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mads198-9 · 3 months

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The Alcott

POV: the WIP made it out of the google drive

Summary: “If he’s a serial killer then what’s the worst that could happen to a girl that’s already hurt?” - Lana Del Rey

Warnings: None really, some explicit language though. Just some fluffy angsty dialogue to either help you sleep or keep you up at night. This is my first time writing for Joel (and practically ever) so I apologize if it isn’t Hemingway-esque. This is not edited but I hope you enjoy it nonetheless. I’m debating a smutty pt. 2 😗

@amydunnewithmen (where the delulus run wild)

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3 minutes.

It had taken Joel all of 3 minutes to set fire to a year of your life. A year of longing, patience, resentment, guilt and every ounce of shame that Joel had clutched to his chest since September 26th, 2003.

It took you over two decades to find an ounce of peace. A place to, finally, let yourself breathe. To close your eyes out of comfort rather than necessity. You’d barely crawled out of the last city you scavenged. A metropolis that fell into a desolate isle. All you’d ever known of people was the way they’d looked with fungi crawling through their veins and seeping out of their orifices. Never a true person. The closest you’d come to other conscious humans were those who had already abandoned their humanity for the sake of surviving. What they didn't realize was that for them to live, they had to give up everything they’d ever lived for. You didn’t consider these men to be ‘people’.

Looking at your facilities it was nothing short of a miracle, it was a miracle that you’d found Jackson. A single woman dragging her depleted muscles through feats of snow, a trail of blood broadcasting your vulnerability to anything within a mile’s radius.

You don’t remember how you’d found it but you remember your pleas. Your claw marks on Jackson’s fortifying wall. You fell to the ground the moment they’d opened the gates. Almost relieved to have had a gun pointed at your head, because at least it was a person. Someone to end your suffering. You didn’t care in what way. A saviour in the form of a man nonetheless, one you’d come to know as Tommy. Tommy Miller.

He was how you’d found Joel. How Joel found you.

It was Tommy who’d found what was left of you, Maria who had housed you, but Joel who’d really saved you.

It started pure. For you at least.

The first you saw of Jackson’s newest constituent was his and Tommy’s embrace. Maybe that’s why you were never scared. Not of him, not of what he'd done, because you saw the best of what he could do. His reason for all that he had done. Family.

You hadn’t felt your heart stop in ages. Up until him, fear was the only thing that had the power to constrict your chest.

No words were spoken between the two of you for months. As the Tipsy Bison’s bartender you were the loosener of lips. An observer by nature, a listener by force, a tolerator of none. His drink order spoke for him those first few months.

Whiskey. Neat. No ice to dull its sting. A welcomed burn to the back of his throat but he sipped it like water. Years of practice of not only enduring pain, but learning to think he’d deserved it.

It was the first thing of substance you’d ever said to him. Your words numbing him like the whiskey in his glass. It took two minutes of silence for him to scrape the floor of the bison with his barstool and drag his ass out of the bar.

You blew it. Or so you’d thought. If anything, you had initiated what would be the most painful and pleasurable experience of your life. One that brought you to your knees in more ways than one. It felt stronger than any romantic pull you’d experienced. Every pace further from him began to hurt. A religion.

From that moment on Joel thought about more than just the glances you’d given. Your perception of him wasn’t wrong in the slightest but it gave him something new to think about. To dwell on and give his fist motivation when the house was silent and his needs too great.

Months of simmering tension and lenghtneing conversations that tugged the corner of his lips up led you to what would become your favourite place. The eventual route of all your pain.

His arms.

Before the age of 25 you’d experienced every horror the world had to offer. You’d spent your life running, burning the memories of your old life with every fire you’d lit to warm your skin. All while everything within you froze with time. You’d never had a moment to explore your thoughts let alone your body.

Joel was the first. In every way imaginable.

Even in heartbreak.

In all of Jackson, Tommy was the one to know Joel best. He’d seen the colour come to his brother’s cheeks at the mere mention of your name and he’d seen the way his eyes bored holes into those who gave the two of you suggestive looks in public.

The jealousy of the men who thought they had a right to fuck you and the envy of the women you ‘stole’ Joel from. The looks of outrage that painted the churchgoers faces chipped away at his resolve every time the two of you were together and only reinforced his shame.

Echoed his anxieties of whether or not he was ‘too old’ for you. Too destructive to be around such innocence. Too hardened by his years alone. How your presumed father issues were the only thing that drew you to him.

The hunter’s voices won out in the end because he lost you, at the alcott.

The last thing he wanted, he’d done to you.

You’d once loved it here. The Alcott. A space delegated to the books that once littered the halls of the ravaged homes across Wyoming. A place that Maria saw as a solution to your lack of a purpose.

Even after everything, you can’t imagine leaving.

You hadn’t left in the weeks since Joel drove a knife through your chest. Weeks you spent curled up in the back of the shop, surrounded by books, their pages riddled with love stories and sonnets, ridiculing you with their happy endings.

Draped in the flannel he’d long left, finding yourself relating to it. At first glance, an abandoned piece of cloth, but you saw it as much more. It was something he no longer had use for. Something he chose to leave. A landmine of memories. Its scent sending you into a spiral with every inhale.

It took less than a day for his resolve to crack and less than twelve hours for Ellie to tell him that he’d been a dick and only six for Tommy to see the change in him. For once in his life Joel Miller was cold. The left side of his bed that once held you now held the weight of your pain, his loss. The shattered look in your eyes as he’d told you to move on painted itself to the backs of his eyelids. His own voice haunting him, telling you to find yourself outside of who you are with him. That he’s too old for you. That you were only a kid and no matter how bad the world had gotten he wouldn’t take advantage of that.

What he didn’t know was that the time spent with him made you feel like a woman, not the solitary girl everyone else saw you for. The days spent with his lips against you were the only times in which you’d believed that your skin was your own.

But he didn’t realize that, or did not let himself because he was bad. For all intensive purposes Joel Miller was a serial killer. A lethal weapon. Nothing that could provide you with the warmth you sought. The warmth he knew you deserved. And god did he want to be the one to give it to you. Joel had spent the last twenty years of his life preserving life, not experiencing it. Hell he still was, patrolling the outskirts of Jackson four times a week. This time taking the long way home just to pass by your house. It was as he expected, as much as he’d kicked himself he knew you, craved you, understood you. So it was no surprise to see no light coming from your house. No noise either. At first he panicked. His mind his own greatest enemy in how it conjured up a thousand scenarios of you leaving Jackson, all ending with your heart stopped and skin blue.

Where on god’s green earth could you have gone. Where you’d never left.

The Alcott.

You hadn’t heard him come in.

“You're still here.”

Questioning you in his thick southern drawl, draping across his words like honey. Damn it. Damn him for still making you blush.

His presence isn’t what startled you, it was the fact that it was Joel. Your Joel, now just Joel.

“I never left.”

He regretted everything he’d ever done to you the second he saw your wide eyes boring into his own. Glossed over in every shade of pain.

He didn’t have to ask why, he was sure he knew, but he asked anyway. Never a man to stumble over his words he could barely get two syllables out.

Looking down to his shifting feet then back to you he asked you what he already knew.

“Why?”

“Because I love this place. What used to feel like our house. Even if it’s cursed now.”

He thought his heart would start screaming with the way it was beating.

“I, uh” clears his throat “I didn't want to darken y’doorstep. Anymore than I already have I’spose.”

“Funny. I’ve had the lights off since you left.”

You practically slurred your words. What was left of you both had been draining you emotionally, in only the 2 minutes he’d been here.

“So… I, uh. I was g’nna ask ya, how’ve ya been?”

Your laugh was as dry as the Texas heat Joel had come from. But less familiar.

“Why are you really here Joel? You’ve always been shit at small talk, didn’t suppose that changed in the last week.”

“Jesus” A week? “Feels like a lifetime since the last time I saw ya.”

“Funny how a ‘lifetime’ is what seemed to be between us. Different generations and all that bull shit.”

“Look kid -”

“No. Don’t you dare call me ‘kid’. Don’t make me feel smaller than I already am. Those people out there may have beaten you into submission but I am an adult. I’ve been one since I saw my first infected. I’ve been on my own and just fucking fine without anybody since I was a so-called kid so I dont want to hear another god damn word. You and everybody else think I can’t so much as cross the street without holding your hand but I've done more than that with less.

You know I survived on my own.

Before you.

And if it’s up to you, I will after, but I don’t want to.

For the first time in my life I got something I wanted, needed, and I don’t want to give it up.

You.

Ellie.

Tommy, Maria, the baby.

Jackson.

Living.

It’s more than surviving.

But apparently not to you.”

“That is not true.”

You didn’t realise you’d stood up until you could feel the heat radiating off of Joel, his flannel, everything.

“Then what is huh? I was a quick fuck. The first wet thing you’d felt in twenty years or what?”

You were yelling at this point and Joel hadn’t moved an inch. Not giving you anything. Not even a response except for the pinching between his brows. And it was killing you.

“You know it wasn’t like that -”

“Then what the FUCK was it if. not. real?!” Emphasizing each word with a pound to his firm chest.

Nothing you said from then on was comprehensible. Just sobs ripping from your chest as you threw your weight into him. Sinking into the floor, dragging him down with you.

His arms shooting out from his sides to enrapture you the second he felt your knees buckle and tears flow. Pulling you into his lap as your body shuddered. Immediately finding the crook of his neck. Inhaling him again. Finally, you couldn’t tell if it made you cry more or less but all you could notice was Joel. All you could feel, hear and smell was Joel. The smell of firewood dotting his skin mixed with the old spice soap he’d managed to scavenge on last week’s patrol. The feeling of giving into his arms again, coming home, and the sound of him cooing, and sniffling?

He’d lost it. Thought he’d lost you and that was his breaking point. Feeling his own tears seep into your hair you knew it was real. You knew he meant everything he’d said back then. Back before Jackson got to him. Before he’d let his own mind turn on him. And as much as it’d hurt then, it felt good now.

“Shhh, shhh.

I gotcha baby. I know, oh I know. More than you could imagine.”

“Please, please, please.”

Holding your face, and your heart, in his calloused palms he looked you in the eye.

“Please what, baby?”

Looking like a doe at his doorstep, your crumpled frame fitting perfectly within the confines of his lap.

“Please don’t leave. Please stay. I tried, I tried so hard to be good to you, for you.”

“Oh honey, you were, fuck you are baby.

The best I’ll ever get, all I ever want.

I’m not leaving baby girl.

Never.

Even if you ask me to, I’m not going anywhere.”

And this time, he didn’t.

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This sounded so much better in my head -

W o w

I actually wrote something… hot damn.

I’m debating a second part?? of smut??

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