#neckache | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sixhours · 3 months

Text

Like Father, Like Daughters

Rating: PG Word count: 1.6k

Notes: Indulgent The Last of Us fluff from the Ghosts of Babylon universe.

Originally posted at ao3 02/24/2024

~*~

She’s standing over him like a specter in the dark for he doesn’t know how long.

He’s reminded of Sarah and how she would creep to the side of his bed, padding in on silent feet her footie pajamas. He would drift up from the depths of sleep and there would be a small child with dark, glinting eyes staring into his damned soul, and he’d think of The Shining , those twin girls at the end of the long hall.

He hated horror movies even more now that he’d lived one.

“Jesus,” he shudders, rearing back. He hasn’t slept with a gun under his mattress for months, but that doesn’t stop him from reaching for one. “Ellie? What’s wrong?”

She doesn’t answer, but he can make out the faint trembling of her shoulders in the darkness.

“Nightmare?” he asks, and she gives a single terse nod.

He scoots back to the opposite edge of the bed and pulls back the covers.

“She’s…n-not here?” she asks, voice cracking at the edges, sounding too small and fragile for her 17 years.

“At the clinic tonight,” he murmurs. “C’mere, kiddo.”

She crawls into bed, pulling the quilt up to her chin, her hand automatically finding his under the covers. It reminds him of when they were on the road, bedrolls laid out side by side at a respectable distance, but never quite far enough that they couldn’t reach out and reassure the other that they were still together, still alive.

The tiniest hiccup of a sob as her fingers tighten over his.

“Breathe, kiddo. You’re alright.”

“I…know,” she hitches, but she doesn’t loosen her grip. Her hand is icy, he can feel the vibration of her lingering terror, and he resists the urge to pull her into his arms.

Ellie wasn’t a snuggler. She’d been raised at arm’s length, starved for touch until the need was cruelly erased from her biology. The last time she willingly curled up against him was after Silver Lake when they’d sought shelter in an unheated cabin and been forced into proximity by her shock and the need to conserve body heat. She’d clung to him like a baby koala, unable to make her bloodied, frozen fingers let go of his shirt. He’d held her like that for hours, rocking her back and forth like a small child as he tried not to think about how close they’d come to losing each other.

But after that, even on the worst nights, when the nightmares chased her relentlessly into the dark, she wanted her space. So he’d lie on the floor next to her bed and she’d curl around his hand until she fell asleep. He’d wake up with a neckache that took a week to abate, his spine popping like firecrackers when he finally managed to sit up, but he never complained.

~*~

“Wanna talk about it?” he asks when she’s quieted, when her grip on his fingers is no longer iron-tight.

“S’the usual,” she whispers, thumb running over the dry, scarred skin of his knuckles, the knuckles he’d broken and bloodied in her defense more than once. “Nothin’ new.”

She’s picked up his drawl, he’s noticed. It comes out when she’s tired.

“Thought maybe they’d stopped,” she sighs, watery and defeated. “Feel like such a fuckin’ baby.”

He grunts in sympathy. “Bad dreams don’t care how old you are, kiddo.”

He should know.

After a while, her voice drifts from the dark, muffled by the quilt.

“Do you dream about her? About Sarah?”

The name doesn’t hurt so much when it falls from his daughter’s lips. His answer is a whisper.

“Not enough.”

~*~

She’d moved out to the garage two months ago, and, surprising no one but himself, he’d taken the separation hardest of all. He hadn’t realized how much he depended on the comfort of her presence until she was outside, divided by the night and a locked garage door. When he couldn’t sleep, he’d sit on the porch and watch the soft light of her window until he couldn’t keep his eyes open.

She’d imprinted on him like a mother on its young. Wasn’t it supposed to be the other way around?

Three years from the time she launched herself at him with the intent to kill. Three years since he snarled like a cornered animal and told her she wasn’t his daughter. Three years since she brought him back from the dead.

And now he’s expected to just…let her go. He rails internally at the unfairness of it.

You need her more than she needs you , isn’t that what you said?

He regrets every second of her life that he’d missed, so many years he’d never see. Her first smile, her first words, her first steps, all at the hands of an uncaring military governess. He couldn’t have been a father then, anyway, too deep in the pills and booze and self-loathing to care about anything but making the next run…but a deep, hidden part of him can’t forgive himself for not finding her sooner. For failing her before he knew he had someone to fail.

He doesn’t realize his pillow is damp until she speaks.

“Dude…are you crying ?”

“No,” he huffs. “M’just tired. Someone woke me up.”

He hears the shit-eating grin in her words.

“You’re worse than Maria when she’s pregnant.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he mutters. God, she was right, though. He was hopeless–soft and mushy in his old age, bruised as an overripe fruit. Sometimes he doesn’t recognize himself after what she started, what you finished.

“Hey, I heard a good one the other day,” she continues.

“Shoot.”

“I was gonna make myself a belt made out of watches…but then I realized it would be a waist of time .”

Joel snorts, smiles. “That’s awful. Two outta ten.”

“I saw you grin. That’s worth at least a five.”

“Three,” he counters. “Final offer.”

“Ugh, fine.”

~*~

“Joel?”

“Mmm-yeah,” he murmurs. He’s drifting, half asleep.

“Are you gonna marry her?”

That wakes him up. “What? Jesus.”

She giggles, a sound he can’t hear often enough. “C’mon, dude. You love her. You want her to have all your gross old-man babies.”

“Shuddup,” he grumbles. “We’re not–I don’t–Christ, I’m sixty fuckin’ years old, kid.”

Marriage wasn’t common in Jackson–there was no registrar, nothing legally binding–but some people still liked the ritual. Last month, Theresa and her girlfriend tied the knot in a small ceremony in the south field. Joel was pretty sure he and Ellie had only been invited because of his relationship with you, and then he’d only attended because you insisted it wouldn’t be weird.

It was weird. But, as Ellie was quick to point out, there was free cake.

“Hmm. You were married before, though, right? To Sarah’s mom?”

“Yeah.”

He’d spent a week’s wages on two cheap gold bands and wore his ring for years after the divorce was final. It was easier than answering questions from nosy strangers and single women. Where had that ring gone? Probably caked in dust in a drawer somewhere in Texas.

“So…did you love her?”

He snorts. “Was a different time.”

“...what about Tess?”

The name sends an unexpected pang of regret through him.

“No,” he sighs. “Not the way you’re thinkin’.”

It’s not a lie, but it’s not the truth. What he can’t say is that he couldn’t love Tess; that he couldn’t love anyone back then, really.

Not until Ellie. She had taken his broken heart and sewn it back together with crude stitches in trembling hands the same way she’d mended his wounds in Colorado. Then she’d handed it back to him and refused to let him go.

She was impossibly stubborn and impossible not to love.

“Why’re you askin’?”

He feels rather than sees her shrug in the dark. She’s mentioned a girlfriend in passing, and he’s done what he hopes is an admirable job of not making a fuss over it, but he’s out of his depth. She’s outlived his first kid by a lifetime, and it’s all terrifying and new, like when he’d brought Sarah home, tiny and fragile in his clumsy, unstained hands.

Sarah, who had never seen a prom, never had a first date, never been kissed. Sarah, who would never be a bride.

He tries to imagine giving Ellie away, laughs to himself at the notion of ever having kept her in the first place. Could he walk her down an aisle and let her go? He’s a brute, but he’s never been strong. He is a weak, selfish old man.

…but he could do it if she wanted him to, he decides. If it meant she would have the kind of happiness he’s found with you, he could do it. Would do it.

“Marriage is just a buncha paperwork, anyway,” he grumbles, forcing his eyes shut.

“What a fuckin’ romantic,” she snorts. “Remind me what she sees in you again?”

He wants to tell her that love in the apocalypse is the protection of a loaded gun, plenty of food, and the safety of strong walls.

He wants to ask if she’s been in love before. If she’s in love now.

But he does neither of these things. He just smiles and answers truthfully.

“Couldn’t tell you, kid.”

~*~

You stumble up the stairs when the dawn light is golden on the horizon, bleary-eyed and ready to fall into bed.

There’s a lump under the covers in your spot. Joel and Ellie are mirror images of each other; on their sides, knees tucked up, his hand tucked under her chin. Even their soft snores are set to the same gentle rhythm, bonded by something stronger, richer than blood.

You linger in the doorway, heart in your throat at this indulgence, this tenderness found between two lonely, bruised souls.

You think it might be hope.

#the last of us #the last of us fanfic #fanfic #joel and ellie #joel miller #ellie williams

46 notes · View notes