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yeyinde · 2 years ago

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ATROPHY | Joel Miller x F!Reader

》 SUMMARY: It's her, him, and the beats in between. A slow simmer of sex to something more. Something he isn't quite ready for, yet knows he can't let go of. 》 WARNINGS: 18+ SMUT (mild); allusions to death, assault; female gendered reader, female gendered anatomy; minor game spoilers; Joel isn't bad at feelings – he just doesn't want them. Joel is tired™ 》 WORD COUNT: 10,9k

His grief, sorrow, the ones that he tries to shove into a box marked apathy, are worn in the crevasses that line his weathered face. Deep canyons make him look ages older than he is. He wonders if she can see them. If she can peel the divots back and uncover the festering sickness, the rot, that sits in the folds.

It's his own fault, he thinks, for stuffing his grief in the same place he keeps his worry.

》 NOTES: I did something different with my writing. It's still a Reader insert, but. I tried third person instead of the usual second. also, how this ballooned up to nearly 10k is lost to me since it was just supposed to be smut?? I had this clear image of older Joel laying in bed, his guitar leaning against the wall, catching the light of the sun as you slowly rode him, and now? I don't even know. ⤑The gif is mine. Please don't take or repost without permission

MASTERLIST | FAQ | AO3

Complacency is a death sentence in a world like this.

Lazy Sundays spent between the warm, damp sheets. Boredom. Afternoons strumming his guitar on the front porch. Sleeping in. Drinking at a saloon in town. Music. Laughter.

It doesn't exist.

Shouldn't.

And yet—

His guitar sits, abandoned, in the corner of the bedroom. The wood still carries the heat from his thumb this morning when he played a song alone on the porch. Eyes bleary, full of sleep, of rest, as he took in the varicoloured dawn cresting through the indigo sky.

Those same weathered, beaten hands that strummed the chords to Hurt are now occupied again. One perched on her hip, skin sateen soft and plush, full and warm and clean from the shower last night as she bears down on top of him in a quiet cadence, a muted, languid dance. The other cups the swell of her breast in his palm, nipple still damp from his hungry mouth, and flushed red from his teeth.

This should just be a fantasy.

A dirty thing in the recess of his mind when he has a moment to himself breathe. A thought, a whim. Something to needle away at the last vestiges of his consciousness when he sees her in the wild—vibrant, young, and free—and then sullied in the back of his head when he leans against a tree, and thinks of the dirt on her skin, the blood on her delicate hands, and how they'd taste under his tongue.

But this isn't a dream.

When he sleeps, he dreams in black and white. The only colour that bleeds through is red. Blood red. Pulpy and vicious. Ugly. Garish. It splatters across the pavement where he laid Sarah down, where he lost Tess, and everyone else he never promised to save and still couldn't.

He knows this isn't a dream when he blinks his eyes open, and she's there. Sitting atop him in a kaleidoscope of colour, drenched in ochre from the still rising sun. The only red is her blistered lips, the rough burn between her thighs from the scrape of his beard, and that sinful little tongue that slips between her teeth when he slides in deep.

And then—his eyes drop to her side—that ugly wound that cuts her flesh, ripped over the seam of her ribs.

He's awake. Lucid.

She's much too heavy to be something carved from fantasy.

He doesn't say this, of course—Joel isn't stupid, and for someone so considerably smaller than he is, she packs a hefty punch in those slender fingers that curl into a fist barely the size of an apple. The sharp jab of a rusted, blunt knife. Knows where to hit him, too.

He tucks it away, and lets his hands explore, feeling the tangibility of her weight, her presence, under the tips of his bloodied fingers.

(Broken on the same teeth that caused her to hurt.)

The knob of her hip bone juts out through her flesh, and he grazes it with his thumb, feeling the soft curve.

Real, he thinks. Flesh and bone.

He can feel the flutter of her racing pulse under his hand when he kneads her breast in his hand, and lets her nipple graze teasingly over the rough skin of his weathered palm.

The tight clench of her around him—pussy a perfect knot around the base of his cock, all pretty and tied tight like a bow—is another stroke of realism his dreams, nightmares, fantasies, could never imbue.

It's a present he's sullied more times than he can count, each touch another tally to the neverending number of sins that pile higher than the hollow skyscrapers in Boston.

Joel feels each breath that leaves her heaving chest. Each gasping hiccup of his name when she raises her full hips up, and then slide back down the length of him in a slow, languorous roll until he nudges against the seal of her womb, and steals the air in her lungs.

It's real.

A paradox, then.

One of those things that shouldn't happen, but is. Like her, and him, and everything else in between.

He knows what the others in town say when they see her—pretty and soft with a ginger touch and a sweet curl of a voice when she whispers his name. It doesn't make sense for her to be all wrapped up in him, following along behind like a shadow to a man who's cut from ashlar, and reeking of rot. Ruin.

He's calamity in ageing grey, and she's the ripe, forbidden fruit he's not allowed to bite. Poisoned apple. Cherry sweet.

(He wonders if they'd recoil once they saw that her insides were gnarled; acrid and sour; bitter melon. Lemon drops.

That she is far more like him than they could ever dream.)

They glare at him from the corner of their eyes when she swells like a lighthouse in the midnight gloam at the sight of him wandering back from patrol, eyes all bright and beaming, and beautiful—Christ.

She's a picture, he thinks.

One of those pinup girls he'd find in dirty magazines as a kid. When he and Tommy would sneak a peek behind the barn, away from prying eyes. A portrait of lust. Desire in high gloss.

A classical beauty—the type that would make men drown themselves at sea. A starlet in the golden age back when it mattered.

Writers' muse, maybe: she would have been the girl everyone talked about—the one that eluded the tortured artist, made him pine.

Hemingway would call her brutal.

Cat in the Rain.

(She liked his old, heavy face and big hands.)

He doesn't know much about poetry but he knows she's the type who could make a man want to stain his fingers in ink just to capture the curve of her lips when she smiled.

A vixen. Hellion. Lilith.

Her voice is a song when she says his name. A hymn.

Dangerous.

He doesn't know when this started.

Maybe, when they brought her in with the rest of the group she was travelling with. Beaten down, hungry. Clinging to life with frostbitten fingers.

Her eyes were flat; a stagnant pond. Lips a grim, blue line. Placid. Gone. She'd been out there for too long to ever find comfort behind walls, and he knows the feeling of trying to crawl out of your own skin when people stand too close.

She scoffed at the idea of this place, of sanctuary. Resentful and derisive. He could see the distrust in her clenched jaw, balled fists. This world was a whim—evanescent—and what they gathered from the rest of the group, survival hadn't been easy outside of safe zones.

Wall after wall fell, she said, tone flat. Blank. Haunted by ghosts still lingering in the canyons of her eyes. Stopped believing in stuff like this after a while.

Her eyes were stained—jaundiced and red, filled with burst blood vessels—and raw from how hard the edges of her knuckles had dug into the flesh of her eyelids. They spoke of sleepless nights. Ones interrupted by her own sense of survival, hyperarousal.

He knows the feeling of jerking awake whenever his brain starts to lull, to slip into that dangerous facsimile of security.

Pipe dreams. She wears her fatigue like its armour, wielding the brunt of her exhaustion like a shield.

(Sleep often feels like a bad habit for people like her, like him.)

But like him, it waned slowly.

The chips in her veneer cracked, split, and he saw the incipient filament start to seep in. Complacency. Comfort.

A few months in, she stopped being so defensive when they invited her out for drinks, and when they talked about dinner parties, and birthday celebrations. Derision was still a heavy weight in her distant gaze, clutched in bleached knuckles like a claymore, when she looked at them, a touch incredulous.

Joel understands the feeling.

The itch in your guts, the discomfort in your chest. It festers, doesn't it?

Children play close to the fences, making up games of tag, and hide and seek, as if those things with broken, pustulous faces weren't skulking within arm's reach just a breath away.

This whole place is a vacuum. The interior is covered in thick molasses; stuck in stasis. They pretend that birthdays and holidays matter. Dance around the saloon at night with drinks in hand. Pale ale. Old booze.

It's rigid in its structure: patrols that span the entirety of a day—from dusk to dusk in three shift increments—and daily checks of the fences, the gates. Trading with other communities. Rules. Regulations.

It gives the idea of safety. Of security.

(But the bruises on his hands and the gash in her side are proof that it's sometimes not enough.)

Slowly, though, as the days wore on and the fences stood proud and tall and secure, she softened. Tucked it away with a smile, and started saying, I'll think about it instead of clipped jerks of her chin, or nothing at all.

Joel doesn't know if she ever really did think about it like she said she would.

Broken promises carry a distinct sound. One he knows all too well.

She never showed up despite the invitations. Never came to celebrate.

She stood by the fence, and looked out, eyes wide, mouth flat. The coil in her shoulders, the tremble in her hands, reminded him of a trapped animal. Cornered, and tense.

She'll bite someone eventually.

(He just never expected it to be him.)

The tension didn't flee the crease of her eyes, but she tried to integrate herself into the fold, the community. Slowly. Slowly.

He took stock of her in the same measure he does everyone new who wanders in. Assessing. Watching. Cautious.

He could tell right away that she was a wildcard. A lit match slowly burning down the wick in a sea of gasoline.

Pretty, he finds, despite himself. Drawn in by her allure; a coruscating light in the middle of endless, unfathomable grey.

He catches sight of the weathered face that blinks back at him from the frosted windows, hazy and thick with condensation that make the grey in his hair, his beard, look startlingly whiter than it was ten seconds ago. It's a jarring reminder of who he is. What he's done.

It's not insecurity that keeps him from seeking her out, but self-preservation. Some people, he finds, just have this magnetism about them. A beacon. A light. A gravitational pull that drags you closer and closer.

And hers is purely primal. Animalistic. She smells of sex and sin and makes him think of object permanence when everything around him had been clouded in the sharp shade of ephemeral grey.

She's a fractured mirror. Medusa in the making.

Joel's always avoided broken glass.

(Ladders. Black cats. Cracks in the pavement. Pretty girls who swallow everything like a black hole—)

Too sweet, he finds. Forbidden fruit. Tart, ripe, and sugar dipped.

(He never had much of a sweet tooth, anyway.)

Through his observations—necessary, he tells Tommy when he catches the way Joel's gaze follows her around when she moves; limbs ballerina lithe, swan songs after dark: just because we let them in, doesn't mean we can trust them—he finds out everything he needs to know.

A rusted sign on the side of the road says, stay away. Danger in dulcet. Soft and sweet. A perfunctory bow in battle before the deadly blows come.

He oscillates between finding her both too soft and too hard, and it's the unknown that makes him wary.

She's a caged animal. Everyone is just kidding themselves if they think she's domesticated.

Somewhere in the throng of people milling about, drinking and dancing like the world wasn't in shambles, she finds his gaze, matches his stare.

Most people looked away.

But she's not most people, is she?

No, she's dangerous. Pretty in a way that's entirely too ethereal for the broken remnants of what remains. Left behind. Mouldering until death claims its victims. Until the spores released from the earth itself burrow in the rucked lines of your head, sprouting up like flowering buds.

She makes men want.

And while the pickings might have been slim, Joel knows there are several (and maybe a little more) above him in terms of desirability. He's older. Gruff. Rough around the edges without any whim of changing, or scouring himself down so that his jagged pieces don't pop something as tender and sweet as her.

He doesn't put himself in the same bracket. Despite Maria's insistence, Tommy's needling, he isn't a bachelor.

Hasn't made himself available.

And he isn't.

Not since Tess. Not since—

None of that matters. He's too old to think about romance, about skin and sex, and warmth. And more.

The thought of it all leaves something sour twisting in the gnarled rot of what remains inside his chest.

Despite that, or maybe in spite of it, she comes to him.

(Somehow. Somehow.)

She asks him to dance, and the breathy tone of her voice tastes like a lit cigarette; it plumes nicotine in the air. Second-hand smoke. A contact high.

He finds it disarming when she laughs after he says no. Firm. Hard. Dismissive.

Not in your lifetime, sweetheart.

The unspoken stay away rang clearer than the echo of her laughter.

And that was that.

But she came back.

("If not a dance, then how about a drink?"

"Wastin' your time, sweetheart."

She grins, then, soft and coy. "Not much else to do with it these days besides chatting up a handsome stranger."

He pretends she didn't make him choke on his drink, and eyes her warily instead. Dangerous, he thinks. The type that just doesn't quit. One who is just small and malleable enough to slip inside the tiniest splinter.

Just like a raspberry, she'd rot fast. Festering. Clouded white and infectious. Worse, in many ways, than the parasites outside of the walls.

"Just don't get your hopes up." He settles on after a moment, a lull, that makes her blood-red lips curl up like the curve of those stupid hearts dangling overhead.

And hates that he doesn't really know if he's still just talking to her or the wandering eyes in his own skull when he says it.)

He doesn't know why she takes a liking to him of all people. Of all men. He might be out of touch with the reality they live in now, always on the fringes of waiting for things to buckle at the knee, and collapse into ash, but he isn't stupid. Oblivious.

Joel sees the way she stares at him. Open, wanting. Curious.

She shouldn't be. There's nothing in him—nothing left. His insides are polluted, gnarled. Ugly. A gurgling cesspit that doesn't know how to fix, only dissolve. Consume. He's acidic. Caustic.

Bad for anyone's health.

He can't keep anyone safe, and all he knows how to do anymore is push people away, and lie (and, lately, make Ellie so incensed with anger, she cuts him to the core and spills his choleric blood out onto the pavement where it hisses and sounds just like Tess).

He's a patchwork mess of a man sewn together with a churlish hand. The broken pieces are borrowed and maligned, but they sometimes feel like they fit when he shifts, and spits enough contempt to keep everyone else from getting too close, and—

It's enough.

(He likes it that way.)

But she—

His hands grip her tight sometimes—too tight—and the stains he leaves on her skin set his teeth on edge. It's too much like ownership. Possession.

(And he finds the colour that blooms on her flesh to be too fucking pretty to ever sit comfortably in the gnarled pit of his guts.)

"Don't worry, Joel," she whispers when she catches him staring at the marks he left behind. Dark and ugly. Contrition tastes of old nickels. "You won't break me that easily."

It's a bad decision.

But he was never known for his good choices, and when she fluttered her eyes at him, hand pressed to his chest like she were allowed to touch him, he crumbled.

She didn't give him much of a choice to fight back when all she asked for nothing but the warmth of his skin, and the taste of him on her tongue.

Pleasures of the flesh. It's easy. Simple. He fucks her behind the saloon, rough and dirty, and swallows the sounds she makes against the brick like they're just for him. He takes her home, and knows that when he's nestled between her thighs, it's as close to heaven as a man like him will ever get.

And then—it's over. She leaves. He pretends to sleep.

Rinse. Repeat.

It carries on this way for nearly two years. Distant, cold. He can't remember the last time he had anyone warm his bed, but it takes the edge off, the stress and pain of Ellie's distance, her mistrust, and hatred, and she asks for nothing.

She lets him grab her when he wants. Lets him bend her body into whichever shape suits him best, and says nothing about the fingerprints that he leaves behind, the astringent tang of rot when she slides out of his bed, his hands, and out the door.

He lays back, the same hand he used to grip the back of her neck when he fucked her into the mattress now resting under his head, and he pretends doesn't feel colder now than he did before.

There is no promise of forever. There's no promise of exclusivity, or monogamy, but he knows that she hasn't fucked anyone else since she got here, that those pretty thighs only ever parted for him, and he's too worn down to entice anyone else who wasn't looking for a sleazy fuck against a tree into his bed, anyway.

Complacency begets comfort, security, wants.

They settle down in their borrowed homes, in their borrowed beds, and think about making the most of their borrowed time.

In that, they yearn. Family. Togetherness. Everything they had before they tried to drag into the now. Forcing a square through a round hole. A mismatched puzzle piece into the slot it wasn't made for.

Sometimes, they get lucky and it slips through. It distorts itself into something different, and new, just to fit through the preconstructed crack.

Joel doesn't think about then. He thinks about now. A broken world no closer to resolution, absolution, than it was thirteen, fourteen years ago. There is no roseate veil over his eyes; everyone else can see it.

He isn't the type of man someone brings home. The one you push and push until he fits through the front door, and back into normalcy. Stagnancy.

And she's not the type of woman who'd ever try.

He likes that about her.

Poisoned candy apple. Pretty on the outside and rotted within.

There is no future outside of the way he fits inside of her, and this is as permanent as the blemishes he leaves on her pretty skin.

Then he dreams, and it's of her.

Lifeless, blue. The way her head splits open is beautiful in that macabre sort of way horrible things sometimes are. Flowers burst behind her eyes, petals budding out of the hollowed space that once made his chest stutter when the sun caught the crevasse of black that split from her pupil and bled into her iris. A small stream of ink.

The canyons of gradient colours are now filled with blooms of enoki. Red amanita curls out from her ears.

Where he once laid his palm over her chest is now a gaping hole flowering with a pulsing mass of candlesnuff and staghorn.

Death cap where her heart once beat.

Beautiful, he thinks, even as he howls her name.

He wakes up drenched in a cold sweat, and the curve of her name heavy on his tongue. His knuckles pop when he fists the damp sheets between his trembling fingers, but the ache feels good. The sting reminds him he's alive. Whole.

He's awake, but the nightmare doesn't end. The sight of her body lingers in the back of his head when he strums his guitar and plays a song for the demons within. He thinks of her when he forks over the expired box of condoms he found on a run, and listens to Jesse ramble about how Ellie is doing in exchange for the loot.

It's her he sees.

She blinks at him, eyes that same shade that sometimes makes his breath hiss between his teeth, and then her crown caves in. Forehead splits down the middle. One half stands where it was as the other falls over on her shoulder.

Fractals spill from the plumule that was once her brain stem until the two halves are bleached white like dead corals on a ruined reef.

The flowering toadstool quivers. What was once her—wit, charm; that uncanny ability to make him feel like the ground beneath his feet was crumbling—is a mass of spores. Polluted. Rotted.

Where she once stood is a puppet. Dead. Gone.

Her head tips. Ink spills from the putrefying blood vessels, congealing in the air. It spools into a circle. A black hole.

He lifts the gun, and feels nothing at all.

Everything he could have felt, feels, is syphoned into the needlepoint of no return, the place where she once looked at him, and said, I don't want anything from you, Joel. I just want you.

He wakes before he can see the aftermath of pulling the trigger.

A fluke, maybe. But it happens each night after that.

He knows, then, that there's no turning back.

Permanence doesn't belong in this borrowed home, but she somehow drags it through the foyer and into his bed, anyway.

She stayed over last night.

Joel doesn't think he tried to let go when he collapsed into the bed beside her, arms woven around her sweat-slicked back, locked tight like a pair of shackles that mean about as much as a prison or the law these days.

It was cold. Late. He didn't want her to walk back in the snow all alone.

That's all.

But Joel isn't a gentleman, and despite how much he wishes he wasn't, he's egregiously self-aware.

He knows he's in trouble when it just makes sense to keep her close. When it's easier to have her within arm's reach than it is to meet at the front door, and let her in.

(When he sleeps better if he can feel her burning skin on his.)

"You're thinking too much," she gasps, eyes lidded and heavy. Drinking him in.

Joel doesn't know what a pretty thing like her sees in a man like him.

He can't offer her anything except the cold comfort of a warm body, but even that is null. He knows there are younger men prowling outside her door, just itching for an opportunity to make her look their way.

(She never does.)

"Yeah," he rasps, the word sticking to his teeth. "Never been much of a thinker."

"Really? Ain't that a surprise."

His hand slips from her hip, palm swatting at the soft flesh of her ass. The sting makes her tighten around him like a vice.

"Watch your mouth."

The way she gasps his name, breathy and aching, makes him stifle a groan between clenched teeth, her voice rolling over him like warm sea breeze.

She's a lot, he thinks, and yet—she asks for nothing.

(Nothing but him. One of the things he can't give her. Won't.)

Still.

Her nails press into his damp chest, catching on the smoked dusted patch of coarse charcoal hair. Bracing herself against the swell of his ribs, and slowly rocked back into him, taking him deeper and deeper into her soaked, tight cunt.

The pulse in his neck throbs out of his skin, a tick she likes to press the flat of her tongue against and drink up the briny droplets of his sweat. He can see the want in her eyes when he catches her staring at the column of his throat, the way she bites her lip like it's a substitute for how badly she wants to sink those same teeth into his flesh. Mark him as her own.

Possession. Ownership.

Sometimes, he catches the glossy, rotund image of himself in the inky puddles of her pupils, blown wide with feverish desire, and he can see the same expression, the mien, captured in her startling hue.

Mutual want.

It's easier to give in sometimes. To let go.

He can't, though, and selfishly, he knows she'll never ask. She will bite your lip, the inside of her cheeks, and your tongue until it's raw and bloody before she lets the words slip through the gap of her teeth.

(He feels the rough, chewed ridges on velveteen flesh when he rolls his tongue between her ivory teeth, swiping over the insides of her cheeks; broken skin split and metallic—a testament to her own selfless desires.

He tastes it on his tongue long after she's gone. Wet pennies. Dandelion sour.)

It knots inside of him. She'd ruin herself before she asked him for more.

Maybe somewhere in his avoidance, his distance, she knows he's ruining himself by just giving her this much. Nothing, and yet—

Everything to him.

An impasse, then. Uncrossable when he's already two feet out the door.

"Joel—"

"I know, sweetheart," he murmurs, low. Rucked gravel. Falling rocks. It jars him how easily he responds to her. She says his name, and he'll drop anything in his hands to get to her quickly enough. "I know."

The wound on her side pulls taut when she moves. It draws his eye like a beacon. Makes him grind his teeth together until it sparks pain down his jaw, the enamel sawed to the raw nerve.

His hand slides over her molten flesh, trailing over the soft curve of her waist, until his thumb brushes the seam that keeps her insides from spilling out. The swollen, bruised skin is warmer than the rest of her body. Glossy where it tugs against the black threads keeping her whole.

Joel didn't go with her on this particular trade. She went with some new kid they'd picked up, all varsity grins and clean hands. He seemed so damned eager to get her attention in the pub. Her age, too.

Made a pretty couple, Ron said. Fucking loud mouth Ron.

He was supposed to go, but when the kid caught him in the corner, nursing a beer that sat in his guts like a stomach ache, and said, hey, man, can I take your spot? he didn't know how he was supposed to say no and still cling to the degrees of separation he wedged between himself and the world.

So, he raised his mug to his mouth, and forced himself to drink, to nod.

Knock yourself out.

The flash of sadness that flickered over her face meant nothing at all—nothing—but he felt something churn inside of his rotted guts. Atrophy, he thinks. He isn't meant for this. Doesn't want it. Need it.

She's a bigger liability the closer she gets. A slow-moving black hole consuming all of the counterscarps he dug until nothing is left but crossable rubble.

It's better, then, to cut it at the root before it infects the rest.

So, he does.

Maybe, he expected something different. For her to call this thing what it was, and then demand more of him, yell and scream and beg for the things he wouldn't give her—if only so he could break her heart into pieces, and force her to let go. To stop.

Force himself to do the same.

But she doesn't

It's a quiet acquiesce; a little more than a nod, and a grim line of her pretty mouth. Okay, it says. If that's what you want.

And that's what she always says, isn't it? If that's what you want, Joel. Whatever you say, Joel. Sure, Joel. Okay, Joel.

A spitfire in ochre. A bright lighthouse in the middle of the grey sea.

(The only person she dims for is him.)

Joel doesn't see her off. Doesn't say be careful or come back safe because words like those don't fit between his teeth. They aren't meant for the nothing between them. The chasm of everything she can't pry from his gnarled fingers.

She leaves with him.

He drinks alone.

Despite whatever nonsense Tommy says, spouted over rationed potatoes and deer meat stew, he isn't sulking.

"Let your girl go out alone? Unlike you, brother."

The way the words sat in his chest felt like an anvil.

"Ain't my girl," he muttered. He wanted to be angry but all he felt was numbness. "Ain't my anything."

It's Maria who gets under his skin when she scoffs.

"Joel Miller, you're the biggest dumbass I ever met, save for your damned brother. Gonna push a good thing away and die alone."

"No one asked you."

Maria tries to fill in the blanks of something that doesn't exist.

It peels back the gossamer from his eyes, and he sees, then, the way they skirt around him and her like it's something. As if his name is permanently attached to hers.

He pretends he doesn't feel the burn in Maria's glare when he doesn't see her off at the gate.

It doesn't matter. It doesn't.

He isn't there when she comes back, and hates, even more, that he feels something prickle inside his chest when Maria catches him near the stables, and says, I expected more from you, Joel.

It doesn't feel good when he bites back, that's your problem, Maria. Shouldn't have gotten your hopes up.

Joel lives in his vindication, in his pettily forced indifference. She hasn't come to see him, anyway, and he's sure that she and Varsity jacket are meeting at the pub for that date he'll never give her.

Doesn't matter, he thinks. And then, if only to burn himself in the flames, he adds: better this way.

She'll know when he's not there. She's smart like that. Know him in ways he doesn't think anyone else ever could. Ever wanted to.

(He hates it, and her, sometimes, for it.)

She'll understand. She might corner him one day with that dry ire dripping from the corners of her mouth, patronising and grim, and she'll do what she does best when she strips him bare and leaves him to rot.

Her eyes are cobra pits. Her teeth leak venom.

But she won't push.

It'll simmer out when she blinks, knowing that this is it, and she'll say: okay, Joel.

Okay.

He braces for it—hates that has to because that means something, something he isn't ready to acknowledge—and—

And it's all moot.

She never shows up at the gate.

It punctures something in his lungs when Tommy looks up at him, face ashen and worried, and says: "she didn't come back. They didn't come back."

It takes an hour to find her, left for dead and beaten within an inch of her life by the side of the road. A wound in her side—a gaping hole he swears he can see through. Milky bones poke through, drenched in red, and—

His heart doesn't stop, but a piece of it breaks off and lodges itself in his throat. He can't swallow. Can't breathe.

Something curls out from the moon-white line of her rib.

A bud, he thinks. Distant. Warbled. A saprophyte.

He has the image of her in his head. The same one he sees when he closes his eyes and falls into a fitful sleep.

Beautiful even as the cordyceps split her skull into blooming monkshood in hideous grey and plum. Pale and lifeless; a marionette on toadstool strings. A puppet in fluorescence.

"She's—"

Tommy's hand reaches down, fingers curling around the sprout.

Don't— not Tommy, too—

He pulls back, and Joel catches the tremble in his joints, the whites of his knuckles, when he spreads his fingers.

In the palm of his hand sits a leaf.

A leaf.

The bark that leaves his chest tears right through the clot in his throat. Rips him open from the inside out.

"A fucking leaf—"

He carries her back, and doesn't let go until the doctor is there, urging him out of the room.

"You'll get in the way."

He sees the looks they give him when he passes, but Joel never cared what people think.

Doesn't plan on starting now, either.

He's on the wrong side of fifty, and has more blood on his hands than the looted bars of soap could ever scour clean. He knows who he is, and maybe, maybe, knows what he wants, and Ron's loud mouth never meant much to him, anyway.

Joel gets a name when she's sleeping after surgery—lucky, he overhears, got there in the knick of time, any later and—and brings nothing with him when he leaves. He won't need it. Doesn't want it.

He finds them chatting over an open fire, and beats them to death with nothing but his bare hands.

He doesn't burn them. Doesn't bury them.

When he's finished, covered in blood and aching, and satisfied, he drives an ice pick through their skulls (the same thing, he finds, that caused the hole in her side), and leaves them to rot.

They say nothing about the blood on his shirt, or the broken, mangled fingers of his hand. He's content to leave them. To feel the agony as his broken bones split through cracked skin.

(He thinks of her—broken, blue—and clenches his hands so tight, the pain makes him blackout.)

He only lets Maria patch him up when she hisses about infection, and blood poisoning.

Says nothing at all about what he'd done, where he'd gone.

She doesn't ask.

When she's finished, she says: "woke up yesterday."

He knows. Still: "that right?"

"Gonna go see her?"

"Don't need me crowding around her bed."

"Maybe she, for some reason, wants to see your ugly mug."

"She tell you that?"

"Didn't ask about you, if that's what you're asking." She snorts. Shakes her head. "Both a'you are really perfect for each other, you know?"

"We ain't."

Her brow raises. Something prickles across her expression. "Huh."

"What?"

"Nothing," she shakes her head with a small smirk. "Just… didn't know you knew the word we, is all."

"We done here?"

He doesn't go to her.

Stubborn as an ox, she comes to him.

She says nothing about the bandages on his black and blue hands. Nothing about the way he can't make a fist through all the swelling. Her hands are soft, and warm, when they wrap around his. Small, delicate. A baby deer cupping the paws of a grizzly bear.

His eyes flash with something that tastes of the same rotten satisfaction he felt gnarled inside of his chest when the man who left her for dead on the side of a road wheezed as Joel broke his nose, and then battered the broken bulb into a messy, mushy pulp.

He didn't stop until grey matter leaked through the holes.

She knows what he did. He feels it in the way she stares at the black, swollen mess of his fingers. Bones broke on teeth, on a fractured skull.

He doesn't regret it. He doesn't even think he enjoyed it much, really.

It had to be done. Had to.

They took a life. Varsity Jack, she tells him. Stabbed in the heart when he tried to defend her with the same ice pick that ripped through her flesh.

Her tone is flat. Empty.

He sees bruises on her knuckles, those little fists were her only defence against them, and the red welt on the man's face makes sense now.

He feels proud.

She's not broken—battered, beaten, torn to pieces—but she still stands, whole, intact. Resilient. Strong.

(A survivalist. The only time she ever alluded to more was to tell him that he was worrying for nothing. That, above all, she would survive. Outlive him, even.

"What are you so afraid of, old man?" A cheeky wink. Her tongue dips out, and touches the upper corner of her lip. "I'm gonna outlive you, anyway."

God, he thought, he really hopes she fucking does.)

It doesn't surprise him to see her eyes cloud with anger, arsenic white, when she brings his hands to her lips, pressing a soft kiss to his knuckles. Anyone else might have asked why. Said thank you, even.

She just murmurs, "I hope they suffered."

Saccharine sweet.

Rotten to the core.

He saw the same shade of calamity in her eyes when she wandered in, grim and distant, as the one that stared back at him in the mirror. Her complicity in this doesn't surprise him. If anything, he wonders if she's angry he left nothing behind for her.

The thought makes his lips quirk in a needle of something he hasn't felt in a long time.

"They did."

The words are uttered like a promise. His busted pinky twitches, and it makes her smile. A bloom of petal pink flowering across her face. Soft and tender. The swell of a sea mark burgeoning out in the gloom of grey.

And all for him.

Joel pulled her in close. Closer still.

(Too close, maybe, because now he doesn't know how he'll sleep without her by his side)

His thumb slips over the tumid skin poking out from tight, black sutures. The threads are the only thing keeping her together.

Beneath it is a bruise. Black. The tip of his thumb presses against the cresting peak. Knuckle to skin, it's a perfect fit.

(In all the same ways he and she aren't.)

"I'm okay, Joel," she whispers, and the thick, dulcified tone of her voice shakes him from the labyrinth of his mind.

It's his own fault, he thinks, for stuffing his grief in the same place he keeps his worry.

"Yeah," he intones, and he isn't sure if he's speaking to her, himself, or a god he hasn't spoken to since he was eighteen and Sarah got sick for the first time. Maybe everyone, all of them, all at once.

It makes her huff. "Am I losing you already, old man?"

"Ain't that old," he bites back, hips lifting when she slides down. It makes him nudge something that has her eyes fluttering, mouth dropping, slack. Her nails catch skin when they rake over his chest.

Sex has always been an outlet. A comfort. It blankets that part of his head that never quiets—failures, failings—and offers a respite from it all. Her weight on his hips, chest, thighs doesn't dull it all but buffers it.

White noise in his ears when her nails rake over his skin. The scent of her clings in the air around them—sex, kerosene, cinder, ash: the scent of a wet forest after a wildfire scorched the earth—and clots out the fetor of decay, of mildew, and moss, the earthy tang that reminds them of death. Of them.

It's a distraction. Distance in skin, sweat, and heat.

It's just sex, just—

"God, Joel," she gasps loud, sharp, when he pitches his hips into her, blunt and unforgiving, and hits deep. Carves out the shape of him in her soft, fluttering flesh, and tries not to get lost in the thick scent of her.

It dusts over everything until he still smells her even when she isn't here.

Temporary made permanent.

It's the very thing he runs from finally catching up. He feels the graze of fingers ghosting over the nape of his neck when he looks at her, poised and centred above him. Aphrodite in flesh and bone. Her fingers prickle his skin with their sharp tips, and the indents left behind are soothed over when she gasps his name like it's something special. Meaningful. An orison murmured in the quiet box of a confessional booth.

The curtain rustles.

"Yeah," he grunts, low and filthy; the noise sticks in the back of his throat when he feels her tighten up around him. A little apple-sized fist of pleasure. He flexes his thighs, hands grasping her tight, and knows he's going to keep her here again tonight. "Fuck, sweetheart—"

The way she moves is liquid. Mercury. He watches, eagle-eyed and enraptured, as she squares her shoulders, and takes him to the root. The base.

Her presence in his life atrophied his defences until they lay scattered on the sheets that reek of her. In the folds of his pillow where he rests his head at night. The featherlight wood of his guitar when she leans over his shoulder, and says, play me another one, Joel.

He's a dog without an owner. A stray mutt on the outskirts of town, wandering through the city in search of sustenance.

She's the one who keeps feeding him. Lays out a dish just for him, and scratches her nails behind his ears until the curl of his lips subsides. A slow broiled trust. He stops showing her his canines, his claws, when she shows him the vulnerable curve of her neck, and lets him mark her skin with his touch.

Joel will mourn her the same way he does everyone else—achingly empty, and tearless—but he thinks, now, that he might think of her once, and then never again. He's selfish. Always has been.

(Can't afford not to be when she looks better bearing his mark. When he sleeps easier with her breath in his ear.)

Just sex. The words are weak in the back of his head, and he feels the shaky resolve begin to crumble, chossy wobbling under unsteady feet, when her head falls back in a mockery of prayer, the utterance of his name heavier than the sins on his shoulders. Just sex. Just—

The grille falls, and shatters into smelted pig iron at their feet.

—it's just her, him, and the beats in between. A slow simmer of sex to something more. Something he isn't quite ready for, yet knows he can't let go of. Won't. Not now, not ever. He won't give her anything, nothing but the touch of his hands, and the weight of his body, but it's juxtaposed to the worry heavy in his chest, the anger still lacing the broken bones in his fingers when his thumb brushes the curve of her wound.

It splits in her ardour. The bottom scab tugged too much, lifting from broken flesh.

Ichor pebbles on the seam. It pools an angry merlot against the indigo scab, but when it slides down her flesh, it's Phlegethon red.

His thumb catches it. It's warm, and sticky. He smears it over her quivering belly, and fights the urge to try and lick it clean. Knows, somehow, it would taste of Lethe.

Joel's teeth ache when he grinds them together, tongue lashing across the ivory seal. He's thinking too much—abstracts, concretes; they blur together in a cacophony of want, take, run, hide—

Keep.

"It's okay," she says again, as if all his secrets laid bare. As if the talons digging into his flesh somehow tapped a vein, an artery, that leads directly to his stem, and she's syphoning the thoughts in his head with the same ease that she steals the breath from his lungs. "It's okay, Joel. It's—"

She doesn't finish. Her words are shorn, bitten at the grain when he reaches up, holding her around the waist, and brutally fucks into her weeping cunt with the finesse of a starving man invited to a feast fit for a King.

It jostles her. Breasts swaying, head bobbing back and forth as he nearly lifts her off the bed with the force of his thrusts.

The brutality of it screams one shrill echo of it isn't. None of this is okay. None of it.

She's chiselling him open until he's a raw wound exposed to the unforgiving air. Until he bleeds and thinks of her. Until the only sound that drowns out the terror raking across his synapses is her voice when she murmurs his name.

"We're fine, Joel—," it carries the flavour of axiom. Aphorism when she says: "we'll be okay."

She trembles over him, muscles straining to keep up. This isn't her taking; despite being perched above him like a queen astride her throne, she gives. Lowers herself the way he likes. Circles her hips until he sees white behind his eyelids.

The weight of her feels like an anvil. The heat is enough to liquefy his bones.

"Keep goin'," he rasps the words out—a strange limbo of being both an encouragement and a demand. It lacks the bite it had before, when he'd bend her over and fuck her until he was satisfied, until the howling in his head, and the ache in his bones was eased with the soporific gossamer only sex could give him. "Just like that, pretty thing—"

It's a slip. An accident.

Her rhythm stutters. Her ribs expand wide under his palms; ballooning up so much he wonders if she's trying to burst them at the seams or float away. Irrational, of course. Sex makes him stupid. Makes him hungry and needy, and has him feeling like he's almost, almost human, and—

He holds on a little tighter.

Pretty thing. Her lips form the words in a soundless exhale. Pretty thing. She's used to him calling her all sorts of sobriquets smeared in a palpable stroke of derision. It's not contemptuous, but he makes his mockery of it clear with the flout in his tone. Sarcastic, caustic.

Sure thing, beautiful. If that's what you want, sweetheart. Go on then, gorgeous.

She always wore the same sour twist to her lips, the exaggerated eye roll. The heavy huff.

It was never flirtatious, never complimentary.

This—pretty thing—is the softest he'd ever regarded her.

He watches her throat bob when she swallows, eyes tracing the nervous flutter as she struggles to grasp the concurrency of his words, the way he said them. Their meaning. It flickers through those depths that threaten consumption whenever they dust over the length of him. Thinking. Thinking.

They were always abstract, but his words are concrete, and she isn't sure how to carry the heavy cinder he drops on her. Her fingers are used to the ephemeral weight of his scorn; the delineation of distance—unspoken but unignorable. Unequivocal in its separation.

"Wow," she breathes, tremulous. She grasps at normalcy but he can see how much those two words have rattled her. She swallows again. Eyes narrowing. Viper pits. "Getting soft in your old age, huh?"

Joel isn't ready to acquiesce.

He pitches his hips up, letting her feel the solid length of him—blunt, burning iron—and feels his chest flutter when she whines, head dropping back as he bludgeons into her core.

"Fuck, Joel—"

He isn't soft. Isn't malleable. He's made of carbonised grief, anguish, despair. Reinforced with volcanic clinkers running rivets of apoplectic fury.

He isn't soft. Isn't what she deserves, or needs, or should even want—

But the way she says his name is pyrolysing.

Cinder. Soot. Ash.

He spent so much time holding firm against the walls to keep her out, he never bothered to filter the air he breathed. She clots in his lungs. The scent of her builds. A mass forms. Metastasises inside of him.

Her hands fall there, palms drawn to the steady thump of his beating heart. It drums under her skin, a stuttering rhythm that makes her own chest swell with her shaky inhale.

His slide, rough skin scraping over her soft flesh. She burns hotter than the acorn stove in the corner of the room, and he feels the heat simmering in his veins. Scents the sulphur and volcanic ash in the air when she leans down, bending at the elbows to press her lips against his. It's chaste, as far as their usual kisses go. Biting and vitriolic. As if being sweet, tender, was forbidden.

Maybe it was. He doesn't know what he'd have done if she kissed him like this back then. Honeyed rich, and molasses slow. It tastes like smoke but reminds him of the rock candy he'd make at home with Tommy when he was young.

She moans into his mouth when his hands slip around her waist, her thigh. He holds her steady, and rocks up into her to the same tremulous beat as her clumsy, fragile kisses. The vibrations buzz on his bruised lips, and the tingle of her voice washing over him makes his cock twitch inside of her.

The press of him, unyielding and firm, against her soft, soft walls makes him grunt. Another noise pulled into the cacophony of them. It's lower than anything he's ever made before. New. Novice.

Fucking her now feels marginally different than it had only yesterday. It's raw. Vulnerable.

He thinks of a slow burn. A candle wick.

Wonders, then, if she feels it, too. This rawness that sits in his thundering chest; a scraped-out, hollow feeling that draws in more and more of her until the crater is filled with the essence of her sweat, the heavy breaths she tries to stifle in her throat to keep kissing him like she'll never get the chance to again.

And that must be it.

This isn't what he normally gives her—bruises and bites, beard burns over the delicate softness of her flesh; he leaves her kiss-bruised and drunk off of the taste of him, malt-heavy and whisky sour.

Intimacy is saved for moments when she cums around him, tightening up like a strung bow in his archer's hold; when she squeezes herself into the nook of his shoulder, whimpering as he fucks her through her high, and chases his release in the spasming clutch of her willing body. When he cums, painting her stomach, her thighs, her ass, with the stain of his spend, the only physical proof he'd been inside of her, and smears the wet mixture of them on her heated flesh, still buzzing with the aftershocks of her orgasmic haze.

It's reserved for the microcosm carved from their shared release, drenched in the glow of the chemical slurry that saturates their brains, releasing endorphins until they feel nothing but the buzz of each other. Skin to sweaty skin. Each breath a gasp.

He lets her linger in these soft moments. This singular dissonance sits incongruously with everything else between them. But then she shifts. The microcosm that filmed around them bursts.

She slips away after he does, slowly leaning over to pull on her discarded clothes, and wipe the stain of him from her body.

His fingers itch for a cigarette when he watches her through lidded eyes as she stumbles around on fawn legs.

She always hesitates for a moment. Joel often wonders if she's waiting for him to ask her to stay.

He never does. She leaves.

(Rinse. Repeat.)

But now—

"Easy, now," he murmurs, tongue slipping through the gap of her teeth to chase her taste. "Don't rush this, sweetheart."

Everything about this is unlike him, and she moans her disquietude into the scant space between them, brow knotting together when her stitches pull, and he leaves a bloodied trail across her waist, knuckles split and bleeding anew.

They're both bloodied, he finds. Drenched in each other's sweat, spittle, and blood.

It makes dizzy. Makes his fingers dig into her flesh, holding her closer to his heaving chest as he takes. His hips raise off the bed—a clumsy slant into her welcoming sex, and he feels her shudder when he hits deep, cock nudging that soft place inside of her that always makes her forehead crease.

He can't see it when she leans down, peppering wet kisses across his grey beard, and painting hard through her nose when he presses the flat of his palm against the base of her spine and fucks into her with sharp, unrhythmical thrusts.

"That's it, take it just like that—," he grinds the words off, and tastes the condescension in his tone.

In response, she bites down on his pulse point.

Another break in the routine. The rules lay scattered around them, smouldering embers of this incipient beginning to something neither of them is ready for.

Her hands wiggle out from between their chests, bringing them closer together than before, and when she tangles her fingers in the damp curls behind his ears, he swears he can feel her heartbeat echoing through his ribs.

He spears himself into her faster, seeking that place he knows will make her melt—

"Joel, oh—ah, fuck—"

—and once found, he cruelly angles the head of his cock into it, rasping out words of patronisation into her ear.

Good girl, he says, and groans when her cunt tightens around him like a nautical bow. Taking me so good. Gonna cum for me? Gonna cum around my cock—

He can feel his release brimming up like a fever in his veins. White-hot and arctic cold. It sets his nerves on fire, and the pressure of her around him makes him see pure white.

He thinks of church on Sundays when she chants his name like a hymnal—Joel, Joel, Joel—and finds nirvana when she sinks her teeth deeper into his flesh, unmarked and unclaimed until now. He'll have the perfect impression of her teeth embedded in his skin, and thought alone makes that gnarled spool inside of him loosen.

Joel is taken by surprise when she cums—voice a shaky, shrill howl of his name, and the sound of it, the blood that stains his beard when she turns, baring her teeth and pressing them flat to his jaw, makes him grunt. It's raw. An oozing wound.

She flutters around him like the beat that echoes through his bones, and feels a hunger inside of him grow.

The uncoiled knot inside of him rears, once dormant and dead to the world, now gnashing its jowls at the hands that prodded it from its slumber. Rapacious. A black hole when it yawns.

The town knows she's his. Has since she sidled up to him, all soft smiles and viper eyes, and asked him to dance, for a drink, and what's a handsome man like you doing in a place like this? Got anyone I should worry about, Joel? Wanna dance? Wanna fuck—

And they know, now, that he's hers when he carries her in his arms, and knocked his forearm into the necks of anyone who tried to pry her from his clutch.

They know. They know, but it's not enough.

He wants to mark her, stain her. Leave her with the permanent smear of him on her pretty skin.

Fuck—

This wasn't supposed to happen, but the keen awareness comes much too late.

He fucks the frustration into the tight clutch of her willing, forgiving, body, and tries not to come apart at the seams when she mewls his name like he's just as much of a burden to her as she is to him. Bankrupt. Bereft of the walls and the rationale that kept him lightyears away from everyone else around him (until Ellie, the hospital—this place that reeks of stagnancy and burrowed into his marrow), he crumbles in her hold once more.

His release hits him like a sucker punch to his gut, and the force of it makes him ache.

He doesn't pull out like he always, always, does despite the contraceptive she has, and spilling inside of her spasming cunt feels too much like heaven for him not to come apart at the seams. For him not to shatter into pieces when she pulls him closer, and murmurs, that's it, Joel. That's it—cum for me. Just let go, I got you—

And for the first time in a long time, he does.

It's an awkward assemblage of limbs that don't fit together, bodies that are too incompatible, but he tugs her down onto the mattress beside him, and makes it work. She rests the flat of her palm over his sweat-slicked chest, nails raking through the dusted grey smatter of hair on his chest. The inside of her thigh is wet with him, with her, them, when she slides it over his hip.

Her head rests on soft tissue where his arm and shoulder meet, ear nestled into his armpit. His arm around her back, fingers resting on the curve of her elbow. It's then, when he finds his thumb brushing small circles into her dewy skin, that he realises what this is.

Cuddling, he thinks, a touch derisively, in the apocalypse.

It was never a burning release, the aftermath of that intoxicating chemical bath of endorphins, oxytocin, and then a quick until next time.

Being trade partners for most of the scheduled shifts—his brutality, and her knowledge of survival made them a perfect match outside of this clumsy moment of intimacy—meant that she often stayed for a few hours afterwards discussing plans, and who to barter with next or the places they haven't yet scavenged. Lying naked beside each other, shoulders sometimes brushing as they spoke—that was the extent of their post-sex ritual.

This, he knows, is new. Different.

It has the same cadence as last night when his massive hand swallowed her wrist in his palm, and he said, just sleep here, but it's a syncopation. Lighter, somehow, than the gruff way he demanded her company, the brutal divot between his brow.

She moves, slow and languid, and for a moment he thinks about letting her leave. Repairing the chasm that crumbled between them into heaps of broken ruination and anguish, her hand brushes his when she pulls away, and he knows he won't.

For such a massive presence, she's surprisingly small in his grasp. The bump of her wrist bone fits snug against the broken, swollen knuckle of his middle finger when he folds his hand around hers.

The hitch in her breath, the rapid flutter of her pulse beating against his too rough, too worn palm are the only measure of her hesitation, her confusion.

They're not themselves in this moment.

The moor around him collapses. A sinkhole forms.

He clings to her and drags her under with him.

The words won't form on his lips. His throat is bereft of what he feels in his marrow, unable to utter them aloud, to make them real. As if speaking his burgeoning desires is somehow worse than a death sentence.

Wanting in this world is dangerous, and ruinous, but when Joel sees the dawning realisation buoying to the surface in those unfathomable black holes, he knows there's nothing more worrisome, more deadly, to him than her insatiable appetite. Her desire for more.

More—

And just him.

Something in her gaze splinters. Cracks. Her shoulder slump in something that tastes of the same defeat that taints the pinch in his brow.

"You are getting softer, Joel Miller," she takes a stab at a joke but her hands shake too much for it to land properly. "Who'd have thought all it would take is old age and mortality—"

"Shut up," he grumbles, and fights the thrum of satisfaction that spumes in his veins when she lays back down beside him. "Didn't hear you complainin' this much five minutes ago."

"Yeah, well—" her hands settle on his chest, fingers carting through the damp, matted hair. "There's a reason I'm always on top, you know. Worried you might throw your back out."

"You say that like I haven't already."

Her chin scraps over the soft flesh where his bicep meets the curve of his shoulder, eyes bright in the morning sun that smears rays of ochre across the bridge of her nose.

She's pretty, he thinks, and feels that same gnawing in his guts, that same hunger, when she dips, and presses a kiss to his skin.

"Poor baby," she coos, brows drawing together in mock sympathy. "I can't believe a little missionary ruined you so badly. Guess I should take better care of the elderly."

"Wasn't the missionary," he huffs. Her skin is soft, tacky, when he runs his fingers over her shoulder. "It was carrying your heavy ass home."

"Did my heavy ass snap your hips, too—"

"Christ," he bites out, but it lacks any heat. "You just never shut up, do you?"

He hears the click in her throat when she swallows.

"Guess you'll just have to shut me up, won't you, old—"

He presses his lips to hers, and steals the goading words from her quivering mouth.

"Call me an old man again, and I'll spank your ass, little girl."

The condescending tone is thick, but where he expects her indignation over the same words spoken to her by everyone else when she said she wanted to go with him on runs—stay here where it's safe, little girl—it instead makes her suck in a sharp breath between her teeth. He feels the vacuum of it against his lips, and blinks up at her.

"Did you like that—"

"No," she snaps, and drops her head to his chest. "God, Joel, you really know how to ruin a moment."

"Is that what this was? A moment?"

"Yes," she volleys back. "You don't think it was?"

He swallows down the tang of panic that salts his tongue, and presses his lips to her crown instead.

"Ain't much of one, was it?"

"We'll make a better one," she murmurs, the lilt of a promise heavy in her words.

When she settles in his fold, cheek laying flat against his chest—hiding her embarrassment he tones with a particular thrum of fondness so sweet it makes his teeth ache—he folds his arm over her shoulder, keeping her tucked into the bracket of his body.

She's too small for him to ever be a perfect fit. Too hard inside that pretty little head for him to ever wiggle through. Too soft for him not to ruin her completely when he holds her too tight in his hands that overlap in a way that sometimes makes him dizzy, feverish with want, with fear.

She doesn't click in the same way Tess does—did.

A silent agreement of unspoken distance. Never ask for more, it hissed because you'll be brutally disappointed. Never hunger because you won't ever be satiated. Don't yearn. Don't want. Don't, don't, don't—

No, she doesn't click. She doesn't fit. Not with him. Not at all.

(Tess left him whole.

She devours.)

Consumes.

Her eyes are black holes, and ever since she looked at him through the fanned ring of her lashes, and said: you won't break me that easily, he's been standing on the edge of her event horizon waiting for that perfect singularity to swallow him whole.

(He thought her pull would happen quickly. Instantaneous.

But she's been ripping him apart the entire time; morsel after morsel until all that remains is raw nerve. Scraps.)

A slow descent into comfort, kinship.

She's on the same plane of existence as Tommy, Ellie. Maria, too, he supposes, a touch begrudgingly. His circle widens, expands. The bubble encompassing her, too, and he knows that he'd mourn her in the same hushed breath as the rest.

I'll outlive you, old man.

(He's never wanted something more in his life right now than for those words to come to fruition.)

For the first time since the walls reared, since the gunshot that still echoes in his ears like a reminder of his sins, his failures, Joel thinks of tomorrow. And the one after that. And after that.

He thinks of her, and them, this, in the afternoon. Over old stew. Tommy's laughter. Maria's knowing glances. Ellie's anger. Her scorn. Distrust.

Wasting the night away in the bar that's always several octaves too loud not to make him tense, antsy. Watching her dance around the room, ballerina nimble with a sprinter's pace. Listen to her joke and laugh with the men who look at her a touch too long, and a shade too intense, and—

Bringing her home after. Back here in this small house where he rots. Where he plays his guitar as if the chords of Hurt would ever be enough to drown out the bullets and the bloodshed. The clicks, the groans. The scent of moss, and fungus.

Taking her to bed in the sheets that hasn't stopped smelling like her since he fucked her three times over Christmas until she sobbed into his pillow, and begged him for respite. When she brushed the grey hair from his temple with fingers that wouldn't stop trembling despite the ease in her grin, and the polynya in her eyes as she regarded him with more than just desire. More than just sex and sweat and the comfort that comes with losing yourself to the chemical high of another body tucked into the crevasse of your own.

She doesn't fit. She doesn't belong.

But fuck—

He knows he's gone when he can't imagine her anywhere else.

"Sure," he says, and wonders when she let herself into his life, into the gnarled remanants of his chest. "Whatever you say, sweetheart."

(He only dreams in black and white, but when he closes his eyes and dreams of her, it's in a startling palette of browns, reds, and blues.)

#UMMMMMMM #this ended up becoming bigger than i expected #it was honestly supposed to just be super quick smut as an intro to me writing Joel and now it's a Thing #Joel Miller #Joel Miller TLOU #joel tlou #tlou #joel miller x reader #joel x reader #joel tlou x reader

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