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macfrog · 4 months

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wish you were here | one shot

thank you lovely anon for this gorgeous request which felt like a huge mug of hot chocolate and a pair of socks fresh from the dryer to write. i hope you enjoy.

pairing: joel miller x fem!reader

summary: you and joel skip jackson’s annual holiday party in favor of some alone time. (not that kind you filthy animals it’s the HOLIDAYS)

warnings: fluff lmao, thirty-year age gap and u can stay mad, set around the holidays but no mention of christmas etc, nothing but love and two hints of sex. that's all. oh and no guitars were harmed in the making of this - joel canonically goes and gets the guitar after the fic ends. dw.

word count: 1.9k

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Jackson is alive with a thrumming heartbeat. Pulsing through the air, bumping gently against the quick-lying snow and filling the otherwise silent night. A steady, rhythmic heartbeat.

A heartbeat which sounds a lot like Blue Monday, but a heartbeat nonetheless.

The holiday party is in full swing down in the Tipsy Bison. Seven o’clock ‘til late! on flyers plastered all over the commune for the last month. Tommy had tried relentlessly to convince Joel this morning on patrol – It’ll be a good night; You oughta come along, show face at least. At the same time, Maria was on your back about it in the stables.

Y’all hardly come to anything fun, she’d argued.

We come to stuff.

When’s the last time you came to anythin’?

We were – we were at Mike’s birthday dinner.

What – five months ago?

We like alone time.

Alone time? You’re never apart from one another.

Alone time – together.

Neither attempt had been successful. Tommy and Maria had exchanged a disheartened glance as the two brothers passed their horses to you on their return. Joel clipped your cheek, took his gloves off and fixed them onto your frozen hands before making off for home, a proud grin on his face. You’d held your own as well as he had: you two had a clear evening ahead.

He had lit and nurtured a fire, had made himself a coffee and heaped half a damn bag of tiny marshmallows into a hot chocolate for you, but when he’d come through to take his place on the couch, you were already stood out front.

It’s bitter out – a soft breeze, but a thick chill on its wings. The sky a washed gray, heavy clouds overhead. He slips outside, setting the mugs down on the table, and slings a blanket over your shoulders. Kisses the curve of your neck, scruff of his beard tickling your skin.

‘s freezing, pretty bird.

Then keep me warm, you whisper, turning into his arms. He steps back, settling into his chair, flicking his fingers for you to fall down into his wide lap.

You curl up against his torso, your head hooked beneath his jaw. Wonder how drunk Tommy is by now. What is it – nine?

His wrist lifts, moonlight gleaming in the reflection of his broken watch face. Just gone ten. I bet he’s on his ass already.

You giggle into his shirt, breathing in the scent of the pine trees, the smoke from stoking the fire inside, the bite of hot coffee. The echo of voices swelling in merry song turns your attention down the street – two figures hooked onto one another, stumbling through the powdered snow. Some slurred rendition of September melting into All Night Long before the smaller of the two tugs their partner off into a darkened house.

Joel laughs to himself, the bristle of his beard catching on your hair as he shakes his head.

You ask him softly, Will you play me something?

His breath soars, a cloud hot and pale white, past your temple and up into the pastel sky. Gets swallowed somewhere overhead by the wash of warmth from the porch light. He turns his mug until the owl faces the street, the bottom gnawing against the wooden armrest of his chair.

I’m serious.

What do you wanna hear?

That one you’re always practicin’. The plucking one.

Another rumble between your shoulder blades. His chest jolts with a solid laugh. The pluckin’ one.

You know the one.

I know the one.

Will you play it, if I go get the guitar?

Baby, his lungs nudge on your back as they fill, it’s late. We’ll wake the neighbors.

Everyone’s at the dance. C’mon.

And he can’t argue with that. The entire street lies dark, vacant. Yours is the only house with soft-glowing eyes, the muted orange of the fire flickering behind closed blinds. Two figures, tangled in a chair on the dim front porch; a hunting jacket around his shoulders, and his body around yours.

You tug on the blanket, wrapping it around your elbows as you stand. Just once. Play me it once.

Joel’s looking up at you, setting his mug down on the table. Play you it as many times as you want, pretty bird. Just – quietly.

There’s a spring in your step that drags another chuckle from Joel’s lips: the kind that drips like honey down your throat and warms the pit of your stomach – a sweet, comforting thing, a sound you swear was made purposefully for you. Divine and deliberate.

Like – all of him. Like the shape of your name in his mouth, the curl of his tongue as the sound surfs over it. Like the curve of his hand and the way yours so neatly molds into it.

The way it did the day he found you, crouched in the gray backroom of some butchers deep in the city, and took you all the way back to Jackson. Let you cling to him on the back of his horse; your weak arms around his waist, anchored by the heavy jacket he’d thrown over your back. Your ear between his shoulder blades. And that was that.

Fifty-six. One brown-turned-silver hair away from thirty years your senior. He still remembers before. Talks about movies, talks about computers. Talks about Sarah, when the sun hits the wall at a certain angle and he reckons he could see her standing right there, the soft shadow of her hair dark against the golden wall. When you make a joke and he laughs a ghostly sort of laugh, like he’s hearing the echo of her voice make the same quip three decades ago. He always says she would’ve loved you; you like to think he’s right.

He found you: a lonely little broken heart, and he pulled you to your feet with a rough palm against your own. Hands calloused only from years spent carving wood and pressing the hard strings of his guitar into the fretboard, and nothing else. No violence and no bloodshed; no survival or threat. Music, and patience, and kindness.

And maybe you found him, too, in the same sort of way: roughened up, awkward and messy stitches holding him together. Maybe the two of you nursed one another back to life; each brush of your hands in the dining hall and each meaningful glance while out on patrol sewing those wounds up a little tighter, a little safer.

He sits forward when you hold the instrument out, sweeping a broad palm down the slope of the body. Pinches the pegs one by one, twisting them while his thumb taps on each string.

Come here, he says, beckoning you forward with a flick of his chin. He taps on the seam of his jeans, widens his legs for you to curl up between them at his feet – the way you always do.

Your elbows hook over his thigh, ear pressed against the inside of his knee. Staring up, blinking slowly, eyes glazed with the cold and with the light and with love.

He plucks gently, slow at first. Letting the strings snap with a twang, vibrating enough that you feel the small rattle in your jaw. Your eyes fall closed, head rocking with the light tap of his heel on the porch. When you peer at him through your lashes, he’s watching the skilled movements of his fingers intently; as if he’s as much a spectator as you are – his body doing all of the thinking and working for him.

So, he sings, and your stomach melts to a puddle, so you think you can tell –

Your eyes close again, the low rumble of his voice crisp in your ears. Like thunder, like the promise of something great and mighty. Something moving, something rolling and changing the landscape of your body, your mind and your soul. The lines between living and dying begin to blur, the seam tearing between this plain and the next.

Did they get you to trade – your lips parting to whisper the words with him – your heroes for ghosts?

His thumbnail dragging down the strings, his strong fingers flitting between chords. Like he was made to sit here, in the dead of night, and carve a space in the world for himself and his voice and for you – lain in the safe scope of his body, protected by his breadth and brawn and lulled by his sweet song.

His breadth and brawn – the parts of him which have kept him standing here. His skeleton, his muscle. But the thing that keeps you warm at night, buried side by side under a threadbare woolen sheet together, the thing that you link your arms around as he leads you home from the nights you dare to visit the Tipsy Bison: are his heart, his flesh, the gray-singed hair which falls in a featherlight wave over his forehead. The hair you sweep from his eyes when he’s on top of you, his hips cradled in yours, that all-encompassing feeling of every part of him filling every part of you.

It all feels that way. The warmth of him, the feeling of being wrapped around him. Hooked around his body, bones intertwined. Absorbing one another, his words breathing life into yours, slowly growing louder and braver with each pluck and strum of music.

We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year.

Your makeups entangling, ribcages locking together, flesh meeting flesh and hair twisting until one day, Tommy will come looking for his brother and find the two of you here on your porch, your arms still draped over Joel’s thigh and his fingers still mid-song. Stuck, alone, together.

What have we found? Joel looks down to you as though asking the question – his eyebrows raised – and you reply, a dumb smile across your lips, The same old fears, and then, together –

Wish you were here.

He plays until his fingers must start to hurt, the way he clenches and loosens his fist. Setting the guitar against your chair, hands hooking under your arms to pull you back up to him.

That one your favorite? he asks, the cold tip of his nose circling yours.

You nod. Only when you sing it.

I like the way we sound together.

You smile, shrinking into his chest again, your fingers surfing back and forth on the worn shirt. I like the way we do a lot of things together.

His hands slip beneath the fabric of your shirt, massaging your waist. He dots a trail of light, damp kisses along your forehead, dipping to your temple, the angle of your cheek until your jaw lifts and his lips are against yours, his tongue parting to lick purposefully at yours.

I love you, pretty bird, he whispers, the words falling sweet and fair on your tongue.

You take a moment to let them seep into your skin. ‘s the first time you’ve ever said that, you tell him.

Joel smiles. He knows. But you knew it already, he counters.

You know, too. Mhm.

Alright, he groans, slipping his hands under your thighs and hoisting you up to his height, bedtime.

It’s only ten, you complain, wrapping the blanket around his shoulders as he carries you inside. It’s too early to sleep – Joel.

Didn’t say we were goin’ to sleep, he mumbles, kicking the door shut.

#happy max monday is this becoming a thing? can i claim mondays? boomtown rats move the fuck over #i just wanted to sit between joel miller's legs and look up at him all dumb and in love ok?#joel miller #joel miller fic #the last of us #tlou fic #joel miller x reader #joel miller one shot #jackson!joel #joel miller fluff

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anyoldfandom · 2 months

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I am actually. I am so emotional over the Salazar parents and I need to share this to tumblr too.

A lot of stories where the MC is adopted I feel. Either dismiss the biological parents and the impact they have on the kid's life, or makes them evil and abusive, framing the loss of the bio parents as a good thing, or at least something we shouldn't think about just look at this new family.

But Genrex doesn't do that. From the start, Rex wanted to find out more about his parents - it's one of his primary character motivations, next to helping people. He loves them, even though he doesn't know them.

And the more he finds out about them, the more he realizes they loved him. Rylander is consumed by guilt but as Rex's first connection to his pre-Event life, the first thing he does is hug him. And when he tells Rex about his parents, the two things Rex knows is that 1) they were scientists, and 2) that when he was in danger, they were desperate enough to use their secret, experimental technology to save him. Technology built from their desire to help the world, to save countless lives and end countless suffering.

And then. When he finds out that they were dead, he doesn't stop caring. It'd be so easy, too, to tie it up there - his parents were good people, he got his answer about them, the end. But they don't. He doesn't. Because the show is saying once again that they are his parents. He still calls them mom and dad, even as the show makes it clear Holiday and Six adopted Rex as their son. Even as the show even parallels Six and One with Rex and Six (and I will talk about that more later if I don't forget, trust me), to really drive home how much they're family. Rex even says he considers the two of them family, and later that he considers Noah, Claire and Annie family.

He has new family, the show tells us, but his old family still matters to him. He's upset that he never has the chance to meet his parents, that everything he hears about them, about his time with them, is secondhand knowledge. It tells us clearly that not only does Rex still love them, but that he still wants to know them. And everything we find out about them reinforces the love that they had for each other.

We see Abuela and the family in Mexico, who connect him to his birth family and tell him that he was so loved back then, and still is now. We see their office in Abysus through Rex's eyes. The picture of him and his dad on his desk. The drawing Rex drew, proudly pinned to the wall.

We see it in the familiarity of the drawing. That that robot, that build, was what Rex created when he was lost and scared and alone - that it was made to keep him safe. That it first appeared in his mind in a place he felt safe.

The show says, tenderly and softly, that the love is still there. That the fact these people died was nothing but a tragedy, that their love is a big part of what made Rex who he is today - that every molecule in his body is filled with their final gift to him. That every time he cures someone, every time he uses a build, every time he makes a machine - we see the love that they had for him.

And the way he quietly absorbs his father's face. The way he freezes and whispers "Mamá?" when he finds out Zag-Rs has their mother's voice. The fact that she even has her voice as a testament to Caesar's love, too - that it was meant to bring comfort and safety. The way Rex yells at Caesar when he finds out they have a family property, a connection to their past, the way he fights to protect it.

And, none of this takes away still from Six and Holiday being Rex's family too. None of this removes the work either set of parents did for him, the love either set has - the show says that it was unfair that the Salazar parents were lost. That Six and Holiday are not replacements, that they still love him as parents but play different roles in his life. They can not, and have no desire to, replace the Salazars. But Rex needs parents, he needs protectors, and so they will do what they can for him - at first out of necessity, to keep this kid they barely know safe, but then out of love. They aren't replacing what was lost, but are doing their best to do what Rex's bio parents would do. And they do mess up in it - they mess up in ways Rex's bio parents might not have. Six is clearly bad with showing affection, affection we saw the Salazars give Rex so easily, and Holiday is overworked and stressed constantly, sometimes breaking under the pressure and snapping at Rex and Six, things we never saw the Salazars do.

It's just. It's about how sometimes things will not be the same. They will be different. That doesn't mean the people you lost aren't still with you.

#This is also. Why I dislike the 'Rex was secretly made for the nanite experiments the accident was a lie' theory so much #Bc it assigns malice where the show says over and over again there was only love.#That this was only ever a tragedy of good people whose good intentions were manipulated and twisted.#And I think giving them something shitty to have done in the past especially goes against the message of the show's perspective on adoption #The family we choose is not always stronger than the family we are born to. Sometimes they are equal in different ways.#Rex's bio parents are gone but not replaced. They have also shaped who he is #Six and Holiday are just picking up where they left off. Because they have to.#Also I don't like the theory that Rex's parents are EVOs somewhere bc I think it diminishes the impact of the tragedy too.#I get. Wanting them to have a happy ending. But I think it's important to realize that this is the closest they can have to a happy ending.#Some things cannot be replaced. Or fixed. Sometimes life takes what we love and what loves us. And that is okay.#It is okay to be upset at that and it is okay to never fully move on.#'What about Caesar?' I have. Another post's worth of thoughts about him.#But I think he's also a character who is defined more by Rex by their relation and defined by the story by his guilt #I think he is the closest thing Rex has to a shitty bio family member and he is shitty in plenty of ways #But he's also a parallel to Rex in a lot of ways. He fails where Rex succeeds bc of it.#generator rex #genrex #Anyways. Sorry for the big post.

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