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heartpascal · 6 months

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fight the tide

▹— joel miller x platonic!reader

▹— summary: you face the consequences of going to seattle

▹— a/n: hello, this ended up being different to what i had planned. i hope yall enjoy anyway. its very angsty. very sad. at least to me. be careful with what you read. mind the warnings. love you.

▹— warnings: MAJOR TLOU 2 SPOILERS, suicidal ideation, or thinking about dying, almost hoping to die, major character death (referenced), canon-typical violence, eg murder, descriptions of blood / being covered in blood, kinda religious imagery / talks of divinity (no explicit religion mentioned), hints at a possible romance with jesse

▹— taglist: @rhymingtree @sleepygraves @wnstice (everything!) @auggiesolovey @just-kaylaa @evyiione @lemonlaides @fariylixie0915 @faceache111 @randomhoex @canpillowscry @pedropascalsrealgf @star-wars-lover @coolchick333 @soobsdior @rvjaa @sunflowersdrop @definitely-not-a-seagull-i-swear @miss-celestial-being (pedro)

MASTERLIST

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Setting off from Jackson was a distant memory, by now. It was hazed over, an image in your mind that didn’t seem to fit into reality, no matter how you tried it.

The past few weeks didn’t seem real to you, either.

More than once, you had found yourself waiting to wake up. As if all of this could be some sort of bad dream. A nightmare that you couldn’t escape, no matter how many times you pinched and clawed at yourself, trying to figure out how to prove that this wasn’t real.

Because, really, how could it be? This world, this city, it didn’t feel like it could be true. You didn’t feel like you, and this certainly didn’t feel like it was your life. Wherever you looked, the terrain showed the aftermath of a rampage.

Bodies strewn across the ground, puddles of red dripping down curbs, down cars, down buildings, down your hands. It was beneath your fingernails, caked into your hair, drying on your clothes. For a moment, you thought it was yours. It was the only plausible reason for why you were feeling so empty, wasn’t it? The only explanation for why your heart felt as if it would burst at any given moment.

This rampage was an act of such violence, such rage, it seemed unfathomable to you. You couldn’t remember a time where you had felt something so deeply that it presented as destruction. As a massacre.

That was the word for this, too. Massacre. All of these bodies were once people, once held love and life and the ability to hurt and kill others, just as you did. And when you looked closer, when you looked at their guns and their knives, the bows and the arrows, you knew they had been trying to kill you.

It made sense.

You didn’t want it to, but it did.

These people had tried to kill you, had tried to slaughter you, and they had ended up dead for it. It wasn’t the first time that had happened, either. Joel had killed more people than you could count, just for the crime of trying to bring you harm. It made sense that he would do it again.

“Joel?” You called, your voice echoing in the empty surroundings, bouncing off of bodies and weapons, off of the tangible feeling of death that hung in the air.

Your chest was heaving, breath entering and leaving your lungs so rapidly that it didn’t have time to supply the oxygen you so desperately needed. You hadn’t noticed how unsteady your breathing was, until you had spoken, until you had called out for Joel. It made you feel dizzy, all of a sudden, like everything was hitting you all at once.

For a moment, you didn’t notice that he hadn’t answered you.

But his silence lingered, and the only thing you could hear through it was the sound of your own panicking breaths.

That feeling from earlier — the one of your heart, which had been feeling as if it would burst at any given moment, revealed itself as a choked sob. It jumped out of your throat when you opened your mouth to call for Joel again.

Your devastation didn’t register, for more than a moment. Until you remembered why you were here, why there was a gun in your hand, empty of ammunition. When you looked around, you didn't find Joel. Instead, all you found was blood and death and your machete lay on the ground, a dent in the grass, covered in blood and gore.

There was something hanging over your head, something which felt as if it was holding your head underwater. It felt like the water was forcing its way down your throat, into your lungs, filling them up until all you could do was choke, heave on the lack of breath. Your head was exploding, pressure against the sides of your skull, pushing out, out, out, like a fungus was bursting through you. Only the vague feeling of your hand pressing against your head reassured you that you weren’t Infected.

The memories flashed before your eyes, distorting the image of destruction ahead of you, filling your mind with reality. Joel. Cracked skull, insides out. The unrelenting taste of iron on your tongue, your teeth. Getting on a horse in Jackson, and leaving. Fighting your way through Infected, people, even past Tommy. All in your search for vengeance, for Abby.

And all it had led you to was before you, laid out in death.

Did this make you a monster? Was it evil? You’re not sure if you believe in such a thing anymore, but if you did, you think it would look like a woman, braided hair, golf club raised in the air. But there’s this nagging feeling at the base of your skull, asking you, are you better?

You don’t know what it means. Are you better? Than what? Because of this? You want to ask Joel, but when you turn, he’s still there. Still lay out on concrete, skull scattered around the room, blood staining your skin.

It’s all you can think of. It’s all you can see. Even in the bodies around you, the people that you killed, you see a flash of white, a splatter of blood, and it’s all Joel. There’s the imprint of his boot in the grass, the sound of his voice in the wind, but the only heartbeat you can hear is your own.

Your knees press into the grass, and you stain your jeans with blood, but it feels soft. Softer than the concrete in that basement, softer than the frozen dirt in front of his gravestone. It’s welcoming, or something like it, and your heart aches with it.

A sound breaks through the air, pierces through the air that carries Joel’s voice, and it takes you more than a moment of your throat aching to realise it’s you. And there’s disappointment in that, you realise, that the only person here is you. Nobody is here to kill you, and nobody is here to protect you.

The sound coming from you doesn’t sound like your voice, doesn’t have any familiarity to you. It doesn’t convey words, but rather something harsher, something deeper, a sound which traverses language and time. It breaks these barriers, and empties the chest of something ancient, something eternal.

It wavers as time passes, it comes and goes, much like your recognition. Sometimes, you’re here, belting out something that doesn’t fit into words, and then you’re there, screaming out for mercy that never comes. And all you can hear is Joel, and he’s yelling at you, to you, but you can’t tell what he’s saying.

All you can see is his lips spelling something that he couldn’t say, that you couldn’t translate. You want to tell him you love him. You want to scream at him for going down there. You want him to pull you away from these corpses, but he can’t, and neither can you.

No matter how hard you try, there’s nothing you can do to pull yourself up, to overcome that weight that continues to drown you. It presses down on you until your nose is against the grass, and all you can smell is iron and dirt.

You stay there, one palm pressed against the machete that had been resting on the ground, the other gripping the dirt, for what seems like eternity. There’s no escape from it, nowhere you can turn to pull yourself from this mourning, this hell. And you know that nobody is coming to save you.

It sends a chill down your spine — tingling and bringing feeling back to limbs that had long-since turned numb, the realisation that you are going to end up just like Joel.

Here, against the ground, reduced to something less than human.

And — like Joel — there’s no fighting it.

If Abby approached, golf club raised to the heavens, you would accept it. You would welcome it.

Because surely, whatever would be waiting you, it would be better than this. This endless moment of suffering, of pain and grief so deep it encompasses your whole being. You wonder—hope that Joel would be waiting for you.

You feel guilty, a moment later, because you know that Joel deserves to rest—whatever that meant. And you also know that he had never done that, when he was around you. It was selfish to hope for him to be waiting for you, to hope that he would put whatever was awaiting him on hold, all for you.

Joel had been waiting to die for a long, long time.

Ever since Sarah.

And that fact sends a fresh wave of guilt through you, as if you could hold on to any more emotion, because Sarah was his daughter. She was everything he had wanted, since the moment she was born. And he had been waiting to join her. He had waited for Tommy, for Tess, and then for you and Ellie.

Maybe, Sarah sent Abby for him.

Maybe she got tired of waiting for her dad, whilst he feigned dad for two orphans, left alone in the bitter end of the world.

You try to think of her like that. Some sort of angel, a gift sent from Sarah, all to give Joel the mercy of death. To give him the easy way out. Because Joel didn’t have a choice about dying, Abby had made sure of that, so he couldn’t feel an ounce of guilt for leaving you and Ellie and Tommy to pick up the pieces, to carry his body home to an empty house, a dip in the earth.

It made sense to you, somehow.

Abby seemed so… unmovable.

She was like the force of nature. Nothing you, or Joel, or anyone, had done would’ve stopped her from doing what she did.

If you thought of her like this, as something divine, something above yourself, it was easier. It was easier to forgive yourself for failing to stop her, and now, for failing to end her.

But it also makes the guilt so much heavier.

And you don’t know how you can carry it, anymore.

Because if she was that, if she was something like a divine intervention, then you were doing everything that Joel had never wanted, for nothing. This, right here, this explosion of death, this blood, staining your hands, was what Joel had tried to steer you away from.

He didn’t want you to turn out like him.

Angry, burned, covered in blood.

Monstrous.

He was covered in the scent of stale blood, of death so old it had decayed to nothing, to earth and ash and life reborn. He was stained with it. Distorted by it. It had made his vision red, for as long as he could remember.

Joel didn’t want that for you.

Joel didn’t want you to end up here, knelt in the grass, drenched in blood and sweat, in guts and gore and everything wrong with this world.

And there’s even more guilt in that knowledge. You’re disappointing him. You can practically hear his voice ringing through the air, asking you what you were doing, why you were doing it. You could hear him telling you that he’s not worth all of this. It hurts that you can’t tell him otherwise. If he was here, you could have screamed at him, told him he was worth everything. But he’s not.

How do you carry that around with you? How can you? Are you supposed to drag the weight of Joel’s dead body behind you for the rest of your life?

He would tell you to let him go. He would tell you to live your life. But Joel had never really understood just what he meant to you, to everybody. He could never quite grasp the concept that he was loved, that he was one of the reasons you got up in the morning, one of the reasons you always fought to go home.

The problem is—you don’t want to let him go.

Your hand curls around the grass beneath it, sticky with blood, as if you could physically hold on to him. More than anything, you’re worried about losing the memories. If you let go of Joel, if you let his death fade to the back of your mind, would his life follow? Would you start to forget everything he had done for you? Everything he had meant to you?

Would you forget the sound of his laughter? The smile that only appeared on occasions, which lit up his entire face? The hug he greeted you with when you came home after a particularly hard day? The embarrassing talk he gave you about liking people your age? The feeling of having a father?

If you could, you would stay in those memories forever.

A ghost in your own past, haunting the man who had gone somewhere you couldn’t quite bring yourself to follow. You would go through all of that, the good and the bad, all over again, if it meant you could stay with Joel. Because despite everything, all of the things you had lived through, Joel Miller had become your home.

How could he expect you to let go of that? How could you be okay with that? After the life that you had led, you deserved to go home. It was hard not to resent Joel for expecting you to be okay with letting him go—divine intervention or not.

And you know, that if the tables were turned, if it were you who had been buried, if it was Joel who was here right now, he wouldn’t let you go. He would hunt Abby down, and he would make her suffer for what she had done, because Joel Miller was a force of nature, too.

Either way, he would have to find her.

So, shouldn’t you?

You think that you need to know. You have to find out if she’s this unearthly being that you have made her out to be. You need to know if you could’ve stopped her. If Joel could be alive, right here, right now.

There’s something so poetic about it all, you think.

Maybe, if you were in a better headspace, you could’ve figured it out. But really, what use was poetry in this world?

You’re working up the courage, the ability, to move, when you hear the footsteps crunching gravel just behind you. They’re heavy, purposeful, and you realise you’re still weeping, still screaming out for someone who can’t come. You think—hope—that this is Abby, here to put an end to this suffering. To these unending questions.

But there’s a warm hand against your back, a moment later, and no golf club swung at your skull.

“I’ve got ya, kiddo.” A voice says to you, hands grasping your shoulders, the twang of an accent so familiar that you’re reaching out, eyes closed, waiting for the person to reach back. When they do, your eyes open, but it’s not who you thought it was. You hadn’t died on this grass, and Joel wasn’t here to get you. Instead, Tommy stood in his place, his hands cleaner than your own.

When you look around, you wonder if you’re the monster that people will tell their children about. The person who ripped people to shreds, who tore them apart for no reason other than a quest for vengeance, one that wasn’t even fulfilled. Maybe, you think, you will become a cautionary tale. A warning for others. An example of what not to become, even in the apocalypse.

This was senseless. It was a slaughter.

All of these people are dead, and you don’t even know their names. They fought to protect themselves and the people around them, something of a team, maybe even a family, all because you are angry, and you are hurt, and you miss your dad. How many of these people have families at home? Families who will never see them again, because of you.

You know you’re not a divine being.

There was no otherworldly reason for your massacre. There was nobody behind a curtain, choosing your actions. No—there was just you.

What right did you have to decide these people should die? What right did you have to end their lives? Was one man—one dead man—truly worth this? Did he deserve to be the reason for your murderous rampage? Would he have wanted this? Would he be proud?

“C‘mere.” Tommy says, kneeling on the ground beside you, and shifting you until he could hold you tightly in his arms. If you don’t focus so much, if you let your mind wander, this could be Joel. It could be your dad hugging you, staining his clothes with the blood you’re drowning in. They’re similar enough, brothers, that you can imagine it is.

He’s holding you together.

“We need to get you out of here.” Tommy tells you, breaking the illusion you had been hoping to live in forever. You know he’s being patient with you — you can tell with every gust of wind that rustles the grass below you. Each one could bring more people, more bodies, yet Tommy refuses to rush you. Instead, he holds you tightly, like the cracks in your surface may lead to you bursting.

You suppose he’s right to worry.

His brother is dead. Joel is dead. And here he is, holding you in one piece, as if that wind could shatter you.

Selfishly, you don’t want him to be patient, or gentle, or kind. You want Tommy to show you some kind of mercy, to bring you peace of mind, of soul. But he can’t, unless he has some kind of insight that you don’t, unless he has ripped Abby apart and seen the divinity in her creation.

“C’mon,” Jesse says then, appearing out of seemingly nowhere. You hadn’t realised he was even nearby. Didn’t hear him approaching, though that could’ve been because of the unearthly wailing that had surrounded you. “I’m sorry,” He says, hand wiping at your face where it rests against Tommy’s shoulder. “We have to go. We have to go now. I’m sorry.”

And he does sound sorry—god, he sounds more apologetic than you had ever heard him.

You don’t know if he’s sorry for making you get up, for making you face the world again, or if he’s sorry that you’re even here, sorry that Joel is dead. You don’t know which you would prefer. You try to decide, and realise not long after that the two of them had pulled you to your feet, hands gripping you, waiting for you to hold yourself up.

“Jesse,” You choke out, reaching for him, as if seeing him for the first time. His hands are holding your own before you can even get out another word, uncaring of the blood that covers them. He squeezes once, twice, thrice, before he lets go to press his hands to your cheeks, grounding you, almost.

“It’s okay.” He says, and you can see in his eyes that he knows it’s a lie.

He takes your hand, pats your cheek, his forehead against your own for no more than a moment, before he’s letting Tommy take over, letting the man soothe his fatherly instincts. Uncle Tommy. You imagine a life where you would have called him that.

Tommy leads you away.

Away from the bodies, the gore, the guilt, hopefully. He grips onto you the whole way, pulls you along every time you stumble, holds you up whenever you long to fall. All the way until you reach a theatre, where Ellie and Dina have been bunkered, one of them tells you. We’re going home.

You wonder if they’re going to bury you in the ground, beside Joel. Home. You think it sounds nice.

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