I think you don't give yourself enough credit.” When you turn to face him, Tommy puts the switchblade in your open palm. Your fingers reflexively close around it, and it's cool to the touch. Smooth. The grain in the wood looks like the wriggling lifelines in a human hand. “You made him leave this life. You got him to care enough to make a real one, and you didn't even know it.”

You flick open the switchblade. “This is beautiful.”

“Gave it to me for safekeeping when he retired,” says Tommy. “It was the prize for completing his first job.”

You frown at your reflection, angling the knife up and down. “How old was he?”

Tommy covers the blade with his hand and retracts it. “Keep it,” he says. “It never belonged to me.”

You try to push it toward him, suddenly repulsed. You've heard from his own mouth about the lives he's taken, but the thought of your Joel holding the very same weapon, sinking it into flesh, slicing through the strings that hold a person together, makes your fingers tremble. “It doesn't belong to me either, Tommy.”

“Maybe not,” he says, “but I think you’d know what to do with it better than me.”

You swallow hard. “A man declares war because he wants peace.” Your thumb slides along the smooth edge of the hilt before you hide it inside your bag. “I can't pretend to understand what you both went through, Tommy. But know that I’m glad you found a good life. And know that if you break Maria’s heart, I’ll make you swallow paint.”

Tommy nods sombrely. “I’ll tip the can myself. We're thinking green for the nursery.”

“Green is good.” You give him a conciliatory smile.

“Joel’s a good man,” he says. “He's just… misguided.”

“Are you a man of God, Tommy?”

He laughs. “I don't think anyone who came out of that place alive still believes there's a God. If only the Sisters could see us now.”

“I hope they never do,” you tell him. “I hope they never get the satisfaction of knowing they hurt him.”

“I don't think they’d be much satisfied,” says Tommy, “if they knew he'd found peace after all.”

Hours unfold. The canvas sits untouched as you and Tommy sit next to one another, the moon outside slowly enveloped by clouds. The silver silhouette casts a halo through the grey, and you think of your Joel, alone on his warpath, bloodying the ring on his finger. You think of your name on his back, nestled above the praying hands, and the pit of restlessness yawns wide open.

“He should be back by now.”

Tommy rubs his palms over his thighs, a behaviour you've noticed in Joel. “Yeah, he should.”

“But he'll be okay,” you say, a minute warble colouring your voice, “right?”

“He's Joel,” is all he gives you in return.

Your fingers twist themselves into knots in your lap until the jab of a car horn outside jolts you back to life. “Tommy,” you rasp, wetting your lips. “Go find him.”

He nods, standing abruptly from his chair and yanking his coat free from the hook by the door. “He’ll kill me for leavin’ you alone,” he says.

“We both know he needs you,” you say, turning your head to watch the moon peek out from behind the sheet of grey. “Just bring my husband back.”

There's a distinct sensation that erupts across the skin of a nonbeliever who crosses the threshold of a church. It begins in the floorboards, where the soul of a supposed Christ lingers, and radiates up through the soles of the feet, through the knees, until it circles the brain, persistent as a murder of crows. You don't belong here.

The little church is nothing extravagant, which Joel has to find a little funny. Five rows of pews on either side, a basin of holy water next to the pulpit, a smattering of devotees kneeling on the padded seats in front of them. He swallows the burn and approaches the pastor.

“My son,” says the man, spreading his arms wide as if welcoming Joel back from a pilgrimage. “Welcome. What troubles your heart today?”

Joel pulls the Benelli from his canvas bag and blows out the pastor’s kneecap.

His deafening roar echoes off the domed ceiling and reverberates through the stained-glass paintings of the Virgin Mary. “Fuck!” cries the pastor, scrambling backward with a hand covering his bloodied leg. “Fucking cunt, fucking asshole, vete a la mierda! What the fuck is your problem?”

Joel turns and fires another two shots at the guards on the balcony. One of them tumbles over the edge. The kneeling figures flee the scene, some screaming, some praying.

“Donde esta Cabrera?” Joel growls, bunching the pastor’s white collar in his bloodstained fist. When he doesn't reply, Joel applies pressure to the wound in his knee between his thumb and forefinger. “Habla.”

“Fuck!” he howls. “He isn't here. Hijo de puta, he's not here!”

“Fine,” says Joel, hauling the man upright with little regard for his obliterated knee. “Then we're takin’ a little field trip.”

Joel knew many of Cabrera’s secrets during his time working for the bastard. He would have changed the codes to the vault, but it’s the same nonetheless. Joel shoves the pastor down the winding staircase and aims the barrel of the shotgun between his eyes.

“Open the vault.”

“Manuel will kill me,” pleads the pastor.

Joel lifts a brow. “You see me cryin’?”

A pale, trembling hand rises to the keypad and types in the code. Inside the vault, two women are counting piles of cash behind the counter. Joel gestures toward the door with his shotgun. “Ladies,” he greets, “out.”

They scurry out of the vault with their hands in the air. Inside the small concrete cell, safes are embedded in the walls, twice Joel’s height, one of them unlocked and brimming with neatly piled heaps of bound bills and documents. Joel reaches up and unlatches a shelf, watching the avalanche of blood money cascade onto the floor around his feet. With one hand, he produces a lighter from his pocket and flicks on the flame. It ignites the piles of cash and papers as Joel walks out, leaving the wounded pastor on the floor.

A whisper goes up in flames behind his back. “El espectro.”

At the aggressive slam of car doors, Joel climbs the staircase to the balcony and looks over the rear exit. Outside, Manuel Cabrera and his men cross the concrete toward the church. Joel curses, ejecting the shell from his shotgun and inserting a new clip. The stained glass crumbles with the first shot as he puts a bullet in a bodyguard’s head. The shouts flutter toward the sky in the ensuing panic. Joel hears Manuel cry out his orders: Around the back. You two, flank him. The bastard’s here; go fucking kill him.

The smell of smoke begins to stick to his throat as he takes another shot. The sound of dress shoes clatters, echoing, across the floorboards below him. “Goddamn it,” he growls. He’ll be flushed out before long if he doesn't move. Joel checks his clip, fruitlessly searches the body on the balcony for more ammunition, and kicks him over the edge. The resounding thud of his corpse against the pews is somewhat gratifying. Cabrera’s men crowd the dead man, which gives Joel just enough time to descend the staircase and shoulder open the back door. The parking lot teems with Cabrera’s army ants, creeping around parked cars as they search for the boogeyman.

One of the bodyguards ducks behind a Range Rover, and Joel bares his teeth, the wolf at the hunt. He shoots out the front tires, which deflates the car just enough to give him a glimpse of the man’s head. He takes the shot.

“Puta!” someone cries. Joel ducks as a shot pings off the front bumper of the Cadillac next to him, and he briefly takes stock of his ammunition. Fuck. He would have really liked to keep the fucking high ground. Now, he's as trapped as they are. Rats in a maze of shiny new cars.

Joel peeks around the corner and feels the heat of a bullet seat through the sleeve of his jacket. He shoulders the sting of the new wound and rounds the corner, raising his weapon and firing. He counts another two, three, five dead, and the moist air begins to cling to the back of his neck, sweat lining his collar, blood soaking his sleeve. He calls Cabrera’s name. He calls again.

“Let's end this,” he growls. “Come out, and I’ll spare the rest of them.”

An explosion nearby sets him off-kilter, rattling the earth beneath him. The church goes up easily, flames licking the sky, sirens blaring several blocks over, the steady eruption of chaos like golden nectar in his mouth. Joel rises to his feet and continues his charge.

He calls Cabrera’s name again. He thinks of your body, prone and cold on the floor, reaching for him. He thinks of that night and imagines himself saving you before any of it happened. He imagines turning out of the restaurant that very first night, retreating into the darkness where it was comfortable and you were safe.

No—he'd gone to the light. He’d let it all topple, and he'd do it again. This world is not where he belongs. You are what the word has led him to. All the gospel and the hymnals and the nights spent praying on his knees to a false god led him to your soft, supple side, not to the jagged edges of this unforgiving Underworld.

He calls Cabrera’s name again, but he hears the roar of the engine too late. The circle of vehicles crowds him, claustrophobic, and it's Manuel Cabrera who steps out.

He looks the same as he did eight years ago, when Joel approached him and asked to be released from his contract, if not a little more grey. He's dressed in an Italian suit and his shoes are unscuffed. His hair is combed back and his eyes are sunken into his face.

Something strikes Joel in the back of his head, and he sees the Creation of Adam on the north wall of the orphanage, the wrinkled old hand, the stray dogs.

The starchy scent of the canvas sack jolts him awake. Someone yanks it up over his head, and he blinks in the harsh light of day.

He's in a giant empty warehouse. Light filters through the broken glass windows high above their heads, shards and empty bullet casings and cigarette butts crunching underfoot. Judging from the scuffling of feet around him, ten or so men surround him where he sits in an old folding chair, bound by the wrists. He feels a throbbing ache in his skull and winces. You’ll give him hell for this.

“It’s good to see you, Joel,” says the silhouette sitting across from him, flanked by two more shadows. Joel blinks them into focus. “It’s been a long time.”

The edges soften until he can see the whites of the eyes, the cool detached gaze, the glimmer of a silver watch. “Manuel,” says Joel. “¿Cómo está su hijo?”

A huff of air is all he gets in reply. Manuel sheds his long coat and leans forward on his elbows. “You know, Joel, my son was a fucking moron.”

“I could've told you that,” says Joel, “and I would've saved you a lot of breath.”

“My son,” growls Manuel, “was a moron, but he was my son. I told him as much—told him there was nothing he could do, not when Joel Miller was hunting him down. And when I asked him what he had done to warrant the boogeyman’s vengeance, he said it was because of a girl.”

Manuel rubs his hand over his stubbled jaw, laughing like the situation is amusing. “Well, that’s good for you, Joel. Good to finally find something you care about, to find a reason. I see you're putting your retirement to good use. Fighting for your very own Helen of Troy.”

Joel says nothing, studying the manic glint in Cabrera’s eye. He recalls that same look from the night he asked to leave, placing his gun on the desk between them.

“I want out,” he said.

“Out?” said Cabrera. “And why, Joel, would you ever want out?”

“Because I’m done here,” he said. “I'm done in this world and I’m done with you.”

Joel wonders if Cabrera had been waiting for that exact moment: for Joel Miller, the ghost in the corner of the Underworld’s bedroom, to step forward and give Manuel Cabrera the opportunity he needed to rise to the very top.

“Very well,” he said after a long silence. “But I want you to consider whether your freedom is worth what I’m about to ask of you. It will not be easy.”

“It’s worth it,” said Joel. “Now tell me what I need to do.”

Cabrera sits across from Joel the same way he did eight years ago, the same insidious gleam in those black eyes, smiling smugly without moving his face at all.

“You've changed,” he says. “You’re softer, Joel. That wedding ring must've done a number on my killer.”

“Maybe I never stopped bein’ a killer,” says Joel.

“Maybe not. But the difference is that now, you have a reason to keep living.” Cabrera has the gall to feign remorse as he shrugs his shoulders. “You took my son from me, Joel. You understand how this world works.”

Joel kicks out his leg instinctively, baring his teeth at Cabrera like a caged dog. Two henchmen clap down on his shoulders and abruptly pull him backward in the chair. The rope around his wrists chafe.

“When I signed that contract,” he growled, “I had nothing to live for. Nobody to love. Until the day she showed up in my life. She gave me a word to follow that wasn’t yours or your God’s.” His mouth hardly fits around the name. Yours has always felt softer on his tongue. “Trust that Emiliano deserved worse than the death I gave him.”

“A woman above God,” Cabrera utters under his breath, rubbing his palms over his thighs before he rises to his feet and grabs Joel by the hair at the scruff of his neck. Joel winces at the prickling sensation erupting across his scalp. Cabrera’s breath stinks of weed. “El espectro,” he says mockingly. “The fuckin’ boogeyman. You're not so scary like this.”

Cabrera forces Joel to look up at him. The pressure accumulates behind his nose, painful enough to make his eyes water. “You burned my church down, Joel,” says his captor. “Money is replaceable, sure, but the leverage I had on this city… Hijo de puta. Just for a fuckin’ girl, Joel?”

Joel can't help but sneer. “Yeah, I enjoyed that part.”

It earns him a blow across the jaw, and he relishes the electric lash that wriggles down his side. Cabrera lets go of his hair and gestures with a glance to his men before he turns away, plucking his coat from the chair.

“Manuel.”

He watches Cabrera consider it: to indulge Joel, or to let him rot.

The first hit he executed on Cabrera’s behalf earned him just ten thousand. Then thirty-something, having long ago left the Sisters, the hard wooden floors worn with the pressure of so many kneeling bodies, the Marines, and the sound of warfare, Joel didn’t have many places to stay. He took the red money, earned from the body and probably the pockets of a dead senator, and rented a place.

Nighttime in the city didn't mean quiet, not outside nor in. That night, Joel sat on the side of his bed in a cockroach-infested Brooklyn apartment whose walls smelled of cigarette smoke, and he put his face in his hands. Leaving one war only to enter another, Cabrera told him, is just the way of life. You, Joel, are a killer.

But that can’t be all, he thinks now, his hands bound and his blood singing in his heart. He wonders if you're asleep by now, if you've taken to his side of the bed like you used to, if you've stretched your hand across the linen for a taste of the memory of that love-like-sunlight.

It's your blood, he realises, that courses through him. Your blood that tastes sweet as ichor, your blood that runs in his blue-green veins. It's your blood he hears whispering to him when the dreams go black as pitch and he cannot hope to breathe.

The last contract he took for Cabrera earned him no prize but his freedom. Nothing but the smell of your perfume and your warm body tucked neatly into his every night and the cool kiss of your twin wedding bands could have satisfied him. He was not just a killer. He’d proven it. He’d lived it in eight years of gentle mornings, kissing you awake starting at the roots of your hair, and he’d loved it as much as they all had tried to make him love a God that never loved him.

He’d never forgotten how to kill. But he hasn't forgotten how to love, either. That, he figured out all on his own.

“All I wanted was peace. And your son took that from me.” Joel lifts his head to watch Cabrera: the way his spine stiffens, the way his eyes narrow minutely. “He killed my peace and so I killed him. So you can either pull your contract,” Joel says, feeling the snarl pull at his vocal cords like jagged claws as his voice begins to rise, “or you can die screaming like your bastard son.”

He barely lurches forward in the chair before a plastic bag is shucked over his head, suctioned tight around his throat. Two men hold him down as Joel struggles against his bonds, gasping against the cool plastic. He's overpowered, hands wrenching his shoulders back against the chair. He kicks out for leverage, but his strength is waning, and the brief high of losing consciousness brings him back to you.

He took you to Greece for your honeymoon—or, rather, you took him. You were more travelled, more comfortable in the bright spots of the world, more settled in the spotlight. He thinks about how the sun adorned your skin like sequins, how eyes followed you everywhere you went, how you would see him frowning at all the attention and quietly take his hand.

They don't exist, you would tell him. You're all mine now, Joel Miller. And it’s just you and me.

Maybe there's a scrap of truth to fate. He's always been yours, long before he ever knew your face.

He basks in the sunlight on the beach for the time being. You wore his sunglasses when yours broke. You let him apply your sunscreen and you tucked your head into his shoulder on the luxurious chair. You fell asleep with your hand on his chest. Joel spent an hour studying the band around your ring finger.

Maybe Greece was a dream. Maybe the sun was a trick of the light and the clouds were smoke and the sky was black and the memory dwindles to a pinprick and he's grasping onto the image, your smile, your laugh, bells and perfume and a candle set at the foot of a golden statue—

“Stop.”

“Stop,” says a voice, and the air comes rushing back in. Joel wheezes, blinking hard to clear the spots or maybe to preserve the picture. But you're gone, slipping softly away as the brush of your knuckle over his cheek, and Joel is alive again.

“Tommy?”

His brother doesn't look at him, but Joel sees the brief shimmer of gunmetal hidden in his waistband.

He can feel the bruises blooming in a circle of fire around his throat. You’ll really be furious with him.

Joel watches his brother pull the handgun and feels the ropes cut into the tender skin of his wrists, helpless as he feels now. “What in the hell…”

“I’m sorry, brother,” says Tommy, turning the gun on Joel.

#fic: helen #kiwisbell's fics #pedro pascal #joel miller #joel miller x reader #joel miller smut #joel miller x you #the last of us #the last of us hbo #tlou fic #joel miller angst #joel miller fanfiction #joel miller x female reader #joel miller x f!reader #joel miller au #john wick au

371 notes · View notes